Hamster Book Club podcast interview

The Hamster Book Club podcast, devoted to Doctor Who books, has posted a big long interview with me, covering my books The Time Travellers, The Pirate Loop and the short-story anthologies I edited for Big Finish. 

We also cover my non-fiction work including Bernice Summerfield - The Inside Story, and biographies David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television and the forthcoming Written by Terrance Dicks.

Doctor Who: The Time-Travelling Almanac

The official Doctor Who website has announced my new book, The Time-Travelling Almanac, to be published on 3 October. It is illustrated by Emma Price.

Blurb as follows:

Experience a year from the Doctor's perspective with an exciting new release from BBC Books.

“The ground beneath our feet is spinning at a thousand miles an hour and the entire planet is hurtling round the sun at 67,000 miles an hour, and I can feel it.”

– The Doctor

Doctor Who: The Time-Travelling Almanac is your essential companion to a Time Lord’s ‘Year’. You’ll learn how to feel the turn of the Earth under your feet (hurtling round the sun at 67,000 miles an hour), the times each day that Sea Devil attacks are most likely (depending on the tides), how to avoid disturbing dangerous faeries (distances measured in yards), and why, despite all the invasions and Goblins, Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year. 

Releasing later this year, The Time-Travelling Almanac is a must-have guide with useful tips and information provided by the Doctor and friends – and occasionally his enemies.

Doctor Who: The Time-Travelling Almanac is out in hardback on October 3rd 2024. You can pre-order here.

A Short History of the World, by HG Wells

I've somehow got two editions of this little book, originally published as part of the Thinker's Library by CA Watts & Co in 1929. One is the slightly revised third impression of 1934, the other is a fifth edition from 1941 that the (mostly) surviving dust jacket says is "Revised and brought Up to Date ... with a new chapter reviewing the opening phases of the Second World War". The latter belonged to my maternal grandmother, who wrote her name in pencil on the first page.

Earlier this year, I described the effect of time travel in Wells's The Time Machine (1895):

"It’s as if the traveller is perched on a bicycle in front of a cinema screen, working a lever to speed up the film being shown until it passes in a blur."

There, the film starts in the (then) present day and whizzes far into the future. The effect is much the same in A Short History of the World but we start from an estimated 1.6 billion years ago and whizz forward to the present. The intention, Wells says in the Preface, is that it should be read "straightforwardly almost as a novel" (p. iii).

That means we rattle through events and ideas quickly, most chapters just a few pages long. Wells admits that he has little access to histories of China and elsewhere, so there's an acknowledged western bias. Even so, its odd that some 50 pages - about one-sixth of the whole book - are devoted to the history of Rome, not least given the author's claim that,

"the whole Roman Empire in four centuries produced nothing to set beside the bold and noble intellectual activities of the comparatively little city of Athens during its one century of greatness" (p. 134).

The point, of course, is that Wells is using history to illuminate the (then) present, and Rome provides the template for the British Empire and the clash of the great powers. 

"The Roman Empire was a growth; an unplanned novel growth; the Roman people found themselves engaged almost unawares in a vast administrative experiment ... In a sense the experiment failed. In a sense the experiment remains unfinished, and Europe and America to-day are still working out the riddles of world-wide statecraft first confronted by the Roman people." (p. 119)

In that mode, his chapter on Jesus as a historical rather than religious figure reads like a description of a Fabian social reformer. That's also true of his description of other prophets and thinkers, though he adds the caveat that a modern reader of their ideas may also find,

"much prejudice and much that will remind him of that evil stuff, the propaganda literature of the present time." (p. 82)

For all he covers a lot of ground concisely, Wells is careful not to draw too simple parallels or to make his history overly simplistic.

"It is well for the student of history to bear in mind the very great changes not only in political and moral matters that went on throughout this period of Roman domination. There is much too strong a tendency in people's minds to think of the Roman rule as something finished and stable, firm, rounded, noble and decisive. Macauley's Lays of Ancient Rome, SPQR, the elder Cato, the Scipios, Julius Caesar, Diocletian, Constantine the Great, triumphs, orations, gladiatorial combats and Christian martyrs are all mixed up together in a picture of something high and cruel and dignified. The items of that picture have to be disentangled. They are collected at different points from a process of change profounder than that which separates the London of William the Conqueror from the London of to-day." (pp. 119-20).

That disentangling includes his acknowledgement that only a small minority in Rome enjoyed the benefits and freedoms of the empire. He devotes considerable time to the myriad roles played by slaves in agriculture, mining, metallurgy, construction, road-making and on galleys, as well as working as guards and gladiators. What's more,

"The conquests of the later Republic were among the highly civilised cities of Greece, North Africa, and Asia Minor; and they brought in many highly educated captives. The tutor of a young Roman of good family was usually a slave. A rich man would have a Greek slave as librarian, and slave secretaries and learned men. He would keep his poet as he would keep a performing dog. In this atmosphere of slavery the traditions of modern literary scholarship and criticism, meticulous, timid and quarrelsome, were evolved." (p. 133)

That's surely a popular novelist having a dig at the pretensions of poets and critics of his own age. The novelist is also there in the sizeable imaginative leap of trying to get inside the heads of early humans to describe how they thought and felt about the world around them (Chapter XII, Primitive Thought) - an attempt later repeated by William Golding in The Inheritors and by the first Doctor Who story. Less credible is the novelist's odd conspiracy theory that, after Alexander conquered Egypt in 332 BCE, 

"the Phoenicians of the western Mediterranean suddenly disappear from history - and as immediately the Jews of Alexandria and the other trading cities created by Alexander appear."(p. 94)

This, I suspect, is drawn from whatever racial theories Wells was reading. As I rather expected, there's quite a lot here on the geographical movements and cultural impact of particular ethnic groups such as the Aryans, detailing skin colour and other racial characteristics. The terminology used is similarly racist and  of their time, and I already knew Wells was an enthusiastic eugenicist. But I think that makes it all the more notable when he endeavours to avoid prejudice. For example, there's his response to the wealth of evidence of early humans found in France and Spain:

