Sarah Govett

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Whoa, did I just sing soprano? I think I'm breaking into the June twenty third through the twenty. Nope. For Life, your weekly delve into the dark dystopian pop culture of the seventies, eighties and beyond. I'm Andy Bush, I'm aided and abetted by Dave Lawrence, the co author of the Scarred for Life books, all three available right now on Lulu dot com. And we love hearing about stuff that terrified you.

Uh what scarred you as a kid? Come and say hi on our Insta at SCARDPOD or the SCARDFLY Facebook page. You're gonna be reading more of your terrifying messages out at the end of this episode. Uh this week's guest is the author and screenwriter Sarah Gavett. Uh Sarah co-wrote the screenplay. for the twenty twenty three sci fi thriller Tim about a rogue AI humanoid robot that went to number one

on Netflix in the UK. Uh she's also written several successful young adult novels series, including the Territories trilogy, the India Smythe series, and the dystopian standalone We Go On Forever. As she's branched out into adult fiction with her debut crime thriller novel Believe, which is out right now. It's a pleasure to welcome Sarah Gavette to Scarred for Life. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me on.

Hey, it's great to have you on the podcast, Sarah. Um you know, as a proper privilege, uh let's start by asking what your relationship is like with fear. Are you someone that enjoys being scared? Do you seek out scary movies or you try and avoid it? Um, so I think it's slightly strange. So I get I get r really easily scared.

by movies. Like I hate anything really gory, anything too creepy. But then I have a strange fascination with it as well. So if something scares me, that's normally what I want to write about. And I almost can kind of become obsessed with it as an idea and then kind of keep following it down. wormholes and wanting to know more and more about it.

And your books cover an incredible range of kind of subjects and genres and we create some amazing worlds. Uh you think about to when you were a kid, what kind of what kind of stuff did you consume then? Was it mainly books? Was it T V, film, what kind of thing? Uh so I I read a lot. Um my parents were really strict, so there was very little T V that I was allowed to to watch. No that's what strange hair. Was not allowed to watch Green Shell. There you go.

So yeah, so then I was left to read a lot. Um I I read loads of grounded sci-fi. So I read lots by sort of John Christopher, John Wyndham, so kind of ideas like that, kind of near future. worlds or books based around thought experiments. I love them and they really kind of resonated with the And then you I mean you started out in in young adult fiction. Is there is there more freedom writing i in that world first before you kinda head into adult fiction?

Um, no, I think I wrote that first just because that was the first idea I had. So I was working as a private tutor at the time and I was running my own tutoring agency. And so I was dealing a lot with kids and exams and exam stress. And so I had an idea about kind of a world where if you had to sit an exam age fourteen and if you pass the exam, then you got to stay on the dry lands, it was like a flooded world. If you failed it, you get sent to the wetlands to die.

Um, so it was literally just like the idea that I had based on the the life I was living at the time. And when you write your first book, you don't get paid for it in advance. You've got no idea if it's gonna get published. So you just write it purely for fun. Um And and yeah, yeah, I loved it. And then I kind of was really lucky to get a writing career off the back of it.

You said that even though you get it's scared easily, you become fascinated by scary ideas. Has there ever been an idea so scary that when you went on a deep dive into it, it scared you too much and you just had to back away from it? Um, I think anything to do with um kind of people's minds completely fracturing. So descent into proper madness, that absolutely terrifies me because I think as an author, you're always

or a creative, you're always kind of skirting madness because you want to descend into your own imagination. You want to become part of this world that you've created purely in your head. So you're always kind of pushing the boundaries, almost trying to sort of break logic. And so I think if I ever read anything about madness, it does scare me because I can see the potential for kind of ending up there. I guess when you're an author, you've only got yourself.

To work with, I guess. And it's the same with anything, whether it's like, you know, if you're a golfer or something like that, you can get in your own head a little bit. So do you w is your mind do you work well with y with your brain? Is your brain uh helpful or do you sometimes have to work against your your inner monologue with that kind of thing? So I I'm lucky in that I can concentrate.

really easily. So I can write I can write pretty fast, but at the same time I know it's not always healthy. So I can I can really burn out as well. So if an idea grips me, for example, I I'm starting to write a new book at the moment. then I become I'd become so obsessed with it that Then I just having thoughts about it all the time. I'll go for a run, I'll have more thoughts, I'll have a shower, I'll have more thoughts. I'll be sending myself emails as I'm trying to go to sleep because

because my brain won't shut down. It's constantly thinking about this idea. And it's both an amazing state to be in because it feels like you're you're flying and it's wonderful and it's why I love it. But at the same time, it is very it is very kind of draining, uh, because you're so like you're so on, you're so firing all the time.

And you know, you mentioned the dystopian thing earlier on with the with the wetlands, et cetera. Um You know, there's some great dystopian themes about children trying to be children against the backdrop of kind of something awful that's unfolding around them and uh you know, just uh like The Last of Us, which you know obviously is on a lot of people l enjoying on T V and stuff pretty recently. Is is that is that a a theme that kind of really kinda resonates for you?

