Charlie And The Great Glass Elevator

Charlie And The Great Glass Elevator

As of today, the plan is to record two articles with Warren tomorrow to finish off the main material needed for Episode 26.

This will make it very much an Episode of two halves, as the other two main pieces have been sitting on my hard-drive for some time, but hopefully it should all knit together.

Anyway, what else has been happening?

Well, we were pleased to return on as guests on 'The Shy Life Podcast' recently, as Paul did Episode 194 as another Live show. How it's worked the last couple of times is that we've hung around in the chatroom, making the odd awful joke, then once Paul finishes the broadcast, we quickly go over to Skype for more nonsense.

This time Paul was joined in the studio by Nick and Andy, so the format of answering some Random Questions led to about an hour of extra material.

During this, we chatted about favourite books for a while, and the subject of Roald Dahl was raised, reminding me of my fondness for the rather overlooked 'Charlie And The Grear Glass Elevator', which was another of those titles I first came across in the school library.

I've always found it a shame that Charlie Bucket's first adventure has been made into a film twice now, but no-one's ever managed to pull off the entertaining, if even stranger, sequel.

OK, so it becomes obvious when you read it that some money is going to be required to do the space scenes in a convincing manner, but there's nothing in there that's utterly impossible.

The Elevator itself is clearly a relative of the TARDIS and some of the haunting illustrations by Faith Jaques do take liberties with its internal dimensions, but I've got no problem with that.

The trip to the Space Hotel 'USA' reminds us of how we once thought we'd all be spending our holidays in orbit and the depiction of the President, one Lancelot R Gilligrass, and his Patent Fly-Trap does raise a smile these days.

We have a frightening monster in the variable shape of the Vermicious Knids that you could do quite happily with some basic CGI, but really it's the second half of the book that's really stuck in my mind.

Without hopefully giving too much away, an experiment with Wonka-Vite (pills that will make you younger) goes a bit wrong when Grandma Georgina is regressed to the age of minus two. Her spirit (one presumes) shifts into a different dimension, Minusland, where she becomes a ghostly shadow.

After being sprayed with an antidote, she ends up back in our world, but aged 358 and with a memory of being on a ship going by the familiar name of 'Mayflower' in 1620...

This whole dabbling with Time fascinated me when I first read it, even if it does raise some very knotty questions about rewriting one's personal history.

But remember that the events in the famous Chocolate Factory are not the whole story, so if you've never read this one, do try and track it down.

But even to this day, I sometimes wonder what all the buttons in the Great Glass Elevator did and what adventures pressing them would take you on...

Episode 194 of 'The Shy Life Podcast' can be heard here.

(Written by Andrew Trowbridge)