The Inheritors, by William Golding

Two years ago, Backlisted devoted an episode to The Inheritors, the second novel by William Golding, author of The Lord of the Flies. Ever since, I've been meaning to reread it, not least because panelist Dr Una McCormack asked me about the book's influence on the first Doctor Who.

In The Inheritors, a small group of primitive people face what Iain Banks referred to as an "outside context problem", a threat so far beyond the limits of their understanding that they don't stand a chance. In this case, we recognise - as the primitive people do not - that the strange "other" people who have settled nearby possess weapons and transport, and the intent to kill. As the book goes on, we realise that the people whose perspective we share are Neanderthals; the cruel, drunk and good-at-killing "others" are humans, the inheritors of the world.

It's a strange, heady book that builds on stuff in The Lord of the Flies: the idea of humans as essentially violent and primal; a reversal at the end where we see everything from someone else's perspective that changes our sense of what we have witnessed. The Lord of the Flies is a staple of the secondary school curriculum - I studied it for GCSE - but The Inheritors is a harder read, the action not always clear, and there's plenty of nakedness and sex.

Golding seems to root modern gender politics in the ancient past. His Neanderthals have clearly designated roles:

"A man for pictures [ie thinking]. A woman for Oa [ie having children.] (p. 117)

Except, as we see, the truth is more complicated and the male who says this often gives way to more gifted, able women who see pictures more clearly. Golding's not exactly a feminist here - he rarely gets through a page without mentioning breasts, though the Neanderthals would surely be used to seeing each other naked. The women might have better ideas and understanding, but its all told from the perspective of (heterosexual) men. 

I think there's something similar with racial or colonial politics. The Neanderthals and the humans are distinct groups, physically and culturally, and there's a sense of innate separateness - or apartheid. And yet there's a scene in which Liku can speak the same language as the humans, and begin to form a bond, while the humans effectively adopt one of the Neanderthals as their own. The suggestion is that whatever inequalities exist, it wasn't always thus and there is still a chance to change. (We now know, of course, that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred, that many people alive today have a direct genetic inheritance from Homo neanderthalis; my understanding is that this wasn't understood at the time Golding wrote this.)

So, what about Doctor Who? The first ever Doctor Who serial is a four-part story generally known as An Unearthly Child (the title of its first episode) but also as 100,000 BC or The Tribe of Gum (titles used by the production team for the serial as a whole).

When he began working on Doctor Who, writer Anthony Coburn was on the full-time staff of the BBC's Script Department, where his job included looking for books to adapt for the screen. Golding had been lauded since the publication of Lord of the Flies in 1954, and the BBC had adapted that and several other of his novels for radio. Surely then, Coburn at least knew of The Inheritors. But there's some suggestion that he drew on it directly.

In 2003, Alan Barnes listed for Doctor Who Magazine some of the connections between that first Doctor Who serial and what he referred to as "the most renowned prehistoric novel at the time", singling out the sense in the novel that Golding's Neanderthals do not "make" fire from scratch but carry burning embers with them (each fire inherited from the last).

"Clearly, the secret of fire-making has been lost, and so the fire must be transported as a constant. Likewise, in The Cave of Skulls, Hur tips ash ("the dead fire") over Za's kindling. Both Golding's and Coburn's Neanderthals have something like a religion - the first devoted to "Oa", a kind of "Earth-Mother", the other to "Orb", a sun-god. But perhaps the best reason for believing that Coburn was acquainted with The Inheritors lies in the similarities between Golding's Neanderthal names and Coburn's: the names of 'Ha', the leader, and the woman 'Fa', are echoed by Coburn's 'Za', for instance, with the male names 'Lok' and 'Mal' resembling ancestors of 'Kal'."(Alan Barnes, "Fact of Fiction: 100,000 BC", DWM #337 (2003))

I think there are more direct links than that. Both feature an unnamed "old woman" where all other speaking characters have names. In Doctor Who, she's credited as "Old Mother", but in the dialogue is only ever "Old Woman" - capitalised in the script. Both these old women mutter from the sidelines about what the leader ought to do. 

"'Mal! Mal! We have meat!' 

Mal opened his eyes and got himself on one elbow. He looked across the fire at the swinging stomach [of a doe they had scavenged] and panted a grin at Lok. Then he turned to the old woman. She smiled at him and began to beat the free hand on her thigh. 

'That is good, Mal. That is strength.'" (p. 58)

Both old women are murdered at key dramatic moments. When the novel's old woman dies, we discover she is the mother of one of the other characters; the Doctor Who story never tells us who Old Mother is the mother of, but that seems to have been part of an early draft.

Then there is the way these primitive people understand the world around them - and describe their own understanding. Throughout The Inheritors, the Neanderthals speak of the "pictures" in their minds that they endeavour to share with one another. Compare that to the following from Doctor Who's third episode (the red bits as per the camera script but not the broadcast version):

KAL: My eyes tell me what has happened... as they do when I sleep and I see things. Za and Hur came here to free them, and find out the a way to make fire. The old woman saw them and Za killed old woman. Za has gone with them... taking them to their tree [ie the TARDIS]. Za is taking away fire.

HORG: The old woman is dead. It must have been as your eyes said it was. (Doctor Who episode 3: The Forest of Fear]

There's something, too, in the way control of some "technology" (in the broadest sense) defines who has power - weapons and boats in the book, but also clearer thinking; fire in Doctor Who. As Alan suggests in DWM, the second Doctor Who story then builds on that idea - the Daleks threatening to obliterate all other life on their planet with a neutron bomb. I wonder if something of that second story was also inspired by The Inheritors, or at least the review by Arthur Koestler in the Sunday Times of 25 December 1955, which was then quoted on later editions:

"An earthquake in the petrified forests of the English novel." 

As I said in response to the Backlisted episode, The Inheritors surely influenced the 1970 story Doctor Who and the Silurians - in which a prehistoric people wake up to discover "their" Earth has been conquered by humans - and then the novelisation of that story, which begins with a chapter all told from a Silurian's point of view. There are other Doctor Who stories too, directly or indirectly. But then, if The Inheritors influenced the very first Doctor Who story, all of Doctor Who draws a line back to that book.

