In this episode we talked about Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator by Roald Dahl.

Our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com and we're on instagram @stillscaredpodcast! Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her music on her bandcamp. Outro music is by Jo Kelly, and you can find their music under the name Wendy Miasma on bandcamp. Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com

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 Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator by Roald Dahl.

(Intro music plays)

Ren Hi, Adam.

Adam Hello, Ren, you rascal. How are you doing?

Ren I'm doing alright, are you in the mood to talk about a weird book?

Adam Yeah, I don't know what I'm going to say about this book of random malarkey!

Ren Yeah, Charlie and the random malarkey.

Adam Yeah, it's an interesting one, and considering what an impression it made on me as a kid, I could hardly remember any of it.

Ren Well, same. Well, same. Yeah. This is Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator by Roald Dahl from 1973, illustrated by Faith Jacques.

Adam What? Oh, I've got the Quentin Blake illustrations.

Ren Oh do you? Oh, okay, so I was going to do the cover check first because I deliberately got a vintage edition.

Adam Oh, no, I've got the new edition. So I assume there’s some edits. I mean, it still seemed pretty offensive to me, so I can't imagine.

Ren Oh, OK. I'm curious to see.

Adam Yeah, I don't think it's been that edited, if it has been. You know, after all this farago about editing Roald Dahl to make him politically correct and so on. They left a lot in there if so!

Ren Yeah, we'll come to that. What's your front cover?

Adam My front cover is definitely a scritchy Quentin Blake illustration and it's of Willy Wonka, Charlie and Grandpa Joe ascending in the elevator above the planet Earth into space.

Ren And yeah, your interior illustrations are different too, that's interesting. OK, so mine is from 1978 and it has a full colour illustration on the front that shows the the whole crew: Willy Wonka, Charlie, Grandpa Joe, Charlie's parents and then the rest of the grandparents in their bed, crammed into this glass elevator, but they look quite jolly about it. And they're descending into a green pastoral landscape and being hailed by the Oompa Loompas.

Adam And and what do the Oompa Loompas look like?

Ren The Oompa Loompas are just small white people wearing loincloths.

Adam Yeah. I mean, that's similar to Quentin Blake's illustrations of them, I would say. They've got very sticky up hair, but that's pretty much how Quentin Blake does hair anyway. So what is your memory of this book?

Ren My memory of this book is just vermicious knids and Grandma Georgina becoming a minus.

Adam Yeah, same here.

Ren And that is it.

Adam And a general ambience of dread and confusion.

Ren Yeah, exactly. A general sense that it is a bad book, not in terms of quality, but in terms of being malevolent.

Adam Being a wrong book. Which it is.

Ren Yeah, that you might hide. Like you might not want it to look at you on your bookshelf, that kind of book.

Adam I felt like that about The Witches. But this is a much weirder book than The Witches. The Witches is straightforwardly scary, you know, it’s basically a horror book for kids. Now this is ostensibly science fiction, I suppose? A kind of fantastic Jules Vernes-esque romp, perhaps?

But it's probably more deeply unsettling, like existentially unsettling than The Witches.

Ren Yeah.

Adam And I think especially if you go into it expecting anything like Charlie the Chocolate Factory, because structurally it's so different because Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has a really satisfying narrative progression in which you have Charlie, the good kid, and then a bunch of naughty kids going through trials which expose the naughty kids as naughty and they receive some kind of comeuppance, and then Charlie is rewarded with the Chocolate Factory at the end of the book.

Whereas this, the plotting of this book is really weird. And I think it's really hard to describe because basically it's a book in which simultaneously a lot happens, like things happen of ontologically and philosophically, massive proportions like reality- warbling proportions in terms of what's happening, and yet simultaneously it's a book which nothing happens at all and there is zero narrative progression.

Like completely zero, like it's a book of complete stasis even while this elevator is zooming up into space and then into the bowels of the earth. And I think — and that's the kind of highbrow way to explain it — but I do think that gets to why it's so disturbing as a child, this weird sense that a lot is happening and stuff is happening that makes you kind of question the way reality works, in a way that's confusing and strange. And yet it's really hard to remember what happens because really nothing happens. Does that make sense? It's hard to explain.

