This week we talked about the 2019 CBBC series The Demon Headmaster, based on the 2017 novel The Demon Headmaster: Total Control by Gillian Cross.

If you want to follow us on twitter we are @stillscaredpod, and our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com.

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

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

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

Transcript

Ren: Welcome to Still Scared: Talking Children’s Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children’s books, films and TV. I’m Ren Wednesday, my co-host is Adam Whybray and today we’re talking about the 2019 reboot of The Demon Headmaster. Enjoy!

Ren: Hi Adam!

Adam: Hello!

Ren: Ren pants distressedly Hi, this is our first time recording in the new human era, so excuse us if we are a little bewildered…

Adam: I mean theoretically it shouldn’t make any difference to our recording as we never record in the same room.

Ren: No, that’s true, we have actually been practicing social distancing for some time.

Adam: But if you will accept any mistakes we make as being wholly due to corona, please do, that would be great.

Ren: We are recording on Zoom though.

Adam: We are, which gives this whole thing a managerial kind of feel, which is appropriate for the book and TV series that we are looking at.

Ren: It is very efficient. Yes, so we’re here, we’re talking about the 2019 series, reboot? sequel? something, of The Demon Headmaster.

Adam: Yes, so I’ve got the book here that it’s based on, Demon Headmaster: Total Control, is a reboot. So the tagline on my copy says ‘He’s back! In a brand new adventure!’ which makes the Demon Headmaster sound like —

Ren: — like a big blue dog, or something.

Adam: Exactly. But the book is quite different to the programme as we will discuss.

Ren: Yeah, I haven’t read the book but I will take your word for it.

Adam: The main difference being that as you say, this new series is kind of at once a reboot and a sequel—

Ren: — We should probably say that we’re going to full spoiler this from the beginning, and there are some fairly significant spoilers, so if you want to watch it, do that first.

Adam: And I would say it’s worth a watch.

Ren: It is actually, yeah. It was better than I thought it would be. So, yeah, you think this is going to be a reboot of the series, updated for the 2010s with new characters, and it is, but as it goes on it turns out that it’s actually a sequel to the 1996 series and ends up tying that series in, in surprising and quite delightful ways for adults like us who grew up with that series.

**Adam: ** Yeah, and I think manages to do it so that it’s interwoven into the narrative and there is this dual appeal and dual addresss, but isn’t doing that thing you get in cynical kids animations like Shrek, and Shrek 2, and Shrek 3 and Christmas Shrek and Halloween Shrek, where you’ve got the cutesy stuff for the kids and the innuendo for the adults.

I feel like this isn’t talking down to kids but it’s certainly watchable from an adult perspective as well.

Ren: Yeah. I’ll give a brief summary of it, we’re not going to go into all the details of the plot as it’s 10 1/2 hour episodes and there’s a fair bit of meandering that we don’t need to go into all the ins and outs of —

Adam: — I was going to be charitable and say that it’s labyrinthine.

Ren: Yes, yes.

So it’s a very similar premise to the original series, or the first book, but the details are different. It’s a failing school, Hazelbrook Academy, it gets a new headmaster, and suddenly the students become models of excellence and obedience.

He, of course, is achieving this through hypnotism, and it is up to a group of plucky students to overthrow him as the stakes keep escalating and his ambitions of control grow to encompass the whole country.

Our cast of characters this time are: Tyler and Lizzie Warren, siblings, played by Ellie Botterill and Jordan Cramond. They are our central protagonists. Their mother is ill, and they have been away to the US to try and help her find a cure. When they return to Hazelbrook in the first episode, everything is changed.

Ethan Prenderghast/Adebayo, played by Dijarn Campbell is Hazelbrook’s football star, although as we find out, before the demon headmaster’s intervention he was keen on coding, not sports. He has an ongoing storyline about discovering the truth about his parents’ recent death, the knowledge of which has been suppressed by the headmaster.

Angelika Maron, played by Lori Stott is the deputy head’s daughter, and is introduced as the perfect mini-capitalist entrepreneur, selling overpriced kale-and-cabbage smoothies from her Angelik Eats stand in the school. It’s a big surprise when in episode 4 she’s prompted to remember her activist past, and suddenly starts to spearhead the revolution.

Adam In Extinction Rebellion! Which is nice.

Ren Oh, was it?