Backlisted suggested Golding's influence on Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker (1980), which I want to reread soon. But I now wonder if the racial aspects especially of The Inheritors fed into Nigel Kneale's Quatermass and the Pit (TV version broadcast 1958-59), and into Pierre Boulle's novel La Planète des Singes (1963) - the source of the Planet of the Apes film series. There's the "Dawn of Man" sequence that opens 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), with two groups of primate clashing, one inspired to use weapons. I can see the interest in humanity's primitive urges, and also the reversals of perspective, in the work of Iain Banks - the "outside context problem" referenced above is a feature of Banks's Excession (1996).

There's more, I'm sure - all inheritors.

Cinema Limbo on King Kong (1976)

A huge, confused ape wrestles with King Kong. Reader, that ape is me...

The Cinema Limbo podcast re-evaluates old films, and host Jeremy Phillips asked me to discuss the 1976 remake of King Kong. You can listen to our extended rambling here:

http://www.podnose.com/cinema-limbo/068-king-kong

Space Odyssey, by Michael Benson

A couple of years ago, I praised a jaw-dropping exhibition of images of the Solar System which were on temporary display at the Natural History Museum. I said Otherworlds was, “brilliantly curated by Michael Benson,” so I eagerly anticipated his new book on the making of the film 2001 to mark its  50th anniversary.

Space Odyssey is excellent, detailing the minutiae of each stage in the creative process, from director Stanley Kubrick first making contact with writer Arthur C Clarke to the film’s premiere four years later, its immediate aftermath and the fates of these two men. It is fascinating, insightful and profound – just like the film.

It’s a thrill to follow, step by step, the development of iconic moments – who suggested what and when, and how Kubrick marshalled, encouraged and ran ragged the team around him. Most surprising is how late some of the decisions were made – even deep into cutting, the film almost had a narration and a specially composed score (rather than using pre-existing tracks). On p. 394, we’re told Kubrick even considered getting the Beatles to provide the music. Indeed, the film we know now and I have on Blu-ray is a cut-down, improved version of the one that premiered in New York in April 1968 to such a negative response – effectively, Kubrick was still revising the film after it was finished.

Several of the many, many people Benson interviewed refer to Kubrick as a genius, but the overall impression is of a brilliant, difficult and rather cowardly man. When a real leopard was filmed for the Dawn of Man sequence, Kubrick was the only member of the cast and crew to be inside a protective cage. Worse, we watch in horror as Kubrick insists that stunt performer Bill Weston do longer and longer takes in a spacesuit that Kubrick has also insisted have no holes to prevent the build up of CO2. Weston is rendered unconscious, as has been only too inevitable, and though he recovers Kubrick then avoids him.

There are other things: that Clarke was treated unfairly in contract negotiations, which led to him not getting royalties on the film, and suffered delays in getting the book version approved that didn’t help the delicate state of his finances; the special effects team done out of an Academy Award by Kubrick taking credit for their work.  And yet it’s difficult not to admire this difficult, selfish man for his dedication. His approach, his care, his achievement are remarkable.

I found a lot of it funny, such as when (p.91) Kubrick, unsure how to realise the apes in the Dawn of Man sequence, wrote to noted actor Robert Shaw about playing play the lead, unspeaking ape – because he felt Shaw already had simian features. No response is recorded.

Likewise, in the papers drawn up to greenlight the movie, there’s a list of contingency directors. David Lean seems an obvious choice (he hadn’t directed science-fiction before, but then neither had Kubrick), but others are more surprising:

“Try to imagine 2001 – A Space Odyssey directed by [Billy] Wilder, the man who made Some Like it Hot.”
Michael Benson, Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C Clarke and the Making of a Masterpiece (2018), p. 90.

The same page also picks out a detail in the contract referring to jurisdictions – the rights to the movie covering not just different countries but extending into space.

“The boilerplate had coincided with the destination.”
Ibid.

Benson is an expert guide, though I kept wanting to add prepositions to his wry, dry US journalese. He also feels the need to explain the abbreviation “NB” (p. 66) and that “George the second” was “the eighteenth-century monarch” (p. 224). But then that’s me assuming these things are readily understood, and Benson’s perspective as an outsider gives him a telling insight into the British film industry of the time:

“The British class system was as quietly rigid and unquestioningly enforced at Borehamwood as elsewhere. Offspring of the lower classes were expected to aspire to union cards from the trades; they might become sparks (electricians), chippies (carpenters), plasterers, grips, drivers, and the like. Upper-class kids, on the other hand, could jostle for positions in management and leading creative positions: assistant directors, camera assistants, producers in training.”
Ibid., p. 225.

This is exemplified in the role of posh boy Andrew Birkin – brother of Jane – who starts out as the production’s tea boy and is soon in charge second-unit shooting in Scotland for the Star Gate sequence, taking command of the camera from operator Jack Atcheler, who found the low-flying aerial photography too perilous. (And not without reason; Birkin tells Benson that their helicopter pilot was killed on his next movie (p. 245).)

There are odd omissions, too: for all Benson details the relationship between Kubrick and young effects pioneer Douglas Trumbull, there’s no mention of Silent Running (1972), mentioned recently by critic Mark Kermode in his series Secrets of Cinema:

“Trumbull said that he made the unashamedly sentimental Silent Running as a response to the inhuman sterility of 2001 – a film in which the most sympathetic character is a homicidal computer. In Silent Running, Trumbull set his hero [Freeman] alone in space with only three worker drones for company. The drones are robots who, during the course of the movie, come to exhibit strangely human characteristics, or perhaps to reflect the human characteristics which Freeman projects on to them.”
Mark Kermode’s Secrets of Cinema (BBC Four, 2018) 1.4: Science Fiction

And although Benson talks about the influence of 2001 on subsequent science-fiction films, there’s little on the wider cultural impact. I was struck by a small comment when referring to the success of Clarke’s novel of the film.

“His other work benefitted as well, with three new printings of Childhood’s End in 1969 alone.”

Benson, p. 435.

It’s in this context that Childhood’s End influenced David Bowie’s 1971 song “Oh! You Pretty Things”, which in turn part-inspired the TV series The Tomorrow People. There’s no mention, either, of the conspiracy theory spun out of the technical excellence of 2001’s visual effects: that Kubrick then helped to fake the Moon landings.

One thing Benson does mention is of great interest to something I’m writing at the moment. Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) won an Academy Award for its cinematography, which included interior scenes,

“illuminated almost entirely by candlelight. The result was the first accurate representation of what eighteenth century interiors looked like before the advent of electricity, giving the film the remarkable aspect of a period oil painting come to life.”
Ibid., p. 438.

This, says Benson, was achieved through the use of fast Leiss lenses with extremely wide apertures, developed for the Apollo programme to photograph the far side of the Moon.

