The radio link
Back in the 1980s, Miles Kington wrote in The Times:
Radio 4 has invented a kind of English not found anywhere else in the media: the radio link. This consists of taking two topics which have absolutely nothing in common and then finding a link between them, and the more tortuous the better. One example comes from a presenter who was linking a murder thriller to a programme about cheese-making: "And from something blood-curdling to something rather more milk-curdling…" She might equally well have said: "And so from the gruesome to the Gruyère…" What's amazing is that this sort of contorted thinking has not spread. It seems a natural way of doing the Radio 4 news headlines: "New controls were announced today by President Mubarak to bring tourism back to Egypt. And talking of pyramid selling, that's just one of the many financial devices that Mrs Thatcher promised this afternoon to examine more closely, as she spoke in the Mother of Parliaments. But it was the Mother of Russian dissident Yuri Orlov who made the headlines in Moscow today with a brave declaration of liberty. A brave declaration of another kind was made by David Gower in Jamaica, where England are only 356 behind the West Indies and their steaming attack, though steaming is hardly the word to apply to the weather which will continue cold and frosty.."
I think this would make a good party game, in the style of "Dingbats". You'd have a card with, say, "From: New England. To: Gardening", and have to do a twenty-second voice-over link within a minute. On the back it would have a suggested answer (like "And now, from Rhode Island to rhodedendrons"), but anything would do if the other players would accept it.