Um, yeah, so so so definitely. So when I was writing my territory trilogy, I wanted the children in it to be very much kind of relatable children now rather than mini adults. So it they're still making jokes with their friends. They're still kind of falling in love. They're still kind of irritated by people because I think You know, things like humor it's such a It's such a coping mechanism. It's so human that you would

you know, you'd make jokes whatever situation you were in, you'd fall in love with in whatever situation you were in. And I really like the kind of juxtaposition between those kind of normal, almost kind of passy human mi moments. And then this kind of overarching, kind of horrific world at the same time. As a child were you ever worried that you'd be sent off to the wetlands? No, that's... But I think all...

all kind of worlds that I've built are in a in a way based on fears that I had. So I used to be really scared of rain. I mean it sounds ridiculous, but we'd done Noah's Ark at school and And I think I've got quite a bit of imagination. So after studying Neuroz Arc at school, there was a day when it rained loads and loads and loads and I thought, Oh my god, what if

What if the world flooded? Like where's this arc we're gonna get to? Um so yeah, that probably has something to do with a kind of flooded world. Uh and then so Sarah you had a you had a hell of a a career change to get into writing. Uh tell us a little bit about how that kind of panned out for you.

Okay, so yeah, so originally I was a lawyer in this in a city, a kind of big commercial law firm, because I'd done law at university, so that just seemed like the sensible thing to do. They kind of come to career fairs, they offer you loads of money, everyone wants to do it, so I did it and then I knew from day one that I was gonna absolutely hate that. So I stuck it out for two years, became a qualified solicitor, and then I had no idea what I was gonna do with my life.

So I think I'd always been very serious up until that point. I'd always done the sensible thing. So I decided, right, I'm gonna have one year of just doing ridiculous things, a kind of like late onset teen rebellion. So I did I did hair modeling. I designed t shirts. So I I sewed some t shirts. It was just like me on my sofa with sequins sewing them on. And uh Jordan actually wore one to celebrate her engagement to Peter Andre.

And that was in the front cover of OK magazine. So gold is gonna sequence spelling out always and forever. That's incredible. I mean I know I mean you've done incredibly well with the whole writing thing, but it's gonna be hard to eclipse that I think overall. Oh you know and and we we've had, you know, quite a few authors on on the podcast o over the past few uh seasons and you know they always get asked about

Uh, less way into writing. I mean a lot of people have the the you know, the the dream to do something like that. Uh we did you ever do any like writing courses or how did you did you have to train yourself up to get into a position to be able to do writing or do you just kinda find it naturally?

No, I think um so most of my friends who are authors haven't actually done any courses. They've just had a go. So I genuinely think that's the best way to do it. So I think you can learn everything about writing just from reading. So read books, see what you like, what you don't like, what styles you like, what draws you in. And then I think the best way to write is to then block out the world and just write for yourself. So I have most fun when I'm just writing

a book that I want and I don't think about how my agent's gonna react. I don't think whether or not my editor's gonna like it. I just um I just go for it and lose myself in a world. You mentioned that when you start a project you bombard yourself with your own ideas. Yes. How easy is it then to mesh those together into a coherence? Um so I'm quite lucky in that so far, touch wood, um, it's it's always worked. I think

I think naturally I've got a very logical, kind of sciencey brain. So for example, for A levels I did maths, biology, chemistry, history. So I think my brain's always logically kind of plotting and organizing. So when I write, I have to deliberately not plan. So almost I have to disengage that that logical element in order that I can come up with kind of strange tangentias and keep the creativity flowing. Whereas I've got friends who are much more

purely English humanities creative minded and they have to plan a lot because they almost have to kind of fence in and structure their thoughts um because otherwise they would be all over the place. Whereas I'm sort of the opposite of that. So you do you don't do the Alan Partridge thing and and lie on the bed with a dictaphone, uh with b ideas, note to self, any of that kind of thing?

No, I don't. I sometimes lie we've got a trampoline outside. I sometimes lie on the trampoline and send myself emails about ideas. That's really fun. But no, not a dictatone yet. Uh and then let's talk about Tim. I I I absolutely loved it. The uh the movie we mentioned it in the intro there about uh the the the kind of robot, the I AI robot that kind of

uh goes rogue. Uh how did that come about? Um and what I just think it was a a fantastic such a fantastic kind of it almost felt like an episode of uh a big episode of Black Mirror. It was brilliant. Oh, brilliant. Um, so that came about because my husband and I, we raised it together and we'd been chatting for a while about wanting to write a film and we both love sort of ninety stalker thrillers.

