AAAGH!

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.

Books finished, November 2010

Catching up on the books of 2010. Goldfinger deserves a post of it's own sometime - and I certainly made loads of notes. But blimey, it's an odd book, with a interminably dull golf match that stretches over chapters being followed by an equally dull drive to Switzerland. So many of the iconic moments from the film - such as the girl killed by being painted gold - are reported rather than seen, and even for a Bond book there's a lot of casual racism.

Some of that is the time in which it was written - Fleming also need to explain to the reader what karate is, and the term "'hit' - mobese for murder" (p. 186). But that will only go so far. Bond's thoughts on a girl who's not interested in him, and on where gayness might come from, are quite a surprise:

"Bond came to the conclusion that Tilly Masterson was one of those girls whose hormones had got mixed up. He knew the type well and thought they and their male counterparts were a direct consequence of giving votes to women and 'sex equality'. As a direct result of fifty years of emancipation, feminine qualities were dying out or being transferred to the males. Pansies of both sexes were everywhere, not yet completely homosexual, but confused, not knowing what they were. The result was a herd of unhappy sexual misfits - barren and full of frustrations, the women wanting to dominate and the men to be nannied. He was sorry for them, but he had no time for them."

Ian Fleming, Goldfinger, p. 189.

Of course, later Bond will convert the lesbian Pussy Galore so that she throws off a life of crime and ladies to help Bond stop the villains and get into his bed. We learn that Pussy is only a lesbian because she was abused by her uncle, and that all this time she's been waiting for a real man.

That this man turns out to be Bond is not merely reactionary fantasy but also a massive cheat in the plot. Pussy has only met Bond once - and briefly - before she switches sides. That's during a meeting between Goldfinger and America's fiercest hoodlums, where Bond is being Goldfinger's secretary. He doesn't say anything, let alone do anything to attract her attention. The 'real man' she falls for is the quiet one doing shorthand in a room full of toughs. Really not good enough, 007.

GCSE Astronomy - A Guide for Pupils and Teachers (1999) relates to an older version of the syllabus than the one I'm doing, but outlines the main topics and homework projects which is all very useful.

The Cosmos - A Beginnner's Guide is also me swotting up for class. Accompanying the TV series, it's an enthusiastic trawl through some of the big ideas and newer theories, with a particular pleasure in big machinery and diagrams.

Her Fearful Symmetry is sort of The Graveyard Book as told by Richard Curtis. The male hero is an embarrassed, slightly rubbish Hugh Grant type who falls under the spell of an American girl. He lives alone in a large flat in an expensive part of London without having to work, and is doing a PhD without apparently having to see a supervisor or, you know, actually do a lot of work or anything.

In fact, most of the characters idle along, going to museums and strange bits of London not in their lunch hours and stolen moments of the day but because they're filling time. There's none of the urgency, the effort, to earn enough for the costly capital city, and little of the noise and richness and mixture.

Highgate is just a stone's throw from Archway but is apparently an oasis of old-skool Englishness where no one is Black or gay. Everyone speaks English apart from two eccentric linguists - we get some wry stuff about the differences between American English and the local vernacular, but that's about it.

The volunteers running the cemetery are all sweet and understanding old dears - there's none of the petty jealousies, intrigues and empire-building that bother any place of work, especially one run by enthusiasts. As a result, it's an idyll of London which never quite rings true.

At one point, the book seems to notice this:

"Julia began to play a game that entailed travelling on the tube and randomly popping out at stations with interesting names: Tooting Broadway, Ruislip Gardens, Pudding Mill Lane. Usually the above-ground reality disappointed her. The names on the tube map evoked a Mother Goose cityscape, cosy and diminutive. The actual places tended to be grim: takeaway chicken shops, off-licences and Ladbrokes crowded out whimsy."

Audrey Niffenegger, Her Fearful Symmetry, p. 255.

But this may all be intentional, as the veil of unreality about the world matches the strange and sad and beautiful ghost story. It reminded me chiefly of the death of Simon Callow's character in Four Weddings - with the same awkwardness of feelings amongst a group of decent but unfulfilled people, the same peculiar peccadilloes and the knowledge that there can't be a happy ending, only one that's bittersweet.

It's an odd book, and haunting, but not quite as brilliant as The Time Traveller's Wife.

Sci-Fi Ancient Egypt

I wrote this trail for the Petrie Museum of Ancient Egyptology, which has just had a spangly new makeover. Cat and gothic trails are also available (not by me). Download the latest versions from the Petrie's trails and resources page.

(Will add more images and links when I have a chance.)

“With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same.”

HG Wells (1898), The War of the Worlds, p. 1.

“The man who knows and dwells in history adds a new dimension to his existence; he no longer lives in the one plane of present ways and thoughts, he lives in the whole space of life, past and present, and dimly future. He sees the present narrow line of existence, momentarily fluctuating, as one stage like innumerable other stages that have each been the all-important present to the short-sighted people of their own day”.

WM Flinders Petrie (1904), Methods and Aims in Archaeology, p. 193.

“The point of archaeology is to carefully recover the past, not disintegrate it.”

The Doctor (1989), Doctor Who: Battlefield.

SPHINX
1. UC14769 (IC13, 2nd from top): Part of base of a sandstone sphinx with 2 paws and cartouches each side denoting Seti I.

As Petrie argued, understanding the past helps to place the worries and wants of the present day in context. Archaeology strives to understand the past from the meagre fragments left to us. From the exquisitely crafted jewels and sculptures to the shards of broken pottery, collecting and comparing these fragments slowly brings the long dead back to life.

We know the fragment here shows the paws of a sphinx from comparison with other artefacts and sources. A sphinx is a mythological creature, often (though not always) having the body of a lioness and the head of a woman. Sphinxes are usually found “guarding” royal tombs.

Science fiction can also place the worries and wants of the present day in context by imagining things to come. HG Wells wrote what many consider the first science-fiction novel The Time Machine in 1895 when the British Empire reached across the world.

In the story, a Victorian inventor travels to the year 802,701 where he discovers that humans have died out. Instead, creatures called Eloi and Morlocks live in the shadow of an ancient monument, the only visible remaining trace of civilisation. Wells makes this ancient monument a sphinx, likening the fall of civilisation (and the British Empire) to the fall of ancient empires such as Egypt. The story – and these fragments of two paws – remind us that nothing lasts forever.

Several science-fiction stories show us future societies struggling to understand the fragments left of our own civilisation – often for comic effect. In the 2005 Doctor Who story The End of the World, for example, the Lady Cassandra insists that an old Wurlitzer jukebox is an ‘iPod’.

But there's a sadder connection between the fragments of the past and science fiction. The Petrie Museum holds scant fragments of one of the earliest-known copies of The Iliad. Doctor Who visited the events of The Iliad in the 1965 story The Myth Makers, a story that has since been deleted from the BBC archive. Fragments are left: a full soundtrack (released on CD by BBC Audio), some photographs from the set and a few seconds of low-quality footage.

RAT TRAP
2. UC16773 (Object by Site: Lahun, bottom): Pottery rat trap. Handle, one end and trap door missing - one enlarged air slit partly blocked with ancient plaster. (Originally identified as a coop for small chickens or incubator).

Archaeology and science fiction can both show us how similar we are today to the people of the distant past and future, with the same worries and wants. Here is a pottery rat trap from 1985 -1795 BCE. It gives a vivid sense of the kind of everyday problems faced by people 4,000 years ago. Beside the rat trap is a modern version of the type still in use across Africa. The suggestion might be that little has changed in all that time, that people will always be people. This can also be used to dramatic effect.

In the 2008 Doctor Who story The Fires of Pompeii, Caecillius is pretentious about art, worries about his son getting drunk and how his daughter is dressed. Though this is jokey to begin with, when the volcano Vesuvius erupts, the story is all the more effecting because we've seen these people are so like us.

In The Fires of Pompeii, the Doctor mentions meeting the Emperor Nero – as he does in the 1964 story The Romans. 3. Nero is named in the cartouche on the blocks UC14528 and 16516 (case IC16).