"The greater part of Africa and Asia has never even been traversed yet by a trained observer interested in these matters and free to explore, and we must be very careful therefore not to conclude that the early true men were distinctly inhabitants of Western Europe or that they first appeared in that region." (p. 32)

Or, there's his caveat on outlining what he calls the "main racial divisions" of the neolithic world: 

"We have to remember that human races can all interbreed freely and that they separate, mingle and reunite as clouds do. Human races do not branch out like trees with branches that never come together again. It is a thing we need to bear constantly in mind, this remingling of races at any opportunity. We shall be saved from many cruel delusions and prejudices if we do so. People will use such a word as race in the loosest manner, and base the most preposterous generalisations upon it. They will speak of a 'British' race or of a 'European' race. But nearly all the European nations are confused mixtures of brownish, dark-white, white, and Mongolian elements." (p. 45)

I was also struck by his defence of the latter:

"We hear too much in history of the campaigns and massacres of the Mongols, and not enough of their curiosity and desire for learning" (p. 202).

This all feels very pertinent given the context of the time in which Wells was writing. The chronology at the end of the 1934 edition ends with "Hitler becomes dictator of Germany [and] World Economic Conference in London" (p. 313), but Wells - for all he astutely identifies problems in the Treaty of Versailles leading to future conflict, warns of war, 

"in twenty or thirty years' time if no political unification anticipates and prevents it" (p. 300).

Hitler is not mentioned in the main body of the text; he and Stalin were both added to the 1938 edition. My 1941 edition includes Chamberlain, Churchill and Roosevelt, as well as references to Disraeli and Kipling. In updating the book to cover events of less than a decade, he reaches further back into the past.

It's also interesting what revisions Wells didn't make to the 1941 edition: for example he doesn't add the discovery of Pluto to his description of the Solar System in chapter one. I find myself picking over what he might have added to a later edition, if he'd lived a little beyond 1946. The atomic bomb - a term Wells coined - would be key. His chapter on industrialisation would need something on automation and loom cards, now recognised as so crucial to the development of computers. 

Oh, and his reference to the "fascinatingly enigmatical" Piltdown Man (p. 27) would get quietly cut.

In fact, I'd love to see a new version of this enterprise: a concise, breezy history of the whole world (not just the western bits), making sense of now based on what's gone before and pointing the way to the future...

See also:

• Me on A Man of Parts, David Lodge's novel about the life of HG Wells
• Me on Wells' The Invisible Man
• Me on Radio 4's Front Row discussing the legacy of HG Wells

Berkeley Square, a Play in Three Acts, by John L Balderston

This is an odd, beguiling time-travel romance first staged in 1926, then later adapted for radio, TV and two films. John L Balderston chiefly wrote it, in collaboration with JC Squire — later the editor of If It Had Happened Otherwise, a book exploring ways in which history might have been different — with the plot suggested by an unfinished novel by Henry James. I find Balderston a fascinating figure — he adapted both Dracula and Frankenstein for the stage, and his versions were then the bases of the Universal movies. He wrote The Bride of Frankenstein and worked on Gone with the Wind and the US film version of Gaslight. 

Yet I’d never heard of Berkeley Square until it got mentioned in passing in an interview (more of which below). Given all the adaptations, it seems to have been very well known for three decades and was then lost to time — which is ironic given what it’s about.

The plot involves young Peter Standish, who has inherited a house in Berkeley Square in London, 1929. As the play opens, his strange behaviour is of concern to his fiancee, who calls in the US ambassador (one of Standish’s friends). Standish then somehow swaps places with his ancestor of the same name who is visiting the same house in 1784. The ancestor Standish is about to be engaged to his cousin Kate Pettigrew but Standish-from-the-future instead falls for Kate’s sister Helen… 

At first, Standish-from-1929 is thrilled by the prospect of being back in the past and the opportunity to explore:

“How would you like to walk the quiet streets of London in the eighteenth century? … And breathe pure air, instead of gasolene? And ride in Sedan-chairs, instead of taxi-cabs. … See Sheridan at the first night of The School for Scandal, or hear Dr Johnson say the things Boswell wrote, or watch Reynolds at work…” (p. 38)

But the real past is a disappointment, such as when Standish meets Dr Johnson:

“Oh, he thundered out a few platitudes. Really, his friends ought to stop him from dribbling food and snuff all over his waistcoat. And he’d be none the worse for a bath.” (pp. 83-4.)

Worse, Johnson has, with Standish’s supposed friend Captain Clinton, paid for a good seat in front of Newgate prison to watch the burning of a woman called Phoebe Harris as punishment for coining. Standish is horrified by the brutality and also knows he can make no difference here: history cannot be changed.

The way Berkeley Square uses time travel is really interesting but some context is needed. Time travel stories weren’t new in 1929. They weren't just reserved for science-fiction either, but were very much in the mainstream. In A Christmas Carol (1843) by Charles Dickens, Ebeneezer Scrooge journeys back in time with a ghost to observe the formative events that have made him who he is. He then journeys forward in time with another ghost to see where his life and work will lead. This perspective prompts him to change his ways — and effectively change the future.

In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) by Mark Twain, Hank Morgan travels back in time and across the Atlantic to medieval England, where his knowledge of science is put to good use battling villains and injustice. Time travel again provides some perspective on social issues. That's not the only link between the two stories. From the way A Christmas Carol is told, it’s possible Scrooge dreamt the whole adventure (but his unconscious still prompts him to change his ways), while Morgan may have imagined his journey to Camelot following a bump to the head. That was generally quite common: the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction entry on time travel says that, “until the end of the nineteenth century, dreams were the favoured method.”

The Time Machine (1895) by HG Wells offered something very different. It begins with the unnamed time traveller discussing — with a psychologist, a provincial mayor, a medical man, a very young man, “an argumentative person with red hair” called Filby and the unnamed narrator — the physical principles of travel through time. It’s a scientific debate among a number of learned, sceptical people, positing time travel as a practical enterprise, a mechanical process accomplished with a machine. 

