The DNA of Doctor Who - The Philip Hinchcliffe Years

I've just received my copy of this handsome new book, to which I contributed an essay on the 1975 Doctor Who story Planet of Evil and what it draws from classic works of science-fiction.

The obvious influence, of course, is the 1956 movie Forbidden Planet, which the BBC broadcast at 6.35 pm on Wednesday 6 November 1974 - just right to inspire the development of the Doctor Who stories that became Planet of Evil and The Brain of Morbius. I dig into that and also how the same film influenced early Doctor Who as well as other sci-fi such as Star Trek (citing the excellent ‘Gene Roddenberry’s Cinematic Influences’ by Michael Kmet from 2013) and Star Wars (see the 2012 Wired interview, ‘Ben Burtt on Star Wars, Forbidden Planet and the Sound of Sci-Fi’ y Geeta Dayal).

Hinchcliffe says on the documentary made for the DVD release of Planet of Evil (by my friend Ed Stradling) that he suggested the ‘flying eye’ drone seen in the story, having read of something similar in a science-fiction story at the time. The Dictionary of Surveillance Terms in Science Fiction at the Technovelgy site helped me suggest some candidates for that story.

I also mention Isaac Asimov’s own timeline-of-the-future for his various short stories and novels, which I drew from ‘A page from Isaac Asimov’s notebook’, Thrilling Wonder Stories, vol. 44 #3 (Winter 1955), p. 63.

Edited by Gary Russell and published by Gareth Kavanagh at Roundel Books, you can buy The DNA of Doctor Who - The Philip Hinchcliffe Years from the Cutaway Comics site.

Garry Halliday episode guide

I've posted the first two entries in what I hope will be an exhaustive guide to Garry Halliday, a BBC serial about the adventures of an airline pilot created by Justin Blake (i.e. John Bowen and Jeremy Bullmore), that ran between 1959 and 1962.

The BBC made 50 episodes, only one of which survives. But Doctor Who was devised to fill the same Saturday teatime slot and I think owes a significant amount to Halliday, which I'll tease out as I go through the history.

As with Doctor Who, there were novelisations of Garry Halliday's TV adventures. I now have copies of all five Garry Halliday books, and have already posted reviews here of the first three of them:

• Garry Halliday and the Disappearing Diamonds (1960)
• Garry Halliday and the Ray of Death (1961)
• Garry Halliday and the Kidnapped Five (1962)

Slow Horses, by Mick Herron

River Cartwright is a nepo baby in MI5, his grandfather a retired top spook. But River cocks up a big operation and, in disgrace, is assigned to Slough House with all the other service failures — the so-called "slow horses". There, he's given such menial jobs as listing the contents of a journalist's rubbish bin... But then a young man is kidnapped by extremists and the slow horses might be his only hope of surviving.

The TV version sticks closely to this thrilling, dour and often funny spy caper so I knew pretty much what was coming. A few things are different just because the book is set around the time of publication in 2010, in the shadow of the then-recent 7/7 bombings in London.

That made me think about the context of the references to real people, such as Russell T Davies being named in a newspaper masthead (p. 28) — presumably in a story about what he was up to immediately post-Doctor Who. On another occasion, we're told that the head of Slough House, Jackson Lamb, resembles and could be played by Timothy Spall (p. 32), which is jarring now Lamb has been brought so soddenly to life by Gary Oldman. 

These references add verisimilitude to the grubby, kitchen-sink reality. But that only makes it all the odder when Herron draws so closely from a real person to describe a fictional cabinet minister:

"Peter Judd. PJ to his friends, and everyone else. Fluffy-hair and youthful at forty-eight, and with a vocabulary peppered with archaic expostulations — Balderdash! Tommy-rot!! Oh my giddy aunt!!! — Peter Judd had long established himself as the unthreatening face of the old-school right, popular enough with the Great British Public, which though him an amiable idiot, to make a second living outside Parliament as a rent-a-quote-media-whore-cum-quiz-show-panel-favourite, and to get away with minor peccadilloes like dicking his kids' nanny, robbing the taxman blind, and giving his party leader conniptions with off-script flourishes. ('Damn fine city,' he'd remarked on a trip to Paris. 'Probably worth defending next time.') Not everyone who'd worked with him thought him a total buffoon, and some who'd witnessed him lose his temper suspected him of political savvy, but by and large PJ seemed happy with the image he'd either fostered or been born with: a loose cannon with a floppy haircut and a bicycle." (p. 187)

This amiable bungler — played by Sam West on TV — turns out to be more right wing and ruthless than he first appears. He's ambitious, too, with his eye on further power. Well, we've been there, done that now.

