The Story of the Solar System, by Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock

Out today, The Story of the Solar System - A Visual Journey, is a sumptuous big book of space infographics written by Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock off of The Sky at Night with some help by me and design/illustration by Emma Price. Exactly what you and everyone you know wants for Christmas, if you even dare wait that long.

(Emma and I have another book out next week, too...)

In case of interest, Solar System is the latest of the infographics books I've worked on, following Whographica (2016) written with Steve O'Brien and illustrated by Ben Morris, and Slayer Stats (2018) also written with Steve O'Brien and illustrated by Ilaria Vescovo. I also wrote the regular "Sufficient Data" infographics for Doctor Who Magazine, illustrated by Ben Morris and Roger Langridge.

I've written before about some of what' involved in producing an infographic. They are fiddly. And, if you're writing about space stuff, no sooner have you finished a complicated graphic showing all the moons of Saturns than those bothersome space scientists go and discover a whole load more.

Garry Halliday and the Flying Foxes, by Justin Blake

This is the last of the five Garry Halliday novelisations, published in 1965. That was three years after the last new episode of the TV series Garry Halliday was broadcast and two years after the last repeat. 

The odd thing is that it marks a new beginning, the first adventure not to feature the villainous Voice and the first to feature potential new love interest Vicky Fox. It ends on a bit of a cliffhanger about Garry and Vicky's relationship... 

Whatever the authors might have had in mind, it would have been very different on TV. Here, Vicky is left mourning her brother Nigel who, in giving his life, makes amends for some bad choices. On TV, Nigel survived and was part of the Garry Halliday series for all subsequent adventures.

I was particularly interested to read this novelisation because the TV version is credited to writer David Whitaker - about whom there is quite a good book. There’s no mention of David in the novelisation. He's not there in the indicia, where it is (c) 1965 Justin Blake - the pseudonym of John Bowen and Jeremy Bullmore, creators of Garry Halliday. I’ll dig into why not when I write up the production notes for the episode guide entry on this adventure.

After the events of the previous adventure and the death of the Voice, Garry and his co-pilot Bill Dodds return from Tripoli to their office/home on an airfield in Kent. There they discover that, in their absence, a rival charter airline has taken most of their business, undercutting their prices by 25%. Garry doesn’t exactly run his airline to get rich so the Flying Foxes company must be running at a loss to put him out of business. That means they’ve got money behind them. When Garry looks into it, and watches a flight coming into land (as seen on the cover of the book), he spots something suspicious. Soon, the trail leads him to Rome where a drug developed to prolong life has the opposite effect…

As before, it's a lively, fast-moving, twisty plot involving adventures overseas and some fun, funny set pieces. Sadly, new villain da Rica - aka "the spider" - isn't a patch on the Voice. He's an American hoodlum who takes copious amounts of the BDM drug that he's also involved in smuggling, but there's little sense of a personality. The Voice was so distinctive, he was a selling point for the series; da Rica is a bit generic.

It's odd, too, that the elements set in Rome come so late rather than being part of the sell of the new story from the start. Instead, the opening instalments are set in Kent, around the airfield where Garry Halliday is based and in a nearby lake. It's not especially exciting. When a villain then breaks into Garry's office/home, I was reminded of a similar sequence in the second story - the series repeating itself.

Even so, there's plenty of fun stuff here. One chapter opens by telling us that Bill Dodds "shows enormous intelligence and perspicuity" (p. 25) in what is to follow, underlining his active role in proceedings, and not merely as comic foil. When the plot involves convincing the public that Garry has been killed, Bill gamely heads up to BBC TV Centre and then takes part in a live interview for Tonight in the studios at Lime Grove, with a cameo by real-life presenter Cliff Michelmore. That's not mentioned in the scant surviving paperwork relating to the series - I wonder if it happened on screen?

The supposed death of Garry Halliday causes some problems for the plot. The "death" is contrived to fool da Rica, who duly reads obituaries in the press. But the plot also involves da Rica and his henchperson Luigi not knowing what Garry looks like and so mistaking him for someone else. Presumably at least one obituary ran a photograph.

Similarly, the plot involves smuggled quantities of the age-defying drug, BDM. Before scientific analysis identifies what this is, Garry tries some of it to test that it's not cocaine or heroin - which I don't think is best practice for airline pilots. Other characters also try the drugs. They continue to do so even after it becomes apparent that one batch of the drug is in fact deadly.

The novelisation is surely based on the original storyline and scripts that Bowen and Bullmore delivered before they were reworked by in-house writer David Whitaker, in liaison with uncredited script editor Richard Wade and producer Richard West. It's difficult to know how different the TV version was - though, as I'll detail when I get to the production notes on the episode guide - Bowen and Bullmore clearly felt it departed a great deal from what they'd intended.

But one practical change is evident. In the novelisation, drugs are tested on 20 batches of rabbits, labelled A to J. The chapter "The Secret of Batch J" reveals that one of these batches is deadly. On TV, the same instalment was "The Secret of Batch 3", suggesting a reduced scale, perhaps no more than three hutches, manageable on set.