MINOTAUR and MEDUSA
4. UC14518 (case IC9): Limestone slab with bull-headed god, between parts of 2 other figures.

We tend to think of ancient civilisations existing in isolation – the ancient Greeks and Romans separate from the ancient Egyptians. But it's evident from finds made by archaeologists that ancient cultures traded with one another, and that ideas and stories spread. Myths were retold and reworked by different people, as they have been ever since.

Gene Wolfe's Soldier of Sidion (2006) is set in Ptolemaic Egypt, the third in a series about a Roman mercenary making his way through the ancient world but one where the ancient gods walk among the ordinary mortals. A rich, clever adventure, it dares suggest itself less “fantasy” as historical novel.

In the examples on display in the museum here, we can see that the ancient Egyptians themselves told stories featuring characters we traditionally think of as “belonging” to other cultures – such as bull-headed people (like the Minotaur from Greek mythology) and gorgons (like Medusa).

Many science fiction stories rework myths or elements of them. They might reveal that the gods and monsters of the ancient world were aliens or robots. They retell the ancient stories in space instead of Egypt or cherry-pick incidents or characters.

5. UC48468 (case PC 35): Terracotta medallion of a gorgon head; there are traces of white paint on the surface. The facial features are sharply moulded and the hair wavy with two entwined snakes at the top.

Medusa appears in the Doctor Who story The Mind Robber (1968), the Minotaur in The Time Monster (1972). The latter was released on DVD in March 2010 as part of the “Myths and Legends” box-set (BBC DVD 2851), along with two other Doctor Who stories that rework ancient stories.

SOUNDS FAMILIAR

Sometimes science fiction doesn't rework the myths so much as just borrow the names. For example, the Doctor and the Daleks briefly visit the pyramids in episodes 9 and 10 of The Daleks' Masterplan (1966).

(Episode 9 no longer exists in the BBC archive but episode 10 is included in the "Lost in Time" box-set, along with the few existing seconds of footage from The Myth Makers).

The three Egyptians who help fight the Daleks are named “Khephren”, “Tuthmos” and “Hyksos”.

Khephren takes his name from Chephren / Khafre (c.2558 - c.2532 BCE), the pharaoh who built the second great pyramid at Giza and whose face was the model for the sphinx that guards it. You can see a cuboid fragment from the second pyramid at 6. UC16043 (entrance case on right).

Tuthmos is derived from “Tuthmosis”, the name of several pharaohs in the 16th and 15th centuries BCE. Most notably, Tuthmosis III (1479 – 1425 BCE) was a military genius who massively expanded the Egyptian empire. A cartouche of his name can be seen at 7. UC14542 (case IC5).

The tomb of Tuthmosis III was excavated in 1898 by Petrie's contemporary, Victor Loret (1859-1946). The tomb (KV34) in the Valley of Kings included the first complete-found “Amduat” - the book of the Underworld. It is also, as Sarah Jane Smith tells the Doctor in the 1975 story The Pyramids of Mars, where an account is given of Sutekh's battle with his brother Horus.

Hyksos is named after the people from Palestine who ruled in Egypt in the 17th century BCE. Examples of pottery from their time and influenced by them include the black duck jug at 8. UC13479 (case PC27), with white incisions on display in the Pottery Gallery.

SEQUENCE DATING
The film and TV series Stargate (1994, 1997- ) explain that the myths and names of ancient Egypt derive from meetings (via gateways across space) with aliens. The hero of the film is an archaeologist and sarcophagi are used to resurrect people. In the film, the planet on the far side of the stargate is called Abydos, which is the name of the place where the tomb of Osiris is located and where this limestone stele 9. UC14488 (case IC2) was found.

The film shows us the “real” Egyptian gods Anubis and Ra. The TV series has also shown Apophis, Anubis, Ba'al, Hathor, Nirrti, Osiris and Seth – among others. It has also freely used names and events from other mythologies.

(By comparing the names and events of other mythologies rather than Egypt specifically, Stargate follows in a tradition of science fiction stories taking their cue from Joseph Campbell's 1949 book on comparative anthropology, The Hero With a Thousand Faces.)

The stargates and other technology in the series are made of an element called “naqahdah”. The name is reminiscent of Naqada, a town on the west bank of the Nile that Petrie excavated in 1894.

Whereas some archaeologists before him had been more interested in finding treasure and texts, Petrie carefully recorded everything he found, including the broken pieces of pottery on display in the Pottery Room. (Start at PC3 and also see www.digitalegypt.ucl.ac.uk/pottery/seqdates.html)

By comparing the styles of pottery itself and its decoration, Petrie developed a Sequence Dating system – a timeline of nine developments in Egyptian pottery. This could then be used to give approximate dates to any further finds made which contained fragments of pottery.

According to Petrie's system – and subsequent testing – the town of Naqada is one of the oldest in Egypt, with pottery found from 4000 BCE in the pre-dynastic period. As a result, the name of the town often appears near the top of any timeline. That may well be why the producers of Stargate chose it.

Like Stargate, a 2009 episode of the TV series Primeval suggested that the “gods” from ancient Egypt were real creatures. One of them chased through the Egyptian galleries at the British Museum.

SCARAB BEETLES
10. UC69860 winged scarab beetle (case L)

The way that scarab beetles rolled great balls of dung seemed, to the ancient Egyptians, like the way the Sun rolled across the sky. Perhaps the Sun, too, was pushed by a giant beetle. The beetle was therefore symbolic of time.

The beetles also ate the balls of dung and their young emerged from them – as if, the ancient Egyptians thought, they had been spontaneously created. The beetles were therefore also symbolic of regeneration.

Time and regeneration are, of course, quite important to Doctor Who. But beetles usually play a more sinister role in modern stories that loot the relics of ancient Egypt. In the 1999 film The Mummy, the tomb of Imhotep is guarded by flesh-eating scarabs.

The 1967 Doctor Who story The Tomb of the Cybermen reworks many familiar elements from Mummy stories in a science-fiction context. In the 1959 Hammer film The Mummy, actor George Pastell plays Mehemet Bey, worshipper of Karnak, who pretends to be a friend of the archaeologists then entreats the risen Mummy to kill them. In the Doctor Who story Pastell plays much the same part, but here he's a member of the Brotherhood of Logicians. Instead of scarabs, we are introduced to Cybermats, which poison and kill the archaeologists as the story requires.

ANKH
11. UC43949 (case WEC9) Light green faience ankh inscribed on both sides of shaft with epithets and cartouches of Aspelta.

Egyptian gods are often shown carrying the ankh, also known as the “key of life”, the hieroglyphic symbol for eternal life. There are several different theories about what the ankh derives from. Is it meant to show a man and woman united under the Sun, or does it show the Nile at the centre of Egypt, the loop at the top representing the Nile Delta, or a penis sheath?

In Neil Gaiman's award-winning Sandman comics, the ankh is the symbol of the character Death. In the TV series Lost, several characters are seen wearing ankh pendants, while the giant statue of the hippo-god Taweret holds an ankh in each hand. (Lost is littered with Egyptian symbols and hieroglyphs, see http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Hieroglyphs.)

NEMES HEADRESS
12. UC14363 (case IC17) Head of mottled diroite (about 1/2 size) of King Amenemhat III, wearing Nemes head-dress and uraeus.

The distinctive striped “nemes” head cloth was worn by Egyptian pharaohs. The flaps of the head cloth taper out behind the wearer's ears and hang down below both shoulders. The golden mask of Tutankhamun and the great statues of Ramesses II are famous examples of pharaohs wearing the nemes. It was often worn with a “uraeus” or “cobra” on the forehead, symbol of royalty.

The space helmets worn by Viper pilots in the original Battlestar Galactica TV series (1978-9) were based on the nemes head cloth, subtly suggesting the links between the human refugees seen in the series and the “legendary” planet Earth they were searching for. The helmets featured a viper symbol instead of the uraeus.

