Nothing Tra La La?

Chart Wars - may the hits be with you

2012-01-24T12:09:00.004Z

Last month in Manchester, the Dr and I stumbled across what might be the most 80s piece of vinyl ever pressed. Duran Duran. Bauhaus and Renee and Renato - together at last. And you thought Yoda flogging Vodaphone was a terrible cash-in*.

Yoda flogging Vodaphone is a terrible cash-in.

The sign of 'the penguins'

2012-01-21T18:35:00.003Z

A fun afternoon in Greenwich, first to be grilled for a forthcoming podcast about some things what I have writ, and then to a special preview of the newly reopened Caird library at the Maritime Museum.

Whereas once the museum's vast wealth of records on the history of ships, pirates, migration and cool space stuff was housed down the road in Kidbrooke, it's now neatly packed into 9 kilometres of shelves at the museum, which I got to poke my nose round. The chief appeal will be to maritime researchers and those tracking family history (and there's a digitisation project going on at the moment).

But for the casual, nerdy passerby there was plenty to excite, if you have the sense and sophistication to be excited by weird old books. There's volume after velum-wrapped volume of old maps, complete with dragons and monsters, and a sailcloth bound edition (1779) of William Buchan's Domestic medicine: or, a treatise on the prevention and cure of diseases by regimen and simple medicines with an appendix containing a dispensatory for the use of private practitioners - this copy as used on the Bounty under Bligh.

Of the greatest excitement to me was a copy of Aurora Australis, the book written and published by the British Antarctic Expedition of 1907 over the winter (April to July) of 1908. It's full of drawings, poems and short accounts of the trip by members of the crew such as "Interview with an emperor" (i.e. an emperor penguin). Dork that I am, I thrilled to see ice-berg hyphenated. But the book, the physical object, is a thing of wonder.

The front matter explains that it was "Printed at the sign of 'the penguins'" - beside a neat, square logo - "by Joyce and Wild. Latitude 77°..32' South, Longitude 166°..12' East Antarctica". One of the librarians helpfully told me that this was one of maybe 100 copies produced (the museum holds two copies). That's the print run of some of the small-press stuff I've worked on or reviewed. And they don't compare.

The cover is hard wood - made from a packing case, as the stamp on the inside clearly shows. But it's the quality of the book that's really impressive: good quality lay-out and editing, printed beautifully on a good stock of paper.

So we get an impression of the kind of man that expedition leader Ernest Shackleton might have been in his need to add a second, "Additional preface" with the following caveat:

"But the reader will understand better the difficulty of producing such a book quite up to the mark when he is told that, owing to the low temperature in the hut, the only way to keep the printing ink in a fit state to use was to have a candle burning under the inking plate; so if some pages are printed more lightly than others it is due to the difficulty of regulating the heat, and consequently the thinning or thickening of the ink. Again the printing office was only six feet by seven and had to accommodate a large sewing machine and bunks for two men, so the lack of room was a disadvantage; but I feel that those who see this book will not be captious critics".

Shackleton would later be a member of Captain Scott's ill-fated expedition, while his amazing, old-skool heroism in getting his crew - every one of them - safely back from the Antarctic is featured in this week's Corpse Talk comic strip by Adam Murphy in issue 3 of the Phoenix comic. The books I've mentioned - and a whole bunch more cool stuff - is available on request at the Caird library - subject to the terms and conditions on the website.

AAAGH! in the air!

2012-01-19T15:15:00.003Z

An action-packed AAAGH! from issue #251 of Doctor Who Adventures, available until yesterday. It might owe a little to the opening sequence of The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe. Script by me, art by Brian Williamson and edited by Paul Lang and Natalie Barnes who gave kind permission to post it here. You can also read all my AAAGH!s.

The new issue out today has a splendid AAAGH! by Paul Lang, and also photographs of the Whomobile, Meglos and Quatermass.

The Masters of Luxor

2012-01-18T18:05:00.005Z

The Dr has already blogged about our trip to Luxor in Egypt over new year. I've been writing what follows in fits and starts.

We stayed for a week and packed in as much as possible. Our hotel was a short walk from Luxor temple, the Luxor and mummification museums and a longer walk from Karnak – we arrived there at half eight in the morning and pretty much had the place to ourselves.

We hired a guide and driver to take us to the Valley of the Kings where we poked our noses in the tombs of Ramsees IX, III and IV (but sadly not Thutmoses III which is mentioned in the Doctor Who story Pyramids of Mars). We went to Deir al-Madina (the village of the workers who built the kings' tombs) and the Ramesseum – where we saw the vast, fallen statue that inspired Shelley's poem Ozymandias (which is more than Shelley did, as he based it on a visit to the British Museum). We got to see the Al-deir Al-bahari temple, the Valley of the Queens, Medinet Habu temple and took a cruise up the Nile to Dandara, where the Dr was delighted that opposite a rare carved portrait of Cleopatra and Caesareon is a temple (and the equivalent of two fingers) built on the orders of Caesar Augustus. Having admired the pale blue ceiling that showed an ancient zodiac, we spent the four-hour trip back down the river gazing up at the stars.

We also took a four-hour drive to Abydos, a vast, impressive place still with its original ceiling, where I snapped the following two short videos on my wireless phone:

We saw so much, the Dr took 400-odd photos and pages and pages of notes. The ancient building are covered all over, often with huge Pharaohs smiting people from different countries. Flinders Petrie collected casts of the people’s faces as part of his study of race – something the Dr is writing a book about. And while she gathered evidence, I was struck by how often we saw the same posture, one Pharaoh or other stood with feet apart, one arm raised and the other pointing out, while wearing a kilt with a hanging belt. Here are two examples:

Surely, I thought, that’s Orion.

There were relatively few other tourists: the hotel was only 40% full and was a bit desperate in asking us to come to its gala new year's eve dinner. The local people were keen to tell us that Luxor is safe for tourists – horrified that the Arab Spring and ongoing events in Cairo might have scared people off.

Since so much of the economy is based on tourism, that's a real problem. We'd been warned before we went, but the constant hassle was a bit of a shock at first and then a wearying nuisance. Wherever we stepped, people hurried over to offer taxis, boats or horse-drawn rides – some of the horses barely skin and bone. They wanted to know where we came from, where we were staying, where we were walking to. They wished us happy new year or called out “Lucky man” and “Why not smile?” – and if they got any hint of an answer they'd then offer us taxis, boats or horse-drawn rides. If they couldn't get a reaction from me they'd run round to the Dr. “Madam”, they'd say, and the try exactly the same tack.

One man followed us down the road telling us which hotel we were staying in and for how long – the creepiest sales pitch ever. Another promised us “no hassle” and then continued the pitching in a whisper as if we weren't meant to hear.

In every temple and museum there seemed to be someone keen to point out something in plain sight or to offer to take us past roped-off sections, if we’d only pay out some small change. At the airport, the man loading our bags through the scanner expected something. The guide books advised us to keep a separate pocket of this grubby baksheesh.

It was exhausting at first, but within a couple of days we'd developed thick skins. Sadly, some people did just want to say happy new year – but even saying thank you to them brought more people hurrying over. I managed to offend a man working in a bar by blanking his polite inquiries about where we were from. I apologised, said I'd thought he would only try to sell us something. And without missing a beat he pointed over to his stall of souvenirs and invited us to browse. There’d be something for free if we did. We finished our drinks and escaped.

The worst part was if you did actually want to buy something. You couldn't browse – the people in shops would flap around beside you making suggestions, or trying to put items in your hand. We tried to buy a bottle of water and the man in the shop kept repeating, “Only one?” and then offering to drive us to a place out of town where we could buy souvenirs at a bargain price. Trying to buy a guidebook, we were surrounded by people offering advice, eager to fetch us the same books in French or Italian, a constant, desperate witter that just made us want to give up and walk away. This hustling sometimes just confused us, so we bought more than you wanted or paid a silly price.

“It’s a different culture,” explained the tour rep, before offering to sell us day-trips. We had to buy them from her then and there, and soon found other guests who’d turned her down only to buy much cheaper tickets for the same trips just by asking at reception. Ho hum.

But it is a different culture, one where sharing wealth is a sign of virtue. We have our own strange ways. In crowded London, giving people space (such as by not talking on the Tube) is a mark of respect – though that’s not how it often appears to people visiting the city. But also, baksheesh isn’t so foreign an idea. Watching old films since I’ve been home – The Hound of the Baskervilles from 1939, Doctor No from 1962 – I’ve been struck by the number of times Holmes and Bond hand out money to people who offer them help. Those they patronise seem grateful, and it’s used to show our heroes’ impeccable manners.

Once the Dr met up with a local archaeologist and he organised a driver to take us round, the bothering changed gear. There were still people eager to sell us souvenirs, but they didn’t trail after or crowd us. And it was oddly reassuring to see Egyptian tourists visiting from Cairo treated exactly as we were. (The Dr was thrilled by the numbers of Egyptian tourists visiting their own heritage sites – she thinks it bodes well for the future.)

Generally everyone we met – even the people trying to flog us vastly inflated old tat – were welcoming and friendly. We went to a brilliant new year’s eve party on the roof of a hostel where there was live music and a dancing girl, though (having been shoved forward by the Dr) I felt too awkward and sober to dance with her for very long.

We'd planned to mix the sightseeing with days by the pool, but there was so much we wanted to see that we didn't exactly stop. Most days we were up with or before the sun, having breakfast as the hot air balloons rose slowly over the Valley of the Kings. When we weren't touring, I wrote pages of spec script and read Claire Tomalin's biography of Dickens - which I might blog about if there's ever a spare moment. But don't expect much: Egypt was my last break for some time...

AAAGH! visits Doctor Who Adventures

2012-01-12T17:53:00.004Z

An especially indulgent edition of AAAGH! to celebrate issue #250 of Doctor Who Adventures. Script by me, art by Brian Williamson and edited by Natalie Barnes and Paul Lang - who, as always, gave kind permission for me to post it here.

New year, new product

2012-01-06T13:39:00.003Z

Happy new year! I'm back from a week in Luxor, touring ancient sites and drinking a beer called Sakara. Will try to blog something about what I saw, and also about the various good books I've been reading. But first, these important messages:

There are lots of screenings next week of my short film, Cleaning Up.

I'll be at all but the Berlin screening. Do come along and say hello. I'll also be showing the film at the Gallifreyone convention in Los Angeles next month.

I've also written a superhero comic, The 100% Awesomes for the Autism Education Trust. With art by William Potter, it's designed for use in school lessons to teach kids about autism and difference.

My short story "Last Rites" features in The Hammer Out Book Of Ghost Stories 2012, published this month to raise money for brain tumour charities.

Also out this month is my Doctor Who audio adventure, The Anachronauts, starring Jean Marsh and Peter Purves.

Happy Christmas from AAAGH!

2011-12-22T11:03:00.004Z

A merry Christmas to all of you at home from AAAGH! Excitingly, Doctor Who Adventures #248 is still in shops until next week, but my bosses thought we'd share this with you now. Script by me, art by Brian Williamson and edited by Paul Lang and Natalie Barnes, who gave kind permission to post it here. You can also read all my AAAGH!s.

One man and his dog

2011-12-19T17:54:00.005Z

Been a little busy, but on Friday I got two trips out. First, Scott Andrews took me to see Sherlock Holmes 2, which was whizzy and silly and fun. Then I made the epic trek to Chiswick to review Hogarth's house for something out next year (which I shall post about when it happens). What follows is stuff I didn't say in that.

Hogarth lived in Chiswick between 1749 and his death in 1764. Chiswick seems quite proud of the connection. His house was opened to the public in 1904, but re-opened in November after a fire in 2009. In 2001, a statue by Jim Mathieson of Hogarth and his pug-dog Trump was unveiled on Chiswick High Street. It was unveiled by Ian Hislop and David Hockney - I assume symbolic of his status as satirist and artist.

A picture by Hogarth shows the house surrounded by fields, but now it's right next to a busy road and roundabout (both named after Hogarth). You can see and hear the traffic grumping past as you poke round the displays. (I did not put in my review that Donna Noble realises her taxi driver is a robot on this very road.)

The house was built in what was once an orchard, and the mulberry tree that apparently still blossoms each year is thought to be older than the building. You can just about make out the tree in this picture.

AAAGH! and the carol singers

2011-12-08T13:31:00.003Z

Another festive AAAGH!, this one from Doctor Who Adventures #246 and owing a little to last year's Christmas special, A Christmas Carol, but with added monsters and tomfoolery. As ever, it's written by be, illustrated by Brian Williamson and edited by Paul Lang and Natalie Barnes - who also gave kind permission to post it here. You can read all my AAAGH!s.

As an added treat, here's what Abigail is singing.

Hundred year-old cat

2011-12-06T13:54:00.002Z

The builder currently rebuilding our house made a cool discovery:
The house is at least 100 years old, possibly late 19th century. And there in the original brickwork are the paw prints of a cat. We're going to leave them on show.

AAAGH! and the Advent calendar

2011-12-01T09:39:00.002Z

Another AAAGH!, this one marking the start of Advent. There's all sorts of Christmas festivities coming in Doctor Who Adventures in the next few weeks, as we approach the Christmas episode. As ever, the script for this silliness is by me, the art by Brian Williamson, and the strip was edited by Paul Lang and Natalie Barnes - who gave kind permission to post it here. You can also read all my AAAGH!s.

First Wave interview

2011-11-24T14:11:00.002Z

Daniel Tostevin interviewed me about my Doctor Who story The First Wave for the latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine. But I wittered on so much that he had bits of what I said left over. He has published my additional wittering on the official Daniel Tostevin website.

Happy birthday Doctor Who, love AAAGH!

2011-11-23T11:50:00.003Z

AAAGH! celebrate's Doctor Who's 48th birthday today in a bit of silliness written by me and illustrated by Brian Williamson. Doctor Who Adventures #244 is still in shops for another day, and includes a whole bunch of old-skool stuff, including mention of Koquillion.

As always, this AAAGH! was edited by Paul Lang and Natalie Barnes and posted here with their kind permission. You can also read all my AAAGH!s.

Blake box

2011-11-21T17:39:00.003Z

For your delight and delectation, here is Anthony Lamb's cover for Blake's 7: The Liberator Chronicles, which includes The Turing Test - written by me and starring Paul Darrow as Avon and Michael Keating as Vila. It's out in February 2012.

Ritzkrieg

2011-11-20T16:02:00.002Z

Finished my chum Matthew Sweet's The West End Front this morning. It's a magnificent, funny and strange collection of stories about London's posh hotels during the Second World War (though he freely extends the scope when it means another good story). It was Book of the Week on Radio 4 last week - you've still a chance to hear Kenneth Cranham reading choice cuts on iPlayer.

Matthew has interviewed more than 100 people - those who were there at the time, or the families of those who have since died. The result is a gleefully gossipy account of some often shocking incidents, carefully backed up with solid documentary research.

The book undermines the sentimental view of the Second World War, the idea of a nation steadfastly keeping calm and carrying on, all stiff-upper lips and good humour. There's scandal and skulduggery, scoundrels, sex and death. Some of the events make for very uncomfortable reading. But really this is a testament to the strangeness of real life - in an extraordinary period of history and anyway. Matthew's got a good eye for the incongruous detail, the grotesque detail, that conjures the period vividly.

There's a wealth of top facts, too. Captain Leonard Plugge, Conservative MP for Chatham, gave his name to any "brazen commercialism in the media". Crooner Al Bowlly (whose work I adore) was killed by his own bedroom door. There's the extraordinary image of Winston Churchill, no longer Prime Minister and so no longer living at Downing Street, installed in the penthouse at Claridges because, his wife said, "We have nowhere to go". It is there, on a borrowed wireless, that he heard the news of Japanese surrender.

"'Then he went out into the rain and there were three old ladies under an umbrella who had heard he was there and gave him a cheer.'"
Philip Murphy, Alan Lennox-Boyd: A Biography (1999), quoted in Matthew Sweet, The West End Front, p. 286.

Many of the lively characters Matthew speaks of - and spoke to - have died, and as he argues the Second World War is now passing out of living memory. This chance to capture and record these fleeting ghosts before they are fully gone is utterly compelling.

Dream the myth onwards

2011-11-19T10:13:00.005Z

Here's the introduction I wrote to the book of academic papers, The Mythological Dimensions of Doctor Who (2010) - available as a paperback and on Kindle and things.

Dream the myth onwards
Simon Guerrier

Do stories matter if we know they're not true?

That seems to be central to the idea of myth. They are stories that matter. Ken Dowden, in his book The Uses of Greek Mythology, argues that “myths are believed, but not in the same way that history is”(1). If they were true they would be history. But stories still illuminate the truth.

The father of psychoanalysis certainly thought so. Sigmund Freud used the stories of ancient mythology to illuminate aspects of the human condition. Most famously, he named a group of unconscious and repressed desires after the mythical king of Thebes, Oedipus.

The story of Oedipus has been retold since at least the 5th Century BC. By linking to it, Freud suggested that the desires he'd uncovered were not new or localised. They were universal.

Freud was clearly fascinated by myth. His former home in London – now a museum – contains nearly 2,000 antiquities illustrating myths from the Near East, Egypt, Greece, Rome and China, many lined up on the desk where he worked. He argued that psychoanalysis could be applied to more than just a patient's dreams, but to “products of ethnic imagination such as myths and fairy tales” (2).

But, as Dowden points out, you can only psychoanalyse where there is a psyche. Who are we analysing when we probe ancient myths – which have been retold for thousands of years? Do we examine a myth as the dream of an original, single author, or of the culture that author belonged to? Dowden argues that “psychoanalytic interpretation of myth can only work if it reveals prevalent, or even universal, deep concerns of a larger cultural group”(3).

He also quotes Carl Jung, who developed the idea of the “collective unconscious”, a series of archetypal images that we all share in the preconscious psyche and which, as a result, appear regularly in our myths. Jung warned against efforts to interpret the meanings of these images: “the most we can do is dream the myth onwards and give it a modern dress”(4).

That seems to me what Doctor Who does, retelling old stories in new ways, surprising us with the familiar. The archetypes of Doctor Who – the invasion, the base under siege, the person taken over by an alien force, regeneration – have been embedded for decades. Yet the series keeps finding new ways to present them, and new perspectives and insights along the way.

That's also true of this book, probing the Doctor's adventures for new perspectives and insights. The essays contained here don't take Doctor Who as the dream of one single author whose unconscious desires can now be exposed. Instead, it probes our shared mythology as Doctor Who fans – of which the TV show is just a part – to explore our own cultural unconscious.

“Myth” means many things in this book. It's any fiction with a ring of truth. It's any story with cultural of psychological value. It's any work with staying power, whose themes and ideas are still relevant generations after the first telling. It's the established, fictional history of characters and worlds, the “continuity” so often complex and contradictory. It's the moment at which a character becomes a hero or even a god. It's anything we want it to be.

And that is why it's so revealing.

(1) Dowden, Ken, The Uses of Greek Mythology, London: Routledge 2000 [1992], p. 3.
(2) Freud, Sigmund, Totem and Taboo, Leipzig and Vienna: 1913, English translation ed. J Strachey London 1955. Cited in Dowden, p. 30.
(3) Dowden, p. 31
(4) Jung, Carl and Kerényi, C, Science of Mythology: Essays on the myth of the divine child and the mysteries of Eleusis, 1949, English translation, cited in Dowden, p. 32

Thanks to editor Anthony S Burdge and Anne Petty at Kitsune Books for permission to post it here. I landed the Doctor in ancient Greece in my book, The Slitheen Excursion - where he met what might be the real people who inspired the myths of Athena, Noah and the Medusa, amongst others.

Re: Re: The First Wave

2011-11-18T11:42:00.005Z

[SPOILER WARNING!]

[SPOILER WARNING!]

[Whopping great spoilers for my recently released Doctor Who story, The First Wave, follow.]

[End of spoiler warning.]

Hello Rose

First I should thank you. Your post is full of nice things about my writing generally. You call me “educated and intelligent”, which is not something I hear a lot. So thanks for those bits.

You clearly don't like The First Wave, and I don't intend to try to persuade you otherwise. But you make a number of claims that I don't think are fair. So I'll address those.

You make a lot of comments about Big Finish generally. I don't speak for Big Finish – what follows are my own opinions – and I'm not going to guess what producers or writers were thinking or trying to do. But there are openly gay and bisexual characters in several Big Finish Doctor Who stories, as well as in related ranges such as Bernice Summerfield and Graceless.

My own experience is that it's tricky writing an openly gay character in a Doctor Who audio story. There's already a lot to set up in a Doctor Who audio: a new location in time and space, created entirely from what characters tell us about it; a plot that hasn't been done before in all the hundreds of TV episodes, books, comics and other audios; an exciting monster and lots of jeopardy. Into that must go the Doctor and TV companion – and under the terms of Big Finish's licence with the BBC, they must be as they appeared on TV.

That doesn't leave a great deal of room for anyone else, so other characters tend to be sketched in lightly – character types that the listener can quickly visualise. I'd argue that we're rarely told the sexuality of any of the characters, heterosexual or otherwise.

Oliver Harper gets more depth than most because I created him as a new companion who'd appear in three stories. But his life and background are still quickly and lightly established. And that means it's tricky to avoid tokenism and cliché, to make him a character rather than a label or manifesto. You kindly praise my efforts in Oliver's previous two stories. Thank you.

But you don't like The First Wave specifically because I “stereotypically, pointlessly, offensively” killed off Oliver, who is gay. I'm sorry for causing any offence. You direct me to the TV tropes page on the “bury your gays” cliché. It's a good, fun piece that makes important points. But look again at what that page says:

“Please note that sometimes gay characters die in fiction because in fiction sometimes people die (this is particularly true of soldiers at war, where Sitch Sexuality and Anyone Can Die are both common tropes); this isn't an if-then correlation, and it's not always meant to "teach us something" or indicative of some prejudice on the part of the creator - particularly if it was written after 1960. The problem isn't when gay characters are killed off: the problem is when gay characters are killed off far more often than straight characters, or when they're killed off because they are gay. This trope therefore won't apply to a series where anyone can die (and does).”

“Anyone can die (and does)” is a good summary of the era of Doctor Who in which The First Wave is set. By “era”, I mean Season Three – not, as you argue, the First Doctor's adventures as a whole. In that season, Katarina and Sara die, Anne Chaplet (a sort-of companion in The Massacre) is apparently killed, Vicki is written out during a bloody battle that leaves Steven badly wounded, and Dodo vanishes off-screen having had her brain scrambled.

Actor Peter Purves discusses how abruptly the cast were let go in this period on DVD documentaries on The Ark and The Gunfighters – both of which I worked on. The production team even tried to write out William Hartnell as the Doctor in The Celestial Toymaker, before doing so a few months later in The Tenth Planet. There's a sense in this season that no one is safe and no one gets a happy ending. Steven's own exit from the series in The Savages could have been happy – he goes off to be a king – but that's not how it's played. So what happens to Oliver is perfectly in keeping with the series at the time (something the terms of our licence with the BBC requires).

What's more, a new companion gives us a lot of freedom. Not only can I make him a stockbroker and gay, but I also don't have to return him safely at the end of a story to where he was at the start. That's something we have to do with the TV characters under the terms of our licence. So part of the appeal of creating a new companion is that the listener doesn't know how things will end – or if he will survive.