So and and kind of 80s ones as well. So we were thinking about things like the hand that rocks the cradle, um single white female, um, fatal attraction, and we wanted to take an idea and then update it. for the modern world. And again, we're both really interested in grounded sci fi and ideas and we're both absolutely terrified of Alexis and the idea that people

can unthinkingly take these devices into their homes that will gather information on them, that will listen into them, purely in the name of convenience. So we want to try to film about Big data, data harvesting. And then we also knew when you write your first film, you're not going to get a massive budget at all. So we knew we had to try and come up with a basically a one location, three parter film that would feel bigger.

Um and hopefully we achieved that. We had very few shots that weren't in this house. So we had a little bit at a business park, a little bit kind of driving around from some streets, but apart from that, it was all set in this. supposed smart home centred around a dynamic between two people and a robot.

And it's a great point because y you know, uh y you talk about stuff to your friends and the next thing you know you're getting a push for an advert for, even if you've not even searched for it, which is which is absolutely terrifying. So uh as we stand i you know, i in twenty twenty five, uh where where are we at with robots? Are we Are we friends with robots? Are they okay? Or how do you feel about robots overall?

Um, I hate robots. I I'm I don't have a very good relationship with with technology. It took me about twenty minutes to work out how to connect my headphones to the laptop for this. So I'm very wet of any technology. Um And again, as as you were saying about the idea that you're getting these kind of personalised adverts, again another trigger for writing this film is that my husband and I were chatting at the time about our son's speech development and the fact that it was

Quite slow. We were worried that he wasn't learning to speak fast enough. And then within the next half an hour, both of us at our feeds were getting adverts for speech therapists.

So again, this idea that something's listening in on you and then trying to manipulate you kind of through that um is absolutely terrifying. And then also like more and more I'm getting worried about AI, like partly societal worries, but also for purely selfish worries, the idea that it could come along and try and replace me um as a writer isn't great, particularly on the because it's been sort of trained up on

um like pirated versions of authors' books. So it seems kind of particularly cruel that it could kinda come and take your job. After stealing your stuff. Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. I mean, uh we talked to P Peter Serafinovich, didn't we, about, you know, voice overwork and how AI is mimicking people's voices, et cetera. Uh uh Dave in the Scarflife books, is the fear of the machine, the robot, uh a persistent theme, would you say?

I think I think we talk more about body horror, the idea that machines invade people, you know, like sort of obviously with like things like Cybeman in Doctor Who or you th the the Borg in Star Trek, that kind of thing, the idea that eventually you replace so much of yourself.

that you won't be human anymore. I think that's that that was more the angle we took. I mean, I think you know, we were writing these books about ten years ago starting. So AI wasn't really on the horizon at that point. So But now I'd absolutely put it in because as I said in an another podcast we recorded recently, there's an advert for a product called Liquid Death. which is a a water a brand of water and none of it is real. Everything in it is AI generated. Oh well.

Including the actors and the just everything about it is is fake and it's harder and harder to tell. And I think is to be serious for a second, that's gonna have major implications for the future of politics and everything like that, when you can fake something so convincingly that you don't know what's what you lose sense of what's real.

And you I mean sorry but you guys picked uh well I don't know how involved you were with the the the choosing well you must have been completely involved with the choosing of the uh i who plays Tim or how Tim looks. There's something you know, Dave just mentioned it there, that kind of Uh they call it kind of uncanny value, I guess, a little bit where you get that kind of slightly unsettling um view of of how a humanoid robot looks. It's i it's and that that's a key part of the horror, right?

Abs absolutely. So yes, um I was lucky because my husband directed it, I had a lot more influence and things like cast than I normally would would have done. So yeah, as soon as we saw like Eamon Farron's face, so he's the guy who plays Tim Um yeah, it has to be him. He's so he's got this just absolutely beautifully chiseled face. So, you know, if you were gonna design a robot, you're gonna want someone with symmetry and beauty, but he manages to pull off this kind of exquisite coldness.

With it. So yeah, we were laughing. He was he was absolutely perfect. In the three Stalker films you mentioned, Fatal Attraction and so on, I think all the Stalkers are women. How important was it to get away from that as as the trope? Oh yeah, no that was that was pretty important. We didn't want to have uh another kind of

Barney Boiler woman who's obsessed with this guy and then becomes kind of unh unhinged as as a result. So yeah, it was quite fun to play with those tropes and to make it Um well on the outside kind of a male presence, although obviously it's not really a man, it's a robot.

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Sorry, let's talk about your your new novel, Believe, which is fantastic. I'm I'm currently working my way through it at the moment, it's brilliant. You're stepping into kind of crime. Are you interested in true crime or does it d do s gruesome kind of stories catch your attention when you're kind of doom scrolling through the news? No, I actually really don't like true crime. I d I think I don't like

real kind of real murder or real death as a form of entertainment, I it kind of makes me feel slightly uncomfortable. Um and I think also by so I'm not a I don't exclusively read kind of crime or thrillers. Like I think I dip into all genres. So it's just like if there's a really good one that it really captures my imagination, that's great. But I wouldn't say I'm naturally drawn to to crime or kind of detective stories even. Uh behind me here's the British Library Crime Collection. Yeah. Uh

And and that's I that's exactly my perspective. I don't like real life crime. I d I it has to be like a vicar with side eyed at a cream porn. It can't be like, you know, a husband beat his wife's death with a a poker or something like that. I can't do It has to be heightened and ridiculous.