I wonder, too, how much a moment in which Sonya Delamere - Bill Dodd's fiancee, a returning character who has so little to do in this serial - watches the new girl reflected feelings of the cast.

"The little pang of jealousy Sonya felt was because Vicky was going off to do the kind of thing she used to do herself. But Sonya knew well enough why Vicky had to do it, and being a sensible girl, she stifled her pang, and kept it to herself." (p. 76)

It's an engaging, exciting story but what tantalises me most is how accurate a record it is of the TV version and of what the cast and crew may have felt.

ETA: There's now a full entry on the TV version of this story at the Garry Halliday episode guide.

The Masquerades of Spring, by Ben Aaronovitch

This is great fun - a Rivers of London novella set in New York in the Jazz Age, narrated by the woosterish Augustus Berrycloth-Young. Gussie has fled London and the stern wizards of the Folly because he's been using magic for daft pranks. Then Thomas Nightingale turns up on his doorstep, seeking help to track down a magic saxophone...

It's a fast-moving, quick-witted caper, full of pithy one-liners but grounded in the real history of the jazz and drag scene, prohibition, racism and homophobia. That makes it sort of Dashiell Hammett as written by PG Wodehouse, with some magic mixed in - and not nearly as easy to pull off as Ben makes it look. 

Of course, he has form here. That use of a specific time and place to add some heft to the adventure is the same trick as in Ben's Remembrance of the Daleks (which I adore). Just as that story hinted at hitherto unknown secrets in the Doctor's past, this novella provides some tantalising clues about the early life of Thomas Nightingale.

There's another link to Ben's TV Doctor Who in that Peter Walmsly is, here on p. 29, a reverend who led prayers at Casterbrook school of wizardry, decades before his stint as an archaeologist for the Carbury Trust.

I found it compelling and read it in a day. It closes with the prospect of many more such adventures for some of the principal figures here. Yes, please.

Rivers of London novels I've also blogged about:

• Lies Sleeping
• False Value
• Amongst Our Weapons

Rivers of London novellas:

• What Abigail Did That Summer
• The October Man

Doctor Who and the Left-Handed Hummingbird, by Kate Orman

Someone is meddling with time. That means that when an Aztec warrior ventures into a long abandoned Exxilon spaceship, he isn't instantly killed by the radiation bleeding from its systems. Instead, Huitzilin - his name meaning "southern warrior" and also "left-handed hummingbird" - becomes something like a god. Some 500 years later, the Doctor and his friends arrive in Mexico City in 1994 to find they're late for an adventure and must head back to multiple points in time to catch up...

I've not read The Left-Handed Hummingbird since it was first published in November 1993 - the official publication date was December, but there's a moment in this that I suddenly, madly remembered first reading the night before my driving test so it must have been out the month before. Yet this odd, extraordinary book scored its way into my brain. Reading it again after more than 30 years, it was immediately, vividly familiar, like catching up with an old friend.

Two things surprised me. First, for what I remember as Kate Orman's radical debut, the plot is quite straightforward, even slight. The Doctor and his pals Ace and Bernice are on the trail of "the Blue", ie Huitzilin, which has the power to take people over and make them violent. That includes the Doctor and his friends - all providing Huitzilin with fuel so that he can become corporeal once more. But the more the Doctor is taken over, the more he can see what Huitzilin thinks and feels. And the more Huitzilin becomes corporeal, the more he can be tackled head on...

What makes this so different is the way that it's told, beginning in 1994 - the future, when the book was published - and then dancing back to multiple points in time to piece together the story. Telling a story out of order was a big innovation, perhaps oddly for a long-running series about gadding back and forth in time. And then the novel makes us realise that the pieces don't quite fit because time is in flux and changing. I'm conscious now, as I wasn't at the time, how big an influence this was on my debut novel.

The way it's told includes things we'd never do today. The violence is horrific and vivid, rather than PG or 12A. The Doctor takes magic mushrooms and LSD to communicate with his enemy. One of his companions is a gun-totting solder who kills people with little qualm and reneges on her agreement with the Doctor not to use violence; the other companion kills a man by bashing him with a cooking implement. This book is all set on Earth and yet reading it is a journey to another world.

Secondly, the book is chock-full of references to other Doctor Who, on TV and in print. That's not a criticism - these were books squarely aimed at fans, and I ate up this continuity with greed at the time but was grateful to the entry on this novel in the Cloister Library when trying to remember other books I've not read in more than 30 years. For the most part, you don't need to be able to place these references to enjoy or be caught up in the story. But then there are the exceptions. 

I think the assumed/required knowledge of the reader is 1964 story The Aztecs, which was  readily available to fans at the time of publication having been released on BBC Video on 2 November 1992, and 1974 story Death to the Daleks, released on video July 1987. These  TV stories also inspired two of the best novelisations, too. This kind of thing occupies my head a lot in what I write day to day - how much we can assume fixed points of Doctor Who, the nodes by which we all navigate, as opposed to the obscure stuff that is manna for the dork hardcore (my people). See, for example, what I said about authority as it relates to The Unfolding Text.