That's the central point of the three plays featuring Oliver: anyone can die, and the longer they stay with the Doctor, the more they're on borrowed time. The phrase “borrowed time” appears in all the stories, and The First Wave would have been called Borrowed Time had there not already been an Eleventh Doctor novel called that. From that starting point, I tried to write an adventure that was exciting and also moving. You're meant to like Oliver, and not like him dying.

You object to Oliver's “noble self-sacrificing death to save the main [i.e., heterosexual] characters”*. I don't think you're arguing that he should have died ignobly – perhaps screaming for mercy or siding with the villains. And I don't think you're arguing that I've killed him off because he's gay. I think you're arguing that because he's gay I should treat him differently from any other character. You want me to discriminate.

You praise my previous story, The Cold Equations, because Oliver's “sexuality wasn’t constantly brought up, it was just a fact about him.” But I'd argue that you've made his death – and the scene where he helps Steven dress up in The Perpetual Bond – all about his being gay.

I don't expect any of this to change your mind. But remember that I brought Sara Kingdom back from the dead. The return of Oliver Harper would be a cinch.

All the best,

Simon

(* I could also point out, pedantically, that the show offers little evidence that the Doctor or Steven are specially heterosexual. But anyway.)

AAAGH! at the gym

2011-11-17T10:10:00.004Z

Another AAAGH! from Doctor Who Adventures #243 - in shops till yesterday. This one features Jabe the tree from The End of the World and the Minotaur from The God Complex. (Sadly excised to make it all fit was the First Doctor in vest and shorts on a treadmill muttering that "*Puff!* This old body's wearing a bit thin. *Pant!*")

As ever, the script is by me, the art by Brian Williamson, and the editing my Paul Lang and Natalie Barnes - who also gave kind permission for me to post it here. A special birthday AAAGH! next week. You can also read all the AAAGH!s I've written.

Two covers

2011-11-13T17:57:00.004Z

Some forthcoming things by me:

Doctor Who: The Anachronauts stars Jean Marsh and Peter Purves, directed by Ken Bentley. Cover by Iain Robertson.

Graceless 2 stars Ciara Janson, Laura Doddington, Fraser James and Derek Griffiths, directed by Lisa Bowerman. Cover and design by Alex Mallinson.

Loads of things we learned about making short films

2011-11-11T14:04:00.003Z

Cleaning Up won Best Thriller at the Aesthetica Short Film Festival this weekend. Brother Tom and I had an amazing time in York, seeing loads of the 150 short films shown, comparing notes with lots of spectacularly talented film-makers and wannabe film-makers, and generally larking about.

As a result of all the nattering, we've realised how much we've learned by making our film – and stolen from all the clever people we've worked with.

Calling card
Short films are a way to get noticed, to get more – or different – work, and to prove that your idea for a TV series or film really works. Make your short representative of the things you want to do next.

Volunteer
We spent a day as runners on Danny Stack's Origin and two days as coppers on James Moran and Dan Turner's Girl Number Nine. That gave us a good sense of what to expect, plus we learned loads of practical things that helped us set up our film and make the shoot run smoothly. We also nicked Danny's producer, one of James and Dan's stars, and loads of crew from both.

Research
Watch all the short films you can. Go to the festivals. Buy the DVDs of award-winning shorts. If you've got a particular genre or audience in mind, research it and find out what other people are doing. Most festivals will put your film in a group with a similar theme (we've been shown as a thriller, a comedy, and as part of a group called “wrong place, wrong time”).

No matter how much of a film buff you are, the festival programmers will have seen more films than you. A festival can easily receive 1,000 to 7,000 submissions. What makes your comedy, horror, fantasy any different from the hundreds of others? What are you doing that's better? Watching lots of film, you’ll see they usually all very well made. And then one makes you sit up and take notice. How can you make your film do that?

Genre
Are you making a genre piece – comedy, horror, thriller? That can help you place your film with the festivals, sell it to an audience, build a following. Having watched a huge number of shorts now, comedy is clearly the hardest to get right – and there's nothing worse than an audience sitting stony-faced waiting for a comedy to end. But when it's right, when it works, you can be the talk of the festival.

Good script
We watched a lot of short films before making ours. A lot of people will tell you that it's easier to make films now – you can even get mobile phones that record in HD. But that makes it all the harder to stand out from the rest. A lot of short films look beautiful and are stylishly played and edited. But the thing that makes the best ones stand out is that they have good scripts. Commission a writer, as Tom did, to write something an audience will remember.

James Moran recently blogged a whole, free seminar on writing.

It also helped that we had a professional TV writer as our script editor. Joseph Lidster made me work very hard: the script for Cleaning Up went through more than 20 drafts.

Why should anyone care?
You need to ask this a lot. Will the basic idea of your film grab people? Will the tag line? Will the names of the actors help sell the film? Are the roles they're playing not what they normally do? Or is the point that you're using people who aren't so well known? Your film needs to fight to gain attention.

Make a film on your own
Before you start assembling a big cast and crew, make a small film first, perhaps on a mobile. That way, you understand the process from start to finish, can see where your weaknesses are and can make a lot of mistakes – without a whole huge crew watching. It doesn't have to be any good; you don't have to show it to anyone. But edit it, put music on it, make sure you complete it.

Make it count
The standard of shorts is high, so make sure your money shows on screen. Every shot and line of dialogue has to count. Good locations, good production design and music all help sell your film. (A heck of a lot of short films include sunsets, which look amazing and are cheap.)

What do you offer the star?
I'm presuming you don't have much of a budget. So the only thing you can offer an established, “name” actor is a good script, with a good role for them – and something they don't normally play. And you've no comeback if they turn you down. Nobody owes you this.

Also, every actor should play a character with a name. They've given their time and skill for free, so the least you can offer them is a credit as “Keith”, not “Guard number 5”. It looks better on their CVs.

What do you offer the crew?
You're (probably) not paying people, so you have to treat them well. Don't tell them it's a great opportunity for their careers (klaxons go off, there are axes and bazookas). Define the working hours – and stick to them. Make sure there's a good lunch provided for everyone, tea and snacks and supplies.

You're the one who'll benefit from the film, not them. So you need these people more than they need you. And a good, experienced crew is essential. Ideally, you'll be the least experienced person on set.

Scheduling
Your cast and crew will – and should – drop you in an instant if they get another good, paid gig. You also find you can't work the schedule to get your dream cast and crew together in the same same place at the same time. So you have to work out who is the most important.

Say what you don't know
I made a stupid blunder on Origin by not letting on that I didn't know how to work the walkie-talkies. Don't bluff your way through. Ask advice. Listen and learn. There's a lot of bullshit in films – you have to big a project up just to get it made and seen. But people, especially the crew, will be much happier when you're honest.

Prepare
Do as much groundwork as you can yourself. Your producer and crew may only be there for the shoot itself. Make people's lives easy, and have as much prepared in advance as possible.

Tone
You set the tone of the shoot. So be cool, decisive and fun. As director, everyone will want your opinion all the time, so know what you want from every aspect of the film – and don't dither when they ask you. A happy crew works 10 times harder.

Adapt
As much as you might plan, all shoots run on luck, short films even more so because there is no money. So you'll have to adapt and improvise. Roll with it.

Gratitude
Say thank you. Buy drinks. Have a cast and crew screening. Keep everyone informed of what's happening. Return the favours people have done you. Let them know to call the favours in.

Edit
When you finish filming, you're halfway through the process. Keep your film short and relevant. Cut every frame you can. Cleaning Up lost a whole scenes and at least one of my favourite lines. Be ruthless. Audiences sitting through lots of shorts in one go will thank you.

Trailer
More people will see the trailer than the film. The cut of the trailer is potentially more important than the cut of the film.

Website
Don’t just watch lots of short films – look at how they’ve marketed themselves, too. Some do fancy websites and loads of PR, others don’t. We based our efforts on the Academy Award-winning short The New Tenants.

Don't waste people's time. You want a simple, good-looking website where people can quickly – no, immediately – find your trailer, a list of cast and crew, the tag lines and blurbs, a press release and how to contact you. Make it easy for people to see where it's playing and what awards you've won.

We'll write about sending your finished short out into the world later, when we've a better idea of how what we've done has worked.

H for themselves

2011-10-30T13:43:00.004Z

The Dr sometimes accuses me of tumbling through life as if a guest on QI, where points are scored for top facts and dodging cliche. A while back, for my own entertainment, I came up with my own QI questions, complete with the cliches that set off a klaxon and lose you 10 points. The "H" series was on at the time.

Heiroglyphics
Which profession is a baboon the god of?

X Actors
X Politicians

Thoth – as a baboon – was god of writers and scribes in ancient Egypt. The thinking is that baboons chattered and babbled like humans, which was a sign of intelligence. And baboons throw poo at each other and bear their bottoms, which is like a lot of writers. The ancient Egyptians also used baboons as police dogs.

Huxley
Who else died the same day as John F Kennedy?

X Lee Harvey Oswald
X A bodyguard
X Liberal America

Well, lots of people also died on 22 November 1963 – including the writers Aldous Huxley and CS Lewis. Huxley famously experimented with hallucinogenic drugs such as mescaline and LSD, and at his own request was injected with LSD while he was dying.

Holy Days
Why do most of us get Sundays off work?

X It's the sabbath
X The Bible says so

Edward VI's father Henry VIII split with the Roman Catholic Church and formed a (Catholic) Church of England. Two acts under Edward VI sealed the split. The First Act of Uniformity in 1548 introduced an English prayer book, imposed penalties for non-observance and ordered the suppression of images and Latin primers. It was the first time religious practice in this country was proscribed by a secular authority. The Second Act of Uniformity in 1552 required every subject to attend church on Sunday at one of the rechristened services or morning prayer, evening prayer or the Lord's supper. It was the beginning of keeping Sunday's special, and accompanied by an act for the control of alehouses – the first time liquor began to be licensed. So, strictly speaking, keeping Sunday holy is an anti-Catholic measure.

Honorificabilitudinitatibus
What does Honorificabilitudinitatibus mean?

X It doesn't mean anything
X “I'm very clever”

It means “with honour”, and is Shakespeare showing off in Act 5, scene 1 of Love's Labour's Lost:

I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word;
for thou art not so long by the head as
honorificabilitudinitatibus: thou art easier
swallowed than a flap-dragon.

James Joyce then used it in Ulysees. But is that all that it means? In 1910, Sir Edwin Lawrence-Durning pointed out that it's also an anagram “Hi ludi, F. Baconis nati, tuiti orbi”, or “These plays, F. Bacon’s offspring, are preserved for the world” - which Sir Edwin argued showed Shakespeare's plays were written by Francis Bacon.

Homo
Who's a homo?

X You are
X He is

We all are. All modern humans are examples of Homo sapiens sapiens – note the two “sapiens”, which distinguish us from our late cousins, Homo sapiens idaltu, who died out about 160,000 years ago.

The “homo” bit means “human” or “person”, though “human” derives from the Latin “humanus” - an adjective cognate of “homo”. So the homos came first, then the humans. “Homo” looks like it derives from a Proto-Indo-European word which we now call “*dhǵhem” - that is, “earth” or “soil”. So “Homo” means “Earthman”. Think also of Adam, first man in the Bible, whose name seems to come from “Adamah”, meaning “ground”.

The “sapiens” means “wise”, so we must be especially wise if we're “Homo sapiens sapiens”. But other creatures also have repetition in their names. There's pica pica – the magpie. And my favourite, Meles meles meles – the Eurasian badger.

Blake's 7: The Turing Test

2011-10-18T11:33:00.003+01:00

Big Finish have announced that my Blake's 7 play, The Turing Test (out in February) will star Paul Darrow as Avon and Michael Keating as Vila. The news story says that in my story,

"Avon goes undercover on a research base… in the guise of an advanced android."

The other stories released alongside mine are by Peter Anghelides and Nigel Fairs. Gareth Thomas is also returning to the series as Blake, and it's been announced that Anthony Howells and nice Beth Chalmers will be in it, too. There will be more Blake's 7 CDs later in 2012 - and books as well. So that's all a bit exciting.

I'll be joining producer David Richardson and fellow scribbler Peter Anghelides at a Blake's 7 convention in Oxford this Saturday to natter about what we done.

Meanwhile, my previous Blake's 7 adventures The Dust Run and The Trial - starring Carrie Dobro, Benedict Cumberbacth and Stephen Lord - are available for £3.95 each or £8.95 on one CD from the Blake's 7 website.

The site also has some blogs I wrote about those plays, too.

The angels had the phone box

2011-10-17T14:03:00.004+01:00

The Dr spotted these sneaky Weeping Angels in Kensal Green cemetery, London. There's a TARDIS-shaped gap in the midst of them, which can surely be no coincidence. Empirical proof that Doctor Who is real.

Atwood and definitions of science fiction

2011-10-16T18:26:00.002+01:00

Margaret Atwood was in the Guardian again yesterday, explaining that her books are not science fiction because she doesn't have the skill set to write about Martians. Her “speculative fiction” is about stuff that could really happen, not lurid fantasy about monsters.

I find this kind of semantic argument about what is or isn't sci-fi a bit wearying – and have no problem with Star Wars, Cold Comfort Farm, Mars Attacks and Frankenstein all being part of the same gang. I've written stuff where I've tried to get the complex physics right, and stuff where I've completely body-swerved real science. I suspect a lot of these arguments are less about defining a genre as attributing value. I get the impression from Atwood's article that what she really means is her stuff is serious, with things to say. It can't be science fiction because that's a pejorative term.

(In responding to Mary Beard's lack of love for Cold Comfort Farm, people have explained it's a parody - as if that automatically makes it good.)

There are reasons why you wouldn't want your bestselling book to be labelled as sci-fi. That sci-fi shelves of a book shop are a special ghetto, where many shoppers will not venture. It's not just a value judgement: the definition also affects sales.

I do, though, think there's a way of reading science fiction. Like a murder mystery, you read the story looking for clues – not to spot the murderer, but to create the world in which the story's set. We're told that a door dilates rather than opens, and that vivid, odd detail is like an establishing CGI wideshot, framing the story in an eye-poppingly alien world. With a lot of sci-fi, we're asked to play an active part – which is what can make it so rewarding and immersive, but can also put off the newcomer. Those who've not learned to decode the clues – usually when they're about 12 – will say they just don't “get” sci-fi.

Oryx and Crake, one of the three books Atwood discusses in her article, I read in August, making notes which I never quite got round to writing up. There's no mention in the blurb that it's anything so crass and silly as sci-fi. Rather, it's “a less-than-brave new world”, “an outlandish yet wholly believable space”.

Which is odd, because it's not exactly believable. Smart, funny, insightful and full of quirky perspective, it's monstrously contrived. Crake, the villain, destroys the world to build a new utopia, and no one – not even those closest to him in this techno-future where everyone knows each other's secrets – ever suspect what he's up to.

I guess there's an argument that it's difficult to stop anyone determined to self-destruct – which reflected a post-9/11 worldview when it came out in 2003, but struck a chord with me as I read it because Amy Winehouse had just died. But there's no sense of how Crake's got away with what he's done. All too often his being autistic and into science effectively means that he's magic.

Snowman, our narrator, also just happens to be at the centre of these huge events – and never through any fault or effort of his own. Oryx, Crake and even Snowman's mother drive everything, and he coasts along in their wake. That he's had a ring-side seat through all the key bits of the plot, and is then the last man alive at the end is a convenience for the author. It's not wholly believable.

Rather than some realistic account of where science might take us, this is a parable, a fable. It feels a little mythic because it owes so much to stuff that's come before. There are parallels with the expulsion from the garden of Eden. There's Mary Shelley's The Last Man, while the end is a bit Robinson Crusoe. The Crakers reminded me of Hothouse.

The plot hinges on a classic love triangle – though, again, Snowman gets the girl because she thinks he looks unhappy, not because he does anything to win her heart. Events are contrived to allow discussion of how we escape the violence of our past: Oryx is reconciled with her abusive upbringing but Snowman can't let it go. That matches the efforts to remove violent instincts from the Crakers, though it looks like dreams, singing, art and religion are too much a part of us to be eradicated – and it's implied that means we'll never be free of the violence either.

There's some fun speculative stuff about sex drives, the Crakers' rude bits turning blue when they're in season. But less than a decade after the book came out, the details of its future make it feel parochially of its time. The dot com crash is referred to as if it were a major moment in history, and “Web site” is spelled with a capital letter because it's new and unusual.

Atwood argues in the Guardian that the book portrays a “ustopia” - her own ugly coinage for something that's a utopia (good) and a dystopia (bad) at the same time. I'm not sure what this new definition adds to discussions of utopian fiction. And I can't help feeling that this worry about definitions is missing the point. Books aren't good or bad because they're science fiction. There's good sf and bad. Definitions don't fix plot holes or poor writing, or change how we respond to a story. They're just a way of saying, "look how clever I am".

AAAGH! The Wedding of Mrs Tinkle

2011-10-12T10:32:00.004+01:00

Another AAAGH!, this one from Doctor Who Adventures #238, published a few days after The Wedding of River Song.

As ever it's written by me, illustrated by the amazing Brian Williamson and edited by Paul Lang and Natalie Barnes, who gave kind permission to post it here. Paul takes over the AAAGH! duties for the new weeks. But I shall return. Oh yes, I shall return.

In the meantime, you can read all the AAAGH!s I done wrote.

M1, NGC 2776 and NGC 4216

2011-10-09T14:08:00.005+01:00

As part of my Astronomy GCSE course (which I did 2010-11 at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich), I took some photographs of celestial objects for my coursework.

I used the National Schools' Observatory's Liverpool Telescope on La Palma, using the website to tell it what to look at. I then used image editing software to make the most of the pictures. I had to write a full account of my efforts and an analysis of the images. (And I got an A*, so ner.)

Here are the pics and a few brief notes.

Here's the Crab nebula - or M1 in Messier's catalogue. It's an exploded star, and Chinese astronomers reported seeing the supernova in 1054 AD. At it's heart there's a small, very dense neutron star. I thought the tendrils of gas looked a bit like the insides of a heart.

The image was taken at 21:00:00 GMT on 20 February 2011, with an exposure of 120.00 seconds using filter HA. Temperature was 6.5C, humidity 23%, pressure 779 mBar. It was a dry night with a wind of 2.5 m/s in a SSW direction.

The galaxy NGC 2776 is a lot less famous - or studied - than M1. It's a spiral galaxy in the constellation of Lynx, which appears disc-on to us.

This image was take at 22:19:00 GMT on 28 February 2011, with an exposure of 120.00 seconds and using filter R. The temperature was 8.5C, humidity 9%, pressure 777 mBar. It was a dry night with a wind at 8.6 m/s in a SSW direction.

NGC 4216 is another spiral galaxy, but this time edge-on to us, giving a better sense of the bulge in the middle (containing a super-massive black hole). The dark bits round the edge are probably dust obscuring the stars. NGC 4216 is in the Virgo Cluster.

This image was taken at 04:16:00 GMT on 1 March 2011, with an exposure time of 120.00 seconds and using filter R. The temperature was 8C, humidity 7%, pressure 775 mBar. It was a dry night with a wind at 7.2 m/s in a SSW direction.

There's a more impressive image of NGC 4216 here.

How to write a speech about someone you know

2011-10-08T10:07:00.003+01:00

I sometimes get asked to help my friends and family when they have to write things. In the last few months, I've offered more or less the same advice to a lady writing a eulogy and a gent stuck with a best man's speech. That advice seemed to work out okay, so here's what I said...

You've been chosen to write this because you know the person well.

Maybe you've not known them as long as other people who'll be there. That doesn't matter. You know them and I don't. If I asked you, "What are they like?", you could tell me.

And you probably wouldn't start by telling me how tall or old or fat they are, but the kind of person they are. To do that, you can probably think of something they once did that tells me exactly what they're like. You can probably think of three different things they once did that gives me a rounded picture.

A time that shows their sense of humour. A time that shows what they were especially good or bad at. A time they were kind or brave.

At least one of those stories should involve you. Another story might be one you've been told by someone else about the person. Something that when you heard it made you think, “Yes, that's exactly them”.

(When someone dies, their friends and family tend to tell stories about things they've done. Ask around.)

Write these stories down. Write them as if you're telling them to me over tea and biscuits. Keep things informal and simple.

Some people like to write the whole speech out in full. Some people just want bullet-points on note cards, so they can make it up as they go. If you're not sure which works best for you, write it out in full and then see how easy you find to read it out loud. You can always have notes on the day.

Put the best story last.

Then think about how you're going to start. It might be something as simple as: “What sort of person is X? Here are three examples...”. Or explain, briefly, how you knew the person and why (you think) you've been been chosen to speak.

If you're going to do jokes, put a first joke in early so people know what to expect.

Go over what you've written. Cut it down. Keep it short and to the point.

Read it out loud to yourself. It feels a bit weird but it really helps. Make sure you can read it without running out of breath or stumbling over the words. Time how long it takes - but make sure you're reading at the same speed you'll read it on the day. Don't rush.

Read your speech to someone you trust and who knows the person – and won't go telling people what you're about to say. Listen to what they say afterwards. More importantly, watch how they react while you're speaking. Rewrite the bits that need it.

Don't drink before you deliver it. Make sure someone else has a copy of the speech in case you lose yours.

Speak up, so people at the back can hear you. Don't rush.

Remember that the audience is on your side: they want you to do well.

Good luck.

AAAGH! and the Cybermats!

2011-10-06T20:37:00.004+01:00

Another AAAGH!, this time from Doctor Who Adventures issues #237, published just a few days after the episode Closing Time, where the Doctor battled Cybermats in a department store.

In issue #238, out in all good shops today, Nervil is a guest at the wedding of Mrs Tinkle...

The script of this episode is by me, illustrated by Brian Williamson and edited by Paul Lang and Natalie Barnes. All my AAAGH!s are posted here by kind permission.

Incidentally, there's a review of the event I did last week, discussing Cybermats, Doctor Who and Egyptian archaeology with Christopher Frayling and John J Johnston.

Doctor Who - The Age of Heroes

2011-10-04T09:02:00.004+01:00

Here, for your entertainment and delight, is my first outline for what became the Doctor Who book The Slitheen Excursion. Big boss Justin Richards had asked me for something featuring the Slitheen and set in Earth's past.

We knocked this back and forth between us for a few days before agreeing a final outline, but this still contains spoilers if you've not read the book or heard the audio version read by Debbie Chazen.

Doctor Who – The Age of Heroes
Simon Guerrier
27 March 2008

June is 17 and not very confident about her forthcoming A-levels. She’s on a college trip to the Palace of Westminster (not, she has learnt that morning, the “Houses of Parliament”) when she spots the Doctor. He must be important because he doesn’t have a security pass – not even the pastel-coloured stickers that they give to the tourists – and yet the policemen with machine guns let him go where he likes.

June dares to follow him and saves his life when a monster jumps out on him. The Doctor stops the monster by talking nonsense. It feeds on nonsense and illogic – so the Palace is like a restaurant. The Doctor owes June a favour and she asks if he can help with her essay. She’s got to write about the history of democracy.

Chapter 1
The Doctor says he knows a thing or two about history. Seeing history live – touching it, smelling it, getting your fingers dirty – is more exciting than dusty old books. But as they set the coordinates for the golden age of ancient Athens, he picks up a signal from an alien spaceship that’s got into trouble. They’re going to have to make a quick detour.

