On the appeal of the Escapist

Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000) is an extraordinary joy of book, one I shall buy for friends and relations for some time to come.

It's the tale of two teenage boys in the late 1930s, one a fey dreamer who's grown up in New York, the other his cousin who's just escaped the Nazis in Prague. Together, they create a new superhero comic, imbued (though they're not quite aware of it) with their own hopes and fears. "The Escapist" is a huge success, at least in terms of sales, but the boy still have battles to fight - Clay with his whole identity, Kavalier in trying to rescue his family from Europe...

We follow their efforts to produce good work and not be ripped off by the management, and see them fall in love, suffer the most terrible calamities and live through momentous history. It's a huge book - 636 pages, spanning more than a decade, epic in scale and geography but also great on the tiny detail. We're peppered with all sorts of data on the comics scene and New York and culture and world of the time. Stan Lee has a cameo role, as does Orson Welles.

It's funny and moving and utterly absorbing - one of those rare, perfect books that you want to race through and yet don't ever want to reach the end.

Then, in the last section, it pulls an extraordinary trick of making you aware of the themes underlying all that's befallen our heroes. It's the coming-of-age for these two geeky kids but there's something more profound. This is the story not only of the Escapist but the escapist artform.

"Having lost [things he's lost], the usual charge leveled against comic books, that they offered merely an escape from reality, seemed to Joe actually to be a powerful argument on their behalf."

Michael Chabon, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), p. 575.

The defence of the escapist could have brought the whole thing crashing down, but its expertly done. I thought, as I started it, that it was ironic that a book about trash culture form had won such a serious accolade as the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2001. That validation of the form is not only well deserved, it's also the whole point.

House of Cards vs House of Cards

For my birthday, Nimbos kindly presented me with the House of Cards trilogy. I felt some trepidation putting it on; having watched the original serial transfixed in 1990, how would it bear up?

It's a majestic bit of television, bold and thrilling and with a perfect cast. The wheeze (as I'm sure you know) is that Margaret Thatcher has just left office as Prime Minister, and the Tory party are in the midst of electing a replacement – as was happening in real life as the first episode was broadcast. The new, safe-bet leader decides not to promote his Chief Whip to ministerial office but keep him in his place. The whip, Francis Urquhart, is not best pleased and begins to take his revenge while also scheming his way to the top job.

Urquhart is written and played as a mix of Macbeth and Richard III, complete with soliloquies direct to the audience that make us complicit in his scheming. Ian Richardson is brilliantly charismatic and sinister, and Diane Fletcher makes for a cool Lady Macbeth. Colin Jeavons is a deliciously grotesque aid to Urquhart, grinning obsequiously as he helps destroy lives.

The story is gripping and twisty, though I felt that someone should have noticed sooner that Urquhart is the only candidate not to suffer calamity.

There are other things that show how much has changed: a Cabinet meeting where there are no women; a candidate for Prime Minister being asked if he's too young at 55; ace reporter Mattie Storin leaving a conference in mid-flow to find a phone box where she can call in her story.

But other things seem still very much on the nose: the stark divide in the Tory party between old money grandees and the upstart self-made men; the queasy relationship between high politics and those who run the press; the sex and drugs and scandal that lurk beneath the veneer. It's cynicism about politics still feels very now.

I was also fascinated by the use of the Palace of Westminster – or rather how the production dodged round not being able to film inside the building. As so often, Manchester Town Hall has enough passing similarity to the corridors of power that most viewers wouldn't notice (and it was conveniently near the old Commons Chamber set at Granada).

The thing that most jarred was the climactic scene. Mattie meets Francis on a secret roof garden supposedly above Central Lobby, and yet it looks out onto the clock face of Big Ben with Victoria Tower just behind. That means it was filmed on the roof of what's now Portcullis House, the other side of the road from the Palace – a realisation which, pedant that I am, rather spoiled the dramatic end.

But it's striking that what makes Urquhart so compelling is not his charm or intelligence so much as his ruthlessness. He can be wrong, he can be monstrous, but we're drawn to him by his determination despite the odds. His soliloquies - where he spells out exactly what he plans to do - make us complicit and, even when in the last episode he commits the most brutal acts, we're completely on his side. The last scene is brilliant: he won't tell us what he's thinking but we don't need him to as we've got under his skin.

The Dr and I then worked our way through the recent American reworking of House of Cards starring Kevin Spacey. It's a slick, thrilling production, again with a very good cast. As it comprises 13 episodes rather than four, it tells a much bigger, more complex story – and yet follows the same beats as the original and shares characters and even whole scenes. At one point we thought they'd abandoned the idea of Congressman Peter Russo following the plot line of Roger O'Neill from the original, but having digressed for a couple of episodes the story made its way back to the old path.

Apart from the running time, I think there are two main differences between the two shows. First, the American version has more women characters and gives them more to do. Urquhart's wife doesn't merely egg him on or make herself scarce as required. Zoe Barnes isn't the sole female journalist on screen, but the latest in a line of plucky women holding those in power to task. In fact, Janine Skorsky,  the older, more experienced reporter, is a brilliant addition: Zoe's development as a character is almost entirely defined by the changing way Janine treats her.

The other difference is that Urquhart and Stamper aren't nearly such clear-cut villains; they're ruthless, yes, but we also see moments of kindness and doubt. They're clearly conflicted about doing what they realise must be done. But it's more than that.

Where the UK show tells us baldly that Urquhart is aiming to be Prime Minister, the US version never quite tells us what he's scheming for. At first it looks like he wants revenge for not getting the job he wanted; then it seems he's merely trying to make a point. We're told about something he wants towards the end of the series – which I won't spoiler here – but the indications are that even that is only a stepping stone.

It ought to be obvious he's aiming to be President, especially if we know the UK version, but Urquhart never says so – not to his wife or mistress or us. That means we're never complicit, and our sympathies are divided between him and the other characters.

In fact, I think the series rather turns us against him in Episode 8. Until that point, we've had little evidence that his schemes and tricks aren't all part of political service – he works hard to get legislation passed that people seem to believe in, and the people he defeats or tricks are shown to be idiots or villains. Yes, he's ruthless but that's how you get things done, and we seem him help or just get on with ordinary everyday folk and that makes him okay.

But in Episode 8, we learn the backstories of Urquhart and Russo. Russo has had a hard life, became a congressman despite that and is still in touch with his roots. Urquhart – again without spoiling things – has been living a lie.

The episode shows that both men are more complex than they appear, but while it explains and almost excuses Russo's shortcomings, it makes us wonder what else we don't know about Urquhart. We learn not to trust him, and as a result the things he does over the next few episodes are done at a distance. That he seems hesitant only makes us less sure of him.

Is this doubt a conscious effort to make Urquhart less black and white? If so, I don't think it's an improvement.