But also, amazingly, there are several references to other Doctor Who stories here that the Cloister Library doesn't cover. Perhaps fittingly for a story that plays with chronology and the unfixedness of time, there are the references in this novel to multiple Doctor Who stories from after it was published. When the Doctor is gravely wounded, his friends are asked why they don't rush him to hospital.

"'Because he's from outer crukking space,' spat Bernice. 'A crukking twentieth-century hospital would probably do a crukking brilliant job of killing him.'" (p. 177)

Which, of course, is exactly what happens to kill off this incarnation of the Doctor in the TV movie Doctor Who (1996). Later in the novel, Ace pulls out her gun only to find that the Doctor has swapped it for a potato, years ahead of him pulling the same trick (with a banana) on Captain Jack in The Doctor Dances (2005). Then the TARDIS lands on Abbey Road (p. 201), as it does in The Devil's Chord (2024).

A few other small things occur. Bernice Summerfield, a 26th-century archaeologist of the 20th century, doesn't know what pizza is (p. 71) or how to open tins (p. 73), and doesn't have much to do. When she reveals, at the end, that she doesn't get to do much archaeology while travelling in time and is thinking of leaving the TARDIS, I could well understand why. I doubt I was conscious of all this when I first read the novel; now I'm all too aware of the note from my editors to ensure the regular characters are always well served.

Something very of its time is the frequency with which the author refers to the Doctor as "the Time Lord". Yes, she also refers to Bernice as "the archaeologist" (p. 238) and Cristian as "the Mexican" (p. 259), but there are far more second mentions of the Doctor as Time Lord, which I don't think a Doctor Who novelist would do now. If nothing else, this incarnation of the Doctor, in the crumpled linen suit of the novels, is one of the least assuming Doctors visually, a man we'd fail to notice in a crowd who is yet a near god-like alien in our midst. Referring to him, a lot, as "the Time Lord" is a convention, a fashion, of the time when this novel was written but I think it'a also the wrong cue for what we "see" - as if this unassuming fellow were wearing a big robe and collar.

And then there's the other strong visual elicited by this reread: of me, aged 17, utterly absorbed by this book, this series, this gang of authors I so much wanted to be part of. There's a bit towards the end of the novel where the Doctor handles a powerful book that glows with light. It's been fun to return to this book that shone so brightly in my formative years and has stayed with me so long after. Thank you, Kate.

See also:

• My own, awful first idea for a Doctor Who novel which I submitted in 1994
• Me on the 1992 Doctor Who novel Nightshade by Mark Gatiss

The Voice of the Dolphins, by Leo Szilard

Prompted by Richard Flanagan's Question 7, I sought out this "science-fiction" anthology by the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard (1898-1964). He's an extraordinary figure, the man who conceived and patented the idea of the nuclear chain reaction, inspired by The World Set Free by HG Wells (in which Wells coined the term "atomic bomb"). In 2015, I made a documentary about this, HG and the H-Bomb, where we spoke to Liza Jardine about her memories of "Leo", a good friend of her father's. But I didn't know that Szilard himself wrote sci-fi.

It's a short, quirky collection, comprising the following:

pp. 7-12 "Nightmare for Future Reference" (1938) by American poet Stephen Vincent Benét (1898-1943), from the Selected Works of Stephen Vincent Benét

• Some time in the future, the unknown narrator addresses an 18 year-old who was one of the last to be born before, during the Third World War, the birth rate collapsed. 

pp. 13-68 "The Voice of the Dolphins" (1960)

• Written sometime after 1998 (p. 35), an account of the years 1960-85 and the way intelligent dolphins helped end the nuclear stalemate (for more on which, see below).

pp. 69-79 "My Trial as a War Criminal" (1947), reprinted from The University of Chicago Law Review, vol. 17, no. 1, Autumn 1949.

• During the Third World War, a virus kills American children and the country surrenders to Russia, whereupon Szilard, Henry L Stimson, President Truman and James F Byrnes are put on trial for their roles in the Manhattan Project.

pp. 81-94 "The Mark Gable Foundation" (1948)

• In 1960, the narrator is put in suspended animation and woken in 2050, where no one has teeth and women choose to impregnate themselves with the seed of a small number of celebrities. The narrator is now such a celebrity.

pp. 95-100 "Calling All Stars" (1949)

• A radio message from the planet Cybernetica warns of odd readings detected in the atmosphere of the planet Earth, from which the cybernetic people deduce biological inhabitants, evolution and nuclear war - and warn others to be wary.

pp. 101-107 "Report of 'Grand Central Terminal'" (1948), reprinted from The University of Chicago Magazine, June 1952.

• A report by aliens on their exploration of the extinct planet Earth, and their deductions about the life forms that once lived here based on aspects of Grand Central Station, such as the coin-operated toilets.

pp. 108-111 "Kathy and the Bear" (no date)

• The author relates two meals with four year-old Kathy and her mother at a hotel, and the child's conversations with a bear skin hanging there.

pp. 112-126 "The Mined Cities" (no date), reprinted from Bulletin of the American Scientists, December 1961 - vol. XVII, No. 10.

• A conversation between "A" and "B" in 1980, looking back on a convoluted system to avoid nuclear annihilation by having Americans mine a Russia city and be ready to blow it up (and themselves), and vice versa.

