As we near the end of series one of Night Terrace, On the Terrace host Vaya Pashos talks with writer Lee Zachariah and audio designer David Ashton about the penultimate episode of series one: “Discoworld”.

Anastasia and Eddie have really started to get into the swing of travelling through time and space – despite her objections. But when they end up in a 1970s disco where the partygoers explode, things get really weird… Have they bit off more than they can chew? Vaya, Lee and David talk about their influences, how the show was recorded, guests stars Adam Richard and Naomi Rukavina, and the secrets of the disco soundscape and soundtrack for this episode.

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Episode seven of Night Terrace, “Discoworld”, 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

• Songs For Europe: Two Short Plays About Eurovision was Splendid Chaps Productions’ first foray into theatre during the 2013 Melbourne Fringe Festival. The plays were written by John Richards and Lee Zachariah and directed by Lucas Testro (also host of the podcast Doctor Who and the Episodes of Death). The first play told the story of a young journalist who tracks down a fictional Eurovision contestant who scored nul points in her youth, while part two was set in a bar in 1974 Portugal where activists are waiting for the signal to start the revolution – a Eurovision hit being played over the radio.
• Henry Higgins is a language professor who trains Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle to speak like an upper class lady in both George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion and the musical adapatation My Fair Lady (though each have quite different endings).
• Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was originally a radio series broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1978 and 1980. If you’ve never heard the original version, do yourself a favour and track it down. The disco sequence Lee mentions occurs in “Fit the Eighth”, the second episode of “The Secondary Phase” (or series two).
• Adam Richard is well-known to Australian audiences as a stand-up comedian and television personality, appearing frequently as a panellist on musical game show Spicks and Specks and Doctor Who after-show Whovians. He also co-created and co-wrote the 2012 ABC television sit-com Outland with John Richards, about a gay science fiction fan club, and played the character “Fab” in the show.
• A Dyson sphere is an enormous, theoretical construct which completely encloses a star, capturing the maximum possible amount of the star’s energy. Though the idea first appeared in a story in 1937, it got it’s name when it was popularised by physicist Freeman Dyson, who thought it would be the logical endpoint of the ever-escalating power requirements of an advanced civilisation. A Dyson sphere appears in the episode “Relics” of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
• Ringworld is a 1970 novel by science fiction author Larry Niven in which a human is recruited by aliens to investigate the “ringworld”, an enormous ring-shaped construct the diameter of the Earth’s orbit, encircling a star.
• Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books are set on a world which is a flat disc, carried through space on the backs of four enormous elephants who stand on the shell of Great A’Tuin, the star turtle. They – and Pratchett’s other works – are the subject of the Splendid Chaps Productions podcast Pratchat.
• You can find Ethan Persof’s The Bureau – both the graphic novel and the soundtrack – at his web site, ep.tc/the-bureau.
• You can watch Sesame Street’s parody “It’s Hip to Be a Square” on YouTube.