Talk to the Hand

The Children's BBC adaptation of The Demon Headmaster ran for three series between 1996 and 1998. It's an interesting adaptation in many ways; after the first series adapted the first two books, they ran out of usable material -- there was a third book but it was impossible to realise on a film budget, let alone for children's television. Author Gillian Cross thus came up with a detailed plot outline for a new story, she went away and turned it into a book, whilst adapter Helen Cresswell wrote a television series using the same story. Those latter two series are hence broadly the same stories as the books, which were released around the same time as the shows went out, but sometimes the two authors have a slightly different take on the same idea, dialogue frequently changes (there is a noticeable change in the show's diction once it's no longer adapting Cross' dialogue verbatim), and the Headmaster is generally more involved in the TV versions, whereas the books tend to keep him as an off-stage presence a lot of the time. A full comparison can wait for another day, however, because I want to look at a few shots from the third series, The Demon Headmaster Takes Over, specifically the fourth episode. Starting with this one:

The Demon Headphones

Q: Who was the first actor to play the Demon Headmaster for the BBC?

You may not be particularly surprised to learn that the A to that particular Q is not Terrence Hardiman. Some 6 years before the CBBC series, the first two books were adapted for Radio 5 Live by Jim Eldridge in October 1990, in a format perhaps coincidentally very similar to how the first TV series would later handle them: a 4x25 series, with the eponymous first book covered in the first two episodes and The Prime Minister's Brain in the second. The only difference is that the TV series gave each book an extra episode; perhaps as a consequence, the characters of Ingrid, Lloyd and Mandy are all merged into Ingrid in the radio version. Anyway, the cast for the radio version was Edward de Souza as the Headmaster and Lucy Speed as Dinah.

To tie in with the TV series, the radio series was released on cassette on 1998, bearing the TV series' logo and font. It doesn't appear to have ever been released on CD, which I find slightly surprising given the series' enduring popularity. If you'd like to hear it, though, you can find it on the Internet Archive. (One wonders if they were ever tempted to realise The Revenge of the Demon Headmaster as a radio play, given it was skipped for the TV series on the grounds of being absolutely unfilmable. Probably not. For yet another little-known adaptation you may not have heard of, there was also a stage musical in 1999, for which Terrence Hardiman reprised his role.)