Wells is vague on exactly what this machine comprises. It has “ivory bars”, “nickel bars”, a “brass rail” and “quartz rod”, but the traveller sits on a “saddle” rather than a seat or chair, which has always made me think of a sort of glorified bicycle. When the traveller works the starting lever, the sense is not that the traveller feels any motion. Instead, as he sits there, he watches a woman come into the room and head out through a different door — at unusual speed.

“I suppose it took her a minute or so to traverse the place, but to me she seemed to shoot across the room like a rocket. I pressed the lever over to its extreme position. The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came tomorrow.” (Chapter IV)

It’s as if the traveller is perched on a bicycle in front of a cinema screen, working a lever to speed up the film being shown until it passes in a blur.

There are other examples from the period, not least the unfinished novel by Henry James published in 1917 that Berkeley Square draws on. But I think Berkeley Square is situated somewhere between the dreams/subconscious of Dickens and Twain, and the physics of Wells. The play does not feature a time machine or tell us anything about how Peter Standish is able to swap places with his ancestor. But he does tell us quite a lot about the mechanics of time.

“Suppose you’re in a boat, sailing down a winding stream. You watch the banks as they pass you. You went by a grove of maple trees, upstream. But you can't see them now, so you saw them in the past, didn’t you? You’re watching a field of clover now; it’s before your eyes at this moment, in the present. But you don't know yet what’s around the bend in the stream there ahead of you; there may be wonderful things, but you can’t see them until you get around the bend in the future, can you?

Now remember, you’re in the boat. But I’m up in the sky above you, in a plane. I’m looking down on it all. I can see all at once the trees you saw upstream, the field of clover that you see now, and what's waiting for you around the bend ahead. All at once! So the past, present, and future of the man in the boat are all one to the man in the plane. Doesn't that show how all Time must really be one? Real Time with a capital T is nothing but an idea in the mind of God!” (p. 36)

A page later, Peter shares a limerick:

“There was a young lady named Bright


Whose movements were quicker than light


She went out one day, in a relative way


And came back on the previous night.” (p. 37)

These machinations on the behaviour of time don’t feature in James and surely come from Einstein. They’re also achingly new. It’s not just that perspective of time is relative to the observer. We also gain this perspective by using a then-new kind of vehicle — the plane.

Berkeley Square wasn’t the only work of fiction from this period to draw on Einstein as a dramatic conceit. A year before the play premiered, Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway (1925) did something similar. That novel explores all sorts of aspects of time on people's lives and consciousness (and was written under the working title of The Hours). Einstein is name-checked early on in the novel but his ideas about the relativistic effects of travel on our concept of time are demonstrated later on. 

One character, Peter Walsh, returns to London after five years in India and goes to see Clarissa Dalloway. He has been moving while she has been in the same place all that time. The result is marked: 

“And how are you?” said Peter Walsh, positively trembling; taking both her hands; kissing both her hands. She’s grown older, he thought, sitting down. I shan’t tell her anything about it, he thought, for she’s grown older. She’s looking at me, he thought, a sudden embarrassment coming over him, though he had kissed her hands. Putting his hand into his pocket, he took out a large pocketknife and half opened the blade.

Exactly the same, thought Clarissa; the same queer look; the same check suit; a little out of the straight his face is, a little thinner, dryer, perhaps, but he looks awfully well, and just the same.”

Basically, time has passed for Mrs Dalloway but not Peter.

In the case of Berkeley Square, I think Einstein is just bit of the zeitgeist thrown into the mix. The plot also features a Crux ansata — an ankh — to suggest the eternal souls of our star-cross’d lovers, surely drawing on Egytomania sparked by the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922 (Balderston later adapted The Mummy for Universal). 

Or there’s the eye-roll at modern life as the UK follows the US:

“Yes, cocktails, jazz and one universal traffic block—London’s just like New York.” (p. 29) 

I wonder how much the fatalism was of its age, too. The horrors of the past can’t be changed and young lives can’t be saved, in a play staged less than a decade after the end of the First World War. No one here has any agency; the implication is that none of us do. 

This seems to have connected with audiences of the time. According to JP Wearing’s The London Stage 1920-1929 (p. 467), Berkeley Square premiered at St Martin’s Theatre in London on 6 October 1926 and ran for an impressive 179 performances up to 5 March the following year. The cast included sisters Kate and Helen played by Jean Forbes-Robertson and Valerie Taylor. (I know Taylor as Nora in Went the Day Well?, a film made in 1942 but bookended by a character addressing us from the future, after the end of the war.) 

Taylor and some other members of the London cast of Berkeley Square transferred to New York when the play opened at the Lyceum on 4 November 1929 with Leslie Howard in the lead role as Peter Standish. It ran for 229 performances. Theatricalia lists multiple stage versions until 1949.

1937 BBC radio
Berkeley Square,
image from Radio Times

Howard and Taylor were in the 1933 film version available in full on YouTube. Howard was also in a 1937 radio production for the BBC, and the BBC broadcast other radio versions in 1935 (with Peggy Ashcroft as Helen), 1941, 1944 and 1951. That last one coincided with a second film version, now under the title The House in the Square (aka I’ll Never Forget You), with Tyrone Power in the title role (a version of this, with Gregory Peck, failed to get off the ground in 1945). And there were TV versions on the BBC in 1948 and 1959.

And then… Well, nothing. Whatever connection it made with the audience, it’s time has passed.

I’ve a copy of the script published by Longmans, Green and Company (London, New York and  Toronto) in 1929, to coincide with the premiere on Broadway. I bought it because of a chance remark by New Zealand born playwright Jennifer Compton. She told Toby Hadoke for our Looking for David documentary that in 1973, while working on the play that became No Man's Land / Crossfire (in which feminists from different times meet in the same house), her tutor on NIDA's playwriting course advised her to read this old play.

1959 BBC TV
Berkeley Square,
image from Radio Times

That tutor was David Whitaker, the subject of my book. I’m not sure when David discovered the play. He was working on staff in the BBC script department when the 1959 adaptation was made. Whenever he encountered it, I think it had a profound impact on his understanding of time while first story editor of Doctor Who.