There are a lot of machinations here, the security service riven with people plotting and counterplotting, betraying their friends to further their own careers or to cover their behinds. Management and "joes" learn to apply one of two protocols to any given situation:

"Moscow rules meant watch your back, London rules meant cover your arse." (pp. 253-254)

Here, London rules are most in play. In fact, save for the kidnapping in Leeds, River visiting his grandfather just outside Tonbridge and a sequence in Epping Forest, this is all set in London. Like le Carre, the focus is on activity here, carried out by our people, rather than external antagonists. There's something of The Sandbaggers about the whole thing, too: a focus on spycraft as office job that makes it suit a TV budget.  

Some small things are different from the TV version, such as details in prose being rendered in dialogue on screen. The TV version includes flashbacks to elucidate Catherine Standish's past but doesn't show us River Cartwright's childhood or some of the other history shared with us in the book. The kidnapped young man is, on TV, held in a house on an anonymous street; in the book it's the more definite Roupell Street near Waterloo, a place I know very well having once worked just round the corner. (And, er, from the Dalek battle there, too.)

But more than anything, knowing the TV version made me conscious of how frequently Herron uses ploys to hold our attention. There are continual cliffhangers, sometimes contrived by telling events out of chronological order, withholding bits of information or suggesting that one thing has happened then — a few pages later — revealing something else. In some cases, these ploys wouldn't work on TV where we can see what's happening, such as when Herron delays telling us the gender or ethnicity of particular characters, then makes that a surprise.

These methods make for a compelling read, though much of the trick here depends on the reader not knowing what will happen next. I wish I'd read this before I saw the TV version and need to hurry up reading the next ones in the series so I can get to later books unspoiled.

The Hobbit, by JJR Tolkien

Last night, I finished reading this to Lady Vader, having read it to the Lord of Chaos about five years ago and having had it read to me by my late dad when I was of a similar age. I've read this book countless times, have seen the films and various versions on stage. This is the first time I've read the coo-posh Folio edition that my dad gave me and the Dr long ago one Christmas, illustrated by Eric Fraser. That was a kingly gift!

A few things strike me this time round. First, the number of times that Bilbo Baggins is referred to as "queer", Tolkien of course meaning strange or eccentric. I don't think I've ever seen a reading of Bilbo as gay but there are various bits of circumstantial evidence here and The Lords of the Rings to support it. That in turn informs a story about close male friendships, through thick and thin.

The older I get, the more fascinated I am by Gandalf, this benign, wise figure trying to sort out a hundred different bits of shit all at once. Having never had much interest in the expanded lore, this time I hung on all the little hints about what Gandalf gets up to after leaving Bilbo and the dwarves at Milkwood, and goes off to deal with a Necromancer. I now know from the film versions of The Hobbit what that's alluding to, which had always passed me by before. If I ever have a spare moment - not likely, mate - I'd like to know more about what Tolkien wrote about that and exactly when, given his revisions to the first edition of The Hobbit to better fit its sequels.

I was conscious, too, this time of the voice of Gandalf, which I so associate with my dad's reading and then, in respectable second place, Ian McKellen. Reading The Hobbit this time, I was also struck by the difficulty of distinguishing voices - the gruff-voiced dwarves, with the especially gruff-voiced Thorin, as distinct from gruff Beorn or gruff Bard or gruff Smaug. But on the whole this is a story that really works read aloud. The only thing, I think, that benefits from seeing the words on the page is all the riddling with Golem. There, for the reader to play along, it helps to pick back over the words as one might scrutinise the clues in a crossword.

But whereas The Lords of the Rings is about a fellowship of disparate characters, all very different and distinct, the main cast of The Hobbit is harder to distinguish. 

The Wine-Dark Sea, by Robert Aickman

First published in 2014, this is a collection of eight longish short stories — each comprising more than 50 pages. It’s the first Aickman I’ve read, after lots of recommendations. And days after finishing this collection, I’m still trying to make sense of what I might think of it all.

