Sascha Martin's Ripping News, the Podcast: Episode 1

Hello and welcome to the official first episode of Sasha Martin’s Ripping News.

If you’ve listened to the teasers and experienced the horrors of Sasha Martin’s gobbledygook, then you’re desperate to have one question answered.

Will Mary Alice ever get her clothes back?

Fear not, we shall return to that rotty, clotty island on the snotty yellow sea and discover the fate of our embarrassed castaways.

But not today, for now we step back in time, the eensiest, weensiest fraction of time, to the occasion of Sasha’s very first Ripping News Day.

It’s a tale not long in the telling and fully encompassed within this single episode.

So settle back, relax and enjoy the launch of a landfill hero and Sasha Martin’s rocket ship.

Sasha Martin’s rocket ship was twice the teacher’s height.

He brought it in for news one day.

His mum had said, all right.

He left it on the table with a note that said, don’t touch.

So someone pushed a button and the rocket started such a roaring, then went silent.

Then it gave a mighty boom! And Sasha grabbed the rocket as the rocket left the room.

It flew across the playground with a piercing kind of wail.

That was Sasha, hanging screaming from the rocket’s burning tail.

Children tumbled from their classrooms looking skyward with concern, seeming not to hear their teachers, who insisted they return.

Sasha rocketed above them like a spectre, pale with fright.

But they laughed and yelled and giggled, not be thinking of his plight.

Till the rocket dived among them and accelerated fast on a beeline for the room where Mrs Barnum stood aghast.

Through the window went the rocket, through the room and out the door.

Through the middle of the building, setting fires on the floor.

At the end it made an exit through the solid staff room wall.

Then it looped a loop and headed for the tuck shop in the hall, where the mums and dads were busy with the pies for lunch that day.

Till the rocket scooped the oven up and carried it away, dropping pies and bits of birthday cake on parent volunteers, then erupting through the roof.

The children greeted it with cheers.

But the cheering stopped when Sasha’s rocket headed for the ground and the children rang for cover.

Sasha’s eyes were big and round and he wasn’t very happy, you could tell, the way he squealed.

Then the rocket raised its head and sped towards the lower field, where the children on the oval, playing volleyball, looked round and they scattered as the rocket passed them, just above the ground.

As they watched the missile spin about to make a second pass, they heard Sasha screaming, save me! And his bottom scraped the grass.

When he gathered speed and headed for the children once again, Mr Jack and Mrs Barnum made an urgent plan and then held the net strung out between them, pulling really, really tight.

And they braced themselves to catch and hold the rocket in its flight.

Then the rocket hit the net.

The net extended more and more.

The rocket started slowing down.

It coughed and gave a roar.

But then it found a second wind and tore the net away.

And with it came the teachers, who had tried to make it stay.

The rocket carried Sasha and the oven and the net.

Mr Jack and Mrs Barnum, who were voicing their regret, in a spiral and a wiggle and a circle and a roar.

Then it tilted fully vertical and up and up it tore.

As the children watched in wonder, as the lunchtime hooter blew, Sasha’s rocket simply vanished in the sky’s enormous blue.

Well, lunchtime passed in wondering, with all the faces raised, all documenting everything as ever up they gazed.

Till a squeaky little voice rang out, a finger pointed high, and sure enough, a speck of light was shining in the sky.

The speck grew ever larger as the children watched in awe.

The rocket coming down again looked bigger than before, which they couldn’t understand till one among them gave a hoot, for the rocket was attached to an enormous parachute.

Mrs Barnum touched down first and Mr Jack behind her fell.

The net and then the oven and the rocket came as well.

Then Sasha, then the parachute that settled over all.

Then a deluge of the other flying things began to fall.

When it stopped, the children screamed and they were wild like buccaneers, as they tore away the parachute to find the rocketeers.

Mrs B was blown away, bereft, befuddled and bemused.

Mr J was jibber-jabbering and jumpy and confused.

Only Sasha had a greeting and a shaky kind of smile, but he said he mightn’t build another rocket for a while.

At the school they spoke of nothing but the incident for days.

Every classroom conversation, every drawing, every phrase had a flashing silver missile, screaming teachers and a net.

Sasha Martin was a hero.

It took ages to forget.

Now the school is back to normal.

Only little things have changed.

The pies are shaped like rocket ships.

The oven’s been exchanged.

They had to put a skylight in the ceiling of the hall, and the staff room has a window where there used to be a wall.

And of course a certain day each week just crackles with suspense, with the children looking eager and the teachers looking tense.

It’s the day when Mr Jack and Mrs Barnum hide away.

They’ll be doing that this morning because it’s Sasha’s news today.

The end.

And yet it’s barely the beginning.

Next week, Sasha Martin’s ripping news plunges into the Pleistocene and 2M goes nose to nose with the whiffy, sniffy, crashy, crushy, sassy, massy megafauna of landfills long ago.

Sasha Martin’s time machine.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the past.

Coming soon.

I love you.