In this episode we discussed 'The Demon Headmaster' and 'The Demon Headmaster and The Prime Minister's Brain' by Gillian Cross, as well as the first series of the BBC tv series 'The Demon Headmaster'

Since recording this episode we have set up a twitter account and email address for the podcast! Find us @stillscaredpod on twitter, or message us at stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com.

Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, find her work at makiyamazaki.com

Outro music is by Joe Kelly, and his band Etao Shin are at etaoshin.co.uk

Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find her work at behance.net/lettydraws

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Transcript

Still Scared: Talking Children’s Horror. Episode 1: The Demon Headmaster.

(This transcript has been slightly edited for clarity)

Ren: Welcome to Still Scared: Talking Children’s Horror, I’m Ren Wednesday and with my co-host Adam Whybray I’m going to be talking about creepy, spooky and disturbing children’s books films and TV. For our first episode, our halloween episode, we’re going to be talking about The Demon Headmaster by Gillian Cross. Enjoy!

Ren: So, some of the things we’re going to talk about on this podcast are things we’ve experienced as children, and some of them that we only came to as adults. But this was something that I definitely watched and read as a kid - how about you Adam?

Adam: I don’t remember reading it? I remember the original covers and the demon headmaster looking pretty ferocious, but I certainly remember the television programme, just images - like Hunky Parker the grotesque pig television character. I remember the pig’s face and I remember there being great vines, great green vines.

Ren: Oh yeah, I think that’s a later book. I remember there being - there’s all sort of images, vines and there’s certainly parts from the first series that we’re going to discuss that have definitely stuck with me.

Adam: I don’t think I have so much images from the first series, vaguely the octopus from octopus dare. But I certainly remember the ambience of it, and I remember it being a programme that I was scared to watch but definitely enjoyed watching, that I found compelling and that I definitely watched it of my own volition. I remember that it had an odd kind of melancholy to it. Obviously it wasn’t broadcast on Sunday evenings, but it had that kind of Sunday evening melancholy to it, as a child. It’s a very grey and concrete show and I think that kind of dreariness—

Ren: It does have a touch of the antiques roadshow to it.*

Adam: Yeah, I think the languid pace of the first series, and the kind of dreary eeriness of it all definitely stuck in my mind, so it’s more the memory of the ambience that stayed with me rather than the plot for instance.

Ren: Yeah. So, for people who haven’t seen or read it, the premise of the first book is that the headmaster of the school can control nearly everyone, pupils and teachers included, through hypnotism and he uses this to create his vision of a perfectly orderly, sterile, obedient school.

There’s a few pupils can resist the hypnotism, including the main character, Dinah’s foster brothers. At the beginning of the story, Dinah has just joined the school, so we learn about what’s going on as she does.

So, I guess as this is about children’s horror maybe talking about what is scary about it might be a good place to start?

Adam: Yeah, absolutely. I think part of what makes it scary is that while it’s called ‘the demon headmaster’, it’s not, certainly not in the first book, very fantastical. And although the headmaster seems to have demonic aspects it’s never clearly established whether he’s an alien or a human or a demon, or quite what he is.

But his actual power of hypnosis is one clearly rooted in reality, and in fact a lot of the means at his disposal in the first book and the first three episodes of the tv series are ones that an actual cruel or abusive headmaster would have. The children get told of, and when they go home to tell Dinah’s mum what is going on, she says to the two brothers Harvey and Lloyd: ‘you’re lying, you’re making this up, you got in trouble for bad behaviour, that’s what the school told me’. And of course this is wholly plausible.

I think it speaks to that terrible power disparity that you feel quite keenly as a child between yourself, and if not necessarily individual teachers, then the school as an institution. And between children and adults. And that fear that things might happen to you, and might be done to you, and you might not be believed.

Ren: Yes, definitely. And it’s that fear’s heightened with the hypnosis which means that they definitely won’t be believed, because all the other children have been hypnotised to repeat these rote phrases talking about how marvellous the headmaster is.