But I mean I th w one point that is interesting though is that the the thing of not being able to trust people. You know what I mean? Like in terms of in the book, uh Natalie not being able to trust her husband. Uh you know, it's that element of like someone that you think you know might be doing something that means that you don't know you don't know them at all. And that's kind of terrifying in its own right, isn't it?

Yeah, so I mean that's what I really wanted the book to be about. So I think the idea is, well, that you that life's so It's often so overwhelming. So you have to create these belief systems in order to get through it. So different people b will believe different things. I'm not talking about

religion really, but more like the idea that if you work hard you'll succeed, like if you're innocent you'll walk. If you're guilty, you'll go to jail. You have these certain people you can trust. And so I wanted to create a world in which this character had all these kind of belief system set up so she had her husband who is her rock. She she's a lawyer, so she believes in the rule of law. And then one by one I take them away from her. So she accuses her boss of rape, but then he's found

Not guilty, so her whole faith in the legal system's shattered. Um, she becomes heavily dependent on her husband, Ryan, who you know, he's been there for her throughout. He's the one constant in her life. And then he's accused.

of exactly the same cry by a young, really beautiful woman who's just started work for him. So so again, I wanted all these kind of these pillars of belief in her life to be taken away so she's thrown into thi this situation which she's left reading and she can't trust anyone or anything. And then y you gave us a little hint there that you're writing your your next novel at the moment.

So well I was so I've written two more since then, since this. Um so I've written the follow up to Believe, in which the same detective's gonna come back and solve a new case. And then I've written a standalone memory thriller, which is um so it's set in a world where you can you can kind of read people's memories and you can delete traumatic ones.

Um and then it's the issue is then um so s someone who works for a startup, she be begins to think that this procedure's being done on her, potentially against her. consent. Um so again it's playing with this idea of of madness and not being able to trust trust your own mind. And then I'm starting to write some um massive, like epic volcano thriller at the moment. There's a curve.

Really enjoying. I know. So it's probably not a great idea'cause you're space to you're supposed to build a brand and stick to the brand. Bye-bye. I like I don't know, I've got some ideas. I like kind of jumping around and writing whatever takes my fancy.

Okay, well listen, this gets us nicely to your uh scars then, Sarah. Uh every week someone brings with them three things that have terrified them and and uh helped create the person that they are today. Maybe we'll get some uh Uh some of the uh the original reasons why you might be coming you know, riding the volcano thriller that you just mentioned there as well. Uh could we have your first scar, please?

Okay, so all my scars are book based, probably again because I had to read so much and then wasn't allowed to watch TV. So in no particular order. So the first one is a book called

uh The Tripods by John Christopher. So this is one of these kind of sci-fi authors I love reading. And so I read this about age 10 and it really got under my skin. And so in a nutshell, it's set in a world where alien tripods rule the world and they control humans by capping them at fourteen, which means they place a metal cap on the person's head, which then controls their thoughts and feelings and stops them from questioning any aspect of the tripod's rule.

And so we follow a guy called Will, who's thirteen, and he sees his sparky, independent cousin Jack, goes through this capping ceremony and then dramatically change personality afterwards and Will knows that next year this same procedure is gonna be done on him. So again, I think it's this idea that something can come along and try and control your thoughts. It absolutely terrified me and kind of as I hinted at before it echoed through everything that I've written.

Now was this made into Dave, was this made into a uh a T V show in the eighties?'Cause I swear I have memories of the tripod. It was. It was made yeah, they they adapted the first two books, never got to the third, so it's it's one of the greatest incomplete science fiction series ever made. They never they never adapted the the the f it's trilogy's an initial trilogy, isn't that? It is a trilogy.

Yeah. And then there's a prequel book as well, but th the the third book never got made into a T V show. Did you feel that the T V show did justice to the books or no? I I haven't watched the T V show actually. So I've watched clips on YouTube and then to me no they didn't. But I know they were working with sort of eighties like special effects. Um which probably aren't the greatest. So there's a lot of like green flashing around and the tripods aren't the most realistic.

But but for me the books the books are so perfect that I didn't want um a TV adaptation. In your legal career and so forth, have you ever met anybody who thought, Yeah, they're capped? Yeah. You don't have to answer that question. That's your legal advice. Yeah, I've met a lot. Yeah, probably. Or or or potentially really advanced robots. So yeah. One or the other.

Fair. Uh so I mean, you know, th th there's an interesting thing there as well about um that I I guess you're saying about they get to a certain age and they get kept. Is it Logan's Run, that that weird uh was that s sci fi Dave, Logan's run where you get to a certain age and and something bad happens to you? Yeah. I can kind of get with that. Yeah.