Ren It does make sense. Yeah, it doesn't feel like a sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It doesn't feel like a proper book.

Adam It doesn’t feel like a proper book.

Ren It feels like Roald Dahl had a weird night's sleep and jotted some stuff down and turned it into a book.

Adam Oh, yeah, it feels like if you're watching an improv show, and the improv show had gone on for 24 hours and all the performers were really sleep-deprived. And they were still trying to be funny, and some of it was kind of funny, but other bits are just confusing and scary.

Ren Yeah, it does feel like that!

Adam And stuff was happening, but it didn't really make sense.

Ren But also it's it's doing that using these characters who have become quite beloved, but just putting them in these alarming and nonsensical situations that feels quite frightening for them.

Adam And I think you'd also expect more of the Chocolate Factory.

Ren You would.

Adam You get some of the Chocolate Factory, but also it turns out that this Chocolate Factory contains a minus land, which seems to be the realm of the not-yet-born. Right. OK. So that's an astral plane. So somehow, a Chocolate Factory owned by an eccentric billionaire contains an astral plane. That is quite a lot to accept as a reader, I think.

Ren It is, I think it's a big ask.

Adam It’s like the Twin Peaks, The Return. If Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is original Twin Peaks, this is Twin Peaks The Return, where it's like: right, you wanted weird, now this is going to be weird!

Ren So this book begins pretty directly after Charlie and the Chocolate Factory left off —

Adam Oh, immediately! Yeah.

Ren With Charlie's extended family being collected by Willy Wonka and his glass elevator as Charlie's been chosen to inherit the factory. And there's his parents and there's still these three other grandparents who refuse to leave their bed, so the bed comes with them, too. But Willy Wonka insists that in order to re-enter the factory, they have to go higher first.

Adam Why? Why?

Ren Yeah, so they keep going higher and higher and, I think reasonably, Grandma Josephine panics at Willy Wonka's erratic behaviour, but it prevents Wonka from pressing the correct combination of buttons at the correct moment and oops, they are in orbit.

So, they're spotted by the pilots of a transport capsule for Space Hotel USA. Which is a a vast hotel that's that's about to be furnished with crew from this capsule. And Willy Wonka decides that it would it would be fun to beat the shuttle to the space hotel and get on board before they do. So they do. And this is where they encounter —

Adam But before the encounter, right, there's quite a long a long chapter with the president and various members of state. And I don't understand how Roald Dahl thought this would be appealing or interesting to kids. It's really odd. It reads like this kind of strange political cartoon or satire of American politics, kinda aimed for children. But what it's doing in this book, I have no idea.

Ren Yeah, who knows? The President of the United States is quite an important character in this book for no reason. And he's a very stupid and emasculated president. I don't know if this is meant to be aimed at Nixon, who I guess would have been president at the time?

Adam It doesn't feel like if it's a parody of Nixon, if it’s a parody of Nixon it’s a really weird parody of Nixon! Because if you're going to parody Nixon, right, he needs to be kind of weasley and conniving and grotesque. And this president is just a soft boy.

And there's a whole bunch of comedy business between him and his nanny, Miss Tibbs, who is, to quote: “The power behind the throne. She stood no nonsense from anyone. Some people said she was as strict with the president now as when he was a little boy.” And she even gets a strange, A.A. Milne, Lewis Carroll style song about the president.

Ren She does. It's all entirely baffling. Yeah, I think the bit that has probably been somewhat edited between our versions is the exchange with the the Prime Minister of China?

Adam No, no, I don't think it's been edited.

Ren Ah, okay, cool!

Adam I mean, it's funny because I like to see myself as someone who's against too much censorship or so on. But yeah, it's not on, to be honest. It's a rough read. It's basically the kind of most corny, cringey jokes about how Chinese people stereotypically speak. Over like two pages. It's pretty bad.

Ren It's pretty bad.

Adam It's like you've just wandered into some awful Bernard Manning or Ken Dodd routine, basically.

Ren Why?

