Host Vaya Pashos and Night Terrace co-producer Ben McKenzie talk us through episode seven, “The Retirement of Horatio Gray”, written by Lee Zachariah, with a little help from “off the Terrace” correspondents David Ashton, Petra Elliot and guest star Andrew Hansen!

Eddie has escaped the Gauls, but the terrace house he’s entered isn’t quite the one he expected… He’s ended up with Horatio Gray, the DEPARTMENT’s ex-gadget man who has been flying through the history of the Earth like a human wrecking ball – including changing his own past so that he also never started time travelling! Can Eddie cope with someone more prone to paradoxes than he is? How will they escape the might of the Spanish Armada? And will Eddie ever see Anastasia and Sue again?

Vaya and Ben try to make sense of the impossible history of Horatio Gray, while also admiring the work of guest stars Andrew Hansen and Stephen Hall. You’ll also find some behind the scenes audio, an alternate version of Sir Francis Drake, and all the usual nonsense from Vaya and Ben.

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Episode seven of Night Terrace series two, “The Retirement of Horatio Gray”, is available on BBC Radio 4 Extra for 30 days after broadcast. You can listen to the very first episode, “Moving House”, and purchase both series and a variety of Night Terrace extras via nightterrace.com or the Splendid Chaps Bandcamp store. Find Vaya on Neighbuzz at neighbuzzpod.com.

Show Notes

• The Block is a Channel Nine home renovation reality television show. Couples (or other teams of two) compete to make the most profit by renovating and selling at auction an apartment in the same block. In 2018, for it’s fourteenth season, the show’s producers bought the Gatwick Hotel in St Kilda, forcing it to cease operating as a boarding house – considered something of a refuge for people in trouble since the 1950s. There’s a great audio documentary about the building and its long history.
• The bootstrap paradox – more often these days referred to as a “causal loop” – is explained by the Twelfth Doctor in the opening sequence of the Doctor Who episode “After the Flood”. It’s available on YouTube.
• Hieronymus Karl Friedrich, Freiherr von Münchhausen, was a German nobleman who lived in the 18th century and fought for the Russians against the Turks. His exaggerated tales of his service earned him some notoriety, leading to the publication of various (much older) tall tales as Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia, by Rudolf Erich Raspe. “Pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps” doesn’t actually come from the book, in which – as in the film – the Baron only lifts himself up by his own hair. The phrase has been around since at least the 19th century, though, first as an example of an impossible task, then as a metaphor for aiding yourself in a task.
• The English cricket team were, rather humiliatingly, defeated 5-0 in the 2013–14 Ashes series of test matches against Australia. They also failed to make it into the final knockout stage of the 2015 Word Cup. So the joke was spot on in 2015 when it was written. More recently, England has recovered – they entered the 2019 World Cup as favourites, and narrowly won the final against New Zealand in what is considered one the best games of cricket in recent history. Still, Eddie hasn’t seen any cricket since 2014, so let’s not judge him too harshly.
• Hook turns – in which a car pulls into a lane at the side of an intersection and then turns across the traffic – are most often used by bicycles in many parts of the world. Melbourne is one of the few places where specific intersections are marked where cars must use them.
• While there’s not quite consensus on how planets form, it is true that rocky planets like Earth are thought to condense from matter spinning around newly forming suns. It’s not necessary for something to specifically form the initial core, but it would certainly fit in with the “core accretion model”.
• David Ashton is, indeed, a wizard.
• Blink, written by Steven Moffat, is the tenth episode of the third series of Doctor Who. The protagonist Sally Sparrow (played by Carey Mulligan) is caught up in an attack by living statues known as “Weeping Angels”. It’s available pretty widely.
• The Blow Parade was a five-part music rockumentary series written by and starring Chris Taylor and Andrew Hansen, and originally broadcast on Australian youth radio station triple j in 2010. It was also released as an album with the full musical tracks featured in the episodes, and won the ARIA Award for Best Comedy Release. Most of the web sites for it are now gone, but at the time of writing all five original episodes were available in the Special section of the double j web site.
• War on Waste ran for two seasons on ABC television in 2017 and 2018. Inspired by the 2015 BBC series Hugh’s War on Waste, which was followed up in 2019 with War on Plastic with Anita and Hugh. The Australian series is available on ABC iView.