But yeah. But there's a weird element of like waiting for this thing to happen, which I guess is quite scary amongst the the tripod thing, don't you think so? Absolutely. Absolutely. And so I think that's why there's so much kind of suspense in it. And I think that's why it resonated with me so much the idea that this thing you're approaching this thing that you absolutely dread. You're almost like

on this treadmill and you can't get off. And I think probably subconsciously when you're reading it as a kid as well and you're worried about you're worried about adulthood, you're worried about puberty, you're worried about kind of your whole life changing. It's it's a sort of Um version of that too. Have you ever read Greg Egan's book about jewels? Where you have a jewel implanted when you're a child and it learns your entire personality, anything about it, you know, the age of

Something like twenty or if they switch your brain off and replace it with a jewel. That that's a similar sort of thing, I think. I haven't but I'm definitely gonna go and read that now. Sounds like Sarah's kind of thing. It is. What effect did this book have on you then? Did it give you kind of nightmares or did it just kind of inform the kind of stuff that you then went on to search out more, stuff along the same kind of lines?

Um so I think I definitely searched out more stuff along these lines and I think I've been really, really wary of people trying to influence me or trying to manipulate me. Like so I'm not this this isn't a good personality trait, but I'm not a team player. I like I don't like being part of like a big group thing. I like working out things for myself. I really love being self-employed. It doesn't suit me being in an office and being in part of a hierarchy.

Um, and probably part of that is a fear that people are gonna mould me or or change me or shape my thoughts in some way. Yeah, then everything everything that I've written has got some aspect of fear of either having your mind controlled, your personality controlled, or um or losing or as I said before, edging slightly towards madness and then losing control of your own thoughts.

Yeah, I mean like you know, one of the things I think with from a parental side of things is, you know, kids and smartphones and what access they have to things and you know, that kind of content that they're seeing if they do have those smartphones in terms of the shaping their view of the world. Do you think that is a kind of it's not a cap, but it's kind of an element of of mind control and thought control a little bit, isn't it, in people's development? Oh absolutely. Um

And y y you can definitely see how it affects people's kind of concentration, how it affects their attention span, whether or not they can engage. Um so yes, that's that's completely their brain. It has to some extent been broken by a machine. Okay, well there you go. There's your first scar. Let's get your second scar, please, Sarah.

Okay, here we go. So so another book. So it was reading The Witches by Roald. So I read it probably around age eight and was absolutely terrified. And I remember this really, really real kind of visceral fear I felt at the idea that witches could be out there in disguise. Kind of walking among us. And I don't know if you remember, but there were all these ways that you could spot a witch. So they had kind of large nostrils.

they were bald so they had to w wear wigs which gave them like itchy sculpts and they wore gloves even in size, all these details. And then soon after I'd read it, my parents went out and they'd hired a babysitter from this agency and she turned up. And she was wearing gloves and she kept itching her head and I was just

Absolutely terrified. So I remember I didn't see a wink that night. I just lay in bed, kind of eyes open. I was too scared even to go down the landing to the bathroom for a wee. So I just stayed in my room kind of shivering all night. But that but that kinda sparked I believe an interest uh in kind of witches and witchcraft in you a little bit, is that right?

Right? Yeah, absolutely. So again, because I'm always drawn to and fascinated by these things that scare me. So I kept on reading up about witches, kept on being interested in witches, but then They kind of fear morphed and changed. So I didn't believe in actual witches anymore, but I became interested instead in the idea of like witch hunts. and how witch hunts were used as a kind of societal tool of oppression and as a kind of form of misogyny.

So when I was doing my A levels you could write a kind of project on whatever you wanted for history. So I chose to write about witch hunts in early modern Europe. As you do. Interesting as you do. Interesting topic. Um and so he was looking at into witch hunts being driven by kind of famine, driven by religion, driven by desire to control women. Um

And then it kind of kept on spiralling from then. So I read uh The Crucible, when to watch the Crucibles, so Arthur's Miller's Arthur Miller's play about witch hunts. And then um And then it it develops into a fear of potentially being subject to to a witch hunt and how you would try and survive if you were the victim of like a false accusation.

Yeah, to skip back to the book for a second. I actually started reading the book this morning. Oh, okay. And I thought I thought I'm never gonna guess the scary bit. Yeah. Amen.

Squelch a child a week, otherwise they get really grumpy. And then the second chapter begins with it the the narrator having their parents die in a car crash when they're seven years old, straight away, so that's depressing. And then And then the granny tells us about five children who've recently disappeared through to witches and one of them ends up in a painting, trapped in a painting forever. It's scary stuff. It is. I w I was traumatized by chapter three, it was it was terrible.

Yeah, I I've tried reading I've got three kids. I've tried reading it to to each of them and we've never made it to the end of the book. They've been too scared each time. So put it away, Mum. I don't wanna listen to that.