Adam: Yeah, of course. And they don’t even - they have this tiny solidarity group called Splat, that Lloyd and Harvey are members of and I think Lloyd is the leader of, and Dinah when they learn to trust her is initiated in as well and brought into the fold. So they have this space of respite but otherwise they’re on their own. And the demon headmaster partially controls the school through this regime of prefects, which again, is something based in real life, the idea of prefects being stands in for the teacher’s authority or the rules of the school is a real one. The prefects are very good at divide and rule, so even these tight friendships, and I think they are very tight, definitely in the first two books, are sometimes threatened.

Like in the second book ‘The Prime Minister’s Brain’, in which the demon headmaster tries to get access to the prime minister through this convoluted scheme involving a hypnotic video game called Octopus Dare. And you get the sense that two of the younger kids really don’t like this game at all, and really don’t get the appeal of playing video games and want to be playing outside, whereas older friends and siblings just want to be playing video games, or like Dinah, learning to program.

Ren: Oh, yeah. We’ll come back to ‘The Prime Minister’s Brain’, I think, but I did want to ask you about that because in my copy, I think I have an updated version - where Dinah’s making a website for the group.

Adam: Oh, that’s interesting! Because in my copy of ‘The Prime Minister’s Brain’, she’s learning to program in Basic.

Ren: Now that is more appropriate for 1985, yeah.

Adam: And wonderfully, you get her Basic coding.

Ren: Oh wow!

Adam: Yeah, so we’ll go back to the first book but if I can just read you the start of my copy of ‘The Prime Minister’s Brain’, it starts:

“Settling herself into the crook of the big old pear tree, Dinah began to check the computer program she was writing. 2100 print is sun shining y/n: “;2100 input a $ 2120 if a $ = y then go to 2300”

Ren: That’s really cool!

Adam: Yeah, there’s several passages of this interspersed through the first two or three chapters.

Ren: Okay, it’s fairly revised then because my copy just says ‘Dinah is building a splat website’

Adam: I think that’s a shame because you really do get a sense in that original copy of Dinah as a budding programmer, which is really cool, and that her programming smarts are partly what let her infiltrate the government security system.

Ren: It makes sense, yeah.

Adam: I like the idea that Dinah - I think it might be a good idea to talk about Dinah as hero briefly, because I think she’s an interesting protagonist for a children’s series. She starts off certainly not very communicative.

Ren: Yes, particularly in the books. She’s a little more forthcoming in the tv series but particularly in the first book she’s, well, Lloyd describes her as a robot when he first meets her, and she is very restrained.

Adam: Yeah, and it’s interesting because it’s almost as though parallels are sometimes being made between the demon headmaster and Dinah, I think. Like in the kind of emotional blunting and robotic-ness, but of course we have access to Dinah’s inner thoughts and emotional life, so we know this is just an outward appearance and that actually she’s a very self-reflective and self-aware person but she doesn’t always chose to express this, and that she’s very reticent and careful before displaying her emotions.

But I find it quite interesting that in one of the later demon headmaster books, the demon headmaster seeks to manufacture a kind of alien robot who is a clone basically of Dinah, who is evil. So it has all of Dinah’s intelligence, but none of her compassion and emotional self interest. So it’s a kind of dark, or metal Mario, so a dark version, or a shadow version is a better way of putting it, of Dinah.

Ren: Yeah. For a bit of context, Dinah is incredibly intelligent but tries to hide it, at first. And even from the first book the demon headmaster is trying to find ways to use her. When he works out that she is very intelligent, at the end of the book she has to facilitate his plan to hypnotise the country through the tv by winning this school quiz.

Adam: Which occurs on the ‘Eddy Hair Show’, which is one thing that I think was rendered more vividly for me in the book than it was on the television programme. Because in the book you really had a sense of this programme of absolute, slightly unsettling chaos. It really sounds like a show with genuine health and safety violations, which of course is true of kids tv of the late ‘80s and early ’90s. You had shows like Fun House and things, with kids slipping on gunge, which was this incredibly 90s fixation, I think.

Ren: Oh god, yeah. Gunge.

Adam: — Or Slime. This fluorescent coloured or multi-coloured goop being poured on people.

Ren: I feel like the rendition of the Eddy Hair Show in the tv series definitely reminded me of Get Your Own Back

Adam: Oh yeah, absolutely.