They arrive in Athens, 1687 AD. The Venetians are at war with the Turks. There’s a Turkish garrison in the temple up on the rock overlooking the town – the Parthenon is pretty much complete and looking good for its 2,000 years. For a brief moment June and the Doctor are separated and June realises she could be stranded in the primitive past. There’s something odd about the war though; both sides accusing the other of using strange and magical weapons.

The Doctor and June are reunited. They get away from the fighting Turks and Venetians and investigate the distress signal. They soon discover a party of Slitheen.

Chapter 2
But it emerges that they’re not there to muck up the war. They just want to keep everyone away from a grotto of stalactites and stalagmites which they’re using for some nefarious purpose.

The Slitheen are, though, fascinated by the Doctor and June – who must, they think, be using some kind of warp-core technology to journey back in time. And even schoolkids know that warp-cores are dangerously unstable. So the Doctor finds himself arrested as a dangerous maniac, when that’s what he normally accuses the Slitheen of.

June helps the Doctor escape, but rather than running away the Doctor insists they find out what the Slitheen are up to. It turns out the stalactites are calcified Slitheen – these Slitheen’s ancestors who were on Earth thousands of years ago.

Chapter 3
As they get older, Slitheen suffer from hardening of their soft tissues – a bit like we suffer from hardening of the arteries. They slowly lose the moisture inside themselves, and mineral deposits build up until they can’t move. The early affects are like Calciphylaxis, with brittle skin etc. And then they harden out entirely and become like statues.

At first the Doctor assumes it is some kind of rescue operation. But the young Slitheen want to know what happened to all the loot they never inherited. When the older Slitheen won’t tell them, they throw tantrums and blow things up.

Chapter 4
The Doctor has to intercede. The Slitheen spaceship, hidden on the top of the Acropolis, explodes. This blows up the Parthenon – history will assume the Venetians did it.

Chapter 5
The ancient Slitheen will not survive long. But they recognise the Doctor and June, having met them thousands of years before. They’re dying, and realise the Doctor hasn’t met them yet. They say he’ll understand what happened to the loot when he goes back to meet them. And they die. June is upset by this, and the Doctor admits he’s not used to feeling sorry for Slitheen. They’re a very strange family.

But now it seems he and June have to go back in time to meet these Slitheen in the first place.

The Doctor looks through history for the Slitheen signals. He finds them – roughly the same place but about 3,000 years before. And that’s worrying because mankind is quite impressionable back then. Sophisticated, space-faring aliens mucking around with the ancient Greeks could do terrible things to the development of human history.

Having landed in about 1,500 BC, the Doctor does a scan for aliens. And there are nearly 2,000 of them in the area. They step out into a world where aliens are living amongst the humans quite openly. Spaceships and high technology can be seen everywhere.

Chapter 6
There’s a great tourist industry running to the place, all kinds of aliens getting to mix with humanity when it hasn’t even sussed out basic architectural stuff like the arch. These aliens aren’t changing history. They’ve always been there – they’re the Gods and monsters of Ancient Myth.

At first it seems fun, but June is horrified by how the aliens pretend to be Gods to the locals. And some aliens are very badly behaved, frying the humans with laser guns just for a bit of a laugh.

The Doctor just runs off. June tries to stop some aliens picking on the humans. The aliens turn on her. She is going to be fried.

Chapter 7
The Doctor arrives dragging some Slitheen with him, insisting he and his friend didn’t pay for their tickets expecting to get fried. He waves his psychic paper around and people assume he’s a tourist, too. And the Slitheen intercede: it’s not done to fry fellow holiday-makers.

June recognises these Slitheen. The ancient Slitheen they met in 1687 turn out to be running the tourism. They are young and sprightly hucksters, and don’t take kindly to the Doctor and June interfering.

They invite the Doctor and June back to their office for a glass of something to make up for the inconvenience. The Doctor is keen to find out more of what they’re up to so agrees to go along. On the way, the Slitheen explain the terrible complexities of this project – how they use accelerators to grow food very fast to feed the demands of the tourists, how the bookings system keeps breaking down… all the rigours of a small business.

But the invitation to drinks is really a trap. The Slitheen know psychic paper when they see it. And they assume the Doctor is some kind of anti-time-travel protestor, and the one who has been causing all the earthquakes. For the sake of saving humanity, the Slitheen will now execute him and June.

Chapter 8
The Doctor and June escape death at the hands of the Slitheen when a half-man, half-snake called Cecrops comes to complain about how some of the other tourists are treating the locals. The Slitheen insist they’ve got a contract with the local kings that strictly agrees the terms of tourists’ behaviour.

Humans are to be respected. The Doctor uses this point of law to get himself and June released. The Slitheen get very nervous the moment anyone mentions lawyers.

Cecrops is very embarrassed about the tourist trade. He is a real humanophile, though his enthusiasm for how the little ape people slowly puzzle out problems doesn’t go down very well with June who finds him patronising.

The Doctor asks about these anti-time-travel protests, which people assume are some sort of politically correct statement that humans should be left alone to develop. Cecrops explains that he’s got problems with that ethos, too – the humans’ lives are nasty, brutal and short. June is surprised to discover she would be considered in late middle-age by being 17.

But anyway, Cecrops hasn’t seen and sabotage. He’s seen natural phenonema – earthquakes and things. It’s just the earthquakes have been really bad recently. And, as if on cue, there’s a terrible earthquake.

Chapter 9
The Doctor, June and Cecrops try to help people. But the Doctor insists this isn’t any ordinary earthquake. It’s a warp shift; the side effect of unstable warp core technology. June remembers the seventeenth-century Slitheen saying even children knew that was dangerous.

They investigate. Yes, the Slitheen here are using some dodgily acquired warp core technology to bring their tourists here. And they’ve been greedy; the system is exhausted and sagging at the edges. There are earthquakes and other strange phenomena. The Doctor tries to fix things, but the Slitheen catch him and it’s them trying to stop him that pulls the plug on everything. There’s not an explosion; instead the whole world seems to be falling apart.

Chapter 10
A widescreen disaster movie. The huge explosion causes a massive flood right across the Mediterranean. As described in the Greek legend of Deucalion, the rivers swell over the coastal plains and engulf the foothills, washing everything clean (the legend might also be the same route as that of Noah and Utnapishtim, but we’ll skirt round saying so explicitly). From the Acropolis they watch the great tidal wave coming in, and thousands are killed.

(I’ll probably expand this action stuff; have June separated from the Doctor and having to be a bit of a heroine. Have the Slitheen show that, though they’re greedy and dangerous, they don’t actually mean any harm.)

Chapter 11
The floods pass; the climate and timeline just diffusing the kinks in the system. The warp core technology is wrecked so all the alien holiday makers who’ve survived now find that they are stranded. Facing this mob, and the thought of insurance claims etc., the surviving Slitheen throw themselves off the Acropolis into the receding waters – ostensibly to their deaths.

June can’t believe they wouldn’t have had an emergency escape plan, and the Doctor is delighted. He leads the aliens to the cave where, in 2,000 years, there’ll be Slitheen-shaped stalagmites. There is a small vortex pod hidden at the back of the cave. The Doctor messes with its dimensions until it’s big enough to carry everyone.

But Cecrops is one of a few aliens who want to stay. If they don’t help clear up some of this mess, he says, the humans here are all going to die.

Chapter 12
June is suspicious of the Doctor – he seems happy to let the aliens believe that if they don’t take the vortex pod they’ll be stranded here forever. Why won’t he mention the TARDIS? But she has come to know him and she supposes he must have a good reason. Anyway, it looks like the aliens could do these humans some good.

Cecrops adopts the daughters of the dead Athenian king Actaeus. (In legend, the half-man, half-fish Cecrops, first King of Athens, taught the Athenians marriage, reading, writing and ceremonial burial.)

But with the waters all round the Acropolis, how are humans going to survive? The Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to draw water from the rocks – a spring of not very pleasant-tasting water, but water all the same. And June has seen how the Slitheen provided food for the tourists. She points their accelerator at the rock and up springs an olive tree. It’s not quite what she had in mind to feed everybody, but the olives will serve as an appetizer. (This makes the Doctor Poseidon and June Athene, I think.)

There’s a party later that evening. It looks like things are going to work out. With the loss of the aliens and creatures, a new age begins. One not of Gods and monsters but of extraordinary human beings. The age of heroes.

But the Doctor is still not content. He’s not sure history is quite on course as it should be. And anyway he promised June he’d show her real democracy at work.

Chapter 13
The TARDIS arrives in 480 BC to see the Parthenon being built and the golden age of Athens in full swing. June is appalled to discover that 17 is still considered quite old here. And that women aren’t going to get the vote until 1952 AD.

The Doctor and June soon get separated, but June has learnt a lot in her adventures thus far and is okay now to explore on her own. It seems the Gods and monsters are remembered as legends. But the town isn’t known as Athens – it’s called Cecropia.

She thinks the Doctor will make for the Acropolis to see the building work going on. And she’s curious to see the view of Cecropia up there. At first the male builders don’t see what business it is of hers, but their old, fat foreman seems pleased by June’s interest and offers to show her around.

But as soon as they’re on their own, the fat old man unzips his forehead. Creaky and old folk, it’s the last of the huckstering Slitheen – stranded on Earth for 1,000 years.

Chapter 14
The Slitheen have been hidden on Earth for 1,000 years. They had tried to get rescued at first, and then they’d seen the difference Cecrops was making with the primitive humans. They helped out – not pushing them or inventing anything for them, but getting them to write things down so the things humans learnt could be passed on. They’ve got people telling stories, sharing ideas.

And it’s hard work because humans keep having wars and things. The Parthenon is being built on the ruins of a previous one razed to the ground just a few years ago. And the Slitheen are running out of time. They’re calcifying, becoming the stalagmites June has seen in the future. If they could reach their people there are possible cures, but they’re just going to dry out.

June knows it has to be like this because she’s seen what happens. But the Slitheen are glad to have played their part, to have written themselves into history even if no one will ever know. They’re glad that June knows.

She leaves the grotto of dying Slitheen to find the Doctor waiting for her. He left her to discover the truth for herself – just as the aliens had let humans develop their own way. Now the lesson is over and its time for June to go back home.

The Doctor takes her back to the Palace of Westminster the same moment that she left. But she’s a different person now; better and wiser for what she’s seen.

Only when the Doctor’s gone does she realise she can’t use any of what she’s seen in her essay. She hurries off to rejoin her college mates.

AAAGH! and the Shining

2011-09-29T10:45:00.003+01:00

Another AAAGH!, this one from Doctor Who Adventures issue #236, out a few days after the Doctor Who episode The God Complex. Issue #237, in shops from today, features Cybermen and Cybermats. I'll be wrestling with Cybermats live on stage tonight with Sir Christopher Frayling.

As ever, the above strip was written by me, illustrated by the amazing Brian Williamson and edited by Paul Lang and Natalie Barnes - who also have kind permission for me to post it here. You can also read all my AAAGH!s.

Sayle

2011-09-26T16:56:00.002+01:00

Stalin Ate My Homework is a smart, funny and self-effacing autobiography by Alexei Sayle. It covers the years 1952 (when Sayle was born, on the same day that eggs stopped being rationed) to 1969 (when he started at Southport College of Art – his mum having sat the interview for him). There’s lots of this kind of odd, engaging detail in the 53 short chapters, Sayle’s life and times sketched out in fleeting glimpses.

Sayle was named after Maxim Gorsky. His parents, Joe and Molly, were Communists – dedicated to the party, even after the brutal repression of the uprising in Hungary. Sayle’s good at explaining the different factions, the personalities and the culture of the left. I found his explanation for how his parents could condone events in Hungary (seeing it as a test of their faith in totalitarianism), and then his own leanings towards the Maoists in the 60s, really illuminating of the politics of the period – I’ve not seen it spelt out so simply before. He manages to address the theory and the personalities involved, and get some jokes in, too.

Joe worked for British Rail and used his free pass to take his family all across Europe, so it’s also a travel memoir. Again, the family’s visits to Communist countries – at the height of the Cold War – are fascinating. Sayle notes the irony of a family so dedicated to totalitarian equality lording it up as guests of the Party, and the pang of having to return to ordinary living when these holidays were over.

While there’s a passion for the politics, there’s also a delight in human frailty and life’s strangeness, and he’s good on acknowledging his own weaknesses, anger and stupidity. There's lots on the way that Liverpool changed after the war - linking the architecture to the communities living around and in it. He’s good at unpicking the hippy and peace movements – young guys who were terrible at organising anything and who seemed mostly in it for the sex. It’s all told with an endearing sense of his own envy and confusion, belying the usual cool shtick of the 60s.

The book is dedicated “to Molly”, and it’s as much Sayle’s parents’ story as his own. Molly is a perfect comic creation – argumentative, sweary and utterly adored by the writer. Joe has an easy, carefree faith in the Party ensuring everything will be all right in the end and seems to hold it as an article of that faith not to get on a train until it’s already moving. He and Molly cut sparks and are devoted to one another.

Another child might have resented his "famous" parents overshadowing his own identity - just as he starts going to pubs, so does Molly and she holds court there. I wondered if there might be a link between the nerdy, shy boy who is known because of his parents, and the bullshitting that seems to pervade his teens. Is it an effort to define himself on his own terms - to find a way to get attention for something he's doing himself? But perhaps that would only work if Sayle were more hostile or resentful.

The glowing affection for Molly and Joe makes hints about Joe’s declining health all the more powerful. It's what makes this such an absorbing and feel-good read. But the following passage is worth quoting in full for its mix of history, comedy and gut-wrenching pathos. I find it utterly haunting, and a sign that this isn't just a funny, daft book but something really special.

“The Bedfordshire CID had come to our house to interview my father about the murder of Michael Gregsten at Deadman's Hill on the A6 in Bedfordshire, on 22 August 1961, along with the rape and shooting of his lover, Valerie Storie. James Hanratty, a professional car thief, had been charged with the crimes. Hanratty's alibi was that at the time of the murder he had been in the Welsh seaside town of Rhyl, staying in a boarding house named Ingledene run by a woman called Mrs Jones, in the attic room, which had a green bath.

The police had discovered that Joe had stayed at Ingledene between 21 and 24 August, in the small front room on the first floor. He was there on behalf of the NUR, taking part in a recruitment drive. In his book Who Killed Hanratty? Paul Foot describes Joe as 'the most important witness from the prosecution point of view'. He says that Joe saw no sign of Hanratty, although he admits, 'he was out on union business from dawn to dusk'. Which sounds typical enough.

Hanratty's trial began at Bedfordshire Assizes on 22 January 1962. On 17 February he was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Hanratty's appeal was dismissed on 9 March, and despite a petition signed by more than ninety thousand people he was hanged at Bedford on 4 April 1962, still protesting his innocence.

Joe was away for a week attending the trial in Bedford. One night Molly spoke to him on the phone, and when I asked how he was she replied that he had told her he was frightened. I asked her what my father was frightened of, and she said he was worried that Hanratty might have criminal friends who could harm him in some way.

When he returned from the trial Joe told us that what had upset him most was that he had been the final witness called in the trial. He realised that the last person Hanratty had heard testifying against him, the last person he had seen on the stand, the final person confirming his fate, was Joe Sayle. After that he was taken down, sentenced and hanged two months later. The last witness to testify against the last person executed in Britain was my father. Though he never talked about it, since he was such a good-natured man that must have been a heavy burden for him to bear.

Over the next few years the case did not go away: prosecution witnesses attempted or committed suicide and several books were written about the case, including one by Lord Russell of Liverpool. There were newspaper articles, radio and TV programmes, all of them contesting the soundness of Hanratty's conviction and reminding Joe that he might have taken part in the execution of an innocent man. When one of those programmes came on we did not shout at the TV as we usually did but simply changed the channel and said nothing. In 2002, the murder conviction of James Hanratty was upheld by the Court of Appeal which ruled that new DNA evidence established his guilt 'beyond doubt'. So the coppers got it right.”

Alexei Sayle, Stalin Ate My Homework, pp. 113-5.

(Wikipedia says Hanratty wasn't the last person executed in the country - I assume that's dramatic licence.)

The AAAGH! Who Waited

2011-09-22T13:47:00.004+01:00

Here's the AAAGH! from Doctor Who Adventures #236, last week, nicked broadly from The Girl Who Waited but with a guest appearance by Prisoner Zero. The new issue, #237, is out today and features a homage to The Shining which I'm particularly proud of for a magazine aimed at 6-12 year-olds.

As always, script by me, art by the amazing Brian Williamson and edited by Paul Lang and Natalie Barnes, who also gave kind permission to post this here. Why not read all my AAAGH!s so far?

Wheeler

2011-09-16T15:13:00.003+01:00

“Archaeologist and Man of Action” says the back cover of Still Digging, the 1955 autobiography by archaeologist, soldier and “acclaimed Television Personality of the Year”, Mortimer Wheeler. Wheeler's something of a hero – Indiana Jones as played by Terry-Thomas, with moustache and twinkling mischief. This illustrated 2'6 paperback has been a joy to read.

Wheeler himself calls the book,

“an average life in one of the great formative periods of history”.
Sir Mortimer Wheeler, Still Digging – Adventures in Archaeology (1958 [55]), p 9.

He deftly brings to life service in two World Wars and the violence of the partitioning of India up close – there's a thrilling account of him rescuing a Muslim colleague's family from a siege only for them to tick him off for not bringing their luggage, too. All in all, it's a rather chappish rollick through his life, with excerpts from diaries and correspondence to add vivid contemporary detail. It's generally fun and good-humoured, with an eye for the absurd character or moment. At the same time, he's forthright in his opinions.

“The British Museum I abjured [as a young man] as I abjure it today, a place that suffers from a sort of spiritual cataract and out-stares the visitor with unseeing eyes.”

My 1958 edition adds a footnote to this view:

“I regret this remark. It was written before I became a Trustee of the British Museum and, had truth permitted, I should have deleted it.”
Ibid., p. 24.

That forthrightness is matched by an unapologetic vocabulary when speaking of other nations. There's plenty, for example, on the habits of “the Hun”. Yet for all the racial terminology, he's also strikingly tolerant for his time. The following passage is a typical mix:

“I have in mind the sixty-one students who flocked to me from the universities of India and from the archaeological departments of the Indian states: swarthy Muslims from the North-West Frontier and the Punjab, little round-faced talkative Bengalis, quick-witted Madrasis, dark southerners from Cochin and Travancore. Also, today – only a few years later – such an assemblage of races, tongues and creeds would no longer be feasible. Religious and political barriers have split asunder those who in 1944 worked together with single purpose and common understanding.”
Ibid., p. 174.

It's not just that he wished other races would bally well get along with one another. He's an enthusiastic participant in World War Two, but when the Eighth Army pushes the Germans out of Libya, he's happy to work with Italian – that is, enemy – and Libyan archaeologists, freely acknowledging their superior skill and expertise. He also readily credits the many women archaeologists he's worked with over the years, and is carefully to cite both their unmarried and married names. Foreigners, natives and ladies are treated as equals – all that matters is that they're up to the job.

Wheeler delights in archaeology as a proper, bona fide science, describing particularly fine discoveries or developments in method, and reporting with special glee when some new piece of evidence torpedoes a long-standing theory. He's surprisingly modest about his own contributions to the field – such as dividing digs into grids. Acutely aware that so many of his peers had been killed in the First World War, he concludes that his eminence in the profession,

“was the outcome of circumstance, not merit”.
Ibid., p. 206.

There's a shadow over much of his otherwise jolly outlook. As well as the wars, there's the death of Wheeler's first wife, Tessa, in 1936. Wheeler was away on a dig at the time. His account of learning the news while heading back to England and seeing it in the paper is told with exemplary restraint, which makes it all the more haunting.

He's quick to credit Tessa's contributions to several of his digs. But there's just a single, brief mention (on page 183) of Margaret, his wife at the time of writing, and no mention at all of the wife in between.

As I posted a few weeks back, Mavis was drawn and bedded by Augustus John – before and perhaps after her marriage to Wheeler. Wheeler divorced her in 1942 having caught her with another lover and excised her completely from his memoirs. John, though, gets a mention several times – and even gave the book it's title. (There's no mention of the duel.)

Wheeler is otherwise cagey on the subject of girls. Apart from Tessa, the only romantic entanglement is a newly liberated Italian contessa, who calls him “the General” before he escapes her advances. He's such an old rascal otherwise I suspect his private life might not have been nearly so tame as the book implies.

There are plenty of vignettes about the celebrities he encountered – such as eminent archaeologists Pitt-Rivers and Petrie. But Wheeler was also clearly interested in everyone, no matter their origin or status. The appeal here is as much his perspective as what he did or who he met. As an archaeologist and war-veteran, he takes the long view and sees his own insignificance in history.

“At its best, this book will be little more than a scrapbook: probably few lives are otherwise, save those of the very successful or the very humdrum.”

But there's also a compelling philosophy behind these rag-tag adventures. On the same page, he says,

“I do not believe in much except hard work, which serves as an antidote to disillusion and a substitute for faith.”
Ibid., p. 9.

He says, but for John and his publishers, he'd have called his book “Twenty Years Asleep” - based on the line in Don Juan that we miss a whole third of our lives. Wheeler is a fidget, too eager to get out and explore all the fascinating stuff. His enthusiasm engaged generations of young archaeologists all around the world, and then the TV-viewing public. That delight in rigorous investigation, and the wry, self-mocking twinkle in his eye, is just as arresting today.

“Whilst adoring luxury I abhor waste, and am firmly of the view that most of us are unconscionably wasteful in this matter of sleep. It must at the same time be added that I have been made aware of other opinions.”
Ibid., p. 205.

AAAGH! and Bernard

2011-09-15T14:55:00.005+01:00

Here's the AAAGH! from issue #234 of Doctor Who Adventures, out a few days after the broadcast of Night Terrors (in which a small boy who is scared of Peg Dolls and a dog must overcome his fears). Issue #235 - out in all good shops today - features some timey-wimey issues that might just possibly be inspired by The Girl Who Waited.

As ever, the script is by me, the art is by Brian Williamson and the strip is edited by Paul Lang and Natalie Barnes - and posted here by kind permission. You can also read all my AAAGH!s so far.

Plugs and plugs

2011-09-10T12:31:00.005+01:00

Sorry - a pluggy post. I have a new CD out this month - Doctor Who and the Memory Cheats starring Wendy Padbury as Zoe Heriot and Charlie Hayes (Wendy's daughter) as Jen. The spooky cover is by clever Marcus at Amazing15 (who I also sometimes work with doing daftness for Doctor Who Adventures). Here is the blurb:

Zoe Heriot remembers everything. But she remembers nothing.

A genius with instant recall, Zoe’s mind has been purged of her memories of travelling with the Doctor and Jamie in the TARDIS. And years later she is in deep trouble – prosecuted by the mysterious company that has evidence that she has travelled in Space and Time.

Except Zoe knows they’re wrong.

Aren’t they?

But if that’s the case, why is there proof that Zoe was in Uzbekistan in 1919.

Can the memory cheat?

The story owes a bit to Col. Bailey's Mission to Tashkent, which I have blogged about before. I'm interviewed about the CD in the new issue of free Vortex magazine (issue #31). Look, my name is even on the cover, as if I am a draw.

