The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Atomic Radiation, by Margot Bennett

“Informed public opinion is infectious, even to governments.” (p. 149)

Thursday, 30 July 1964 saw publication of two paperback “Penguin Specials” from Penguin Books both looking at the same subject. At four shillings, Nuclear Disaster by Tom Stonier,

“was based on his 1961 report to the New York Academy of Sciences which dealt with the biological and environmental effects of dropping a 20-megaton bomb on Manhattan”. Geoffrey Goodman, “Obituary — Tom Stonier”, Guardian, 28 June 1999.

Alongside this, at a slightly cheaper three shillings and sixpence, Margot Bennett’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Atomic Radiation is, according to the back-cover blurb, a “first reader in the most uncomfortable subject in the world”. 

The title is surely a riff on The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism by George Bernard Shaw, first published by Constable & Co in 1928 and republished in 1937 as an inexpensive two-volume paperback — the first Pelican Book — under the revised title The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism & Fascism. 

Of course, that was timely given the ongoing civil war between Republicans and Fascists in Spain, and the growing power of the Nazis in Germany. I’d be surprised if Margot Bennett wasn’t aware of the book, given that in 1937 she was in Spain. It was the year that Margot Mitchell (sometimes known as Margot Miller) married English journalist Richard Bennett while both were working for the Government — that is, Republican — radio station. Bennett, who also worked as a nurse, had been machine-gunned in the legs the previous year and at the time of her engagement had recently broken her arm when the ambulance she was in crashed under shellfire.

There’s nothing very militant in her book on atomic radiation, written 27 years later. “Politics is not the concern of this book,” she tells us in her introduction (p. 10). The focus is instead on the cause and effects fallout,

“addressed more to women than to men [because] the mother is far more intimately concerned with the health of the family than the father. It is the mother who sees that the children have green vegetables and milk, and who nurses then when they have measles.” (p. 11)

This still holds, she says, even if the mother has a career; a woman with no family, “still has a tenderness to children that is different in quality from the feelings of a man.”

It’s not exactly the most feminist stance but this is a politically active woman writing in the mid-1960s for a small-C conservative readership, the emphasis on presenting just the facts rather than on what we should think. The book concludes on a broad political note:

“Science affects us all; so far, overwhelmingly to our advantage. If there are times when we feel this is not so, as members of a democracy we have some kind of duty to find out what is happening.” (p. 154)

But there’s no sense of a particular party or ideology being favoured. We’re left to make up our own minds.

The domestic perspective — the way radiation affects milk and green vegetables, and our children — might imply this is rather lightweight or condescending to the ordinary housewife. Nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed one contemporary review thought it was, 

“little more than another text book, and heavy going at that.” (Robin Turner, “Nuclear penguins and others”, Birmingham Post, 8 August 1964, p. 5.)

A more generous review found it,

“Thought provoking … easily read but thorough” (John Berrie, “Woman’s angle”, Nottingham Evening Post and News, 7 August 1964, p. 10.)

It’s certainly thorough, covering the ground in detail in just 154 pages (not including appendices, glossary and index). After the introduction, the first three chapters give us a grounding in the physics involved in atomic radiation — “Inside the Atom”, “Neutrons and Nuclear Energy" and “Fission, Fusion, and Fallout”. We then switch to biology for “The Message in Our Cells”.

Chapter 5, “The Subtle Enemy”, then applies the physics to the biology to explain the damage atomic radiation can do to us and to future generations. The next chapter, “The Influential Friend”, puts a counter case, outlining all the beneficial ways atomic radiation can be applied. “Pollution and Protection” addresses what can be done to mitigate potential fallout. Bennett then provides a conclusion, making the case that even statistically “negligible” numbers of people wounded or killed would still be tragic for those concerned.

A lot of this is very technical. Promotion for the book at the time said that Bennett wrote in “plain English” (for example, “For Your Bookshelf”, Halifax Daily Courier and Guardian, 31 July 1964, p. 4). Even so, I found it quite hard going and made slow progress. 

Two things really bring it alive. First, Bennett peppers her book with vivid real-world examples of the way radiation can affect people’s lives. Hauntingly, she details the stages of radiation sickness suffered by early pioneers, from skin rashes and hair loss through anaemia, sterility and useless, deformed fingers to the fatal cancers (pp. 96-97). Or there’s the awful story of the Radium Girls (pp. 100-101). 