Ren: Which was a ‘90s kids tv show where children competed to pour gunge over parents or teachers or other authority figures —

Adam: Often for perceived slights, which would often vary in fairness or magnitude, which was a very odd thing because there was this kind of flattening of moral difference. Like, you know, one of them might be that the kid really doesn’t like eating lettuce, and their dad forces them to eat lettuce, and you think ‘that’s a bit mean, fair enough’. But then another one might be that the kid wants to go to space, and his mum says ‘no, you can’t go to space’ and these are treated as equally punishment-worthy offences.

Ren: Yep. We’re definitely on a tangent now. But in the book, it describes Eddy Hair wrestling with spaghetti, and the spaghetti wrestling back and sneezing. And when I read that I just had to pause for a moment and try and imagine spaghetti sneezing. It does seem somewhat magical.

Adam: It does, and Eddy Hair himself seems to stay even outside the show in this role, if it is a role, as this kind of madcap prankster figure. So he’s described as driving through the streets in his car, and the car being, you know, multi-coloured and having polka dots. And when one of the kids sort of stops him, in fact to try to prevent the broadcast and recording of the Eddy Hair show because they know at this point that it’s part of the headmaster’s plans. They try and stall Eddy Hair and Eddy Hair kind of gleefully proclaims that he can’t write ad then sort of laughs and speeds off.

Ren: Yeah, he does seem a lot more lie a kind of embodiment of chaos in opposition to the demon headmaster being the embodiment of order and sterility and stuff.

Adam; Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Ren: If we just backtrack a little bit. I wanted to talk about the snowball scene, which is one that really stuck in my memory from having seen it as a kid. It’s going back to the theme of not being believed as a child, and this is the scene where that really hits home. Because Dinah knows that something is wrong but she doesn’t know exactly what it is, so she decides to break a rule to see what will happen, and she throws a snowball in the playground.

But unfortunately her foster brother Harvey wants to join in and despite Lloyd trying to stop him, all three of them get punished. The prefects (who we’ll come back to) decide that their punishment should be for them to take off their coats, scarves and gloves and sweep all the snow into the centre of the playground and then make all of that snow into snowballs. And the way it’s written, it’s very vividly written. You can imagine how painful it is having to touch all of this wet cold snow, and having to form it into snowball with out hands.

Adam: And Harvey is described as having asthma as well, so he’s clearly in serious potential danger doing this.

Ren: In the tv series, I think Dinah says ‘Harvey might die’ or something, and Rose, who’s the prefect who engineered this punishment, just does this horrendous evil little smile at that, just this touch, like she was delighted at the idea that he might die.

Adam: Yeah, we should talk about the child actors in particular some more. I mean, generally I think the child performances are variable, although the fact that some of the performances are more stilted is okay because it’s oddly in keeping with the atmosphere and thematic of the show — because of course the kids are meant to be hypnotised a lot of the time. So the fact that some of the kids sound like they’re just parroting back lines, really doesn’t matter. If anything it adds to the strength of the show.

But some of the actors are very good, and Katherine Wyeth is very good at Rose. And as you said, she has this genuine malevolence that is actually quite unsettling. I don’t know if she’d experienced bullying herself and if she’s channeling that back, or where that’s coming from, but she does a very good job of subtly communicating that. Some of the prefects are just robotic, like sentinels, but you get the idea that the character of Rose is genuinely a pretty nasty piece of work.

Ren: Yeah, she’s incredible. She was actually one of my strongest memories of the tv series and I was genuinely surprised to watch it again and she that is about 14 years old! She’s a child, but she has such a villainous presence and I think she becomes the secondary villain in the first three episodes.

Adam: I mean, she’s kept in as a character. They do things with her in later seasons.

Ren: Oh, do they?

Adam: Oh yeah, she isn’t in the last three episodes but she certainly reappears. If you look at the imdb page she’s credited for ten episodes in total, so there’s certainly a lot more of her. To put that in context, the actor playing the demon headmaster, Terence Hardiman, is credited for nineteen episodes.

Ren: Oh brilliant, I think she’s threatening to upstage terence Hardiman at points in these first three episodes, she’s so good.

Adam: Yeah, I mean Hardiman certainly is a chilling presence. You do get the sense of him as implacable — that he is entirely unmoved by pleas for mercy, which I think is what makes him scary. He seems to not have a compassionate bone in his body.