Adam Well, the badge that she had was an Extinction Rebellion badge with a line through it, so whether that is genuinely thematic or just quite lazy art direction, I don’t know.

Ren And finally, Blake Vinney played by Jordan Rankin. In my opinion definitely the most interesting character. And I’m not just saying that because he’s Glaswegian, but incidentally I do really love hearing a Glaswegian accent on TV, it made me happy.

He starts out as the bully threatening Tyler, and then has a really interesting story throughout the series as he’s subject to the most intense psychological torture by the headmaster, starting off as ‘head welcomer’, (equivalent to the prefects in the original series) and then demoted to janitor, before joining the resistance.

Adam: Did you think that the orange jumpsuit that he ends up wearing as a janitor looks a lot like an American prisoner uniform?

Ren: It did, yeah! It definitely had that vibe to it. But I thought the actor does a really compelling job of portraying the suppressed rage under Blake’s hypnotized veneer.

Adam: Yeah, and like painful cognitive dissonance. Sometimes it really looks like his brain is breaking, basically.

Ren: So I thought maybe we could start with talking about the differences between how the hypnotism works in this series, versus the original.

Adam Well, I mean it’s still the eyes isn’t it? He doesn’t have a spinning hypnotic belly button.

Ren Uh, no. That’s true. That hasn’t been updated for the twenty-first century. It’s a different headmaster, but with a similar demeanour.

Adam Slightly less gaunt and Victorian.

Ren Yeah, he doesn’t wear a cape.

Adam And he doesn’t look like John Major. But it is very much meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Ren In the original series, there was a core group of protagonists (SPLAT) who were immune to hypnotism while the rest of the school was in complete thrall.

Whereas in this series, no-one is immune, but there is a greater emphasis on the fact that the hypnotism wears off, and has to be sort of regularly reapplied like suncream.

Adam: To quote Zizek: ‘We’re eating from the trash can of ideology all the time’, and none of us are immune. And when you think you’re the most immune that’s when you’re the most susceptible. Ahhh.

Ren: Ahhhh.

But this is interesting, because it means that our core group of characters fade in and out of awareness of what is happening to them.

Adam: Yeah, and in and out of solidarity as well. It makes for a more alienating and disturbing experience at times, because they can’t ever wholly trust one another, and there’s times when they do awful things to each other under hypnotism.

In the original there’s very much the sense of the plucky kids banding together, and you do get some of that in the book whereas in the series everyone seems far more atomised.

Ren: I think particularly with Angelika and Blake, they end up switching between two distinct personalities across the episodes, and you’re never quite sure which one is going to be present: the hypnotised self or the conscious self.

Adam: Although the Demon Headmaster in this series utilises technology sometimes to hypnotise people in a similar way to in the original, where you have the ‘octopuss-s-s-s-s’ hypnosis in the second series of the Demon Headmaster, and in this one there’s phone apps for the parents?

Ren: Yeah, all the parents are given a tablet that tops up their hypnotism to keep the kids in line when they’re not in school. In quite a Black Mirror sort of scenario.

Adam: I mean, I really liked this as a critique because it does capture the way that institutions and companies have latched onto this ‘Oh, we’re doing something that’s good for you and nice and charitable’ while actually taking back rather more than they’re giving.

It actually reminds me of Mark Fisher’s (?) critique of mindfulness and wellness culture in corporate settings. Like, if you’re unhappy at work and you might have genuine good concrete reasons to be unhappy at work, you might have an open-plan office and your chairs are giving you backache and you get a wellness check through on your email and you say, ‘actually I’m not doing so well’, and then you get an email from HR saying ‘We’re really concerned about how well you’re doing, so we’re going to put you on a mindfulness course in your lunch breaks. No, we’re not going to pay you for doing that course, and yes, you are going to have to do it in your lunch time, but this is for your own good and it shows how much we care about you.’

It reminds me of that, in a way, Gillian Cross is clearly interested in the way that schools have become more corporatist, and the academisation of schools. There’s a good interview with her that I’ll send to you to link in the show notes about this, and her scepticism about the ways that schools have become more privatised and bringing in outside businesses etc.

Ren: And Angelika and her cake and coffee stall definitely get the brunt of this ire.