The modern version of Battlestar Galactica (2004- ) has not retained the nemes-style helmets, but there are still occasional hints of the links between the refugees and Earth's ancient civilisations. For example, pyramids can be glimpsed on the colony planet Kobol.

Both the original and modern versions of Battlestar Galactica are available to buy on DVD.

MAGIC
13. UC36314 (case J): Hippopotamus ivory clapper, reconstructed from fragments, in form of right hand; incised bracelet band at wrist and ornate net pattern on arm.

There are many theories about the wands found, usually made of hippopotamus ivory. Hippopotamuses and elephants are dangerous creatures, so acquiring the ivory from a living animal may have been part of the ritual. The wands do not use all of the tusk, either, so each tusk may have produced a “family” of linked wands (not dissimilar to the families of wands in Harry Potter). Wands were clearly of great value. Some use ebony and other precious materials.

Little is known of Egyptian magic, which makes it ripe for speculation in horror and science fiction stories. The Book of the Dead is central to many stories dealing with mummies and resurrection. But Egyptian magic is also used to time travel in both Tim Powers' award-winning The Anubis Gates (1983) and Terry Pratchett's less serious Pyramids (1989).

SUTEKH
14. UC45093 (case IC7): Upper part of a green glazed steatite round-topped plaque incised with image of Seth standing, to his right a column of hieroglyphs 'excellent praised one, beloved of Seth lord of Nubt'.

In the 1975 Doctor Who story The Pyramids of Mars, the Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith battle the Egyptian god Sutekh – also known as Set or Seth. The inscription says that Seth was “Lord of Nubt”, the ancient name for Naqara (see above).

Though Seth was Lord of Nubt, the opening shot of The Pyramids of Mars uses stock footage of the step pyramid at Saqqara. A block, possibly an altar or the top of a pyramid looks like the Step Pyramid in Stonework: Statuary IC15 15. UC69838.

Sarah knows about Sutekh's battles with his brother Horus: she explains Sutekh was captured by Horus and “the 740 gods named on the tomb of Tuthmosis III”.

The story includes robot mummies, sarcophagi that transport people, a forcefield controlled by canopic jars, and sphinx-like riddles to get into the pyramid on Mars. It draws heavily on the 1959 Hammer film The Mummy, as did The Tomb of the Cybermen (see above).

While Egyptian mythology (and Doctor Who) is full of creatures that are human but for animal heads, unusually, the animal that provides Seth with his head is unknown to science.

HEROES
16. Portrait of Flinders Petrie by Fülöp László (1934). The old man in the picture might not seem a likely inspiration for Indiana Jones. Yet the traveller-archaeologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries told exciting tales of the worlds they'd discovered – and the adventures they had in discovering them.

Indiana Jones, Rick O'Connell in The Mummy, Daniel Jackson in Stargate and the Doctor's future wife, River Song in Doctor Who have followed that lead. The archaeologist battles the odds to uncover strange and surprising artefacts that change how we see our own place and time.

Like detectives, they use the clues left behind (17. UC50615 Roman Terracotta Tower lamp, like the ‘TARDIS’ lamp on the altar to the household gods in The Fires of Pompeii), the battered artefacts and writings. They don't use them just to solve crimes but to build whole cities and empires and worlds. Exploring the real, ancient world turns out to be just as rich, strange and exciting as anything we can imagine in a story.

© Simon Guerrier, 2010

Primary sources
Battlestar Gallactica (1978-9, 2004-)
Doctor Who

• The Romans (1964) – BBC DVD 2698
• The Myth Makers (1965) – soundtrack available from BBC Audio
• The Daleks' Masterplan (1965-66) – episode 10 available on Lost in Time, BBC DVD 1353
• The Tomb of the Cybermen (1967) – BBC DVD 1032
• The Mind Robber (1968) – BBC DVD 1358
• The Time Monster (1972), included in Myths and Legends, BBC DVD 2851
• The Pyramids of Mars (1975) – BBC DVD 1350
• Battlefield (1989) – BBC DVD 2440
• The End of the World (2005) – BBC DVD 1755
• The Fires of Pompeii (2008) – BBC DVD 2605

Gaiman, Neil, The Sandman (1989-96)
Lost (2004-10)
The Mummy (1959)
The Mummy (1999)
Rowling, JK, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997)
Powers, Tim, The Anubis Gates (1983)
Pratchett, Terry, Pyramids (1989)
Primeval (2007-)
Stargate (1994, 1997-)
Wells, HG, The Time Machine (1895)
Wells, HG, The War of the Worlds (1898)
Wolfe, Gene, Soldier of Sidion (2006)

Secondary sources
Burdge, Anthony, Burke, Jessica, and Larsen, Kristine (eds.), The Mythological Dimensions of Doctor Who (2010)
Campbell, Joseph, The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949)
Dowden, Ken, The Uses of Greek Mythology (1992)
Petrie, WM Flinders, Methods and Aims in Archaeology, (1904)

Thanks to Scott Andrews, Debbie Challis, John J Johnston and Stephen Quirke.

Film Focus: Dave McKean

Another old Film Focus thing, this time an interview with director Dave McKean to go with my review of Mirrormask.

Was thrilled to speak to McKean over the phone, having long been an awed fanboy. I even got on to my Art A-level course (having not done the GCSE) by showing the tutors a sketchbook mostly comprising cut-and-pasted bits of Signal to Noise from my sisters copies of The Face. Excitingly, I've since met and been on a panel with McKean at a convention. He signed a copy of Mr Punch for the Dr (I chose that one 'cos it's about a wife beater.) Anyhoo...

Dave McKean interview
Conducted 27 February 2006

As I understand it from Neil Gaiman’s blog, Henson’s found that they had two million quid stuffed down the back of the sofa and wondered if you could make a film with it. Is that roughly how Mirrormask came about?

It’s almost that, yes. That’s the funny version. The slightly less funny version is that somebody at Columbia/TriStar – who released Labyrinth and the Dark Crystal – just noticed that those films, over the years, had done very well. Actually, when they were released they did not do so well because they were expensive. But over the years they have been around all the time, and people still like them and watch them.

Is that on video and DVD?

Yes, and they’re still showing at science-fiction festivals and fantasy festivals. They are just constants, and new generations of people keep finding them and enjoying them. So they offered Henson’s the chance to make another one, but they only had the aforementioned two million quid down the back of the sofa. So yes, that’s how it came about.

How much was it to be a conscious continuation of Dark Crystal and Labyrinth?

I think those sorts of conversation carried on before Neil and I were involved. I think the very first possibility-type conversations between Lisa Henson and the folks at Columbia/TriStar were, ‘Well, maybe it could be a sequel to Labyrinth or something like that…’ Those conversations had gone by the time we came aboard. At that point it was just a fantasy film, non-specific but for a family audience. So not a blood-and-gutsy adult film. Other than that, anything we liked.

So that gave you a lot of freedom then?

Yes.

I know you principally as an illustrator, I think as most people will. You used to illustrate for things like The Face, back in the eighties…

Yeah, we did a story called Signal to Noise, which I’m hoping to make as a film next.

I’ve read interviews with people like Terry Gilliam talking about the difference between being an illustrator and making moving images. How much more difficult is it to get the same effect from a moving image?

Um… it’s actually not difficult, I’ve found.

So you don’t feel you’re compromising your vision at all?

It depends. I’ve made some short films, and am continuing to make short films here, literally on my own. In that respect, there’s no compromise at all. When you get to the level of a film like Mirrormask, there are compromises but they tend to be creative ones, meaning that the budget is fixed and that becomes your wall, the box that you’re in. Actually, that’s really liberating in a way, because it forces you to be resourceful. You can’t just continually throw money at problems, you have to use your brains a little bit.