Ren: Yeah, and he’s watching in the snowball scene, at one point Dinah says: ‘this is too much, the headmaster won’t stand for this, surely this punishment is too barbaric’ and she looks up and sees the demon headmaster watching from the staff room.

Adam: Yeah, it’s a nice kind of pull back and reveal moment, really. She still has faith at this point that the corruption doesn’t tun that high, but then, oh yes, of course it does. It’s interesting that that same kind of journey from trusting implicitly the system to incredulity, to then horrific realisation that they’re in on it, is given to Robert, who is a minor character in the second book ‘The Prime Minister’s Brain’.

He tries to report the machinations to the demon headmaster, who is now in the guise of the computer director, conducting a quiz of sorts, or a test, to find the best computer brain of the year or something — but basically he’s trying to root out kids who are good at computers so they can hack into this system for him. But the character of Robert, who’s one of the ‘brains’ so-called, who’s along for the competition, tries to explain to the computer director or the demon headmaster what’s going on and says ‘look this isn’t acceptable’ and of course again, the demon headmaster or computer director is completely nonplussed. In fact, he has him taken away for being outspoken.

Ren: Yeah. He doesn’t have a name apart from the various titles he assumes, I don’t know if he gets a name later, probably not.

Adam: That’s why I was struggling for a moment there. Do you still call him ‘the demon headmaster’? The demon headmaster is his role, but you can’t really just call him ‘the demon’. I don’t know if it’s just like Stephen King’s ‘It’, where there’s just some kind of primal arachnid, some kind of evil elder god behind it all. Yog-sogoth or something, just puppeteering these vessels.

Ren: I mean that makes it even scarier, so.

Adam: ‘To rich for my blood!’

Ren: ‘Ooh that’s a bit far, Adam’

Adam: But I think the other kids are really good as well. I think the lead trio of Dinah, Lloyd and Harvey so — Frances Amey, Gunnar Cautery and Thomas Szekeres, they’re all really good, I think. Frances Amey as Dinah doesn’t quite have the kind of alienation perhaps that Dinah definitely experiences in the first book. She’s definitely a much warmer presence than the Dinah in the book. She seems quite vulnerable, basically. Both in the books and in the programme in different ways, Dinah is a very likeable character.

Ren: Yeah, I agree.

Adam: Which is interesting and good, because she’s not necessarily likeable in the ways you might expect from a children’s book. She’s not very gregarious, she’s not particularly funny, she’s quite serious as child protagonists go. She isn’t one for epic adventures, clearly in ‘The Prime Minister’s Brain’ she’d rather be programming. But she’s shown to have a kind of integrity, and a belief in goodness and the truth that stands firm. Which means it’s all the more devastating for herself and for us as readers when she’s hypnotised into saying things that she knows to be lies, because clearly that is a violation of her character and she’s very confused about why she finds herself to be parroting lies that she knows she doesn’t believe. She knows that she is not a liar, so she is very perplexed and troubled by this because she realises quite quickly that something is wrong and something is being done against her will.

Ren: Yeah, this might be a good time to talk a bit more about ‘The Prime Minister’s Brain’ because there’s this sort of escalation that happens between the first and second books where as you say, in the first book sh’s parroting these lies that the headmaster has hypnotised her to say and she doesn’t know why she’s saying them, but in the second book where it’s these images of the octopuses that are hypnotising people, it has an emotional effect on her.

In that when she looks at this octopus she feels - well, when she gets a letter that says that she’s won the competition but she needs this very expensive computer to come to the final, looking at this octopus makes her feel angry and overwhelmed with emotion at the idea that she wouldn’t be able to do it, and it’s very out of character. And I don’t think we really see any more of this in the book, but it is an interesting ramping up of the hypnotism that this time it has an emotional effect.

Adam: Yeah, and it’s also compared explicitly later in the book to a drug or alcohol addiction. So, that Dinah and the other kids who are affected by it - it’s quite interesting that the two kids that aren’t affected by it, which is Harvey and Ingrid, that they are the two youngest kids in the group and they aren’t particularly affected by it, but the other kids kind of crave this digital octopus on the screens and are are transfixed by it. And in the book every time it comes up you have the word ‘Octopus’ in bold, and then the s-s-s-s-s, which I rathe like.