Adam: Gillian Cross seems to really dislike pretentious pop-up coffee places. I mean, I’m a sucker because when I was reading it there was a bit about a ginger hot chocolate and I thought ‘Mmm, that sounds rather nice!’ and then one of the kids drinks it and says: ‘It’s disgusting!’.

Ren: This is a tangent: I was floored, I was shocked and stunned when she was selling cupcakes at the school assembly thing and she had a portable card reader to sell cupcakes to the parents. My God. She is a villain.

**Adam: ** What have we become! The moment where you threw something in rage at the telly.

Ren: ‘A child?! With a card-reader?! Surely this has gone too far!’

Another new aspect of the hypnotism is the idea that the headmaster has hypnotised each student into taking up a different speciality within the school, usually quite at odds with whatever they were interested in before. For example Lizzie becomes the school’s…. (long pause) Ba…ckuan?

Adam: I was almost going to say macrame. But sadly it’s not.

Ren: Ba…Bajiquan expert. I think.

Adam: A form of martial art.

Ren: A form of Chinese martial art, yes. And Tyler becomes the robotics specialist.

I was wondering if you thought there was a subtext of racial/class profiling in the specialisms that the kids were given.

Adam: I did, until the Chinese martial arts was introduced but then I wasn’t so sure. Because the idea is that Ethan, who’s one of the only black kids in our central cast is into computing and then is coercively switched onto sports, and Lizzie’s slightly socially-awkward geeky brother who actually really likes magic is made an expert in computers and robotics.

Ren: And Lizzie’s friend Sophie, who’s East Asian is made an expert on science after previously having been into art.

Adam: That’s true. I guess I think it is probably there. I was a bit thrown by the martial arts because that is not in the book. In the book, Lizzie’s the one who has to learn the Shakespeare sonnets, which is given to a minor student in the programme.

Ren: I think it’s not very prominent but there is a shade of that.

A way in which the hypnotism is the same is the way that stock phrases are placed in people’s heads, so that when they try and tell anyone about the headmaster, all they can do is repeat that ‘he’s inspirational, he’s really turned the school around’. In contrast to the original series’: ‘The headmaster is a marvellous man, and this is the best school I’ve ever been to’.

Adam: It’s interesting because superficially he has (turned the school around). The kids certainly are much better behaved. Blake, for instance, used to be a terrible bully, and now he’s not bullying anyone. We’d normally see this is a good thing, but obviously they have no free will in this situation.

There’s also a sense, and you get this more in the book, that they’re not really learning. And this strikes me as a critique of some of Michael Gove’s educational reforms. This return to rote learning and devaluation of the humanities and importance of rote learning.

Ren: He was the Conservative party education secretary. And I think that was also a theme in the original book and series as well, you had the kids standing round in circles at lunchtime chanting their times tables and kings and queens of England and that sort of thing.

It doesn’t come across so much in this series, although the speed at which they become adept at their new skills definitely shows that they haven’t actually learned it themselves.

Adam: It’s like the matrix!

Ren: It is like the matrix, that’s what this always makes me think of.

So he’s definitely learned some new tricks, in his twenty-year sabbatical from Demon Headmastering.

Adam: We say ‘he’, but of course it’s not necessarily the same Demon Headmaster.

Ren: The… entity that creates demon headmasters has learned some new tricks?

Adam: Yes, because we get the impression by the end of the series, you might disagree with me, but there’s a race of creatures, an alien race… or they’re manufactured? Like Pokemon, but demon headmasters.

(In Pokerap voice) Demon headmaster, demon headmaster, demon headmaster!

Demon headmaster uses hypnotism!

Ren: So we’ve talked a bit about the technology, there’s definitely an expanded role for technology in this series, with tablets and drones and electronic wristbands helping enforce the demon headmaster’s authority.

**Adam: ** Yeah, it’s always technology being used to control people even when it’s presented as something fun, or something to be enjoyed. Or for your own good, that’s definitely the critique of the drones.

Ren: Yes, the drones do routine checks on the kids to make sure they’re doing their homework, and by episode 4 are zooming about all over the school enforcing the rules.

Including hoving into view beeping ‘Warning: unsustainable market practice’ when Angelika starts giving away food and drink for free.

Adam: Did it remind you of your Food Not Bombs day at uni?

Ren: Hehe, yeah. What do you think about the political/social justice themes of the show?