My next CD is out in November. Doctor Who and the First Wave is the final part of my trilogy starring Peter Purves and Tom Allen. Me and Will Howells went to see Tom's show in as part of the Scipmylo festival in Shoreditch last night, a chat show with guests Stephen K Amos, Katherine Ryan, Ed Byrne and some bloke called Matt Smith.

Will, Nimbos and the Dr will be on Only Connect on BBC Four on Monday. Oh, and there is a Twitter competition to win tickets to the first screening of my short film Cleaning Up.

Think that's everything.

AAAGH! and the Teselecta

2011-09-09T13:36:00.003+01:00

Another AAAGH!, this from last week's Doctor Who Adventures, issue #233. As always, the strip is illustrated by Brian Williamson and edited by Paul Lang and Natalie Barnes - who gave kind permission for me to post it here.

Issue #234 - currently in all good shops - features another AAAGH! by me, with a Peg Doll and a dog called Bernard. You can also catch up on all my previous AAAGH!s.

Trailer and details for my short film, Cleaning Up

2011-09-06T17:34:00.002+01:00

Cleaning Up - Official Trailer from Guerrier Brothers on Vimeo.

Full cast and crew for Cleaning Up - a short thriller starring Mark Gatiss and Louise Jameson - is now up on the spangly official Guerrier brothersTM webventure. Why not follow @cleaningup_film on Twitter and join the Facebook Cleaning Up experience journey thing.

Screenings start next week with a showing at the Cambridge Film Festival at 1pm on Saturday 17 September, followed by a screening at the Branchage Film Festival in Jersey at 1pm on Sunday 25 September. More screenings and things to come.

AAAGH! Let's Kill Litter

2011-09-01T10:42:00.004+01:00

Another AAAGH! by me, this from #232 of Doctor Who Adventures - published two days before broadcast of the new Doctor Who episode Let's Kill Hitler. It's by me, illustrated by Brian Williamson and edited by Paul Lang and Natalie Barnes - and posted her by kind permission. Have written a whole new run of AAAGH!s, so plenty more to come. Sorry.

Next time (or, in the shops from today): AAAGH! and the Teselecta.

John

2011-08-24T17:45:00.002+01:00

Michael Holroyd's 600-page biography of the painter Augustus John (1878-1861) is a dense, detailed work that's taken me months to get through. I've stopped and started to move house, write my own stuff or read books on comedy or writing or for work. It’s not a book to dip into; for all the comic moments and celebrity cameos, this portrait merits time.

I loved the brooding power of John's portraits when I first saw them during my A-levels, then discovered the artist lurking in old photos of the Fitzroy Tavern (John first met Dylan Thomas there, says the book). I'd seen the book a few times in remainders and second-hand shops, but been scared off by the size and its strikingly ugly cover.

But John's name and work has continued to crop up in other things I've been reading, and when I was in Cardiff in March, his portrait of Mavis Wheeler at the National Museum Wales was the one that held me transfixed. In a few, simple lines – seemingly dashed off – he conveyed not just a beautiful woman but a tantalising sense of her character: thrilling, smart and naughty.

Mavis was wife of another hero of mine, the twinkly archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler. So I thumbed through the book to see if Mortimer got a mention. And bought the book on the basis of this single line:

“Wheeler, Sir Mortimer: challenged to a duel by AJ, 526-7”

Index to Michael Holroyd, Augustus John – The New Biography, p. 717.

Holroyd tells John's life broadly in chronological order, from his days in fear of a strict father in Tenby, through art school rebellion into established notoriety – as much for his private life as his work. John was fascinated by the gypsy life, learning their language, living among them, wearing big hoop ear-rings. And there's a constant wanderlust in the book; in his last few years he seems especially fidgety because he can't just climb into a young woman's bed or disappear off across the country. There’s the striking image of him, a month before he died, frail and ill, but taking part in an anti-bomb sit-in in Trafalgar Square.

John's the archetype of a particular kind of artist: a beardie, boozy, bombastic womaniser, father of too many children to keep track of, constantly getting into rages and fights. He's not a particularly likeable man – he treats his wife Ida particularly badly – but Holroyd mines his antics for detail, insight and comedy. There's a particular gem of rascally, drunk lechery on pages 289-91 that’s got the feel of Withnail. John sneaks round a friend's house at night in search of his two pretty “secretaries”, gets the wrong room and ends up in the nursery with the governess (a dwarf). In the scandal the next morning, he leaves in disgrace but is pursued by the friend who John takes to the pub to set things right, where they get into a boxing match with a complete stranger. As Holroyd says, the stories about John are much more fun to read than be a part of.

For all his unconventional ways, John mixed with key figures of the period, painting their portraits, getting them drunk and – if they were women – fucking them. Ian Fleming's mum, the wives of both Mortimer Wheeler and Dylan Thomas, his own son's girlfriends (and possibly, their wives) and any number of models are included in the list. This sexual appetite is mixed up with anecdotes about his friendships with Hardy, Bertrand Russell, Lawrence of Arabia, Prime Minister Asquith and the Queen.

The book is often engrossing because of other people's lives – John's wife Ida, his sort-of wife Dorelia and sister Gwen are as much part of the story. But even the smaller roles are vivid. Take the subject of the portrait that made me buy the book. Mavis – really Mabel – Wright had an affair with John before she married Mortimer Wheeler. And it looks like they overlapped long afterwards, too. The first mention of her reminded me of Sarah, Pauline Collins' character in the first series of Upstairs, Downstairs:

“About her background she was secretive, confiding only that her mother had been a child stolen by gypsies. In later years she varied this story to the extent of denying, in a manner challenging disbelief, that she was John's daughter by a gypsy. In fact she was the daughter of a grocer's assistant and had been at the age of sixteen a scullery maid. During the General Strike in 1926, she hitchhiked to London, clutching a golf club, and took a post as nursery governess to the children of a clergyman in Wimbledon. A year later she was a waitress at Veeraswamy's, the pioneer Indian restaurant in Swallow Street”.

Ibid., p. 524.

Holroyd uses these relationships to cast light on John's own work. But I found there was generally little analysis of John the painter. The book reproduces only a handful of his works and though we're told of fashions and fights in the art world, I didn't ever feel the book explained or grouped his work. His portraits are discussed in terms of how much they looked like or pleased the sitter:

“Men he was tempted to caricature, women to sentimentalize. For this reason, as the examples of Gerald du Maurier and Tallulah Bankhead suggest, his good portraits of men were less acceptable to their sitters than his weaker pictures of women.”

Ibid., p 469.

There's even less on the style or composition of his landscapes, and his still life work is almost dismissed out of hand. We’re told he only tried clay late in life.

John’s frustration with his own work is evident – a late anecdote has the old man crying in the street at his own lack of ability. Holroyd details him prevaricating for years over particular portraits, or painting over or destroying work he alone seemed not to like. Despite saying that he didn’t fulfil his potential, Holroyd tells us that John worked hard and continually – the cruel irony being that work wasn’t necessarily improved in proportion to the hours devoted.

I'd have liked more on the traditions he worked with in, the tools he used, the kind of brushwork and marks on the canvas. Holroyd seems to agree with critics who claim (and did so at the time) that John never quite realised the promise of his early work, but doesn't venture an opinion on why or what he should have done.

It's a rich and rewarding biography of the man but not the artist.

AAAGH! goes swimming

2011-08-18T10:57:00.005+01:00

Another AAAGH!, this one from Doctor Who Adventures #230 and featuring Craig the Sea Devil, a cat nun, a Cheetah person and a Hath. Written by me, illustrated by Brian Williamson and edited by Natalie Barnes and Paul Lang - and reprinted here by kind permission. Next time: Let's kill litter!

"All you do is quote fact and figures..."

2011-08-13T15:29:00.004+01:00

"'After all, we are in the entertainment business.'
- Ruper Murdoch on the Hitler diaries”
Quoted in Robert Harris, Selling Hitler, p. 293.

The Dr picked up Selling Hitler – The story of the Hitler diaries for 90p in a charity shop. The book was first published in 1986 and this battered paperback with Alexei Sayle mugging on the front was brought out in 1991, to coincide with, says the back cover, “the major five-part ITV drama series, starring Jonathan Pryce, Alan Bennett, Barry Humphries” and Sayle. Yet the true story of a huge publishing swindle seems particularly relevant now: how News International and other publishing companies were so consumed by commercial pressures that they, fatally, ran a major scoop despite serious questions about the source.

It's a fascinating story, Harris detailing the huge market in the 1970s for Nazi-related material. On telly there was Colditz and Secret Army, the papers were tracking down former SS officers to interview and/or bring to justice, and a trade in illicit knick-knacks that the Fuhrer might have touched was commanding ever higher prices – and ever more outlandish fakes. I was also struck by the context in which Hitler's diaries are set.

"It was clear that the only author who might remotely be compared Adolf Hitler was Henry Kissinger. His memoirs had been syndicated across the globe in 1979 in an intricate network of deals, simultaneous release dates and subsidiary rights, which was a wonder to behold. Hitler was probably bigger than Kissinger – 'hotter', as the Americans put it.”
Ibid., p. 210.

Forger Konrad Kujau produced a pile of diaries, hundreds of paintings, notes and manuscripts – most as if by Hitler, but also corroborating details from those in his inner circle. His previous forgeries had been already spotted by – or embarrassed – other historians and publishers. If the German magazine Stern and the other publishers had been more open with their haul and sought more opinions, the whole fraud would have collapsed much sooner.

Harris is good at explaining the slow erosion of the experts' doubts and hesitance. The reputation of Lord Dacre (Hugh Trevor-Roper) was seriously damaged by his authenticating the diaries as genuine, but we see how he was given little time and little access, and was apparently lied to. Those with the skills and experience to make judgments – scientists, historians, those who'd dealt with forgeries, journalists who'd seen this kind of thing before – were not let in on the secret or only in limited ways.

But even as the deals were being signed, on Wednesday, 20 April 1983, Philip Knightly at the Times listed his own concerns, based on having seen the costs incurred by faked Mussolini diaries in 1968. His concerns perfectly spell out the errors being made under commercial pressure to rush out the exclusive:

"Questions to consider:
What German academic experts have seen all the diaries? Has, for instance, the Institute of Contemporary History seen them?
What non-academic British experts have seen all the diaries? Has David Irving seen them?
How thoroughly has the vendor explained where the diaries have been all these years and why that have surfaced now: the fiftieth anniversary of Hitler's accession to power.
The crux of the matter is that secrecy and speed work for the con man. To mount a proper check would protect us but would not be acceptable to the vendor. We should insist on doing our own checks and not accept the checks of any other publishing organisation.”
Quoted in ibid., p. 290.

I've quoted Jacob Bronowski before describing Nazism as a faith not a science because it preferred certainty not awkward questions. The history of Agent Zigzag showed that the Nazi secret service were less effective than the British because the Nazis could not admit weaknesses of intelligence information. The same thing seems to be going on here – the various editors and management people were so keen on the publishing event of the century that they trapped themselves in the story. They wanted to believe so they ignored the doubts.

As it is, David Irving became the unlikely sceptic-hero who wouldn't stop asking awkward questions and pulled down the whole house of cards. A little like, I thought, Hugh Grant suddenly becoming the moral arbiter on phone-hacking, or John Prescott this week on Question Time being criticised for always bringing up “facts and figures” to support his case.

But I've also been fascinated by the insight into the culture at News International so soon after Murdoch had taken over the Times.

"In the spring of 1983 ... [Murdoch] ruled his empire in a manner not dissimilar to that which Hitler employed to run the Third Reich. His theory of management was Darwinian. His subordinates were left alone to run their various outposts of the company. Ruthlessness and drive were encouraged, slackness and inefficiency punished. Occasionally, Murdoch would swoop in to tackle a problem or exploit an opportunity; then he would disappear. He was, depending on your standing at any given moment, inspiring, friendly, disinterested or terrifying. He never tired of expansion, of pushing out the frontiers of his operation. 'Fundamentally,' Richard Searby, his closest adviser, was fond of remarking, 'Rupert's a fidget.'”
Ibid., pp. 263-4.

With publishing and broadcast subsidiaries, Murdoch was in prime position to fully exploit the diaries. Harris says Murdoch could be furious and sweary as well as ruthless. He was explosive when Stern reneged on a deal for the diaries after they'd shaken hands. And he refused to be played off against the buyers from Newsweek – instead, making a deal with Newsweek to buy the rights together and share them out to mutal advantage. When Stern tried again to bump up the price, Murdoch and Newsweek walked out – and Stern were forced to pursue them and offer a much lower price. It's an astonishing, shrewd and wily bit of dealing. And all, of course, in vain.

If there's one criticism of Harris' book, it's the lack of notes or references. A lot of his material comes from publicly accessible reports and inquiries that followed the swindle being exposed. But he also says in his acknowledgments that,

"Almost all this information came to me on the understanding that its various sources would not be identified publicly.”
Ibid., p. 9.

So we have to take his story on trust.

Events, dear boy, events

2011-08-12T10:17:00.005+01:00

I've reviewed Project Nim for the Lancet. It's slightly informed by a post here a while back about Baboon Metaphysics.

Will resist the temptation to link ape behaviour to the events in London and round the country this week. On Monday, we could see the fire in Croydon from our house - smoke and helicopters in an otherwise clear and moonlit sky. We followed it on the news until the news stopped having anything new to say. Over the next couple of days we saw lots of police cars and vans whizzing about and my train was a bit delayed on Monday.

On Tuesday, we thought we get out of the house for lunch and wandered up the hill to the nice coffee shop. A small number of women and children were running towards us, terrified by reports of rioters coming our way. We turned round and walked back down the hill - and the reports turned out to be untrue. Tesco was busy with people as we bought lunch, with lots of people on the tills trying to serve customers quickly (truly a sign of the End of Times). The staff were also lining up trolleys in front of the shop windows, building a barricade. And there was a palpable sense of terror - all anticipating the worst.

And yet outside it was sunny and quiet and people were getting on with their lives. It was all a bit strange and surreal - and unsettling - but there's not a lot to report. Had to do some extra work yesterday as a result of the riots, but even that was pretty quiet.

So, other stuff...

I'll also be talking about the Tomb of the Cybermen and Tutankhamun with Christopher Frayling and John J Johnston at the free Cybertut event next month. Do come along. There will probably be wine.

And the new issue of Doctor Who Adventures (#230) features another AAAGH comic strip by me. I helped out at at a DWA event at the Doctor Who Experience last week - and got to sneak round the exhibition too. It is cool. There is a Zygon and an Ice Warrior and even, if you look for it, the swimming pool robot from Paradise Towers.

Otherwise, caught up in a bundle-load of writing, which I must get back to...

AAAGH! - The Romancing of Mrs Tinkle

2011-08-04T08:37:00.003+01:00

I've been back at Doctor Who Adventures recently, and written four more AAAGH!s. This one is from #228, which was a Cyberman special.

Script by me, art by Brian Williamson, edited by Natalie Barnes and Paul Lang - and posted here by kind permission. Next time: Craig the Sea Devil.

Also, I'll be joining the DWA gang at the Doctor Who Experience tomorrow to explain how we make the mag and its comic strips. Do come along.

Basket case

2011-07-25T18:25:00.003+01:00

Blue Cat's protest sit-in while building works commenced this morning:

Jaunt

2011-07-24T11:24:00.010+01:00

Had a nice couple of days' escape from London before our building work starts in earnest. Went to Ely for the afternoon, mooched round the cathedral and Cromwell's House (I was there in 2007, too), then fell into a pub.

Spent the evening in Cambridge eating pizza at Torchwood, and next morning did the Sedgwick -

- and Fitzwilliam museums.

The Dr loved the newly redesigned Greek and Roman bits, and I found some beautiful Augustus John landscapes and even a sculpture by Eric Gill. So that was nice.

Thence lunch with A. and A. and a trip to the Polar Museum, with its ceiling maps of the poles by Gill's brother MacDonald. The museum is mostly now about the indigenous peoples of the Arctic, but there's plenty of material on polar exploration by Europeans, and the story of Scott's ill-fated mission still packs one hell of a punch.

Spent the afternoon punting and pottering (I found the alleyway from Shada / The Five Doctors). The Fort St George pub has carved ladies behind the bar that seem to be slightly naughtier versions of the caryatids.

Then went to dinner at Cotto which was, frankly, amazing.

Next day we schlepped back to London and mooched round the Out of this World exhibition at the British Library, which is packed with detail. Rather pleased I'd read the majority of the key texts, though think it misses a trick by not addressing issues of race and class that are often so implicit in ideas of the "alien". And it still seems strange to see a sci-fi exhibition feature lots of Doctor Who but no Star Trek (though my teenage self would have cheered).

Looked through the windows of the Gilbert Scott restaurant which the Dr would like a trip to for her birthday. Instead we had a drink in the bar at St Pancras, where the service was immaculate. Went for a pee, though, to find this lady staring down at me.

Home to feed the cats and then out to dinner with @classicdw to tweet all about Robot - Tom Baker's first story as Doctor Who. Lovely tea afterwards and then home. Done some rewrites this morning and now off to a birthday party, with a long week of typing and building work to come.

Chase me

2011-07-20T19:07:00.004+01:00

ZOMG! I love Simon Holub's amazing cover for Doctor Who and the First Wave, a play what I have wrote starring Peter Purves and Tom Allen.

Parliamoont

2011-07-15T10:13:00.004+01:00

Long week. Knackered. But took this photo last night as I stumbled home.

The Turing test

2011-07-09T11:31:00.002+01:00

I am writing more Blake's 7.

The BBC sci-fi show ran between 1978 and 1981, with a bunch of plucky heroes battling the evil Earth Federation, with plenty of fights and explosions. It was created by the chap that devised the Daleks.

Big Finish announced on Monday that they'll be producing new audio adventures featuring the original cast of the TV show. The first box of three stories in "The Liberator Chronicles" is by me, Nigel Fairs and Peter Anghelides, with Justin Richards and David Richardson cracking the whip. There will also be new Blake's 7 books. My story is called "The Turing Test".

Pre-order Blake's 7: The Liberator Chronicles

You can also read an interview with David about the series. The deal was done with B7 Enterprises - who hold the rights to Blake's 7, and for whom I've already written two audio episodes. It's also running a Blake's 7 t-shirt competition on Twitter.

The next wave

2011-07-01T08:28:00.003+01:00

Those splendid fellows at Big Finish have announced two more Doctor Who plays by me.

The First Wave is out in November, starring Peter Purves, Tom Allen and the Vardans. The Anachronauts is out in January 2012, starring Peter Purves and Jean Marsh.

Reel time

2011-06-28T12:56:00.004+01:00

You Tube now boasts a new show reel by Alex Mallinson showing his CGI skillz.

It includes clips from Alex's amazing Bernice Summerfield "Dead and Buried" cartoon (also available in full), the Cyberman DVD documentary he did for me and the brother, and some sneaky peeks at our short film, Cleaning Up.

Alex is also after your face for the cover of Graceless 2.

The Impassable Sky

2011-06-27T12:50:00.003+01:00

As every child knows, The Gunfighters was the last Doctor Who story to have individual episodes until The Five Doctors, A Fix With Sontarans, Doctor Who (also known as the TV movie) and then Rose onwards.

On that basis, my Companion Chronicles squeezed into gaps before The Gunfighters have all had individual episode titles, at least on the scripts. I got asked online what the titles were for my latest effort, The Cold Equations, and a clever chap called Chris of Fenric then went and made this, which I like.

The awkward age

2011-06-23T11:52:00.004+01:00

I was in Copenhagen at the weekend. The Dr had been there for a week shadowing a new Egyptology exhibition and I joined her for the last couple of nights.

On Saturday, with my birthday hoving into view, we trained out to the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, with five different kinds of longship on display and lots of other cool stuff.

I liked how much they used the Bayeaux tapestry to show how these people once lived: gleaning from the comic-strip history vital clues about colours, tools and shapes, even the haircuts of different groups of people.

A panel on the history of the Vikings describes them getting over their 'awkward age' (i.e. marauding round other countries, raping and pillaging) in time to lead the Europeans on their crusades (i.e. marauding round other countries, rapings and pillaging).

But it also gave the lie to the Vikings as burly savages, showing the sophistication of their work. The ships were made from flexible, bendy planks, and then expanded over the fire to make them longer and lighter. That made strong, flexible and nippy crafty, ideal for stealth operations. But larger ships could carry plenty of cargo, and (as in Jonathan Clements' Brief History of the Vikings) there was a lot of emphasis on the friendly trade that was much more the norm than the pillaging.

Having read the Sagas of the Icelanders last year, it was good to see lots on the multicultural mixing of the time. As I explained to the Dr, the history of the Vikings is inextricably mixed up with the history of the UK.

As well as the original ships, expertly preserved, there was also a lot on the experimental archaeological project to rebuild a longship and sail it across the North Sea and circumnavigate the UK. This meant lots of footage and panels about sea-sickness, which at best disrupted watches and basic ship duties and at worst took out a third of the crew. Watching the crowded boat sitting so low in stormy and dark water, I got a sense of why the Vikings might not have been in the best moods when they arrived anywhere.

In the drizzle outside the museum there were tourists in horned helmets (though the Vikings didn't wear horns) rowing for themselves, and various beardie people at stalls selling hand-crafted Vikingish tat. I settled for a chicken sandwich - and was delighted to discover that the Danish word for chicken is 'kylling'. And just by the museum is a small fast-food place: Viking Pizza.

The Dr also took me round the prehistoric bits of the National Museum, and had clearly had a lovely week exploring other museums in the week. Copenhagen's a friendly, bustling city crammed full of people on bikes. I had a lovely time and only saw a small fraction, so am hoping to go back again.

AAAGH! goes to war

2011-06-16T11:18:00.003+01:00

Another AAAGH! from issue #221 of Doctor Who Adventures - which stopped being on sale yesterday. Written by me, art by Brian Williamson, edited by Paul Lang (who insisted on pink Krotons) and Natalie Barnes - and posted here by kind permission.

It's my mid-season finale (because I don't have any more AAAGH!s in the pipeline as yet). So I'll have to fill this blog with something else.

Oh, I am going to Copenhagen tomorrow.

AAAGH! at Eurovision

2011-06-15T15:12:00.003+01:00

Here's another AAAGH! by me, this one from issue #217 of Doctor Who Adventures, on sale two days before the Eurovision final. Art by Brian Williamson, edited by Paul Lang and Natalie Barnes and posted here by kind permission.

Tomorrow: A good AAAGH! goes to war!

AAAGH! v the Silence

2011-06-14T11:46:00.003+01:00

Here's the AAAGH! from issue #216 of Doctor Who Adventures, the week after Day of the Moon was broadcast. It was written by me, drawn by Brian Williamson and edited by Paul Lang and Natalie Barnes - who gave kind permission to post it here.

Tomorrow: AAAGH! at Eurovision.

AAAGH! at Easter

2011-06-13T13:58:00.003+01:00

Another AAAGH! comic strip, this from issue #215 of Doctor Who Adventures, published the week after Easter. Written by me, art by Brian Williamson and edited by Paul Lang and Natalie Barnes - who kindly gave permission to post it here. Next time: AAAGH! meets the Silence.