I’d be interested to know more about the Russian scientist who claimed to be able to cure the effects of radiation on DNA via a simple pill (p. 114), or about the Scottish boy discovered playing in a “pile of radioactive dust” and the factory making luminous dials that proved so radioactive that the Radiological Protection Service had the whole site buried (both stories p. 146). Frustratingly, there are no notes or bibliography to guide us to more information.

Secondly, throughout the book Bennett uses relatable, often domestic analogies to explain the complex ideas. She likens electrical charges — the way positive and negative attract one another but two positives or two negatives repel — to attraction between people, where a talker will fall for a listener (p. 17). She describes atoms of different elements as being like different breeds of dog (p. 22). Compounds and molecules are likened to marriages (p. 24).

Sometimes those analogies show how far we have come. On page 83, she refers to the cumulative effect of exposure to radiation over “the long days of our lives — 20,000 days if we live to be about sixty”, which doesn’t seem very long at all. (Bennett lived to 68).

But on the whole the effect is to make a complex, technical subject more tangible. The central, political idea here is the responsibility to be better informed: nuclear weapons are devastatingly powerful, but knowledge is also power — one to hold the arms race at bay.

*

Obligatory Doctor Who bit

Since the book was published at the end of July 1964, Bennett must have delivered the manuscript no later than, I’d guess, the end of May. Given the technical detail, it can’t have been a quick book to write. As well as the time taken to research it, a note just ahead of the introduction tells us that, 

“Everything factual has been checked by scientists whose knowledge is far more than equal to the task” (p. 7).

We’re not told who these scientists were or what the editorial process involved, but writing and editing surely took some months, which means work on the book overlapped with Bennett’s conversation(s) with BBC story editor David Whitaker about potentially writing for Doctor Who. As detailed in my post on Bennett’s novel The Furious Masters, that seems to have happened in late February 1964. She was being considered to write a story comprising four 25-minute episodes as a potential replacement for what became Planet of Giants — but nothing further is known about what her story might have entailed, or whether she even submitted an idea.

I partly read this book in the faint hope of finding some clue as to what she might have discussed with or submitted to Whitaker. The short biography of Bennett on the opening page is suggestive:

“She likes variety in writing and is now doing something in Science Fiction,” (p. 1) 

That “something” may have been The Furious Masters, published four years later. Or Bennett may have completed work on her study of atomic radiation and then turned to Doctor Who, only to discover that she was now too late and Planet of Giants was going ahead after all…

Then there’s one of the allusions she uses. At the end of her introduction, Bennett says that there’s no point wishing that the atom had never been cracked open.

“Man can’t afford to retreat; it is by discovery and invention, from fire and flint axe onwards, that he has survived. The axe is dangerously sharp, and the fire has grown as hot as the sun.” (p. 13)

Unlike most of the analogies she uses, this isn’t contemporary or domestic — it’s making a link between modern technology and the ancient past. 

The first ever Doctor Who story, broadcast 23 November to 14 December 1963, involves a tribe of cave people where authority is dependent on the ability to make fire (I think this owes a debt to The Inheritors by William Golding). “Fire will kill us all in the end,” opines the Old Mother of the tribe.

In the next story, we see something of this prophecy come to pass when the TARDIS materialises in a petrified forest that Barbara initially thinks is the result of a “forest fire”. It turns out that the devastation is the result of a neutron bomb, leaving the ground and atmosphere “polluted with a very high level of fallout”. Beings called Daleks are among the survivors.

I’m not the first to suggest that the Doctor Who production team deliberately juxtaposed the role of fire in the prehistoric tribe and the role of nuclear weapons on this futuristic world as part of a wider ambition to have the time travellers witness key moments of societal change. And it’s exactly the same connection made by Margot Bennett.

Did she and David Whitaker discuss it? And who exactly informed whom?

The Voice of the Dolphins, by Leo Szilard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wartime Britain 1939-1945, by Juliet Gardiner

This enormous volume - 591 pages before the exhaustive acknowledgements, notes, bibliography and index - is a detailed history of the Second World War from the perspective of those at home. It's an extraordinary read, full of horrifying detail, and very useful for something I'm currently working on.

What really struck a chord was some people's response to the things they could do to protect themselves and others. 

“In November 1939, the Daily Mail had asked its readers, ‘What part of the war do you mind most?’ … ‘Women in Uniform’ came first and ‘Blackout’ second.” (p. 45)

Gardiner quotes from JBS Haldane's 1938 book ARP (ie air-raid precautions), concerned that his unemployed neighbour will not be able to afford the paints and blinds required for blackout. 

