Thanks for bashpodder. I have made one small change which has no
benefits really: it seems that xsltproc is capable of reading from http
all by itself, so there is no need to use wget, viz.:

       file=$(xsltproc parse_enclosure.xsl $podcast 2> /dev/null)

This doesn't even reduce the number of lines of code, though it does
reduce the number of bytes in the script...

Thanks,
mike