MAG Commentary - Retrospective #2

Transcriber’s Note: Alex & Jonny generally talk over the clips that have been selected. For ease, we are replicating the main clip played, then presenting their commentary, rather than trying to intersperse lines. The episode in question also continues to play, faded into the background.

ALEX

Hello and welcome to a special episode of The Magnus Archives.

JONNY

Hello!

ALEX

I’m technically your host today, I guess.

JONNY

Me too!

ALEX

Well, yeah, we’re co-hosting but –

JONNY

We are your hosts.

ALEX

Okay. We are your hosts, I guess. Uh, so this is Alex and Jonny, and what we are doing today is we are going to be giving some commentary on a number of clips that have been selected by members of the company as their favourites, for being either weird or funny or whatever.

We don’t know what they are.

JONNY

It’s a director’s commentary with me, the writer, and whatever Alex is.

ALEX

Also here. That’s me. What will be interesting is we’re commentating on a podcast to ourselves.

JONNY

Commentarienting.

ALEX

So we’ll see how that goes. Commentarientating. Thank you. Yes. So we’ll, we’ll see how this goes. We have no idea what these clips are.

So, these are going to be quite cold opens from us, and I suspect I probably won’t even recognise a couple of them at first. So I’m relying on your encyclopaedic knowledge, Jonny.

JONNY

You are… misinformed about…

ALEX

Your complete encyclopaedic knowledge!

JONNY

…how often I have actually listened to these episodes.

[ALEX SNIGGERS]

[CLIP: MAG018 – The Man Upstairs]

“On my third knock the door swung inwards ever-so-slightly, and I realised it was not locked. There is… little in my life that I regret quite as much as going inside.

I pushed the door open as much as I could but it didn’t open very wide, as there seemed to be some sort of resistance behind it. The smell would have been overpowering, but by this point I was almost used to it, and fought down the nausea. There was no light coming from inside, and I fumbled on the wall for a switch. I found it, and the instant before I flicked it on, I realised I felt something soft and wet on the wall next to it. Unfortunately, before I had a chance to fully comprehend what I was feeling, I had turned on the light and saw Toby Carlisle’s flat in its entirety.”

ALEX

So which episode is it, Jonny?

JONNY

I don’t know, there’s a lot of knocking on doors in this series.

[ALEX CHUCKLES]

There’s a smell…

ALEX

Must be about Tim then, right?

JONNY

Oh, it’s… she’s just popped! With all the worms!

ALEX

Is that it?

JONNY

Yeah, yeah – it’s number six, Squirm.

She’s –

ALEX

It’s not ‘meat guy’?

JONNY

Oh. No, you’re right. It’s – she hasn’t popped it. It’s, it’s ‘meat pile’. You were right.

[ALEX LAUGHS]

I can’t believe this…

ALEX

It’s fine.

JONNY

Right off the bat.

ALEX

Okay, okay, so ‘meat flat’ for me –

JONNY

Oh, okay. Okay. I-I need you –

ALEX

It’s called Meat Flat, right?

JONNY

Yes, but I need you to say ‘meat apartment’, because it really sounds like you’re saying ‘meat flap’.

ALEX

[Chuckles] Okay. ‘Meat apartment’, then. ‘Meat apartment’. So, that’s Season 1, right?

JONNY

Yeah.

ALEX

That’s early Season 1, in fact.

JONNY

I think it’s like, episode, I want to say, 16 or 18, The Man Upstairs.

ALEX

Okay, so at this point, we realised that we might have a show that a few people might listen to.

JONNY

This was still one of the very early ones that I conceived of. And I know this because I definitely came up with it when I was actually living in a flat, which I actually moved to my current house shortly after the series started. Which is weird, cos you then moved in just across the road from where I had been living.

ALEX

[Sniggers] Always like ships in the night, and never in a convenient way.

JONNY

I was really quite pleased with this idea in the sense that I really liked the idea of leaning on, like, processed animal meat, because so often it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s human bodies!’

Like, no, it’s just meat where meat shouldn’t be.

ALEX

So, this was definitely, you were still in Yurt 1.0, I think at this point, so –

JONNY

Oh yea, Classic Yurt.

ALEX

So for anyone who doesn’t know, Jonny is recording this episode holding a lapel mic, if I remember correctly.

JONNY

I think we attached it right from the off.

ALEX

But the attachment broke, don’t you remember, for a while?

JONNY

Oh god.

ALEX

I had to tape it basically to you, and we were holding it at various points because we had to do like away from mic stuff. And you were under a blanket on a sofa with a clothes horse, basically on your lap, I think, to record this episode.

JONNY

Was this one in James Ross’ apartment –

ALEX

Yeah, yeah it was.

JONNY

– or was it… it wasn’t in your flat pre-asbestos?

ALEX

Gosh, no, no, no. We’d already recorded this come launch, give or take. And launch was happening while I was homeless.

JONNY

Right! I just remember that, like, this being the first episode where I was like, ‘Oh, Alex is gonna let me be as gross as I want.’

ALEX

[Laughing] As long as you don’t swear!

How to – Yeah, with this episode, I’ll confess some of them speak more than others. This one spoke to me. It was a really good example of the horror where, yes, technically the pile opens its eye at one point, I think, and gives a bit of a blink.

JONNY

Yeah. There is technically a monster.

ALEX

Yeah. But that’s what I mean. It’s like technically, but you could have had exactly the same story without that, and it would still be super scary. It just wouldn’t have that one extra tiny little element, but it’s always that one extra little element that codified so many of early Magnus episodes.

JONNY

Listening to it now, there is just the smallest hint of just disappointment in myself that I didn’t return to meat pile… y’know? Cos, like, I set up that monster, but, like a lot of hooks in the early season, it didn’t actually get picked up. It didn’t actually get – end up going anywhere.

ALEX

No, Meat Pile did! Meat Pile grew up big and strong, and ended up in a hole, eating everything that came along.

JONNY

Oh no. Yeah, no, no, no. Like, I mean, ‘hole full of meat’ was like an evolution of ‘meat pile’, but like ‘meat pile as monster’, I dunno.

ALEX

‘Hello. I’m Jeffrey Meat-Pile’, that kind of thing?

JONNY

Yeah, I feel like it could have gone further.

[CLIP: MAG034 – Anatomy Class]

“DR. ELLIOTT: When I went to the classroom shortly after what should have been their final tutorial, I found something on the desk. It was an apple. Next to it was a handwritten note that said “Thank you for teaching us the insides”. I burned the note, just in case.

ARCHIVIST: And the apple, did you… eat it?

DR. ELLIOTT: Do I look like an idiot? Of course not! I cut it in half, first, to check if it was… off.

ARCHIVIST: And?

DR. ELLIOTT: Human teeth. Inside were human teeth arranged in a smile. Here, I brought you the two halves to see for yourselves.

ARCHIVIST: Oh good lord! That’s…

DR: ELLIOTT: Deeply unpleasant, yes. You can keep it, if you want. As proof.

ARCHIVIST: We do not want it. I’m afraid it isn’t really proof. Someone could have stuck those teeth in after the apple had been cut.

DR. ELLIOTT: [Somewhat distressed] You think I would do that?!”

ALEX

Oh yeah!

JONNY

[Fondly] Ah… Bone apple teeth.

ALEX

[Fondly] Yeah… I figured we’d get this one.

Season 1 music.

Great performance.

JONNY

I assume you’re talking about me, so thank you.

ALEX

Sorry, yeah, great performance, and you’re there.

