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.