In titular story “The Wine-Dark Sea”, an Englishman called Grigg is on holiday in Greece, where he becomes intrigued by a small island that the locals say is off limits. Grigg steals a boat to see the place for himself, and there falls under the spell of three women, a modern take on sirens.

I’d been expecting something in the vein of MR James, and there’s a similar slowly dawning disquiet. But Aickman’s protagonists are ordinary, relatable people rather than James’ bookish academics. There’s also a strong sexual element, very unlike James. In “The Wine-Dark Sea”, Grigg has sex with these sirens; in other stories here, the sexuality is less certain — we’re not always sure if characters are being predatory, or if actions speak of deep-felt desire. But part of the effect is that we’re put on our guard.

That’s a big element of “The Trains”, in which two young woman, Margaret and Mimi, are out rambling and get caught in a storm. They seek shelter in a strange old house overlooking a railway line, and find it a museum to the construction of that same railway. Mimi is enchanted by the owner of the house, Wendley Roper, but Margaret is more sceptical. And yet Mimi is scandalised and Margaret more matter of fact when Roper’s “tall, muscular” servant, a gothic figure called Beech, walks in them while they’re getting changed and Margaret is “absurdly naked”. Was it an accident? As the story progresses, there’s an every growing sense of threat.

In “Your Tiny Hand is Frozen”, lonely Edmund St Jude (landline) phone keeps ringing. Initially, he hears, odd ghostly voices or gets people trying to reach a particular business. And then he strikes up a friendship with a woman who seems keen to reach him in person… This reminded me a lot of Nigel Kneale’s 1952 radio play “You Must Listen”, which I saw a live performance of last year. Both are supernatural stories about technology that was then cutting edge and which people all had in their homes; an encroachment of the strange into the very familiar and everyday.

The best of the bunch here, I think, is “Growing Boys”, about a mild-mannered middle-class woman, Millie, whose sons are fast becoming something monstrous, though their school won’t spell out exactly why they’re being expelled. It’s a comedy of manners and yet brilliantly disturbing.

At one point, Millie tries (again) to talk to her husband Phineas, but he’s too caught up in his own aspirations to stand as a Liberal. Besides, he’s also teetotal.

“If only one could give him a proper drink before one attempted to talk seriously with him; that is, to talk about oneself.

‘It’s the boys, Phineas. You don’t know what it’s like being at home with them all day.’

‘The holidays won’t last for ever.’

‘After only a week, I’m almost insane.’ She tried to rivet his attention. ‘I mean it, Phineas.’

Millie knew extremely well that she herself would be far more eloquent and convincing if Phineas’s absence had not years ago deprived her too, though with never the hint of an express prohibition, but rather the contrary. When she was reading, she had learned of the Saxons never taking action unless the matter had been considered by the council, first when sober and then when drunk. It was the approach that was needed now.

‘What’s the matter with the boys this time?’ asked Phineas.

Millie twitched. ‘They’re far too tall and big. How long is it since you looked at them, Phineas?’

‘Being tall’s hardly their fault. I’m tall myself and I’m their father.’

‘You’re tall in a different way. You’re willowy. They’re like two great red bulls in the house.’

‘I’m afraid we have to look at your family for that aspect of it. Consider your Uncle Nero, if I may venture to mention him.’” (pp. 153-154) 

We get here Millie’s despair, hints of the monstrosity of her sons which we then conjure for ourselves, and the way Phineas undermines her — and puts the blame on her, too. Later, when Millie moves in with her Uncle Stephen, he carries her to bed and then, later, welcomes her into his own bed where he can “look after” and “protect” her (p. 192). The sense is of something more brooding and sexual going on, another monstrous something in the family. What’s more, when Millie consults a psychic, she spots other women she knows seeking their own advice — as if the whole community is beset with unsettling strangeness.

In “The Fetch” a man is haunted by a ghostly spectre who carries off his loved ones. Again, the story is as much about the man’s strange marriage to a friend’s ex-wife, and her relationship with her maid, with hints of something sapphic. 