AAAGH! meets the Doctor

2011-06-10T12:46:00.002+01:00

Another AAAGH!, this time from Doctor Who Adventures #213 earlier this year. You might like to know that AAAGH! goes to war in the current issue out in shops now, in a strip featuring the Krotons, a Slitheen and Chris Moyles.

As always, the above strip is by me, illustrated by Brian Williamson and edited by the splendid Paul Lang and Natalie Barnes, and posted up here with permission. Paul's also posted up one of his AAAGH!s - in which Nervil and Mrs Tinkle meet the EastEnders.

Blam! Blam! Blam!

2011-06-09T16:58:00.003+01:00

Feast your eyes on Stuart Manning's brilliant poster for Cleaning Up, a short film starring Mark Gatiss, Louise Jameson and Anton Romaine Thompson. It's directed by Thomas Guerrier and - by some staggering coincidence - written by me.

We're in the final stages of post-production and are already elbows deep in submissions to film festivals and whatnot. I'll be hollering on a lot more when there's more to be hollered, but in the mean time you can join the Cleaning Up Facebook massive and the official Cleaning Up Twitter experience.

The Ordeal

2011-06-08T17:47:00.003+01:00

It’s 20 years since I took my first GCSEs - four of them, a year early, what with going to posh school. Tomorrow morning, me and Nimbos and a motley gang of heroes sit GCSE Astronomy, which we’ve been studying at the ROG since September.

It’s been a really interesting course. I’ve looked through a telescope for the first time, ordered a robotic telescope in Las Palmas to take pictures of galaxies for me, and had some nice nights out in the pub. But there’s a massive amount to keep all in my head and I’d forgotten my keen terror of exams.

It doesn’t help that exams are so entirely counter-intuitive to a hack like me. I spend a lot of my life having to write authoritatively about complicated subjects, which means reading up on them quickly, distilling that simply and then doing check upon check. I try to use at least two reliable sources and then get someone expert to read it over anyway.

This very process got me on to the course. I asked television’s Marek Kukula to read over my first draft of Doctor Who and the Cold Equations. With great tact he explained my grasp of the complex stuff was quite good, but my basic maths and physics was appalling.

Too often as I’ve revised my scrawling notes and gone through past papers my first thought has been, ‘I know where to find the answer to that’. I know exactly which book has the best looking Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, which photocopies unpick the Equation of Time and which magazine details all the things the Huygens probe found out about Titan.

The freelance skill, hard learned over years, is to know where to check these things and not to rely on my memory. Or that’s what I’m telling myself as I jangle in terror at the coming ordeal.

AAAGH! and the Atraxi

2011-06-07T13:46:00.006+01:00

Another AAAGH!, this time from issue #209 and featuring the Atraxi and a Weeping Angel. As before, script by me, art by Brian Williamson, edited by Paul Lang and Natalie Barnes, and posted up here with the kind permission of the lovely Doctor Who Adventures.

AAAGH! and the Racnoss

2011-06-06T14:23:00.005+01:00

Putting up my AAAGH! meets Idris comic strip went down well so I've permission from my splendid bosses at Doctor Who Adventures magazine (every Thursday, with free gifts and mayhem) to put up more.

Each week, young Nervil and his robot Mrs Tinkle, find jobs for old Doctor Who monsters. This is my first one, from issue 207 in February. It features the Empress of the Racnoss (from The Runaway Bride), and a joke in the last panel which I came up with when I was little.

Written by me, illustrated by clever Brian Williamson, edited by Paul Lang and Natalie Barnes.

Two plays

2011-06-01T12:53:00.005+01:00

I have two new plays out this month. Sorry.

First there's Dark Shadows - The Creeping Fog, Click the link for trailer, more details and to buy the damnable thing. The story, set in a London museum during the Second World War, stars David Selby (he's in The Social Network, you know) and Matthew Waterhouse. Thrillingly, it's Matthew's Big Finish debut (but he's not playing Adric. Or is he? Is he?!? No he isn't.)

Producers James Goss and Joseph Lidster commissioned me because I didn't know too much about Dark Shadows. They wanted a standalone, spooky story that would appeal to old-skool fans of Dark Shadows but also to a broader audience. So this is, clearly, the perfect thing to buy now so that you're all set for the Tim Burton/Johnny Depp movie next year. Yes it is. Quiet at the back.

Lots more about Dark Shadows at the Collinwood site, run by clever Stuart Manning who also did the cover for my story.

Then there's Doctor Who and the Cold Equations, starring Peter Purves and Tom Allen. Click the link for a trailer, more details and to buy yourself six copies. It's an exciting space adventure which has already earned 10/10 from the nice Doc Oho. Following on from The Adventure of the Perpetual Bond, the first Doctor Who and his friends Steven and Oliver find themselves on a spaceship... and things then go a bit wonky with aliens and stuff.

The lovely cover is by Simon Holub. Tom is interviewed in the new, free issue of Vortex magazine (issue 28). We recorded a third Steven and Oliver story last week.

Some comics

2011-05-30T16:14:00.003+01:00

Very exciting to see that there'll be a book of Jamie Smart's amazing Doctor Who searches. I've loved Jamie's work since I first saw Fish-Head Steve in the DFC - which you can now read in full on his site. And for older but no less silly readers, there's also Corporate Skull, again free and on the internet, you lucky, lucky swine.

But enough about other people.

As well as lovely, silly, AAAGH!, I've also been writing a few other comic strips for Doctor Who Adventures. That includes "The Very Cool Bow Tie!" in issue 218 (from a couple of weeks back) which included Amy and Rory in pre-Raphaelite costume for no other reason than my amusement.

I raise this as I've not really talked about comics work on here before. I've pitched on-and-off to 2000AD since I was 16, and am still gathering rejections. But as well as Doctor Who Adventures, I've written comics and short stories for GE Fabbri's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, have just completed a comic drawn by William Potter about a team of superheroes, some of whom are autistic, and wrote an eight-page strip for Electric Sheep magazine.

The strip, "Final Cut" is drawn by Pearlyn Quan and you can see a PDF preview here. I wrote it last summer, and am a bit surprised reading it now how not-entirely-cheery it is.

Francis Galton and eugenics

2011-05-28T14:13:00.003+01:00

YouTube now boasts a video of the Dr's short lecture on Francis Galton and the legacy of eugenics, but I don't seem to be able to embed it here so you'll have to click the link.

Galton, who invented the term eugenics and liked his statistics, also sported a fine pair of sideburns which are still the fashion. The Dr's worked on exhibitions and things to mark the centenary of his death.

AAAGH!

2011-05-27T11:46:00.003+01:00

Since January, Doctor Who Adventures has featured a back-up comic strip, AAAGH, in which a small boy and a robot lady find odd jobs for Doctor Who monsters. It's basically an excuse for mayhem, silliness and celebrity guests. I have written a whole bundle of them, usually while giggling madly. Here's Idris, Doctor Who's wife and wheels in one, popping by the office.

Doctor Who Adventures is out every Thursday. Thanks to Paul Lang, creator of AAAGH and evil overlord, and editor Natalie Barnes.

Podcasts

2011-05-23T20:53:00.003+01:00

Three podcasts on which I witter:

Bad Wilf
Me and Joseph Lidster on writing, recorded 5 March 2011.

Radio Free Skaro
Me and brother/boss Tom Guerrier discussing our Doctor Who DVD documentaries in January.

Adventures in Time and Space and Music
I rabbit on about stuff, including music in Doctor Who, while a bit jet-lagged in Chicago last November.

Rules for hacks

2011-05-21T14:24:00.006+01:00

At least a year ago, Erykah asked for some advice on being a freelance writer. I've been freelance since August 2002 and have employed lots of freelancers – but couldn't think of anything particularly useful. Since then, I've been scribbling things down as they occur and have got a list. What follows is some things I was told when I started out and some things I wish I'd been told.

“The code is more what you'd call 'guidelines' than actual rules.”
Barbossa, Pirates of the Carribean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003).

First, there's no great secret to writing. You write stuff, you try to make it as good as possible and you send it to people.

While you wait for them to reject it, you write something else. You collect rejection letters. Some of them will include advice or guidance, or even ask you to send something else. Then, if you're both good and lucky, you might get some work. If you don't muck that up, you might get some more work. Slowly, gradually, you get more.

You keep writing, trying to make it as good as possible and sending it to people. The rejection letters still come...

Then there's what I wrote three years ago:

Nobody owes you a job
Really, they don't. Even if you know them, even if you bought them drinks, even if they employed you before. Even if your idea or finished story is the most fantabulous thing in the universe. When they say "no", they mean it. Don't hang on like a stalker ex. You just walk away.

Likewise, if they say, "That sounds interesting - email me," or "Can you write that up," that's code for "Go away just now." Don't continue to harrass them about your brilliant idea; you're just making them less likely to love it. Especially if they're in a pub or anywhere else not on duty. They don't owe you this. And it's really very creepy if you're still following on their heels, explaining your brilliant idea, as they go to the toilet.

(This happened to me once. Well-meaning bloke still pitching to me while I was having a pee.)

Make it easy
James quotes the great Wil Wheaton's "Don't be a dick". And that's true. Be as not like a dick as you can be. (I see various people at least raising their eyebrows at me of all people saying this.) But also make things easy for the people you are working with, and also those people you're not. It's a small world and you never know when you'll bump into these people again, or what position they'll be in. You don't want to be the difficult genius who makes everyone's lives just impossible. Be the perfectly competent workman who can just get on with the job.

That doesn't mean just doing whatever they say. If you think something's wrong, you say it; you get to argue your case. But if whoever's in charge then makes a decision, you kind of have to abide by it. No use storming off or shouting at them. They're the ones in charge. As it will tell you in the contract you signed.

You don't want to have to surrender your genius? Well, you'll have to produce it yourself. Good luck! You want someone to stump up the cash and make your writing into a real thing? Then they get a say.

Don't get comfortable
Once you've been doing this a while, once you've found your style and "voice", make sure you're still stretching. Try different styles, try different voices. The broader portfolio of things you can do, the more likely you'll stay employed. But also (and perhaps more importantly) the more you stretch and hone your writing. As one editor told me recently, when it feels easy you are doing it wrong.

Pay the rent
There's this idea of writers in smocks in garrets, all booze and syphilis and frustration. I know people who've lived off food parcels, or been late on a deadline 'cos their word processing kit got impounded by bailiffs. Get a day job if you need to. Get one that involves writing if you can. (Again, writing adverts and labels and speeches and jokes all stretches what you can do.)

And don't carp on at your editors, like it's all their fault. Especially when they pay you on time. You don't want to give them the impression they employ you out of pity rather than 'cos you're good.

Call for back-up
I've got an accountant, know a few lawyers and have used their sage advice quite a lot. It's much easier to chase madly late payment. One time I was several thousand pounds out of pocket at Christmas, and had to get a lawyer involved. Having big guns on your side is good because they have to start taking you seriously.

(I don't, though, have an agent. I don't need one for what I do at the moment; it's all take-it-or-leave-it fixed rates and conditions. It's haggling over that stuff which - I think without having one - that an agent is for. They have the awkward conversations so that you don't have to. They're not there to edit your stuff or tell you you're brilliant (though the good ones do that as well).

Enjoy it
You don't have to be a writer. Or rather, you can write just for yourself. So if you're going to make a go of writing for a living, just remember that it's your choice. 'Cos if it's just like any other daggy old job, you might as well get one with more regular payment and hours.

And also try to:

Do as you're told
Write what you've been asked for, to the word count and deadline. If that's ever going to be a problem, say so in advance – your editor should never have to chase you.
Ask questions you don't know the answers to
What's the point of writing something that only confirms what you already know? Even if you're explaining something, make sure it includes something you didn't know when you started.
Avoid lies
There's an internet eager to catch you getting things wrong in your writing. But also, don't lie about the work you've done or people you've worked for. Older freelancers might say they faked stuff on their CVs early in their careers but these days it's much easier to check obscure references.
Be skeptical not cynical
Let meaning choose
If you haven't already, read George Orwell's Politics and the English Language, which is such a brilliant manifesto for good writing.
Say yes to work if you can
At least when you're starting out, you don't know what a job might lead to and it's also good to be the person editors go to when they get stuck.
Add something that's just you
Sometimes called "added value", there are 100 other hacks queued up to take off you, so what makes what you do unique?
See people in person
You're more likely to be kept in mind – and get more work – if people see you in person. That doesn't mean stalking your editors, but an occasional meet-up is good (and often involves drinkies). Also, many people who don't work from home think you're getting away with something if you do - and, of course, you are.
Always have a notebook on you
And use it. Bit of stories, bits of dialogue you overhear, things you see in the news. Partly it means you'll retain these gems, but also you'll free your brain to think of more ideas.
Listen
This includes listening to yourself, honing your instincts about what works and what doesn't. Paul Abbot described Russell T Davies as making “good choices” in his writing
Keep up with paperwork, contracts, invoices
Show don't tell
Use the medium
If you're writing TV, write something that couldn't be a film. If you're writing audio, write something that couldn't be a novel.
Write something every day

Selling out
If you're going to sell out, at least a good price. (That one from my late Grandpa.)

Voice
You often get told when you're starting out that you need to develop your own voice in your writing. And while that's true, I'm not really sure how you do that other than to write lots of stuff. So don't worry about the voice, just keep writing.

It's not just the writing
Punctuality, reliability and how easy you are to work with are all important. This happens a lot: an editor says they need a freelancer. People in the office suggest people who do good work: A, B and C. “But A is annoying to sit next to,” says one of the subs. “And B never makes the tea,” says one of the designers. “C bought us Percy Pigs!” remembers the posh chap in marketing. Freelancer C gets the job.

A list
The only power you have as a freelancer is to turn work down. So you've little control about where your career goes or the sorts of work you might do – you can pitch for stuff, but you might not get it. When I started out, a wise man suggested writing a long list of everything I quite fancied writing, big and small, likely and fantastic. Once you've got that list, you can work out which items need to come first. For example, you (now) won't get to write a Doctor Who book until you've written some other books – so get on with those other books. You won't be asked to write an episode of Doctor Who until you've written some other TV – so get on with your spec script.

Your own stuff
I wish I'd been told this at the start rather than slowly working it out. I love writing spin-off stuff – and it's made up a lot of my career, But the stuff that will make your name and give you most satisfaction is the stuff that's completely your creation. (It's also the stuff that's most likely to make your fortune, since you don't have to share or hand rights to anybody else.)

Ideas are the easy bit
Don't be precious about your ideas. Having a good idea is like spotting someone pretty. The hard work is getting them to go out with you.

Don't fuck the fans
It's easy to exploit people who like your work. They might buy you drinks or ask advice or want something more personal than an autograph. It's not you they want but your status, your validation for their investment. So don't take the piss. You're not required to give them time, but at least be polite. If you are going to conventions and things, remember that it's work. And most importantly, make what you're writing worth their time. Fans should make you try harder.

You are not important
You're judged by your work, so make that work good and let it speak for itself. Also, watch how you deport yourself online – Twitter, Facebook and blogs are also you writing. What do your entries there say about you as a writer? People who might give you work are likely to google your name first - will they be impressed by what they see? Don't be dooced and don't be a dick.

You can also read James Moran's advice on writing from back in 2008.

Normal service will be resumed

2011-05-21T14:23:00.000+01:00

Hello. Not blogged in ages. Been caught up in lots of things. Moved house, took on lots of work, have an exam next month... But even the Dr noticed I'd neglected the blog, so I shall endeavour to do better. Starting now.

The balloon hoax

2011-04-02T13:45:00.005+01:00

Went to see Piccard in Space last night, a new opera by Will Gregory, best known for his work with Goldfrapp. It told the story of Auguste Piccard - inspiration for Professor Calculus in Tintin and, with his brother, for Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek - travelling up to the Stratosphere in 1931, in a balloon of his own design to conduct an experiment on light that would prove Einstein's theory of relativity.

Einstein appeared, wild-haired and womanising, to explain the experiment - though I only understood it because the same light experiment was the subject of Jim Al-Khalili's brilliant documentary, Everything and Nothing, last week.

Piccard got the audience to sing along to the formula for the deviation of time, there were a few good jokes (a big song about a broken barometer leaking mercury that would eat up the aluminium balloon and so kill our heroes undercut by the mercury being 'hoovered' away by low pressure, or Piccard explaining that he is not from Mars but Belgium), and it was all quite fun.

But the departing audience no wiser about what exactly Piccard had proved or how, or even why Newton was made out to be such a villain. So if the plan was to excite and inspire people who wouldn't normally be interested in complicated physics, it didn't exactly work. Worse, the promised Moog synthesisers never really stood out, and I've seen better lab-coated nerdy performances from the Radiophonic Workshop. (That's still a much kinder response than reviews in the Independent and Telegraph.)

But, prompted by the conductor, we followed the performance by traipsing over to Festival Hall to see the real balloon on display. Small, fragile, primitive, making the achievement and the daring to attempt it all the more extraordinary... A real source of wonder.

Mrs King

2011-03-24T20:34:00.017Z

Very busy with new house and work stuff, but here's the talk I gave on 10 February at the National Portrait Gallery...

Next month, a 29 year-old former accessories buyer for the clothing chain Jigsaw will marry a flight lieutenant from the RAF. But this won't be any ordinary wedding: Kate Middleton is marrying Prince William, second in line to the British throne.

The couple have always attracted attention from the press but the announcement last November of their wedding was something else. Every British paper ran the story on their front page – and all of them had an angle.

"Kate's very special," said the Daily Telegraph, playing up the romance. As with many papers, it highlighted the fact that the engagement ring is the one worn by William's late mother, Diana, Princess of Wales – and skirted over how her marriage had turned out. This is the royal wedding as fairy-tale.

The Daily Mail didn't seem quite so delighted. Yes, the engagement is a cause for celebration, but it's headline chides, "We got there in the end, darling," as if annoyed at having been kept waiting – or as if the happy couple owed it to the paper and the country to get engaged sooner. The Mail was also quick off the mark to use the announcement to flog some commemorative merchandise. It's the royal wedding as product, meeting the demands of its market.

"A royal wedding in the age of austerity," mused the Guardian, taking a step back to place the announcement in its socio-economic context, asking what it said about the state of the nation as a whole. Yes, okay, it's a royal wedding, but what's in it for us?

One paper didn't overtly lead with the happy couple.

There's cheery. At first sight – and in the news-stand next to other papers – this seems completely different: no smiling, happy couple, not even any colour. But what's that down in the corner? "I wish her well," says columnist Julie Burchill, "but Kate Middleton is marrying beneath her."

For all it's doing it's own thing, the Independent is still taking a position on the story. Burchill's column is a reversal of earlier press criticism of Middleton – that she wasn't posh enough for the prince. There were reports in 2007 that she used inappropriate words like “toilet” and “pardon”. Several papers have discussed whether it's appropriate for our future queen to have a job, or that her parents run a small mail-order business.

The key word is appropriate. The papers – and perhaps the rest of us – seem to believe that anyone marrying a king or queen must have an appropriate pedigree, curriculum vitae and vocabulary. But the role of consort has no formal definition, and it's a role that Kate's various predecessors have all struggled with.

I'm going to look briefly at five other people who married kings and queens of England. I'm going to look at how much power and influence they had, and what they might tell us about the role Queen Catherine will play in future.

NPG x36017 Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh
by Dorothy Wilding
chlorobromide print, 1947
11 7/8 in. x 10 in. (303 mm x 253 mm) overall
© William Hustler and Georgina Hustler / National Portrait Gallery, London

This dashing chap is the current consort, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. The photo is from 1947, the year he married the then Princess Elizabeth.

Unlike Kate Middleton, Philip was already royal. Both he and the queen are great, great grandchildren of Queen Victoria. He was born Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, nephew of the then king of Greece. A year after Philip was born, King Constantine was deposed and the royal family had to flee the country. Philip was, famously, carried away in a cot made from an old fruit box.

So he grew up as a prince in exile. He was taught at the Schule Sloss Salem school in Germany, which has been set up by Kurt Hahn after the First World War with the explicit intention of producing leaders for the future. When Philip was 12, Hahn was arrested for criticising the Nazis. After his release he moved to Britain and set up a new Salem school in Scotland – Gordonstoun. The young Prince Philip was one of his first students, and his sons and grandsons also went there.

I wonder how much the prince's exile and education under the Nazi-hating Hahn influenced the consort he became. As I said before, there's no formal definition of a consort's role.

Jeremy Paxman interviewed Prince Philip for his book, On Royalty, published in 2006, and asked him about his role when his wife took the throne. “I did ask various people what I was expected to do,” said the prince. “And?” asked Paxman. “They sort of looked down and shuffled their feet,” (p. 234).

Instead, the prince has been able to make the role his own. I think his education and his family's exile have taught him to be useful, to make a contribution to the advancement of the country and its people. Paxman likens him to his predecessor as Queen's Consort, Prince Albert, and remarks on a similar “Teutonic approach to work”. Paxman speaks of a “more than nominal” involvement in the 800 organisations of which the prince is patron.

We can see the influence of his old school in the Duke of Edinburgh's Award, set up in the late 1950s to encourage the personal development of young people through volunteering, self-reliance, the learning of skills and sport. Since then, some 4 million young people – from all backgrounds – have taken part.

Prince Philip was a thoroughly modern consort, too, championing science and industry. He was the first royal to be interviewed on television, and was also a TV presenter. Watch Prince Philip host a live programme for the BBC's The Restless Sphere series on 30 June 1957.

It's an extraordinary programme. For more than 70 minutes, the young prince single-handedly explains the experiments to be carried out during the International Geophysical Year, including early satellite technology, solar observation and oceanography. It's fascinating to watch him deftly explain complex technical ideas, work the different props, link to and fill time around pre-recorded segments from all across the world, and generally keep the show running smoothly. In another life, he might have presented Tomorrow's World. He cuts a rather dashing figure, a Renaissance man from a far off time when we still just about had an Empire.

But the prince also discusses evidence from different sources around the world that the oceans are rising and glaciers melting – as if the climate were changing. He tells us that more evidence – much more evidence, gathered over many decades – will be needed to know for sure. And over the next decades, he championed that research and concerns about the environment. Watch Prince Philip on breakfast show TV-am in November 1987.

In many ways, the prince was ahead of the game on the environment. Perhaps his position as a statesman without portfolio, constantly meeting experts and representatives in every walk of life, gives him a unique position. He's continually briefed on the latest scientific findings, and he uses his position to share them with the rest of us.

He's still speaking on the subject today, but two things have changed. First, there has been increasing evidence for climate change and increasing numbers of people speaking about it – and against it. It has become more fashionable and political – and the royal family as a whole are expected to avoid political statements.

And secondly, something has changed about the way the royal family is represented.

“A huffy note enters his voice when he talks about how his family have been treated by the mass media,” says Paxman, who then quotes the prince: “'It is absolutely extraordinary what has happened in the last thirty years. I mean, before that we were accepted as quite normal sorts of people. But now, I mean now I reckon I have done something right if I don't appear in the media. Because I know that any appearance in it will be one of criticism.'”

That's from a chapter in the book called “Gilded but gelded”, all about the royal family's relationship with the press. That's a big subject – too big to get into here, so I'll just recommend Paxman's book. Instead I want to stay on the consort's role and responsibilities – and the fact that Prince Philip says that no one else told him what he was required to do. He has clearly set out to be useful, to help people fulfil their potential and to help the world. But his response to the way the press now responds suggests another motivation.

