I love Julian Gough.

I may have mentioned this here before.

http://rickoshea.wordpress.com/2007/07/17/jude-level-1/

He’s the ex-lead singer with the favourite band of my poorly dressed teenage years, Toasted Heretic. In the many. many decades since then he’s become a blogger and award winning author of short stories and novelist. Every now and then he drops me a note from his undoubtedly exotic gaff in Berlin, this one you have to pay attention to. Do have a listen to it, it’s very, very good:

 

Hi Rick,

This might (or might not) interest you…

I once wrote a timeless comic fable called The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble. It was the first short story ever printed by the Financial Times. A parody of the dot-com boom and bust, it involved goat prices in Somaliland getting out of hand, and threatening the global economy.

So timeless was my comic fable, that it also mapped exactly onto the recent subprime boom and bust. So the BBC asked me to turn The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble into a radio play, which went out on Friday. It suddenly occurred to me that you, or some of your listeners, or blogreaders, might enjoy a comic take on financial crisis, so I thought I’d drop you a line. It’ll remain available (for free!) until next Friday as a podcast from the BBC iPlayer at this address-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00k9p0w/Afternoon_Play_The_Great_Hargeisa_Goat_Bubble/

It stars Hugh Quarshie, the Royal Shakespeare Company actor. (Your readers might also have seen him in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.)

I’m very pleased with how it turned out. I doubt Radio 4 has ever packed so much economics into a drama. Highly educational, but with jokes. And goats being hit by aeroplanes.

If you do mention it on your pointy blog, could you provide a link to my website, here:

http://www.juliangough.com/journal/2009/5/15/the-great-hargeisa-goat-bubble.html

… as I’d love to hear what people thought of it. There is nothing lonelier than writing radio drama for BBC Radio 4. A million people hear it, but you have no idea if they’re laughing, crying, or throwing their radio out of the window. Unless you happen to be standing under their window.

The original short story (for print freaks) is available free here:

http://www.juliangough.com/the-great-hargeisa-goat-bubble/

(It’ll be part of a novel, Jude: Level 2, coming out later this year.)

And if anyone wants a copy of the radio script (but Jeez, why would anyone want a copy of a radio script?), they can email me through the website and I’ll happily send them one.

Quote freely from this if you want…

Best of luck,

-Julian Gough