The title story seems to have been prompted by real-life John C Lilly claiming, in the year the story was written, that "dolphins might have a language of their own" (p. 15). We learn from Szilard that one of the few recommendations of the President's Science Advisory Committee to bear fruit is "a major joint Russian-American research project having no relevance to the national defense, or to any politically controversial issues" (p. 14). Instead, the Biological Research Institute in Vienna, established in 1963, focused on dolphin intelligence.

The institute quickly established that dolphins are highly intelligent. We learn, from a book published in 1998, that,

"the dolphins, who grasped mathematics, chemistry, physics and biology with ease, found it difficult to comprehend America's social and political system" (p. 35)

With the dolphins' help, the Vienna Institute develops a cheap food that has the side-effect of lowering birth rates and so solves the problem of over-population. From the licence paid on this best-selling food stuff, the institute has the financial backing to reshape the world. We follow the various, complex schemes and politics. Then, with the nuclear threat averted, questions are raised as to whether the dolphins really were intelligent - implying that the American and Russian scientists between them have duped and saved us all.

Within this fun wheeze, Szilard tells a sprawling future history, predicting the revolution in Iran if not the exact date, and poking fun at various subjects, often with the eye of an outsider. With its new-earned wealth,

"The first major investment made by the Vienna Institute was the purchase of television stations in a number of cities all over the world. Thereafter, the television programs of these stations carried no advertising. Since they no longer had to aim their programs at the largest possible audience, there was no longer any need for them to cater to the taste of morons." (p. 18)

I wonder if he had advert-free BBC Television in mind as the saviour of humanity. There are jibes on the way the two-party system in America favours minority rule since a few per cent of voters with some strongly held view on a particular issue can determine which of two candidates wins (p. 33). On the same page, he cites "Szilard's diary, recently published by Simon and Schuster" - that is, some 40 years after this was written - to show he was right all along about allowing China to join the United Nations.

There's something similar when an extended footnote details the way in which an article by Szilard in the February 1960 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was initially misunderstood.

"After his death, Szilard appears to have received some recognition, however, from his Russian colleagues, who names a small crater after him - on the back side of the moon." (p. 28)

Even the way he refers to the far side is a joke. In fact, there is a Szilard crater, named in 1970 and on the near side of the moon.

The playful and mischievous tone continues through much of what follows. In "My Trial as a War Criminal", the Russians develop a virus that predominately kills children. This was never to be used, and only kept in case of emergency. A later, more advanced virus was intended for use in war.

"It would not affect children at all and would kill predominately men between twenty and forty. Owing to the premature outbreak of the war, however, the Russian government found itself forced to use the stocks which it had on hand." (pp. 69-70)

This is grim humour from a man so closely associated with the development of nuclear weapons he then failed to contain, and well understood the bureaucracy involved in unleashing weapons of mass destruction. There's a similar caustic wit as he considers the option of a new life in Russia, having already lived in Hungary, Germany, England and the US. 

"When you are above fifty you are no longer as quick at learning languages. How many years would it take me to get a sufficient command of Russian to be able to turn a phrase and to be slightly malicious without being outright offensive?" (p. 71)

The twist at the end of the tale is that Szilard and his fellows escape the inevitable guilty verdict when the Russians fall victim to their own virus. That's a consistent idea in this book. These weapons are not something we use on other people; whoever unleashes them, we all lose.

The last story, set in 1980, was first published in The Bulletin of the American Scientists in 1961, and includes "B" asking "A" who first thought up the convoluted idea of "mined cities".

"B: Szilard had proposed it in an article published in The Bulletin of the American Scientists in 1961, but the idea may not have been original with him. His proposal was presented in the form of fiction and it was not taken seriously." (p. 120)

The argument then follows, and repeats almost word for word, some of what was covered in "The Voice of the Dolphins" - which Szilard then acknowledges, but says is a complete coincidence.

"A: I read The Voice of the Dolphins when I was ill in the hospital; I remember that it contained many rather crazy prediction, but what they were, I do not recall." (p. 126) 

It's a daft book full of complicated, intricate ways to prevent nuclear annihilation - none of them madder than the real predicament facing the world. I've read and heard a lot about Szilard and his rather odd perspective and humour - he was, says Richard Flanagan, one of the Hungarian scientists known as "the Martians" because they were so odd.

The blurb for this book refers to his "wry sense of humour and a heartfelt fear for the future of mankind". More than anything, there's a playfulness here, following any daft idea to its logical end. But what did Einstein, or President Truman, make of this strange fellow and his extended flights of fancy. I suspect he was exhausting.

Dead Lions, by Mick Herron

How do you bring an audience up to speed on the story so far?

I posted in April that the surviving episode of children's adventure serial Garry Halliday (from 1960) begins with a minute-long recap, showing stills of 10 different characters and detailing multiple twists. As I said, we can compare that to the opening moments of a rare, surviving episode of soap opera Compact (from 1962), where there's no narrated recap but everything we need to know is relayed concisely in the opening scene.