[BOTH ALEX & JONNY CHUCKLE]

Gosh… Season 1, you’re so arch!

JONNY

The actor for Doctor… Doctor What’s-his-face…

[ALEX LAUGHS]

Y’know, Doctor What’s-his-face –

ALEX

Yeah, Doctor What’s-his-face. I remember Doctor What’s-his-face.

JONNY

– is a very good friend of mine called Martin.

In fact, the character Martin is sort of lazily, half-named after. Really fun recording, cos obviously Martin does acting voice acting and that sort of thing.

ALEX

Yeah, yeah.

JONNY

And he’s great to work with, but I just remember bringing him in, and, like, we did a recording, and Alex just looked so dour, and said, “We can’t use any of this.”

And we were like, what? Did we do something wrong? Were our performances not up to scratch? And Alex was like, when you are recorded, the two of you sound identical.

ALEX

Oh, yeah! It was almost like there was speech jamming happening. You could not tell the difference at all, because his slightly dour voice was your Archivist voice.

JONNY

Yeah. It was so weird. Cos, like, to hear us in person, you wouldn’t have said that we sounded – Like, we’re both middle class, young, white guys, and we don’t sound massively dissimilar, I guess, but it certainly doesn’t feel like the same voice. But apparently when recorded just the specific tones that get stripped out.

ALEX

It’s because as well, in the early days of Magnus, we were using a slightly different EQ and that’s because – here’s a trade secret. So, for Magnus, we actually just use the default telephone EQ for Audacity, but we add, like, extra compression and blah, blah, blah. But what that meant is, it strips out the extreme bass and extreme treble. And for the two of you, that just meant there [chuckles] there was nothing left that wasn’t just The Archivist.

JONNY

Yeah.

ALEX

It’s actually one of the reasons that Martin’s pitched up at my end, is because I end up getting lost in the shuffle as well if I don’t pitch up a little bit. But you’ve got to remember that this is early days, and that those defaults have shifted, and so on, which is why it’s a little bit of a fuller sound now.

JONNY

I just remember feeling a bit sorry for Martin, because he was having to put on this sort of weird, slightly higher voice than he normally would.

ALEX

I did ask him to up-register, didn’t I?

JONNY

Yeah. And, like, periodically throughout the recording, you’d have to just stop it and be like, ‘We just need to reset the voice’, because it would gradually, like, normalise as he got more comfortable with the lines.

ALEX

Better that than slowly creeping upwards, right? [Pitches voice up gradually to squeaky levels] ‘And then I found an apple. And then there were teeth in there.’

JONNY

The problem was him getting comfortable with the lines. So every time he got comfortable, you were like, ‘You need to stop doing that.’

ALEX

I mean, that’s directing vocals for Magnus 101: “I’m sorry. You seem to be, you know, anything other than uncomfortable, let’s go again.”

[JONNY CHUCKLES]

He was such a good sport as well.

JONNY

Oh, he’s great.

ALEX

Because he was an early guest, and early guests, it really was like, ‘Cool. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming. We’re really, really happy to have you here – get under the blanket!’

JONNY

Yeah, well, there’s a reason that all our early guests were, like, just our mates. It’s largely that, and also, you know, we, we couldn’t pay them back then, so…

ALEX

I forget… it’s easy to lose track of how far it’s come.

JONNY

Like, so many of those early VAs are just, like, I did some improv with, or like we acted a bunch in uni. It’s great.

ALEX

A few of the writers I shared a course with are in here as well, dotted around.

JONNY

Yeah.

[CLIP: MAG032 – Hive]

“I used to pick at my skin. It was a compulsion. I would spend hours in the bathroom, staring as close as I could get to my face to the mirrors, searching for darkened pores to squeeze and watch the congealed oil worm its way out of my skin. Often I would end with swollen red marks where it had become inflamed with irritation or infection. Did I hear the song then?

Was it when I was a child, such a clear memory of a classmate telling me a blackhead was a hole in my face, and if I didn’t keep it clean it would grow and rot. Did I hear it then, as that image lodged in my mind forever? Or was it last year, passing by a strip of green they call a park near my house, after the rain, and watching a hundred worms crawl and squirm to the surface.

Perhaps I’ve always heard it.”

ALEX

Yeah…

JONNY

Oh yeah…

[JONNY AUDIBLY SHUDDERS IN DISGUST]

Gross…

ALEX

I do remember telling you on that recording, ‘Enjoy it more!’ ‘I am enjoying it.’ ‘No, no, no, no. Like, sound like you’re enjoying it more.’

JONNY

There was a hard limit, actually, as to how much I could enjoy this one, but it kind of is also the reason that it works as it does.

This episode was written roughly three hours before it was recorded. It was finished roughly three hours before it was recorded…

[ALEX EXPRESSES AUDIBLE REMEMBRANCE]

…at about four in the morning. And I had not slept for a long time,, because I hadn’t learned to manage my writing time properly in Season 1. So often I would be like finishing up the episodes just before leaving to go to recording.

ALEX

You have no idea how hard it is, to direct a script blind.

JONNY

Yeah, I know. I know. And I, you know, on the other hand, sometimes it did work. Like, I don’t think Hive would have been as good if I had been fully rested.

ALEX

There’s another one that did well by that. And it’s the one where, ‘I can’t sleep with the billboard –

JONNY

Yeah, that was Fatigue.

ALEX

Yeah! Fatigue, that was it. That’s not me condoning it by the way! That’s just me saying Fatigue is another one that had that feel to it.

JONNY

To be fair, for Fatigue, that was actually kind of a deliberate thing. I’d kind of put myself in that position intentionally to get that slightly dreamlike sense.

ALEX

Yeah.

JONNY

This one was, let’s call it a happy accident.

ALEX

See, I really miss the Jane Prentiss stuff because –

So, we changed how we did the music. At first in Season 1, we had a slate of music done, and then we crossfaded between them, but there was too much progression in it. It swells up and blah, blah, blah built-in, which at first was great because it was built to last at the standard runtime. But unfortunately, as things went on, we ended up having to bend and stretch and scrape it, and crossfade so much that actually became a headache.

But later seasons are a bit more static drones. So they’re not as complex, but they don’t have the progression. But for Jane Prentiss and for The Piper, I got to use two of the tracks that we rarely get the chance to use any more. One, which has a real dirty sort of [Alex makes a sort-of buzzing sound] to it. And the other one is the Creepy-1, because they all have these names where it was just like, Creepy-1, Threat-4! And Creepy-1 was just The Piper’s tune, which is a sort of like, [Alex makes a warbling ghost-like sound]. And I just – I miss the Season 1 ones. I occasionally have sneaked them in where I can, but for Season 5, they’ve just not really been appropriate. But I sneaked them in –

JONNY

Elizabeth’s too good for them now. Like…

ALEX

cos Brock does the music, the monster. Here’s the weirdest pet peeve ever. I don’t understand how Brock does what Brock does. Which is, we give him the track and say, Brock, we need the music. And then he turns it around in about four hours. And I don’t understand how! Because I know the tool that Brock is using, and I know the materials that Brock’s working from. And I can’t do it!

And Brock won’t tell me what the secret sauce is!

[JONNY LAUGHS]

But I’m now in a situation with Brock, where I’m, like, ‘Cool, Brock, this might be a long one’ and Brock’s like, ‘Ooh yeah, that’s three-and-a-half hours’ or whatever, and then it’s just – I don’t understand!