Ren: It does it on the tv series, it goes ‘Octopusssss’, just sort of hisses it in the background.

Adam: But one thing i like about it is that if we think of the show, and I don’t want to sort of over-read it, but if it is functioning as an allegory of sorts for a repressive or autocratic political regime, then while the first series is more of a fascist state being depicted — so it’s focussing on the installation of order through orderlies, through a sequence of command and stratification of power, that you have this guy at the top who’s making his underlings do things that are willing to use torture and fear to keep the kids in their place, whereas it strikes me that in the second one they’re moving more towards a kind of stalinist depiction or of a kind of autocratic government regimes that you got in communist regimes.

And I say this because a lot of my academic writing is on communist era Czechoslovakia and one thing that I’ve noticed reading testimony of people who lived through that time is the idea of internalised censorship, so just the threat that you were being watched all the time and that your neighbours might inform on you was enough to make artists censor their own work to the degree that yes, there were formal censorship bodies like there were under nazism, but not in the same way, it was more that you didn’t know if you’d get in trouble for doing something transgressive, making a transgressive piece of art, you’d be more likely to err on the side of caution and because you didn’t know which of your family members or friends might be an informer, and there were a lot of party members. You kind of internalised these things so at a certain point, although the threat of physical violence might still be present, it’s no longer necessary because the threat of violence is internalised and does the work for the state. I think you get that to a degree in he second book, this idea that the demon headmaster or the computer director doesn’t aways have to do that much, you know, once he’s set up the system he can kind of sit back and let the system do it’s work for him.

Ren: Yeah, and he’s set up a very elaborate - the office building where the final takes place, where the children are going to break into the prime minister’s computer for him is a very elaborately constructed automated system.

Adam: Governed by a super computer, basically. So, it is staffed to a degree, there are people in white lab coats who do some work, or who work as guards but apart from that -

Ren: But none of them make really any impression at all, unlike the prefects in the first book.

Adam: Yes, that’s a good point. They are very anonymous and autonomous right. What does makes an impression instead is the little robots, right. So in the warehouse where all the food’s kept are these little robots with extendable arms that put things on the shelves, and similarly there’s a robot assembly lines creating the meals for the children.

Ren: And this was written in 1985, so this was somewhat more fantastical than it is now.

Adam: Yeah, it’s got this kind of techno-futurist thing going that now seems more banal that it would have done at the time.

Ren: Yeah, I wanted to mention a little bit about the context of the time because 1985 when this was written -

Adam: So it was written quite a bit before the tv series - the tv series ran from 1996-1998.

Ren: So in the tv series you’ve got the context of both times going on, and I feel like maybe the ‘80s influncee is kind of the idea of whizz kids who are hacking into a government computer, a lot of fears then of what young people might do with this new technology that they (the adults) don’t quite understand, and they might break into military secrets or whatever.

Adam: Yeah, I think that’s certainly a very ‘80s fear, although I’m just looking up when the first Hackers film came out and that is ’95.

Ren: What about War Games?

Adam: War games is a bit earlier than that, that’s a good point. I was thinking more of that kind of cyber dystopia aesthetic going on in the ‘90s right. I think of something like Hackers or Lawnmower man.

Ren: I have no idea what that is.

Adam: Or Existenz right, the Cronenberg film. And obviously the demon headmaster never quite reaches that level of technological horror or body horror, but certainly this dystopian vision of an automated and computerized system and a society of greater abstraction is definitely present in the second book and goes forward as the series progresses. As I said you get genetic engineering coming in as a topic in one of the later seasons, so they’re not quite after school specials but they are for me engaging with issues at the time.

Ren: Yeah, and I also think there’s the quite ‘90s fear of children becoming addicted to computer games that might be coming in there a bit.

Adam: And the idea of the online realm as this kind of other and uncanny other space, right. Like the sort of limitless imagination but potentially limitless horror. Like, when you watch adverts from that time for home computers and the internet there’s this real sense of awe and also abstraction. That 90s trope that you’re seeing a resurgence of now - I’ve used some VR technology recently, and I’ve found it really interesting that within the VR world, to demarcate where in the real world a wall is that you can’t get past is a green glowing grid.