“As a result he will probably show a light, and my life, not to mention the King’s, will be endangered.” (p. 47)

Another neighbour, said Haldane, 

“can afford paint and blinds but she is an absolute pacifist, who says that she will have nothing to do with war … She says she is going to keep her lights on, and if a bomb hits her house she will be well out of a wicked world. As I have never yet seen a bomb hit the mark at which it is aimed, I think it is much more likely that a bomb aimed at her skylight will hit me … If lights should be covered, as I think they should, then this should be made a matter of law, like the lighting regulations for vehicles.” (p. 48)

“Which it was,” adds Gardiner. But there are still examples of people ignoring the rules, or feeling they should be exempt, or blacking out parts of their houses - like not having your nose inside your mask. There's even a doctor concerned about the effect on people's mental health.

The Blitz itself makes for harrowing reading. The scale of devastation would be hard to grasp if Gardiner did not thread the narrative with awful detail - names, what they were doing as the bomb landed, the bits of body never identified. Each school and hospital is like a knife being twisted. There's so much tragedy and suffering, it's easy to see why some people felt conflicted about celebrating the end of the war when it eventually came.

Gardiner is good at explaining how, after years of war and bombardment, the V-1 and V-2 managed to feel different:

“many people found them a particularly scary form of warfare, an unreckonable mechanical monster impervious to human interference, a science-fiction horror. George Orwell [in Tribune, 30 June 1944] noticed the widespread complaint that the V-1s ‘“seem so unnatural” (a bomb dropped by a live airman is quite natural p. 551 apparently.’)” (p. 550)

And there's more contemporary resonance in the people who fled Liverpool and Bristol once the bombing started in earnest there.

"it was largely in response to the unwillingness of many provincial towns and cities to learn the lessons of London and prepare for the homeless and the disorientated, as well as the dead and the injured. ‘It seems that each city and town had to experience a major attack before making adequate plans for the relief of the community.’ [this cited from Richard M Titmuss, History of the Second World War: Problems of Social Policy, p. 307.] In this context trekking can be seen neither as a tendency to scuttle nor as mindless flight, but as a largely rational response to a desperate situation.” (p. 366)

There's another modern parallel in the realisation, in late 1944, that the war wouldn't be over by Christmas and there was yet more to be endured - and yet more lives to be lost. The book concludes with the end of the war, and a sense that the British people had voted for a better, more equal future, the Labour Government able to build on the nationalised systems imposed during war. But there are hints of the difficulties to follow: the rise in divorce rates (hitting a peak in 1947), the problems of living standards when about half the housing stock in London and much in cities elsewhere had been damaged, the economic hit to the country as a whole, the scale of those physically and/or mentally injured...  

Getting through the crisis is one thing; dealing with its long-term impact is another story...

Doctor Who Magazine 558

The new issue of Doctor Who Magazine includes my feature on the role of David Whitaker in developing early Dalek mythology and helping to make them a cultural phenomenon. As story editor on the first year of Doctor Who, Whitaker commissioned the first Dalek story from writer Terry Nation, defended it from BBC management who didn't approve, and then - when the Daleks proved a huge success - worked with Nation to exploit them across various media.

The article coincides with a beautiful new edition of the Dalek comic strips from the mid-1960s that Whitaker probably wrote most of, and the brand new Daleks! animated series that takes many of its cues from that strip.

V for Victory, by Lissa Evans

Entirely selfishly, I bought this for the Dr's birthday so that I could read it. It's the third in a trilogy, after Crooked Heart and its prequel, Old Baggage - both of which I adored. 

We pick up with young Noel Bostock and his adopted aunt Vee - though she's neither of those things officially. Now going under the name Mrs Margery Owens, she and Noel bugger on through the chaos of north London at the fag-end of the Second World War. At any moment of any day, a V2 might fall on them and it's exhausting - not least because the chores and home-schooling must still somehow be done. Still, there's romance kindling in the air for each of them. And then they both stumble into people who know something of their past - and might expose their secrets...

As before, there's a wealth of telling historical detail worked deftly into the breezy tale, which I knocked through in a matter of days. It's so teeming with life and emotion. We really feel the outrage of Winnie the Warden discovering that her harrowing real-life experience has been filletted by her sister for a sexy novel. Or there's Noel's infatuation with a girl who's moved away:

"Noel recognized Genevieve Lumb's neat but forceful handwriting. Even the thought that she had licked the envelope was quite physically stirring." (p. 53).

