‘Please don’t be sick,’ said Mr Wonka.
‘Try and stop me!’ said Mrs Teavee.
‘Then you’d better take this,’ said Mr Wonka, and he swept his magnificent black top hat off his head, and held it out, upside down, in front of Mrs Teavee’s mouth.
‘Make this awful thing stop!’ ordered Mr Teavee.
‘Can’t do that,’ said Mr Wonka. ‘It won’t stop till we get there. I only hope no one’s using the other lift at this moment.’
‘What other lift?’ screamed Mrs Teavee.
‘The one that goes the opposite way on the same track as this one,’ said Mr Wonka.
‘Holy mackerel!’ cried Mr Teavee. ‘You mean we might have a collision?’
‘I’ve always been lucky so far,’ said Mr Wonka.
‘Now I am going to be sick!’ yelled Mrs Teavee.
‘No, no!’ said Mr Wonka. ‘Not now! We’re nearly there! Don’t spoil my hat!’
The next moment, there was a screaming of brakes, and the lift began to slow down. Then it stopped altogether.
‘Some ride!’ said Mr Teavee, wiping his great sweaty face with a handkerchief.
‘Never again!’ gasped Mrs Teavee. And then the doors of the lift slid open and Mr Wonka said, ‘Just a minute now! Listen to me! I want everybody to be very careful in this room. There is dangerous stuff around in here and you must not tamper with it.’
26
The Television-Chocolate Room
The Teavee family, together with Charlie and Grandpa Joe, stepped out of the lift into a room so dazzlingly bright and dazzlingly white that they screwed up their eyes in pain and stopped walking. Mr Wonka handed each of them a pair of dark glasses and said, ‘Put these on quick! And don’t take them off in here whatever you do! This light could blind you!’
As soon as Charlie had his dark glasses on, he was able to look around him in comfort. He saw a long narrow room. The room was painted white all over. Even the floor was white, and there wasn’t a speck of dust anywhere. From the ceiling, huge lamps hung down and bathed the room in a brilliant blue-white light. The room was completely bare except at the far ends. At one of these ends there was an enormous camera on wheels, and a whole army of Oompa-Loompas was clustering around it, oiling its joints and adjusting its knobs and polishing its great glass lens. The Oompa-Loompas were all dressed in the most extraordinary way. They were wearing bright-red space suits, complete with helmets and goggles — at least they looked like space suits — and they were working in complete silence. Watching them, Charlie experienced a queer sense of danger. There was something dangerous about this whole business, and the Oompa-Loompas knew it. There was no chattering or singing among them here, and they moved about over the huge black camera slowly and carefully in their scarlet space suits.
At the other end of the room, about fifty paces away from the camera, a single Oompa-Loompa (also wearing a space suit) was sitting at a black table gazing at the screen of a very large television set.
‘Here we go!’ cried Mr Wonka, hopping up and down with excitement. ‘This is the Testing Room for my very latest and greatest invention — Television Chocolate!’
‘But what is Television Chocolate?’ asked Mike Teavee.
‘Good heavens, child, stop interrupting me!’ said Mr Wonka. ‘It works by television. I don’t like television myself. I suppose it’s all right in small doses, but children never seem to be able to take it in small doses. They want to sit there all day long staring and staring at the screen . . .’
‘That’s me!’ said Mike Teavee.
‘Shut up!’ said Mr Teavee.
‘Thank you,’ said Mr Wonka. ‘I shall now tell you how this amazing television set of mine works. But first of all, do you know how ordinary television works? It is very simple. At one end, where the picture is being taken, you have a large ciné camera and you start photographing something. The photographs are then split up into millions of tiny little pieces which are so small that you can’t see them, and these little pieces are shot out into the sky by electricity. In the sky, they go whizzing around all over the place until suddenly they hit the antenna on the roof of somebody’s house. They then go flashing down the wire that leads right into the back of the television set, and in there they get jiggled and joggled around until at last every single one of those millions of tiny pieces is fitted back into its right place (just like a jigsaw puzzle), and presto! — the photograph appears on the screen . . .’