“The Inner Room” is about a doll’s house that turns out to have a peculiar real-life counterpart. “Never Visit Venice” sees a traveller give himself up to the spectres of the city. And then there’s “Into the Wood”, about an English woman whose husband is employed to work on road construction in Sweden. While he is busy in this boring line of work, she checks herself into a beguiling hotel, which turns out to be a sanatorium for people who cannot sleep. At first, she seems unaffected… But the title is not about what happens to Margaret Sawyer, but what she will have to do next, beyond the end of the story as told. 

Some stories here end decisively, revealing exactly what’s been going on. Others end more opaquely, leaving us to puzzle out their prospective meanings. They’re all very odd, the main thread of plot peppered with other strangeness in passing. And yet they’re also grounded in real details. Aickman is clearly well-read, the stories full of specific detail.

“[‘Orm’ meaning ‘serpent’] was one of the few Swedish words Margaret felt more or less able to manage. The high tessitura in which the language is spoken, the combination of breath and altitude in the vowel sounds, were quite beyond her.” (pp. 375-376)

Or there’s Margaret Sawyers ’s reference to her own Manchester home in the “Cheshire subtopia” (p. 378). That last word is the coinage of Ian Nairn, railing against the nightmare of post-war British architecture, where all urban space looked the same so you could might never know where you were. I think that’s what makes these stories so effective. Aickman isn’t so much adding new strangeness into the recognisable, everyday world; he’s teasing out and showing us what’s already there. 

See also: me on Dark Tales by Shirley Jackson

David Whitaker postscript / Terry Nation party

You can now download for free the four-page postscript to my biography of David Whitaker, detailing some of the things I've learned since the book was published last November.

The postscript is included in The Who Shop's exclusive paperback editions of the book, and will be added to future versions of the standard paperback at some point.

To accompany the release of the postscript yesterday, I posted a thread to both X (formerly Twitter) and BluSky, and here it is in full:

Terry Nation and pals at Lynsted Park, source

Writer and Dalek creator Terry Nation was born on 8 August 1930. OTD in 1964, he hosted a big birthday party at his newly acquired home, Lynsted Park — an Elizabethan mansion in Kent.

You can watch footage of Nation interviewed at home by Alan Whicker in 1967 on the BBC website. But my interest is in that party.

This party haunts my imagination, symbolic of Nation becoming a big showbiz success story after years of toil in light entertainment.

But, like most of these things, the more I’ve looked into it, the richer and stranger the story gets.

I wonder about the logistics. Did Nation provide everyone’s drinks? Was good laid on as well? Given Lynsted Park was quite remote, was there a lot of drink-driving back to London?

But also, who was at this party? While in the Doctor Who production office, Nation sent an invite to actress Carole Ann Ford. (The office kept a copy: Nation to Ford, 31 July 1963, WAC T5/648/2 General)

Nation was at the time hard at work writing The Dalek Invasion of Earth, the serial that would see Ford leave Doctor Who after a year playing the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan.

On the DVD / Blu-ray commentary for The End of Tomorrow (the fourth episode of The Dalek Invasion of Earth), Ford and her colleagues recall Nation’s lavish birthday bash.

In fact, Ford remembered that Nation’s grand new house was in a bit of a state. In particular, she recalled that the swimming pool couldn’t be used; it was full of rubbish. 

Co-star William Russell said Nation told him that he hadn’t bought the house because he was suddenly rich from inventing the Daleks (whose debut story had concluded earlier that year).

Instead, Nation said he’d taken out an ‘enormous mortgage’ as a spur to keep busy writing. It was a means to success, rather than a marker of success having been accomplished.

Who else was at the party? Given that Ford and Russell were there, Nation probably invited Doctor Who’s other stars — William Hartnell and Jacqueline Hill.

Hill’s husband Alvin Rakoff told me he remembered going to Lynsted Park but wasn’t sure if it was for this particular party.

Producer Verity Lambert also remembered being at the party, according to the DVD/Blu-ray commentary. 

Nation’s invitation to Ford said story editor David Whitaker could help her find the house, implying Whitaker was there, too.

At the time, Whitaker was working with Nation on the new Dalek TV story. They were also co-writing The Dalek Book for publication in September. (And Whitaker was novelising the first Dalek TV story.)