JONNY

To be fair, maybe he’s sparing your feelings because if you pushed and were like, ‘What are you doing?’, uh, like, he’d just be like, ‘You just need to be better, mate.’ Like…

ALEX

Just, yeah, Alex, just calm down. You’re just very extra, and it doesn’t need to be all that.

JONNY

Wh-What’s the phrase… ‘Git gud’.

[ALEX LAUGHS]

ALEX

You know what? I fear you might be right on that one. God, what a damning indictment.

[CLIP: MAG046 – Literary Heights]

“In my determination to chase a young man stealing a book, I had apparently completely forgotten my age, which returned all at once and I collapsed slightly on the stairs. I began to climb then, slowly, towards the top of the bell tower. I have never been afraid of heights, but as I got higher and higher up those stairs, my head started to swim and my heart was beating so fast I was honestly worried that I was in danger of a heart attack.

Finally, I reached the top flight of stairs. I could hear shouting from the bell room. It was Mike, he was screaming something that sounded like a chant or a prayer. Most of it was in languages I didn’t know, but I could make out the words “Altiora”, “vertigo” and “the vast”. I reached the top and there I saw Mike standing before an open window. He held the book before him like a protective ward and in front of him was a strange, branching figure.”

JONNY

Ohhh! This is… Mike Crew. Yeah, belltower, lightning…

ALEX

This wasn’t an episode that was recorded in situ, was it? This was an ‘in the office’ recording, right?

JONNY

I do not remember, to be honest.

ALEX

Alex is very unhappy with the reverb he’s hearing here if that’s the case.

JONNY

I think this might have been a corridor recording.

ALEX

If it’s a corridor recording, fine, Alex is doing his job. If this is meant to be in the office, I am deeply ashamed to have reverb.

JONNY

Oh, no, I mean that we’d recorded this in the office of different Martyn’s flat –

ALEX

Oh god! I think you’re right. That’s a deep cut on early Alex. I think that might be real reverb instead of artfully crafted, y’know, melt-in-the-middle reverb!

JONNY

Cos there were only so many, there were only so many sleeping bags we could duct tape to the wall.

ALEX

Ah, okay. So, there was a phase where we had to record – Martyn our CTO –

JONNY

Martyn with a Y.

ALEX

Yeah. We recorded in his – not the one that Martin’s named after, that’s a different Martin, obviously.

JONNY

Yes, keep up.

ALEX

So this was recorded in a corridor at the very, very top of, like, I don’t think they were ex-council, but effectively ex-council flats. So, like, think city centre, but super, super, super high up. And they had a corridor that had no windows or anything that we could record in. And every day to make the recording work, because the scheduling and so on, I would start my day – Like, I would be up and going at 4am, because I had to lug all the equipment there, cos we couldn’t store it there.

So I’d get there for something like 6am, then do set up, and do all of the tech setup and testing and so on, so that we could start at 9.

JONNY

Then I’d arrive, and we’d finish the setup, because it was still going.

ALEX

Yeah. And then, normally we’d finish by 12, because then we’d bounce straight on to [Rusty Quill] Gaming. So I’d finish at 6, wrap down ‘til 8, and then be home for, like, 11, because the trains would change. And that was my, just, that was just a recording day – 4am ‘til 11. Hooo, god.

JONNY

Well, I remember that corridor, the lightbulb that Martyn had put in his corridor, was like this disco rotating thing.

ALEX

The one that Martyn deliberately put into his corridor.

JONNY

It was great!

ALEX

So, I know, if this is Martyn corridor, there were good chunks of this season recorded where people would deliberately put the disco light on, and then record scary Magnus with, like, proper Night Fever disco lights going!

JONNY

It was fun!

Yeah, it was great! Also, I really liked this flat because, out the windows, you could see all the way to, like, the City of London. And on a clear day – well, not – On a clear day, in inverted commas, you could see this aura of smog around it.

[ALEX CHUCKLES]

ALEX

It was grim. God, I j– I forgot about those recordings. I was so extra. I put in so much… The amount of things that we have solved over the years with just brute force –

JONNY

Yeah.

ALEX

Just pouring time and effort in, instead of being able to use anything else. I forget how much a difference the studio makes now.

JONNY

We’ve become content and lazy.

ALEX

You’re right. We should get lean. We should be gone of all this frippery.

JONNY

Absolutely.

ALEX

Go back to recording into a polystyrene cup and some string. The way… [can’t hold the laughter in any more] the way God intended!

[BOTH LAUGH]

JONNY

I liked writing this episode as well. Just cos it’s one of those, like, old-school kind of classic M.R. James-style ones –

ALEX

Yeah.

JONNY

– where it’s just like, ‘Oh, he is a bookseller who, uh, finds a sinister tome. And a young man gets embroiled in this sinister tome, and he doesn’t know exactly what happens, but he sees some strange things that he cannot explain’.

And it’s just one of those, like, it’s classic.

ALEX

It’s – okay, this sounds like a compliment, and it’s meant strictly as a factual statement, Jonny. It’s a good example of, like, timeless horror.

JONNY

Mmmm, well, inasmuch as it is possible to have timeless horror.

ALEX

Okay. Fair point. But all I’m getting at here is, some of our stuff will date terribly, because it would be like a reference, or it’ll be just a manner of speaking or a slang. Whereas that one, I think, if I remember correctly, holds together quite well. But I’d have to relisten all the way.

JONNY

Yeah. I think of it as old school.

[CLIP: MAG062 – First Edition]

“GERTRUDE: Well?

MARY: No need to rush me, Gertrude. I’m sure we’ve got all the time in the world. Besides, look at this dusty old thing; expect it needs time to warm up. You don’t use it much anymore, do you?

GERTRUDE: Tea?

MARY: God, no, hate the stuff.

GERTRUDE: Why are you here?

MARY: To make my statement, of course. I know the Institute and me haven’t always seen eye to eye, as it were, but I thought it was the least I could do.

GERTRUDE: Why now?

MARY: Why not? Big changes are coming, Gertrude, and I have to think about leaving something for posterity.

GERTRUDE: Fine. Subject is Mary Keay, recorded 3rd July 2008. What is it regarding?

MARY: What a question. I wonder. Plenty to choose from, I suppose.

GERTRUDE: Hm, take your time.

MARY: Did I ever tell you about my first Leitner? Of course, this was before he was collecting them, so back then it was just a strange book.”

ALEX

[Excitedly] Oh yes!

JONNY

Oh yeah! I knew this one was coming.

Was this my mum’s first recording?

ALEX

Cor… I adored this recording!

I can’t remember if it was your mum’s first, I don’t think it was.

JONNY

I think it might’ve been her second or third. I think her first was actually in your house, but it was, like, shoved in a corner, because you’d just moved in. I think her first was the one about the sinister circus.

ALEX

Yeah, yeah. This was in the post-homeless phase. Yes, you are correct.

But, this one was still in Martyn’s flat. And I remember –

JONNY

Yeah.

ALEX

– because we had them in the corridor, and this was Carrie Cohen who plays Mary Keay.

JONNY

Yeah, aw, she’s great.

ALEX

And Carrie, just turned up and, like, we’d done the casting, we’re like, ‘Yeah, this, this seems like someone who could do a good job.’ She played, like, a few witches in TV series, and things like that.

Then we start recording, and it came from nowhere! It was just, like, ‘Oh right, should I sit down and give this a go then?’ ‘Oh yeah, if you would.’ [adopts mock sinister voice] ‘Hello!’ It’s just like [Alex devolves in appreciative noises].

And it was just, every take was gold with these two. Absolute gold.

