So, almost no one in Transylvania Waters had ever even heard of television or radio, never mind actually seen or heard it. Of course, as they were all born outside of the country, all the Flood children knew a lot about television.
And they missed it.
So did Mordonna and Nerlin, but since Nerlin was now King Nerlin and in charge, he could do something about it.
‘We will bring TV to TW,’ he said.
Obviously Winchflat, with all his technical genius, was just the person to do it.
Winchflat was in seventh heaven.49 He could imagine nothing more exciting than big rooms full of really complicated electronics, except perhaps big rooms full of really complicated electronics and his beloved Maldegard Ankle.
Although she’d never seen electronics before, Maldegard soon realised that she too adored computery, electronicy stuff.
With a fiancé who was an incredibly gorgeous prince with a monobrow that looked like two very hairy caterpillars snogging, the most extensive collections of pliers, soldering irons and coloured electric wires in the whole of Transylvania Waters, and the knowledge of how to use them, how could she want for more?
A life of programming meetings, tinkering with gadgets, getting married – hopefully live on TV – and having a string of super-intelligent babies that also adored electronics stretched out before her.
There was just so much to look forward to. Her dreams of inventing a perpetual motion machine and running petrol engines on water, dreams that she had always dismissed as silly fantasies, now all seemed possible.
Together Winchflat and Maldegard scoured the world’s television stations and put together their first year’s list of programs. Maldegard, like all the population of Transylvania Waters, had never even heard of television, let alone seen it, so her choices were strange to say the least. She thought a show where a lot of morons were locked up in a house for a month while everyone watched them talking drivel and showing each other their bottoms might be popular. But her favourite suggestion was an even more ridiculous show called Transylvania Waters’s Got Talent, where endless people with absolutely no talent at all stood up and did really pathetic things while a team of judges with even less talent told them they were wonderful.
‘Like your mum does when you sing really badly at Christmas,’ she said.
‘I’m not sure,’ said Winchflat. ‘I think both programs might upset people because they might think that we think they are stupid enough to actually enjoy them.’
‘Aren’t they?’ said Maldegard Ankle.
‘For the rest of the world, you’re probably right,’ Winchflat agreed, ‘but Transylvania Waters people are much too intelligent for that sort of show.’
In the end they decided that instead of watching a house full of morons do moron stuff for an hour, they would broadcast the RockallCam so everyone could watch three morons stuck on a very small rock, trying to cook seaweed while not falling into the sea, and moaning at each other all the time. The show was named after the Countess Slab – Big Blubber.
It was a huge hit because everyone had hated King Quatorze and the Countess and this allowed the viewers to hate them over and over again.50 Viewers were invited to phone in with extra punishments to be meted out to the Ex-King and the Countess. These were entered into a competition, with a prize for the nastiest, meanest, most enjoyable one voted for by the viewers.
Top punishments were shown over and over again and there was a special every Sunday afternoon – Big Blubber Uncut – where a lot of sharp knives and running with scissors were usually involved. A firm favourite was watching the Ex-King as an invisible elf tore the arms off his teddy bear and unravelled the left sleeves of all his cardigans. When Quatorze tried to pick up his wrecked teddy, it bit off his little finger and spat it into the sea where it was eaten by a lobster. Also very popular were the plagues of gross insects, cockroaches, slugs, limpets, etc., that kept infesting the Countess’s ears.
Transylvania Waters’s Got Talent was not a great hit because Transylvania Waters was actually full of people with lots of talent, so no one who went on the show ever looked stupid or useless, unlike other countries.
‘You see, the point of these rubbish reality shows,’ Winchflat explained to Maldegard, ‘is to make useless people watching them feel good about themselves by watching people who are even more useless than they are, and Transylvania Waters is a useless-free zone where everyone is clever.’
Winchflat brought the rest of the family in to make programs.
Satanella and Brastof hosted a gardening program, which wasn’t so much about growing things as digging up stuff and burying it. Their show was called Better Bones in Gardens.
Morbid and Silent ran the children’s TV programming. They decided that most human children’s television was much too frightening for Transylvania Waters children.
‘I mean,’ said Morbid, ‘wouldn’t two adults dressed up like giant bananas scare the willies out of you?’
Silent nodded.
So they created their own programs such as PlayGhoul where kids could learn simple spells including how to give your teddy bear a throbbing heart that dripped real blood and how to turn your annoying baby brother into a garden gnome.51 Probably the most popular item ever was making a real living-dead zombie out of two cardboard boxes and some sticky tape.52
Merlinmary was the only one of them not to make any TV shows, not because he/she didn’t want to, but because she was so electric that every time she went into the studio, all the equipment blew up.
Valla and Mildred Flambard-Flood created a lifestyle series set in Transylvania Waters’ most famous graveyard and their show was called Better Tombs and Gargoyles. Each week they opened up a different grave and brought its occupant back to life to take part in a quiz where they could win exciting prizes like having a famous interior designer re-decorate the inside of their coffin, which would normally cost a fortune. This led to a whole new fashion for designer coffins. Some were decorated with so much gold and so many jewels that people would die early just so they could enjoy them. The really cool people had several coffins, each in a different beautiful location around Transylvania Waters, where they would go and die just for the weekend.
