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Hello and welcome to Spectators Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for The Spectator,

and this week I'm very pleased to be joined by the playwright, novelist and philosopher Michael

Frayne, whose new book is called Magic Mobile. Michael, welcome. I mean I say welcome, obviously,

we're stuck at home and this is being conducted over Zoom. How is lockdown treating you?

Well, it's keeping me very busy. There's so many people sending messages saying,

how are you, are you surviving the lockdown? And we send out so many messages saying,

how are you, are you surviving isolation and so forth? I never be so busy in my life.

And what new book we're looking at Magic Mobile.

It's obviously a pre-lockdown work.

Certainly wrong.

But it's sort of a collection.

I mean, the way it's printed and a lot of the subjects, you know,

in these sort of short sketches or squibs, I don't know how you describe them, are also technology. Is that the thing that sort of unites it? I mean, what, sort of what is it? What sort of thing is it? It's hard to describe for me. I don't know. It's a collection of over about sketches, just ideas for special games, so I wrote them down. But I agree, it now

seems to refer to a world that no longer exists. All this was finished last year, I should say.

We've been waiting for the BBC broadcast to go out, they start in May, before the book

was published. So it is, it's getting a bit historical now.

It's a BBC broadcast. It's a series of, I mean, are they doing them on the radio?

Yeah, Martin Jarvis does them on the radio. He's recorded a great many of my things in the past.

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