For one thing, the speech quoted above about the river and the plane is very like David’s own description of the mechanics of time, which he outlined in a reply to Doctor Who viewer Mr R Adams of Quinton on 1 May 1964 — a copy is held in file T5-649 Viewers Letters 1964 at the BBC’s Written Archives Centre in Caversham. David changes the metaphor a little: instead of a river observed from a plane, time is a winding road which the Doctor can observe from up on a hill. This position gives him perspective of the whole pattern but he cannot change or divert its path.

David wrote this letter on the same day that recording took place on The Temple of Evil (first episode of The Aztecs), in which the Doctor insists to companion Barbara that,

“You can't rewrite history! Not one line! … What you are trying to do is utterly impossible.”

A few months later, in Prisoners of the Conciergie, Barbara again probes what is possible. She has witnessed the young Napoleon Bonaparte in 1794 and later wonders what change she might have enacted with a few quiet words.

DOCTOR WHO:

Well, I can assure you my dear Barbara, Napoleon would never have believed you. 
 

IAN: 

Yes, Doctor but supposing we had written Napoleon a letter telling him, you know, some of the things that were going to happen to him.  


SUSAN: 

It wouldn’t have made any difference, Ian. He'd have forgotten it, or lost it or thought it was written by a maniac. 

BARBARA: 

I suppose if we’d tried to kill him with a gun, the bullet would have missed him. 

This is in a story written by Dennis Spooner, who succeeded David as story editor — and immediately changed the rules. Spooner's next story, The Romans, has the Doctor directly influence the course of history, sparking the Great Fire of Rome. In Spooner’s next self-scripted story, The Time Meddler (1965), we meet a member of the Doctor's own people who can and does change history. David responded; his 1966 novelisation The Crusaders, based on a TV story he wrote for Spooner, begins with the Doctor once again insisting that history is immutable.

Spooner’s view of time has prevailed in Doctor Who. In fact, it’s given the Doctor a sense of purpose, as protector of the delicate web of time. That explains why the Doctor on some occasions can and on others cannot stand idly by and let things take their course. A classic example is in the 1975 story Pyramids of Mars, in which the Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith face a villain in the year 1911.

DOCTOR WHO:


If Sutekh isn’t stopped, he’ll destroy the world. 


SARAH JANE: 

But he didn't, did he? I mean, we know the world didn’t end in 1911. 

DOCTOR WHO:

Do we?

He sets the controls of the TARDIS for Earth in 1980, where they find a desolate wasteland. Sarah acknowledges that they have to go back to stop Sutekh. Change is possible, even necessary. The sense is less of change as of moulding.

DOCTOR WHO:

Not chosen [but] shaped. The actions of the present fashion the future. 

The threat of changing history therefore serves as motivation for the Doctor, and so has dramatic value. Not being able to change history makes the Doctor and the companions mere bystanders, and is so less dramatically satisfying. Yet David Whitaker stuck to his guns anyway - and I think that’s because Berkeley Square suggested the drama of not being able to change history, which is what gets explored in The Aztecs, one of the best acclaimed early stories.

It occurs to me that the series Quantum Leap owes (perhaps by coincidence) something to Berkeley Square in that its hero Sam Beckett swaps places with individuals in history in the same way that Peter Standish swaps with his ancestor. Yet the whole point of Quantum Leap is that Sam is tasked with changing history for the better, guided by his friend Al who can provide him with the odds of success in a probabilistic universe.

Anyway. I think Berkeley Square also influenced the middle section of David’s The Evil of the Daleks (1967). There's something of moral, outspoken Kate, good but timid Helen and their caddish brother Tom in Ruth Maxtible, Victoria Waterfield and Arthur Terrell. The TV story features a portrait of Victoria’s late mother, whereas in the play, the house in 1929 features a painting of Peter Standish by Sir Joshua Reynolds, painted during his trip to the past.

That painting has a bigger role in the play, where Reynolds is haunted by his subject.

REYNOLDS:

Something in your face eludes me … I thought at first it was irony. And yet, I fancy I know irony—and there is a quality in your every look, when I take up my brushes and fasten my eyes on your face, beyond all my experience of human nature. (p. 74)

As in the 2010 Doctor Who episode Vincent and the Doctor, the idea is that artists can see something the rest of us don’t. (The fact the Silents in 2011’s The Impossible Astronaut look so much like the figure in the famous painting The Scream suggest Edvard Munch had the same ability.)

Reading Berkeley Square again this weekend, it strikes me that the modern Peter Standish has a guide to his time in the past — his ancestor's diary. David Whitaker provided the Doctor with a diary when, in The Power of the Daleks (1966), the Second Doctor must take on the mantle of the First. 

And, perhaps fittingly, there's a connection that the authors could never have known as it’s related to their future. David's novelisation of The Crusades includes the detail that the Doctor’s granddaughter has married a man called David Cameron; in the play, there's an important American character called Bill Clinton.

Doctor Who Magazine #574

After some time off to make room for the Christmas quiz (and answers), the new issue of Doctor Who Magazine features another Sufficient Data infographic, written by me and illustrated by Ben Morris. 

This one marks 50 years of Day of the Daleks and owes a little to the blog post I wrote a while ago on the economics of the Daleks.

The Tides of Time #47

The Trinity term issue of The Tides of Time, fanzine of the Oxford Doctor Who society features an interview with me conducted by editor James Ashworth, plus reviews of things I've written - Lesser Evils from last year and The Time Travellers from way back in 2005. There are plenty of other things in the whopping 104 pages, not all of them about me. But I am very magnanimous.

Influencing the Doctor #51 and #52

The latest episodes of the Influencing the Doctor podcast feature me being interrogated by host Ethan Gibson on my writing. We cover everything from how I got started and what my influences are, questions about The Time Travellers, Blake's 7 and Graceless, to the stuff I'm up to now - Scourge of the Cybermen, my forthcoming Sherlock Holmes novel The Great War and even some vague hints about what I've been doing this week...