Or, is this uncertainty inevitable given that the US version was devised as an ongoing series not a self-contained serial? Does such doubt lend itself to the greater screen time? The follow-up to the UK series, To Play The King, lost something from Urquhart being in power and seeming unassailable, and a whole season with Spacey as President would merely be a less feel-good West Wing...

So I'm optimistic for the second season if a bit disappointed by the first. But my disappointment is largely because I was very quickly caught up in the US version. It's more realistic, better at showing what politics is and how it affects people's lives, and the women get to be more than just furniture.

I'd not expected to like the translation at all, so how very disloyal is that?

Telegraph Avenue

I was spellbound by Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon but find it difficult to say exactly why. It seems effortless, even breezy – I suspect because it's so carefully, expertly wrought.

Two friends struggle to keep their record shop going despite mounting debts and the threat that a new mall will be built nearby with a lavish music store inside. Meanwhile their wives face a crisis in their midwifing business because the medical establishment doesn't take them seriously. At the same time, their sons dream of working with Tarantino.

There are lots of other characters and stories – we learn one old man's tragedy in a single sentence shortly before he dies. It's a rich tapestry of human life, comingling and complex, funny and sad, full of telling detail and characters we feel we know; sort of west coast Dickensian.

Threads run through the disparate lives. Many characters hanker for the past – music, traditions, the way it looks in old films. The book is full of references to pop culture, used as analogies to explain behaviour or events. Things from Star Trek or Star Wars illuminate the every day. (I recommend Matthew Sweet interviewing Michael Chabon on Night Waves last year, where they discuss Chabon's fascination with Doctor Who and the illness of nostalgia.)

There's a compelling sense of the benefits of change: racial politics and empowerment better than the old days, an acceptance of fluid sexualities. Set in 2004, there's a surprise cameo from Barack Obama, offering the hope of change – rather than change to be scared of.

But again, it's more complex than that: characters aren't set free by letting go of the past, rather forms warp and shift and people just sort of deal. Decisions are made, battles fought, there are moments of sudden violence... and life rolls ever on.

It's this good-natured languidity that makes the book so appealing. The setting and laid-back feel reminded me a lot of Philip K Dick’s Mary and the Giant. There are clever lines and observations, and in the middle of the book a single sentence lasts 12 pages. It's clever – and deserving of a second read to pick up on more of the tricks. But the lasting impression is one of ease. A great, smart, feel-good book perfect for lazy-day reading.

Doctor Who: 1964

Episode 29: The Bride of Sacrifice
First broadcast: 5.15 pm on Saturday, 6 June 1964
<< back to 1964

The Doctor surprised in The Bride of Sacrifice, nabbed from Doctor Who Gifs.

The above grab shows the Doctor surprised to learn he's just got engaged to be married, in the third episode of The Aztecs (just rereleased on a special edition DVD). It's a gem of a story, about "truth", cultural relativism and the opening of a door. But it's the getting engaged bit I want to focus on here.

Nowadays, we're used to the Doctor snogging ladies and the occasional gentleman. He's been doing it since the TV movie in 1996. But in Doctor Who on TV before that, he pretty much never kissed anyone. Some people see him kissing people now as a kind of betrayal.

Yet, when we first met him he had a granddaughter, Susan, travelling with him - and there's never any indication that she's not exactly what she claims. (The Doctor also refers to his "family" in part three of The Tomb of the Cybermen (1967) and part two of The Curse of Fenric (1989), and to having been a father in  Fear Her (2006) and The Doctor's Daughter (2008).)

In The Aztecs, the Doctor uses his friendship with Cameca in his efforts to get back to the TARDIS, stuck behind a door in a tomb that can only be opened from the inside. But when he first singles Cameca out from the crowd of other pensioners in the Garden of Peace, he doesn't know she'll be useful. The Doctor asks Autloc about this woman he's spotted, and Autloc says, "her advice is most sought after ... You will find her a companion of wit and interest". The Doctor goes over and chats to her about flowers - and it's only then he learns that she might know someone who can help him get back to the TARDIS.

What does he see in Cameca? The Doctor objects to being dumped in the Garden of Peace with the other old folk, who he says must be "bored to tears doing nothing". He later tells her that, "their minds are old, Cameca, and that's something I'm sure yours will never be". We know from his later companions that he's drawn to the young at heart.

The engagement is a misunderstanding and the Doctor is shocked. Yet he doesn't object before that when Cameca nuzzles up to him, calls him "dear heart" and speaks of the bliss in her "thirsty heart". Even after they're engaged, the Doctor still pats her hand and calls her "my dear" - more than he'd need to were he simply using her to get back to his Ship. In fact, at that point he thinks there's no way back into the tomb.

Later, Cameca knows the Doctor will be leaving. We don't know how she puzzles it out, but it conveniently means that the Doctor doesn't have to lie to her or sneak off without a word. He tells her, "You're a very fine woman, Cameca, and you'll always be very, very dear to me". She in turn tells Autloc, "I have just lost all that is dear to my heart" - but still takes the risk of bribing a guard to rescue Ian and Susan.

The Doctor is grateful in their last scene together. "That was a very brave thing for you to do, Cameca, but you can't stay here". Yes, there might be a reaction because of what she's done, and we might wonder why the Doctor doesn't offer to take her with him in the TARDIS. She responds, "I'd hoped I might stay by your side." But the Doctor doesn't answer, and won't look at her, either. "Then think of me," she says. "Think of me."

As she hurries away to her uncertain fate, we hold on the Doctor's face, but what is he thinking? When at last he gets back to the TARDIS, he thinks better of leaving behind that the token Cameca gave him. She does mean something to him.

What makes this so compelling is how little we're told and how much we're left to infer. But also, this early in Doctor Who and with the rules still being established, we don't know how unusual romance is for him. We know precious little about what he got up to prior to meeting Ian and Barbara. In the first year of Doctor Who, there are six references to previous adventures:

• In An Unearthly Child (#1), Susan says she's lived on Earth in the twentieth century for "five months" and can't understand why Ian and Barbara won't believe that the TARDIS travels in time and space. The Doctor says, “Remember the Red Indian. When he saw the first steam train, his savage mind thought it an illusion, too.”
• In The Cave of Skulls (#2), Susan says that the TARDIS has previous been disguised as “an Ionic column and a sedan chair.”
• In The Edge of Destruction (#12), Susan refers to an adventure “where we nearly lost the TARDIS, four or five journey's back.” The Doctor adds, “Yes, the planet Quinnis, of the fourth universe.”
• In The Brink of Disaster (#13), the Doctor says he acquired the coat Ian puts on from Gilbert and Sullivan.
• In Strangers from Space (#31), the Doctor refers to “that extraordinary quarrel I had with that English king, Henry the Eighth. You know, he threw a parson's nose at me!” When Barbara asks what he did in response, the Doctor says, “Threw it back, of course. Take them to the Tower, he said. That's why I did it.” Susan explains: “The TARDIS was inside the Tower.”
• In A Desperate Venture (#36), Susan tells the Sensorite First Elder, “Oh, it's ages since we've seen our planet. It's quite like Earth, but at night the sky is a burned orange, and the leaves on the trees are bright silver.”