The remarkable thing is that these extraordinary, unprecedented times feel utterly real. But it's also a delight to spend time in the company of good people just trying to get by, despite all the crap going on. 

I was especially moved by the ending, where Vee and Noel face some tricky emotional stuff relating to his biological parents. It's so perfectly done, so impossible to describe here without spoiling. At one point, Vee wonders what might have happened if she'd not made a connection with this awkward teen at a critical moment, how nearly he might have been lost. But we leave them happy, the war over and a new world on the horizon. After all the devastation, what survives is the love. 

At Childhood's End, by Sophie Aldred

This melding of Doctor Who old and new is great fun and surprisingly moving. With help from Mike Tucker and Steve Cole, it's written by Sophie Aldred, who played Ace in Doctor Who between 1987 and 1989, and it sees an older Ace reunited with the Doctor - the current, female incarnation.

It's structured in three parts, just like one of Ace's TV stories, and includes a character from 1989's Survival and a load of references and retcons to that era, but all feels engagingly, refreshingly new. I especially liked how well the author(s) capture the current Doctor and her companions, with some credible awkwardness between police officer Yaz and explosive experts Ace.

At one point, due to quantum wossnames, Ace glimpses all kinds of possible lives, allowing her to encompass the various Aces from books and comics and audio while at the same time over-writing all that with this authoritative version. It also dovetails nicely with the trailer Aldred starred in last year for the Blu-ray release of her final season in Doctor Who, legitimising it and following its lead emotionally.

I think there's a callback to the days of Doctor Who books aimed at an adult audience when we first meet this older Ace: she's woken from a nightmare and gets out of bed; we're told on page 11 that she's naked. It's an odd, incongruous detail for an adventure aimed at the whole family.

Otherwise, the horse-like and rat-like aliens and the various scrapes and solutions make this feel very much like the TV series of today. It rattles along breathlessly, full of jokes and surprises. I find myself wondering where exactly in this year's series it takes place: after the events of Fugitive of the Judoon, given than Yaz first learns of Cybermen in that story, but chats about them with Ace here on page 137. 

Crooked Heart, by Lissa Evans

Old Baggage, which I loved, is a prequel to this brilliant, comic novel about bad behaviour during the Second World War.

We begin a little after Old Baggage left off, with eccentric ex-Suffragette Mattie Simpkin living just off Hampstead Heath with the small boy, Noel Bostock, she's sort of not-quite adopted. But Mattie's memory and wits are fast escaping her, and when war breaks out Noel is sent to St Albans with other evacuees. There, he's taken on by Vera Sedge, who thinks he might help earn some money in the latest of her ill-fated scams. But nerdy, lonely, grieving Noel has ideas about how to improve their takings...

Evans conjures a dirty, drab and distinctly criminal Blitz, where even the wardens are on the take - I think the most distressing, haunting moment is a woman being led off to an asylum while her house is robbed by the men ostensibly helping her. Life is hard even before the bombs start falling, full of tragedy and meanness and indifference. But as we weave our way through Noel and Vee's adventures, and those of Vee's own mother and son, there's the promise of something to light up the dark - hope of connection, perhaps even a little joy.

That's the gift here: so much of what happens is miserable, so much of what's described is viscerally horrible. And yet the character, the humour, the compassion shine through and make every page a delight.

15 years of The Coup

Fifteen years ago today, on the hot, sunny morning of Saturday, 7 August 2004, I followed a print-out from Streetmap round the back of the Academy in Brixton to a tiny cul-de-sac, Moat Place. It was my first visit to Moat Studios, for the recording of my audio play, The Coup - the first of more than 60 I've since written for Big Finish.

The Coup is available for free from the Big Finish website.

In August 2004, I'd been freelance for two years and Big Finish had published six of my short Doctor Who stories. The third of these, "An Overture Too Early", had been a last-minute replacement for someone who'd had to drop out. As a result, I got more work when things fell through or needed doing quick. Assistant producer Ian Farrington also liked the way I'd written the long-established character of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart.

Ian was producing a Doctor Who spin-off series about UNIT, the army division that investigates weird goings on and then blows them up. He told me this series would be set in the present day with an all-new cast of characters, influenced by the then hip TV shows 24 and The West Wing. But he also wanted the Brigadier to feature in two episodes - the "pilot" episode to be given away free on a CD with Doctor Who Magazine to lure in the punters, and in the final episode of the series. I slowly realised he was suggesting I write the former.