It’s this sort of connection that makes the book such an absorbing, astonishing read. But I think the detail that most lingers is a quotation from Clarke’s 1960 essay, “Rocket to the Renaissance”, in which he draws a parallel between space travel and something from history – not the Wild West or even Homer’s Odyssey, but life emerging out of the oceans.

“We seldom stop to think we’re still creatures of the sea, able to leave it only because from birth to death we wear the water-filled space suits of our skins.”
Ibid, p. 51.

• See also: Me on the death and legacy of Arthur C Clarke

Doctor Who post script
I’m intrigued by the one reference in the book to Doctor Who. Benson tells us that in the autumn of 1965, in the weeks leading up to the start of filming on 30 December, the spacesuit backpacks, front manoeuvring controllers, button panels for the arms and the space helmets were produced either inhouse at the studios in Borehamwood,

“or by AGM, the London company also busy manufacturing ‘Daleks’: the cylindrical alien cyborgs seen in Doctor Who, the cult BBC-TV series.”
Ibid., p. 123.

Pre-production and the start of filming on 2001 overlapped with the recording of the 12-part The Daleks’ Master Plan on television. We know the team on 2001 contacted director Douglas Camfield a few days after the broadcast of episode 5, Counter Plot, on 11 December 1965 to find out how he’d achieved the space-travelling and molecular dissemination effects.

Yet I’d never heard of AGM, so checked with Dalek expert Gav Rymill. “Autumn of ‘65 would have been just before the enormous batch of props made for Daleks Invasion Earth 2150 AD,” says Gav. The Dalek props – for the TV series and the two films – were supplied by Shawcraft, but it’s possible AGM supplied some of the sets or other props used in both TV and films. We shall do more digging...

Freedom, dignity and drones

I've been reading BF Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), which argues for a "technology of behaviour" or "cultural engineering". That sounds like the sort of thing that might feature in a sci-fi dystopia - which is chiefly why I've been reading it.

In some ways, Skinner's book reads as a chillingly impersonal manifesto for more control by the state or scientific elite over how we're brought up, arguing that much of our behaviour is simply a response to the conditions around us. In the nature/nurture debate, such a hot topic at the time, it's firmly on the side of the nurture.

Yet it's less about what should actually be done than it is how we think about improving behaviour. If we can only get beyond outdated ideas such as "free will" and autonomy, Skinner argues, we might finally progress.

I've found it by turns fascinating and frustrating, and it's often hard to tell when Skinner's examples are the results of scientifically rigorous experiment or just things he thinks to be true. But every so often there's a passage that stands out, such as this on the conflict between dignity and freedom.

"From time to time, advances in physical and biological technology have seemed to threaten worth or dignity when Medical science has reduced the need to suffer in silence and the chance to be admired for doing so. Fireproof buildings leave no room for brave firemen, or safe ships for brave sailors, or safe airplanes for brave pilots. The modern dairy barn has no place for a Hercules. When exhausting and dangerous work is no longer required, those who are hard-working and brave seem merely foolish.

The literature of dignity conflicts here with the literature of freedom, which favors a reduction in aversive features of daily life, as by making behavior less arduous, dangerous, or painful, but a concern for personal worth sometimes triumphs over freedom from aversive stimulation - for example, when, quite apart from medicinal issues, painless childbirth is not as readily accepted as painless dentistry. A military expert, J.F.C. Fuller, has written: 'The highest military rewards are given for bravery and not for intelligence, and the introduction of any novel weapon which detracts from individual prowess is met with opposition'."

BF Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), p. 56.
(Fuller is apparently from "an article on 'Tactics', Encyclopedia Britannica, 14th edn.")

I find myself instinctively wanting to counter this thesis. Yet surely that last point is at the heart of discussions about the morality of using the atomic bomb at the end of World World Two (see my post on Codename Downfall - The Secret Plan to Invade Japan). It might also help explain why the use of remote drones seems so particularly wrong. The argument is often used against them that they kill civilian women and children as much as they do enemy combatants, but that can also be true of using soldiers. Is the problem more that drones, by reducing risk to our soldiers, make it too distastefully easy?

I'm not convinced but I find myself puzzling over that when I should be building my dystopia. As so often, I post it here to clear it out of my head.

Two comics with William Potter

A few years ago, I worked for William Potter on the esteemed journal SpongeBob SquarePants' Krusty Kards Collection and a Shrek sticker book. I have also bounced around to his band, CUD, more than once. But more recently, we've worked on some comics.

The 100% Awesomes was produced for the Autism Education Trust as part of a teaching pack to "promote awareness of difference and autism" among school children in years five to seven. Here is the first page:

The 100% Awesomes, page 1
Art by William Potter

William and I then worked on a pitch for an original series, Wind-Up Wilbur, about a robot boy (sadly, the strip wasn't picked up). Here's the first page of that:

Wind-Up Wilbur, page 1
Art by William Potter

Events, dear boy, events

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

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

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

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

So, other stuff...

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

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

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

Film Focus: King Kong

Another of my Film Focus reviews. (Something a bit different tomorrow, promise.)

King Kong
Reviewed 6 December 2005

[In brief]
Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) is an unknown young actress, suddenly out of work during the worst of the Depression. She’s little choice but to take a job on a new movie spectacular, to be shot on location. Though the director’s a swindler, the crew seem rogues, and Ann’s so in awe of the writer she can’t speak to him, things really get difficult when she reaches the mysterious Skull Island where the film’s to be shot, and meets her leading man… 

[In full]
Spectacular, terrifying, and genuinely affecting, Jackson’s brilliant remake of the classic monster flick is a perfect date movie. It could just do with being a bit shorter.

What makes “King Kong” win over other monster movies? In terms of basic story, it’s similar to other, lesser monster flicks, and owes something to Conan-Doyle’s “The Lost World”. Intrepid explorers find prehistoric beasts and monsters, bring one back to civilisation to parade before the masses, and it escapes and causes havoc. Kong, though, differs by not merely making the monster sympathetic, but making him the romantic lead. This is a tragic love story. No, really.

Kong (Andy Serkiss) is beautifully realised, and it’s difficult not to fall for his deep, sultry stare. As one girl sighed afterwards, “If only a man could look at you like that.” The cast are all very watchable, with suitably-arched but well-judged performances all round. Carl Denham (Jack Black) could easily have been a one-note character, but Black makes him real.