We know the Doctor can be selfish and amoral, we know he doesn't like to get involved, and we've seen him be charming to get what he wants. But we don't know his history with women.

The one person who could tell us is Susan. Her reaction would tell us everything: would she roll her eyes because the Doctor always got caught up like this, or look on horrified and wonder what her Grandmother might think? As far as we know she never learns about Cameca or the Doctor being engaged. The only person who does is Ian - who laughs. Perhaps it's that reaction that makes the Doctor more wary about such things until his eighth incarnation. Or perhaps it's the hurt he can see he's inflicted on Cameca.

In part, Susan doesn't comment on the Doctor's affair because she barely appears in the middle episodes of the story. Actress Carole Ann Ford was on holiday for two weeks, so appears in one pre-filmed scene per episode. In those scenes, Susan faces forced marriage and refuses: "I'm not going to be told who to marry". There are similar sentiments in an earlier story, Marco Polo (by the same writer), so who taught Susan her attitudes to marriage? Was it her time at Coal Hill School - or was it the Doctor?

Ironically, in Flashpoint (#51) the Doctor locks Susan out of the TARDIS and abandons her to be with the young man she loves, so she won't have to make the decision herself. The Doctor is heartbroken by his decision - and it's an extraordinarily moving sequence. Doesn't that suggest that he's a romantic? So there's every chance he's left broken hearts behind him all through time and space.

Next episode: 1965.

The Thin Man

This week, I finished Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man (1932), a gripping, twisty thriller in which a former detective comes back to New York and gets caught up in a murder investigation involving people he once worked for. It's a brilliant, clever and funny book - and though I saw the ending some miles off, the delight is as much in how Hammett gets there as what that ending is.

His is a broken world, where pretty much everyone is flawed and/or broken. Our hero, Nick Charles, is a hard-drinking cynic, who can spot the threads of the mystery only because he's got such a jaded view of humanity. He's usually one step ahead of the other reprobates in the story - the drunks and hoodlums, the bullying cops and wild children - and his only reward is to get roughed up and shot. Women can't help falling in love with him - or are they throwing themselves at him in exchange for something else?

Nick keeps telling people he's no longer a detective and that he's not taken the case, but the more he insists the less people believe him. Besides, his wife Nora is fascinated in the unravelling gossip and scandal, and it's Christmas - so they spend their whole time being invited to drinks with the people who are involved.

Nora's a fascinating character - the only nice person in the whole story. I absolutely love her reaction at the end as Nick finally spells out the mystery - she gets the last line of the book:

"'That may be,' Nora said, 'but it's all pretty unsatisfactory.'"

Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man (1932), p. 190.

There are all sorts of stylist flourishes. A lot of the time, Nick plays dumb, refusing to say what he thinks is going on or what he thinks of particular people - "I don't know" could be his catchphrase - which means we're all the more eager to get inside his head. The first few chapters are all very short - many no more than two pages - which really helps us get caught up in the story. The dialogue is sparky and sassy, and often gets interrupt-

Which makes the scenes feel frenetic. In some ways, the rickety-click of the dialogue and the revelations give it the feel of a bedroom farce, only with brutal murders and psychosis. It's easy to see why Hammett's work made such good movies. (As well as straight adaptations, his influence can be seen in films such as Yojimbo and Millers Crossing (one of my favourite ever films). My chum Eddie Robson writes about that in his excellent Coen brothers book.)

The Thin Man is not the best of Hammett's five novels - that, I think, is Red Harvest (1929), followed by The Maltese Falcon (1930). But it's clever, concise and compelling adventure - and a masterclass in writing a thriller.

LA story

A week ago, I was on Venice Beach in Los Angeles with the Dr. She took me to Small World Books - a cool little bookshop crammed with good stuff I'd never heard of, exactly my idea of a treat - and I looked for something with a link to LA. I found Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye.

It's been odd reading it this week and recognising street names and districts from our gadding about - places we went to, names I steered by on Googlemaps. I'd noticed the strange, uneasy mix of the very rich and the very poor, living side by side, that Chandler captures so perfectly. We'd gone to gawp at the Egyptian Theater because it's apparently based on Luxor - but the thing that was most like our recent trip to Egypt was the constant, desperate effort by hungry-looking guys to raise a smile or shock us so we'd buy their meagre tat. All this while Broadway hosed itself down in readiness for millionaires to present each other with golden statues.

But Chandler's tale of corruption circling seedy crime, and a newspaper mogul indirectly paying off the police and burying a story, has struck a chord this week.

Chandler's Marlowe is a cynical guy in a cynical world. And yet for all he's sarcastic to cops and hoodlums, millionaires and servants, and the more his story drips with weary resignation at the city-sized mess, Marlowe's revealed - like Rick at the end of Casablanca - to be a strong, moral character, doing the difficult, right thing for no reward and quite a lot of grief. For such a cynical story, it's an oddly uplifting read.

The book's at its best when the dialogue is short and crisp, the wise cracks sharp as a Mexian's throwing knife. It's slightly breaks the spell when characters rant at length about what's wrong with the modern life. And yet this from rich Harlan Potter (do his friends ever call him Harry?) seems especially timely - or depressingly timeless.

"We live in what is called am a democracy, rule by the majority of the people. A fine ideal if it could be made to work. The people elect, but the party machines dominate, and the party machines to be effective must spend a great deal of money. Somebody has to give it to them, and that somebody, whether it be an individual, a financial group, a trade union or what have you, expects some consideration in return. What I and people of my kind expect is to be allowed to live our lives in decent privacy. I own newspapers, but I don't like them. I regard them as a constant meance to whatever privacy we have left. Their constant yelping about a free press means, with a few honorable exceptions, freedom to peddle scandal, crime, sex, sensationalism, hate, innuendo, and the political and financial uses of propaganda. A newspaper is a business out to make money through advertising revenue. That is predicated on its circulation and you know what the circulation depends on."

Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye, pp. 233-4.

Dream the myth onwards

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

Dream the myth onwards
Simon Guerrier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that is why it's so revealing.

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

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

Catching up

Blimey. 2010 has been a bit of an old sod, all told. Having had next to no work for most of the summer, things suddenly got a bit manic in the last few months. Hence the lack of blogging. What follows is a splurge of me trying to catch up, more for my own future interest than yours.