Adam: I thought they were done pretty convincingly! The XR style flashbacks were a little cring-y at times, but you kind of need them to be a bit obvious so you get the idea across quickly and efficiently.

I thought as a critique of surveillance culture it was pretty dead-on. It’s interesting, because to me if we decide to read the new Demon Headmaster as a political text, which you don’t have to (!), it seemed to me to be coming off as a more libertarian position than a left-wing one.

Because while there’s a critique of the acadamisation of the school and the kids being forced to specialise, you don’t so much get the sense that you do in the original that the class needs to come together in collective revolt against the demon headmaster. There isn’t really much sense of solidarity in this.

And a lot of the critiques seem to be focussed on the idea that the headmaster is taking away their individual free will, and their rights to be disruptive, or even be a bully. But a lot of the critiques seem to be around individual liberty, and I’m not saying ‘Get rid of all individual liberty!’, but those concerns strike me as quite libertarian concerns.

What did you think?

Ren: I thought there was some interesting stuff around Blake and around Lizzie’s mum. With Blake, his speciality is being a janitor, which isn’t really a speciality, that’s what is decided because the headmaster says: ‘‘You’re of low intelligence. Take pride in menial tasks and small achievements.’ And I thought that made more explicit the headmaster’s fascist views.

Adam: Yeah, you never really had much of a sense of a eugenicist theme in the original.

Ren: But I do think that is there in this one. Lizzie’s mum is ill, and there’s a point where… there’s a bit where all the parents get…. what actually happens there? It’s a kind of alternative version of the school at the end.

Adam: Yeah, that’s really strange! The living thought experiment bit.

Ren: It’s fairly bizarre.

Adam: So Lizzie makes some kind of Faustian with the Demon Headmaster, and basically he says ‘Oh, I’ll cure your mother from her illness if you go along with everything that I say’, and so she accepts…

Ren: And then the mother is suddenly the deputy head of the school, and various other things have suddenly changed, and Lizzie’s wildly confused and says, ‘But what happened to your illness, mum?’ and Lizzie’s mum says ‘Illness is weak and inefficient’, and Lizzie says ‘No, it’s just something that happens’.

So I thought that was quite a nice juxtaposition of Demon Headmaster views and a more humane view of the human condition.

Adam: Yeah, and the Demon Headmaster views rather aligning with those of our current government and the department of work and pensions.

And in terms of janitors, obviously there’s been a fair amount written about how much the coronavirus has brought home how important people doing for example, waste disposal are, compared to say, advertising executives.

Ren: Yeah, absolutely. So someone calls him a fascist and throws a milkshake at him.

Adam: That does happen!

Ren: It does happen, I really enjoyed it. Unfortunately Blake takes the brunt of the milkshake.

Adam: If this had been made back in the 90s it would have been gunge. Why don’t we have ‘gunge a fascist’?

Ren: This is skipping forward a bit, but I was very happy to see the callback to the Eddy Hair Show.

**Adam: ** So, I watched this with my partner Antonia and she was quite excited to see Eddy Hair, so who was it played him?

Ren: Oh gosh, I don’t know.

Adam: There was this very confusing bit that I really liked, where they go on a computer to try and investigate the Eddy Hair Show and the old demon headmaster, and they go through this site that looks like a preserved Geocities site that is a bizarre series of flash animations with imagery from the original series. And they don’t really learn anything from it.

Ren: No they do, they find the co-ordinates to the old school. But yes, this is at the start of episode 6 where the kids literally google ‘spooky headmaster’ to try and figure out what’s going on, which seems like a very realistic thing to do in this scenario.

Adam: And it’s interesting because they look that up and there’s lots of people on message boards saying: ‘Oh do you remember that creepy headmaster from when he was on the Eddy Hair show?’, and it was kind of great because it was kind of like how you’d have people discussing the demon headmaster nostalgically online.

Ren: Ohhh okay, it was Danny John Jules who played Eddy Hair.

Adam: Is that Cat from Red Dwarf?

Ren: Yep. That makes sense.

So episode 6 of 10 is when we start getting these callbacks to the old series. The kids go on this bizarre Geocities flash animation trail, and find the map co-ordinates to the old school, and when they go there they find photos of kids on the wall in the old green school uniform, and an oil painting of Terrence Hardiman’s headmaster in the office.

Adam: Which I hope he now has in his home!