Given all these Doctor Who luminaries at the party, they surely tuned in to watch that evening’s episode — the first instalment of The Reign of Terror by Dennis Spooner.

(To this, my esteemed publisher Stuart Manning added: "Hazel Peiser, the partner of would-be Doctor Who Meets Scratchman director James Hill, recalls attending a party at Nation's mansion where the guests watched Doctor Who go out on TV. James was working on The Saint around that time, so it probably checks out.")

Spooner shared an agent with Nation, who’d recommended him to Whitaker. Two days before the party, it was confirmed that Spooner would join the BBC staff to shadow then succeed Whitaker.

The chances are that Spooner was at the party, too. In his biography of Nation, Alwyn Turner says Roger Moore also attended *one of* Nation’s parties at Lynsted Park, wearing a blue jumpsuit.

I like to imagine them all there together: the current Doctor Who, the future James Bond plus Jackie Hill — who was responsible for Sean Connery’s first big break. For more on the latter, see my post on I’m Just the Guy Who Says Action, by Alvin Rakoff. 

At the time of the party, Moore was the star of The Saint, for which Nation wrote (for higher fees than Doctor Who). A week after the party, Whitaker met Saint script supervisor Harry Junkin. 

A week later, Whitaker met with Leslie Charteris, creator of The Saint, to discuss a potential musical. Nothing came of these meetings but they were surely instigated by or through Nation. 

(Whitaker refers to both meetings in letter to his new agent, Beryl Vertue, at Associated London Scripts, on 14 August 1964, a copy held in Doctor Who production file WAC T5/648/2 General)

In throwing the party and in putting Whitaker and Spooner up for potential jobs, Nation was sharing his largesse. He could afford to be generous — couldn’t he?

As I imagine that party, I wonder what was going through Nation’s mind and how much he felt able to enjoy it himself. He’d certainly had a good few months since the debut of the Daleks.

‘The Daleks have transformed Mr Nation’s life,’ reported Andrew Duncan in Women’s Mirror just over a year later on 30 October 1965, ‘and he could eventually make £1 million from them.’ (NB, he hadn’t yet.)

Then Duncan quoted Nation’s own insecurities about this success. ‘I’ve got this enormous fear that one day a man is going to come and take back all the money.’

DWM - The Missing Doctor Who

Out today, a new special edition of the official Doctor Who Magazine looks in detail at what's lost - from fans' most wanted missing episodes to the written but never made Tenth Doctor story by Mark Gatiss set in the British Museum.

I've also written or co-written three pieces:

Cut to the Chase, pp. 20-23

To accompany CG recreations by Gav Rymil, me and Rhys Williams detail the Dalek Pursuit Ship, mentioned in episodes 3-5 of The Daleks's Master Plan and then seen in episode 6, "Coronas of the Sun". 

The Hole Story, pp. 32-35

There are 97 missing episodes of Doctor Who and, to date, 786 episodes existing in the BBC archives. But there are still bits missing from the latter - stuff broadcast but since lost, and stuff recorded but never shown...

The Final Countdown, pp. 44-49

Gav, Rhys and me again, this time on the sets for the last of the missing episodes, The Space Pirates Episode 6.

We've previously recreated sets from a bunch of missing episodes, so here's the list so far:

1. Galaxy 4 episode 2: Trap of Steel - DWM #583
2. The Daleks' Master Plan episode 4: The Traitors - DWM #586
3. The Daleks' Master Plan episode 6: Coronas of the Sun - DWM SE Missing Doctor Who
4. The Daleks' Master Plan episode 7: The Feast of Steven - DWM #559
5. The Tenth Planet Episode 4 - DWM #565
6. The Power of the Daleks Episode 1 - DWM #584
7. The Moonbase Episode 3 - DWM #562
8. The Macra Terror Episode 1 - DWM #569
9. The Evil of the Daleks Episode 1 - DWM SE Production Design
10. The Abominable Snowmen Episode 1 - DWM #581
11. The Wheel in Space Episode 1 - DWM #575
12. The Space Pirates Episode 6 - DWM SE Missing Doctor Who

What's more, here's Andrew Orton's recreation of the sets from Marco Polo episode 1: The Roof of the World:

See also: 

• Me on Doctor Who missing episodes - so what?
• Buy my book on the largely missing story The Evil of the Daleks