Previously, on Pagan Idol:
two weeks to go
week zero
week one
week two
week three
week four
week five, part one
week five, part two


WGMY 104.1
week six


...though police are yet to recover the weasel involved. But if that’s not enough to make you stay home with a book, Dan has the pick of tonight’s live music.

DAN: That’s right, Stace! Eighties nostalgists will be flocking like seagulls to the Backcombed Catacombs, where long-lost rockers Trylöbyte prepare to recreate classic album Eye of the Gryphon. Eva Destruction, sometime Seductor of the Innocent, kicks off her first solo tour at the spooky disused Metro station under Maitland Street. Word from City Hall is that there’s definitely nothing weird alive down there, and any suggestion otherwise is irresponsible scaremongering. Across the water, highbrow theremin trio the Metebelis Three continue their residency at Club Oooooooooooo. At the Pudding Lounge you can catch Dropping Clangers, the San Francisco handbell troupe putting the camp back into campanology, while at the Fatal Toilet you can catch three kinds of scabies. That’s not a band, just a general warning. And there’s the live music roundup. Stacey!

STACEY: …

DAN: Stacey?

STACEY: Mm? Sorry, zoned out a bit. Early start. This is WGMY, your station for news and comment. It’s eight-seventeen, and time to talk Pagan Idol, the show for which the term “reality TV” proves increasingly inadequate. After a flurry of emails, including two not from himself, we’ve invited back Haqqisaqq, Inuit god of vengeance and public relations.

HAQ: Good morning.

STACEY: It’s been an unsettled few weeks for Pagan Idol. Contestant withdrawals, schedule changes, the back-and-forth between taped show and live broadcast. Must be difficult sometimes to know whether you’re coming or going.

HAQ: Hey, that’s showbiz! Always keeping you on your toes. But that’s also what keeps things fresh. Complacency is its own punishment.

STACEY: If nothing else, at least you’ve had the constant of that bleak, beautiful Arctic backdrop. You’re one of many Inuit deities to rhapsodise about the rage of the winds, the biting sub-zero temperatures, that great lifeless expanse... the haunting isolation...

HAQ: We’re proud to call it home.

STACEY: So how did it feel when Channel Nine transferred the entire production to Parodopolis?

HAQ: It’s an exciting evolution for the show, and one which opens up a great many possibilities.

STACEY: It’s true there was little disappointment in evidence among contestants and crew. We saw almost a carnival atmosphere as they packed up and left for the airfield within minutes of the announcement.

HAQ: That’s a powerful testament to their can-do attitude and impressive organisational skills.

STACEY: So what prompted the switch? Technical reasons? Location filming in such a harsh environment must be difficult. Or budgetary issues? The damage sustained by your Ice Palace in last week’s harpoon mayhem won’t be cheap to fix. Contestant safety? Not that it’s been a big consideration thus far, but I guess the insurance costs...

HAQ: Once again, Stacey, the Official Inuit Pantheon is very proud of its roots in the far north. At the same time, we’re an expanding multi-role operation with interests and responsibilities all over the globe. The contestants will benefit from the chance to demonstrate their skills in a different environment, and that’s what we’ll get by filming a few episodes in Parodopolis.

STACEY: A few episodes?

HAQ: The remaining episodes.

STACEY: To put it another way, Channel Nine executives have wrested the show from your cold sealskin mittens and brought it back home where they can exert more control.

HAQ: Nonsense. The Inuit Pantheon has enjoyed great freedom in using the Pagan Idol platform to communicate our distinctively Arctic qualities; I’m delighted to say that we’ve met all of our targets in that area more quickly than expected. Following on from that success, we agree with Channel Nine that now would be a suitable time to broaden the show’s scope.

STACEY: By ditching all the Inuit stuff.

HAQ: The show retains a strong Inuit flavour, with the same once-in-a-lifetime prize and the same judges.

STACEY: Except for harpoon god Sniiqattaaq, absent without explanation.

HAQ: Was he? I barely noticed. Though I was pleased by the introduction of new judge Vaqquumpaaqq, god of food preservation. But as you suggest, the Inuit-specific tasks may take a back seat for the time being; the next challenges will be more generically pagan, looking for skills common to many pantheons, and presented in an urban context to which viewers can more easily relate.

STACEY: Hence the first challenge in the new inclusive, urban, grounded-in-the-everyday Pagan Idol: seducing a mortal while disguised as a meteorological phenomenon.

HAQ: It’s standard practice in Mediterranean and African pantheons. Zeus tends to visit maidens as a thunderclap or a fall of rain. Elsewhere you have fertility mists and divine winds. It all made for a stern test of our prospective deities’ interpersonal skills.