Ren: I really hope so. It seems like he’d be into that, judging by the antics that we hear about him.

Adam: I don’t know about any antics!

Ren: I’ve seen anecdotes of him on twitter of him playing up the demon headmaster role to people.

So the phone in the headmaster’s office rings and it’s Terrence Hardiman’s voice saying ‘Look into my eyes’ and the eyes of the painting move. They find a secret compartment in the office, and find a vhs tape in it. And then they all go (cockney sparrow voice) ‘Wot? Eh? Wot’s this? I’ve never seen one before because I’m a child.’

Adam: It’s like most of my students with DVDS or watching films in cinemas, or in a group.

Ren: They try to leave with this VHS tape and the Demon Headmaster does something sinister with a map and deploys members of the public who start circling in on them and a lollipop lady says ‘Conformity brings happiness and health!’ and they’re circled by these people filming them on their phones, until it turns out that resistance is futile and Angelika gives over the tape to save her friends.

But, they find a bit of paper inside the VHS case that looks blank but under the light they can make out the words: ‘My name is Dinah Hunter, and if you’re reading this it’s happening again’.

Dun dun dun.

Which is quite exciting!

Adam: Yep, because Dinah Hunter’s the protagonist from the first Demon Headmaster. They try to find Dinah online, but it comes up with an obituary, but the next day at school a new stern brunette teacher turns up, and then rides off on a motorbike when it’s found out that she’s not meant to be there, sending the headmaster’s drones spinning out of the sky.

It turns out that she works for MI6, and there’s also a tantalising mention of Rose, who was the chillingly sadistic prefect from the original series —

Adam: And the fan favourite character!

Ren: She’s brilliant.

So it was very exciting to get a mention of Rose.

**Adam: ** I was excited too. But I’m not entirely sure with what they do with the characters.

Ren: Yeah. So. How it plays out is that…

Adam: You think that Dinah’s got a brilliant plan!

Ren: You really do. There’s this kind of showdown in the old school involving a bomb, this is the first one, there’s one later on as well. But in this one, Blake manage to disarm it and then Dinah gets captured by the demon headmaster, and starts parroting his phrases and being thoroughly hypnotised, at which point you think: ‘ah, she’s just pretending to be hypnotised! She’s going to have a brilliant plan!’.

Adam: ‘Yeah, Dinah Hunter wouldn’t just be another drone!’ Or would she. Well, you know, we all get older, we all lose the heady independence as youth and go to work for MI5. She’d already copped out.

Ren: I guess so, and I guess they did need to leave it to the actual kids to save the day. But Dinah is much of a lemon for most of it.

Adam: She’s quite easily dealt with, really. Antonia was quite disappointed by that, and thought it was quite an odd thing for Gillian Cross to do, but it’s notable that Dinah doesn’t appear in the book Total Control at all, so I do wonder to what extent this was Gillian Cross’s decision and whether she was consulted on the screenplay.

But it does seem odd, because Gillian Cross wrote half a dozen Demon Headmaster books all with Dinah Hunter as the protagonist, and it does seem a bit odd to bring back your beloved protagonist only for them to be felled at the first hurdle and become a fascist drone for the rest of the series until they’re saved at the end.

But as I said, we all disappoint ourselves as we get older. Maybe it makes sense that our childhood heroes aren’t what they were.

Ren: The other slightly odd choice is that it turns out that Lizzie and Tyler’s mum is Rose.

Adam: Okay, so, we’d better work this out because it is quite strange. So, at some point during her childhood, or during the original series the demon headmaster did, what? Implant a virus? There’s quite a bit of bio-engineering stuff in the third and fourth series of the Demon Headmaster, so is that it?

He’s clearly given her some kind of chronic illness, or debilitating condition. A microchip? Did he ask Rose to come into his office and put something in her brain?

Ren: It’s been so long since I’ve read the books, but Rose definitely continues to have a role beyond the school era. I think there’s a fairly long relationship with Rose.

Adam: So I guess this is just part of the other Demon Headmaster’s control over her, and made her unwell. It’s like she’s been put on standby, basically, like she’s been cooped away in this new suburban house with a new identity and if the demon headmaster or the super-being who controls all the demon headmasters needs to dispatch Rose, she’s there, and has this illness so she can’t fight back? Maybe?