• Influencing the Doctor #51: Simon Guerrier part one
• Influencing the Doctor #52: Simon Guerrier part two

Kindred, by Octavia E Butler

"'There's worse things than being dead,' I had said." (p. 283)

Prompted by a recent discussion on the radio of Octavia Butler's Kindred, I reread this book that has haunted me for decades. It's about Dana, a 27 year-old black woman living just outside Los Angeles in 1976, who keeps finding herself back in the early nineteenth century, on a plantation near Baltimore owned by her ancestors. One direct ancestor, Rufus, is the no-good, controlling and unpredictable son of the owner, and Dana realises that he will someday force himself on a slave called Alice, and have a child from which Dana is descended. Until that happens, she must do more than merely survive in this appallingly hostile environment - for all his faults and cruelty, she must keep Rufus from harm.

The title, then, is a pun on Dana's dread for this relative with whom she is somehow bound. As with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, we're never told quite why she travels in time, nor how Rufus can summon her back from the future when his life is under threat. She can only return home, briefly, when her own life is in danger - which happens frequently enough. There's then what happens with her white husband Kevin while she's away, and whether she can transport things or even people with her that might help her survive. It's full of incident and shocking twists as Butler explores the territory: the practicalities against escaping; the state of medicine at the time; the way other black people of the time treat this trouser-wearing, educated black woman; the necessary pragmatism when you don't have any rights and live under constant threat of violence.

It's so brutal, and Dana and other characters under such unrelenting threat, that I stopped and started through it, sometimes only managing a few pages at a time - it's not exactly the right thing to go with lockdown-induced anxiety. Yet it's also a very timely read, exploring the legacy of slavery on us today. The 1976 "present" is no coincidence, where at one point Dana - back in her own time - is torn over celebrating the bicentennial. She refers to the "older people" of her own time who do double takes when they see her with her white husband. There's a sense, too, of how much easier life is for him - in the past and present - compared to what she endures.

I've read a fair number of time-travel stories, many of them addressing race to one degree or another, but this is direct and unflinching, and as much about the haunted now as it is then. Dana is left mutilated by her experience, physically scarred by the past as she lives in the present. We end with her revisiting the places where she was once trapped, looking for the house she once lived in, the grave of the man she was linked to, any trace of the slaves - the people - she knew. There are hauntingly few clues as to what became of them, which implies its own awful story. The implication is that she - and we - continue to live in their shadow.

A few years ago, I researched my own family history and learned that the Guerriers were among the first refugees, arriving in London in 1677, though the paucity of records means we can't be sure of the lineage until 1730. But other branches of my family include those descended from slaves and those descended from slavers. The database of Legacies of British Slavery holds a record for Mary Turner (née Trench), born 9 July 1815 and my great-great-great grandmother (or: her grandson was the father of my grandpa, who died in 2007). On 17 October 1836, Mary was granted £100 13s 8d as compensation for the emancipation of five slaves she owned in Clarendon, Jamaica. Her father received much more. That weighs heavily and I am keen to read Alex Renton's new book, Blood Legacy.

"'You probably needed to come for the same reason I did.' He shrugged. 'To try to understand. To touch the solid evidence that those people existed.'" (p.295)

An Unearthly Child takes place on a Tuesday

I've just rewatched An Unearthly Child, the very first episode of Doctor Who, and noticed something I don't think I've noticed before. On the blackboard in Ian Chesterton's room, it says "HOMEWORK TUESDAY".

Below this, in the bottom-right corner of the blackboard, it says "FOR THURSDAY":

So the homework has just been set, and the episode takes place on a Tuesday.

We can narrow things down a bit further. In the second episode of Doctor Who, Ian says that he and the others were just, "in a junkyard in London in England in the year 1963."

When in the year might this be? The episode was broadcast on Saturday 23 November 1963, and recorded in studio on Friday 18 October, but that doesn't necessarily tell us when the events depicted are set. But the daylight depicted - or not - in the episode can give us a clue.

In the first episode, it's dark by the time Susan reaches the junkyard after the end of her school day. It is dark enough inside the yard - which is open to the sky - that both Ian and the Doctor use torches. What time did it get dark?

Before leaving school, Susan tells her teachers, "I like walking through the dark," which implies it is already dark. The episode also begins with a policeman walking through the already dark lane outside the junkyard, picking out details with a torch; we then dissolve to the school just as the final bell rings. The implication is that the dissolve transports us in space but not in time - that it is already dark enough to need torchlight before the end of the school day.

But schools usually finish mid-afternoon and, as I know from collecting my own children, it's not dark at the end of the school day, even in the midst of winter. I checked at timeanddate.com, and the earliest sunset in London predicted for December 2020 is 15:51 - the sunset between 8 and 16 December.

The ringing of the school bell suggests that Susan hasn't stayed later than the end of the school day, for example at an after-school club. So if An Unearthly Child is set on a Tuesday in London 1963 where it's (almost) dark by 3.30, it must be 10 or 17 December.

In other words, the first episode of Doctor Who is set a little in the future.

PS: the broadcast version of An Unearthly Child was not the first version made. The earlier, "pilot" episode, included on the DVD, was recorded on 27 September - and there the blackboard is blank:

PPS: 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks returns to the school and junkyard in 1963, and a calendar on the wall in the school says November - but its broad daylight at tea-time, which doesn't seem quite right. 2013's The Day of the Doctor suggests that Totters Lane and the junkyard are in the immediate vicinity of the school.

ETA: Wise Jonathan Morris points out that the story could just as easily be set in January or February 1963. Wise Paul MC Smith, author of the exhaustive new book The TARDIS Chronicles 

suggests March, and points out this detail of the day of the week had already been discussed in Cornell, Day & Topping's The Discontinuity Guide (1995). Bother.