Ren: Oh really!

Adam: Yeah, yeah, which is such a 90s image of the digital world! So I found that quite interesting. I mean, around the time I would have been watching the demon headmaster I would have been going on trips with my now, I can see, incredibly patient father, I don’t think I appreciated this quite enough at the time, to Sega World at London’s Trocedoro which became Fun Land, which was at the time the largest arcade in Europe. Obviously it had all sorts of arcade games, but also had early and proto VR technology and immersive indoor rides where you wore a headset, and simulators and things like that.

Ren: It makes me think of - do you know that series one episode of Buffy where there’s a demon on the computer?

Adam: Yeah, I do vaguely remember that.

Ren: And that gooosebumps book.

Adam: Is that like - something like, it’s not ‘It Came From the Web’ but -

Ren: No, I think it is ‘It Came From the Internet’!

Adam: And it is literally like, a CGI spider that comes out of the computer, I think.

Ren: Out of the world wide web, yes.

Adam: And from there the hilarity ensues, or the horror.

Ren: But as you were saying at the start, I feel like the atmosphere of both the books and the TV series is this very chilly, downbeat sort of feeling to it that is not quite as campy as goosebumps books.

Adam: I wouldn’t quite call it campy, it’s true. there might be kitschy elements but it’s not flamboyant. It’s not an extravagant show, somehow. There is something down to earth about it. I’m not saying it’s continuing in the British tradition of kitchen sink realism, but it has that kind of dreary workaday-ness to it, which is what made it disturbing as a child. That it feels like it does take place within a believable world that is our own or like our own, rather than in a fantastical realm.

Ren: Yeah, I think so, and I think there is something quite British about that.

Adam: Yeah, I mean if you look at ‘70s horror right, you have this kind of interest in parochial horror or folk horror, this is often talked about under the rubric of hauntology. I’ve never managed to find a coherent definition of what on earth hauntology is, it seems to be something like ‘the unveiling of what should be veiled by nostalgia’ or ‘giving the veils of nostalgia an ontological presence’ or maybe ‘taking what was subtextual and under the surface in these 1970s horror films and programmes, and bringing them to the surface, and taking what was on the surface and putting that under’.

If you look at something like Look Around You, it has this thing where the most kind of staid aspects of 1970s educational videos become the creepiest. It’s the dreary synth music and the commands to have your text books ready that become troubling and unsettling, whereas all the fantastical magical stuff is done in a vey matter of fact way. And I don’t think ‘The Demon Headmaster’ is necessarily part of any bigger tradition but I definitely get what you mean, that it’s specifically British and it’s almost doing for the urban environment what the ‘70s kids programmes like The Owl Service, or The Changes did for the rural, or the countryside. In those stories it’s very much about hidden energies and currents under old England drawing on ideas of the folk revival of ley lines and wicker and ancient stuff you get in the wicker man as well, whereas I think the rhythms in the demon headmaster are far more urban and far more regimented, it’s a Britain sapped of vitality, a portrait of a kind of brutalist concrete Britain.

Ren: And there’s this scene where they’re trying to find the building, where the final takes place and it says that it’s an island. And they’re on the tube and it’s stuffy and horrible and they say ‘wouldn’t it be lovely to go to this island, the running water and the clear air’ and they get there and it’s a traffic island. So yeah, there’s no respite really.

Adam: No, that’s an interesting point. There’s very little respite, the respite comes right at the very end of the first book and right at the beginning of the second book.

Ren: And it’s maybe slightly lampshaded, but Splat spend a lot of time climbing up a rubbish chute —

Adam: Yeah, A LOT.

Ren: A lot of time! at one point one of them complains that they’ve done nothing but climb up a rubbish chute —

Adam: Which seems like a bit of a meta joke. I’d say about a quarter of ‘The Prime Minister’s Brain’, certainly concening those characters is them climbing up the rubbish chute. But it’s interesting because the concern with waste seems to have changed, it’s handled differently in ‘The Prime Minister’s Brain’. We were talking about Eddy Hair in ‘The Demon Headmaster’, and the description of the gunge and the spaghetti monster and the chaotic mess of this tv show, and the kids loving this and revelling in it, while it’s deeply offensive to the staid and orderly demon headmaster. But obviously in this book the kids aren’t gleefully jumping for joy at having to climb up a rubbish chute, there are quite long descriptions of carrot peelings and other stuff —

Ren: teabags —

Adam: Yeah, and it’s quite grubby, right? It sounds sticky and unpleasant and it’s quite vivid. I don’t know if it’s just been set up in contrast to the sterility of the computer lab, there’s something about how the demon headmaster’s plans don’t factor in waste, it’s always about repressing that which is messy, that which isn’t orderly.