When it gets up to Terry’s $80 million mark, you’re really dealing with a ton of money. You’re dealing with people who are very nervous and twitchy about spending all that money. That’s where it starts to get much more compromised and difficult. Obviously the possibilities are huge because you’ve got all this money to throw at the show, but you’ve also got people looking over your shoulder constantly, people who may not be sympathetic to your whim at that particular moment. Whereas on Mirrormask we could almost make it up as we went along. Obviously we didn’t, but we had a very free and easy, improvisational, ‘let’s make the most of this’ attitude to the making of it.

Is the final version of the film then as you envisaged it from the beginning?

It is, but obviously in the making of it all kinds of things happen that are not necessarily in your control. Actors do things that you weren’t expecting – good and not so good. Things work, things don’t work, actually what we set out to do in the first place maybe wasn’t any good, and then you have to rethink that. All of those sorts of creative things have compromise, but it’s free of people changing it just for changing it’s sake, or in real opposition to what we wanted to do. There’s none of that in it. Its problems are our problems, and down to our inexperience or things not working so well, those sorts of things. But basically, it’s the film we set out to make.

You say about actors. The film is grounded in reality, quite different from the hippy, slightly pantomime feel of Labyrinth. How do you get the actors to understand where you want to go with this, and the tone of it?

A lot of it is just the nature of the script. We wanted, at every turn, to try and keep the actors very naturalistic. Even though you’ve got Gina McKee dressed up in a huge wig, with black eyes and her gold skin, and in this ridiculous throne and everything, we had her dialogue be basically that of a worried mum. That was very important, to always ground it in reality.

So there’s that, and then the whole thing was story-boarded, so I could explain where we were – where they were walking through, what they were talking to. But I think very quickly they realised that it was only going to work if you connected to the human elements. Even though they were surrounded by these ridiculous things, if you don’t connect with Helena – Stephanie – and her worries and feelings about her mum, and where she is in her life at this particular point, then no about of pretty picture-making is going to be worth sitting through for an hour and a half.

It just gives it a point, as far as I’m concerned. I love looking at these baroque fantasy films. They’re enjoyable, but if I’ve got to spend two years making one, I want to know that at the end of the day it is actually about things that are important to me. Just on a basic level, my daughter is now twelve, and I know I’ve got these sort of feelings, battles and whatever coming up with her. Just on a personal level, at that point it really means something to me.

As well as the monsters, a lot of the sense of threat is from Helena just growing up – throwing away her old drawings, snogging the wrong sorts of boys and wearing punky clothes. Is that a reflection of you as a parent?

I think so. It’s probably more, at this point, a reflection of Neil’s experience. He has two grown-up children now, and they’re both great. They’ve grown up wonderfully, but I know that he went through all of these anxieties. And at that age, just because hormones are raging and you’re very confused in life – you’re not a kid any more but you’re not an adult yet – you’re really at a crossroads. You can go either way in about two minutes. One minute you’re wonderful, caring, helping with the cooking and doing all these things, and then something happens, you turn on a dime and become a horrible, spiteful and selfish brat. And you barely have control over it. That’s the state of mind.

So to deal with somebody at that age is interesting in itself, and then you give them a little life-push. Her mother getting ill, the circus off the road and everything falling around her ears: then we’re into some sort of drama that means something.

Did you have a particular audience in mind?

Families. Pretty much anybody. We didn’t have the children in mind – we didn’t want to make what you could call a kids’ film. I’ve sat through enough of those, getting nothing out of them at all and being talked down to because they’re just for five-year-olds. I didn’t want to do that.

I didn’t expect everyone to like it. Far from it, I think it’s always going to have a pretty small audience. But that small audience would, I think, be made up of people of any age, including kids and older people.

Do you have to think differently about illustrating for kids? Is there a difference between drawing for Varjak Paw and for Sandman?

I think it’s fairly obvious. It’s pointless putting in references to some obscure film or piece of literature on a kids’ drawing because you’re just being pretentious. And obviously I wouldn’t put tons of violence or nudity in a kids’ book because it’s just not appropriate. Other than that, I don’t really draw much of a distinction. I don’t like second guessing what kids will like, as much as I don’t like second guessing what adults will like. Doing signings, talks and Q and As for the children’s books, adult books and for this film, it only seems to confirm that. I have no idea who is going to show up. It seems to be any age, any sex, and social group. The statistics don’t mean anything.

I don’t like second guessing all that stuff, I’m just doing what I’m doing. If I hit a run of a few years where people are telling me I’m doing absolutely appalling work that nobody’s buying, maybe that’s the point when I rethink what I’m doing. For the moment we seem to be doing okay. I’m happy just to send these things out there, and whoever likes them likes them. I don’t expect everybody to like them, but maybe a few people will.

Are the responses you get to things surprising? Do people read in things you never knew were there?

Sure. That’s kind of part of it, really. It becomes a conversation. You think you’ve thought about it from every conceivable angle, but there’ll always be something, some connection made, that you have no control over at all. It goes out into the world and it has its own life. That’s the point. Doing the work is only 50 percent. The other half is the connection with the audience.

Where do you go next? You’ve designed a musical for Elton John…

Yes… That wasn’t quite where I planned to go next. But it came up and I’d never done anything like that before so it seemed like a fun thing to try and tackle, and a world I knew nothing about. I love to learn new things, so those were the reasons for doing that. At the time it involved making some film clips to project on the set, and that was fun to do. I was doing that last year, so again that feels like old news now.

Is that physical prop design?

Yes, it was designing all the sets, and then the physical pieces were adapted from the drawings that I did and made by a physical-set designer in New York.

The projections were of my artworks and photographs. The films changed drastically. It’s a very troubled project, actually. It will open on Broadway in late March, but it’s gone through a lot of changes and a lot of different people coming in, so it was a very confused and a difficult way of working.

That’s a project with compromise, is it?

That’s a deeply compromised project. To be honest, it had to be. It was in such a state in San Francisco where we did previews, it really needed somebody else to come in and try and give it some shape and order. But I guess you live and learn. In the meantime I’ve just been writing other films. I’d like to make another film so my plan is to try and get four or five projects up and running so that they’ll hit in the years down the line. It takes so long to set up.

As well as taking a long time to set up, Mirrormask has been waiting for release for months and months.

It’s taken longer to release it than it did to make it, which is really ridiculous. Unfortunately, that’s just a reflection of the fact that Sony really didn’t know what to do with it. It just confused them a little bit. I think they had in mind that it would just be a little, straight-to-DVD nothing, and then it got accepted into Sundance and they had to rethink that. Then we weren’t really with one department. We started with Columbia/TriStar, then that label collapsed or was absorbed and we were put somewhere else. We were up to the theatrical release department, and kept on being bounced around. It just meant that everything’s happened one after another after another, end to end, rather than all of these things happening concurrently. Usually on a film the DVD release is worked out and planned before the film even starts shooting. But all of our little blocks of time in the release of it have been laid end to end. That’s why it’s taken such a ridiculously long time.

So when did you finish the film?

We finished the film in November 2004. Is that right? It’s all a blur now. Yes, that’s right. We finished November 2004, we did Sundance 2005 in January, and then the whole of last year was trying to tease out some sort of campaign or release plan from Sony. So only now is it being released. Strange. Time flies.

And doing interviews now, it feels like old news?

It feels like such old news, I can’t believe it. I feel like I’ve been talking about this film my whole life.

Do you know how long it’s likely to be in cinemas?

It’s getting a limited release through Tartan. To be honest, no I don’t. It depends to a degree how it does. There are some places that have booked it for three weeks, but I don’t know. All of this seems to be a matter of wait and see, play it by ear.

And is the DVD release fixed on how long it’s in cinemas?

It will be influenced by that, but to be honest I think it will be out pretty quickly. The DVD is already out in America, and they’re keen to make sure that people buy the English version. I would much rather people bought the English version.

Is that because it has different things on it?

No. For other reasons that I’m being rather cryptic about, that I can’t really tell you, I’d rather people buy the English version.

Vulgar reasons like money?

No, nothing to do with money.

You talked about setting up films for the future. Will those be of a similar fantasy bent, and working with Neil again?