JONNY

I’ve always enjoyed every time my mum has to record with someone else. She’s always just in awe of them. And it’s like, ‘No, you, you were really good too.’ And I remember like, she came out of this sess [ion], like ‘Wasn’t she good? Wasn’t she good!’

ALEX

‘Isn’t she good!’ Yeah, I remember.

JONNY

It’s like, ‘So were you. You were very good too.’

[ALEX LAUGHS]

ALEX

But they were just – You see there was an issue as well, that not many people know, is that we used to have all of the raw [audio] stored on basically an external hard drive that, long story short, as part of the whole, everything went to awfulness, like, a few things got lost in the shuffle. I’ve still got hope that I could recover them, but there was a bunch of raw audio, which is just your mum and Carrie shooting the breeze whilst we were doing all the tech setup, and they got into competitions of, like, cackling and things like that.

JONNY

That sounds about right.

ALEX

It was… absolutely gorgeous! And it was – I was actively distraught when we lost that audio. I still have, like I said, hopes to bring it back, but this was genuinely one of my favourites.

But we were, oh god, we were still recording using Big Bertha. Big Bertha is an Alesis MultiMix USB 2.0 – it was a massive, massive mixing desk. And for a while in the podcasting sphere, it was the mixing desk. Like, I started the entire company with a 600 quid investment, which was in that mixing desk. And that was it. I just had to save up for so long. Basically it was the mixing desk, and they, they’d even discontinued it when we started, but I managed to get hold of it. And we had to stop periodically, because, as with all tech in my life at the time, if it ran too long, it started to melt.

[ALEX LAUGHS]

JONNY

I remember how proud you were of the fact that you’d, like, you’d gotten, like, the last of this discontinued mixing desk that was the standard in podcasting.

ALEX

It was so hard to get hold of! And it was worth every penny. But it was the fact that, like, we – I’d just punish the poor thing.

JONNY

Until Summer here.

ALEX

Yeah. I just punish the poor thing, and then it was just, we had to take breaks, and it was like, ‘Oh, is this so that your actors can rest?’ I was, like, ‘Pffft! They don’t need rest, no!

JONNY

Actors?! No, it’s so the equipment can rest.

ALEX

No, this is for my, this is for my poor, my poor mixing deck. I actually still got it. It is still our backup. Although I think now it’s the backup of the backup. I could not part with it because –

JONNY

And you say you’re not sentimental!

ALEX

I’m not sentimental about all these flashy humans wandering around the place, but Bertha, like, Bertha, I fully intend to put in a glass case somewhere as the reason we exist.

[JONNY CHUCKLES]

JONNY

She’s gonna be buried alongside you.

[ALEX LAUGHS]

ALEX

Well, it can’t be on top, I’d get crushed!

[CLIP: MAG081 – A Guest for Mr. Spider]

“When he reached the entrance, he held up the book and placed it on the front door. I saw that cut-away panel of Mr. Spider’s stained and bloody right-hand door. And he knocked on it twice. I saw the words clearly in my mind almost more than I heard the sound: ‘KNOCK KNOCK’.

The door opened, and inside was dark. Against that darkness I could see the thin grey strands wrapped around the limbs of my former bully. And then, from inside, stretched two impossibly long limbs, bony and covered in coarse, black hair. For a second, there was almost the start of a scream, but the legs wrapped around him too quickly, and he disappeared into the doorway and out of sight. It slammed behind him, and he was gone, taking the book with him.”

ALEX / JONNY

Ohhhhh!

JONNY

Yeah.

ALEX

This still feels recent to me.

It feels like we made this like a few months ago.

JONNY

I think there is this feeling of real distinction between Season 2 and Season 3.

ALEX

Yeah, cos we’re into, we’re into the new music. You can tell, cos it doesn’t have that… progression.

JONNY

Into the new music, we’d started recording at the studio.

ALEX

Yeah.

Although, you’ll notice that the actual total volume is lower, because, over the years – there’s a thing in the industry where, basically, it’s called the, like, ‘War on Loudness’, which is where advertisers want to come in super, super, super-loud, so they they grab the attention, but it can lead to issues. At distribution.

JONNY

Wasn’t it, the old joke that, like, our opening and closing was like 400% louder than our actual episodes?

ALEX

It was. And it was meant to – and it did a good job at first – bridge the gap between these ludicrously loud ads versus the content. But then over time we’ve changed the way that we compress, and the way that we do the audio, so that now the vocals, if you compare Season 1 vocals to later, if we were ever to do a remaster, Season 1 would change radically just by virtue of processing. Because I listened back to the early ones and I’m like, yeah, they’re nice. But we cheated so much. It’s stuff like, we have a tape deck. Why do we have a tape deck?

Yeah, it sounds good. It also covers all manner of sins in the earlier seasons. Why do we have the tape EQ? So that I can strip out frequencies that, at the time, we could not record.

JONNY

I remember when I was first pitching Magnus, and I mentioned, like, I really wanted this, like, tape hiss, tape recorder aesthetic, and I could see your shoulders, like, visibly sag in relief.

ALEX

Oh yeah. We physically were unable to do what we do now for audio. It was possible. We didn’t have the tools or equipment or time or anything like that. And so much of – And this is just art in general, isn’t it? So much of the creative decision-making will be tied to not just what’s cool, but you know, what’s feasible, what works…

JONNY

What can we do.

ALEX

Yeah, you’re actively creating not very well if you don’t. You’ve got to play to what you can make. And Magnus is so much… not just determined by its time, but I truly believe that Magnus was a thing that anyone could have made from ground zero. Like, you know what I mean?

JONNY

Yeah.

ALEX

Like, we didn’t have anything really in place…

JONNY

But they didn’t, we did, so suck it!

[ALEX CHUCKLES]

ALEX

But you know what I mean, though.

JONNY

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

ALEX

Like, later Magnus, yeah, is a thing that you can listen to, and go, ‘God, I don’t really know how they did that. Wow.’ But early seasons of Magnus really were just… a labour of love and it’s, like, ‘Okay, Alex, we need to have this sound effect.’ ‘I don’t know how to do that. I guess I’ll go on Google and look up foley or something.’

JONNY

To a certain degree. What I pitched to you originally was something that I’d kind of been intending to try and get made regardless.

ALEX

Yeah.

JONNY

So there was an aspect where it was like – Oh, I’m sorry. I just, I just heard Sasha, sorry, Georgie at the end…

ALEX

Oh yeah!

[WHILE THEY WERE TALKING, THE REST OF MAG081 HAS BEEN PLAYING VERY FAINTLY IN BACKGROUND; STATEMENT IS FADED UP TO HEAR A SNIPPET]

“GEORGIE: Did you… clean the kitchen?

ARCHIVIST: Er, a bit. I, I mean, I can’t exactly pay you anything; I thought…

GEORGIE: It’s fine. To be honest, it’s nice to have someone keep the Admiral company while I’m out.

ARCHIVIST: He literally just sleeps on the radiator.”

ALEX

Oh gosh, yeah, cos, uh, he was in the flat, wasn’t he, at that time?

JONNY

Yeah.

But so, like, I think a lot of the initial concept was me thinking, like, well, if I have to actually just go away and, like, find a way to just make this, what is, like, the simplest thing that I could possibly make?

And I honestly think that’s one of the reasons when I went, ‘I want to do a huge number of episodes’, you didn’t go, ‘Nah, piss off.’

ALEX

Oh, yeah, like, absolutely. Like, we had a big talk, because you wanted to make a bunch of, it was like, that’s a lot. I remember actively saying I want a long-running show. That’s a lot, like a lot, a lot. But it was because you’d already done your legwork.