With writers Iain McLaughlin and Claire Bartlett, Ian had devised an arc story about a rival organisation to UNIT, and he was also keen on using a character from a previous Big Finish play - Colonel Brimmicombe-Wood, played by a then up and coming actor called David Tennant. Brimmicombe-Wood had been created by writer Jonathan Clements, so Ian brought him on board too, as well as our friend Joseph Lidster. Between us, we emailed ideas back and forth and the UNIT series took shape.

CJ in The West Wing inspired our lead character, Emily Chaudhry - I borrowed the surname from an old friend of mine who I'd recently got back in touch with. Doctor Who on TV had established that UNIT covered up evidence of alien invasions, so the idea was that the cool, unflappable Emily would be the one they put in front of the cameras to give high quality bullshit. I named other characters - French, Ledger and Winnington - after old friends I'd lost contact with but who'd been into Doctor Who. There was a chance, I thought, they'd still be reading DWM - and two of them were and subsequently got in touch.

Ian and Iain gave me elements to work into my story - such as all the details about this new rival organisation to UNIT - and Ian was keen that my pilot episode should include an old monster from the TV show as an added sell. The Silurians were his suggestion. Otherwise, the plot was left up to me.

Previous CDs given away with DWM had offered small-scale comic vignettes, side-steps rather than full-on adventures. I suggested doing something bigger and more like an action movie. What crisis might flap the unflappable Chaudhry, I thought. What about if UNIT were outed and finally had to admit to the existence of aliens? That seemed to match Ian's desire to take his UNIT series somewhere new and unexpected, and the other writers seemed to agree - or, at least, not object.

So I got on with writing my episode, starting with a Silurian/UNIT battle at Potters Fields by Tower Bridge. That's the location of City Hall - as if the Silurians are attacking the Mayor of London. I chose it because Tower Bridge is a well-known landmark the listener would be able to visualise, and because I'd passed through Potters Fields each day for months on my way to work.

Writer Jonathan Morris had provided very useful notes on my first few short stories so I sent my first draft script to him, and to my friends David Darlington and Robert Dick. They all said much the same thing - that I needed to cut down my dialogue to make it pacier and more exciting. The result was that I cut back the long speeches but didn't replace it with more scenes, so the play ended up running shorter than the 25 minutes requested. I don't think I even knew then the rough word count of 4,500 words for that length of time - my version is just 3,761 words. My stage directions aren't specific enough, and there are two long speeches that have people talking over them but contain information the listener shouldn't miss. (I've included the Brigadier's full speech below.) I look back on the script now in horror at my greenness.

The version of the script I've got is dated 6 June 2004, a clean copy without notes or revisions. There were plenty of changes needed to get it to this point, but I can't remember what they were. I remember Ian being very patient and encouraging.

(ETA: Jonny Morris has kept my first draft, from 30 April 2004, which I sent to him, Matthew Griffiths, Robert Dick, Ben Woodhams and Peter Anghelides for comment. It is just over 4,000 words long - and doesn't include Orgath's speech as an appendix at the end as the later version does. Which means I cut about 1,000 words from this version!)

So, on 7 August I arrived at the studio. They'd already recorded some of the UNIT series proper that week, the series regulars established, the pronunciation of names fixed. Ian was directing my story, and I mostly sat in the background being overwhelmed. My friend Scott Andrews, who I'd written a small role for, was brave enough to ask Nicholas Courtney - the actor who played the Brigadier - if he was going to be in the new TV version of Doctor Who, the one with Christopher Eccleston which had started filming just a couple of weeks before. Nick told us he hadn't heard anything and modestly suggested he was no one important. He then asked me why, in my story, the Brigadier had a knighthood. I told him that after all the times he'd saved the Earth he deserved it, and he was rather taken by that. He asked about the origin of my surname, and got interested when Scott mentioned I'd just started freelancing for the House of Lords. We gamely discussed a new story, about the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Lethbridge-Stewart. Perhaps he'd be defending aliens from humans...

In those days, it was rare to have a camera on your mobile phone so there were no selfies. I don't remember anyone taking photographs for publicity - I think they covered the UNIT series on other recording days. Besides, we were on a tight schedule. Looking back, I realise Nick made a point of finding time to talk to me and Scott.

Otherwise, I remember just being awe-struck by the cast, and wishing I'd given the brilliant Sara Carver a bit more to do as Winnington. We finished at lunch-time and while the cast went to the pub - in the days before Big Finish started providing its own infamous lunches - I had to rush off to Bristol for my cousin's wedding. By coincidence, the friend I'd named Currie after was putting me up for the night.