Once on the island, things pick up quickly, and the film just gets better and better. There are so many excellent sequences. Ann Darrow not seeing the dinosaur creeping up on her, and the ships’ crew being lunch for a nest of huge insects, had a core of hardened hacks squealing appreciatively in their seats. The fleshy worms that befriend Lumpy (Serkiss again) are some of the best, most convincingly textured CGI ever managed.

There are so many great moments, this could easily have been a five-star movie. However, it’s too long by an hour. It takes an age actually getting to Skull Island, with too many vignettes where we get to know the monster-fodder crew. Jamie Bell, for example, though good, gets two plots. There’s the red-herring of his mysterious background (he’s found on the ship as a boy), and his surrogate father’s efforts to keep him on the straight and narrow. Neither, though, really go anywhere, and the film would miss little without them. We don’t need to be told the significance of his reading Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” – just seeing the book in his hands would have been just as effective.

And yet there are questions the film doesn’t answer. Where do all the islanders go? They vanish the moment they’ve introduced Kong to Ann, never to be mentioned again. Then there’s the ease with which Driscoll (Adrien Brody) and Ann escape back to the town. A party of gun-totting sailors is soon eaten up by Skull Island’s monsters, but two naïve arty-types get away with hardly a scratch.

In New York, the special effects run the risk of being too cartoony, mostly because, unlike with the sailors, we don’t see the bodies. Kong’s easy killing of women-who-aren’t-Ann would be all the more striking if we saw any of the dead victims up close. It would also make more sense of the city’s response to this monster-gone-mad.

Perhaps it’s too much to expect a creature feature like this to worry too much about realism. Yet it does make the effort to confront elements in the original that are difficult. In the 1933 version, Denham’s a hero, and there’s no question that Kong’s a great prize to be shown off in New York. Jackson makes Denham more of a monster than the titular ape, doing whatever he has to just to get his own way. When members of his crew get eaten, rather than taking the hint he grandly eulogises that they’ll finish the film in their memory. And in capturing Kong, as Driscoll says, he’s only able to destroy the things he loves. (A risk Jackson also ran in remaking this beloved movie.)

This is made all the more plain in the film’s callous ending, with the ignominy of flat-footed soldiers having their pictures taken by Kong’s body, the press climbing all over him. Ann and Driscoll, refusing to go to the show in the first place, retain their integrity. Both work in the same “entertainment” industry as Denham, but Ann’s juggling and prat-falling are innocent pleasures that helped her win over Kong in the first place, and on the night of the gala performance she’s taken an anonymous role in another play. Driscoll, who’s written plays Ann so admired, has also by the end discovered the simple pleasure of light comedy.

Again, though, this thread isn’t fully resolved: why isn’t Denham arrested after Kong escapes? He grandly blames “beauty” for killing Kong, as ever refusing responsibility for all the people being killed. Jackson could have had the same, classic last line of the movie, only with Denham being carried away by the police, protesting his innocence. It feels like they’re torn between updating the original and yet not changing it…

But this really is nit-picking. “King Kong” is a hugely enjoyable, eye-popping movie that pushes all the right buttons. If they could only have been as bold in the editing as they were in the making, it would be without doubt the film of the year. The only problem with Kong is there’s just too much of him.

Domestic bliss

Have been busy this week with a damn load of work - which is something of a relief after a rather desperate January. Has meant some late nights and a wealth of research, but am feeling a lot better now that somebody wants me.

On Friday, I took a few hours off to go to London Zoo with the Dr. It was 10 years since I'd first stumbled up to her and said "You're lovely." As I said this time last year,

"The lesson is, my young padawans, that if you fancy someone, tell them."

Me, "Gallifrey and nine", 19 February 2009.

We'd adopted each other animals at London Zoo - I got the Dr an Asian lion, she got me a lady gorilla reputed to stink of garlic. The Asian lions were best, all snuggled up in a pile, watching us visitors languorously. We also liked the baby monkeys and the owls. I took a picture of the Dr playing with the tiger-paw gloves, and realise now we should have bought them.

We were home well in time for the live EastEnders, which was all rather manic and brave. M'colleague Lisa Bowerman says that audio drama separates the men actors from the boys, and the same seems to be true of live telly. Turned over to BBC Three after, to shout at the obscenely indulgent behind-the-scenes thing. Managed about 20 minutes.

Instead we put on another True Blood - we're now five episodes into season 2. It's much stronger than season 1, with more screen-time and plot for the other characters around Sookie and Bill. The Dr loves the comedy vampires. But it is all having an effect on the cat.

Yesterday I wrote a comic strip and two (very) short stories, which I hope will be approved by the Masters. Then I went out to see Ghosts, a play by Ibsen reworked by Frank McGuinness, starring Lesley Sharp and Iain Glen. It's a brilliant play about the shadow cast over a family by a long-dead father - who remains a constant presence though never appearing in person. A very deft bit of writing, and Sharp and Harry Treadaway (playing her son) were incredible. Not entirely convinced by some of the accents, though. Glen seemed to be playing the vicar as Abraham Lincoln.

Today, I was interviewed about my Being Human book and am writing more stuff, while the Dr is finishing her William Morris embroidery by attaching it to a cushion. Later we shall eat the kilo of best beef what I bought as a treat.

But perhaps our most exciting news is that we have a bath. It's been five weeks since the shower was pulled apart. B&Q's promise to deliver our purchases "within three weeks" turned out to be not entirely true. Their promise to ring us with a date of delivery, and to let us know why things were delayed, was not entirely true either. The Dr chased and chased - and spoke to some helpful, apologetic people - and the stuff was finally delivered on Thursday. Well, all except the end panel for the bath which we hope will now come next week.

The delays have meant our helpful Man has taken on other works, but he was round late last night getting it set up so that we can at least have a wash. It stills needs plenty of work, and there's a sink to be put in, but we're both skippy with delight.

1 in 100

Had my picture taken yesterday morning by George Bamford, as part of his “Young Guns” project. The wheeze is he'll snap 100 “young, influential people” for an exhibition and book – more on that when it happens. Of course, my job is to throw their youth and influence into sharp relief. One of these kids is not like the others...

I'm not exactly brilliant at having my picture taken. When we got our wedding photos back all those years ago, the Dr complained I was pulling daft faces. I, um, wasn't. So now I tend to. But I've also been snapped by a few professionals – ones who make you close your eyes tight and scrunch up your face the moment before they snap you, and one nice lady who made me sit in a hedge.