Victorian Queens of Ancient Egypt

Marianne Brocklehurst's diary

Victorian Queens of Ancient Egypt, my fourth documentary for Radio 3's Sunday Feature will be broadcast on 3 February. This morning, presenter Samira Ahmed is in the Guardian about it:

• Guardian: "The lure of ancient Egypt is a way to revitalise faded industrial towns"

There are details for the programme on the BBC website:

Samira Ahmed explores the profound connection between ancient Egypt and the Victorian heyday of Britain’s industrial north – in a legacy of museums and northern pride.

Being taken to see the mummies has become a rite of passage, captivating generations of children since the late 19th century. Ancient Egypt is now embedded in early years education. At more than a hundred museums across the UK, that culture helps shape the British imagination. Where did that affinity come from?

To find out, Samira follows in the footsteps of three extraordinary women: Amelia Oldroyd, Annie Barlow and Marianne Brocklehurst. Each came from a northern, mill-owning family, and each felt compelled not only to visit Egypt and to collect antiquities, but to share their treasures with those at home. Each established local museums that survive today, inspiring new generations.

Today, such museums face an uncertain future. By returning to these women’s stories, can lessons be learned from the past?

Contributors:
Katina Bill, Kirklees Museums and Galleries
Matthew Watson and Rizwana Khalique, Bolton Library and Museum Services
Danielle Wootton
Emma Anderson and Kathryn Warburton, Macclesfield Museums
Rebecca Holt, MPhil student at Oxford University
Heba abd al-Gawad, Egyptian Egyptologist
Alice Stevenson, Institute of Archaeology, UCL
Dr Chris Naunton

Producers: Simon and Thomas Guerrier
A Whistledown Production for BBC Radio 4

The Story of Susan Foreman

That splendid lot at BBC Studios have produced this lovely video telling the story of Doctor Who's granddaughter, Susan Foreman.

The text is by me and Christel Dee, from our book The Women Who Lived, but there are all new illustrations by Lara Pickle, Dani Jones, Caz Zhu, Mogamoka, Rachael Smith, Kate Holden, Sonia Leong and Gwen Burns. Hooray!

Worthing Wormhole and Gallifrey

I will be a guest at Worthing Wormhole this Saturday, signing copies of Doctor Who: The Women Who Lived with co-author Christel Dee.

Christel and I have also been announced as guests at Gallifrey One in Los Angeles in February. (By exciting coincidence, I first met Christel the last time I was at Gallifrey, in 2016.)

And here's a picture of my tired old head this morning at the BBC... 

The Essential Doctor Who - Time Travel

From my munificent masters at Doctor Who Magazine comes The Essential Doctor Who - Time Travel, available in shops and for download.

I've written five pieces for it:

ORIGINAL EVIL
How 1967 story The Evil of the Daleks might have been very different, as I pick over the original outline (published here for the first time) and speak to the woman originally cast as Victoria - all taken from my Black Archive book on The Evil of the Daleks.

THE AGONY OF PERPETUITY
Actor David Collings discusses how he utterly terrified me as a child as the alien Mawdryn in 1983 story Mawdryn Undead.

HOLMES ON HOLMES
Using archive interviews with the great Robert Holmes to explore 1985 story The Two Doctors - in his own words.

CREATING ANGELS
I journey to the church in Suffolk that inspired the Weeping Angels, first seen in 2007 story, Blink.

WE OUGHT TO BE DOING THINGS
When Doctor Who began it was impossible to alter the past - so what changed?

Time and Space

A couple of very good books read recently.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North is near-on impossible to put down. It's about a bloke called Harry August who, when he dies, lives his life over again - but remembering everything that happened before. He can change small things - such as going into different professions or marrying different people - but the big stuff like the Second World War or his mum dying young from cancer is rather set in stone. And Harry's not alone, either - there's a whole network or "oroborans", looking out for each other and passing messages to one another forward and backward in time. Including a message from the future that the end is coming, and increasingly quickly...

It's one of those books that starts with a brilliant, ridiculous idea and plays it out perfectly logically, but then adds ever more thrilling developments. To say more would only spoil it, but gosh it is good.

An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield is packed full of fascinating detail about the counter-intuitive nature of working in Earth orbit. For example, there's this moment in November 1995, when Hadfield was on a space shuttle that docked with the Russian Mir space station. It was an extremely complicated bit of orbital mechanics, but they docked successfully - and three seconds early.

"Only we couldn't get the hatch open. On the other side, they were kicking it with all their might. But the Russian engineers had taped, strapped and sealed our docking module's hatch just a little too enthusiastically, with multiple layers. So we did the true space-age thing: we broke into Mir using a Swiss Army knife. Never leave the planet without one."

Chris Hadfield, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth (2015 [2013]), p. 191.

But the book aims to find life lessons from Hadfield's experience that we can all benefit from, so there's lots of home-spun advice about why it's good to sweat the small stuff and to be prepared. An example is Hadfield learning "Rocket Man" on the guitar on the off-chance that he met Elton John (which he did) and was invited to play something with him (which he wasn't).

I found Hadfield's drive and goal-orientation a bit wearying, but he's an extremely amiable, likable guy - and quick to recount his own failures and mistakes, such as that time one of his colleagues got a face-full of his nail clippings. He's also got a very accessible style, coolly acknowledging the weirdness and danger and randomness of his day job. And it's hard to not like the guy responsible for the first ever music video recorded in space.

Modern Man wins at Kinofilm 2014!

Hurrah! Modern Man - a short film I wrote - has won Best Three-Minute Wonder at the Kinofilm International Short Film Festival in Manchester. You can read the full list of winners on the Kinofilm website.

The film has also been playing recently in cities even more exotic than Manchester. Director Seb Solberg blogged about his recent trip to see Modern Man playing in Paris.

You can watch Modern Man below, and I wrote a thing about making it.


Modern Man from Sebastian Solberg on Vimeo.

On time travellers not using Twitter

Yesterday's Inside Science on Radio 4 interviewed Professor Robert Nemiroff from Michigan Tech University about his much reported search of the internet for evidence of time travellers in our midst.