Adam And also not only is it offensive and rubbish, but also why? Like, there's no reason for it to be there at all. On any level. Narratively the whole chapter doesn't need to be there. Why is there this chapter about this soft boy president? It’s completely inexplicable.

Ren So yeah, I completely forgot all of that. I guess I probably didn't really read it very thoroughly, it probably wasn't very interesting to my 10 year-old self, unsurprisingly.

Adam After Roald Dahl's got that out of his system, then our intrepid band of explorers do arrive at the Space Hotel.

Ren And there is some malarkey where NASA is listening in to their exploration of this hotel, so Willy Wonka pretends to to speak Martian? I don't know.

Adam It's not Spike Milligan quality, this, I have to admit. You know, it's a bit like On The Ning Nang Nong, but it's basically just silly noises.

Ren Yeah, silly noises. And then when you think this book might just be a bit boring, it becomes terrifying.

I kind of want to read a fair bit.

Adam Feel free to basically read Chapter 7, frankly. This is where the children's horror really suddenly hits.

Ren OK.

"In the lobby of the Space Hotel, Mr Wonka had merely paused in order to think up another verse, and he was just about to start off again when a frightful piercing scream stopped him cold. The screamer was Grandma Josephine. She was sitting up in bed and pointing with a shaking finger at the lifts at the far end of the lobby. She screamed a second time, still pointing, and all eyes turned toward the lifts. The door of the one on the left was sliding slowly open and the watchers could clearly see that there was something… something thick… something brown… something not exactly brown, but greenish-brown… something with slimy skin and large eyes… squatting inside the lift!

Chapter Seven

Something Nasty in the Lifts

Grandma Josephine had stopped screaming now. She had gone rigid with shock. The rest of the group by the bed, including Charlie and Grandpa Joe, had become as still as stone. They dared not move. They dared hardly breathe. And Mr Wonka, who had swung quickly around to look when the first scream came, was as dumbstruck as the rest. He stood motionless, gaping at the thing in the lift, his mouth slightly open, his eyes stretched wide as two wheels. What he saw, what they all saw, was this:

It looked more than anything like an enormous egg balanced on its pointed end. It was as tall as a big boy and wider than the fattest man. The greenish-brown skin had a shiny wettish appearance and there were wrinkles in it. About three-quarters of the way up, in the widest part, there were two large round eyes as big as tea-cups. The eyes were white, but each had a brilliant red pupil in the centre. The red pupils were resting on Mr Wonka. But now they began travelling slowly across to Charlie and Grandpa Joe and the others by the bed, settling upon them and gazing at them with a cold malevolent stare. The eyes were everything. There were no other features, no nose or mouth or ears, but the entire egg-shaped body was itself moving very very slightly, pulsing and bulging gently here and there as though the skin were filled with some thick fluid.

At this point, Charlie suddenly noticed that the next lift was coming down. The indicator numbers above the door were flashing… 6… 5… 4… 3… 2… 1… L (for lobby). There was a slight pause. The door slid open and there, inside the second lift, was another enormous slimy wrinkled greenish-brown egg with eyes!

Now the numbers were flashing above all three of the remaining lifts. Down they came… down… down… down… And soon, at precisely the same time, they reached the lobby floor and the doors slid open… five open doors now… one creature in each… five in all… and five pairs of eyes with brilliant red centres all watching Mr Wonka and watching Charlie and Grandpa Joe and the others.

There were slight differences in size and shape between the five, but all had the same greenish-brown wrinkled skin and the skin was rippling and pulsing.

For about thirty seconds nothing happened. Nobody stirred, nobody made a sound. The silence was terrible. So was the suspense. Charlie was so frightened he felt himself shrinking inside his skin. Then he saw the creature in the left-hand lift suddenly starting to change shape! Its body was slowly becoming longer and longer, and thinner and thinner, going up and up towards the roof of the lift, not straight up, but curving a little to the left, making a snake-like curve that was curiously graceful, up to the left and then curling over the top to the right and coming down again in a half-circle… and then the bottom end began to grow out as well, like a tail… creeping along the floor… creeping along the floor to the left… until at last the creature, which had originally looked like a huge egg, now looked like a long curvy serpent standing up on its tail.”