I I recently saw a talk by a previous guest of ours, Grady Hendrix, he does a great talk about witch witches and witchcraft. And the one thing that surprised me from it was that uh Matthew Hopkins, I think was twenty eight when he died. He wasn't like the Vincent Price character we're aware of. He was like in his late twenties. When he died. Gosh. Yeah. He he wasn't like this older guy hunting witches down, he was just a quite a young guy. Wow, yeah, that's scary.

There's there's a there's a uh a hotel we we go to occasionally called the Missly Thorn, uh in Manningtree in in Essex and that's I think that was Matthew Hopkins's base of operations and it's uh incredibly creepy round. I mean I I've I've mentioned this before on the podcast, but I just think Essex is just full of

the the you know, the haunted remains of of its ho you know, horrific witchcraft history. Like uh even in Leon Sea where we live, there's a place called Moon Corner, which where apparently like a hundred or so witches were hanged over the years there. So it's uh it's pretty horrific stuff, isn't it? Oh absolutely. And all you had to do would be like have a mole in a strange place or have a wart or be particularly good at healing people through herbs.

and then suddenly you're a witch. Yeah. And and that's it. And you can't and also just the idea that it was um okay to see if you're a witch, we're gonna drown you. And if you drown, then you're innocent. And if you don't drown drown, we're gonna burn you at the stake. I mean, just having that as your kind of two options is just terrifying.

You can't win. And and I guess you um you your the accusation element then is a big part of your of belief, right? In terms of being accused of something and being hunted down by people. Yeah, yeah. So I wanted um I wanted to kind of play kind of the two sides of belief. So so this idea that um Natalie's struggling because no one believed her and then she's also struggling because someone's kind of

accused her husband and then she knows that women don't tend to lie about things like that. So again, the this whole idea of Do you go with a presumption of innocence or not when it's surrounding an as kind of such a controversial issue?

I mean Dave's just been describing now, uh, you know, reading the book and it's kinda terrifying, even to the present day, even to an adult. Is it important for kids to be scared when they're growing up? You know, a little uh dose of fear is good for kids. What do you think from a parental perspective? Yeah I I think it is. I think there's a reason that um all those kind of traditional fairy tales are quite scary because they do kind of you you want to ingrain certain

certain things in your kids. So for example in Little Red Riding Hood. She doesn't do what she's told, she leaves the path, the wolf gets her. Like it's important that kids learn, stay on the path. Like if you're told, you know, don't do this, don't go off with a stranger, bad stuff happens. So I think, yes, through stories you are always You're trying to indoctrinate your kids.

I think the absolute uh pinnacle of this is I've got the Hilaire Belloc's cautionary tales over there where any child who does anything even even things like shouting, they're going to die. They're gonna something Really? is gonna happen to the Quite quickly. They're gonna be eaten by the line. They're gonna be crushed by the the door form. Terrible, terrible stuff.

Yeah. But also I think they're they're fascinating for kids as well. So, um my youngest, so he so he's six, he loves the idea of Hansel and Gretel, the idea of being kind of caught in a whip by a witch and then being stuck in a cage and having to put your finger out and then put a chicken bone out to try and pretend that you're not putting on weight and you've got this little bony finger. So again, even a six year old likes to be scared like that. I think it's quite fun.

There are significant downsides though because I I'm actually quite tired at the moment because I was up at four o'clock this morning because my little boy was having a nightmare about mosquitoes drinking his blood. So he's he's he's what's been reading your book collection again, Dave. Far too many educational nature videos as far as I'm concerned.

But I mean, uh, I hate to bring up the specter of nanas again. We do s we talk a lot about nans and nanas and grands on on this podcast'cause they are such a a hub, uh a lightning rod of of uh chartered terrors. But I mean I guess this kind of witch thing kind of plays into a little bit that kind of fear of

You know, you probably you know, s have uh you know, the c some of the strange stuff y Gran or Nan might have had when you were growing up, like uh I've mentioned this before, but my nan from Liverpool had lots of strange religious iconography in the house in Liverpool growing up. Does that kind of resonate with you, Sarah, that kind of s the strangeness of that old world that old people kind of bring with them or have around them?

Um so kind of things like old dolls totally scare me. Anything like that or things that are missing something, like a doll that doesn't have an arm. Absolutely terrifying. But for me for me as a kid, it wasn't as much like the religious stuff. So my dad's quite religious, but my mum's a complete atheist.

So for me it was almost like the absence of religion was what was scary because normally for kids, like I'm not religious at all, but with my kids I talk about heaven. Like heaven is such a useful construct, even if you're not religious. This idea anything happens to me, I'll be up in heaven, I'll be looking down on you, you'll be fine. Whereas I I didn't grow up with that. I my mum was very much more, um, okay, there's nothing after you die and your body's eaten by the worms.