The second Slow Horses novel bring us up to speed from the perspective of an imaginary cat stalking the offices of Slough House floor by floor, describing the disgraced intelligence operatives working there. That includes the two new characters replacing characters killed in the first novel. It's a bold conceit for a series grounded in the grubbily, boringly and compellingly real and could fast become wearying. But, kept to just an introductory sequence and used to delineate the distinctive features of each of the main characters, I think Mick Herron gets away with it.

The sequence ends with a pen portrait of slovenly Jackson Lamb on the top floor who would, if the cat really existed, throw it out of the window to its death. The point is that Lamb is quicker and more ruthless than he might appear, and in the story that follows his long experience and cynical perspective mean he's the one intelligence operative not to be fooled...

Once again, the TV version - which I came to first - is a very close adaptation of the book, the main difference that a final confrontation with a baddie involves young River Cartwright in the book and Jackson Lamb on TV. River was the protagonist of the first book and TV series, but we're already seeing the focus shift. It's the same phenomenon, I think, as Captain Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation or President Bartlett in The West Wing. Each was originally envisioned as a kind of guest star who'd appear infrequently to offer wise counsel, while the focus was on the ordinary staff getting into scrapes and adventures. The issue, I think, is that the authority of such characters exerts something like gravitational force, and the more a series continues, the more it is drawn to that power.

The novel ends with another tour of Slough House, this time from the perspective of a mouse. It's effectively the punchline to a book-long joke. I wasn't at first sure whether this was another hypothetical creature but it turns out to be real - and prompts Jackson Lamb to wonder if they need a cat.

Conan Doyle: Mystery and Adventure, by Mark Jones

In 1967, BBC Two broadcast a 13-episode anthology of adaptations of short stories by Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle. The series was variously known as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and The Short Stories of Conan Doyle, and generally well reviewed. What's more, it was the first TV series overseen by John Hawkesworth, who went on to even greater acclaim with The Gold Robbers (1969), Upstairs Downstairs (1971-75) and The Duchess of Duke Street (1976-77), before developing for television The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1984-85), starring Jeremy Brett.

Just one episode of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle survives - the very odd The Mystery of Cader Ifan, which I saw for the first time last week at Kaleidoscope's "The Play's the Thing" event in Birmingham. But Mark Jones' comprehensive study details production of the series, based on Hawkesworth's extensive archive at the BFI, paperwork in the BBC's Written Archives Centre, press reports from the time and interviews with cast and crew. It offers a wealth of detail and insight, with plenty of photographs, clippings and illustrations from the original stories helping to conjure a vivid sense of what has been lost.

As Jones explains, for rights reasons the series had only a limited release overseas, which means there is perilously little chance of copies of the missing episodes ever being found. Doctor Who fans can torture ourselves with the promise that some of the missing 97 episodes might yet be out there, somewhere. There's endless discussion of the various possible leads and of which episodes we'd most want returned - the Missing Episodes podcast is very good on this - which makes me fidgety with stress. It's almost refreshing to start from the basis that stuff has gone for good.

Among the fascinating things here is the influence of other anthologies of old stories, notably Granada's Saki (1962), Maupassant (1963) and The Liars (1966), in which the original sources were reworked so that characters would recur through the run. The BBC's head of serials, Gerald Savory, who'd worked on some of these series, advised Hawkesworth to do the same (pp. 17-19). We then seen the problems this caused for production, with clashing schedules for filming and rehearsals. 

Some practicalities are surprising: on The Lift, it turned out to be easier to film in Paris than in Blackpool. And how extraordinary to see the viewing figures for a "successful" series on BBC Two of the time: an audience of 450,000 watched The Willow House School on 26 February 1967 (p. 154); just 250,000 watched The Mystery of Cader Ifan on 12 March (p. 194). Eleven of the 13 episodes were repeated on BBC One between August 1967 and June 1968, in a mixed up order that played havoc with the continuity of the recurring characters. It would be interesting to know the viewing figures, those these don't appear to survive.

Other things struck me because of overlaps with my own bits of research. In romantic episode The Chemistry of Love, one of the recurring characters, Tom Crabbe (Keith Buckley) goes to a posh reception disguised as the vice-principal of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, one Anton Mikhailovich Asimov. This character is not in Doyle's original story, "A Physiologist's Wife", so is an invention of Hawkesworth and the name of the invented scientist is striking. At the time that the title of the TV episode was changed (2 November 1966, p. 90), production was under way on a Doctor Who story that directly referenced the work of science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov: in Episodes 2 and 3 of The Power of the Daleks, the scientist Lesterson speaks of the Daleks having "positronic" brains. (In Episode 5 of The Evil of the Daleks (1967), positronic brains containing the "human factor" are added to three Daleks.)

Isaac Asimov was a well known figure, with several of his works adapted for British television: "Little Lost Robot" shown as part of Out of this World (1962), The Caves of Steel adapted for Story Parade (1964) and six stories adapted for Out of the Unknown (1965-69, four of them prior to the broadcast of The Chemistry of Love. Why would both Doctor Who and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle connect themselves to Asimov at roughly the same time? My guess is that both were in response to his epic Foundation novels winning the Hugo Award for Best All-Time Series at the Tricon world science-fiction convention in the first week of September 1966. Foundation was originally a series of short stories that the author then reworked, which may have appealed to Hawkesworth doing something with Doyle.  