Here we get an illustration, at least in my edition.

Adam Same here. What does your illustration look like, is it coloured?

Ren No, it’s black and white, it’s a line drawing of this creature in the door of the lift, in the shape of an S, with it’s one eye looking out. Quite textured.

"Then the one in the next lift began stretching itself in much the same way, and what a weird and oozy thing it was to watch! It was twisting itself into a shape that was a bit different from the first, balancing itself almost but not quite on the tip of its tail.

Then the three remaining creatures began stretching themselves all at the same time, each one elongating itself slowly upward, growing taller and taller, thinner and thinner, curving and twisting, stretching and stretching, curling and bending, balancing either on the tail or the head or both, and turned sideways now so that only one eye was visible. When they had all stopped stretching and bending, this was how they finished up:”

And here we see the full display of them, spelling out:

" 'Scram!' shouted Mr Wonka. 'Get out quick!'

People have never moved faster than Grandpa Joe and Charlie and Mr and Mrs Bucket at that moment. They all got behind the bed and started pushing like crazy. Mr Wonka ran in front of them shouting 'Scram! Scram! Scram!' and in ten seconds flat all of them were out of the lobby and back inside the Great Glass Elevator. Frantically, Mr Wonka began undoing bolts and pressing buttons. The door of the Great Glass Elevator snapped shut and the whole thing leaped sideways. They were away! And of course all of them, including the three old ones in the bed, floated up again into the air.”

Adam I think maybe why it's so effective is because things have been quite slow and sedate up to that part. And then, I mean I love the suspense built up by all the elevators coming down, that's terrific.

Ren It’s effective horror!

Adam Yeah. And it's just such a weird image these egg-like shapes. I think maybe when you think of eggs, you think of that perfect smoothness and hardness and then the fact that they're also bulging and pulsing underneath, that they’re kind of liquidy? I mean that encapsulates my Texture of the Week.

Ren Yeah, shall we?

Adam Shall we sing? I mean I was thinking there's the oompa loompa diddly do song from the film.

Ren and Adam, to the tune of the Oompa Loompa song Texture, Texture, Texture of the week. Texture, texture, texture of the week!

Ren Yeah, I mean it is basically the vermicious knids, but I got an extra one which is later when they are re-entering Earth's atmosphere with a vermicious knid wrapped around the elevator and it starts burning up. And it says it made a noise like bacon frying.

Adam How horrid. So Willy Wonka explains to them that these are these creatures are vermicious knids.

Ren They're dirty beasts!

Adam Yeah, he tells Charlie: “If they'd have got them, you'd have been a cooked cucumber. You'd have been rasped into 1000 tiny bits, grated like cheese and flocculated alive. They'd have made necklaces from your knuckle bones and bracelets from your teeth.”

And Charlie, in what feels a bit like an editorial insert says why would they tell us to scram if they want to kill us and eat us? And Wonka says, well, it's the only word they know. OK.

Adam But while they don't kill and eat Wonka and and Co, they certainly do kill and eat a lot of subsidiary characters who aren't important.

Ren They do, the poor space hotel stuff get thoroughly chomped upon.

Adam Not the astronauts, only the working class stuff, I note.

Ren The bellhops and the maids, etcetera.

Adam Yeah, which is broadcast, or the sound of it is broadcast live across the entire globe.

Ren It is. But before that the great glass elevator is chased by an enormous vermicious knid.

Adam That butts itself against the elevator with the pointy end of the egg, which turns out to be its butt. Yeah, and then there's a whole song about it’s butt. At times this is a weirdly butt-centred book.

Ren Yeah. So we can politely pass over that, I think. And then we get the nurses song, which is about the president.

Adam I don't know what the tune is, maybe I should go for it. Might be fun.

(Squeakily)

"This mighty man of whom I sing,

The greatest of them all,

Was once a teeny little thing,

Just eighteen inches tall.

I knew him as a tiny tot.

I nursed him on my knee.

I used to sit him on the pot

And wait for him to wee.”

And so on.