I’ve heard, over the years, a lot of people pitch stuff. Yours is still high up there in – This isn’t a very sexy way of describing it – most sensible.

JONNY

Yeah. Well.

ALEX

Where you just rocked up and went, ‘Okay, we could do this because of this. I-I’ve got this because of this, this, because of this.’ And it was just like, ‘Okay. Yeah. Like that makes sense. We can do that.’

Yeah, I don’t think I’ve had anyone pitch it as such a, ‘Oh, it’ll be easy!’ as much as you did.

JONNY

Love to be a sensible creator.

[CHUCKLES ALL ROUND]

[CLIP: MAG097 – We All Ignore the Pit]

“ARCHIVIST: Right. Keep saying it’s not meant to trip whenever one bulb goes, but “No, John, I don’t want to bother the landlord.”

[SIGHS]

Ah.

NIKOLA: [Sing-song] You don’t want to do that.

[FOOTSTEPS]

[SHARP INTAKE OF BREATH FROM THE ARCHIVIST]

NIKOLA: I mean, you can if you really want to, but you’re not going to like it. Sometimes not being able to see something is actually quite a good thing.

ARCHIVIST: Who are you?

NIKOLA: Well, my father called me Nikola, and then I killed him, so I thought I rather deserved to have his second name too. Which makes me Nikola Orsinov. Pleased to meet you at last.

ARCHIVIST: You, um… You killed Gregor Orsinov?

NIKOLA: Yep! He got really boring, and I’m a monster. I mean, what do you want me to do – not pull him apart?”

JONNY

[Excitedly] Ah, Jess is coming!

There she is!

[VARIOUS CHUCKLING TO NIKOLA’S LINES]

ALEX

[Snorts with laughter] Good line! [Referring to: “He got really boring, and I’m a monster.”]

JONNY

Ahhhh, Jess. I remember when I pitched the character, you’re like, ‘Oh, this might be a tricky one to cast.’ And I was, like –

ALEX

Tricky one to cast, and you went ‘I’ve already cast it.’

JONNY

I was like, ‘No mate, I know who’s playing this.’

ALEX

Actually, interestingly, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, this episode specifically, the segments from it, got really big on TikTok with the clowncore crowd.

JONNY

Sorry? There are some assumptions of baseline knowledge you’re making of me there that I don’t have.

ALEX

Okay, I now have a decent number of people in the company whose job is to make me aware of things like this.

So, clowncore is a subculture of people who basically do the, like, scary clown thing, as like an aesthetic, whether it’s cosplay or events or whatever. Right?

JONNY

Right, right, right.

ALEX

A bunch of our audio is now circulating on TikTok, cos it’s a good one for people to lip sync to and cosplay to and things like that.

JONNY

Yeah. I’ve never really got the whole ‘lip sync to audio’ on TikTok thing. I know it’s just me being, like, an old man, but –

ALEX

“I’m Jonny Sims, I’m one of the few people who makes more podcasts than, uh…

JONNY

[Laughing] …I listen to…

ALEX

“…on TikTok.”

But no, in all seriousness, it’s because a fairly prominent clowncore, like, costumer – very good, actually, really, really good – Basically used a bunch of Magnus audio with no idea of context, and just said, ‘I found this really cool audio on TikTok, and it was just perfect!’ And it was the knock-knock, uh, you know, I am plastic and blah, blah, blah.

JONNY

Yeah.

ALEX

And then off the back of that, this entire sub-community kind of stumbled onto Magnus.

JONNY

That’s fascinating!

ALEX

But it’s just a, such a good example of like, the ways that I have heard people become aware of it are becoming increasingly tangential.

JONNY

The, like, just the ripples and the tides of the internet are fascinating.

ALEX

But yeah, I’m not doing enough justice to Jess, here. It was a fabulous performance, and it was another one where she just rocked up and did it.

JONNY

I’ll be honest. There are a few – There are some times characters that I have written and then, like, I’ll realise partway through that I am writing for someone.

ALEX

Yeah.

JONNY

And, like, to a certain degree, that was actually Gertrude.

ALEX

Yeah, no, that’s fair actually.

JONNY

Like, it was that thing where we were having trouble casting her. And I was like, ‘Oh no, hang on, I’m reading this in my mum’s voice.’

ALEX

Yeah…

JONNY

Let’s get her into like, give it a shot.

ALEX

I forgot. We really did struggle to cast Gertrude because honestly it wasn’t intended – It wasn’t like a, ‘Oh, and I’d really like my mum to play Gertrude.’

JONNY

No.

ALEX

Like, we didn’t even broach that until we’d actively –

JONNY

Same with my dad playing Leitner!

ALEX

Yeah.

JONNY

Like, in both cases, it was after, like, maybe a month, month and a half of, like, trying to figure out, well, who, who can we get to play?

ALEX

And logistically it was just really tricky and blah, blah, blah, but, retrospectively, obviously, I’m really glad it panned out like that. The idea that it’s Gertrude’s your mother, and Leitner’s your father is really nice.

JONNY

It’s fun on a meta level as well. But no, Jess is one of my absolute favourite people, brilliant friend, and I’ve been working with her creatively in one degree or another for like, it must be going on 10, 12 years now. So… it was very much like –

ALEX

I first met her through The Mechanisms.

JONNY

Yeah, fundamentally, I was writing this and, like, as soon as this character came up, I was like, yeah, that one’s for Jess.

ALEX

Yeah. God. Sorry, I’m just having a bit of a blast from the past. Jess actually also has an, uh, uncredited part in Magnus, which I don’t think many people know.

JONNY

I’m not sure I do. I probably do know –

ALEX

Coffin song!

JONNY

Ohhhh yeah! Of course, we were all around!

ALEX

We did a – We had to do a sequence where it was you singing, me singing, but we all had to do the [Alex demonstrates a low moaning wail]

JONNY

Oh yeah. I remember she got very irate, because she is a professional singer and it was a, and it was quite a slapdash recording.

[ALEX LAUGHS]

ALEX

Well, the issue is that she was too soprano as well. I was like, ‘You’re coming in real big and!’

[LAUGHS]

[CLIP: MAG103 – Cruelty Free]

“It smelled awful on the floor, and as the pink form began to move towards me, my resolve started to waver. It was far too heavy to be supported by its skinny, twig-like legs, but something still propelled it slowly forward, inch by inch, that familiar pink drool leaving a thin path for the enormous body to follow, until it was right on top of me.

I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth, waiting to feel the pain of it starting to tear into my flesh. But instead, I felt it settle next to me, the meat of it sinking into the spaces left by my position. It was pressing up against me, and let out the most contented sound I have ever heard from a pig. The message could not have been clearer: ‘Friend’.”

JONNY

Oh… Pig! Pig!

ALEX

Oh, is it Pig?

JONNY

Pig!

ALEX

You’re right, it is, it’s Pig!

JONNY

Monster Pig!

ALEX

It’s Monster Pig!

[ALEX CHUCKLES A LOT]

JONNY

I love Monster Pig!

ALEX

Monster Pig was weird.

JONNY

Ahhh. I love –

ALEX

Monster Pig was such a weird episode pitch!

JONNY

I love Monster Pig. I remember, one of my housemates at the time who was listening to Magnus after that one dropped, talked to me and was, like, ‘You do know that’s really funny?’ And I was like, [sarcastic] ‘No mate, I wrote a horror story about the world’s biggest pig, and no idea it was going to be comical.’ Although, like, I think it was one that I was quite deliberately trying to, like, ride that line…

ALEX

Yeah, yeah.