My day job since September has been at Doctor Who Adventures, which has been a joy. It's quite a trek into the office and back - especially when there's any hint of weather - but that's given me lots of time for reading, which I'll try to blog about in the next few days.

At the end of November, the Dr and I jetted off to the States so I could spend the weekend showing off at Chicago TARDIS. Had a brilliant time - and the Dr made her debut on a convention panel, too. As always, there was too little time to natter with some very good friends and it was all over too quickly. But Graceless - which me, Ciara Janson and Laura Doddington were there to flog - seemed to go down well.

I also got a copy of Running Through Corridors by my chums Rob Shearman and Toby Hadoke, in which they watch all of black-and-white Doctor Who, two episodes per night. It's a pleasure to be in their company anyway, and the book is full of smart insights and jokes. It helps that Rob's a professional writer (he wrote for Doctor Who on TV himself) and Toby a jobbing actor - that experience gives them more of an 'in' to the mechanics of the programme than many other guides.

My favourite bits were when the two authors disagree over something and where real life crops up as part of the diaries - when their (non-fan) spouses chip in thoughts, or where the authors tell us about personal links to the stories. It's also fun just seeing how they juggle the watch round conventions and train journeys and things: the everyday minutiae of being a fan, fitting the programme around real life. Can't wait for the next volume.

After the convention, the Dr and I bussed up to Madison, Wisconsin to stay with some friends. We poddled round Madison and ate huge burritos, but mostly we spent the week loafing about. That was, sadly, quite a highlight of my year. I wrote two chapters of the Novel, read a fair bit and also did some thinking, which is a crucial part of being a freelancer and not something I've had much time for recently.

We returned to Chicago for one last night, and went out for a splendid dinner with T. All the time we were away we'd heard horror stories of the snow in London and how civilisation had collapsed. But on our last day the snow came down in Chicago - and it made not a jot of difference. We wrapped up warm and ventured out into the street, where the cars and buses and trains were all running just fine.

We caught the train down to the Museum of Science and Industry, where we had time to look round the U505 German submarine before going into Jim Henson's Fantastic World (runs until 23 January 2011).

Cor, that was fun. It's a comprehensive history of Henson's work, with many original sketches and puppets amid film clips and live performances. I'd seen a lot of the sketches before (in Jim Henson's Designs and Doodles - a Muppet Sketchbook), but its a very different thing then seeing clips of the realised creatures, shambling about.

I loved seeing Henson's non-Muppets work - his adverts, his documentaries, his experimental films. The producers of Sesame Street apparently brought him on board because they'd noticed that children were hooked on the speed and brightness of adverts. The Dr was much taken with the exhibition and is going to use it as the basis of some report thing she has to do at work.

As always, the museum shop was full of things we didn't want and had little that we did. So we made our way to the airport. Blimey, O'Hare Airport is a dreary place to sit for hours. There's little in the way of shops or distractions - you have to go back out of Passport Control for most things, and the one bar was the only place to ID me the whole time we were away.

But the plane home was pretty much on time and unencumbered by the snow. I watched Inception and Salt, neither of which really did anything for me. (On the way out, I watched Agora - featuring Rachel Weisz, and her nekkid bum in one bit - and Toy Story 3. The Dr cried at the sacking of the Library of Alexandria, I did not so much as sniffle at the toys. Honestly.)

Got home to find a crazy world of emails hollering for work. Since getting back I've written one play and pitched for four more - just as well I had that thinking time! The brother/boss also needed a final, final rewrite on our short film, having fixed the location.

Oh yes: we've made a film. Cleaning Up stars Mark Gatiss, Louise Jameson and lots of brilliant people, and was shot the weekend after I got back. I'd been working on the script since 2008 - and intensively over the last year, since Joseph Lidster signed up as script editor - but suddenly it was real, with a whole massive film crew. Mad and exciting, and I'm really rather proud of the brother/boss. He, producer Ben Greenacre and everyone else just worked wonders. I sort of stood in a corner and tried not to get in the way. There'll be plenty more about the film in the new year, sorry.

I also got to see Gatiss in Seasons Greetings - which is magnificently funny and runs til 13 March. And I've seen Harry Potter 7.1 twice. While I appreciate all Jonny's shrewd remarks, I still pretty much loved every second.

And then it's been working and working. The day job, some interviews, a comic strip or three, a magazine feature, a play and a world of pitches... It's feast or famine in this job, but all told, I'm knackered. Whited out on Christmas Day and went to bed with a migraine for most of the afternoon, then spent the next day carefully not doing anything. I start a part-time job in a couple of weeks that I'm hoping will make life slightly less fraught and more orderly.

Meanwhile, the Dr has been slaving away at the paperwork so that we can move house. And once that's done she can have a second cat - one she's already selected. Lots of changes in the air, and lots we have to do, but things are on the up... It's been a hell of a year, and I'm quite glad to see the back of 2010. But 2011 is already looking exciting. Let's see what can go wrong...

Where's Simon?

Graceless, the three CD sci-fi mini-series what I wrote, is out this month. The Big Finish website boasts full details and a trailer, and the new issue of free online Vortex magazine interviews stars Ciara Janson and Laura Doddington.

Ciara will also be at the Dimensions convention next week, along with director Lisa Bowerman and the Big Finish gang. Me, Ciara, Lisa, Laura and a whole cohort of slebs will also be at ChicagoTARDIS at the end of the month. Hooray!

That sadly means I miss Nev Fountain and Nicola Bryant signing copies of the Mervyn Stone Mysteries at Forbidden Planet on 25 November. The books are now out and already garnering nice comments on the internet. I've been helping with the publicity.

Also out now is Cinema Futura, edited by Mark Morris and containing the wise words of many wise people, including my chums Guy Adams, Paul Cornell, Joseph Lidster, James Moran and Rob Shearman. Oh, and there's me going on about the Peter Cushing Doctor Who films.

Plus I've got a story in the new Bernice Summerfield anthology, Present Danger, edited by Eddie Robson. It's the first thing I've written for dear old Benny in three years - back when I was her boss and king.

I'm afraid there's a load more of stuff by me due out over the next few months. Prison in Space, my adaptation of an unmade 1968 Doctor Who story, is out in December (there's a trailer on the site, too). In January, there's The Perpetual Bond starring Peter Purves and Tom Allen, and a whole bunch of Doctor Who DVD documentaries with my name on the credits. Sorry.

I am, meanwhile, manically busy with a whole bunch of stuff. I'm very nearly done on one extremely thrilling project which I've been slaving on for over a year. Announcements and things in due course. Am also having a lovely time at Doctor Who Adventures, am writing comics and short stories for somebody else and am just about keeping up with my space homework. But phew, knackered. Back to work...

"Where they burn books..."