Ren And so on. Thank you. Yeah, it is very like the: "Speak roughly to your little boy and beat him when he sneezes” from Alice in Wonderland, yes.

Adam Yeah, it is. “He only does it to annoy —“

Ren “Because he knows it teases” Yeah.

Adam And then we get an epic space battle!

Ren And then we get an epic space battle! A squadron of vermicious knids attacks the transport capsule and the great glass elevator has to tow the survivors to safety.

Adam It's like something out of HG Wells crossed with a really obscure stupid adventure game puzzle.

Ren Yeah. And then one of these vermicious knids turns itself into a snake and wraps itself around the elevator and then the rest of them form a chain, and they're trying to to hook onto the elevator and the space capsule and draw them back. But Wonka manages to find the downward acceleration button and they end up streaking through the Earth's atmosphere and burning up all the vermicious knids. And then they crash back into the Chocolate Factory!

Adam Halfway into the book. Halfway into the sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl’s best known book.

Ren Yeah. And then we sort of get reset.

Adam So basically, that first half of the book might as well not have happened. It's kind of a prologue, I guess.

Ren Yeah. So if you're feeling suitably discombobulated. You're like, oh, okay, now we're back in the Chocolate Factory. We're familiar with the Oompa Loompas, we know them. But the grandparents will still not get out of bed.

Adam And Willy Wonka has kind of strange plan to have them work in the factory? Like his main reason for wanting them out of bed is their labour, as far as I could tell, which is quite odd.

Ren Yeah, quite odd.

Adam So Charlie now owns the Chocolate Factory, and of course Charlie is going to get his bedridden grandparents to labour away in the factory until they die. I just found that completely inexplicable.

Ren In case you're wondering, Charlie's parents have next to no bearing on anything. They are just about there.

Adam Yeah, only just about there. They're quite eerie, actually.

Ren Yeah, they’re so void, it's a bit odd.

Adam They're given so little dialogue, and when they do, it's all very generic. It's really strange.

Ren So Wonka’s plan is to use his de-ageing medicine Wonkavite on the grandparents.

Adam Yeah, yeah, and if you didn't think that Willy Wonka possibly offing or killing off young children or at least putting them into perilous situations in Chocolate Factory was bad enough, here it turns out that he's been conducting experiments on the Oompa Loompas that seemingly are so horrific he won't even directly talk about them, even when pressed repeatedly by other characters.

He’s like: “It took hundreds of experimental attempts." And when they’re like: “OK, what happened”, he’s like: “No, not going to talk about that.”

Ren It's really ominous.

Adam It’s so ominous! Which I guess that's sort of the character. Like that's how Gene Wilder obviously played him in the film. I think it tips the balance from eccentric billionaire into genuinely terrifying evil scientist.

Ren Yeah. Genuine madman.

Adam It's quite disturbing.

Ren Yeah, but despite this, the grandparents do decide that they will take these pills and in fact become so keen that they each take four. Oh, an Oompa Loompa comes and sings them a song about it. And they take four of these pills each despite the Oompa Loompa quite clearly singing that they will each reduce their age by 20 years.

Adam I guess this is a bit of a callback to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in which the Oompa Loompas sing about the dangers of say gluttony, and then a child commits gluttony, or the danger of watching too much TV and then a child watches too much TV, that kind of thing.

So it's a little bit of an anti being greedy thing maybe? It feels like there was really half-hearted edutainment bits in this book. It's like Roald Dahl's editors or his publishers have said, look, Roald, you've got to put in some stuff to keep the kids on the right track because some of this is a bit, you know, keep it clean, mate. And so he's like, alright, so he just adds in a random stupid poem out of nowhere about not taking medicine from the cabinet.

Ren He does, yeah, about not taking laxatives. And I didn't design to remember that at all. So that took me by surprise.

Adam I don't know when Dirty Beasts was published, the collection of poems, but it really feels like a B side, you know, a poem from one of his poetry collections that was not very good and it's just shoved in here.

Ren Yeah, so they take these four pills, which means that Grandma Josephine and Grandpa George become babies, and Grandma Georgina, meanwhile, becomes a minus.