So I remember being out in in our garden and just seeing this really plump earthworm and just think, oh my god, it's gonna it's just waiting for me. Uh so I think, yeah, the the lack of religion can be as scary as religion itself. I think my big family problem was the kiss, you know, when you go somewhere and there's a an a an aged ant and she's always got like a hairy wart on her nose and it's sort of a mole and you've got to give her a kiss.

I think it's it's I blame my family for having the crone gene to be honest. Uh and and Sarah, one other thing about the um you know, the element of a witch hunt or you know, that law and society can't save you now because you're at the you're at the mercy of the mob. I also think that's a quite important part of what makes um

Disaster movies so powerful in that you know what how would you cope? How would you cope if like it was an apocalypse or a zombie apocalypse or it was the end of the world or a flood or whatever? You just mentioned I don't want to keep going on about your v volcano novel, but I am absolutely obsessed with it now. Uh is is that a A a theme that you work on in that is like how you know, it makes the reader think, How would me and my family cope? What would I do to sort to help my protect my kids?

Absolutely. So there's a another John Christopher book called The Death of Grass that my husband and I both love. And the idea in that is that There's a virus and it's taken out all grass related species. So basically it destroys all crop plants apart from potatoes. And then you enter

like famine and it's everyone for themselves. And we have this kind of really controlled 1950s society that then totally collapses. But in it, the main character flees to to Wales, where he has this kind of valley that he knows that he can guard. And so yeah, so my husband and I we have our like escape plan plotted. So the idea is we'd take the

boat that our elderly neighbours have. We'd head down, down the Thames, out towards Wales. And now we've made friends with really nice family, but the the dad, he's like ex-paras. So he would be our like army guy. So he would defend our valley. Whereas we'd just like brilliant not be very useful living there. Whilst your elderly neighbours try and find their boat that they think was out the back of the house. Let's try and find that.

Are you taking the elderly neighbours with you or do you have to beat the crap out of them to get their boats off them? I don't I don't think they'd make the journey actually. We leave them we'd leave them some tins.

Brilliant decoy. That'd be great if the m if the zombies do get at them. Uh right, let's let's get your third and final scar then, please, Sarah. Okay, so this one's a bit weird. So another book. This time I was reading a history book about Henry VIII and I was probably about nine at the time. And I think we had we're about to go on a school visit to Hampton Court Palace. And so I remember I was like flicking through it and I got to the pages about Henry VIII's wife.

and reading about him, sort of chopping off Amberlyn's head. And again, it filled me with such abject horror that someone could do this to another person. So he'd want to get rid of his wife, so he'd chop her head off. uh just to get her out of the way. And I think the thing that disturbed me the most was that Anne Boleyn then just had to kneel down and wait for the blade.

So again, like anything else, something scares me, I become weirdly fascinated by it. So then I started getting really interested in decapitation, as you do. I should do. I do. So I read I went on to read like age ten, like all the Scarlet Pimpanel books. I don't know if you've ever read them, they're not super famous, but the idea is there's this English aristocrat.

and he leads a double life. So apparently he's like this wealthy fox who just goes to parties. But in reality, he's a quick thinking master of disguise and an incredible swordsman. He goes off to France and he rescues French nobles from the guillotine.

Oh wow. Because I mean I'm I'm reading the book about the the life of Napoleon at the moment and and the the moment is during the kind of uh the the you know, the big the Great Terror or whatever. And that that sound I mean, that goes back to the whole mob element and being accused of something and you've got no defence and then suddenly you're at the guillotine. Yes.

And I think again there's something so like coldly efficient about a guillotine that you have a blade that's raised up and then it can be lowered and it was introduced because they could they could kill twenty people an hour, I think it was, using using a guillotine. That's that'll come up in a pub quiz at some point, Sarah. Good intel? Okay, good. Excellent. Um yeah, so so I just found I found it absolutely disturbing and then I wanted to kind of read as much as I could about it.

And even now recently, so I was reading up about euthanasia and went onto this forum and people were talking about their kind of kindest, least painful way. to kill a human. Um and someone suggested that the best the best, least painful way would be to so to drug someone, to give them lots of sleeping pills, and then use an incredibly sharp Get a single. We which sounds it sounds barbaric.

But it might but it might be true. And then I went into like a kind of rabbit hole of research into whether or not consciousness can persist in decapitated heads. And you can read all these are quite strange. Are you not allowed to use the computers in the library anymore, Sarah? I do wonder.

No, no I'm not. Um but there are all these different accounts during the French Revolution as to whether people's kind of eyes or mouths twitched after the head had been severed and you even had one account in which someone suggested that the person's name was called out and their eyes kind of opened in response Oh my word.

Well first of all, never get your laptop fixed to PC World. Second Secondly, I I've done I've been down a similar rabbit hole just this morning and I found out I want Mike Mike's a chicken who had his head chopped off and survived, I think, for eighteen years after having his head chopped off. And he and he's literally a headless chicken. But Dave, this can't be right. You can't have a chicken with no head that survives for eighteen years. You know?