Was going to write something about book-burning, then remembered I already had:

"We pass through Bebelplatz, the square where the Nazis burnt 25,000 books.

The well-read Dr quotes Heine’s remark that,

“where they burn books they will also, in the end, burn people,”

and wonders whether the burning of the Satanic Verses all those years ago was the first symptom of more recent religious tensions. I start to answer that burning books is easier than burning people, but that’s not actually true.

The destruction of books is the destruction of social structure. The law is in books, as is religion and science and history. To burn a book is a refusal to empathise, to think, to engage. When you have burned down people’s ideas and opinions there is nothing left to stop you burning the people down, too.

Bebelplatz is an empty, open space amid the university, and though there are a couple of artworks about books in general, I think there should be something more lasting. They should have something like the stalls of mixed second-hand reading outside the National Film Theatre, with all kinds of well-thumbed, unsuitable ideas at tantalisingly affordable prices."

Me, "I am a doughnut", 6 September 2006

Moving and doing things

Busy, busy, busy with a spec script that needs finishing, sorting out the flat to put it up for sale and scrabbling around for paid work. But a few bits and bobs of interest.

Issue #18 of free magazine Vortex (PDF, 7.02Mb) includes a thing by me on the mini-series Graceless, which includes some notes on the kind of things to worry about when writing an audio play:

"You need distinctive settings with the characters moving and doing things, to disguise the fact it’s all made by actors standing in little recording booths. You try to keep the scenes to no more than three pages (partly because it helps the pace, partly because you can’t fit more than three pages on the stands in the booths). You try to make every scene end with things having changed for each of the characters, while keeping their immediate desires and fears clear to the listener. You worry about names and technobabble that might trip up the actors, and how simply and vividly you’re making everything..."

Me, "In The Studio - Graceless", in Vortex #18 (August 2010), p. 4.

The same issue of Vortex also boasts new interviews with the Fifth and Eighth Doctors. You can also catch up with past issues at Vortexmag.com.

For more on writing audio plays, see m'colleague Jonny Morris on the writing of his new Doctor Who play, Cobwebs.

Graceless itself will be out in November, and I'm thrilled to be going out to ChicagoTARDIS to help flog it. Was there two years ago and had a lovely time.

Also, my Doctor Who play The Guardian of the Solar System is now out and generally seems to be going down okay. Nicholas (Nwhyte) liked the "fantastic image of elderly prisoners forced to maintain a gigantic clock", though felt,

"It doesn't all make perfect sense, and the three stories will probably confuse listeners who know nothing of The Daleks' Master Plan. But I enjoyed it."

EG Wolverson is a lot more positive, calling it,

"a delectable fusion of staggering concepts, fan service most foul, and agonisingly heart-rending drama – a combination that most listeners will find impossible to resist."

And also now live is the BBC's Hand on History website, linked to the season of programmes about the Normans. I researched and wrote a small chunk of the clicky map that helps you find Norman day trips on your doorstep.

Power of the dahlesque

“‘It’s a Snozzwanger!’ cried the Chief of Police.
‘It’s a Whangdoodle!’ yelled the Head of the Fire Department.”

Roald Dahl, James and the Giant Peach, p. 141.

Finished this last night having not read it for at least 20 years – and was anyway more familiar with a fab dramatised version on tape from circa 1983. Young James is a lonely orphan living with two beastly aunts when a strange little man offers to transform his life. All James must do is brew up a tonic from a bag of fizzing green thingies. But in his excitement James trips over and the green things disappear… into the roots of the old, dead peach tree.

This, the first of Dahl’s books for children quickly establishes the form. There’s the grotesque and funny people and incidents, the love of word play, lists and rhymes, and the simple, vivid imagery. It’s an exciting, wild adventure, embracing strangeness and danger. But all sorts of things struck me reading it now that never struck me back then.

James, unlike many of Dahl’s later heroes, is exceedingly good. He never does anything even a little naughty. He’s less consumed with a thirst for adventure than a wish for other children to play with and perhaps the odd trip to a beach. He appears feels no savage thrill of revenge – or indeed anything at all – when his horrid aunts are splatted. And we constantly see his good manners – he helps the creepy crawlies no matter how daft or difficult they are, he freely shares the peach flesh with the children of New York and he holds open house in his peach-stone home.

Yet, like many of the heroes to follow, James is smart and resourceful. He knows all the answers when needed, able to identify America from its skyscrapers and to put names to Cloud Men and rainbow-paint. (He might just be saying what he sees there, but his naming comes with authority and is taken up by the other characters.) He’s also the one who comes up with all the plans for getting the peachers out of peril.

I was conscious reading the book again of the comment on my post about Matilda, that Dahl,

“clearly had some issues with women”.

Mr K, 1 February 2010.

And I simply don’t agree. Yes, there’s the two grotesque aunties, but they’re balanced by the kind and nurturing Ladybird, Spider and Glow-Worm. As in plenty of Dahl, there’s much to be said about good parents – both the Mum and the Dad. The loss of James’ parents is what starts this story; in others its bad parents that drive things. Think of the spoiled children in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or of Matilda’s philistine crooks. But there are examples of good parent-figures and bad – in Matilda there’s Miss Honey and the women at the library – and the good ones can be silly, difficult and even spiteful. For dashed off sketches of character, they’re rather rounded characters.

In fact, I’d dare suggest that one might accuse Fawlty Towers similar “issues with women”, because the female roles are so exaggerated and mad. But it’s true of the men too. The twisted worldview is not gender specific

The number of distinct voices in the book is an issue if you’re reading it aloud. There’s James, his two aunts and seven giant creepy-crawlies to begin with. Then there’s the crew of a ship in the mid-Atlantic (I made them all posh), the Cloud Men and – just as you reach the finale – a whole bunch of Jen-yoo-ine Noo-yor-kerz. (The Dr asked me, please, to stop doing those.)

These distinct characters have complex inter-relationships. The Earthworm and Centipede bicker the whole time, the Spider has spent her life living with human prejudice, while the Ladybird ends up marrying the (human) Head of the Fire Department - a few pages after we’d seen him cowering at the sight of her. That’s almost like something from Torchwood, the odd juxtaposition made part of the happy ending, with no judgement passed or comment on the impracticalities.

There’s a great swathe of coincidence and good fortune involved – but having had his parents eaten by an escaped rhino and then ending up with aunts Sponge and Spiker, I suppose it could be argued that James’ luck had to drastically improve. It’s almost a return to the mean.

But that’s not quite the point. The book celebrates the visceral and strange. The peach itself is a Freudian paradise, all soft flesh and soppingly juicy. The simple, vivid imagery is constantly arresting, Dahl’s world lurid and tactile.