There's another connection to The Evil of the Daleks, in that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle filmed at Grims Dyke house on 20 January 1967 (p. 171), three months before the Daleks were there; I've added the details to my list of filming at Grims Dyke. There are further connections between Doctor Who and this Doyle series simply because several cast and crew worked on both. Richard Martin, interviewed by Jones on 12 July 2022, recalls using vaseline on "special fronts to the camera" (p. 57) to achieve a ghostly effect on the mummy seen in Lot 249, having pioneered this technique - to resistance from the crew, he says - on Doctor Who (for the strange atmosphere of planet Vortis in The Web Planet). Martin also recalls his working methods:

"I was always fairly well pressed to do the camera script in time. ... I used to go in my study at home and would consume most of a bottle of whisky. I'd be up to four o'clock in the morning, and maybe just have a little bit of rest before having to go in and deliver this script. The real problem was trying to get enough rehearsal time. I'm a rehearsal addict. I love seeing what the actors do with the script and capturing what they do correctly." (p. 57)

In assessing these lost episodes, Jones asks how closely they kept to Doyle's original stories, how effective they were as drama and in conjuring an atmosphere, and how sharply we should feel their loss. My sense is that he'd most like to see the spooky episodes returned. But if we're playing the game of which of thee lost stories I'd most like to see, I'm haunted by The Croxley Master. 

Medical student (and recurring character) Philip Hardacre is a medical student, forced to work for the pompous, lazy Dr Lichfield as the only means to pay his own university fees. Then Philip learns of a boxer pulling out of a forthcoming fight. Encouraged by surgery maid Mary, Philip agrees to take the man's place and go 20 rounds against the "Croxley Master" for a prize of £100. 

This "master" is the tough and dishonest Silver Craggs. Against all odds, and by fighting fairly, Philip knocks out his opponent. Whereupon Craggs' mistress, Anastasia, played by brilliant Alethea Charlton, 

"storms into the ring and lands Philip a tremendous blow on the jaw which fells him to the boards. As Mary and Anastasia start fighting, the two heroes of the fight are forgotten, lying side by side, unconscious on the canvas." (p. 69)

See also:

• Me on The Sign of the Four, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 
• My article "My immortal Holmes" in the Lancet Psychiatry
• My review of 2015 film Mr Holmes in the Lancet Psychiatry
• My novel The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Great War

Doctor Who Magazine #608

The new issue of the official Doctor Who Magazine is out today. My regular Script to Screen feature (pp. 26-30) this time covers the slug-like Mantraps seen in Dot and Bubble, for which I interviewed executive producer Joel Collins and production designer Phil Sims.

There's also a review of Deathworld, the story I script edited for Big Finish, which Jamie Lenman finds "surprising, and really quite touching". In Galaxy Forum, reader Bill Silver says nice things about the work Gav Rymill, Rhys Williams and I did on recreating the sets of missing episodes in the recent special issue.

And I think Eddie Robson's fun "This month in..." column (p. 49) uses an image of Doctor Who creators Sydney Newman and Donald Wilson that I spotted in an old issue of BBC in-house magazine Ariel, snapped on my phone and then cropped - those are Judi Dench's hands (and wine glass) in the bottom left.

Aerial, December 1967

Garry Halliday and the Sands of Time, by Justin Blake

I'm ploughing on with my episode guide to the BBC children's serial Garry Halliday (1959-62), and ahead of an entry there on the fourth of the eight serials, here are some thoughts on the novelisation.

At the end of the third Garry Halliday novelisation, airline pilot and adventurer Garry skis down a mountain in Switzerland in time to catch the elusive criminal mastermind known as the Voice. Until now, no one - not even his own henchpeople - have seen his face. The Voice is sent to prison - and then promptly escapes.

In this next adventure, the Voice aims to deal with the 10 people who clapped eyes on him during his short time as captive, and thus regain his anonymity. The Swiss police inspector, the pilot of the plane who flew the Voice from Switzerland back to London and some prison staff at Pentonville each go missing for a week or so, and then are found with their memories wiped. As Garry, his trusty co-pilot Bill Dodds and their friend Inspector Potter from Scotland Yard investigate, they too face capture and the same sinister process.

This fourth Garry Halliday serial - broadcast over seven weeks between 5 November and 17 December 1960, never repeated but published in book form around September 1963 - taps into a contemporary fear. Brainwash Culture, Daniel Pick's 2016 documentary for Radio 3, is very good on the history of this, in real life and popular culture (and very useful when I wrote my book on 1967 Doctor Who story The Evil of the Daleks).

In short, during the Korean War (1950-53), reports emerged of coercive techniques being used by Maoist forces. This "brainwashing" was cited to explain why western prisoners of war had apparently aided their captors and why 21 American soldiers asked not to be repatriated. Whatever the truth behind these claims, they informed Richard Condon's 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate, in which a loyal American soldier undergoes conditioning that makes him commit treason. An acclaimed film version starring Frank Sinatra was released in 1962, the same year that Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange and Len Deighton's The IPCRESS File were published, both exploring the disturbing ways in which such techniques might be exploited.