Ren: But also Adam, also, it’s the rubbish chute that saves them, ahhhhhhh.

Adam: ahhhhh.* * Yes, this is true, at the end of ’The Prime Minister’s Brain’, the demon headmaster rigs the computer system and he takes a helicopter, which is a bit foregrounded, there’s quite a lot of talk about this helicopter earlier on the book, so we know it’s going to come up again, and the roof of the building opens and he takes this helicopter to take to fly to Downing Street, and to stop the kids from ruining his plans he sets up the computer system so that any interference with it will set off an explosive device basically, that will set the building aflame which is hidden within the elevator. So they do try to prevent his plan, and eventually succeed, and so the elevator catches light, and they have to escape and the only way is down through the rubbish chute.

Ren: And it is a pretty dark scene in which the children vote to stop the demon headmaster/computer director even if it means burning to death in an office building.

Adam: And it’s very clear that’s what the stakes are, they basically outright state that if we do this we’re probably going to die, so are we doing this?

Ren: Which is probably a good point, I just wanted to talk about the headmaster’s complete lack of qualms about physically harming children.

Adam: Please do!

Ren: So right from the first book, it’s a theme because in order to test that Dinah is actually hypnotised he sticks a pin in her arm and one time she’s pretending to be hypnotised, and he pricks her with this pin to check and -

Adam: I’ve highlighted that line actually in my copy, it’s a really chilling last line so If you don’t mind i’ll just read this last passage. So she’s going under hypnosis: ‘but the words in her head drifted off into silence and floated away on a great tide of sleep as she slumped slowly forwards in her chair. This time she did not feel a thing when the headmaster stuck the pin into her arm’. It’s genuinely quite a chilling sentence i think, because of the matter of factness about it.

Ren: I think also in the tv series, the headmaster quite threateningly opens a letter with one of those old-fashioned letter openers that are basically a dagger, which is a little bit of foreshadowing.

Adam: And of course in the third episode the kids are halted trying to stop the recording and broadcast of the Eddy Hair show and - do you want to say what the headmaster does?

Ren: Okay, so the headmaster finds them at this critical moment and he brings with him the prefects and a group of hypnotised children. When splat tries to stand up to him and tell him ‘no, we’re not going to let you do this’ he tells the children, I quote: ‘in front of you are six straw dolls that are no longer needed, you will advance on them and pull them to pieces’. And Terence Hardiman really relishes that line. The children advance on the members of splat and start pulling at their clothes and tugging their hair and they will - they will pull them to pieces.

Adam: - rend them apart. Yeah, I think that’s one thing the books and then the programme do very well, is just the sense of threat does feel very real. You don’t get the sense that the demon headmaster is kidding around, he definitely doesn’t have any compunctions when it comes to murdering children.

Ren: Yeah, and I thought this was actually a very good use of the ‘90s cgi, in this scene.

Adam: You’ll have to remind me because I watched the series a couple of months back now.

Ren: Okay, when he tells the children ‘in front of you are six straw dolls’ you see from the children’s perspective an animation overlay of those straw, corn dollies just overlaid over the members of splat, and it’s very simple but it really works.

Adam: Well, I think that can be said of the series and the books as a whole. They’re not doing anything massively fancy, the narratives are simple but they do work. I was quite surprised re-watching the programme how well it holds together ad I found it perfectly watchable as an adult, I didn’t feel like I had to watch it ironically or just nostalgically. It’s patchy, but I did find it genuinely unsettling, and quite engaging and I did find some of the acting, as I said particularly by Katherine Wyeth playing Rose, really good.

Ren: Yeah.

Adam: So I just wanted to finish off with one last thing which is Gillian Cross sometimes using the demon headmaster books as a way of making comments about the education system. She’s sneaking in her opinions about the education system. Certainly, the demon headmaster’s hypnosis in the first book is meant to resemble learning by rote, I think.

