This week, my friend Daniel joins me for the first time, to discuss a shared passion of ours, the stories of Roald Dahl!
In the first half we focus pretty closely on discussion of Dahl's longish short story The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. In the second half, we broaden the scope to talk a little bit about Dahl's other works, particularly some of his more popular children's fiction, and their ideas around retributive and 'childish' justice. Works discussed include Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Witches, The BFG, Fantastic Mr Fox and several others.
0.00 The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
0.54 Dahl and the nature of justice in his stories
You can find the show on Twitter at @EGoat_pod (or tweet at me on @D_Faggiani) and email us with any feedback on escapegoatpod@gmail.com. All our episodes so far are now on Spotify, our YouTube channel, and Apple Podcasts! Do spread the word!
All original intro, outro and other incidental music in this and prior episodes recorded and made available by kind permission of Richard Gilbert.
NOTES
We'll almost certainly end up doing another podcast about Roald Dahl some other time - probably focusing more on his more nominally 'adult' stories, which Daniel and I have a lot to say about.
Just to highlight - we (very briefly) mention Dahl's pretty unpleasant antisemitism in this podcast, but don't really go on to examine it at all. We're not wanting to minimise it - it will definitely be a topic of proper discussion next time we do a cast about Dahl.
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar can currently be found on YouTube here, read by Martin Jarvis. I think this is the version I listened to growing up, and, yes, Jarvis does basically do a (fairrrrrly restrained) 'Apu voice' in Indian accent when voicing Imrat Khan. I know Andrew Scott has narrated a more recent version - I have no idea if he does the same (let us know!)
The author Jack Graham, who I mention towards the end of the cast, touches on his conception and defence of 'childish' politics (in a good way) in this piece, and I think in others. Apologies if I misrepresented his views in any way on the cast, I hope I got the basic gist across!
