The Demon Headmaster
The title character is a strange being with the powers of hypnosis and a desire to take over the world, as he believes it will be better under his ordered rule.
He has piercing light green eyes, which he normally hides behind dark-tinted glasses —- removing these in order to hypnotise his victims.
With the help of her new friends, SPLAT, (Society for the Protection of our Lives Against Them, the children at the school who are immune to the Demon Headmaster's hypnotic powers), she successfully stops the Headmaster's plot to hypnotise the country through the Eddy Hair Television Show and she gets adopted by the Hunters.
The other SPLAT members disagree until Ingrid shows them her Hunky video, which Dinah eventually realises is due to subliminal messages in the tape.
[4] Dinah's father is headhunted for a new job at the Biogenetic Research Centre, unaware that the Demon Headmaster is the director.
[3] When the army starts dismantling the research centre, Dinah contacts Professor Claudia Rowe, an expert on botanical sciences who has expressed an interest in the creeper.
People start talking like robots, even Claudia Rowe, and more and more of the population seem to be wearing strange badges.
Dinah's search leads her to the university where she finds the mysterious Director developing "Hyperbrain", a computer with superhuman intelligence and deadly potential.
However Lizzie suddenly starts to behave aggressive against the school, her brother becomes a robotics genius and their recent made friend Ethan becomes a soccer star.
They team up with Angelika (a girl who suddenly became a coffee business enthusiast) and even Blake (who became a Multilingual greeter) and discovers the great plot of The Headmaster to show to the Prime Minister the great results of the school, thus allowing The Headmaster to administer other schools.
The first story, called 'Crash Landing', is set at some point after The Prime Minister's Brain, and is about the Demon Headmaster crashing his getaway helicopter in a small village, although he is identified only as 'the Visitor'.
The second story, called Carnival!, does not explicitly identify one of its characters as the Demon Headmaster, but from the illustrations and description are meant to make it obvious that it is him.
She arrives in the story at the Hunters' house as a foster child, having been orphaned at an early age and brought up in a children's home.
Her intelligence causes the Headmaster to take an interest in her, and makes her pivotal in his plans to win a national school quiz competition for nefarious ends, as well as other subsequent plots, made easier by the fact that she is the only member of SPLAT not immune to his hypnosis.
A standing joke within the stories is Lloyd's tendency to make loud alliterative exclamations when annoyed or surprised, typically involving strange-coloured foodstuffs - e.g. 'Black bananas!'
Harvey accepts Dinah into the family and SPLAT a lot quicker than Lloyd and the others do, and soon is as close to his new sister as he is his brother.
The fact that she is the youngest does mean that she is generally ignored if she makes a suggestion The Headmaster is the main antagonist of the series.
He can turn almost anyone into a hypnotic state by having them look into his eyes, except for a few who seem to be naturally immune, among them Ingrid, Mandy, Harvey, Lloyd and Ian.
In the course of the novels he has either established or infiltrated such diverse organisations as a school, a computer lab, a television studio, a genetics research facility, a university, and even a night club, with the goal of using his contacts in these businesses to enforce his will on the world.
It aired from Monday 14 October with the pilot episode, everystudentastar, adapted and showrun by Emma Reeves.
Terrence Hardiman returned as the original Demon Headmaster in the first season's final episode, where he forced his 'successor' (Nicholas Gleaves) to stand down when their plans were thwarted — albeit only appearing as a hologram of himself rather than in person.
Reeves has pitched a second series to CBBC, using further elements of Total Control, as well as its sequel, Mortal Danger.