JONNY

Because fundamentally comedy is a fail state of horror, and horror is a fail state of some comedy. It’s a really interesting line to try and thread, to try and keep it so that, like, something is funny, but also grotesque. I think that, like, which side it falls is almost entirely down to the listener. Like, I know that some people have been like, ‘Oh, pig freaked me, right the hell out.’

ALEX

This is a blast from the past. I actually did a bunch of academic work on this. So, I did a Masters with the Central School of Speech and Drama for Writing for Stage and Broadcast Media.

JONNY

[Faux-mockingly] Oohhhh!

ALEX

Very good course, I’d recommend. It was wonderful, and is the only reason I got this far, because a lot of it was just, like, you got to actually write. [Chuckles] If you don’t write, you’re not a writer. And that was a significant chunk of the course that sunk in.

But part of it was, I had to do a bunch on, yeah, the grotesque in comedy, and how it interacts with horror. So there’s lots of stuff, like, Blue Jam and things like that.

JONNY

Ah, Blue Jam…

[VOCALISED SHUDDER FROM JONNY]

ALEX

Yeah… Blue Jam’s weird… and –

JONNY

Brilliant, but also, like

[VOCALISED SHUDDER THE SECOND]

ALEX

Yeah, very odd.

And so, as a result, yeah, Pig. Pig definitely hits that note for me, where at the end of it, it wasn’t like, ‘Oh no, what have we done’ or anything. But it was just like, ‘This is an odd one!’

JONNY

Yeah.

ALEX

But in a way that was good, because part of Magnus as well is, you can’t, I mean, Podcasting 101, everyone wants infinite amounts of the same content that’s also consistently fresh and new every week.

I mean, all, all you have to do is give exactly the same thing –

JONNY

You lose audience, if you change; you lose audience, if you stay.

ALEX

Yeah, it’s just the, it’s the eternal struggle. And Pig was a really, really nice one because… Yeah, you’ve got Piper, and things like that, which is just like straight down the line, this is scary stuff. And then Pig or Episode 100… and Mr. Spider as well, scary as anything, but I also count as an unusual one.

JONNY

Well, I, I don’t know. Like, I always feel the fact that Mr. Spider is so consistently up there in terms of everyone’s, like, favourite episodes, when I’m just like, it’s a scary kids book. It’s horror on easy mode.

[ALEX LAUGHS]

Like, I would’ve really struggled to not make that one really scary, you know? Whereas I feel like Pig, I’m like, no, this one’s, this is me trying an expert level horror run.

ALEX

[laughing] God, we keep calling it ‘Pig’!

JONNY

And I don’t think I land everything, but, like, I’m proud that I gave it a go.

ALEX

You have been good at giving me fair warning where it’s like, ‘Hey FYI, I’ve got one coming up. It’s going to be difficult to stick the landing’, because you’ve set yourself challenges before. Cos the door one as well was one way you went, where you’re just like, ‘I just want to do a scary door with no addition, just the scary door. That’s my challenge.’

So Pig was always hitting that note. I really did toy around with, is there a way to work Pig into Season 5 as a giant, like, kaiju striding across the landscape, but it just –

[JONNY LAUGHS]

JONNY

‘twas not to be.

ALEX

Yeah, I wish we could have got it together though. Just the idea of Monster Pig, just striding around, not actually doing anything. Just there!

JONNY

Just vibing.

ALEX

Always appealed to me.

[CLIP: MAG144 – Decrypted]

“‘Five. Six. Four. Eight. Four. Six. Four. Seven. Four. Eight. Two. Seven.’

With each new number, my blood pounded and my heart raced, though I didn’t have the faintest idea what they might have meant. I had actually brought a notebook and pen, I now realised, just to write down the numbers. And so, I did. Four hours I spent, patiently jotting down the numbers. ‘The Skye Boat Song’ repeated every hour and a half, but I went through the sequence a few times just to assure myself it didn’t change and I hadn’t missed any.

When I finally took out my headphones, the sudden rush of summer evening sounds hit me like a wave, leaving me reeling and dizzy. It took me a moment to realize how late it was, and how sunburned I had gotten in the process. Everything ached and my heart pounded as I limped home. I’d been out easily twice as long as any time before…”

ALEX

Oh, interesting!

JONNY

Ohhhhhhh!

It’s The Extinction.

ALEX

Yeah.

JONNY

[At Alex’s narration] Who’s this guy?!

ALEX

Dunno. Get rid of him.

JONNY

This isn’t me reading a scary story.

ALEX

No wonder the waveform’s horrible.

JONNY

Ah, I hadn’t even clocked that, like, maybe I was spotting that your, your voice looked different on the waveform.

ALEX

You are – Um, so part of it will be that I deliberately pitch up to hit the EQ better. So I actually come out consistently a little bit louder for you, but we event out and kind of compensate for it.

I’m really surprised this one was selected, actually.

JONNY

It’s the first one that, like, really grabs the idea of The Extinction, which, like, landed a lot stronger than I think either of us expected.

ALEX

You know what? That’s fair. Actually, yeah. It is an early Extinction one, because everyone knows this at this point, that I dive down like research rabbit holes, occasionally, just fall deep, and I’m like, ooh.

JONNY

Oh same, same.

ALEX

And number stations for me was a real fascination for a long time. Admittedly, prior to this recording.

JONNY

I have a suspicion you might’ve actually, like, not exactly asked, but –

ALEX

I suggested number stations.

JONNY

I don’t remember if I was like, yep, already got it planned. Or, like, yeah, I can definitely do a number station one.

ALEX

I don’t remember. I remember suggesting it cos I really wanted to do a number station one, and I’m glad how this one came out.

JONNY

Yeah.

ALEX

Number stations are just odd. There’s a few things that I just fell down the rabbit hole of. Because I just find them inherently creepy: number stations, water towers… There’s just something inherently creepy about water towers. They’re just… scary. They’re like these massive tripods that just loom everywhere and everyone ignores.

JONNY

I really enjoyed this, because it’s nice to experiment with the format occasionally. And I liked this one, because it gave a little bit of homework. Because I used basically the world’s simplest crypto code, the world’s simplest code with the numbers. And like, eventually some people decoded it and it, like, I think it was like ‘the world is always ending’ or something like that.

ALEX

Oh, I didn’t know that people decoded it! I never got that message.

JONNY

Yeah, people decoded it. Like, it was a very simple cypher. It’s one of those things where, like, it’s not in and of itself a particularly, like, terrifying message, but actually putting in that work always makes it hit harder. And so I was, I was very gratified to see that, to see that coming out.

ALEX

Yeah, yeah.

Well, it makes me think actually, we did for a while, and this, this is something that I can talk about now because we know it’s not a thing, is we talked about whether we should do, like, ARG stuff tied to this.

JONNY

Oh yeah…

I feel like I’ve always been just on the edge of making an ARG.

ALEX

Yeah.

JONNY

You know? Like every creative project I do could theoretically include an ARG, but they just, they never have, and –

ALEX

Oh, sorry for anyone who won’t know – Augmented Reality Game. It’s one where, like, I don’t know, there’s a code, and if you call that number in the real world, you’ll get access to a recording that’ll tell you to go to a GPS location in the real world, blah, blah, blah. But…

JONNY

They were huge in the noughties.

ALEX

We dis– we dis– Yeah, we discussed it. And logistically we realised that we could do that, but it would actively, negatively, impact the podcast, because it would be such a heavy draw on time.

JONNY

Yeah.