All of the films I’ve got planned certainly have a strong visual component to them and a surrealistic bent or fantasy element. But some are just human, adult dramas which have strange sequences in them. One or two of them are complete fantasy pieces. Some with Neil, some not. I’m interested just to write something on my own right now, just to see how it goes. The next film I’d like to make is based on a book, Signal To Noise, that Neil and I did together, but I’ve ended up writing the script.

To be honest, the book was always a favourite of mine even though it didn’t work. I always felt that we could do much better. I think the script for the film is much better, it’s a much bigger, wider story and you really understand what’s going through the character’s mind.

According to Neil, when I saw him speaking in London late last year, you and he had “discussions” about how to write Mirrormask from the off. You had cards to lay out the plot, and he wanted to just crack on and write it.

We have very different ways of writing. We found out on Mirrormask – I don’t think we ever realised that before.

So how much did working on the film change your relationship? I have this idea that usually an illustrator starts where a writer finishes.

For the books that we’ve done, that really is the relationship. Neil writes a script. Depending on the book, we talk about it beforehand, and then talk about it again afterwards. But basically Neil’s free – absolutely correctly – to just write what he wants to write. Then I come in and try to see how best to make it work visually. The trouble with the film was that Neil is used to just writing anything, and we couldn’t afford to do just anything. We couldn’t afford to do armies of orcs, the sky full of battleships and things. We just couldn’t do it. So I felt I just needed to be in the room.

I didn’t want to write it particularly, but I just wanted to be around when we were planning it to make sure that what he was writing I understood. It’s very important for me to understand it completely because I’m going to be asked 300 questions every day by different people in the cast and crew, and I’ve got to be able to know the answers, or at least have an opinion. I needed to make sure it was technically feasible, and it was not always obvious what was expensive and what was cheap. That’s why I ended up in the room.

Then, just because I was there, inevitably you start kicking ideas around, so some of the story ideas ended up being mine, and some of the scenes I ended up writing because it was just easier for me to write them because I had a good sense of them.

So does that change the “power relationship” between you?

I think it does, really. The books are much simpler and we have a strict demarcation. The words are Neil’s and the pictures are mine, and I think that’s pretty evenly balanced. Unfortunately it’s the nature of film that it comes down to the guy on the floor talking to the actors at the time, and that’s the director.

I think if you listened to Terry Gilliam talking about Tom Stoppard on Brazil, when they would have arguments about this, that and the other, Terry Gilliam would say, ‘Yeah, I appreciate all that. But at the end of the day I’m the one who’s going to be directing it, so I’m just not going to do it. I don’t understand it, and I need to direct something that I understand.’ Unfortunately, that is the nature of it. I think that is the big difference, and often the big frustration, of writing film scripts.

They are not finished objects, they are blueprints. You’ve got to understand that – Neil does understand that, because he’s written enough of them now. They are just sketches. You may fall in love with the words or this or that, but if an actor can’t say it, or if when he does it sounds completely wrong, or for whatever reason, it goes. And it goes there and then, it’s brutal. When you’re shooting a film, you’ve got a certain amount of time to do each scene. You’ve just got to make those decisions. Unfortunately it’s down to the director to do that.

Was it a quick shoot? Was it hurried?

It was hurried. It was 30 days, so six weeks: two on location and four weeks in a blue-screen studio. It’s funny, some scenes felt like we had time to really make the most of, to look around the locations and find interesting shots and angles and ways of doing it, to play with actors a little bit. But some of it felt awfully rushed, and that’s no fun at all because you end up just throwing anything at the wall, hoping to pick it up in the edit later on. Inevitably you get yourself into problems. So it would be nice to have just a little bit more money and therefore more time, next time to be able to relax and really think properly about everything.

Were the actors playing animated characters – like Lenny Henry and Andy Hamilton – on set with the actors, or recorded later?

No, they were all done later. On the set, it was just me doing an impersonation of a monkeybird, a mask on a stick for the Gryphon, or things like that, with somebody off-camera reading the lines. It was very difficult to bring all these elements together in the actor’s mind. They struggled, but I think Stephanie Leonidas got it immediately. It took her about a day to be able to just stand in the big blue room and imagine this street and the mist, surrounded by cats. She could just do it. It’s a bit of a knack, I think.

Was she cast through an audition process? Did you have people in mind when you were writing it?

I had Gina McKee in mind, but she was the only one.

Is that true of the voices for the animated characters as well?

That’s pretty true of the voices. Maybe we had Stephen Fry in mind – an incredible, wish-list hope that he might do it. But no, I don’t think any of the others we had in mind while we were writing it. Obviously they came to mind pretty quickly once we were into shooting it.

With Stephanie, my producer, Simon, just saw her in a TV film. We were gearing up to do this huge sort of trawl of theatre schools and God knows what to try and find a girl who could do this, and he just taped this film called Daddy’s Girl which she was in, and she was fantastic. So we did one day where our casting director brought in girls, and there were a couple of really good ones. So I thought we were in good shape. And then Stephanie came in at the end of the day, and just blew them all away. She was in a league of her own.

Excellent, well that’s our time up, I think. Dave McKean, thanks very much.

My pleasure. Is that really half an hour?

Film Focus: Mirrormask

More of my old reviews from Film Focus. This one got me mentioned on Neil Gaiman's blog - with a corresponding explosion of hits to this one. I'll put up my interview with director Dave McKean tomorrow.

Mirrormask
Reviewed 25 February 2006

[In brief]
Helena craves a normal, everyday life like all the other kids have. But her parents run a circus and when she’s not performing with them her only escape is her drawing. When her mum becomes seriously ill, Helena finds herself venturing even further into her strange, troubled pictures…

[In full]
A beautifully eerie and twisted vision to enthral children and terrify their parents.

While Mirrormask looks extraordinary, the story and plot both seem familiar. Following in the tradition of the Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, a not-quite-an-adult explores a strange and illogical fantasy world, encountering very odd people on the way.

Even those who aren’t actually evil are unwittingly dangerous, like adult-sized children capable of great harm. As in Labyrinth, it’s our heroine’s burgeoning maturity that sees her through – choosing her friends carefully and not snogging the wrong boys.

There are also recognisable elements from writer Neil Gaiman’s other work: the twisted mirror-world from his novella Coraline; the protagonist’s fear of embarrassment by their parents from his new novel Anansi Boys, as well as spying spiders and flocks of evil birds. The vast and strange library with its impossible books is right out of his best-selling comic-book, Sandman.

But Mirrormask is implicitly about the familiar reflected in a new and strange way. Even the real Brighton seems unreal through Helena’s eyes – the view of the beach from her home bleakly gothic, and Auntie Nan no less peculiar than the old woman with the sphinxes and cake.

Every strange and sumptuous frame is a work of art – those who’ve loved Dave McKean’s covers for Sandman and Varjak Paw cannot miss this. Mirrormask definitely rewards a second viewing just to pick up on missed details. This is a real achievement for a film made so – relatively – cheaply.

The CGI is awesome, full of brilliant creatures and textures till the end. There are occasions when the real cast don’t quite seem to be there – floating rather than touching the floor, or not seeing the wild things right in front of them. This is a minor quibble, though, and in some ways adds to the strangely dreamy effect.

All kinds of warped influences make up Helena’s world. We hear a twisted version of Bacharach and David’s “Close to you”, and see Helena and her new friend Valentine chase through a street like a Jean Miro painting. In another nice twist on the familiar, bulky Henry Moore-like sculptures float as weightless as clouds.

What becomes increasingly clear though, is that it’s Helena’s own world that’s being warped: the Prime Minister looks like her father, and is just as ineffectual in stopping the decay, while Helena’s torn feelings for her very sick mother produce two doppelganger queens, one perfect and one utterly terrifying.

This strange and inventive world is under threat from the Queen of Shadows, who vomits all kinds of monsters to help scour the land for her errant daughter. As well as the freaky spiders and monkeybirds already mentioned, there are thick, nightmarish roots to entangle even the strongest-seeming characters. However fast Helena runs, destruction and death remain close behind.