Nemiroff and his students searched Twitter for references to the discovery of Comet ISON (21 September 2012) and the naming of Pope Francis (13 March 2013) - but references to them tweeted before either event took place. The abstract for Nemiroff's paper concludes:

"No time travelers were discovered. Although these negative results do not disprove time travel, given the great reach of the Internet, this search is perhaps the most comprehensive to date."

Hmm, I thought. And again, hmm.

Twitter is relatively big news now, but how long will that last? If Nemiroff had conducted his research a few years ago, he might have studied the contents of MySpace or eGroups or newsgroups - the social media of a bygone age that our children will speak of as myth. Recently, the Global Social Media Impact Study suggested that older teenagers see Facebook as "dead and buried". In 10 years time - let alone in some more distant future from which time travellers might come - will we need reminding what Twitter even was?

Even if time travellers knew about Twitter, why would they use it? If the tweets are not archived in their future, they might wish to read them in our time - but why would they themselves tweet? Nemiroff is rather supposing that any such time travellers would want us to notice they'd been here.

In fact, time travellers are a bit sniffy about Twitter:

KATE:
Within three hours, the cubes had a thousand separate Twitter accounts.

DOCTOR:
(UNIMPRESSED) Twitter?

Doctor Who: The Power of Three by Chris Chibnall.

That might well be a direct response to Nemiroff's study. And, just to rub it in, The Power of Three was first broadcast on Saturday 22 September 2012 - the day after Comet ISON was first spotted, and so months before Nemiroff even started his research.

Doctor Who: 1991

After episode 695 (Survival, part 3)
Timewyrm: Revelation, first published December 1991
<< back to 1990

Andrew Skilleter's cover art for
Timewyrm: Revelation by Paul Cornell

Who was Doctor Who for?

I argued last time that in 1990 Doctor Who had stopped being for children. That fact was self-evident to Peter Darvill-Evans, who in 1991 was editor of the long-running Doctor Who novelisations. I spoke to him in 2006 about it:

‘It was quite obvious,’ says Darvill-Evans, ‘that Doctor Who fans had grown up, particularly as the viewing figures were relatively low towards the end of the 1980s. It meant that the vast influx of Doctor Who fans had been teenagers during the 70s and early 80s, and they were now growing up. It was a bit absurd to be producing children’s books for them.’

John Freeman could also see this on Doctor Who Magazine: ‘Our readership was late teen and getting older by the issue.’

Me, Bernice Summerfield: The Inside Story (Big Finish: 2009), p. 10.

Both men tailored their publications to suit this older, more dedicated audience - and that's probably how Doctor Who Magazine and the books survived the long period without Doctor Who on TV. DWM studied and analysed the show in ever greater depth. The New Adventures books featured adult themes - sex and swearing, drugs and psychedelia, and an awful lot of references to then-current indie bands.

At the time, I was just the right age to embrace this more mature Doctor Who (the first of the New Adventures was published just as I turned 15). Now it seems incredible that the range would purposefully exclude child readers. This, though, was very much of the time - I argued before that Doctor Who was just one of a number of well-known heroes being reinvented in a darker, more violent form. (In 1989, I'd been furious that the new James Bond film was a certificate 15 as I wasn't old enough to see it; and I felt terribly grown-up getting into see Batman, the first ever certificate 12.)

But it wasn't the adult tone of the Doctor Who books that especially hooked me so much as the sense of community they engendered. That community was down to two factors that made the New Adventures very different from most other ranges. First, there was something in the contracts that Darvill-Evans drew up for the authors.

"We had to put into our contracts with authors that these characters and the TARDIS and so on were owned by the BBC, therefore they couldn’t use them without our permission. I also put into the author contracts a clause which said that any character that the authors created remained theirs but that they, by signing the contract, granted Virgin Publishing the right to use those characters in other people’s books. It meant that any character or creation, or anything created in a New Adventure, could be used by any other New Adventures author."

Ibid., p.9.

As a result, authors developed characters and settings from previous books, creating a vividly detailed history of the future, full of recognisable friends and enemies. The more you, as a reader, kept up with the series, the more rewarding this development would be.

But there was something else profoundly important. Darvill-Evans had spotted what he called,

"a huge untapped and rather frustrated pool of talent amongst Doctor Who fandom".

Ibid., p. 11.

The press release announcing the New Adventures, dated 27 June 1990, said the range was open to submissions from previously unpublished authors. This was an unprecedented step: reading the 'slush pile' of unsolicited manuscripts can be arduous work. Yet the Doctor Who books quickly struck gold.

Paul Cornell was the first to be accepted. His first novel, Timewyrm: Revelation, was the fourth New Adventure, published in December 1991. It was an extraordinary, strange and rich debut - I received it as a Christmas present and read it from cover to cover that very afternoon.

Paul was followed by more first-time authors, among them Mark Gatiss and Gareth Roberts (who, like Paul, would write for the TV series when it returned); Justin Richards (now in charge of the Doctor Who books); and Andy Lane (now the bestselling author of the Young Sherlock Holmes books). That was just in the first couple of years: Doctor Who books continued to offer opportunties to first-time authors.

Not only were the books developing a shared universe but anyone could be part of it. I sent my first submission in to the editors in 1994. You can read it here (it's not very good) and see the response I got from editorial assistant Andy Bodle (which was amazing). Even though I was rejected, the kind response and the invitation to try again kept me avidly reading the series, and it kept me writing.

(I was finally commissioned to write a Doctor Who novel in 2004 - 10 years after my first attempt. I owe my career as an author to that initial, kind rejection.)

So, as I said at the start, who was Doctor Who for?

Watching telly is a largely passive experience. It might make us laugh or cry, we might shout at the screen, but (unlike theatre, for example) our responses don't shape or affect those telling the story. Our role is simply to watch. There are shows that want us to write letters or ring in, or - these days - Tweet along. But, especially with drama, the audience mostly takes what it's given.

Fandom - any kind of fandom - is about being involved. Dressing up, writing our own stories, discussing the production of the show in depth - all fan activity - is about taking an active part. It's sometimes said as a criticism that fans have a sense of entitlement, but that's exactly what being a fan is (though that doesn't excuse bad behaviour).