ALEX

And I think at this point we realised that just from writing alone, putting it together, it just wasn’t feasible. I know since that someone’s done it actually. There’s been a couple of podcasts that are doing quite well, that really heavily tie into the ARG element, and have a reactive story based on how far people get. More power to you – that’s a very impressive achievement.

JONNY

That’s been… a trend in internet horror I’ve been, like, not exactly following, but like, periodically encountering that’s really fascinating, for a while. Like, it goes, I mean, the earliest versions of that I’m aware that were widespread were a lot of the early Slenderman, things like EverymanHYBRID, TribeTwelve, all that sort of stuff.

They leaned very heavily into this ARG element with, like, viewers getting packages and all this sort of thing.

ALEX

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[CLIP: MAG135 – Dark Matter]

“Maxwell told me it is in our nature to fear the dark, and I could not disagree. For all my intellectual reverence of it, I could not deny that on those few occasions I had found myself in full and proper darkness, my heart had trembled. And rightly so, he said, for are we not creatures born of the light, contemptible and corrupt? Surely then, this fear of confronting the pure nature of the universe is right and good. Surely this fear of the dark is the truest communion that humanity could ever hope for. And at his words, I felt afraid, and my heart soared in terror and elation as my eyes brimmed with tears, for I knew he spoke the truth.

So, we began to work together, to worship together in his church, the only church I’ve ever felt I truly belonged to. It was wonderful.”

JONNY

Oh, I think this might be Manuela!

ALEX

I don’t remember this one.

JONNY

It’s Manuela’s statement. The one before they actually meet her in Ny-Ålesund.

ALEX

Ohhhhh…

Yeah. I confess a lot of The Dark ones blur together for me, pun intended, like –

JONNY

Yeah. It’s, I think, always been the power that we’ve struggled the most to properly make as scary as it should be.

ALEX

It’s just so frustrating, because it’s so easy in cinema.

JONNY

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, in an audio medium, the fear of the dark is harder to convey, but I love going on a weird off-kilter, cultish, religious screed. Love it.

ALEX

I’m sure I never noticed that before, Jonny.

JONNY

Yeah. This one specifically I can lay almost entirely down to the excellent podcast Apocrypals…

ALEX

Oh yes.

JONNY

…getting me massively into Gnosticism. There’s a period – There’s, like, a stretch of like 20, 25 episodes –

ALEX

That’s such a you statement, Jonny. [Adopts fake posh voice] ‘Oh, you’re still on Catholicism?’ ‘No, I’ve, I’ve moved on to Gnosticism now. It’s, it’s all the rage.’

JONNY

There’s this run of like 20, 25 episodes in Season 4, where you could see that I was just going down this massive Gnostic rabbit hole, research wise.

ALEX

So, here’s a question then. Do you remember when you stopped being afraid of the dark? I’ve never asked this question of you.

JONNY

As in, uh, like in my actual life, life?

ALEX

Like, was there a formative experience? Yeah, because there’s some of the powers that I know, like, from our like chats or whatever, like, this speaks to you on this level or whatever, whatever. Well, for The Dark, I’ve never actually asked, like, is there anything that The Dark formatively attaches to you in any way?

JONNY

I mean, I definitely was afraid of the dark as, like, a child, child.

ALEX

Yeah, yeah.

JONNY

‘Cause, you are, aren’t you? At some point, it swapped from being afraid of the dark to being, not exactly afraid of my thoughts in the dark…

ALEX

Oh, more like a solipsistic thing?

JONNY

Yeah… Like, if I got into, like, a particularly scary or weird thought cycle, I found that I had to, like, turn on the light to kind of dispel it.

ALEX

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

JONNY

Because it was that thing of, like, without any visual stimulus, my brain would just sort of go on these, like, almost like low-key panic attacks, not actual, but like, that sort of loop.

ALEX

I wonder if that comes out in the writing, actually, cos now I’m thinking about it, I can’t think of any shared victimhood in The Dark.

I know that there’s been, like, multiple cult members at once, but has there ever been more than one victim simultaneously suffering to The Dark? I don’t think there has…

JONNY

Not really. There were the shadows that tore that dude’s head off under the church.

ALEX

Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

JONNY

I forget the name of the surviving witness there, but there were two people there, and one of them got their head off.

ALEX

It’s just thinking… cos, like, some of them obviously lend themselves to, like, more people and less, and so on. I was just – Yeah, I’ve just realised with The Dark,  never asked you, I never, never dug in on that specific one.

JONNY

I think it is one of those things that, at this point I find The Dark to a certain degree,  a comfort in a lot of scenarios. And like, I dunno, something about working night shift for two years, y’know.

ALEX

It does change you.

JONNY

You just kinda get used to it.

ALEX

But it is still odd. It is still odd, thinking back to you and me knowing each other pre-Magnus, just having met randomly at the night work.

JONNY

Yeah.

ALEX

That’s so odd to me.

JONNY

It’s one of those things where it’s, like, it’s not as random as it sounds, because, like James Ross, I think, was the reason that we’d both gotten this, like, weird night-shift gig. Yeah.

ALEX

It was a good gig for creatives.

JONNY

We were already in the same sort of circles.

ALEX

Hmm.

[CLIP: MAG160 – The Eye Opens]

“Hello, John.

Apologies for the deception, but I wanted to make sure you started reading, so I thought it best not to announce myself.

I’m assuming you’re alone; you always did prefer to read your statements in private. I wouldn’t try too hard to stop reading; there’s every likelihood you’ll just hurt yourself. So just listen.

Now, shall we turn the page and try again?

[PAINED SOUNDS OF SELF-STRUGGLE TO AVOID CONTINUING]

Statement of Jonah Magnus regarding Jonathan Sims, The Archivist.

Statement begins.

[RAP OF SOMETHING ON WOOD]

I hope you’ll forgive me the self-indulgence, but I have worked so very hard for this moment, a culmination of two centuries of work. It’s rare that you get the chance to monologue through the voice of another, and you can’t tell me you’re not curious.”

JONNY

Ohhhh, shocker…

[RESTRAINED GIGGLES FROM ALEX]

ALEX

We’re listening to, for everyone’s benefit, you’re listening to Jonny reading the character, John –

JONNY

Oh is this me? I’d completely – Oh, you… what a –

ALEX

Bear with me…

[Continuing] – channelling Ben Meredith playing Elias, bearing in mind that Ben Meredith’s Elias is Ben Meredith’s impression of Jonny.

[ALEX BREAKS INTO GIGGLES]

JONNY

It’s such a looped, recursive… nonsense.

ALEX

Such a recursive mess.

Yeah, this was a nice pitch. I remember you pitching this. This was a nice idea for an episode. Really, really clever.

JONNY

It was, ah, the, the exact… [laughs] That’s me.

ALEX

It’s the biggest compliment I can give you, mate.

JONNY

Yeah, no, I’m absolutely aware that sensible is the biggest compliment you can give. And I am also deeply amused by the implications of that.

But, yeah, no, I remember that the – like, how we were going to do this drop, this change, was something we’d been going back and forth on for, like, three and a half seasons before we finally settled.

ALEX

Oh yeah.

JONNY

My original idea was actually that this happened twelve episodes into Season 5.

ALEX

Mmmmm.

JONNY

The idea that there was, like, a false resolution at the end of Season 4, and, like, the first ten or so episodes of Season 5 were just this entirely dead end. Not exactly a waste of time, but like a complete fake out.

And then this happens a third of the way through the season. And then the rest is just what the whole of Season 5 ended up becoming.