Ren: Yeah? Yeah? Maybe?

Adam: That was my fevered attempts at trying to make sense of it, because I didn’t really understand if I’m honest.

Ren: No, me neither. I think that’s a good gist of it.

Adam: Sorry listeners if you’re just like: ‘what? what is he prattling about?’ because honestly I don’t really know what happened near the end of the series.

Ren: Yeah, I mean, I didn’t even have suspected coronavirus and I also found it quite confusing.

I’ve been going back and forth, kind of arguing with myself Gollum-style. Like: ‘But she looks nothing like Rose!’ ‘Yes, but lots of adults look nothing like they did when they were 10!’ ‘Yes, but she really looks nothing like her!’

Adam: Yeah, I’m surprised they didn’t get back the original performers, but they’ve probably moved on with their lives. We probably can’t expect people to be like Rose, sat on call, ready to be dispatched for the new Demon Headmaster any given moment.

Ren: I believed in the adult Dinah being the adult Dinah. The adult Dinah I found hard to square with the child actor.

**Adam: ** Yes, I would agree with that. But we do get one cast member back!

Ren: Yes, we do. Right at the very end who turns up the original demon headmaster himself!

Adam: Although I totally thought he was going to turn out to be the Prime Minister, but maybe that would have been too strong a political statement.

Ren: Yep, so Terrence Hardiman’s headmaster turns up. This is when the kids have hacked the new demon headmaster’s attempt to attempt to hypnotise the country, and old demon headmaster turns up and says: ‘The operation has failed. We need to put in the emergency exit strategy, we need to destroy the new headmaster’.

Even though they’ve spent twenty years on this new body, it needs to go. So he sets a timer for an explosive device in the school, reveals himself to be a hologram and nonchalantly says ‘I can build a new one, it’s fine’.

Adam: Well, holograms are actually my Texture of the Week. A texture that is not a texture, though more of a texture than Ava’s so-called social textures.

Ren: Well, shall we?

Adam and Ren: fumbling and whistling noises Texture! Texture? Texture… of… the week!

Adam I like how you were trying to match the pitch there of your instrument. Very harmonious.

Ren: Thank you. I am in a band, you know.

Adam: Oh yeah! What’s your band called?

Ren: We don’t have a name yet. But I’m the drummer. Yeah, a hologram texture, Adam?

Adam: Well, in the book the headmaster doesn’t deign to make a real appearance in front of the kids, he just dispatches a hologram instead, and there’s a description of the hologram I really liked:

‘Ethan started the film playing again and saw the door opening and Lizzie walking into the room. But — the headmaster wasn’t there. Ethan frowned. Lizzie wouldn’t have gone in without being called. So where was the Headmaster? Lizzie looked just as baffled as Ethan felt. But only for a few seconds. Then, in the middle of the room, the air began to sparkle and shiver, like a crowd of tiny, silvery midges. At first it was just a strange formless shimmering. But gradually, it thickened and a tall figure began to take shape. Ethan saw Lizzie open her mouth, as if she was going to speak. But she didn’t say anything. She just stared as the Headmaster appeared before her, with one hand raised to take off his dark glasses.’

Ren: Ooh.

Adam: I like shimmery, sparkly holograms.

Ren: I have two food textures, one being the chunky green smoothie that Angelika tries to sell the kids for exorbitant prices from her stall. Which did look distinctly unappetising.

Adam: I thought it looked quite nice!

Ren: Well, you know I’ve been drinking green smoothies for a long time.

Adam: I remember when we were both at York you would always be serving up kale and kale alone, kale sprinkled with kale!

Ren: It’s true, I was on the kale bandwagon.

**Adam: ** But now it’s become popular—

Ren: — It was just the chunks, Adam. It was the chunks I found unappetising.

Adam: Chunks o’ kale. Yeah, I don’t mind a chunky smoothie.

Ren: Okay. And chunky blue icing being smeared on a muffin was my other texture, when the kids are hypnotised into helping bake goods for Angelika’s stall and they’re smearing very thick, very blue icing on muffins.

Adam: To be fair, Ren, we are in lockdown and some degree of rationing is to be expected. So if I was offered a vegan chunky blue muffin or a kale smoothie, at this moment in time I wouldn’t be turning it down.

Ren: I definitely didn’t factor in enough sweets for lockdown.