That’s aided by Quentin Blake’s illustrations, which have been added to more recent versions. I don’t remember the original book too well so am less affronted here by the replacement of earlier pictures by another artist. But my memories of Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator are indelibly tied up with Joseph Schindelman’s worm-like vermicious Knids - a formative strangeness in my early childhood, now sadly lost from new editions. (The Knids get a mention on p. 142 of James and the Giant Peach.)

There’s little to suggest the book is 50 years old, just a reference to the King of Spain not being on the Spanish throne (as he was before 1976). Perhaps a more recent book would shy away from kids freely accepting strange gifts from even stranger little men, or of mixing up and drinking down fizzing “magic” potions (something I remember being levelled at George’s Marvellous Medicine when it was first published).

A book written in the last nine years might also ditched the arresting image of the peach hanging above New York like a gigantic bomb while the President eats his cereal. The bomb then drops because a plane crashes into it.

A wild and witty madcap adventure that has stood the test of time. (We’re onto Fantastic Mr Fox next.)

Geek heaven

So, that holiday in Florida then, in which I learned many top facts about the history of the NASA space programme. You have been warned.

First, I demonstrated my own unsuitability as a spaceman by missing my flight. I read 13.00 as 3 pm, and arrived at Gatwick at ten-to-twelve thinking I was heroically early. Saw my error the moment I looked at the departures board, and hot-footed it over to the Virgin Atlantic desk, who thought I’d still have time to make my flight. They then vanished for 15 minutes, trying to work out if I could be fast-tracked through security. Answer came there none.

The airport was extremely busy, it being half term. And the longer I waited the more obvious it was I wouldn’t be jetting off that afternoon. Got put on the same flight the next day at no extra charge, which seemed a pretty good compromise. Schlepped my luggage back home.

The flight the next day was packed, mostly with families spending half-term at Disney. They ran about and squealed. I read a couple of hundred pages of Anathem (still not finished it yet; it’s huge!) and watched Star Trek, the first ten minutes of Ice Age 3 – a world of unfunny whenever the characters spoke – and something else so dull I can't even remember. Didn’t sleep; I never do on planes, and my knees were pressed against the seat in front so I could never get comfy.

Arrived in Orlando eight hours later feeling itchy and stinky, and then spent an hour getting through customs. A nice man wanted to go through all my luggage, and was suspicious of the various Dr Who books I’d brought for the convention’s charity auction. But then he looked up the details of Hurricane Who on his computer, lit up that it was something to do with Torchwood, and let me go.

J and J were waiting to collect me, and with this delay were a little concerned that I might have got it wrong again. We drove to the hotel in Celebration, and after a shower and a change of clothes, I emerged in time for dinner at a place down the road. American food is often big and meaty, which can leave you feeling a bit like a blocked sink. But we found a splendid Japanese place where a man cooked noodles and juggled knives on the table in front of us, and I stocked up on lots of veg. A world of tired after the journey, I think I spent most of the meal just grinning.

On the Wednesday, a party of us made our way to Universal Studios, where we did the usual rides. Think the 3D simulator Simpsons was probably best. There was bar and meal in the evening, with more chums arriving ever moment.

On Thursday, K magnificently drove me out to Kennedy Space Center, while our chums gambolled off to Disney. We stopped off for provisions on the way; the only British papers available were the Sun, Express and Mail.

After an hour’s drive, we reached the edge of the vast swamp that is the Space Center, and I went into geek overdrive. There was an IMAX show and things to gawp at first, and I poddled about in a state of bliss.

The IMAX show included footage of a fake Moon landing, NASA happy to laugh at the conspiracy theory. There was also a tribute to those who’d died pioneering space travel which included the names of cosmonauts, given equal billing with the Apollo 1 astronauts and Challenger and Colombia. It wasn’t quite the Corporate NASA I’d been expecting – less flag-waving and triumphalist than a lot of coverage of this stuff.

We then clambered aboard our bus for the Then and Now tour through the beach-side missile launch sites that first put Americans into space – basically, those bits covered by The Right Stuff. We drove past the warehouses and hangers where things really happened, and where the film was really filmed.

Many on the tour had been in the area the previous day to see the launch of the Ares 1-x rocket – which I’d missed, dammit. There was much talk of the launch being like the good old days before the Space Shuttle (which Ares is replacing), when rockets rattled windows 20 miles away. I had to be content with spying the Shuttle Atlantis out on the pad, six miles away on the horizon. Cor.

We stopped off at the site of some of the early Mercury launches, and got to poke round inside the squat little buildings no more than 500 feet from the launch pad. Nowadays, the boffins sit three miles from a launch, but in the days of DC current, they couldn’t be further away. Even today, a rocket launch will rattle your windows 25-30 miles away, so this small, cramped bunker crammed with chain-smoking boffins would have been very noisy.

The squat little buildings have huge, heavy blast doors and 15 layers of laminate glass so thick the view outside is greenish. The wall-to-wall computers are bulky to cope with the rattling of a launch. They managed just 528 bytes, and I liked the built-in ashtrays. When there were software problems, they'd use a manual typewriter to rewrite the code and feed it in on spool tape.

Our guide was nicely open about the origins of American rocketry, showing us a rare example of a V2 engine while explaining what rockets like that had done to south London. He himself raised the dubious morality in pardoning the former Nazi Werhner von Braun; again, this wasn’t the kind of corporate history I’d quite expected. NASA seemed keen to challenge their own history, to ask the difficult questions.

In fact, it didn’t feel very on-message for what’s clearly a highly secure military base. Our map of the launch sites shows its original purpose as a missile base, and the garden – or graveyard – of old rockets was curtly unapologetic about the ballistic and nuclear capability.

The missile base on Florida's Cape Canaveral was chosen for three reasons: the generally good weather; on a “bad day” the launches would fall into the ocean not into populated areas; and it's relatively close to the equator, which means less effort to get into space because of the speed of the Earth's rotation.

As we stepped out on to the tarmac of Pad 34 the weather hit 94 degrees. The heat pressed against me as I walked round the tall concrete structure remaining, and the plaque to the Apollo 1 fire. We were warned not to step off the tarmac because of the alligators in the undergrowth. In fact, when the space shuttles come into land, it’s someone’s job to clear off the alligators sunbathing on the runway. All we saw today was a giant tortoise.

The tour finished with a visit to a Saturn V rocket – the ones that launched the Apollo missions – and some other cool stuff. We gaped at the vastness of this great firework and took pictures, then had to get back to the car and our evening’s commitments.

First there was the Cricketer’s Arms, where there was London Pride on tap. Drank myself into a happy corner, and woke up Friday not at all well. Still, manfully, made my first panel – where adrenalin and Alka Seltzer saw off the hangover.

The convention was good fun, and I didn’t do too badly at Just A Minute – though New Fans are so new they didn’t get a reference to the Curse of Fenric which deserved a massive laugh. Our efforts were apparently recorded for a podcast, God help you.