Adam Nooo. That's what child me goes: “nope.”

Ren I know it's so wrong, it's so horrible. And as you mentioned this means that Wonka with Charlie in tow have to go to the hellish astral plane within this Chocolate Factory that is minus land.

Adam I hate it so much. Even as an adult I still hate it. It's awful.

Ren Yes, to administer Vita Wonk, which is the antidote. So shall I not get you to read this chapter?

Adam What, the description? No, I think I should. Okay, I'll read some of chapter 17, Rescue in Minus Land.

Ren Maybe from: “Charlie stood at the open door”?

Adam Alright.

"Charlie stood at the open door of the Elevator and stared into the swirling vapours. This, he thought, is what hell must be like… hell without heat… there was something unholy about it all, something unbelievably diabolical… It was all so deathly quiet, so desolate and empty… At the same time, the constant movement, the twisting and swirling of the misty vapours, gave one the feeling that some very powerful force, evil and malignant, was at work all around… Charlie felt a jab on his arm! He jumped! He almost jumped out of the Elevator! 'Sorry,' said Mr Wonka. 'It's only me.'

'Oh-h-h!' Charlie gasped. 'For a second, I thought…'

'I know what you thought, Charlie… And by the way, I'm awfully glad you're with me. How would you like to come here alone… as I did… as I had to… many times?’”

Waurrrghh.

Ren Waurggghhh. I don’t know what he was up to!

Adam I don’t know, we’ve suddenly gone into like Clive Barker territory or something.

Ren Absolutely deranged. So they see the ghostly figure of Grandma Georgina, in the vapour, and because she doesn't really have a human form anymore, she's a minus.

Adam And to be fair to the illustrators, this is a hard task. So Quentin Blake, I think cops out a bit and basically draws a ghostly grandma. And it's like, no, that doesn't make sense because she's aged backwards. She's aged into a child and then she's the other side, so you can't draw her as old, it doesn't make sense.

Ren Yeah, this one is still — I mean, her features are very obscured by the mist, but she does still look fairly grandma-esque. A tricky job.

Adam She needs to look like some kind of impossible foetus.

Ren Yeah, he has to administer the Vita Wonk with a spray gun, to ensure that she gets enough. Although he does overdo it.

Adam He loves it, doesn't he. He's a trickster. He knows what he’s doing.

Ren He says that she may be “a teeny tiny bit over plussed” But when they leave the hell dimension and go back up, they find out that she is 358.

Adam Can I read the awful description?

Ren Yeah, Thanks.

Adam “Her tiny face was like a pickled walnut. There were such masses of creases and wrinkles that the mouth and eyes and even the nose were sunken almost out of sight. Her hair was pure white and her hands, which were resting on top of the blanket, were just little lumps of wrinkly skin.”

Ren And I've got an illustration to go with this which makes full use of the cross-hatching texture in these wrinkles. I don't think I liked this illustration as a kid.

Adam Yeah, I really like Quentin Blake. I think Michael Rosen's sad book as illustrated by Quentin Blake is one of the peaks of children's picture books. At his best, I think he is remarkable. But he doesn't quite work for Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. It might be ‘cause he doesn't tend to go in for texture as much, he mostly does line work. His illustrations for The Witches are perfect, but I don't think he’s quite the right illustrator for this.

Ren So we're getting towards the end of the book.

Adam What is this plot? What is the plot??

Ren And then they age the various grandparents back to the age that they started with, so, cool? And then Mr Wonka gets a letter from the president Inviting them all to a special celebration for saving, some of the people.

Adam Yeah, good point. They save some of the people. They save the astronauts.

Ren And that is enough to finally get the remaining grandparents out of bed.

Adam And I hate the fact that a visit to the White House is treated as more extraordinary, more exciting, more wondrous than going into space and meeting aliens, venturing into an astral plane. It's like, oh yeah, we've transcended space and time, but the really big deal here is meeting the president and getting a medal.

Ren Yeah, and that's it.

Adam That's it. That’s the book. OK, so it ends:

"A group of extremely important-looking gentlemen came toward them and bowed.