Valla added the ‘Flambard’ to his name too, and the two of them became famous television personalities and very, very rich – they owned the company that made the fancy coffins and a chain of five-star funeral parlours. They were the closest thing Transylvania Waters had to yuppies and even owned a set of French red-enamelled cauldrons that they used on the cooking segment of their show. These saucepans were just a few of the things they imported from overseas and sold for a wonderfully huge profit.
Maldegard was put in charge of current affairs, which was a bit ridiculous considering she was the only one of them who had never been outside Transylvania Waters and knew almost nothing of what was out there.
‘This will give her a fresh, unbiased view of the world,’ said Winchflat, when everyone suggested that she might not be the best person for the job.
Maldegard was a bit deaf. This had been caused by her two brothers bursting a lot of Lake Tarnish Codfish bladders in her ears as a child. This meant that she sometimes misheard things. Because of this, the daily news on TWTV was unlike other countries where a newsreader sits at a desk and reads the news from a TV screen or a sheet of paper. Instead, Transylvania Waters had newsbleeders. Someone stood in front of a white wall and wrote the news with their own blood. How much news there was each day had nothing to do with what had happened in Transylvania Waters that day. It depended more on how long the newsbleeder could write without fainting. Unlike other countries where the news is usually very boring, the news in Transylvania Waters was one of the most popular programs.
When the mistake was pointed out, everyone agreed that Transylvania Waters’ news program was much more interesting so it stayed that way.
The first broadcast from overseas was a stunning concert by the Belgian Primary School Mass
Harmonica Band.53 This lasted for seven hours while seven hundred children on mouth organ, accompanied by five howling dogs, played the entire ABBA songbook thirteen times.
The Belgian Primary School Mass Harmonica Band opened the floodgates and suddenly everyone in Transylvania Waters wanted to know about the outside world.
‘Never in our wildest imaginations,’ people said, ‘did we imagine the world could hold such wonderful treasures as the harmonica.’
‘And shoelaces…’
‘And handkerchiefs!’
‘And clean handkerchiefs.’
The list was endless. The world had so many, many wonderful things to offer, it was impossible to know where to begin.
‘For all your saucepan, harmonica, shoelace and handkerchief needs,’ said Prince Valla Flambard-Flood in the first commercial to be shown on TWTV, ‘be sure to visit The Flambard-Flood Shopping Channel.’
Most countries arrive in the modern age from an age where their grandmothers pulled the plough and soap was merely a rumour. Because these countries are usually very short of money, they usually chop down all their trees and they sell them and then dig up the most beautiful bits of the country, which is always where the most precious minerals are, and sell them too. Luckily Transylvania Waters did not have to do this because, as each family had at least one wizard or witch, it only took a few quick spells to turn the family’s pile of cabbage leaves into a pile of hundred-dollar notes.
The evil King Quatorze had imposed a total ban on anything from the outside world getting into Transylvania Waters. This was because if everyone knew about the outside world then they would realise just what a rotten King Quatorze was and how much they were all missing out on the good things in life, like baked beans and PlayStations and socks and sticking plasters.54 What little information had filtered in was both incredibly out of date and completely wrong, so those people who had actually heard of America thought it was like it had been back in the 1920s and that the King of America was called Mickey Mouse.
Now King Nerlin and Queen Mordonna were running things, the Queen Mother realised it was time to retire, but at 108 years old she still had a lot to offer and sitting round waiting to die while bits of her fell off, or talking to a blank wall and dribbling a lot, was not something she wanted to do.
‘Well, not for a while anyway,’ she said. ‘I’ll keep that to look forward to.’
‘Been there, done that,’ she said, when people suggested things she might like to do.
The trouble was that people kept suggesting boring old lady things.
‘What about embroidery?’ said Mordonna.
‘Or lawn bowls?’ said Nerlin.
‘Never been there, never done that, never going to do that,’ said the Queen Mother as she bid for a Turbo Microlight Personal Jet Transporter on eBay.
‘What about gardening?’ Mildred Flambard-Flood suggested. ‘A lot of old people do that.’
‘Could do that,’ said the Queen Mother as she bid for twenty-five sticks of dynamite on bombBay. ‘Nice bit of landscape gardening.’
The Queen Mother’s husband, Vessel, the Duke Of That Other Place Across The Lake Whose Name I Can’t Remember, was also fed up with life at the royal court because of all the time he wasted when he had to say his name or listen to other people saying it. So he went to the other place across the lake whose name King Nerlin couldn’t remember to find out what it was called.
It was called Kevintown.
‘Maybe I’ll just keep the long name after all,’ he said.
‘Or,’ the Queen Mother suggested, ‘we could get my son-in-law to change the name to one we both like.’
So Vessel, the Duke Of That Other Place Across The Lake Whose Name I Can’t Remember, became the Duke Of Elvistown, which was more suitable than anyone realised because the hermit who lived in the cave behind the village had, in a former life, been a very famous rock and roll singer with that very name. He had secretly gone to the cave in 1977 and had been there ever since.