Saturday morning, we had a talk from Russell Romanella, Director of the International Space Station and Spacecraft Processing at Kennedy Space Center, which was a further world of geek joy. When Kennedy made his famous speech about getting to the Moon within the decade on 25 May 1961, the US only had 15 minutes experience in space – Alan Shepherd having become the first American in space just three weeks before. It’s a balls out moment for Kennedy; either we divert everything into doing this thing, or we don’t bother at all.

The talk was also up to date, with discussion of the Ares launch from just that week, and what the Augustine report to President Obama might mean for NASA’s current targets.

There were more panels and signings and being talked to, and I got to see Toby Hadoke's Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf for the sixth time.

Between my commitments, there were goth ducks and geckos to gawp at, and a pool to escape into. As always, talked rubbish, made new friends and molested the old ones.

After one last morning in the pool, I headed for the airport on Monday afternoon. Bloke next to me on the plane thought Moon was “rubbish”, but seemed quite taken by General Infantryman Joe. (Isn't that a dull name for a hero?)

Back to freezing cold London on Tuesday morning. There’s little more dispiriting than changing trains at East Croydon, especially when the train is cancelled and you have to wait an hour. So I fell into a taxi and home.

Slowly recovered from jetlag and the inevitable con lurgie. On Thursday went to posh singing in St Mary’s Undercroft, the chapel down below Westminster Hall in the Palace of Westminster. The Pugintastic furnishing and some of the tunes seemed a little arch-Catholic: an odd way to celebrate Guy Fawkes’ night. But the detailed programme included top facts.

On Saturday, there were more fireworks, this time in view of Alexandra Palace (from the Dr Who episode The Idiot’s Lantern, no less). We risked clambering out on to a chum’s roof to see the display, then clambered back in to drink too much and watch X-Factor.

Now steeped in work again: pitching for things, organising things, getting on with the writing. And hoping Virgin will fix my telly input in time for Doctor Who on Sunday. Will blog about Dirk Bogarde next.

Does Florida count as the "deep South"?

Just home from a lovely time showing off in Florida, and am now fighting through a deluge of emails before nap-time. Will report on my adventures with real, live spaceships another time.

Meanwhile, be sure to keep up with free thriller Girl Number 9, airing all this week at www.canyousaveher.com. Especially since that riot policeman three minutes into episode two looks a little familiar. Oh yes, see my carrying-a-battering-ram acting.


Mad Norwegian Press have announced I've got a Doctor Who essay in their forthcoming Time, Unincorporated, due out next year.

And my short story in the aforementioned Panda Book of Horror also now has a title - "The Party in Room Four".

SF Crowsnest says nice things about my Robin Hood audiobook, "The Siege", while my former employee Phil is disappointed that the Big Finish history of Bernice Summerfield focuses, er, on Bernice Summerfield and Big Finish. Bless 'im.

Got all sorts of bits of work awaiting my attention now. But first sleep.

The Wire

Watched episode 5.10 of The Wire earlier, and so have finished the series. It's a justly lauded, extraordinary show 'pon which many finer minds have commented. I have some non-spoiler thoughts for those who haven't seen it, and then will leave a gap before blowing the surprises.

It took a while to go into. Episode 1.1 just felt like an okay, adequate cop show. Some cops trying to stop some drug dealers, who eventually set up a wire-tap to listen in on their phone calls. They drink and swear and are caught up in the bureaucracy. And often they're not very bright. Murders happen less because of motives than from accident, stupidity or bitter pragmatism.

At first that means it can seem more cynical than smart. Scott's not got to the end of it because he really doesn't like one particular sweary scene - and it doesn't exactly make the "good guys" look good. Other mates have suggested watching it with subtitles to pick up the slang and detail. But stick with it. Pay attention. And it will reward you.

In fact, it's a lot like In The Night Garden - a kids' show from them that did Teletubbies and narrated by Sir Derek Jacobi (I'm appearing on the same bill as him next month). Like In The Night Garden, you're first reaction might well be "meh". But once you've seen a few episodes you get how it works, and then you are monstrously hooked.

For me it was a scene in about episode four or five, with two cops discussing a murder. And we - the audience - saw other characters discuss the same events in an earlier episode. There's no acknowledgment of that - no flashback, no "previously", no concession to having missed an episode or detail. But just knowing what those other guys said a couple of weeks back changes this later scene, and the episode and the whole of the case.

And The Wire is full of such details. It's got a huge cast, with intricate connections between them. There are good and bad cops, there are good and bad drug dealers, there are those caught up in between. A few people have said that it's more like a novel than a TV show - and I don't think that's being dismissive of TV. Rather The Wire takes its time laying down the plot and building character, and trusts us to keep up with it all (and flick back if we need to).

It's rich and dense and detailed. Though there are exciting bits, it's generally rather gently paced, teasing us with false leads and scenes that go nowhere, in amongst them the crucial clues.

But I've also some specific thoughts for those who have seen it.

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There's a fair bit I don't think works. The end of Bubble's apprentice at the end of Season 4 is too melodramatic - like something out of a soap opera. And the Bad Thing McNulty does in Series 5 didn't ring true, either.

Yet on the whole it is brilliant. There's the way each series focuses on some next aspect of the city - the docks, the roped-off area, the schools and the papers. There's the brilliant characters, lovable and exasperating and real. My favourite is Bunk Moreland, the cigar-chomping dour crusader played by the superb Wendell Pierce. And Idris Elba would still make an awesome Doctor Who.

On top of that, there's the rich character development - the clash between Avon and Stringer Bell, the maturing of Prezbo, McNulty trying not to crash. I love that characters keep coming back with no explanation who they are - the dockers, the lawyers, the guy trying to get Bubble clean.

I love how much it depends on smart, professional people with insight born from experience. I love that they've then got the balls to show these people being very smart in a long scene where the only word spoken is "fuck". I love how it teases us with almost-revelations: us knowing the connection between two characters but the watching cop missing it because of a pee break.

I also love the ruthlessness of it; the sudden, unexpected deaths of major characters which completely change the focus of the series. The scattering of random, mad incident within the tightly plotted stuff. No one is safe, anything can happen...

Baltimore is a brutal place with little mercy. But what makes the struggles of this vast dramatis personae so compelling is the promise of some small hope. The hoodlum might escape the cycle of violence, the addict the addiction, the cop might succeed in getting his man despite the paperwork and politics - or at least not lose his home-life in the process. It's not the acts of crassnass, stupidity and cruelty that make the show work, but the constant, exhausting battle to defeat them.

Grand Tour 2009

Busy, busy, busy. Lots of different bits of work on and about to go on tour…

Tomorrow morning I’m a guest at Faringdon Arts Festival, reading to children at Faringdon Junior School and then trying to answer their questions. Kids tend to ask more challenging, leftfield questions than grown-ups, so I’m more nervous than normal.