'Well, Charlie,' said Grandpa Joe. 'It's certainly been a busy day.'

'It's not over yet,' Charlie said, laughing. 'It hasn't even begun.’”

Like what? What do you mean it hasn't begun? That's the end of the book!

Ren Yeah, why did you just tell us all of this!

Adam And there's not a sequel to this book. So it definitely has begun and finished! You know, we don't get ‘Charlie and the American President’.

Ren No. Or even another book where we experience the whimsy and wonders of the Chocolate Factory. Imagine that.

Adam We've just had monstrous egg aliens and some kind of weird astral realm based on mathematics and that's it. That's it. And some really, really pointless songs that aren't very good.

Ren So yeah, thanks Roald that was —

Adam This is a hot mess of a book.

Ren It really is.

Adam I think I knew something was up with the book as a kid, but I don't think I made a quality judgement. Now as an adult, I’m like, what is this? Come on.

Ren Yeah, as a kid I was just like, this makes me feel bad. Now I'm like no, just on every level. I feel like it would be out of print if that wouldn't create more demand for it. People need to collectively ignore it, I guess.

Adam Yeah, it's a terrible thing. It's a terrible thing. Like, it’s so odd because he can write really good stories, right? He is excellent at plotting. Matilda has excellent plotting and Matilda's late, right. So it's not as though he started good and tailed off, Matilda is one of his last books, and Matilda is perfectly plotted.

I know some of the early one, like James and the Giant Peach is very much one thing after another, but it makes sense. The only thing I'm glad of is that now the Netflix own the right to all Roald Dahl, someone presumably is going to have to make a film of it. Someone, probably right now, is crying as they try to make this into a screenplay. Who would direct this, do you reckon?

Ren Oh umm, Ari Aster, I don't know.

Adam That would be great, actually. Yeah alright. I’d be up for that. Maybe Ari Aster can collaborate with with Jan Svankmejer for his final film.

Ren Let them loose on it.

Adam But yeah, as I say it's a hard to illustrate book and I suspect a remarkably unfilmable book, which makes me really want a film of it.

Ren I mean, watch this space. We're going to be we're going to be straight on the scene if there is a film of this.

Adam Yeah, the Netflix adaptation.

Ren I mean, we said they wouldn't do The Swan and apparently they did The Swan.

Adam That's a fair point.

Ren Which I haven't seen yet. Did you?

Adam Did we talk about the Netflix versions? No? Oh, Oh, I did see it. Yeah. It's all right.

Ren OK, maybe you just said that. Maybe you're just like, oh, it's alright.

Adam The Wes Anderson ones? Yeah, he's just a really odd choice for Roald Dahl because he's so deliberately textureless. I mean, I quite like some Wes Anderson, you know, I love Royal Tenenbaums and Grand Budapest Hotel was great. And so, you know, I do like him, but obviously it's all very particular and just so and clockwork-like, and that's why it's pleasing a lot of it. And the emotions just kind of show through the cracks,

But he's a very odd choice for Roald Dahl because Roald Dahl tends to be too much. It tends to be grotesque and over-textured and a bit unruly and odd. So a very strange person to be doing the adaptations.

I mean, I don't know if there's any more Roald Dahl for us to talk about. You know, the BFG scared me quite a lot as a kid, and we could always talk about the animation, obviously.

Ren It is quite well-trodden territory.

Adam True, it’s more well-trodden.

Ren I think we will come back to Roald Dahl.

Adam I mean, I don't think even we could make a case for The Giraffe, The Pelly And Me being a horror.

Ren Aw, that's nice. Let's cap this off by thinking about The Giraffe, the Pelly and Me.

Adam Which is a lovely cozy book that children will actually enjoy rather than just be confused by.

Right, let's finish. It's a bad book.

Ren That I had a good time talking about. Oh yeah it’s a bad book but fun to talk about. Do you have a sign off for us, Adam?

Adam Not not really. I normally do, but I just like, I don't know, just read The Giraffe, the Pelly and Me, creepy kids, do yourself a favour.

Ren See you next time!

Adam Bye!

(Outro music plays)