“I will be criticized for doing something,” he told Paxman. “So I've retreated – quite consciously – so as not to be an embarrassment. I don't want to be embarrassing.”

I mentioned appropriateness before, and I think the other side of that is embarrassment. But embarrassing who? Himself? The queen? The royal family? The nation? And what is the response when you do cause embarrassment?

NPG 5408 Diana, Princess of Wales

by Bryan Organ
acrylic on canvas, 1981
70 in. x 50 in. (1778 mm x 1270 mm)
© National Portrait Gallery, London

Even if she had lived, Princess Diana would not have been a consort – she and Prince Charles divorced in 1996. But, like Prince Philip before her, Diana created her own role and responsibilities as Princess of Wales – and recreated that role on several occasions. She seemed both to embody and challenge our ideas of what a consort should be.

This is a portrait of Princess Diana (currently on view in the NPG's 32). It's quite a surprising choice for the gallery – very unlike the way we might think of Diana from the time, in ballgowns and finery, the fairy-tale princess in that wedding dress. This is a simple portrait, Diana dressed informally in open-necked blouse and trousers. That simplicity contrasts with the setting, the smart, gold-lined door that frames her, the antique chair she's sitting on.

Other portraits of Diana from the time have her looking coyly away whereas here she holds our eye. That chimes with a description in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography of Diana meeting Charles at a polo match in 1980:

“Her directness and sympathy over the death the previous year of his uncle, Lord Mountbatten, caught his attention: she was not afflicted by the usual constraints on people dealing with royalty, and was neither tongue-tied nor overly deferential. Her credentials as a potential royal bride were obvious.”

What were those credentials? Princess Diana was not born a princess, but her father and both grandmothers moved in court circles and she first met Prince Charles when she was 16 – when he briefly dated her sister. She was well off, having inherited a sum from her great-grandmother. She was not academic, having failed her O-levels twice.

She was, says the ODNB, “A popular, essentially jolly girl with a talent for making friends,” and her O-levels didn't matter because, “arguably, none [were] required for girls of her class, who had no need to earn a living; indeed, displays of intellect could be frowned upon by the largely philistine county set”.

She was beautiful, and could play the part of the fairy-tale princess. And she had an ability to talk unaffectedly to anyone, enchanting people who met her. Both things made her very popular with the press and public, and it seemed she might be just the jolt in the arm that the royal family needed.

But when things started to go wrong in the fairy-tale wedding, it all became very different. It's easy to forget the outrage that met the 1992 book Diana: Her True Story by Andrew Morton – which finally blew the lid on the fairy-tale, after all the years of rumour. Diana had rarely been out of the news before, but now the tone of the coverage had changed. There were stories about her various alleged lovers, or the state of her mental health, or just endless photos of her. The ODNB speaks of the constant harassment, where “photographs of Diana angry, or Diana in tears, Diana at the gym or the corner shop, commanded a far higher price than photographs of Diana carrying out public engagements.”

There's an argument that the press wanted to get at the “real” Diana. Perhaps it was payback for the fairy-tale wedding that we'd all been sold turning out not to be true. Perhaps the institution had got caught up in the story and believed their own press but the royal family – as an institution – effectively lied to the nation and, even worse, to the papers.

But it also didn't help that in some ways Diana brought this press harassment on herself. She was interviewed several times by Morton for his book and got her friends to contribute, too. She'd done so on the basis that she could always deny doing so – and that lie, when exposed, damaged her reputation with the Press Complaints Commission, which had tried to defend her from the media scrum over the book. It was also her choice to dispense with her round-the-clock police protection – so she could pursue her private life without constant surveillance. And that left her exposed to the paparazzi.

Perhaps she was not the canniest player, but at the same time, Diana also used the attention of the press to great effect for important causes. The ODNB says that this was part of a conscious effort to refashion her role and responsibilities.

“From June 1987,” it says, “when she visited the first ward for AIDS sufferers in Britain, she associated herself closely with a huge number of causes and organizations devoted to different kinds of sufferers ... Her patronage was widely sought and widely bestowed: whatever disadvantages might accrue from having a notoriously temperamental and, as time passed, increasingly unpredictable royal patron, Diana's name—and more especially her presence—were guaranteed to raise the profile of issues and organizations, and to increase revenue significantly. There was nothing novel about the association of a royal woman with good causes of these kinds: charity was the traditional outlet for women of the upper classes. But Diana brought glamour to the work and a degree of publicity which was never available to her less photogenic but no less hard-working sister-in-law, the princess royal, among others.”

Though Diana charmed those she met, press coverage was as often cynical as it was supportive, questioning her motives, or using the occasion to put questions about her private life. When she told Martin Bashir in a television interview in 1995 that she wanted to be remembered as the “princess of hearts”, many newspapers showed open contempt.

A year later she was granted her divorce and again set about refashioning her role. Diana stepped down from all but six of her charities and asked Prime Minister John Major to make her a “roving ambassador” on humanitarian issues for Britain. When no official role was created for her, she did it anyway: leading a Red Cross mission to draw attention to the devastation caused by landmines. This was a major political issue. The royal family are meant to keep well clear of making political statements – but Diana was no longer part of the family, and had nothing to lose. As the ODNB says,

“Powerful vested interests opposed the landmine ban, and Conservative MPs went on record accusing the princess of being a ‘loose cannon’, interfering in politics beyond her remit, but her championing of the cause was a significant factor in the promotion of the treaty banning the mines.”

And when Diana died suddenly in 1997, the press – and the nation – were quick to forget all their criticism. “Princess of hearts” was how they remembered her. The empathy, the charity, the tragic fate of the beautiful, fairy-tale princess – that's the image of her that endures. And that's why, in the grand narrative spun by the press, it's not odd that Kate Middleton wears Diana's engagement ring.

We've not discussed love. “It's important to understand,” says Jeremy Paxman, “that, in making arrangements for royal marriages, love is not necessarily the prime consideration. If the couple enjoy each other's company, that is a bonus not a prerequisite,” (p. 87).

But I don't think that's true. We want to believe in the fairy-tale. When Diana's engagement to Charles was announced in 1981, the press asked if they were in love. “Of course,” said Diana immediately. Charles' response has been much picked over since. “Whatever love means,” he said.

Was he in love with Diana? Was he in love with someone else? Charles later admitted to infidelity, and there's been speculation that at the time he'd wanted to marry Diana's older sister Sarah, or his current wife, Camilla. The speculation continues that these women were not deemed appropriate consort material – they weren't suitably innocent or pretty or whatever it might have been.

The pervading story seems to be that Charles chose duty over love – and that that was a mistake. So it's interesting to compare Diana with someone else who wasn't quite a consort.

NPG P265 Wallis, Duchess of Windsor; Prince Edward, Duke of Windsor (King Edward VIII)
by Cecil Beaton
bromide print, 1937
9 in. x 6 5/8 in. (230 mm x 168 mm)
© V&A Images

When Edward VIII gave up the throne to marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, it was largely sold as romance. He chose love over the crown. Like Diana, Edward was a popular figure, photogenic and beloved of the press. Like Diana, his empathy with his people could lead to controversy. “Something must be done,” he said on seeing the collapse of industry and mass unemployment in Wales – and that innocuous, humane statement caused a scandal.

But the British press were discrete about his love life. We know now he had a number of affairs in the late 1920s and early 30s, but the press at the time paid no heed. Even when his relationship with Wallis became more serious – and their yacht trip round the Mediterranean was followed with keen interest by the world press – the British newspapers said nothing.

When Edward chose to give up the throne, the “abdication crisis” proved little of the sort. “Reading the official papers and the private diaries,” says Paxman, “what is striking is how, in the end, the king's determination to marry his divorced American mistress came to turn simply on the question of how it might be managed,” (p. 209).

That says a lot about how the royal family's relationship with the press has changed. But why was Wallis not a suitable consort for the king?

The official reason is that she was a divorcee. At the time, divorced people could not remarry in the Church of England – which made it tricky for the head of the church to marry a divorcee. The irony being that the Church of England was created to grant Henry VIII a divorce from his first wife so he could marry someone else.

But there were other issues with Wallis. The ODNB says that she “impinged on the performance of [Edward's] duties” as Prince of Wales. She was bossy, and had an abrasive irreverence towards Edward's position and the royal family generally. She came from a poor background and she was American.

And she didn't want to be queen. “All the indications,” says the ODNB, “are that she enjoyed her role of maîtresse en titre [chief mistress] and would have been satisfied to retain it ... Once Mrs Simpson realized that marriage to her would cost the king his throne, she tried to change his resolve. Anticipating much hostile publicity when the story broke in the United Kingdom, she retreated first to Fort Belvedere, and then to the south of France. From there, in a series of distraught telephone calls, she tried to persuade Edward not to abdicate, even if this meant giving her up. She accomplished nothing; this was the only subject on which she was unable to dominate her future husband.”

But if Wallis was thought unsuitable then, it's nothing to how she's thought of now. In the last six months, she's been depicted in three period dramas.

In Any Human Heart on Channel 4, she and Edward swan round a golf course, pushing in front of other golfers and pinching their cigarettes. In Upstairs, Downstairs on BBC One, she nearly causes a diplomatic incident in 1936 by turning up at a party with the Nazi Ambassador to Britain, von Ribbentrop. It's heavily implied that she and Ribbentrop are lovers, even that Wallis is a fascist sympathiser. She's briefly in the film The King's Speech, where Edward accuses his brother of heading a plot to usurp him. I gather, too, that Madonna is working on a film in which Wallis is seen cheating on Edward.

These are not flattering portrayals, and the received wisdom seems to be that Wallis was a bad influence on Edward, promiscuous, greedy, silly, even dangerous. Edward was naïve, or stupid, for marrying for love – or at least for loving this particular woman. The story goes that it is a good thing Wallis wasn't queen. And that instead we got this lady:

NPG x12135 Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother by Cecil Beaton
bromide print on white card mount, 1939
9 7/8 in. x 8 in. (252 mm x 203 mm)
© V&A Images

As with Wallis, Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon didn't choose to be queen. She was already married when her brother-in-law abdicated, and her husband became George VI. But even when he'd just been Duke of York, she had “had her doubts and reservations about her suitability for public life and perhaps about her feelings for” him and “apparently turned down his first two proposals of marriage” - so the ODNB says.

She was the first non-royal to legally marry a royal prince since James II in the seventeenth century. But her in-laws, George V and Queen Mary, “thought that this pretty, natural, level-headed, and unassuming young woman would be a good partner for their unconfident son.” And that's exactly the role she played as consort.

Taking the oath of accession, the new king said he took on his responsibilities “with my wife and helpmate at my side”. Perhaps tellingly, at his coronation, “Elizabeth's throne ... was placed level with the king's. Later, in 1943, she was appointed a councillor of state, allowing her to deputize for the king in official matters—the first queen consort to fulfill the role—and she also held investitures on her own.”

The ODNB discusses at length the treatment of the abdicated King Edward, and the decision to deny his wife the title of “her royal highness”. The same title was, of course, stripped from Princess Diana when she divorced Charles. Though, “there is no reason to believe that [Edward's sister-in-law, Queen Elizabeth] was directly responsible for the decision,” says the ODNB, “her opinion on the matter may be imagined. She saw Mrs Simpson as an interloper who had disrupted both the public position of royalty and private relations within the royal family. In the queen's view Mrs Simpson's actions had forced an unexpected and unwelcome change to her settled family life and had imposed ultimate burdens on her husband [which may have contributed to his early death]. To a woman who placed the highest value on responsibility, whether to family or nation, Mrs Simpson's irresponsibility, as she saw it, could not be tolerated, nor should it be rewarded.”

She was also fiercely protective of her husband. According to Walter Monckton, Edward's representative in the negotiations about what his role might be as Duke of Windsor, George VI was not against Edward taking on some minor royal functions – effectively swapping roles with his younger brother. “But in Monckton's opinion ‘the Queen felt quite plainly it was undesirable to give the Duke any effective sphere of work’. She thought the duke ‘was an attractive, vital creature who might be the rallying point for any who might be critical of the new King who was less superficially endowed with the arts and graces that please,” (cited in Lord Birkenhead, Walter Monckton, p. 169).

If Elizabeth had little choice about becoming queen, she also had little choice in her responsibilities during her husband's reign, which was so dominated by the Second World War – the lead up to it, the war itself and the immediate aftermath. In Paris in 1938 to help reinforce the Anglo-French alliance, it was Elizabeth's stylish white outfits – designed by Norman Hartnell – that won the admiration of the press. She was similarly praised for her style the next year in the US, and the king and queen's stay at President Roosevelt's home in Hyde Park has been cited as “a significant moment in the developing ‘special relationship’ between the two nations and one of the most important royal visits in the history of the modern monarchy”.

When the war began, Elizabeth and her husband famously refused to leave London, and she would not countenance her daughters being sent away to Canada. When Buckingham Palace was bombed, she said she was glad: “Now I can look the East End in the face”. As the ODNB says, “she reached out to the British people, sharing their experiences in a way that royalty had never done before. Interestingly, she chose not to appear in uniform during the war and came to symbolize the virtues of normality and peace.” The royal family also apparently conformed to wartime rationing.

Perhaps Elizabeth only chose her role and responsibilities after her husband's death. There's evidence that Winston Churchill advised her in her bereavement, “but it seems equally likely,” says the ODNB, “that the strength of character and the imagination required to play this new role came also, and quite naturally, from Elizabeth herself. She had no wish or aptitude for the role of retiring dowager. Comfortable with her people, adaptable, and with an unaltered ethic of service, she returned to public duties in May 1952.”

NPG x34768 Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother
by Cecil Beaton
bromide fibre print on white card mount, 1970
8 7/8 in. x 8 5/8 in. (226 mm x 218 mm)
© V&A Images

As Queen Mother for the next fifty years, she was patron of more than 300 organisations and charities. She was chancellor of the University of London for 25 years and colonel-in-chief of 13 regiments. She also lived lavishly, employing a large staff and entertaining on a grand scale. She apparently ran up debts of £4 million at Coutts Bank.

But while for any other royal that might have earned the displeasure of the nation – or the press – the Queen Mother never seemed to lose favour. Perhaps it was her cheery, ever-smiling attitude to her public duties. She clearly worked hard as the grandmother of the nation. And she was also discreet – giving one interview when first engaged. Woodrow Wyatt would later reveal that she had “conservative opinions” but she never voiced them openly. Whatever her opinions of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor she never spoke about the abdication – and she attended both of their funerals.

The Queen Mother's own funeral in 2002 was a major event. A quarter of a million people filed past her coffin as it lay in state. She lived a remarkably long life and her popularity never wavered, even as it did for the rest of her family. Why? What did the Queen Mother do that the others didn't? Why do we remember her so fondly? What could Kate Middleton learn from her?

There's duty, hard work and the charitable causes. There's the empathy with the people. But other consorts had that. There's a loving relationship with the king. A bit of style doesn't go amiss either. A twinkle in the eye will more than make up for a slightly naughty gambling habit.

But I think the Queen Mother's chief asset was her discretion. She never spoiled the mystique of royalty, she never told tales and she never got caught up in politics. More than that, by keeping her mouth shut she never said anything embarrassing.

The Duchess of Cornwall at Dundurn Castle
by Ibagli, 5 November 2009
From Wikipedia

When the press speak to Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, it’s as if they only want to catch her out. What does she think of Kate? What does she think of the student protesters? Why was her window open? If she says something innocuous it’s reported that she doesn’t care. If she says something more fun it’s reported that she’s not funny. The woman cannot win.

She does the charities and good causes. She supports her husband. And she keeps a relatively low profile. I discovered while preparing this talk that the Portrait Gallery holds no photographs of her, let alone a portrait.

We still don’t know what role Camilla will play when her husband becomes king. The couple have said that she won’t be a queen – but is that up to them? According to the law, as soon as the present queen dies, Prince Charles automatically becomes king and his wife queen. At the moment, Camilla is also the Princess of Wales because she's the wife of the prince – but she or those around her choose not to use that title. So maybe she'll choose not to be called queen, and maybe she won't be crowned when Charles is. But, technically, she'll still be queen.

And why shouldn’t she be queen? There are strong feelings on the subject. Some feel it wouldn’t be appropriate because she’s a divorcee – though so is her husband. Some feel it’s not appropriate given that she and Charles had an affair while he was still married to Diana. So Camilla not being queen is a sort of punishment for how Diana was treated. Or maybe its punishment for the embarrassment caused by the whole “Squidgy” business.

Would it have been different had Charles married her in the early 1970s? Would Camilla have been made a fairy-tale princess and received the same adulation as Diana? Would she have suffered the same problems, too? Or is there something about their different personalities and ambitions that means things would always have been different?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. But it makes me wonder again how much a consort – or almost-consort – gets to define their own role and responsibilities, and how much they just react to us, as a nation, as perhaps voiced through the press. There’s no formal definition of a consort’s role, but we seem to know instinctively what is appropriate, what is embarrassing, and what makes our blood boil.

So we don’t know what kind of consort Kate Middleton will be. We don’t know how much say she’ll have in her role and responsibilities. But we will know when she gets it wrong.

See also: my talk on 10 people in the National Portrait Gallery's collection that Doctor Who has met

Gone to the dogs

2011-02-20T15:53:00.005Z

Review I wrote for Vector last April:

Blonde Bombshell by Tom Holt

George Stetchkin is a brilliant programmer and a not so brilliant drunk. He's on the trail of some bank robbers who've used teleport technology – which, of course, hasn't been invented. Lucy Pavlov is the mega-rich inventor of world-changing technology but she keeps having dreams about unicorns. And Mark Twain is the impenetrable alias of a very smart bomb. He's been ordered to destroy the Earth by a planet of dogs.

Blonde Bombshell is a rich, dizzy adventure chock-full of big ideas, all fighting for the readers' attention. That desperate effort to dazzle and amaze makes it pretty hard going. There are plenty of jokes but few that make the reader really laugh. Instead, you can hear the arched eyebrow all the way through, a comedy more droll than funny.

There are the painful puns and word plays: the neolithic period on the planet of the dogs is called the Bone Age and they've got a 'T'erier class' of space ship. There's lazy stuff about George being drunk or hungover at the wrong moments. Characters wilfully misunderstand simple statements and events.

Then there are the tortuous analogies, such as 'harder to swallow than a nail-studded olive', 'like trying to build a sandcastle out of semolina pudding' and, 'memories limped home like the survivors of a decimated army.' I quite liked, 'weird as two dozen ferrets in a blender', but the 'two dozen' blunts its simple, vivid effect.

The writing is often too fussy, the jokes too awkward and contrived. Though Mark Twain is as nicely inconspicuous a name as Ford Prefect, the arched style is more Robert Rankin than Douglas Adams. (I've never got Rankin's appeal, either.)

The characters are all rather generic – the drunk and rude but brilliant programmer, the icy, super-rich heroine, the machine that wants to live. There's some nice stuff between Mark and Lucy as they realise they fancy one another, but their own autistic behaviour and the arched tone of the writing makes it difficult to empathise with either of them. The book is big on ideas but leaves the reader rather cold.

Which is a shame because the story itself is often rich and surprising, and Holt keeps the plot moving quickly. There are some great ideas – the dog catching a stick that then lifts it off into space, the fresh, dead octopus that's so much more powerful than the aliens' computers. There are plenty of fine set-ups and revelations.

I didn't like the book at all to begin with, but having persevered for the first 100 pages, the plot then engaged my attention. The disparate strands and concepts are all neatly brought together by the end. But it could be – it ought to be – so much better, and would have been with a firmer editorial hand. As it is, too many bad and overworked gags stop the story from really blowing our brains.

A new chapter

2011-02-10T15:39:00.004Z

It seems no time at all since I was blogging that we'd bought a flat. Ah, the happy, bouncy fellow that I was back then...

Tomorrow, the Dr, the dim cat and I move out after a little over five years. It's the longest I've lived anywhere since moving out of my parents' place roughly half my life ago. It's the first place I've owned, and the first place that's really felt like my own home. There's a lot of good memories bound up in the place. We've had some very good parties, done all sorts of repairs and renovations to make it our own, and it's all a bit sad to be going.

But a sadness also hangs over the place where we thought we might have children and then spent months hiding when that didn't work. So this move also means drawing a line under the fact that we can't have children of our own.

We're moving to a house - though it's not much bigger than the flat - where I'll have a sundial and shed. The plan is to get the place in order while we press on with our efforts to get approved for adoption. (I'm probably not going to go into all of that here.)

So. Five and a bit years ago we got our keys, and then the Dr and I and Mr and Mrs Brown sat on the floor in our new, unfurnished living room and ate fish and chips from the place round the corner. Tonight I'll trudge home from work to pack the rest of the boxes and dismantle the computer and desk.

Then first thing tomorrow the van arrives to spirit our lives off to whatever happens next...

Doctor Who: Portraits in time and space

2011-02-02T18:58:00.023Z

On Thursday next week, 10 February, I'll be speaking at the National Portrait Gallery on five people who have married Kings and Queens of England and will discuss how much power and influence they had on society. "Mrs King" starts at 13:15 in the Ondaatje Wing Theatre.

I gave a talk last year on 10 famous historical figures in the Portrait Gallery's collection who've also met Doctor Who on screen. Never got round to posting that, so here it is now:

Portraits in Time and Space

What an image! The Daleks and Winston Churchill – two such icons!

The Daleks are the number one bad guy in Doctor Who, the first monster the Doctor met on screen, back in 1963. It was their success that made the TV show a hit, and the Doctor's been battling them ever since.

Meanwhile, Winston Churchill was voted "Greatest Briton of all time" in a national poll conducted by the BBC in 2002. Yet Churchill is a complex and controversial figure. Mark Gatiss, who wrote the episode Victory of the Daleks, admitted on Doctor Who Confidential that,

"Churchill is a mass of contradictions, which is partly the reason we're still so fascinated by him ... He's an extraordinary figure: brave, tenacious, a brilliant speaker ... He was simultaneously illiberal and curiously liberal in some ways ... He's not a universally loved figure at all."

A modern Doctor Who episode is only 42 minutes long. With a plot and Daleks and explosions and jokes to cram in, there's hardly time to present a detailed critique of a contentious historical figure. Instead, we are presented with a sketch, an impression – a portrait.

I'm going to discuss ten people to be found in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery that the Doctor has also met on screen. I want to know how – and why – these people are presented to us on canvas and in the TV show. What can these portraits tell us about the people themselves and the times they lived in – and what do they tell us about ourselves?

Sir Winston Leonard Churchill

by Cecil Beaton
Bromide print, 1940
National Portrait Gallery x40055

Here's a classic pose of Churchill in 1940, soon after becoming Prime Minister during the Second World War. There he is working, serious, ready to offer his blood, toil, tears and sweat to the country. A portrait of the war leader.

Note also the cigar in his hand and the spotty bow-tie. They're important props in the image of Churchill. He was relaxed about being caricatured by cartoonists, writing in 1932 that,

"One of the most necessary features in a public man's equipment is some distinctive mark which everyone learns to look for and recognise. Disraeli's forelock, Mr Gladstone's collars, Lord Randolph Churchill's moustache, Mr Chamberlain's eyeglass, Mr Baldwin's pipe – these properties are of the greatest value ... I have never indulged in any of them."