George, though, just asked me about Doctor Who – how do the books work, what did I know about next year, have I visited the set... As I answered he snapped away, and then we looked at what he'd got. All very easy, really. Apparently I've got an animated face with good cheekbones, which is nice to know. And he must be a professional because I don't look like an orang-utan.

Scary, but not an orang-utan.


Me, yesterday morning. Portrait by George Bamford.

Can we save “dirty” and “stick”?

Fascinated by this news story about the oldest words in English. It’s one avenue of research by Reading University’s evolutionary biology group. As their page on linguistics and cultural evolution says:

“Our studies of cultural evolution investigate the idea that human cultures behave as if they were distinct biological species.”

As Charlie Darwin worked out (with a splendid sketch on page 36 of notebook B, in 1837-38), evolution means branching development – a great long family tree.

My chum Millennium Elephant once nicely explained why tree-branching means there’s no such thing as a “missing link”. In his example, you go back in time 500 years and find that human beings are still human beings. They might be a bit cruder and smellier than folk today, but they’re still our species. Make sure you’ve packed your condoms.

The English language of 500 years ago is likewise a cruder, smellier version of ours. Our speech patterns might raise some eyebrows, but we would probably be understood. Their plays and essays might feel “ye olde worlde” to us now, but we can follow the meaning.

The further back you go, though, the cruder and smellier the people and language become, and the less like us you will find them. About 250,000 years back, the branch of Homo sapiens merges with Homo erectus. (No need for condoms, but shame on you.)

Language changes much quicker than genes: a bit less than 1,000 years back, English splits between Norman French and Anglo-Saxon. But English is made up of all sorts of words nicked from other and earlier languages. So the clever Reading fellows have devised a clever comparative wossname to guesstimate which of our words would still be intelligible to the crude, smelly past. This would be useful if you didn’t have a TARDIS to translate for you (or you did but that bit wasn’t working).

The Word changes gadget lets you set the dematerialisation controls on 200 common, modern words. My Slitheen Excursion is set in 1,500 BC and in Greece. But 3,509 years ago scores 11/200 matches:

I; we
Name
How; who
One; two; three; four; five
Tongue

I can see the stickiness of simple, everyday concepts for getting across vital information quickly. But “tongue”?

Presumably they had their own words for “dirty”, “stick” and “guts”. (Although not a word for “zero” which is a much more recent concept – we didn’t have it when we created the Anno Domini calendar, which is why the millennium celebrations were a year out. I keep meaning to read this book.)

But the news report also suggests that “dirty”, “stick” and “guts” are “likely to die out soon”. Note they don’t define “soon”. It’s discussing words suspected of being 40,000 years-old, so does soon mean next century or next millennia?

Second, if I understand it right it’s not that the words will die out but be superseded. We’ll use other words to say the same things. But which words will we use? Does the research give any idea? Surely these new words will have to be better than the ones we’ve already got.

“Evolution is NOT a process of "mistakes". It's an ongoing series of triumphs over adversity, and every species alive today is a gold medal winner. We're NOT just the recipient of a spoonful of divine generosity. We have worked our way up.”

Millennium Elephant, “Stupid by design”, 1 March 2008.

George Orwell’s splendid "Politics and the English language" is a manifesto for more concrete, less pretentious writing. He favours short, Anglo-Saxon words because they’re simpler and more vivid. It would be a shame to lose our guts.

First chance to see...

Stephen Fry was on the telly on Friday night discussing Kakopos. For the uninitiated, these are silly green parrots what live on New Zealand and have forgotten that they cannot fly.

I first heard of them from Douglas Adams. The Observer sent him and a zoologist, Mark Cawardine, to Madagascar to write a Sunday supplement feature of the endangered aye-aye. Adams had such a nice time that (when he'd finished his commitments to Dirk Gently) he and Cawardine then swanned off round the world writing up other endangered species. There was a Radio 4 series, apparently a CD-rom and a book - my favourite of all Adams' efforts. It is amiably, compellingly harrowing. There aren't many other books like that.

Stephen Fry has spent the last year swanning off round the world with Mark Cawardine shooting a TV version of Adams' book. Some of the endangered species Adams saw are are no longer endangered - some have had some more babies, and some are either now or inevitably extinct.

The series will be on later this year, but the official BBC website has some tantalising tasters.

Monkey see, monkey do

This goes on a bit: it’s a book review but also the janglings of my brain in my sparer moments of man flu. Sorry.

After the invasion of 1066, England was pretty much divided between lords and peasants. The lords swanked around in trendy new castles, feasting and speaking French. The peasants either starved or ate root vegetables and spoke Anglo-Saxon. And these two factions saw the same objects and stuff in completely different ways.

To the Anglo-Saxons, a four-legged, mooing animal was something you herded and tended, not something you got to eat. They used the Germanic word, “cow”. When the cow was served up as dinner to the lords, they called it by the French word for the mooing animal, “beef”. Uniquely (I think) English still differentiates between an animal in its state of being alive and one in its state of lunch. By having two words for the same thing, the same thing becomes two distinct entities.

This may, of course, have something to do with how weird we are generally compared to them foreign-speaking fellows about eating things that run and jump. But I shall evangelise St Hugh’s Philosophy of Meat another time.

The point is that our use of language defines our perception and behaviour – what’s called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, even though its more of an axiom. Speaking a different language, or using the same language differently, means living in a different world.

Cow/beef is an example of a physical, tangible creature being perceived differently. In general, nouns are easy to translate – languages just have a different word for the same object. But idioms and more metaphysical concepts are trickier. There’s often something uncomfortable about a literal translation (a “calque”); it doesn’t quite fit. (English tends to dodge this problem by just adopting the foreign term.)

It might then, seem, that we can’t imagine something without having a word for it – that’s how Sapir-Whorf is sometimes explained. So which came first: the ability to name things or our conception of the world around us? Can we think without a language?

This metaphysical conundrum has foxed a good few clever fellows. Charles Darwin, for example, wrote in Notebook M on Thursday, 16 August 1838:

“Origin of man now proved.—Metaphysic must flourish.—He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.”

This oddment of jotting has been pinched as the title for a very good book indeed, Baboon Metaphysics – the Evolution of a Social Mind by Dorothy L Cheney and Robert M Seyfarth. It compiles years of research and close observation of a group of baboons to make sense of what might be going through their minds.