Ren: Right, ‘cause this was written under a tory government, as we’re now again. And certainly Michael Gove as education secretary had very old-fashioned ideas about learning.

Adam: Absolutely, this is before - while there are certainly things to take issue with with how the Blair government changed education, it did also mark some really progressive shifts in terms of how kids learn. Like, taking a subject like history and making it far more about how you analyze evidence and how you interpret historical sources, and before that, or certainly under Thatcher you had a system still based more in rote learning. Learning history was more learning facts and being able to reel of a list of the kings and queens of England. And you see that this is how the kids are learning - when they’re in the playground, instead of playing they just stand together in small rings and chant off lists of facts.

Ren: And it’s definitely seen as regressive and old-fashioned. in the book, Dinah says ‘oh the headteacher’ and someone corrects her and says ’no, you have to say headmaster here’

Adam: Oh, that’s nice.

Ren: Which is definitely a throwback to previous times, I think that was old-fashioned by the 80s presumably.

Adam: I found quite a direct inditement of the demon headmaster’s teaching methods. Ingrid and Dinah are talking about the Eddy Hair show, and Ingrid says ‘I love it, especially the great school quiz - the questions are so hard I can never do any of them’ to which Dinah replies ‘that’s because we’re all taught parrot fashion. The questions in the quiz are puzzles and no-one in our school’s encouraged to think. It’s quite the wrong sort of quiz for our school’. So there was an interview I read in I think the new statesman, with Gillian Cross about the new Demon Headmaster book, and she was saying that it’s been 15 years since she wrote one and going back to the demon headmaster and writing a new book, the school system’s changed a lot in that time. So I suspect the new one takes aim at Ofsted, and the academisation of schools. Teaching kids as…

Ren:… as a business.

Adam: Yeah, yeah exactly, teaching as a business, as little consumers and thinking too much about quantifiable outcomes and what you can plot on a graph rather than any deeper or more nourishing education. I’d be interested to read it to see how she depicts this new school and if her opinions have changed, and what the demon headmaster will be like now, and what means of control - if he’ll still use hypnosis.

Ren: Yeah, or will he have a different power for a different time.

Adam: I don’t know what that would be - flash animations, who knows. I think that would have been early 2000s, heaven knows what it’d be now, it’s been a while since I was in school.

Ren: Just, while we’re talking about politics. Did you think he resembled John Major, is that a reach? I feel…

Adam: I think, I mean, if you went as john major to a halloween party, people might mistake you for the demon headmaster.

Ren: Yeah, I think that’s fair.

Adam: Okay, on that suitably ghoulish image we’ll end things here. Do you want to do the credits today since you’re probably do a better job than me?

Ren: Our theme music is by Maki Yamazaki and you can find their work at makiyamazaki.com. The outro is by Joe Kelly, and you can find his band Etao Shin at etaoshin.co.uk, and I want to just give an extra thank you to Matt Dillon who is @thewarllama on twitter, because it was thanks to his podcasting panels at nine worlds that I thought I could do this at all, so thank you Matt. So you can find me on twitter at @renwednesday.

Adam: and you can find me on twitter at @algorerhythms, the pun being algorithims. And should we say thank you for the art as well?

Ren: Yes, the art is by Letty Wilson and I’ll put a link to her website in the show notes. So yeah…

Adam: And of course the demon headmaster by Gillian Cross.

Ren: Okay…. Adam we should probably come up with a sign off, I forget about this.

Adam: Oh, um, ‘keep it spooky!’

Ren: Yeah… keep it spooky… we’ll come up with a better one…

Adam: Bye, creepy kids?

Ren: Bye, creepy kids.

• This is a reference to a British TV programme in which people took various family heirlooms and knickknacks to a roadshow to be valued, that was broadcast on Sunday evenings and had a hauntingly melancholy theme tune.

• The ‘aahhh’ here is said in a smug tone, in reference to a sketch from the Stewart Lee and Richard Herring series ‘This morning with richard not judy’, in which Stewart Lee as Jesus proclaims various platitudes and instead of explaining them just says ‘ahhhh’ in a knowing tone. **