My bit is just for the school kids, but on Saturday afternoon proper TV writers of Doctor Who Paul Cornell and Phil Ford will be spilling their secrets to anyone who’ll listen. Miffed I’m going to miss that.

I’ll be at a guest at the Winchester Arts Festival on Saturday, at the library where I used to borrow Doctor Who books. Me, Mark Morris and Nicholas Briggs will be encouraging three sessions of school kids to write their own monstrous stories and explaining what makes a good monster.

At the end of August I’ll be at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich – the centre of time and space itself, and location for Doctor Who and the Dimensions in Time – as part of a weekend of family activities. More details on what that will involve soon.

Over the weekend of 19-20 September, I’ll be at Regenerations in Swansea, flogging copies of the Inside Story. (How splendid that Gary Russell gets top billing above Derek Jacobi and Davros).

In October I’m hoping to do a thing in Manchester and possibly also in Leeds, of which more details soon. And then, at the end of October I’m at HurricaneWho in Orlando.

If you're able to make any or all of these, do come say hello.

Things Exploding 2: Everything’s Exploding!

For research purposes, obviously, the Dr and I went on a date to see Night at the Museum 2. Spent most of the weekend proofing 310 pages of a new book, with the film ticking through the back of my brain. Here are some too-serious thoughts.

It should really be “Night at the Museums”, as night-watchman Ben Stiller leaves the American Museum of Natural History in New York for the Smithsonian in Washington DC – which, he reminds us, is really 19 museums arranged round a lawn (and, in the movie, sharing underground vaults). Though the National Gallery of Art isn’t part of the Smithsonian. And also Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” is in the Chicago Art Institute. But hush. It’s only a movie.

It’s a fun and funny movie, with a massive cast it struggles to fully accommodate. Much of the cast of the first film spends most of this one stuck in a crate. Then there are weird cameos – a couple of would-be villains from other franchises, and a scene with the Smithsonian’s own guard. Both are funny at first but just go on and on…

There are some great comic moments and absurd characters and performances, but I kept feeling it was a rough draft, everything in the script filmed and edited into order before the judicious pruning.

The film is full of incongruous, odd things: a love interest who can’t be a love interest because she’s a museum object; Stiller leaving his son – so crucial to the first film – home alone in another city while he jets off to have this adventure…

A Doctor Who episode like Love & Monsters makes a virtue of the strange incongruity of real life; here everything’s put neatly back in the box. In the final scene, the awkward love interest gets swapped for a real woman played by the same actress (no mention of the artefact-woman flying off stiff-lipped to her death).

And it’s really talkie. Like American football, as soon as there’s a bit of action and excitement, it stops to discuss it in depth. There is much tedious guff about the brilliance of America – and obviously no mention of the cultural imperialism implicit in the museums’ display of precious objects from all round the world. What’s the provenance, say, of this ancient Egyptian portal to Hell?

For all the moral is Stiller realising the nobility of his vocation in guarding these artefacts, the ending depends on a big brawl where a whole load of old stuff gets trashed. The Dr watched in horror – at one point, as the first ever airplane smashed into a huge cabinet of precious things, she even grabbed my hand.

At the end, the museum is bustling with thrilled and interested public from a cross-section of demographic groups – a museum’s happy ending. But what does the mannequin Theodore Roosevelt offer that his (evil) computer hologram version didn’t? He tells the kids the years he was born and died, and we see he rode a horse… The hologram’s just the same, but you don’t need to stay up late to see it.

The museums’ presidents and cowboys get to offer stoic wisdom, but it never really suggests why museums might be important or worth preserving. The artefacts here are only of interest because they come to life.

Gallifrey and nine

Gallifrey was exhausting and brilliant and silly. Saw a whole bundle of old chums and made a great glutch of new ones. Flogged product and drank one or two ales. I said at the closing ceremony (where you have to say something) that I wished it could be Gallifrey every day. Which would be fun, but I wouldn’t long survive.

James Moran has made a number of very serious allegations about me, but surely there’d be pictures. And if there were pictures, surely there’d be evidence of Photoshop in them. I deny all accusations.

Didn’t sleep a wink on the flight home, and my entertainment system wasn’t working either. So I sat in the darkness and thought Thoughts that may one day become things I can brag about. Slowly the hours ticked by.

Eventually we plonked down in Heathrow. Turns out we shared our flight home with the Hoff, and dared each other to ask for pictures with him while we waited for our baggage. Don’t think we actually did – but by then my brain was drooling out my eyes. Out through customs to fall into me and M.’s waiting taxi. We slalomed through west and south London and then finally we were home.

Slept. And slept and slept. And woke up not knowing what day it was or where I’d left my head. Confused and stupid (no, more than usual) have got myself back into work. There’s been quick rewrites on a thing as-yet-unannounced and rewrites requested on something else. Went to the Post Office and the bank and fell through two splendid episodes of Being Human and nearly 300 emails. And then started sneezing; think I picked up a cold on the plane home. Dammit.

The Dr is, of course, delighted by the state I’m in. The whole point of jetting off across the pond without her was to come home relaxed, refreshed and skippy. Not snuffling and stupid and snoring. But I’m taking her out tonight for a posh tea, so she can’t complain.

Because nine years ago this evening I stumbled over to the Dr to tell her she was lovely. And dammit, she still is. The lesson is, my young padawans, that if you fancy someone, tell them.

Golden Gate

Spent the day at San Francisco's fantabulous Exploratorium, and then walked from there, across the Golden Gate Bridge and into Sausolito. Knackering, wet and windy - and muggins forgot to take a coat.

• Photos from the Exploratorium 
  
• Photos of the Golden Gate etc.
  

Off to dinner now as a thank you to our landlords, then M. and I fly to LA tomorrow for a weekend's geeky larking.

The long walk

The stunt wife (M.) and I were out of the apartment at half eight this morning to make our 10am boat trip to Alcatraz - see my photos of Alcatraz. Were there for two hours, then had an ENORMOUS lunch of clam chowder soup followed by very rare tuna steak. Om nom nom.

We then walked to the cable car stop, cabled up the absurdly steep hills to the Cable Car Museum, and generally wowed at the big turney wheels. Next, we clambered down the hill to Union Square, had a coffee, and then trekked to a shop called Giant Robot, down 17th street and back to our pad. Got in just after six - a three-and-a-bit hour walk. All sorts of wild buildings and sights along the way. The photos of the walk are tagged "francisco", or you browse through the whole damn lot via the useful tag "san".

See how easy I make it? (I didn't just stuff up the tagging like a fool.)

Tomorrow, close up on the Golden Gate Bridge. And my feet hurt.