“Roughly 30 million years ago, baboons, chimpanzees, and humans shared the same ancestor. The ancestral line leading to baboons and other Old World monkeys then diverged. For almost 20 million years thereafter, chimpanzees and humans shared a common ancestor, before separating roughly five to seven million years ago. In what ways have baboon and chimpanzee minds diverged since their separation? And what selective pressures might have resulted in the obvious differences between the chimpanzee and human minds?”

Dorothy L Cheney and Robert M Seyfarth, Baboon Metaphysics – the Evolution of a Social Mind, p. 278.

As the authors say, it’s hard enough to know what a human being is thinking, and they can answer direct questions. So the book details a series of clever experiments, each one revealing one more tiny piece of proof. They monitor stress levels by testing for adrenalin levels in the baboons’ poo. They record one baboon's grunts and wahoos and play them back in different situations to see how others react. Slowly an evidence base is built up.

This might sound pretty gruelling but it’s a remarkably easy read. The first hundred pages or so chart the history of man’s interactions with baboons, from the days the ancient Egyptians used them as police dogs and recognised their ability to learn. The evidence of experiments is compared to other animals and human children, but also – brilliantly – to the social observation of Jane Austen, Edith Wharton and Jonathan Swift.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged in baboon society that, while success in the male world is determined by sex, fighting and posturing, success in the female world depends on family, social networks and intrigue.”

Ibid, p. 62.

It’s a nicely packaged book, too, full of photos of the baboons in question – though it's not always self-evident that the photos really show us the behaviour that the captions claim. The baboons might just as well be sun-bathing.

(The look and feel of the thing as a physical object add to the ease of the reading. I’m intrigued by the note in the legal indicia, that:

“the paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Materials ANSI Z39.48-1992.”

How splendid – a book that’s built to last.)

The authors are chiefly interested in giving evidence for the ways the baboons model the world around them than how they behave: the processes going through their heads. While we never get close to what or how they’re thinking, there’s clear evidence of social knowledge (i.e. keeping up with gossip), complex modelling and unconscious workings out. The authors admit to a wide range of gaps in their own knowledge, and the book lays out the areas for future research. But the complex stuff the baboons are doing is all without a language.

Language isn’t just how we talk to other people, it’s how we explain objects in relation to one another. It’s how we talk to ourselves. It is the mechanism for considering our position and our actions, and not just reacting. Because humans are capable of more than just reacting. It’s just we don’t often show it.

“Words tell us what stuff is doing and where it is. The simplest proper sentence is a thing and what it’s doing … Pretty much everything else – adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions and prepositions – is just qualifying this construction, placing the thing and what it’s doing in the context of other things and actions. It’s all about making sense of where things are.”

Me, 2 April 2008.

Interestingly, the authors also conclude that baboons don't really have a sense of empathy. They don't seem to be able to see things from another individual's point of view, which leads to infanticide, abandonment and generally callous behaviour. They appear mean though they don't know any better – it's just that us humans do.

That said, a review by Frans de Waal in New Scientist says:

“Curiously, their book omits the work of half a dozen luminaries of earlier baboon fieldwork, including that of Barbara Smuts and Shirley Strum, who have given us a glimpse of a gentler baboon.”

But I wonder if language – as an abstract model of the world around us, a way of distancing ourselves from the immediate – is then the key to empathy. We can only imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling by having the language to model it.

There's a constant effort to stick to only what the evidence shows, a struggle not to anthropomorphise. But the book is less about how much the apes are like us, but how little different we are from them. We’re disturbingly similar – I kept reading the book thinking how true its conclusions were of humans, too. How much one particular baboon behaves like someone I used to work with, that sort of thing.

I made the links but not wholly kindly. Acting like an ape is still a pejorative term. “Humans,” said Douglas Adams, “are not proud of their ancestors, and rarely invite them round to dinner.” (In the TV version of the Hitch-Hikers’ Guide To The Galaxy, this pearly is accompanied by a tea party for humans and chimpanzees, with the caption “This never happens”.)

At our worst, at our most petty and mean and unthinking, we're very much like apes. We're only better than them when we judge the consequences of our actions, the affect on other people and from their perspective. When we squabble and fight and jockey for position, we're like the baboons; but manners really do make man. We’re no better than apes in our wars but better in our remembrance. And we can only do that because we have language.

“For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn't have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.”

Stephen Hawking, er, hawking British telephony in 1993.

40 long

Just back from a shopping trip to buy a linen suit. I used to have a linen suit, but it was one of the things that got pinched by burglars in 2003. Being the strangely tall sort of fellow that I am, either the culprit was an Ourang-Outang or they just liked the fancy suit bag. So this morning my sister - the tailor - and her friend S. accompanied me round lots of shops telling me what to do.

We tried Moss Bros and Marks and High and Mighty and The Suit Company and John Lewis, and maybe some other ones as well, but ultimately Next had a 40 long jacket and matching 34 long trousers. I tell myself the £110 is some kind of investment.

Despite the longness of the clothes, they still need adjusting. This is due to my Ourang-Outang genes topped up with lashings of monkey serum. The sister is going to unpick the hems and do some clever sewing. But how exciting to discover that we had such problems finding the right sizes because I'm otherwise quite a fashionable shape.

Scribbled several pages of incomprehensible nonsense into my notebook on the way and way back, which I now need to hack away into the computer before rushing off to another engagement. But in the meantime, my friend R. (whose innards I stole for Markwood in The Lost Museum) sent me this:

Prevarication

The BBC news site it full of interesting stuff right this minute (or perhaps it's just greener than the grass of my own writing chores...).

Lisa Jardine has written a very sensible analysis of the statistics relating to knife crime, which undercuts the hyperbolic furore whirling through the papers. I'm not for a moment downplaying the awfulness of any of the incidents themselves, but there's often a desperate streak in newspapers, playing up base urges of greed and fear to get us to notice.

(They of course argue that's it their job just to report stuff as widely as possible, that news is effectively a form of entertainment. But if the media won't take responsibility for the ethical value of their efforts, why should those they judge?)

Then there's this extraordinary time-lapse film from space of the moon circling the Earth. And the rediscovered dance track by Delia Derbyshire.

Nimbos let me know, since I had missed it, that Jamie Hewlett's Monkey will be the BBC's mascot for the Olympics, which is just a world of cool. A blog post from May explains the thinking and background, but misses off just how splendiferous Hewlett's stuff is. Beside the giddy joy of Tank Girl, I loved his work for Senseless Things - and still cherish the edition of Deadline which featured a two-page strip featuring the same characters. And then there was Hewligan's Haircut. And Fireball. And and and and...