The film is full of darkness, with the intangible dread of a nightmare. Though there are some fun gags about such things as herrings, there’s little that’s nice in this world. Reality is seen to be just as random and brutal, too, with sudden sickness and fights about money.

The realism of the performances grounds the story in bleakness, and the put-upon Muppet-esque hedgehog, Small Hairy, adds to the general sense of misery rather than distracts from it. As a result, the film lacks the hippy charm of the Dark Crystal or Labyrinth, and so might not be as accessible to audiences. It’d certainly freak out younger kids.

I suspect that it’s a film more about adults than children anyway. Helena’s horror at seeing a twisted version of herself wearing make-up, snogging boys and throwing away her old, childish drawings, seems more the concern of her parents, struggling to accommodate a child wanting to break away from them. The evil, anti-Helena only wants to get away from an overly controlling mother.

At the beginning of the film, Helena longs to escape the circus and is told that she can’t spoil her father’s dream. Helena’s drawings and her adventures inside them don’t speak of a want of normalcy, but of a need for a dream of her own.

In seeing her own world differently through the distortions of the mirror world, Helena’s able to find her own space. And, of course, the right sort of boy…

Porn for kids

To the BFI Southbank last night to see Coraline in eye-popping 3D. Eye-popping then replacing with buttons…

Coraline Jones moves to an old pink house in the middle of nowhere. While her parents are enslaved to their keyboards and deadlines, Coraline starts to explore. There’s the deep, deep well up the hill, the amazing mouse-circus ringmaster (Ian McShane) who lives upstairs, and the two mad old actresses (French and Saunders) living in the basement. And in Coraline’s own living room there’s a small door. Which leads to another old pink house where everything’s the same but much better… At least that’s how it seems at first.

It’s a wild ride, packed with jokes and scares and cleverness. Apart from a bit with a needle, the 3D is used sparingly to add texture to scenes rather than being all in your face. The Dr suspected you wouldn’t lose much without it, but I think the fact you’re not overtly conscious of the effect is really one of the film’s strengths. As with any special effect, the best ones are when you don’t notice it’s a trick.

That’s important because I assume the 3D is there as a hook to get people into cinemas and not squirreling pirate versions to watch on widescreen almost-cinema TV. It’d be easy to go overboard and showy.

There was a lively Q&A afterwards with Neil Gaiman (what wrote the book the film’s based on), Henry Selick (what adapted and directed it) and John Hodgman (voice of the Father and Other Father, and off the Daily Show and Flight of the Conchords). I liked that Selick started wary with his answers for fear of giving us spoilers.

Apparently Gaiman sent Selick the book long before it was published – and even before illustrator Dave McKean got to see it – having loved his previous work. That means the film has been in gestation for something like nine years. Also, Gaiman’s note on an early version of the script was that it was too faithful an adaptation. It’s a while since I read the book, but the film seems bigger, more visual, less inside Coraline’s own head. There are more set pieces and principal characters.

Answering a question from the audience, Gaiman explained that there are things you can do in a book which just don’t translate to the screen. If he describes the Other Mother as “not-quite-the-same” as the real one, the reader does all the work in realising the difference. Selick has got to realise his own vision, show us what she looks like.

But I also think a book, or a narrated story, means you’re much more inside the protagonist’s head, and the tension and excitement is as much from what they’re thinking. In film you’re rarely privy to a character’s thoughts – telling us what they’re thinking is cheating. As viewers, we stand outside the action, our emotions plucked by action not thoughts.

In book and film Coraline struggles to make herself listened to; even a boy her own age in the film doesn’t give what she says any heed. That creates problems where you’d normally smuggle exposition into the dialogue.

Gaiman says the staged version has faced the same problem, with their Coraline saying as dialogue much more of the descriptive bits of the book. If I remember by A-levels correctly, there are dramatic conventions for this sort of thing. This isn’t cheating, though there are dramatic conventions for a character addressing the audience directly. A soliloquy speaks the truth – or at least the truth as the character sees it.

I don’t think Coraline narrating more of the film would have worked. It would have placed us self-consciously outside the action, at a distance and safe from anything that befalls her. As it is, we’re right up there with her, experience things as she does, part of the 3D world ourselves.

It certainly draws you in; the Dr – the wuss puss – found a lot of it scary. Gaiman said he’s interested in the response in the UK since things like the New York Times review of Coraline dwelt on justifying the very idea of kids’ film being scary. Almost as if, said Gaiman, he was pushing “porn for kids”. Over here, he went on, we know full well that the best telly is watched from behind the sofa (he then body-swerved a question on whether he’d be writing Doctor Who).

It’s difficult judging how scary you can be: Coraline makes monsters from familiar sureties like your parents and friends and neighbours. Coraline’s own house and bedroom and dolls are warped into nightmares. Yet at the same time it’s colourful and fun, Coraline helped along the way with good and true friends, embracing the strangeness of the real world while battling the monsters.

The child who is not listened to reminded me a little of David McKee’s Not Now, Bernard. Being careful what you wish for is the basis for many a scary fairy tale. Yet the child’s vivid imagination reworking the world around them is a bit like Pan’s Labyrinth – a film Gaiman himself admits wasn’t always suitable for a 12 year-old. Just because something is told through the eyes of a child doesn’t mean it is for kids.

Having tried to write scary stuff myself, and struggled to get that balance right, I’m fascinated by this kind of thing (see Scott on his three year-old’s response to Primeval). Just as with grown-ups, different kids will accept and engage with different things. One man’s meat is another’s monster. There’s stuff I was terrified of as kid (Worzel Gummidge, David Collings as Mawdryn…) that I knew at the time no one else was scared of…

It’s good that kids’ stories challenge and scare them, and that they overcome those fears. I guess the trick is in ensuring – trying to ensure – that you challenge, not abuse.

Gotta be larger than life

As well as jamming lasagne and booze down my head-hole, Psychonomy leant me comics on Saturday. The collected edition of DC: The New Frontier comes in two volumes – a bit odd considering it's just a six-issue run. Both volumes together aren't nearly as thick as DC's famous Watchmen.

In other ways, it's very reminiscent of Watchmen. It plays on twee nostalgia for the golden age of comics – all beefcake heroes and gee-golly earnest dialogue. The wheeze here – as with Watchmen – is that, as well as super villains, our heroes get entangled in real historical events. That makes the familiar archetypes problematic. The civil rights movement and the Cold War muddy up simple gradations of “good” and “bad”. Our heroes are faced with – and commit - “necessary” evils, the moments of bloody violence all the more shocking for being side-by-side with the cheesy clichés.

Like Watchmen, we reappraise the characters as we go, learning about them, seeing them change – getting the kind of development that's still pretty rare in the medium. Like Watchmen, the heroes must unite to stop the world being destroyed by a vast monster from hell, an End of Level Baddie that doesn't talk back and they have just have to Kill.

What this ostensibly has over Watchmen, though, is that it's not specially invented heroes here. It's Superman fighting in Korea, Batman being charged of UnAmerican Activities, Wonder Woman stitched up by Nixon. New Frontiers is a radical new origins story for the Justice League – that is, the gang of space heroes comprising Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and a whole bunch of their less-famous friends.

And that's where I found it difficult. There are a hell of a lot of less-famous friends crammed in here, and it's kind of assumed you know who they all are. One whole plotline revolves around a guy whose dad flew with Chuck Yeager but who keeps being cut out of the action. Only late on – when he gains super powers – did it occur to me that all the stalling would seem more clever had I recognised his name. He introduces himself early on as Hal Jordan – real name of Superman's less-famous friend, Green Lantern.

The comic is playing, probably cleverly, on the expectation of readers who already know Hal's name. But I didn't, so it kind of whooshed me by. Likewise, I assume the hero John Henry is some other DC character I'd just never heard of, or he’s related to one or somehow cleverly mirroring someone else... No, I didn't need anyone to explain.