We can see similar ideas being explored in such fare as the 1963 film The Mind Benders, the opening of Ian Fleming's 1964 novel, The Man with the Golden Gun (when James Bond is the victim of such techniques!) and lot of early Doctor Who. It's a particularly effective wheeze in TV and film, where we can see the conflict of "good" characters struggling to fight the conditioning.

Garry Halliday was tapping into the zeitgeist and was perhaps even a bit ahead of the game. But it's odd that the characters we see brainwashed are mostly those we don't otherwise know - the Swiss inspector and prison staff. Inspector Potter, who is also subjected to the technique, featured in the previous serial but played by a different actor, which may have lessened the impact of seeing him "turned" to work for the villains. At one point, Garry Halliday succumbs to the drugged water that begins the brainwashing process but we don't see him act out of character. Bill Dodds is also unaffected. It felt to me as though an obvious bit of drama had been missed.

Then there's the sense of the novelisation patching over holes in the storyline, for example why the Voice can only be recognised by the few people who saw him, rather than from a mug shot when he was arrested.

"What records there were of him had disappeared. There was one newspaper photograph. Even the Voice couldn't get rid of every copy of a newspaper with a circulation of four and a half million. The newspaper picture was blurred and grey on bad paper. It showed a bulky man with an arm over his face. Such as it was, it had been circulated to the police of every country in the world. Most of those to whom if had been circulated had replied, more or les politely, that it seemed useless as a means of identification." (p. 19)

The not quite stated implication is that he has people in the police and in newsrooms who have disposed of the original photographs. The irony, of course, is that very little in the way of visual or written records survive related to Garry Halliday.

That makes it difficult to grasp exactly what this serial would have looked and felt like on screen. As on previous serials, the location filming featured in publicity. In the story, the Voice is working from the fictional state of Balakesh, a short distance from real-life Tripoli. Producer Richard West says in his memoir The Reluctant Soldier & Greasepaint and Girls that he, co-writer Jeremy Bullmore, lead actor Terence Longdon, cameraman Tony Good and West's assistant (which may have been Jean Hart) flew out to Tripoli to film picturesque shots on location, without any idea what the story would entail. The plot would be devised around whatever they shot.

In fact, West says, not having prior permission to film outside the American-run Wheelus Air Base, they were all arrested. On another occasion, locals interrupted filming by throwing rocks. The suggestion is that the guerrilla crew didn't get as much footage as they'd have liked and these frustrations may have coloured the way that Balakesh was depicted.

There had been criticism of previous Garry Halliday serials for stereotypical depictions of silly foreigners. The Arabs here are by turns parochial, corrupt and greedy. Bill Dodds at one point adopts a disguise, half naked and blacked up. The novelisation tells us, not very convincingly, that this was,

"not in the hope of being taken for an Arab but simply so as to make it more difficult for anyone to see him" (p. 105).

Halliday expresses horror at the death penalty being used in Balakesh, though capital punishment wasn't abolished in the UK until 1965 (and not until 2000 for all circumstances). But I think the harshness of the regime is all set-up for the end of the story. The Sheikh allows the Voice to escape into the desert, which is effectively a death sentence. The Voice is last seen wandering lost in the sand with nothing to drink.

There's no mention in the surviving sources that actor Elwyn Brook-Jones was part of the crew out in Tripoli, so I wonder how this haunting scene was conveyed on screen. As with the ski chase at the end of the previous serial, it has the potential for arresting visuals if filmed out on location, and for something much less exciting if realised in studio.

On TV, this wasn't the end of the Voice. Yet by the time the book was published, Brook-Jones was dead and Garry Halliday was no longer being made or repeated. The authors therefore tell us in a foreword that this is the last of Halliday's encounters with the Voice and provide some background to the character. They say this is what Halliday subsequently learned - suggesting that this information was not given in the TV version.

Bill Dodds and his fiancee Sonya Delamare, played by Terence Alexander and his wife Juno, had also left the series, their last appearance at the end of the fifth serial. In this, their penultimate adventure, Sonya has relatively little to do, and based on the novelisation it doesn't look as though the couple were involved in location filming. Oddly, whereas the previous three novelisations were narrated by Dodds, here the story is told in the third person, as if preparing the way for his exit. We're told Bill and Sonya are now happily,

"settled down to domestic life and two kids (at the present count)" (p. 11)

But I wonder how happy things really were as the actors left the series.

Don't Stop the Music, by Justin Lewis

By fun coincidence, I received a copy of this book - recommended to me by various friends since publication last year - two days after happening to meet its author. By another fun coincidence, I've finally read it having just read Question 7 by Richard Flanagan, which explores the idea of the past and present all happening at once. In Don't Stop the Music, the idea is more, I think, that there's an overlapping past.