The Coup was issued with DWM #351 in December 2004. Davy Darlington worked wonders with the sound design and reviews - as much as I dared to look - seemed positive. Having delivered my pilot episode I was no longer involved in the production of the UNIT series but Ian sent me the CDs as they were released, so I found out what happened after all I'd set up. In January I was commissioned for a second Big Finish play, The Lost Museum, which was recorded in March.

Around this time, I was passing through Charing Cross station when someone shouted at me. "You!" said Nicholas Courtney. "You have a French name." I went over and said hello, and Nick told me he was on his way to the pub to meet Tom Baker. He asked if I'd like to join them. It was mid-morning and I was on my way to a freelance job, and anyway I thought I'd never survive a day in the pub with those two. Really, I was just in shock. I asked where they'd be and said I'd look in during my lunch hour. I did, and they weren't there.

On 23 April, Nick Courtney appeared on Doctor Who Confidential and suggested that the Brigadier might now be in the House of Lords. I emailed Ian a few days later, referring to this and suggesting a Lord Lethbridge-Stewart story for the second series of UNIT - should it happen. I had the bare bones of a plot, too. "We'll see..." said Ian, cryptically - already knowing that the chances were slim of doing more with his version of UNIT, what with David Tennant having just been cast in another role...

There wasn't a second series of UNIT, and despite my best efforts no one else took up my Lord Lethbridge-Stewart story. But when Nick Courtney was invited to reprise his role on TV, in 2008's Enemy of the Bane, the Brigadier retained his knighthood.

APPENDIX 1: BRIGADIER’S SPEECH IN FULL:

For purposes of rehearsing it and as background in Scenes 18, 20 and 22.

I doubt many of you have any idea who I am. That is just as it should be. Because of the nature of my former work, I’m not allowed to tell you either. 

This country has often been faced with threats, with enemies. The forces assigned to counter those threats have been, necessarily, covert.

Though we cannot divulge details of the work we do, we are accountable. In my time as head of the UK arm of UNIT, I reported directly to the Prime Minister. That probably explains the knighthood.

Even though they do not have access to the details that we supply the Government, the general public may still know of UNIT, and have some understanding of our security remit. 

As a result, significant changes such as those taking place today, need to be explained, if only to allay public concern. That is why I have been called in. 

Change is good. UNIT has always known that. I hope ICIS will also be able to remember that. And to forgive me, now, for stealing their thunder. 

UNIT was formed to investigate extra-terrestrial phenomenon. 

In nearly forty years, it has been directly responsible for preventing more than 200 attacks by alien beings. Axons, Cybermen, Zygons, Quarks…

As a part of the United Nations, UNIT was not representing individual states or nations when it repelled these attacks. It represented humanity as a whole. 

Now we’ve made contact with a species who don’t want to conquer the Earth. They want to forge diplomatic links. They’re not even from outer space.

It is therefore my considerable honour to introduce Ambassador Orgath of the Silurian people. Ambassador?

Chernobyl

I've finally caught up with the amazing HBO/Sky mini-series Chernobyl, a gruelling experience because the horror is so perfectly executed. No wonder it's up for all of the awards.

Everything about it - the writing, the realisation - is absolutely right. But I especially like The Chernobyl Podcast that accompanies each episode, in which writer Craig Mazin explains to host Peter Segal how much of what we're watching comes from primary sources or dramatic licence. It's full of insight into the real history, including more about the real people involved. But it's also fascinating to hear how judgments were made in the story-telling: what events and relationships to omit (such as Legasov's family) and how much of the stomach-churning detail to actually show.

I'd dearly love more of this: episode-by-episode interviews with the director Johan Renck, produce Sanne Wohlenberg or costume designer Odile Dicks-Mireaux on how you make this history, this whole world, so convincing. And I'd love it done for other drama based in real history: Russell T Davies on A Very English Scandal; Sally Wainwright on Gentleman Jack.

Toys & Games

The new issue of Doctor Who Magazine Special Edition is in shops now, devoted to toys and games over the past six decades.

Among its wonders, I've interviewed Alex Loosely-Saul from The Who Shop (where I spent a lovely afternoon drinking lots and lots of tea), and former head of licensing Richard Hollis, designer Dave Turbitt and current creative development executive Ross McGlinchey about the role of BBC Worldwide in matching toys to the series since 2005.