STACEY: So the eight remaining contestants left deity bootcamp to hit the seedier bars and pick-up joints of downtown Parodopolis. They caused quite a stir in their weather costumes.

HAQ: Yes indeed. I must put in a word here on those remarkable outfits. The Pagan Idol team wish to thank metahuman supplies firm Volkov & Brün for their help in sourcing localised climate manipulators at very short notice.

STACEY: While we’re on the subject: I know it's a late-night show, but didn’t you consider those costumes a little... risqué?

HAQ: In what sense?

STACEY: The leather harnesses. All the gleaming buckles and straining chest-straps.

HAQ: Practical reasons, Stacey. Climate manipulators are much heavier than they look. They do need to be firmly strapped on.

STACEY: Doubtless. But aren’t those harnesses designed to be worn over figure-hugging Spandex undersuits? Or, at the very least, clothes?

HAQ: A minor logistical hitch. The contestants were fitted for Spandex some weeks ago, but that particular freight container doesn't seem to have arrived in Parodopolis, and by the time anyone noticed...

STACEY: As I say, they caused quite a stir. And first out of the traps was Vaughn. As candidate god of atheism, he’s often spent his time in the spotlight trying to debate himself out of a job. This shtick got old about seven minutes into episode one. This week he was grappling with a more tangible problem, namely the recoil from a hailstorm generator that hurled a bruising blast of ice at anyone within speaking range.

HAQ: Weather conditions were drawn from a hat. I think he was glad just to avoid plague of frogs.

STACEY: And on it went. Felix appeared as a shimmering temperature inversion. Guileless hamster enthusiast Alix, as so often, was a little ray of sunshine. We had Ernesto, potential god of Vaseline®, at the centre of a swirling, skin-scouring sandstorm -

HAQ: But didn't his lips look great?

STACEY: What really struck me about this challenge – aside from the man-hours that must have gone into pixellating things out before broadcast – was just how much the weather conditions hindered the contestants’ pick-up technique.

HAQ: It is supposed to be a challenge, after all. And overcoming obstacles is what Pagan Idol is all about.

STACEY: Vaughn, for instance, was thrown out of the Pudding Loft when fist-sized hailstones pulverised the bar. As for Letitia, she was lucky to escape serious injury when her waterspout costume fused the lights in Bar Barium. And it was an uncomfortable few hours for Brandii, who spent the night at police headquarters after cyborg P.I. Yuki Shiro misidentified her as local supervillain Fog of War.

HAQ: I suppose one walking cloud does look much like another. But no harm done.

STACEY: More’s the pity. Still, it was a mercy to be without her self-obsessed caterwauling for most of this episode. Next up was Oscar, never short of confidence, who shimmied onto the scene disguised as a tropical thunderstorm. And what happened from there might have been the most exciting twenty minutes of any season so far.

HAQ: Praise indeed.

STACEY: I say “might have been.” I don’t actually know, because when Oscar delivered the line “hey ladies, who’s for a spot of cumulonimbus” I switched off and went to bed. Maybe you could take us through to the end.

HAQ: Well. Um. The last contestant was Hope, the aspiring goddess of lentils. She adopted the guise of a choking cloud of sulphurous volcanic ash.

STACEY: And the outcome of the challenge? Which of them got lucky?

HAQ: Stacey, they are a great group of contenders. Very well-matched. This one was a real close-run thing. A keenly-fought challenge, right to the end, with no single contestant a clear head and shoulders above the rest.

STACEY: Nobody? Not one of them succeeded in hooking up.

HAQ: As Hope noted, it’s hard to whisper sweet nothings in somebody’s ear when neither party can breathe.

STACEY: Fair enough. So the results of the phone vote?

HAQ: They’re a great group of contenders -

STACEY: No phone vote?

HAQ: It wasn’t necessary. Poor Vaughn had to withdraw after experiencing a malfunction in his hailstorm costume.

STACEY: Gosh. I do hope he wasn’t too badly maimed.

HAQ: A massive powersurge in the refrigeration unit.

STACEY: Uh-huh.

HAQ: It all happened so fast. By the time rescue teams chipped through the metre-thick crust of encasing ice, Vaughn was in the advanced stages of hypothermia.

STACEY: O fate, why dost thou mock us? A month in the High Arctic without so much as a sniffle. Then jet two thousand miles nearer the equator and bam.

HAQ: Not to mention the frostbite -

STACEY: Spare us. Weather me, Dan. Weather me hard.

DAN: The present heatwave looks set to continue, with highs today of...

FADE TO STATIC