This is something that Neil Gaiman's 1602 could have floundered on. The wheeze there is packing all Marvel’s famous characters into Elizabethan England – so the X-Men are hunted as witches, and so on. Gaiman wisely chose to focus on the more famous Marvel heroes. A gag of a spider not biting Peter Parker works because even relative comic-book dunces know the basic premise of Spider-Man.

New Frontiers works well at mixing the complex comic continuity with real and complex history. The bizarre clash of black and white heroism with murky politics gives the story real frisson. But often the clashes are just too bizarre. When the vicious thug Batman suddenly reveals that he didn't fall out with Superman, it works as a nice character thing. But when that about-turn also shows him teamed up with a mad-keen, cart-wheeling Boy Wonder, even Superman boggles:

Superman: “Bruce, you're such a cynic. Which begs the question, what's with the new look and the sidekick?”

Batman: “I set out to scare criminals, not children. As for the boy... Well, I guess we're just two lost souls who found each other.”

Darwyn Cooke, DC: The New Frontier, Volume II, chapter 11.

Okay, so he didn’t beat up on Superman, but we’ve seen him terrorising criminals and breaking a guy’s wrists. Having bedded the story in complex history, Robin feels a glibly, awkwardly shoehorned in.

I suspect my problem is that I'm less impressed by this squeezing in of so much continuity, though I can see it would reward more DC's faithful readers. New Frontiers is reminiscent of Watchmen, but it's not quite as smart and lacks the moments of meekness and humour that counterpoint all the muscular hero stuff. More than that, by creating its own superheroes and history, Watchmen need only refer to continuity when it suits the story.

New Frontiers is great in places and a very involving read. But its very selling point – that it uses DC’s own canon of heroes – is what makes it not quite work.

London under London

I’m a bit of a sucker for the tunnels of London. There’s the space-age aluminium and toughened glass all through the Jubilee line extension that I put into The Time Travellers. Compare that with the hand-made feel of the oldest Tube stations, where the tunnels themselves have kinks in them because horses would freak out if they saw the whole corridor in one go. There’s the echo of the Greenwich foot tunnel and the strangeness of London’s ancient rivers – the various prefixes of bourne, Effra or the Fleet – having once been the highways of the boating city and now all packed up in pipes.

There are few enough opportunities to explore these strange places – a few guided tours, sometimes just tracing the route above ground. And so I’m rather envious to read Neil Gaiman’s description of the brickwork in the Victorian sewers, which he got to explore while researching Neverwhere.

Neverwhere was, originally, a BBC TV series. I must admit it’s not one I remember well – neither fully nor fondly – and I don’t even know how much of it I stuck with. As I recall, it had an awkward, stagey and video feel to it, at a time when telly drama was otherwise all coarse-grained and gritty. It’s not just that it was of its time; it was failing to keep up. The theatricality of fantasy seemed retro in the late 80s when the BBC produced their Chronicles of Narnia. That had featured animated (e.g. cartoon) special effects, like your watching pre-viz placeholders.

Which I suppose just shows the amazing affect digital grading and CGI has had on telly. And in some ways I’m glad there was no Droo in the 90s because it could only have looked cheaper and worse.

The book version of Neverwhere is not constrained by the production values, nor by budgets or regular episode lengths. I don’t know how much Gaiman has expanded or revised the plot but it doesn’t feel like a novelisation – there’s too many characters, too much strange incident, too much you couldn’t pull off in telly. Or, perhaps, it’s very faithful to a script that would have been a huge headache to realise.

The basic wheeze is that a bloke called Richard finds himself in an underground London which mirrors and warps our own. There’s a real Earl at Earl’s Court and Hammersmith is a bloke with a hammer and anvil.

Structurally, it’s very like Gaiman’s later – and, I think, better – Stardust. In both, a rubbish bloke is punching above his weight in the girlfriend department, getting all attached to some posh, demanding girl. She has him jump through all kinds of hoops to please her – but really she just doesn’t like him being him.

I can’t imagine why this bit early on struck a chord:

“Richard found himself, on otherwise sensible weekends, accompanying her to places like the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery, where he learned that walking around museums too long hurts your feet, that the great art treasures of the world all blur into each other after a while, and that it is almost beyond the human capacity for belief to accept how much museum cafeterias will brazenly charge for a slice of cake and cup of tea.

‘Here’s your tea, and your éclair,’ he told her. ‘It would have cost less to buy you one of those Tintorettos.’

‘Don’t exaggerate,’ said Jessica, cheerfully. ‘Anyway, there aren’t any Tintorettos at the Tate.’"

Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere – author’s preferred text, p. 11.

Then, being a bit naïve and well-meaning, rubbish bloke ends up on the wrong side of the divide between the real world and the fantastic. It’s all magic and dangerous strangeness, and he’s hardly equipped to survive it. But his well-meaning naivety and all sorts of chance events and encounters mean he gets by okay. And everyone’s after this sulky, gothy girl for her her special powers. But our rubbish bloke comes slowly to realise that he just wants her for her.

(Four years ago today, I married the sulky, gothy girl what drags me round museums…)

The book is a mish-mash of warped London history and elegant flights of fancy. It kept reminding me of other things – Christopher Fowler’s Roofworld is in many ways this book on its head, while the visceral feel of the undercity is very Perdido Street Station.

It’s goth and nasty and people abruptly die or disappear, all shackled to strange and terrible rules that don’t quite meet with logic. It’s also brimming with vivid images and smells – curries and sewer-folk, leaking wounds and vomit. I’d be tempted to mention Bakhtinian ideas of “grotesque” body horror, if I could remember those bits of my degree.

(I must also point out to the ladies of fandom that on page 260 there’s a shopping trolley that goes “squee, squee”.)

There’s candles and mirrors like in lots of Gaiman’s work, and some elements like the angel could have been lifted straight from Sandman. Like Stardust, for all the not-as-random-as-it-seems violence and viciousness, the easy-going nature of the protagonist rubbish bloke and his desire for no more than an easy life gives the whole thing a warm and enthusiastic feeling. Very RTD, I thought.

What’s also like new Doctor Who – and still rare in other fantasy telly – is how good it is on roles for black actors. London Below is just as much a cultural melting pot as the London upstairs. I guess that’s down to the TV version being produced by Lenny Henry’s production company, just as Gaiman admitted Anansi Boys came about because Henry bemoaned the lack of black characters in horror movies.

It’s an atmospheric and enjoyable book, but sometimes the narrating voice is too knowing and though there are great set pieces it never quite surprises. Perhaps it’s merely lacking an edge that’s there in Gaiman’s later novels. Perhaps if it hadn’t first been written for telly the reveals could have been wilder. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that this very good book had one better just under the surface…

So he was Captain Birdseye all the time!

Sir Arthur C Clarke, who died yesterday, is probably best remembered for getting his physics right. This is the bloke who, for a bit of a lark, worked out the height at which something in orbit above the Earth would match the planet’s speed of rotation. He did this long before there were such things as satellites, where being in what’s essentially a fixed position over the Earth is quite useful. And, rather sweetly, he worked it out as a fun mental exercise in a sci-fi magazine.

His Space Odyssey stories (2001; 2010; 2061; 3001) are also grounded in the latest discoveries from NASA’s missions into the void, accurately spelling out the time spent travelling between planets and describing the correct mineral constitution of moons. Many of the obituaries have stressed the link between his stories and his contributions to proper, real science.

Thing is, I’ve always preferred science-fiction to be more about the fiction. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that the science isn’t important (or just that I’m not very good at it). But sci-fi is period drama, only not set in the past. The props and costumes conjure an atmosphere and lend flavour to the story but it’s the story that’s got to be the focus.

Think about the period drama on telly. It doesn’t wholly matter if your stiff-collared actors don’t shout into their candlestick telephones, or if a set designer’s decided that those phones look nicer without thick cabling like an elephant’s trunk. You don’t actively try to get it wrong and you should do your research. But period drama can easily get bogged down in the tedious detail of etiquette and sci-fi is at its most ponderous when dumping information about how its world works. Much better to get back to the gun-shoots and explosions.