This is basically a sort of toilet book full of odd bits of pop music history. But the organising principle lifts it into something else. Lewis provides facts for each calendar day of the year, in chronological order. In the very first entry, we learn that on 1 January 1958 Johnny Cash plays his first concert at San Quentin State Prison in California, where future country-and-western singer Merle Haggard is one of the captive audience (the author's pun). On the same day in 1962, the Beatles record five songs for Decca Records, who turn them down. On the same day two years later, the Beatles are at #1 with 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' and the first edition of Top of the Pops is broadcast on the BBC (featuring Dusty Springfield, the Rolling Stones and the Hollies). On the same day in 1990, Florida radio station WKRL plays 'Stairway to Heaven' by Led Zeppelin - and continues to repeat it non-stop for 24 hours.

Note the present tense of all this: these bits of history are still happening now, a sense reinforced by the fact that we can hear the music. In fact, I read this with my phone handy to look up tracks on iTunes - stuff I'd not heard in a while, stuff that was wholly new.

Also, note the range in just this first entry: pop and rock and country, reaching right back to the birth of rock n' roll - and beyond. Other entries bring us up to date, or at least to time of publication. There's also a diversity of entry: some funny, some weird and some poignant.

There's plenty here I didn't know, for example that the launch of Sputnik 2 in October 1957 was timed to coincide with the International Geophysical Year involving 67 different countries. I knew about the IGY from when, more than a decade ago, the Dr worked on a BBC archive project which put old clips and programmes online. One thing she and her team dug out was The Restless Sphere, a programme presented by the Duke of Edinburgh - live - giving an overview of all the work planned. I'd not made the connection between that and the space programme, and I learn from Lewis that the IGY was also commemorated in 1982, in the opening track of Donald Fagen's first solo album after leaving Steely Dan, Fagen looking back to the promise of a future that should have been the then-now.

The book is full of these kinds of connections and juxtapositions. One song or event influences another, or the backing singing of one band then has their own entry as a star. These connections are the point; in the introduction Lewis says the lack of an index is a creative decision as he wanted to ensure the book is "a little more than a dipping-in exercise." What I'd really like instead is a map. 

By another fun coincidence, I've used a similar organising principle for Doctor Who: The Time-Travelling Almanac, which is out next month. My hope there was to conjure a sense of the year as physical journey as we go round and round the Sun, so the anniversary of any particular date is us returning to the same spot. In my book, that then sparks other thoughts and peregrinations, some of them much longer than the entries here. It's a different kind of journey, I think, but starting from a similar place.

Question 7, by Richard Flanagan

Richard Flanagan won the Booker Prize in 2014 for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which was in part based on his father's experience as a prisoner of war in Japan. He's also the author of Death of River Guide (1994), in part based on the author's own experience of a near-fatal accident while out on a kayak.

This new book is non-fiction but revisits the real events behind these two novels, connecting them to - among other things - the history of Flanagan's native Tasmania, the invention of the nuclear bomb and the love life of HG Wells and Rebecca West. It's about the way reality informs fiction and fiction informs reality, and the way the past is present in the now. It's a remarkable, rich and vivid flit through all sorts of bits of history, at once directly, movingly personal and yet about us all.

Flanagan cites in his acknowledgements one key influence: the essay ‘The past is in the present is in the future’ by 18 year-old Sienna Stubbs, which describes her Yolŋu culture's understanding of a fourth tense, beyond past, present and future, in which what was and is and will be are all happening at once. So, all these years later after the real event, Flanagan is still 21 and trapped in his kayak, facing imminent death. And HG is still snogging the teenage Rebecca West. And the bomb is still being dropped on Horoshima.

Some of the history here I've already dug into, having made a Radio 4 documentary about how HG Well's novel The World Set Free, in which he coined the term "atomic bomb", inspired Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard to conceive the chain reaction component that would make such a thing a reality; but the Wells book also made him realise the terrible consequence of such a device used on an urban population. We seem to have worked from several of the same sources, and I'm glad to see that Flanagan, likewise, sees Szilard as both a pivotal and fascinating figure (whereas he makes a single, fleeting appearance in the film Oppenheimer).

Flanagan delves further than we did in our documentary (where we had just 42 minutes, and covered some other ground) to explore the circumstances in which Wells wrote The Wells Set Free and the women he was involved with at the time, as well as pursuing what happened to Szilard and addressing his own efforts to write science-fiction. I've got a copy of Szilard's book on its way and will report back in due course.

So it's a fascinating story being covered here, and yet also beautifully, succinctly told in short bursts that make it difficult to put down when you could just do one more short section. Yet it's also often viscerally shocking, whether detailing the impact of the bomb on Hiroshima or the genocide in Tasmania, or the denouement in which he recounts in detail his experience on the river. Also shocking is his meeting the men who held his father captor, asking one old man to hit slap him in the way he'd slapped the prisoners in his charge. Or there's the racism, sexism and cultural condescension faced while a student at Oxford (p. 231), and then this:

"Meanwhile, the Bullers wandered the Oxford streets, dressed absurdly as themselves or offensively as Nazis and after dinner had the whores in. The Buller B—who would be prime minister wanted me to be his wingman when he ran a second time for Oxford Union president, one more whore. I told him I couldn't stand the Union, that I wasn't a member, and why, in any case, would I bother? B— said when I ran he would help me if I helped him and so I repeated my original answer and B— fif-faf-fuddled because he really had no answer, no one did, he was charming and you couldn't believe a thing he said..." (pp. 233-4)