ALEX

Cos yeah, we did so many permutations of what Season 5 could look like.

JONNY

Yeah.

ALEX

We had “Season 5 is all the apocalypse,” which is obviously what we ended up with. We had “Season 5 is a half-way fake out, and suddenly it’s there.” We had “Season 5 is going to be all apocalypse, but only twelve episodes.” Like we tried a few…

JONNY

Ohhh yeah.

ALEX

Oh no, I think it came in at fifteen or something.

JONNY

Yeah. Well, I mean, fundamentally, a lot of it came down to the fact that we weren’t sold on being able to maintain an interesting apocalypse for a full 40 episode season.

ALEX

It’s a tall order. It’s difficult.

JONNY

Yeah. And to be fair, I think some audience might say that we haven’t managed it. I think enough would say that we’ve done a decent job. It’s given us permission to go experimental in a new way.

ALEX

I’m glad of the attempt. And I know that sounds like a cop out, but I am, I would have always wondered what if, if we’d picked any other option than just doubling down. Because we really had to compress the story structure in Season 4 a lot, to make apocalypse happen at end of Season 4.

JONNY

Well, there’s so much plot in Season 4, but at the same time, like, I don’t think it actually feels rushed.

ALEX

Yeah. I think there were – I’m trying to remember… I remember there were elements that we considered exploring that we deliberately lifted out, but I can’t for the life of me remember what they are, which says a lot.

JONNY

It’s a weird one, because of how the, like, the overall structure works with, like, each season being more and more character-driven, and less and less about the, specifically, the statements themselves. As it goes on, more story goes less far, you know, until we hit Season 5 where it takes a sideways leap, and suddenly it’s focusing at least for the first, like, half, it’s focusing a lot on the hellscapes with, like, character moments to contrast.

But yeah, it was an ambitious change, and I’m, I’m very glad that we did it.

[CLIP: MAG181 – Ignorance]

“MARTIN: So what’s the deal with you two anyway?

SALESA: It’s an odd situation, but not a complicated one. Shortly after I decided to stay here, she arrived. Wandered in from the chaos out there, and told me she was going to stay with me. I didn’t get this far by pitting myself against The Web, so I welcomed her in.

ARCHIVIST: And…?

SALESA: And sometimes she cooks.

ARCHIVIST: She ‘cooks’?

SALESA: I don’t know what you want me to say. It’s a big house and I don’t see her much. Can’t even say which corner she’s made her nest in. Whatever she’s doing, all I can do is hope it doesn’t wreck my little oasis. And if it does, then I hope that by keeping her in good graces she’ll at least do me the courtesy of killing me first.

…

Anyway, let us talk of happier things. Or perhaps just take a moment to enjoy not being out there. You are, of course, welcome to stay as long as you like.”

ALEX

Yeah…

JONNY

Ah, Ray! Hello Ray!

ALEX

What a stunner!

JONNY

Took ages to land on the voice actor for Salesa. But Ray was such a joy to work with.

ALEX

Lowri really came through finding Ray.

JONNY

Weirdly, Salesa in this oasis was one of my earliest solid ideas I had for the Season 5 apocalypse.

ALEX

I am so happy with how that came out.

JONNY

Yeah.

ALEX

I am so happy cos it was… really difficult to get the casting through. And then there were equipment problems, and we had to ship it out to Australia, and then the timing problems. And just from a logistic standpoint, that episode should not exist. And certainly it was hard work, but I’m so happy with the end result. Like, it’s really one of my favourite bits.

JONNY

I, I, I think, even by the time we were rem– we were recording Piecemeal, which is Salesa’s first, like, appearance. And you were telling me that I had to make it, like, a hundred percent less sweary. It was all F-bombs, all the time, first draft of Piecemeal.

ALEX

US markets, they don’t like it!

[JONNY IS GIGGLING]

JONNY

I was just, like, he’s, he’s a very sweary man, Alex. But, like, right from the start I, like, I had this idea of Salesa as this, like, just, very practically-minded character. And like, as soon as we started talking about the apocalypse, and I was, like, well, we need to have, like, this rest in the centre.

ALEX

Yeah, absolutely.

JONNY

And like, as soon as we set up, I was like, Salesa is going to be in there.

ALEX

Well, structurally as well. Like, you have to bear in mind is that Season 5 was written, then pandemic hit, Salesa was originally meant to be, they basically drop to the floor in front of him. Mid-season break.

JONNY

Yeah.

ALEX

Because originally we were just – we were trying to toy around with –

JONNY

Just have the one.

ALEX

Yeah. Just have the mid-season break and go for it. So from my perspective, it was the wonderful landing on the lap, ‘Oh, hello.’ And then off we go for the break. So, it still feels slightly odd to me structurally. I can’t complain, because we don’t deserve it to have come out as nice as it did.

JONNY

Yeah.

ALEX

With all of the struggle, with all of the fights to make that episode happen. And Ray was an absolute stunner to work with.

JONNY

For me, it was all second-hand stress, but I remember how much stress there was for Lowri and you, like, trying to get everything set up, and finding the right actor. And, like, once, once we found Ray, like, getting the equipment, and getting everything sorted, and, like, every time we talked, it was, like, ‘Oh –’

ALEX

[Hurried] Stress, stress, stress, stress, stress, stress, stress.

JONNY

’– this new, like, little disaster.’

And then I got on the call, and Ray started talking. And I was, like, ‘Ah. Brilliant. Bullseye. We’ve got it.’

[ALEX CHUCKLES]

ALEX

And it was another one where it is literally, I think, the only note was stuff like, it was either, like, ‘speed up’ or ‘slow down’ on a couple of bits. That was it. Ray was just great. Straight out the gate. It was genuinely one, like you say, where the stress levels were so high going in that recording. Cos it needed to be grand.

And the second that Ray started talking, it was just like, ‘Ahhhh, I’m in an oasis. Good. Yes. Yes. Take us into your oasis, yes please.’

[JONNY SIGHS CONTENTEDLY]

And on that nice chill oasis now, I actually think, I think we’ve come to the end of it.

JONNY

Is, is that it? That’s it?

ALEX

That’s it.

JONNY

There’s not? No, you’re right. There are no more coming. Huh.

ALEX

That flew by.

JONNY

That really did, but then they were like, ‘Oh, we’ve got an hour of clips’…

ALEX

But what a blast from the past!

JONNY

I was like, ‘Oh, that’s gonna to take a while’’. But no, it’s, it’s been a delight.

ALEX

Tell you what, then, we’ll just sit, and just listen, listen to all of them, right. Once we’re done we’ll listen to all 200.

JONNY

Yeah. No. Okay. Well let’s, let’s, let’s just, let’s just, let’s, uh, let’s maybe… I’ve got to go to dinner. Ah, cos I’ve got… Yeah.

ALEX

Alright. Yeah, you go, you go to dinner. We’ll see what we’ve got coming up next week, but I think we’ll call it there then.

Thanks everyone for joining us on this little retrospective.

JONNY

Thank you.

ALEX

Obviously we’ve got more hiatus content coming up, but, uh, thanks for your time. Anything you want to add, Jonny, before we bounce off?

JONNY

Not really. I’m, I’m still, like, oh, it’s weird to hear, like, five years of your life and writing, like, condensed into an hour.

[ALEX CHUCKLES]

It’s disorientating.

[ALEX LAUGHS]

But I think I liked it.

ALEX

Well, either way. We’ll talk to y’all later. Bye!

JONNY

Whoever voiced the Archivist… Probably should’ve picked someone else.