On the Terrace

On the Terrace: Breaking Free

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Episode notes

We’ve reached the end of series one of Night Terrace! In this last episode for season one of On the Terrace, host Vaya Pashos talks to John Richards (head writer, producer), Ben McKenzie (producer, Eddie Jones) and David Ashton (audio designer) about the epic conclusion to the first series: “Home”.

When we last left our heroes, they’d crashed their time and space travelling house into some kind of alien virtual reality disco…thing. And they got themselves ejected. Now, they’re split up, and find themselves in an eerie white void – and they’re not alone. We finally get a bunch of answers about Sue, the DEPARTMENT and even the origins of Night Terrace itself! But can Anastasia and Eddie survive to make use of this information? Vaya, John, Ben and David talk about the plot, guest star Jane Badler, regular stars Jackie Woodburne and Petra Elliott, psychic igloos and the first series as a whole.

We’ll be back with season two of On the Terrace when Night Terrace returns to BBC Radio 4 Extra in August 2019. In the meantime, send us your questions via Twitter, Facebook or email, and we’ll see if we can release a bonus Q&A episode in between series.

Episode eight of Night Terrace, “Home”, is available on BBC Radio 4 Extra for 30 days after broadcast. You can also listen to episode one for free, and purchase the rest of the series, via nightterrace.com or the Splendid Chaps Bandcamp store. Find Vaya on Neighbuzz at neighbuzzpod.com.

Show Notes

  • Jane Badler is best known as the evil alien queen Diana in the 1980s sci-fi series V and it’s modern reboot. She’s also an amazing singer whose work spans multiple genres; you can find out more about everything she does at janebadler.com and she’s on Twitter as @JaneBadler.
  • If you were to look at spacetime – the fabric of the Universe, essentially – at the subatomic level, it wouldn’t be smooth; instead, fluctuations in quantum gravity would cause tiny regions of expansion and contraction, sort of like the bubbles in foam. Hence the idea that very close up, spacetime is a “quantum foam”. The idea is credited to John Wheeler in 1955, though he took it much less literally than Auguste Night.
  • The white void or white void room trope occurs many times in fiction. Notable instances in Doctor Who include the Land of Fiction in The Mind Robber, and the null space between universes in Warrior’s Gate.
  • “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” is an episode of The Twilight Zone television series, originally broadcast in 1961. It’s title references the 1921 Italian absurdist play Six Characters in Search of an Author, and Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1944 play No Exit.
  • Planet Nerd was a geek culture lifestyle show created by Dan Walmsley for Channel 31 in 2007.
  • The Good Place is an American sit-com created by Michael Shur for NBC. It stars Kristen Bell, Ted Danson, William Jackson Harper, Jameela Jamil, Manny Jacinto and D’Arcy Carden. If you get into it, we also recommend The Good Place: The Podcast, which is a lot like On the Terrace, only about The Good Place. (You probably shouldn’t start listening to it until you’ve finished watching season one of the show, though.)
  • Sapphire & Steel was a sci-fi/fantasy serial created by P J Hammond and starring Joanna Lumley and David McCallum. It was produced by ATV and broadcast on ITV between 1979 and 1982, in a series of long serialised “adventures” which do not have titles. It’s weird and spooky and we love it; you’ll need to track it down on DVD, though.
  • Return to Oz is the 1985 unofficial sequel to The Wizard of Oz, loosely based on some of the later Frank L Baum books. It stars Fairuza Balk as Dorothy, whose stories about Oz have landed her in the sites of some sinister psychiatrists, but she returns to Oz (it does what it says on the tin) in order to help her old friends and make new ones.
  • Angel is the spin-off of Buffy the Vampire Slayer which follows Buffy’s ex-boyfriend Angel, a vampire cursed to have a soul, as he tries to fight the forces of evil on behalf of the “Powers That Be”. Evil law firm Wolfram & Hart’s “White Room” first appears in the season three episode “Forgiving”.
  • To find out more about Vaya’s new podcast Media Darlings, watch mediadarlings.com.au and sign up for her mailing list!
  • The other Splendid Chaps Productions podcasts are Splendid Chaps, Pratchat and re:Discovery.