It was online, I believe everything I read online. So well there you go, there's mind control, sir. Dave's believed that. I literally are later into head transplants. So there's a guy in China who's really, really into a surgeon who's really into head transplants. So he's done thousands of head transplants on mice.

So I think the m the longest a mouse has survived with a new head on is like a couple of days. But he really wants to kind of build it up and do kind of full on human head transplants. Oh wow, this takes me back to right at the start of season one of Scarred for Life, Reese Shearsmith, uh was it was it Reese who mentioned the uh uh Wazel Gummage and his handsome.

It used to trouble me about where did the consciousness lie? Was it in his head that got taken off? Was it in the butt I just got freaked out by the whole concept, to be honest. And also the the heads the heads are really scary. I've actually got a question to actually this goes for everybody. If you were to have a head transplant, whose body would you want? Ha That's the weirdest thing I've ever heard, Dave, but thanks for bringing that up.

Uh I'd go for like a Sorry, you don't have to answer that. I mean w one of our previous guests, Mark Morris, was uh was a b got obsessed with decapitated heads and death masks and all that kind of stuff as well. I wonder what it is that's so kind of fascinating about it. Do you know what I mean? Do you ever ask yourself the question, why are you drawn into that kind of thing? Because it it seems to affect quite a few people. A lot of people do seem to be drawn in by that kind of image.

I think so. I think any severing I find disturbing. So that's what I can't watch in any horror films, any form of like Lynn severance. I think it's just because It's your head. Your brain's in your head. Like you spend so much time just living in your head. So the idea that someone could Remove that.

from a from a body. Even someone like say pulling a Barbie doll head off its body, I find like it it makes me feel strange. It makes my stomach flip. So I think it's just yeah, the head's so crucial. Uh many years ago I did well, I did private tutoring as well. Uh I t I tutor math. And one student I had used to carry around a Barbie head.

on a piece of string. That wasn't the creepiest thing. The creepiest thing ever was that a girl who came around with a teapot box full of rapid burn rapid burns that she had and she used to throw on her pants to wake them up in the morning apparently. But um this this Bobby had was actually'cause she'd painted tears on it and it was really quite disturbing.

Has she turned up on any true crime podcast? Jackbook probably. The Barbie doll killer. And then you know, like you mentioned, you know, I think the theme throughout this chat sir has been research for you know, for books you're working on just getting, you know, in interest in different areas.

I do you worry'cause it can be like a a a real, you know, black hole going down these kind of s you know, Reddit forums and all that kind of thing. Do you ever do you ever have to like uh stop yourself and and step away from it?'Cause it you can get kind of sucked in a little bit into these worlds.

Yeah, no, absolutely. So I I tend to not do too much research for my book. So I it's more that I know what story I want to tell and I know how I want to tell it. So I don't want to find anything that will mean that I know that s something's inaccurate or or doesn't work. So I'll do

the research that helps me and then stop if something doesn't really fit with what I want to say. But I think another reason I really like writing in in sort of near future worlds is it does it gives you much more freedom to just make stuff up. Yeah. Um because it hasn't happened yet. No one can contradict you and say that that can't happen.

So you so yeah, I like I like doing random research on issues that interest me, but for work I like to just kind of I don't know, like give into a world and make it all up Well listen, it's been brilliant having you on the podcast. Let's just recap then your three scars. Uh the tripods by John Christopher. Uh your second scar was uh Reading the Witches by Roll Dowell.

And then we've just been chatting about severed heads. As you do to wrap up an episode, uh the history book about Henry the Eighth. And and Berlin, et cetera. And um and watch this space for any volcano uh novel you'll keep us uh up to date first, sir. Give us a first uh Info on that, intel on that. Make sure you go and buy Believe It's Out Now. It's absolutely fantastic. Sarah Gavett, thank you so much. Oh, thank you.

Well, that is it. That's it for another series of the Scarred for Life podcast. Thank you for your continued support. Thank you to our brilliant guest today, the awesome Sarah Govert. And all of our guests in this season, all the way back to Al Murray in that time we've spoken to countless different people, probably twenty-one, twenty-two different interviews. Thank you so much to all of our guests for coming on and sharing.

those things that have terrified them since they were a kid. And of course we did a live show in Manchester at the Culplex. Thank you to everyone who came down to that as well. Um more great stuff On the way this year. We're gonna be back in a couple of weeks, we're gonna take a few weeks' break and then when we return, uh we are gonna be bigger and better, we're gonna be doing more live shows, we're gonna be taking Scarred for Life out and about, out on the road.

and try and meet as many of you as possible. So for now, uh, that is it. We'll be back, like I say, in a few weeks with a brand new Shinier. uh series of the Scarred for Life podcast. Uh the producer is Dane Smith. This is the Locket in Production and we will see you very soon. Until then, sleep well. Do have nightmares.