‘You know what we could do,’ said the Duke Of Elvistown, ‘now Transylvania Waters is making contact with the outside world? We could start a bed and breakfast.’
‘Haven’t been there. Haven’t done that,’ said the Queen Mother. ‘Great idea.’
Because Transylvania Waters is different from the rest of the world, so was the bed and breakfast. It was not so much a B&B as a B&B&B, which stood for Bed and Breakfast and Blood. If visitors were prepared to give a litre of blood, then they could stay for free. If they wanted blood, then they had to pay.
A road was needed before visitors and things could be brought into Transylvania Waters, and Merlinmary was given the job of building the first one. Because of the incredibly high mountains all the way round the country the road would have to be in a tunnel. Normally a big road into a country has lots of lanes going in both directions, but Merlinmary decided to do things differently.
‘It’s like this,’ she said. ‘As we know from growing up among them, humans are strange beings.’
‘Can’t argue with that,’ said King Nerlin.
‘And whereas we know that Transylvania Waters is paradise and the most beautiful place on earth, humans might not see it like that,’ Merlinmary continued. ‘Ridiculous, I know, but humans are not normal.’
‘Can’t argue with that,’ said Queen Mordonna.
‘So what we’re going to do is make a single one-way tunnel in through the western mountains and a single one-way tunnel out through the eastern mountains,’ Merlinmary explained. ‘That way, the only way they can leave is to drive right across the country.’
‘Brilliant,’ said the Queen Mother, ‘and they’ll have to stay at our B&B&B, which is right in the middle.’
‘We’ll build a pub next to it to make them feel at home,’ said Merlinmary.
So very late at night they went to a sleepy old English village, stole a really old half-timbered pub called ‘The King’s Arms’ and transported it back to Transylvania Waters, where it was renamed ‘The Severed Arms’.
By an incredible bit of good luck and timing, the Duke Of Elvistown discovered an unknown talent55 for making beer and produced a range of fantastic beers that became world famous56 and brought huge numbers of thirsty tourists to Transylvania Waters. Not only did the beer taste fantastic, but when people drank too much of it they turned into bright pink, very happy rabbits instead of the usual angry, falling over idiots. And when the bunnyness wore off they had no headache, just a memory of being very happy. This effect only happened in Transylvania Waters. In other countries they behaved like idiots who drink too much do everywhere: fighting, falling over a lot and singing awful songs really badly.
Boring tunnels through several miles of incredibly hard rock is something that even the most powerful spells cannot do. And thank goodness they can’t, otherwise some loony wizard would have bored a hole right through the world and all the boiling hot lava in the middle would have burst out like hot jam from a doughnut and burnt everyone to death. There are, however, a few rare wizards who have special talents to do just that, and Merlinmary was one of them. As he/she had already shown before,57 Merlinmary could generate massive amounts of electricity, and one of the things you can do with massive amounts of electricity is to power awesomely, terrifyingly, brilliantly powerful lasers. And if you can make a laser that is a thousand times more powerful than the sun, then you can bore through solid rock with it.
So Winchflat made Merlinmary a Great-Big-Laser-Hat, which Merlinmary put on her head and pointed at a mountain. As Merlinmary walked slowly forward the laser beam burnt into the rock and vaporised it. By moving her head around, Merlinmary could make the tunnel as wide and tall and she wanted. It had already been decided, very wisely, that absolutely no coaches or trucks would be allowed into Transylvania Waters, so Merlinmary kept the tunnels very narrow and full of tight bends so that only cars could travel down them.
There was also a special caravan and camper van filter at the entrance to the co
ming-in tunnel because, as everyone knows, caravans and camper vans are evil devices invented by the devil to cause traffic problems. There was also a bumper sticker filter, which rejected any car with stickers on it, even if the stickers looked as if they were saying sensible things, because bumper stickers are even more evil than caravans. If a car towing a caravan that had bumper stickers on it tried to drive into Transylvania Waters, there was a big flash of light, a very loud rude noise and the car, the caravan and everyone inside it was instantly transported to a remote rubbish dump in Belgium that had no signs anywhere to tell people where they were.58
Even worse than a car and a caravan with bumper stickers is a car and a caravan with bumper stickers that have a on them. The bumper sticker filter sends these ones into the middle of the busiest intersection of the busiest city in the world at the busiest time of day, then makes the car engine break down beyond repair, turns everyone in the car completely naked apart from a really disgusting cardigan with leather buttons that is way too small to hide all their rude bits, fills the car full of fleas and piles of seven-week-old mouldy pizzas and even older dirty nappies, and covers the caravan in graffiti that insults the people of the country they have been transported to. Naturally, all the brochures advertising Transylvania Waters have warnings about caravans, cardigans and stickers, but it is amazing how many people don’t take them seriously.
Merlinmary’s tunnels were very windy59 because she hated straight lines and also because every time someone called her, she turned her head before switching off the laser. This meant the tunnel ended up with lots of side tunnels, some of which were dead ends and some of which actually bored through into existing cave systems. A lot of tourists spent so long lost in the tunnels that their holidays were over before they even arrived in Transylvania Waters. Then, of course, they had to drive right across the country to leave so they got back to work really late and quite often lost their jobs.
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