As John Cooper explains in his book Great Britons, which accompanied the BBC series, Churchill went on in that article to say that,

"without thinking, he had once donned a minuscule hat and been photographed, giving the cartoonists their 'distinctive mark'. From them on, hats became his signifier for cartoonists ... By 1940 the material was all there: cigars, bow-ties, hats and sticks and his 'pouting cherub' expression; the addition of wartime details such as gas masks, siren suits and the V sign completed the repertoire, producing a popular image of vigorous defiance, laced with humour and sufficient eccentricity to be noticeable, but not dysfunctional."
John Cooper, Great Britons - The Great Debate (2002), p. 136.

Winston Churchill
by Robert Elliot
bromide print, 26 July 1943
National Portrait Gallery x17071

It's this popular archetype of Churchill that we see in Doctor Who. He chain-smokes, he jokes, he charms the ladies and demands the best from everyone.

There's no time to get into the less savoury side of Churchill's character. For example, Mo Mowlam, who championed Churchill in the BBC's Great Britons series, had to concede that, even in his finest hours during the Second World War.

"Churchill was an instinctive, daring, often infuriating war leader. He was rude and unpleasant to his staff, who struggled to keep up with his limitless capacity for hard work and hard liquor."
Mo Mowlam, 'Winston Churchill', in Ibid., p. 127.

His listing in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is a whopping 33,000 words long. As that says, in the biographies after his death, Churchill was accused of,

"racism, militarism, and sympathy with fascism. Hitherto acclaimed as the saviour of his country, he was now accused of leading Britain into a war that fatally undermined its power."
Paul Addison, ‘Churchill, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer (1874–1965)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, May 2010, accessed 28 June 2010

And Churchill was acutely aware of how he was seen – and how he'd be remembered.

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill
by Graham Vivian Sutherland
pencil and wash, circa 1954
National Portrait Gallery 6096

This is a sketch of a portrait of Churchill by Graham Sutherland, commissioned by the Houses of Parliament to mark his 80th birthday. Churchill hated it – claiming that "it makes me look half-witted which I ain't". We've only got the sketch because his wife had the painting destroyed. As John Cooper says,

"The problem was, presumably, that [Churchill] came up against an image of himself as an old, worn man, battered by time and circumstances, no longer a political force but a spent one, the bulldog of the 1940s now a frail geriatric."
Ibid., p. 134

Portraits, like Doctor Who, present an impression of their subject. The artist or photographer show us a particular pose or angle or idea. The "problem", if it is one, with Sutherland's portrait is that it showed the old man, warts and all, rather than the myth. Writer Mark Gatiss said that for his Doctor Who episode he wanted to "get the Churchill from the posters" from the war:

"in the end it came down to printing the Churchill of legend."

That's not to say that portraits are in some way deceitful if they show the legend rather than the real man. A portrait doesn't just tell us what someone looked like. They give us an impression of the subject as a living being. What it felt like to be in their presence. And what they wanted us to feel.

Look at those two photos of Churchill again: two very different portraits of the same man in his prime. He smiles in one, he stares in the other. Both give us a tantalising sense of the man. We can see the light in his eyes, the mischief, the intelligence. Look at the women and children so delighted to see him in the picture on the left – his smile reflecting theirs. The picture on the right is more imposing – he stares directly at us, as if asking what we want, why we've interrupted his important work. Perhaps there's a place for us that big empty table. He offers hope, but he expects us to muck in.

Is this tantalising impression enough, though? Surely the huge entry in the Dictionary of National Biography can tell us more about the man than a couple of photos.

That very point was raised just over 150 years ago when the House of Lords discussed the creation of a National Portrait Gallery. On 4 March 1856, Lord Stanhope cited a letter from the historian Thomas Carlyle:

"Often I have found a portrait superior in real instruction to half-a-dozen written biographies ... I have found that the portrait was as a small lighted candle by which the biographies could for the first time be read, and some human interpretation be made of them."
Cited in Brian Harrison, 'Why biography matters to us', Ibid., p. 23.

Portraits give us a fleeting impression of the real, historical person. The best portraits make it a vivid impression, an insight, bringing the subject alive. It might even inspire us to investigate the subject further.

That's something the producers of Doctor Who have clearly considered. Mark Gatiss was interviewed by Doctor Who Confidential at the Churchill War Rooms, where much of his story was set. "I would be very, very, very happy," he said,

"if people who watched it and enjoyed the episode then come here to find more about it ... Our fictionalised version, I'd like to think in the best possible way, sort of opens a door to finding out the history."

The BBC's official Doctor Who website links from the episode to an archive collection of tributes and biographies by people who knew the real Churchill. I've spoken to teachers who've used the episode as a spring-board for school lessons – in some cases the children demanded it.

And it's not just the children who find it a spring-board. I find myself puzzling over the fact that in this episode the Doctor and Churchill are already old friends – Churchill even has the TARDIS' phone number. For my own sad amusement – and because I write spin-off Doctor Who books for a living – I've spent far too much time wondering when they first met and what adventures they might have had together. [Since I gave this talk, Gatiss has revealed these adventures in The Brilliant Book of Doctor Who 2011.]

He had an adventurous life in his youth, but there's also a sense of destiny about Churchill, as if someone had tipped him off early on about the role he'd play as leader of the nation in its time of need. In the early 1930s, he was one of the first to speak out against the Nazis and appeasement. But even before that, there's this picture:

Statesmen of World War I
by Sir James Guthrie
oil on canvas, 1924-1930
National Portrait Gallery 2463

This is Guthrie's huge, iconic portrait of the statesmen of World War One, dramatically lit under the Winged Victory of Samothrace, and painted between 1924 and 1930. Churchill is at the centre, caught in a shaft of light, looking directly out at us – the only one of the statesmen who does. Perhaps Guthrie chose Churchill as a focus because he had been the youngest member of the War Cabinet in 1914-15 – with a career still before him, the young Churchill represented the future. But the eerie light and and the strong contrasts between light and dark make this an even more eerie foreshadowing of the future. It's almost as if the painter or the subject knew.

Let's return to what I said earlier about these historical figures being a spring-board for school lessons. When Doctor Who began in 1963, it had something of an educational remit. Stories would alternate between the past and the future. In the first story, the Doctor meets cavemen, in the fourth story he meets Marco Polo and Kublai Kahn. We visit the Aztecs and France in the Reign of Terror – where the Doctor meets Robespierre and his companions glimpse the young Napoleon Bonaparte – and then they're in Ancient Rome and meet Nero.

Richard I
by Carlo Marochetti
bronze statue (1860 copy of 1851 original)

Then the Doctor meets this chap. This is a nineteenth century bronze statue of Richard I – the Lionheart, romantic hero of the Crusades. There's triumph and majesty in that pose. And also, the statue itself has its own mythology. In the Blitz, a bomb lifted the statue up into the air, but it survived with only a little damage to the sword – which you can still see today. The pose of the sculpture and what happened to it in the war both play into national myths of brave, defiant Englishness – the same national myths that embrace Churchill. There's more myth-making going on, too. Richard is stood outside the Palace of Westminster, as if linking his heroism to modern democracy, though he died 15 years before the signing of Magna Carta. It's not a portrait of the real man, but of a legend we want to be true.

But the Richard that the Doctor meets is very different from this image. He's trying to broker peace with the Saracens, by marrying his sister Joanna to the brother of his enemy, Saladin. This is a portrait of Richard playing against the mythology – a man desperate to make peace rather than holy war. The story also shows us a sympathetic Saladin.

This is a very different kind of Doctor Who story from the Churchill one. It's 45 years older, for one thing, and television drama has obviously changed. It's in black and white, noticeably much slower in pace than the show today, and there are no monsters, so there's more time to explore character. This is a complex portrait of Richard and the Crusades, especially for tea-time family viewing. It engages our interest by playing against what we think we know about the man.

The formal way the king speaks is also interesting – that's not accurate twelfth century speech. The TARDIS doesn't just land in the past and future, it lands in particular genres, or types of story. The look and feel of this story, and comparing it to other BBC productions of the time, it's almost as if the Doctor has landed in a previously unknown historical play by Shakespeare. At the very least, while the portrait of Richard the peace-maker might not be immediately familiar to the general public, the feel of the story is. The trappings of Shakespeare and serious BBC drama add authority to the character of the king and the issues in the story.

Shakespeare appeared in Doctor Who just two stories later, in the first episode of The Chase. Like Churchill and Richard I, Shakespeare is a national icon, someone we learn about at school. It's a rather nervous, weedy Shakespeare here, an ordinary man not a superstar, scared of being called to see the boss. It's a comic glimpse of Shakespeare, getting the inspiration for one of his plays from Queen Elizabeth I, but one that makes us feel we know him.

The casting and costume seem to be based on this portrait:

William Shakespeare
attrib. To John Taylor
oil on canvas, feigned oval, (c. 1610)
National Portrait Gallery NPG1

This is the “Chandos Shakespeare”, or NPG1 – the very first portrait in the National Portrait Gallery's collection. Shakespeare was enjoying a renaissance in popularity in the mid-nineteenth century when the Gallery was established, and he's since become an iconic figure of the nation. I could write a whole separate talk on whether and why Shakespeare remains relevant today. Instead, I want to focus on why we see him in this story.

In the story, the Doctor and his companions are watching television, but a special television that lets them see moments in history. They choose iconic moments: this scene, Lincoln giving his address at Gettysburg, and a clip of the Beatles. This was broadcast in May 1965, when the Beatles were working on the film and album Help! They were a big, popular band, but perhaps not yet the icons they would be. So it's a joke, but a prescient one, when the Doctor's companion Vicki, from the future, calls the Beatles “classical music” and has been to the Beatles museum in Liverpool.

And that joke says something about our place in history. It makes a connection between a famous historical figure and ones from the present day. Our own times and contemporaries can be just as worthy and extraordinary as the mythic figures in history. Our own time will be judged by the thing we all do now.

Queen Elizabeth I (The "Ditchley portrait")
by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger
oil on canvas, circa 1592
National Portrait Gallery 2561

Doctor Who's version of Queen Elizabeth also matches the portraits from her time – severe and icy and a bit frightening. Here she is in 1592 – a few years before that scene in Doctor Who was set. She's a huge, imposing figure, trampling land under her feet.

In the days before paparazzi and the internet, portraits like this one were sent round the country so the Queen's subjects could see what she looked like. Portraits were a way of making a connection with ordinary people – and showing them how important the subject is.

Shakespeare and Elizabeth have both been in Doctor Who more recently. Let's ignore the fact that The Shakespeare Code (2007) is in colour, filmed on location, and is all a bit faster and busier. Because the modern episode is effectively playing the same gag as the old one, showing us where Shakespeare got his inspiration, getting a joke in for those who know their Bard, and bringing the 1590s to life. They even do the same joke about modern celebrity, comparing Shakespeare not to the now-historic Beatles but to JK Rowling – there's a portrait of her at the NPG, too.

But we're presented with very different portraits of Shakespeare and Elizabeth. Shakespeare is bolder, sexier, more instinctive. Elizabeth is still icy and frightening, calling the Doctor her "sworn enemy" and demanding, "off with his head". Yet it's suggested in a later episode that the reason the Doctor is her sworn enemy is that they used to be married, and that she's not really the “Virgin Queen” we think. This is surely playing on recent popular depictions of the historical figures and their sex lives in films like Shakespeare in Love – also filmed at the Globe Theatre – and Elizabeth.

That's also true of Queen Victoria as she appeared in the series in 2006. The grieving widow, on retreat in Scotland, owes something to the film Mrs Brown. She's 60 years old, has been widowed for 18 years and still isn't over the loss of Albert. No one, bar John Brown in the film or the Doctor in the episode, dares to mention it. She's shocked at first, appalled by their rudeness, and then drawn to them by their concern. John Brown and the Doctor both rekindle something in Victoria, which is at the heart of the story and the portrait of her.

Admittedly, the Doctor Who episode Tooth and Claw also sees Victoria fighting ninjas and werewolves – she herself shoots a would-be assassin. That's not quite what we expect from her. The Doctor and his companion Rose bet each other that they can get Victoria to live up to expectation and say the words, “We are not amused.” But even when she does say it, there's a twist: she's so unamused by everything that's happened that the Doctor and Rose are banished from the kingdom. As a result, the portrait of Victoria is not simply made up of "distinctive marks" and catchphrases, she's a woman who thinks and feels and is constantly surprising.

The real Victoria can also be surprising. Working on this feature, I'd built up a mental image of Victoria from various biographies.

Queen Victoria
by Alexander Bassano
half-plate glass negative, 1882
National Portrait Gallery x95819

There she was, the Widow of Windsor, sulking in all her imperial finery for the last 40 years of her reign, longing to be out of the limelight. Then I found this one, from 1879 – the same year as her meeting with the Doctor:

Princess Beatrice of Battenberg; Queen Victoria
by Arthur James ('A.J.') Melhuish
albumen cabinet card, 1879
National Portrait Gallery x76537

It's very unlike other portraits of her from after the death of her husband. Here, she's simply holding her daughter's hand and smiling. She's suddenly alive – a real person, not a cliché. She clearly didn't spend every moment of those 40 years being miserable. It's not just that I have to reappraise my image of Victoria, it also makes her far more interesting. As Carlyle said,

"one portrait, superior in real instruction to half-a-dozen written biographies..."

That's five of the ten people on my list, so what have we learned so far? Doctor Who is not very consistent. Take his relationship to British rulers. Churchill and Richard the Lionheart value the Doctor's counsel; Queens Elizabeth and Victoria make him an outlaw. Then there's the historical figures themselves. How accurate can they be? Can we really believe that the Shakespeare seen in 1965 and the one in 2007 are the same man?

But perhaps it's more important that they're not consistent. We can see from these episodes how the popular impression of Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare have changed in the last 45 years. They're both national icons, so does that tell us something about how our view of ourselves and our national character has changed, too? The Shakespeare of 2007 is brasher, sexier, more confident and less dignified than the version from 1965. Is that true of the country?

I should also say that for a long period in it's history, Doctor Who didn't meet eminent figures from history? The first Doctor continued to meet them – such as Catherine de' Medici and Wyatt Earp – but when he regenerated in 1966, so did the series. The second Doctor still visited the past, but it was one generally being threatened by monsters rather than real historical figures and events. For the next decade and a half the Doctor would name-drop friends like Lister, Lord Nelson and Marie Antoinette – but we never saw them on screen.

I think there's an important difference between the Doctor mentioning that he's met someone famous and us seeing them on screen. When the Doctor says he took a medical degree under Lister or was a personal friend of Lord Nelson he elevates those figures. He name drops them because they're important. So even if he jokes about the famous people he's met, just mentioning them at all makes them more eminent.

But when he meets them on screen, something else happens. We get a glimpse of the real person, more vivid than the biographies. We might see aspects of them that we don't expect, or we might have our sense of the person confirmed. But living and breathing and alive before us, we witness their eminence for ourselves. We see them being great and worthy figures in history, rather than just taking the Doctor's word for it.

At least, that's how it works in principle. Two eminent figures from British history appeared in the series in 1985, and I think they're the exception to the rule.

In The Mark of the Rani, the sixth Doctor meets George Stephenson, railway engineer and inventor of the Rocket. He's the only scientist in my list – which is perhaps surprising for a show like Doctor Who. The Doctor is constantly battling monsters and superstition with “science”. I'll get on to why I think real scientists don't feature that much shortly.

In the story, Stephenson is planning to gather a meeting of various scientists and engineers, but the village keeps being attacked by angry thugs – who are assumed to be Luddites, protesting changes to traditional life wrought by industry and machines. It soon turns out that the thugs are really the victims of a rival Time Lord – one of two causing trouble in the area.

Though The Mark of the Rani is fun, there's not a great deal on insight into Stephenson as a character – he's a rather well-meaning, but dull figure in the story. We see him working on his machines and discussing them with his financier, but there's little in the story about science and invention – other than it generally being a good thing.

This is interesting, because in stories with with other historical figures, much is made of the contribution they've made to history, as we'll see in a moment. That said, we do see Stephenson working on his machines, getting his hands dirty. He also speaks with a northern accent – something we don't get from this rather austere portrait.

George Stephenson
by Henry William Pickersgill
oil on canvas, circa 1845
National Portrait Gallery 410

He doesn't exactly look like a man who gets his hands dirty.

Also in 1985, the Doctor met HG Wells. The gag of the story is that the Doctor taking Wells about the TARDIS and introducing him to monsters inspires Wells as a writer. This portrayal of Wells is at best disingenuous. Surely his scientific romances – The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man and so on – inspired the Doctor's adventures, not the other way round. There's also little sense of the real Wells in this depiction.

Herbert George Wells
by Mayall & Newman Ltd
cabinet card, late 1890s
National Portrait Gallery x13211

This is the real Wells from the same period. He was known as “Bertie” - never Herbert. Before he wrote his novels, Wells worked in a draper's shop – and was sacked for being “too common” - he later used that experience for his novel Kipps. He was, according to one biography,

“dirt poor, shabbily dressed and permanently hungry”.
John Lloyd and John Mitchinson, The QI Book of the Dead (2009), p. 144.

A sporting injury at school had left him with lung problems that the doctors suspected were tubercular. He wasn't given long to live. This gave his life a great sense of urgency – and he threw himself into educating himself, writing novels and womanising. The man Doctor Who shows as a timid, superstitious fool would in reality later state, "I can't bank on religion. God has no thighs and no life." Admittedly, his womanising came after his marriage at the age of 25 – after the events of the Doctor Who story. And watching this episode as an eight year-old, made me look out a copy of The Time Machine. But though the idiot Herbert is quite fun, surely the real man would have made for a more interesting and involving story.

I feel that Doctor Who's Wells and Stephenson are both missed opportunities – they're used because they are eminent men in our history, but there's little sense of why they were eminent. We see Churchill and Richard the Lionheart being great leaders, and Shakespeare is a genius who can stop monsters with his words.

The Doctor briefly met Einstein in a 1987 episode, though again there's no great insight into the man's character. In the 1996 television movie, he name-dropped Puccini and Marie Curie.

But when the series came back in 2005, meeting real people became a key ingredient in the show. Every year, there are cameos from real, living people – such as Patrick Moore, Ann Widdecombe, Richard Dawkins and Andrew Marr – and there are episodes devoted to real, historical characters. I think that's for important reasons, which I'll come to in a moment.

In The Unquiet Dead, the third episode of the new series, the Doctor met Charles Dickens. Uniquely, Dickens appears in the Portrait Gallery collection, as does the actor playing him, Simon Callow. Like Wells, the Dickens in Doctor Who brushes over much of the real biography. The story is set in 1869, the year before Dickens died. There's a line about his unhappy home life, but Dickens is on sparkling form, and even saves the Doctor at the end.

But the real Dickens was nowhere near as energetic in his last year. Four years previously, on 9 June 1865, he was involved in a serious train crash at Staplehurst. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,

"Dickens himself was unhurt but very badly shaken, not only by the accident itself but also by the experience of working for hours afterwards among the injured and the dying."

Before the crash he had been prolific, but over the next five years he slowed right down; completing Our Mutual Friend and six segments of his never-finished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The crash continued to haunt him – it's influence can be seen in his short story The Signalman, which the Doctor says is the best short story ever written.

Dickens continued to give highly dramatic readings of his work – as we see him do in the TV episode – but his health was fast deteriorating and he had to cancel a tour in April 1869 after what may have been a mild stroke. He'd have been ill and pallid and crippled with gout when the Doctor met him. Here he is in 1867 – two years before that.

Charles Dickens
by Jeremiah Gurney & Son, or by George Gardner Rockwood
albumen print, arched top, 1867
National Portrait Gallery, x9057

Doctor Who's Dickens and Wells might not adhere to the real biography, but they do so for different reasons. Mark Gatiss, writer of the Dickens episode as well as the Churchill one, is again printing the legend. A Dickens like he really was at the end of his life wouldn't be much good for fighting monsters in an adventure story, and it's not exactly tea-time telly for all the family. Instead, Gatiss takes dramatic liberties to present an impression of Dickens rather than a warts-and-all portrait of his final year. There are nods to Dickens' unhappy home life, his exhaustion and illness, but the main thing is the adventure.

It's not just that the Doctor meets Dickens: he's landed in the midst of a Dickensian story. There are ghosts, it's set at Christmas, and the tired, bitter old man is made to embrace life once again – all echoes of A Christmas Carol.

The same thing is true of Agatha Christie when she appeared in the show. Writer Gareth Roberts based the story on a real incident in Christie's life. As the fact file on the official Doctor Who website tells us,

"Agatha Christie really did disappear for ten whole days in 1926, although her car was found in a chalk pit, not next to a river. Some claim she had suffered a breakdown, while others said it was all a publicity stunt."

But the Doctor Who episode isn't exactly a testament to documentary realism. Here's what Christie looked liked in 1932:

Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie (née Miller)
by Bassano
half-plate glass negative, 15 January 1932
National Portrait Gallery, x30728

Again, Doctor Who provides an impression of the woman based on her work as much as her life. The story is a fun, summery murder mystery, with celebrity cameos and the Doctor gathering all the suspects to the drawing room to explain whodunnit. It's as if the TARDIS has landed not in a real 1926 but slap in the middle of an adaptation of one her novels, shown on prime-time ITV.

Donna even remarks on it: "Agatha Christie didn't walk around surrounded by murders," she says. "I mean, that's like meeting Charles Dickens and he's surrounded by ghosts...at Christmas."

It's interesting that the new series has concentrated so much on writers – Christie, Dickens and Shakespeare have all appeared, and head writer Russell T Davies even considered a Christmas special with the Doctor teamed up with JK Rowling.

Why writers? Well, Doctor Who has often been described as a writer-led show – each week it creates a whole new world, so it needs lots of imagination and new ideas. I also think it's easier for the Doctor to influence a writer without doing their work for them. See him with George Stephenson, struggling not to let himself take over the inventor's work – Stephenson has to puzzle it out for himself. I'd like to think that the reason we've seen so few real scientists in Doctor Who is not because of some prejudice on the part of the writers about the people in history they think are important, but because brilliant scientists are trickier to work into stories.

I would also recommend a spin-off CD, Bloodtide, by Jonathan Morris, in which the sixth Doctor meets Charles Darwin while he's formulating his theories on evolution. It's a rare example of real scientific history being worked into Doctor Who.

But why has there been this return to eminent historical figures appearing in Doctor Who? I think these real people help ground the Doctor's adventures in reality. In the same way that his companions are from our own time, and have families and jobs and houses we can relate to, the more we see reality, the more we'll buy into the crazier stuff in an episode. Agatha Christie is real, so the episode can get away with the murderer turning out to be a giant wasp. Just about.

Also, real historical figures mean there's more threat in episodes set in the past. In the Dickens episode – the first of the new series to travel back in time – we're told the future can be rewritten, the world we know could be lost. The very idea of Churchill and the Daleks is exciting because we know that didn't happen, so we don't know what's going to happen next.

The Doctor doesn't want to change history – he says there are fixed points in time that need protecting. An episode like The Waters of Mars was a neat twist on the figure from history. Lindsay Duncan played an astronaut from our future – but a woman the Doctor knew as a key figure in history. Could he save her from her famous death or was he duty bound to walk away? Did the same rules apply to a story set – to us – in the future?