For a brief and thrilling time when Doctor Who wasn't on TV, fans could participate in the creation of new Doctor Who. Not on TV and not for children, but a Doctor Who of the fans by the fans for the fans.

But how did it look to anyone else?

Next episode: 1992

Modern Man: the director's cut

Modern Man from Sebastian Solberg on Vimeo.

Director Sebastian Solberg has posted a new cut of Modern Man, the short film I wrote earlier this year. Full credits are as follows:

Director / Producer – Sebastian Solberg (sebastiansolberg.com)

Facebook: facebook.com/ModernManFilm
Twitter twitter.com/ModernManFilm

Credits:
Rupert – Sean Knopp (@SeanKnopp)
Rachel – Nicola Posener (@NicolaPosener)
Cavewoman - Ramanique Ahluwalia (@Ramanique)
Boy Genius – Nathan Bryon (@Nathan Bryon)

Director / Producer / Editor – Sebastian Solberg (@SebSolberg)
Writer – Simon Guerrier (@0tralala)
Producer– Jassa Ahluwalia (@OfficialJassa)
Executive Producer / Cinematographer – Dale McCready (@dalemccready)
Focus Puller - Juan Manuel Peña
Gaffer – James Humby
Camera Assistant – Oliver Watts
Production Designer – Joe Eason
Art Director – Katya Rogers (@KatyaHarriet)
First AD – James Cleave (@James_Cyprus)
Makeup Designer – Lulu Hall (@HallLulu)
Costume Designer - Georgia Lewis
Costume Assistant - Jasmine Grace Whiting
Stunt Co-ordinator – Dani Biernat (@Danistunts)
Sound Recordist – Miles Croft
Unit Photographer – Gary Eason
Unit Videographer – Vicky Harris
VFX’s Artist – Andrew O’Sullivan
VFX’s Artist – Dan Roberts
VFX’s Artist – James Morrissey
Composer – Lyndon Holland (@Lyndonholland)
Sound Design – David Sendall
Grade – Francois Kamffer
Credits Illustration - Jed Uy

WITH THANKS TO
Sarah Wright, Virginia Nelson, Sarah Ahluwalia, Ella Rogers, Neil Brand, Thomas Guerrier, Adrian Mackinder and Eddie Robson, Ros Little, Abbi Collins Kitroom Monkey and Take2.

You can follow Seb @SebSolberg on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. For any enquires about Modern Man, please contact him here: sebastiansolberg.com/contact/

Short breaks in Elizabethan England

I loved Ian Mortimer's The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England when it was on the telly a few weeks ago and have finally made an effort to read the book, which I got for my birthday almost exactly a year ago.

Mortimer's idea is brilliantly simple: to present the past as if we can walk round it, scouring sources for details on food, accommodation, manners and everything else. He's good at detailing the smells and textures of the period as well as the dry facts, and writing it in the present tense really helps to breath new life into an age that's been well covered before.

This vivid conjuring has a slow-burn effect: you notice it long after reading the words on the page. On Sunday morning, as I wandered round my old home-town of Winchester, I found myself picking out details I'd never seen before - Tudor beams and windows above the shops in the high street, the plan of the backstreets, the medieval buildings that would have seemed old even to the Elizabethans.

A lot of the book is devoted to ordinary life - the limited flavours and colours, the wealth of ripe odours. But he's also good at making sense of the politics, too. Why, for example, did Elizabeth have such a long and successful reign?

Mortimer makes the case that, unlike her predecessors in the Middle Ages, Elizabeth had few relatives - siblings, cousins, those related by marriage - in contention for the throne. She was the last of Henry VIII's children and he was the only surviving son of Henry VII. Even so, Elizabeth had Mary, Queen of Scots, executed and Lady Catherine Grey imprisoned.

But Elizabeth was also careful to establish and underline her authority. Mortimer details her "mannish" behaviour, her progresses round the country so her subjects could see her, and the ways she dominated parliament. Parliament was, for example, banned from discussing the question of who would succeed her, and she called only 10 parliaments anyway in the 45 years of her reign (rather than the customary one a year).

"Like her grandfather Henry VII, Elizabeth has a policy of not creating any new earls, marquesses or viscounts, and she creates very few barons. The reason is to limit the power of her subjects and thus strengthen the authority of her government." 

Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (2012), p. 46.

What's more, a traditional rival to the English monarchy had been done away with by Elizabeth's father: bishops no longer served the Roman Catholic Church but answered directly to her.

"Elizabethan England is thus devoid of private armies, royal dukes and political bishops. Those considering revolt against Elizabeth have no one to turn to for leadership ... After the execution of the duke of Norfolk [in June 1572], the highest rank in the peerage is that of marquess. Never a common title, there is just one in 1600 (the marquess of Winchester), plus a dowager marchioness (the widow of the last marquess of Northampton, William Parr, who dies in 1571). Third-highest in rank are the earls; there are eighteen of these in 1600. Next come the two viscounts, Lord Montagu and Lord Howard of Bindon. The lowest rank is the baronage: there are thirty-seven barons in all. In total, just fifty-seven peers are summoned to parliament at the start of the reign and fifty-five at the end (underage heirs are not summoned)." 

Ibid., p. 47.

Given my day job, it was interesting, too, to learn that peers could not be imprisoned for debt, and other privileges included "the right to be judged by his peers, paying very little tax and freedom from torture" (p. 48) - though Mortimer explains Henry VIII got round that last one by having peers summarily executed and Elizabeth locked up some nobles for years in the Tower without trial.

AAAGH! The Big Clonk!

The second part of the AAAGH! story that began last week. This one featured in Doctor Who Adventures #276 and may owe a little to 2010 episode The Big Bang.

As ever, the script is by me, the art by Brian Williamson and the editing by Natalie Barnes and Paul Lang - who gave kind permission for me to post it here. Paul - who came up with AAAGH! in the first place - is leaving Doctor Who Adventures. Thank you for everything.