Adam: Oh no, I hear ya. My mum’s gone out for shopping once, and I said: ‘please, please bring back sweets!’ and bless her, she bought back a packet of sweets, and I tried to look thankful but… it wasn’t quite the quantity I was hoping for, I admit.

And then the inevitable happened the next day where I was like (squawky baby bird voice) ’Is there anything for pudding?’ and she’s like ‘why don’t you have those sweets?’, ‘what those sweets you gave me yesterday? As if they are still around. Has the corona rattled your brains, mother?’ No, I didn’t say that.

Ren: I’m thankfully very stocked up on tinned tomatoes and onions and…

Adam: I’d already got my Brexit stockpile. It’s not much of a stockpile, it’s like 12 cans and I’ve already started in on them. It’s mostly canned fruit. I’ve got some canned rhubarb that I’m saving for a rainy day.

Ren: I haven’t started a sourdough yet.

Adam: That does seem to be a thing. I get a bit freaked out by my mum’s sourdough. She’s got this yeast she calls Norman, and she’s like ‘Oh, I’m just off to feed Norman’ and it gives me the fear. I don’t like it. ‘Oh no, Norman died. Don’t worry I’ll make a new Norman’.

Ren: Have you eaten Norman’s offspring though?

Adam: Yeah, I think so. He’s probably planning revenge as we speak, I imagine. Yeasty minds.

Ren: So I made a list of dystopian soundbites from the series, I’ll paste them into the zoom chat and I thought we could take turns reading them out.

Ren ‘A disorderly appearance creates a disorderly mind.’

Adam ‘He’s inspirational, he’s really turned the school around.’

Ren ‘Disorder is the enemy of achievement.’

Adam ‘Conformity brings health and happiness, resistance will only bring pain.’

Ren (in drone voice) ‘Unacceptable levels of emotion.’

Adam ‘Control. Command. Conquer.’

Ren ‘We do not celebrate runners up at Hazelbrook.’

Adam ‘Have a profitable day!’

Ren and Adam ‘We can all express our true selves.’

Adam ‘The innocent student has nothing to hide’

Ren ‘I fulfil your deepest desire. I make the decisions so you don’t have to.’

Adam: That’s nice. I feel quite calm after all of that. It’s quite comforting in these times of crisis, you know. I suppose these draconian measures are needed after all.

Ren: Oh look there’s one of the government drones outside my window now!

Adam: Ha Ha Ha.

Ren: Ha Ha.

**Adam: ** You can definitely imagine followers of the Demon Headmaster snitching on people for their second runs, can’t you.

Ren: Absolutely.

Adam: Any final thoughts?

Ren: I think that might be all my thoughts.

Adam: Forever?

Ren: It might be!

Adam: You’re done.

Ren: I’m packing in the old brain machine now.

Adam: The only other thing I have to say is something that I can’t usefully show over the podcast, which is that my copy of the book has a little eye with a spiral, and as you flick the pages the eye opens and closes, like in a flick book.

Ren: Oh, that’s nice, I’m glad to see flickbook technology is still around.

Oh, I did have something else I wanted to say! I was 6 episodes in before I realised it was meant to be set in Glasgow. It was filmed in Glasgow, but there’s only one character with a Glasgow accent and a few other characters with other Scottish characters. It’s a bit confusing, but I’m going to claim it for my adopted home city.

Adam: Well, shall we continue with the recent children’s programming and do the second series of Creeped Out next?

Ren: Yep!

Adam: And if you guys want anything to watch during lockdown you could do worse than the Demon Headmaster.

Ren: So I think that’s it. Sorry if this was a bit spacier than usual, everything’s a bit weird but… we’re doing our best.

Adam: That should be our tagline: ‘A bit weird, but we’re doing our best’. And thank you to the person who may or may not be Ren’s sibling, who left us a very kind review on Apple Podcasts.

Ren: If you weren’t my sibling, you are now. Do you have a sign-off for us, Adam?

Adam: Yes, I just wanted to say that I have evaluated our cash flow situation from the beginning of the show’s run, and our cash flow situation isn’t so good.

Ren: Oh well. See you later, spooky kids!

**Adam: ** Bye!

(Over outro theme)

Adam: Yeah, a bit spacey, but I think we covered it.

Ren: Yeah.

(Outro music plays)