I also wonder if meeting figures in history changes how we view the future, too. How much is our response to meeting Elizabeth X shaped by having seen the Doctor with Elizabeth I and Victoria?

The final person in my list of ten is the only one who's still alive. She's appeared, briefly, in two Doctor Who stories.

Queen Elizabeth II; Prince William of Wales; Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother; Prince Charles
by John Swannell
pictograph, 2000
National Portrait Gallery, x88877

Here's a portrait of the Royal Family. It's quite a formal composition, everyone in their best clothes and stood up straight. Just as Doctor Who has fondly mocked Shakespeare and Dickens, the Queen has also been used for comic effect. In the 1988 story Silver Nemesis, the gag is that the Doctor doesn't recognise her when he saunters round Windsor Castle as if he owns the place (though he has talked about her earlier in the same episode). The joke is that she's important – the Doctor should know who she is. Look at the portrait: basically, she rules.

In the 2007 episode Voyage of the Damned we learn – from Bernard Cribbens – that whereas everyone else has left London in fear of alien invasion, the Queen has remained at Buckingham Palace. She's defiant and proud, harking back to George VI not leaving London during the war. It also reveals something about Bernard Cribbens' character – he's proud of the Queen for staying put. It's part of her iconic image.

Later in the episode, the Doctor narrowly saves Buckingham Palace from being destroyed by an alien spaceship. We see the queen in pink dressing gown, pink slippers and curlers, waving a thank you. It's not like the portrait, it's a rather affectionate view of her. More so, when we learn what was originally planned for that scene.

Cut to save money was the spaceship destroying Buckingham Palace just after the Queen had got outside. The original version of the script describes a "LOW ANGLE, the old woman standing now framed against the sky. She waves an angry fist in the air". "Damn you, aliens," the Queen would have said, "Damn you!"

How much do we know our Queen? She doesn't give interviews. She's still alive so doesn't yet appear in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. We're left with glimpses of her at public events and in portraits. And it's from these that we build up an image of her – one surely more likely to wave a cheery thank you than shake an angry fist at the sky.

The script of Voyage of the Damned describes "an old woman in a nightie and curlers". It's at odds with the formal, regal portraits of the Queen on our stamps and money. And it gives us a tantalising glimpse of the Queen as a real person.

The Royal Family: A Centenary Portrait
by John Wonnacott
oil on canvas on foamboard, 2000
National Portrait Gallery, 6479

Another portrait of the Royal Family from 2000, but the composition is completely different – they're more relaxed, less formal. They're wearing the same sort of posh clothes as the previous portrait, they're in the same kind of expensive room. But just the way they're standing completely changes the impression. It's more fun, more intimate, we can believe they're a family like ours.

And that's what portraits do – here and in Doctor Who. We're able to relate these eminent people to ourselves by looking them in the eye.

I'll finish with an impression of what the Queen is like. While researching his book On Royalty, Jeremy Paxman attended the State Opening of Parliament and saw the Queen discussing horses with a "splendidly spurred official in charge of her transport". She reminded him of his own elderly mother who was also keen on horses.

Paxman has a reputation as a fearless interviewer. And yet, when the Queen glanced in his direction, he says:

"For an instant we had eye contact and I thought with utter horror, 'Oh no! She's going to talk to me!' I wanted the ground to swallow me, anything to avoid finding something to say to this particular old lady."
Jeremy Paxman, On Royalty, p. 23.

Later in the book, Paxman asked a dozen other people what they'd felt on meeting the Queen:

"The most frequently used word in response was 'thrilled'. 'I'd expected her to be a snob,' said a youth on a catering course, 'but she wasn't.' The commonest observation was the surprised discovery that she was 'human.'"
Ibid., p. 217.

The surprised discovery that the Queen is a human being! Now there's a twist worthy of Doctor Who.

MAD... literally MAD...

2011-01-31T18:44:00.002Z

Out in all good DVD shops now is the 1971 Doctor Who story The Mutants, which features another documentary by me and the brother. Here is a clip because you are good:

It's also been announced that I've written another adventure for the Second Doctor Who, The Memory Cheats, starring Wendy Padbury as Doctor Who's friend Zoe.

And I've written an episode of the new series of Dark Shadows, based on the spooky US TV show. My story, The Creeping Fog, is out in June.

William Herschel's telescope

2011-01-30T14:14:00.005Z

Space school today was on identifying constellations, and I've drawn spidery diagrams of such things as Boote, Canis Major and the the big and little bears.

Since I was at the Royal Observatory, I also took advantage of the sunshine to snap some pics of William Herschel's 40-foot telescope, which I mentioned in my recent post on the origins of the Big Bang theory.

The caption in front of the telescope says:

"This is the remaining section of a 40-foot (12m) reflecting telescope, built for the astronomer William Herschel, who became famous for his discovery of the planet Uranus in 1781.

The telescope was the largest in the world and cost over £4000, paid for by King George III. Completed in 1789 and erected at Herschel's home near Slough, about 30 miles (45km) west of Greenwich, it soon became a tourist attraction. Some people likened it to the Colossus of Rhodes, and it was even marked on the 1830 Ordnance Survey map of the area.

Sadly, the Herschels did not use the great telescope for much serious astronomy since it was difficult to set up and maintain. William's son had it dismantled in 1840. Most of the tube was destroyed when a tree fell on it 30 years later.

You can find out more about William Herschel's work in the Weller Astronomy Galleries in the Astronomy Centre on this site."

NB you might want to do that before 8 March 2011, while it's still free.

Last year, I also posted about another telescope in London, the Monument.

Do not read this book

2011-01-29T20:02:00.003Z

Another old review for Vortex, this one from January 2010.

The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart, by Jesse Bullington

Hegel and Manfried Grossbart cross 14th Century Europe robbing and killing and generally pissing off anything that comes in their way. In the first few pages they butcher the wife and family of a yeoman turnip-grower called Heinrich in front of him. Heinrich's friends – and Heinrich himself – are soon in pursuit, so Hegel and Manfried think they'll head for Egypt, which has tombs they can plunder.

That's just the start of Hegel and Manfried's problems. There are monsters and witches around every corner and the plague is tearing through whole towns. Every few pages there seems to be someone to stab or maim or steal from.

I'm not really the audience for this book; I'm bored by gory horror movies and gangster memoirs about who they killed and how much they loved their mums. But there's really not a lot to like about this book. The two leads are vicious, mean and stupid, with little interest in the things they encounter on their journey.

This is a problem, since its chiefly through their eyes that we see the world. In the 100-page sequence set in Venice, there are a couple of mentions of bridges but little else to describe one of the most distinctive cities in the world. There are occasional glimpses of the setting – the Pope is Avignon, the Venetians have sacked Constantinople – but there's little interaction or insight. The bibliography cites more than four pages of books which helped in “realistically rendering the historical world”, but the Grossbarts don't care to learn anything from their adventure and remain unchanged by all that befalls them. They're in this for the violence.

It's not just the two leads – there's not a sympathetic soul in the whole story. Everyone is greedy, vain and stupid. Perhaps it's an accurate portrait of a nasty, brutish age, but it makes for a wearisome read. It's a very violent book, peppered with long descriptions of things being gouged and broken. There's a lot of vomit, too, and the one sex scene (p. 63) is a lesson in grotesque, over-written misogyny:

“Withered breasts swaying pendulously, her tongue flicked over her few teeth and severed their drool-bond. He shrivelled even as he came inside her cold clamminess, screaming in terror at the realization he had been bewitched and wrenching away from her headfirst into the tipped table. He blacked out and vomited simultaneously, her cruel laughter following him into nightmares that stood no chance of besting his first sexual encounter.”

The witch – and manticore, mermaid and demons – allow ever more disgusting abuses of people's bodies, though the constant bludgeoning has only a dulling effect on the reader. The prose style doesn't help, every clause crammed with adjectives. On page 283, a section jumps between different characters in different rooms without any hint to the reader what and who is where.

There are some well-realised, exciting moments – as when they burn house down round a demon – and some attempt at humour as the Grossbarts discuss religious doctrine. But I struggled to care about the brothers or their story. The book ends with them hoist by their own petard, trapped inside the tomb they've come so far to rob. I spoil this for you now so you won't waste your time on the worst book I've read in years.

Big Bang theory

2011-01-28T15:42:00.003Z

"Your maths is correct, but your physics is abominable," said Albert Einstein (in French) of a 1927 paper by a Catholic priest.

Abbe Georges Lemaitre, from a small university in Belgium, had published 'A homogeneous universe of constant mass and growing radius accounting for the radial velocity of extragalactic nebulae' in the Annales de la Societe Scientifique de Bruxelles. Lemaitre - who had previously worked with Arthur Eddington at Cambridge and then Harlow Shapley at Cambridge, Massachussets - proposed the idea of an expanding universe. At the time, Einstein and physicists generally believed in a "finite, closed and static" universe, a "cosmological constant" - despite the fact that his own theory of relativity suggested otherwise.

But Lemaitre,

"derived the relation for an expanding universe to be between the speed of a galaxy receding from an observer and its distance from the observer. Lemaitre also provided the first observational estimate of the slope of the speed-distance curve that later became known as Hubble's law when the American astronomer Edwin Hubble reported his initial observations on galaxies in 1929. These two important properties of the universe were proposed two years before the measurements that would begin a new era in astrophysical cosmology."
JP McEvoy, The Universe - From Ancient Babylon to the Big Bang, pp. 190-1.

When Hubble published his observations, Lemaitre sent his own paper to Eddington and Einstein quickly confirmed that his theory "fits well into the general theory of relativity". There were still lots of questions to be asked about what drove the expansion, and several notable physicists were still skeptical (the "Big Bang" was initially a term of contempt for the idea), but Lemaitre has been called "the father of the Big Bang".

And yet, the idea had been proposed 150 years previously. Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove's Trillion Year Spree refers to a footnote in Erasmus Darwin's 1791 verse discussion, The Economy of Vegetation.

The footnote explains Darwin's response to William Herschel's own "sublime and curious" ideas about the construction of the heavens. Herschel had discovered 1,000s of star clusters (and the planet Uranus) with his telescope. (You can see Herschel's 40-foot telescope at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich and visit his house in Bath.)

According to Darwin, Herschel had observed that there were proportionately fewer stars around the clusters, and concluded that infinite space had first been evenly sprinkled with stars but that, through gravity, they had "coagulated" together. Herschel also observed that the stars were moving round some central axis (that is, that the Milky Galaxy is slowly turning), and concluded that they must "have emerged or been projected from the material, where they were produced."

"It may be objected, that if the stars have been projected from a Chaos by explosions, that they must have returned again into it from the known laws of gravitation; this however, would not happen, if the whole of Chaos, like grains of gunpowder, was exploded at the same time, and dispersed through infinite space at once, or in quick succession, in every possible direction."
Erasmus Darwin, footnote to Canto I, line 105 of The Economy of Vegetation (1791)

I didn't know much about Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) until reading Trillion Year Spree, whose authors - taking their lead from Desmond King-Hele's The Essential Writings of Erasmus Darwin (1968) - devote three and a half pages to him. Hele, they say "lists seventy-five subjects in which he was a pioneer".

"Many inventions stand to Erasmus Darwin's credit, such as new types of carriages and coal carts, a speaking machine, a mechanical ferry, rotary pumps, and horizontal windmills. He also seems to have invented - or at least proposed - a rocket motor powered by hydrogen and oxygen. His rough sketch shows the two gases stored in separate compartments and fed into a cylindrical combustion chamber with exit nozzle at one end - a good approximation of the workings of a modern rocket, and formulated long before the ideas of the Russian rocket pioneer Tsiolkovsky were set to paper."
Brian Aldiss with David Wingrove, Trillion Year Spree, p. 35.

Darwin's long poems with their awkward rhymes might often seem "daft" to us now (though Aldiss and Wingrove cite some of his deft lines), and his reputation was damaged by parodies in his own time.

"Parodies of his verse in George Canning's Anti-Jacobin, entitled The Loves of the Triangles, mocked Darwin's ideas, laughing at his bold imaginative strokes. That electricity could ever have widespread practical application, that mankind could have evolved from lowly life forms, that the hills could be older than the Bible claimed - those were the sorts of madnesses which set readers of the Anti-Jacobin tittering. Canning recognized the subversive element in Darwin's thought and effectively brought low his reputation."
Ibid., p. 36.

He was also eclipsed by his grandson Charles, though Erasmus's Zoonomia, published in two volumes in 1794 and 96,

"explains the systems of sexual selection, with emphasis on promiscuity, the search for food, and the need for protection in living things, and how these factors, interweaving with natural habitats, control the diversity of life in all its changing forms."
Ibid., p. 36.

Erasmus acknowledged that these "evolutionary processes need time as well as space" and "emphasizes the the great age of the Earth", contradicting the "then-accepted view" of Bishop Ussher's that the Earth was created in 4004 BC. (Aldiss and Wingrove admit that "the Scot, James Hutton, had declared in 1785, thrillingly, that the geological record revealed 'no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end'.")

Aldiss and Wingrove call Erasmus Darwin "as a part-time science-fiction writer", though I think they rather overplay the case for his,

"prophesysing with remarkable accuracy many features of modern life - gigantic skyscraper cities, piper water, the age of the automobile, overpopulation, and fleets of nuclear submarines".
Ibid., p. 37.

But perhaps Darwin has a part to play in sci-fi. The authors nominate Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as the first work of science-fiction, a book that Shelley herself claimed to be the result of a nightmare in 1816, following,

"late night conversations with Shelley, Lord Byron and John Polidori, Byron's Doctor. Their talk was of vampires and the supernatural. Polidori supplied the company with some suitable reading material; Byron and Shelley also discussed Darwin, his thought and experiments. At Byron's suggestion, the four of them set about writing a ghost story apiece."
Ibid., p. 53.

I find this all fascinating and have been meaning to write it all up for months. Note to self to investigate Darwin further. I also see you can visit Erasmus Darwin's House in Staffordshire.

Old reviews: Johannes Cabal - the Necromancer

2011-01-27T11:59:00.004Z

Here's a book review of Johannes Cabal - the Necromancer by Jonathan L Howard, which I wrote for Vector in the summer of 2009 and never got round to posting here:

Johannes Cabal has made a deal with the devil. He's already sold his soul; the deal is to win it back. Cabal has one year to claim 100 other souls, and Satan's even going to throw in the means with which to claim them. Soon Cabal is in charge of a travelling carnival, with something to tempt every punter.

But Cabal has obstacles in his way: rival villains and wizards, concerned local residents and his own vampiric brother. And he can only use his dark powers sparingly; they're linked to a ball of black blood down in Hell that shrinks every time he performs a spell.

There's all the makings of a rich and lively adventure here, but sadly it never quite works. The ball of black blood, for example, is forgotten as soon as it's introduced. Rather than curbing Cabal's efforts, he seems to do just what he likes.

Nor the year's deadline feel much of a ticking clock. Cabal sets up his carnival, claims his first victims and makes excuses for a few more. The middle chapters are unconnected episodes: Cabal getting caught in a hell dimension, or the carnival as seen by a small boy. Then, without much sense of time passing, or how the carnival and its staff have developed, we skip to the end and a race for the last two victims. There's no sense of time passing, of the seasons changing, of the strain Cabal is under. In fact, while he may get a bit cross when inconvenienced, there's little sense that events really affect him.

Cabal's brother, Horst, acts as his conscience. The vampire struggling to go without blood is not a hugely original idea. There's no new spin on the character here. Horst chides Cabal and helps save a few worthy souls, but is powerless to sway his brother. The later stages of the book would have worked better had Horst had more influence, or suggested Cabal is more conflicted than he lets on.

As it is, we don't feel any great pressure on Cabal. And to be honest, until the last couple of pages we're given little reason to root for him, either. He's pompous, arched and sarcastic without ever quite straying into wit. That in itself is a major problem for what's meant to be a darkly comic novel. It simply isn't all that funny, dramatic or original.

The denouement hangs on whether Cabal will claim the souls of two poor, innocent women to meet his deadline. But with almost no indication of his having any scruples, this hardly works as a crisis of character.

And yet the last two pages reveal why Cabal sold his soul in the first place, and why to reclaim it again he's gone to such effort and given up so much. There's the first hint of a much more complex, conflicted and interesting character there. One who may well support a continuing series.

Salonica

2011-01-26T18:25:00.015Z

Spent a long weekend in Thessaloniki (also known as Salonica) in northern Greece with the Dr and my parents. Traipsed through a fair few museums and old churches and ate a lot of nice food.

I managed the first 200 pages of Mark Mazower's Salonica, which is brilliantly rich and well researched but a bit heavy for holiday reading. He charts the complex, multi-ethnic history of the city under Ottoman rule, comparing the different customs, manners and superstitions:

"Holy water helped Christians, Bulgarians were fond of salt; others used the heads of small, salted fish mixed in water, while everyone believed in the power of spitting in the face of a pretty child."
Mark Mazower, Salonica - City of Ghosts, p. 85.

He also speaks of the power of pentagrams to Muslims, "for keeping babies in good health", and on the next page,

"Against the fear of infertility, ill health, envy or bad luck, the barriers between faiths quickly crumbled."
Ibid., p. 86.

The Dr's chief interest was the classical history. The Archaeological Museum has a new digitisation project, Macedonia: From Fragment to Pixels, and we had fun spotting Gods in an interactive wordsearch and making information pop up on maps. We were also wowed by the Myrtis exhibition, where different scientific methods help bring back to life a small girl who died in the 5th century BC.

Sadly, a lot of the main museum was closed while we were there, but what we did mooch round was beautifully displayed and interpreted. The Dr especially liked seeing a Roman-period dining table recreated 'live' from a contemporary illustration and using real artefacts.

The Museum of Byzantine Culture was free and quick to look round, with some nicely displayed bits of fresco. We tried several attempts to get into the open-air Roman forum, but always managed to find it closed so took pictures from the edges.

On our second full day, the Dr expertly guided us out by bus to the bus station (always well out of town in Greek cities), and thence onto a bus to Vergina and the tumulus tomb where Alexander the Great buried his dad, Phillip II. It took a bit of wandering through the drizzle to find, and then it didn't look much - a bit of grassy hillock.

But inside was something else entirely: the most amazing museum of all the spectacular riches discovered in the tombs, right next to the tomb doorways in situ. The low-light only enhanced the splendor of the gold, but it was the simple, practical and perfectly preserved cups and pots that impressed - it was hard to believe they were 250 let alone 2,500 years old.

The haul included organic relics - so rare in archaeology of this age. There was a purple cloth with gold thread design, carvings in wood and ivory.

The tomb doorway showed a rare example of ancient Greek fresco painting, showing a hunting scene. On the tops of the doors were still vivid, bright highlights of orange and blue - again, a small detail that makes this ancient, strange civilisation so tangible.

If there was one slight off note, it was the insistence of some of the labels to explain that the finds showed that this ancient civilisation was characteristially Greek - a political claim as much to do with Macedonia's recent history as the past. The god-king buried here in such finery would have sat uncomfortably with the hellenic Spartans and Athenians - who so famously managed without monarchy. It was telling, not showing, forcing an opinion rather than letting us interpret the facts.

But otherwise, it was an extraordinary place and we dawdled round at the end, not really wanting to leave. (It was also all a bit The Daemons - an iconic image of Alexander even showed him with horns.)

The next day we tried Pella, Phillip's capital city and the birthplace of Alexander. This time, our bus efforts were less successful. First we ended up in Giannitsa because our bus driver forgot to drop us off in the right place, despite the Dr asking him specifically beforehand and his nodding as she pointed at the word 'Pella' on our ticket. In Giannitsa he only shook his head - we should have called out to stop the bus when we wanted to get off, what with our psychic knowledge of Macedonia having not visited before, and ignoring the fact that (as we discovered on the bus back again) that he'd not taken the Pella road in the first place.

And we'd been watching very carefully, too - because all along the route there were impressive tumulus tombs in the otherwise flat plains of farmland, all of them cool and alluring, and none of them labelled in big letters so you could identify them from the road.

The bus back deposited us in the pouring rain at a lowly bus stop with a big sign declaring 'Pella' and a map of where things might be.

This solitary map was some way out of town, so we schlepped up through the lashing rain away from it and wandered round and round the town, stopping to take photos of our sodden holiday at the ankles of a big statue of Alexander.

At last, we discovered the new Archaeological Museums of Pella on the outskirts. A large sign outside explained the vast sum spent by the EU on the impressive new building - so new its website is still under construction, though the place has been open since 2009. It seemed a lot of money for a place that had made it so hard to get to, and the small, narrow car park didn't exactly suggest it sees much traffic from cars and coaches. There were more staff than visitors, who followed us round like wardens, telling us we were allowed to take photos without a flash, and then telling us off if we did so.

Again, the actual artefacts were very impressive - some huge and well-preserved mosaics with lots of willy on show, all sorts of domestic and funerary bits and pieces that gave a glimpse of real people's lives. Photographs showed us just how far the archaeological site extended - the outline of a vast city still there because, after it was destroyed in an earthquake, the locals rebuilt their town further along the hill.

Again, the labels insisted that the dialects in the writing and the artistic styles linked these objects entirely and unquestionably to hellenic traditions, so that (the implication was ladled on) 2,500 years later Macedonia can't be anything other than Greek. I think you could probably make the same case for anywhere else Alexander conquered - Egypt, Iran or India.

There was no shop to buy books or postcards, and we could not visit any part of the huge archaeological site - which the old museum had been right in the heart of. It all felt a bit cold and unwelcoming for such a new and expensive place. We tramped back to the bus stop and sulked until a bus came.

Though it sometimes lacked in presentation, don't get me wrong: the sites and artefacts are amazing and it was mostly a great joy to plod about looking at stuff. The churches were all very welcoming, and often contained beautiful frescos. I felt a bit awkward being welcomed inside to look round during the middle of a service. Even when things were quiet, you feel a bit intrusive stood there gawping while devout local people slink to kiss the icons.

There were fun bits of Mediterranea, too, the little differences that remind you you're abroad. D gleefully ignored the no smoking signs in restaurants (one old chap in one restuarant at least made an effort to hide his fag below the edge of the table). The crossword and puzzle books on sale at all the kiosks had bikinied lovelies on their covers - what with that correlation between glamour* and wordsearches.

(* - that is, soft porn but with clothes on.)

The Greek alphabet also kept me childishly amused:

& Toot! - and with a cone of meat. And this logo for telecommunications was everywhere:

But the chief highlight was seeing the Dr relax, grinning round the museums and churches, not thinking about all the stressy house-buying stuff and, er, throwing herself into some shameless cat-adultery...

Units of licenced merchandise

2011-01-09T10:49:00.004Z

Those fine fellows at BBC Worldwide / 2|entertain have put a whole load of Doctor Who clips up on YouTube, including a snippet of a documentary what me and the brother done made.

Meglos is out on DVD this month with this documentary and another one by us on it. And we've got stuff on The Mutants and The Ark, too, which are released in coming weeks.

Also, Big Finish now have a cover and trailer up for The Perpetual Bond,out next month - a new adventure for the First Doctor and starring Peter Purves and Tom Allen. I've also got a short story on the second volume of Short Trips: 'Letting Go' features the Eighth Doctor and is read by India Fisher.

My Primeval book is now out in paperback, too.