Speaking of interviewing people involved with Doctor Who, I've added a 2015 interview with SFX producer Kate Walshe from Millennium FX to my Koquillion archive site - and another interview will be added next week, too.

And I've posted a special thread on Twitter. since today marks 50 years exactly since filming began on The Evil of the Daleks.

(I might have mentioned I've written a book about that story...)

Trailer for The Sontarans

Doctor Who - The Sontarans is out now from Big Finish, detailing the first encounter between the Doctor and those potato-headed monstrosities. It stars Peter Purves and Jean Marsh, and I did the typing.

Clever Tom Saunders at Big Finish has also engineered this extraordinary trailer. Mneh, mneh, mneh - most exciting.

Sontarans and other covers

Here's the cover to Whographica, the book of Doctor Who infographics I've written with Steve O'Brien and Ben Morris. The cover is by designer Jim Smith, and the book is out on 22 September.

And here's the cover for Doctor Who and the Sontarans - in which the Doctor meets the potato-headed monsters for the very first time. It's out in December.

Out now is Doctor Who Magazine issue #502, featuring my interview with artist Mike Collins, talking about his overlapping work on Doctor Who comics and storyboards for the TV show.

Doctor Who special effects

The latest Doctor Who Magazine Special Edition is devoted to six decades of effects in the series. As well as the astounding revelation that the heat barrier in The Daemons (1971) was a physical effect made from tinsel, there's a couple of things by me.

To understand how last year's episode Heaven Sent was realised, I spoke to Will Cohen, Louise Hastings and Salvador Zalvidea at Milk VFX, Kate Walshe at Millennium FX and Samantha Price at BBC Wales.

(The feature also owes a lot to Warren Frey's amazing hour-long interview with director Rachel Talalay, for the Radio Free Skaro podcast. Following that, Talalay posted a video of her demo for the SFX team, demonstrating how they could make a dissolving hand for the episode using a bath bomb kit.)

I also spoke to Academy Award-winning Paul Franklin from Double Negative, who hasn't worked on Doctor Who but explained to me its influence on his own work - including what bits of the series were used as placeholder footage during the making of the movie Interstellar.

(I met Paul when he and I were panelists on The Infinite Monkey Cage last year.)

DWM 2016 Yearbook

Out in shops from tomorrow is the 2016 Yearbook from the magnificent fellows at Doctor Who Magazine.

Amongst all the fun, there's my interview with stunt co-ordinator Dani Biernat (who I also worked with on the short film Modern Man) about being dropped on her head, and featuring a missing scene from The Zygon Invasion.

There's also my round-up of the awards Doctor Who has been nominated for in the past 12 months.

Fall Out

Abaddon Books have tweeted the cover of my forthcoming ebook Fall Out, released in November. It's part of their Afterblight Chronicles range (about a world struggling to survive after a devastating plague), and picks up from the end of Scott K Andrews's acclaimed School's Out trilogy.

Front Row

Last night, I was an interviewed guest on Radio 4's Front Row, talking about TV and films influenced by the nuclear bomb - it being 70 years this week since bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Last night's Front Row is available on BBC iPlayer, and my bit starts at 10:56.

(The Radio 3 Sunday Feature documentary I produced, HG and the H-Bomb, is also still available on iPlayer.)

HG Wells and the H-Bomb

This Sunday at 6.45 pm, Radio 3 will broadcast the new documentary I've produced with brother Tom, HG and the H-Bomb. It's a pick of July's radio and telly, according to those nice people at BBC History Magazine. Blurb as follows:

HG and the H-Bomb
Sunday Feature

Samira Ahmed unearths the extraordinary role of HG Wells in the creation of the nuclear bomb 70 years ago - and how a simple, devastating idea led to the world we know today.

In his 1914 novel The World Set Free, Wells imagined bombs that destroy civilisation and lead to a new world order. But his "atomic bombs" - a name he conceived - are grenades that keep on exploding.

How did this idea become a reality? Samira discovers the strange conjunction of science-fiction and fact that spawned the bomb as Wells mixed with key scientists and politicians such as Lenin and Churchill. Churchill claimed Wells was solely responsible for the use of aeroplanes and tanks in the First World War. Thanks to Wells, Churchill was also ahead of many in writing about the military potential of nuclear weapons - as he did in his 1924 article for the Pall Mall Gazette, "Shall We All Commit Suicide?"