And then Peter mentioned his friend Roo Reynolds - who is about to join the BBC - and especially his geeky lecture on how Lego is full of WIN.

All this and Dr Horrible. How am I meant to get any work done?

I went ape

For reasons of research on something I cannot yet speak of, I have been looking into physics. Specifically, I have been learning about orbital rendezvous and delta-v calculations – the sorts of tricky manouvre one does in rockets in space. You know, real space travel, not all those sci-fi cheats.

The Dr has patiently zoned out of my efforts to explain some of this stuff. She ignored almost all of the DVD of In The Shadow of the Moon, though she was rather moved by the former moon-walkers having trouble coming back to reality. They found God, they drank, they just fidgeted about – though none of them got a job in the music industry in the way that Polly ffaze-Avatron did.

As I’ve said before, the Dr considers all this space stuff to be “moon porn”. Not even my top facts impressed her – like that it took the Apollo missions three days to reach the moon; less time it took the first passenger flights to reach Australia.

I even foolishly attempted to explain to her the late Craig Hinton’s theories that Martian civilisation would have seemed somewhat Egyptian, what with the Ice Warriors and Khufu both being under the yoke of the Osirans. She likes Egyptians. She’s even quite tickled by the idea that the pyramids came from space. Just so long as it wasn’t from mid-70s low-budget Doctor Who space.

She’s also not a great fan of monkeys, and points out that they’re always the baddies. See, for example, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Pirates of the Caribbean or the apes that kidnap Mowgli. Against this, I can offer… er… Muggle Wump in The Twits and... um… Cheetah off of Tarzan. And Bernice’s friend the lemur.

Can anyone do any better?

More importantly, what a marvellous conjoinment of the Dr’s two horrors is this news of space monkeys.

The title for this post is, of course, the greatest Knock Knock joke ever.

Plain speaking

There is a theory I am quite drawn to that humans have factory settings. The idea is that Homo sapiens developed and evolved to fit particular circumstances and that we still fit that specific groove. Depending on where you measure from, that means our default mode is the one that corresponds to the Great Rift Valley or an area just north of Johannesburg. We are built to escape from lions.

It’s an idea explored a bit in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy. A bloke called Frank links the things that stimulate him – going for runs, trying out different foods, solving problems and getting himself laid – to the behaviours that would ensure early man prospered.

Running, goes the example, is ingrained in us because back on the savannah you’d chase after your meals and sometimes things would chase after you. A varied diet is a useful thing to like because you’d always be on the move. It helps if you can live off what’s on offer. Problem solving and curiosity leads to experimentation, tool use and becoming the planet’s dominant species. And getting to pass on your genetic sequence is the only way these qualities survive. That we get a thrill from these things explains how we’re not extinct.

It’s a nice idea and one that I’m more drawn to having been to Africa. I understand all the things other people have said about how you feel drawn to it, in your blood. Yes, it’s all very romantic and just the kind of absolutist genes-make-us-do-what-we-do guff that often has me throwing books across the room. But it’s a nice idea. I can see its use in stories. And I’ve already used it in my other work. Because it helps explain what the written word is for.

Words tell us what stuff is doing and where it is. The simplest proper sentence is a thing and what it’s doing – or, to use the technical terminology, a noun and a verb: “Simon writes”. The smallest version of this construction in the English language, and so the smallest proper sentence, is “I am”.

Pretty much everything else – adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions and prepositions – is just qualifying this construction, placing the thing and what it’s doing in the context of other things and actions. It’s all about making sense of where things are.

(We also need something to help flag up when this is especially important information or in need of an urgent response. These are called interjections.)

I’ve heard some people object to this reductionist idea, saying that language is for all other kinds of expression. And yet poetry struggles to find the best and most concise expression, so that it can’t pack the same meaning into fewer words. The best prose can use the richest vocabulary to precisely, vividly position you in a scene – or even the opposite when the author wants you caught up somewhere strange.

Our language is, then, fit for purpose, doing no more than it needed to back in our early days in Africa. A system for explaining where things are is good for hunting, good for teamwork, good for survival. It allows something that most animals cannot do, the sharing of individual solutions. And in its abstraction from the real, it works as a model for testing new ideas.

This can all be achieved simply and easily, the complexity of a sentence never more than it needs to be. So when you’re writing think of early Homo Sapiens, just getting used to being out of the trees. If he doesn’t keep things simple, specific and straight-forward, he’s going to be something’s lunch.

It doesn’t need to be harder than that. Indeed the whole point of Sir Ernest Gower’s “Plain Words” is that is shouldn’t be harder than that. But I don’t think he used “plain” to mean “savannah”.

So he was Captain Birdseye all the time!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Done that?

Right.

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

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

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

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

The last leg

So where were we? Oh yes, I was blogging from our hotel in the Sydney Rocks, while the Dr was exploring the roof-top hot-tub. I went up to join her and we enjoyed the view, choosing to ignore the ominous low and dark cloud out to sea.

This proved to be a mistake as it meant that as we went out to meet Dr Who author Jonathan Blum for tea in Darling Harbour, I was only wearing Birkenstock flip-flops, shorts and tee-shirt. And so got soaked when the heavens opened. There was thunder. There was lightning. There was a river of water higher than the pavement. There was me and the Dr diving into a posh wine bar, looking like drowned and under-dressed rats, texting Jon to come join us.

He did, and when the sky had cleared he took us squelching for tea in Darling Harbour. I had a pizza and shared a bottle of fizz, and we talked a bit of shop and to Jon’s wife Kate Orman by phone, and then me and the Dr squelched back to our hotel, cold and damp but well-fed.

The next day was a bit over-cast, but we explored the Rocks and took pictures. Again we were struck by the Manchester-ness of the lower-tier architecture, with sparkly skyscrapers behind.

Not that I'm sure the photo right really shows that adequately. You'll just have to take my word for it.


We nosed round the observatory that’s so very like the one in Greenwich – though they call the time-keeping bollock on the roof a “time ball”.

Bought a postcard of the upside-down Moon.

Thence a long walk to Darling Harbour again for pancakes with Jon, followed by a trek round the Maritime Museum. The Dr dared suggest it’s better laid out and interpreted than the one she used to work at herself, with plenty of personal stories and artefacts to bring the Big Ships And Stuff to life.

Just time for a beer in Edinburgh Castle (a pub) before the train back to the airport, and we got back to Melbourne in time for me to grab a quick beer with the sister’s boyfriend.