Sir Arthur’s stories are often actually very good at doing just that. Like the very best writers, you don’t always notice the research that’s gone in to the engaging story. His early novel, Childhood’s End, is better known amongst my peers by two of its best rip-offs – Quatermass and the Pit and Doctor Who and the Daemons. It takes the central conceit of Joseph Campbell’s rather sloppy The Hero With 1,000 Faces – that all mankind’s religions and cultures are off-shoots of the same basic stories – and adds a twist – because early man was mentored by an alien.

The book pre-empts a lot of sci-fi of the 60s and 70s (and songs by Pink Floyd and Bowie) with it’s dawning of a new age for the teenagers which the old folk cannot dig. But its real joy is what theorists of sci-fi have sometimes called the “conceptual breakthrough”. This is the jaw-dropping, gosh-wow bit in good sci-fi where the author has spun the whole story on a massive change in your perspective. Oh blimey, you realise, our 10,000 year-old ideologies are all based on a spaceman with horns.

It leaves the reader open-mouthed like the dupe at the end of an episode of TV’s Mission: Impossible, all the sound effects and scenery revealed as a clever conjuring trick. It’s those big-concept surprises that make sci-fi so addictive.

(There’s a similar phrase from Iain M Banks’ Excession which is not entirely the same thing. An “outside context problem” – like what the Spanish were to the Mayas with their exploding fire sticks – is more total bafflement. A conceptual breakthrough is, even if just to the reader, a momentous revelation.)

Some more examples of the best conceptual breakthroughs. There’s one at the end of Planet of the Apes when Charlton Heston finds a statue on a beach. There’s one at the end of Soylent Green when Charlton Heston finds out what the special foodstuff means to people. You can see the pattern – most top sci-fi hinges on one brilliant reveal.

The four in 2001: A Space Odyssey make up the structure of the film. An alien artefact teaches the apes; an alien artefact awaits us on the Moon; Dave’s beaten HAL and goes to meet the alien artefact; and, er, something about a huge space-baby. Everything else hangs off those freaky moments. It’s not just the physics that have been got right, either; the effects are amazing; the scale constantly enormous with tiny humans in the foreground. And, quite brilliantly, the humans twitter on about nothing in particular, minuscule and mundane. It is only the observing us that finds it wondrous.

But a really good example of the importance of gosh-wow over the numbers is a short story which, annoyingly, Neil Gaiman also linked to in his Clarke post. Unlike Neil, I didn’t meet Sir Arthur but I did once have his telephone number – and that was on a copy of The Nine Billion Names of God.

Spoilers follow so click the link, read the story and come back here after for my paltry thoughts.

Done that?

Right.

How’s that for a gosh-wow ending? Can’t you see Jim Phelps just escaping in his van, his props and costumes abandoned at your feet? And yet, when I first read it, a learned chum who was much more into sci-fi for the physics had a Different View.

For him, the great brilliance of the lack of fuss in that closing line was that that’s not how physics works. The stars are millions of billions of light years away – from us and from each other. It’s not just that you shout “Go!” and they wink off one by one. They’ll have been winking off for millions of years, all in a fiendishly complex and intricate order and just so that – to a computer programmer watching from the Earth – they seem to be extinguishing one by one.

The Clever Thing, said this learned colleague, was that the stars had been going out for millions of years, it just so happened that the time taken by the light of those destructions to register on Earth all rather neatly coincided – the implication being that it is not coincidence. So the programmer, his machine and its result have all been long-expected. This, he said, proved a mechanical universe operating like clockwork; the man-made computer just a machine in a machine. He didn’t agree with my gosh-wow reading at all, that the computer was rendered nothing to the magic truth of God. And we argued long into the night.

I’m not sure what this not-entirely-interesting anecdote might mean. But I’m rather sad I missed the chance to ever share it with Sir Arthur.

That’s no moon

Escape is a fixture in escapist fiction. Our heroes look sly and resourcedul when they can break out of cells, baddie bases and countries using only bits of tin can and their shoelaces.

In fact, it’s a bit of a cliché. One not uncommon criticism of my own “The Time Travellers” is that the austere detention centre on Byng Street is daringly escaped-from twice. (I argue (not entirely winningly) that this is in keeping with the spirit of Old Show.)

I guess escapology’s appeal comes from real escapes, most famously those during wars. Until recently, I’d always associated them with the second world war – and even the Imperial War Museum’s escape show last year focused on Steve McQueen’s moped and Colditz.

But Winston Churchill’s first dalliance as national hero was in 1899, when he escaped from a POW camp in Pretoria.

• “I escape from the Boers” – chapter 11 of Churchill’s “London to Ladysmith via Pretoria” (1900), as available off Project Gutenberg

More recently, Neil Gaiman admitted that he and magician Penn Jillette are working on a film version of a real First World War escape. Hilary Bevan Jones – whose Endor Productions won awards for the fab “State of Play” – spoke of it, too, a few years ago:

“My big ambition is to make the film of my grandfather's book, ‘The Road to Endor’. It's a true story of how he escaped from a Turkish prison camp during the First World War. David Lean had it optioned for years, but it's back in the family again. I only just feel grown-up enough to make it now!”

Liz Hoggard, “All my own work”, The Guardian, 21 March 2004

On Gaiman’s recommendation, I sought out the book via Abe.

Lieutenant EH Jones tells of a plucky confidence trick, played out over more than a year. As much from boredom as anything, the imprisoned Jones fakes a Ouija board session, and pretends he’s in touch with the spirits.

But rather than making his comrades laugh, they start to take him in deadly earnest. Jones, you see, can remember the board even blindfolded…

"The growth of a belief is difficult to describe, for growth is not a matter of adding one piece here and another there. It is not an addition at all, it is a process; and the most that can be done in describing it is to state a few of the outstanding events and say, ‘this marks one stage in the process, that another.’ … In any investigation each point as it is reached is subjected to proof. Once passed as proved it forms in its turn part of the foundation for a further advance in belief. It is the part of the investigator to make certain he does not admit as correct a single false deduction. If he does the whole of his subsequent reasoning is liable to be affected.

It is particularly easy, in a question like spiritualism, to allow fallacy to creep in. There is a basis of curious phenomena which certainly exist and are recognised by scientists as indubitable facts. But the investigator must be careful, in every instance, to assure himself that he is in the presence of the genuine phenomenon, and not of an imitation of it, and, as a matter of fact, this is sometimes impossible to do."

EH Jones, "The Road to En-Dor", p. 23.

Soon the Turkish warders have been snared in the scam, Jones and partner Lieutenant Hill winning small allowances for the other POWs. The camp itself is the former home of now-missing Armenians – the book speaks of the massacre quite openly. So Jones uses the promise of hidden Armenian treasure, and the threat of the spirits’ revenge, to attempt a brilliant escape.

Eric Williams (who wrote the best-selling “The Wooden Horse”) introduces the whole thing as, “for sheer ingenuity, persistence and skill … second to none among such books”.

It’s certainly a funny book, lively book full of vivid characters and set-ups. I was also surprised in the footnotes by how many of those comrades mentioned tried their own escapes – and went on to write their own books about them.

The mechanics of the trick and the ways they fool doubters are explained in some detail, and I can see the appeal to a mage like Jillette. The plan does not all go swimmingly either, and several times nearly kills the two tricksters. As a result, it becomes less about the scam but the steely determination with which the two blokes see it through.

That said, the telling is often disjointed narrative, jumping back and forth between years and incidents, so sometimes not easy to follow. There’s a hell of a lot of place names and people to remember, and the tangents and asides could have been more effectively edited.

Part conman’s handbook, part military history, part pot-boiling shocker, it’s a compelling – if not always easy – read. And cor, there’s a brilliant movie in there. So do get a shift on with that, Neil.