In London's Russell Square, Samira retraces the steps of Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard who conceived the neutron chain reaction. Amid the bustle and noise of the capital in 1933, he suddenly realised how to exploit the potential of nuclear energy and - because he'd read Wells - the devastating impact it would have.

But what could he do? How easy is it to keep a secret in the scientific community, with war looming? Once a dangerous, world-changing idea exists, is it possible to contain it?

To find out, Samira speaks to nuclear physicist Dr Elizabeth Cunningham; Graham Farmelo, author of Churchill's Bomb; Professor Lisa Jardine; Andrew Nahum, chief curator of "Churchill's Scientists" at the Science Museum, London; and Michael Sherborne, author of HG Wells - Another Kind of Life.

Readings by Toby Hadoke
Presenter Samira Ahmed
Producers Simon and Thomas Guerrier
A Whistledown Production for BBC Radio 3.

Black holes and explosions

Two new things! First, the latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine is out today. As well as interviews with Ingrid Oliver and David Warner, it includes my chat with chief special effects blower upper Danny Hargreaves.

I was inspired by this short clip on the BBC's official Doctor Who site of Danny blowing up the head of a Cyberman for the serious, scholarly purpose of supporting British Science Week. We talk physics and chemistry and the Kandyman.

Also, those luminous lovelies at Big Finish have put up cast details and released Tom Webster's gorgeous cover for my new Doctor Who adventure, The Black Hole - which is out in November. Despite the best efforts of Rufus Hound's especially distracting moustache, people have noticed his hat. Whatever can it mean?

V for Vengeance

A few hundred yards from where I live, in a gap between the terraced houses there's a children's playground. It's a regular haunt of the Lord of Chaos, and I'd vaguely wondered if the gap between the houses might have been the result of a bomb in the Second World War.

Recently, the Dr's researches on something else meant she stumbled on the fact that yes, that gap was the result of a V-2 rocket. In fact, our part of South London was especially badly hit by the Nazi vengeance weapons, the direct result of British Intelligence sacrificing my neighbourhood to save central London. They did this by convincing the Nazis that their bombs fell far north of the capital so the aim needed correcting.

I think of the people who lived in the streets around me now, and those who lived in the house where I'm typing this, in a room with a view of a garden that still contains a brick shelter. 70 years ago on VE Day, on the street where my son's playground now is, they hanged an effigy of Hitler. I can't blame them.

Of course, the V-2 later took people to the Moon - as I was surprised to find NASA discussing quite openly when I visited Cape Canaveral in 2009.

"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."

Me, "Geek Heaven", 10 November 2009.

Today, the Dr took the Lord of Chaos to the RAF Museum at Colindale, and thought to snap me these pictures.

The Scientific Secrets of Doctor Who

My new book will be out on 4 June, and this 'ere is the press release:

The Scientific Secrets of Doctor Who
By Simon Guerrier and Dr Marek Kukula
4 June 2015

Doctor Who stories are many things: thrilling adventures, historical dramas, and science fiction tales. But how much of the science is real? And how much is fiction?

Weaving together authoratitive scientific discussion with a series of new adventures by acclaimed Doctor Who writers including Jenny T Colgan, George Mann and Jacqueline Rayner, Simon Guerrier and Dr Marek Kukula explore the possibilities of time travel, life on other planets, artificial intelligence, parallel universes and more. From the dawn of astronomy and the discovery of gravity to the moon landings and string theory, the authors show how science has inspired Doctor Who, and how, on occasion, life has mirrored art, such as the 1989 discovery of 'ice-canoes' on Triton which were featured in the 1973 episode The Planet of the Daleks.

For example, did you know...

• The creation of the Cybermen in The Tenth Planet in 1966 was prompted by two American neuroscientists who argued that astronauts' bodies should be adapted to suit the conditions of space.
• The failure of Beagle 2 to land on Mars on Christmas Day 2003 influenced the loss of Guinevere One at the start of The Christmas Invasion.
• The many parallel universes that feature in Doctor Who, from Inferno to Rise of the Cybermen, are inspired by a reaction to the Schrodinger's Cat theory: that a new universe is created for each different outcome.
• The startling resemblance between Amelia Pond and the Twelfth Doctor and two characters from The Fires of Pompeii isn't simply due to the actors returning to the series: it might be grounded in science as well.
• Time Lords aren't the only beings able to regenerate - when the turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish gets ill, old, or faces danger, it can return to its childhood state as a polyp.

Full blurb and details at the Ebury website. Oh, and here's the back cover with a nice quote from Leela.