On Thursday, I managed to cock-up the trams to Melbourne Zoo, but we got there eventually. Had a great afternoon of cooing at the creatures and taking photos. The highlight was probably seeing the smallish, cuddly-looking Sumatran tigers getting fed. The keepers poked a syringe of milk through the gaps in the fence, and the tigers lapped away like little kittens. They had to chase the syringe as the keepers moved it around, and they were then touching the tigers’ paws as they poked them through the fence. Just the game I play with the Dim Cat at home through the banisters.

Also good were the apes:

The zoo is laid out in regions, so the tigers and apes from East Asia are amongst Asian trees and buildings, while the marsupials are all in a bit that feels very outback. The koalas hid in the tree and it’s illegal in Victoria for people to handle them anyway, so I didn’t take any pictures. The wombats were all cuddled up in the dark, looking snug and comfy. Again I couldn’t get pictures of them.

Then we trammed back into town and made our way to the Ian Potter Centre. There were fun exhibits of aboriginal artworks and a thing on black in fashion which was very goth and the Dr. Then there was pizza, and we bumped into the sister’s boyfriend again by chance, who spared time for a chat as I accompanied him up to the bike shop.

In the evening, me and the English girls (the Dr, the sister and Erykah) descended en mass on poor old Ian and Mrs Mond for wine and clever bloody Joe Lister on the telly. Couldn’t have been a better last night in Oz, with splendid company and many laughs. Ian even showed us the Wicket T Warwick costume he’d been made to wear on his stag do.

Up early Friday for a very long flight to South Africa, where again I didn’t fit. My auntie met us at the airport, and explained the various things we were driving past on the way back to her house. She dealt very well with what were probably two zombies. I was much tickled, though, that they call traffic lights “robots” – and didn’t know that it’s the Czech word for serfdom.

On Saturday, the auntie and uncle laid on an extraordinary trip round Soweto, with local guide Ken Dalgliesh. No, not the one I used to have a poster of. He’s studied and written on the history of the collection of townships that now has a population of 4.9 million, and is also up to his eyeballs in projects to help and support the poorer bits.

So we went to the market opposite the Hani-Baragwnath hospital, biggest hospital in the southern hemisphere, and the Dr and I braved the protein-rich mopane caterpillars that are a local stable. Past the chicken stranglers and heaps of freshly butchered, fly-covered meat, we ventured into a shebeen (pub) to share a carton of the yeasty, frothy Jo’Burg beer which was home-brewed in the days of Apartheid, when the locals were not allowed the “white man’s” beers. It’s thick, heavy, low-alcohol stuff that reminded me a lot of freshly-squeezed milk. The locals seemed very interested in my hat.

We toured through the various areas of the townships. After the fall of Apartheid, the inhabitants were given the plots of land on which they had their small and basic shacks. In the posher bits, they’ve since extended and enhanced these basic facilities, so you’ll see lavish properties and exquisitely manicured gardens bolted on to the side of a crude oblong of breeze blocks. I assume this juxtaposition is better than demolishing such a reminder of their history, and also serves to show how far the inhabitants have come – and in such a short time.

The aunt and uncle were most surprised by the low walls and lack of armed guards and electric fences that are everywhere in their bit of town. Only recently one of their friends was bound, beaten and robbed by a gang described as “militant”. Incidents like that seem pretty regular, too – they and horrendous car crashes are talked about in the way we might talk of a bad morning on the Tube.

Perhaps Soweto is just a safer, happier place with less divide between the well-off and poor. Or perhaps it has always been self-policing, so that no one would dare risk being caught stealing or anything else. I assume we only saw the tourist-friendly bits of Soweto anyway.

But our tour did include the poorer bits, and we stopped off at a community centre (oddly, built by an American basketball charity) which our guide Ken was very involved with. The smiley, happy children hanging out there quickly threw together a performance of dancing and singing, and were keen to get us dancing too. It was all so impromptu and lively. We also met the old lady who has run the place since its most basic beginnings back in 1954. She’s still the one everyone goes to when approving any new developments or projects.

The main part of the tour, though, was following the route of the march on 16 June 1976, when schoolkids with an average age of 13 protested at having to be taught at least 50 percent in Afrikaans – a language they and many of their teachers did not even speak. The subjects chosen to be taught in Afrikaans were history, geography and mathematics, further disenfranchising the country’s black majority. The kids acted independently of their parents, who they saw as subsumed into the Apartheid regime because they accepted it. And in the Catholic church where many of the kids first assembled that morning, we counted the bullet holes in the ceiling and saw the broken edge of the altar where the camo-wearing South African police had tried to scare them off.

The kids were not scared off, and we followed the route to Vilkazi Street where the police dogs (or, some sources say, a single dog) were set on them. The dog was killed, and then the police started firing into the ranks of children…

One boy, Hector Pieterson, was shot in the back, and a photo of his wounded body being carried by another boy came to embody the massacre. The picture (see the last link) is a classic “pieta” in structure, a tragic emblem that fuelled a tide against the regime. But our guide, though understanding this focus, was keen to acknowledge the other 20 people who died that day – not all of them black – and to talk of the wider context.

We stopped at Vilkazi Street to see the memorial to Hector, and then to the larger memorial with a museum to one side. The museum was full of different perspectives and ideas, if a little text-heavy. It was an intensely moving, fascinating place – so much so that the Dr was quite quiet for the rest of the evening. Seeing it makes it all the more remarkable that the fall of Apartheid didn’t descend into a bloodbath. Those we spoke to all credited that to Nelson Mandela; and they expressed concern that there was still the risk of major violence. There was much discussion (not all of which I followed) about how the BEE policy, despite its best intentions, had widened, not helped, an epidemic skills gap in the country. They await the forthcoming elections with some anxiety.

In the evening we went out to a place near to where my aunt and uncle live for some food. And again it messed up our preconceptions and prejudices about the place. There was a mix of white and black people there, and me and the Dr were both struck by how much more integrated Johannesburg is than either Australia or LA, where the races seemed to much more stick to their own. Even the airport at Johannesburg had hefty tomes trying to reconcile the past (including a book by the Dr’s PhD supervisor); we saw no acknowledgement at all in LA or Australia of their own contributions to racial history. But then I also can’t see the UK producing anything so self-critical on, say, the history of Northern Ireland.

On Sunday, we had a two-hour trip to the 55,000-hectare Pilanesburg game reserve to the north of Johannesburg and spent the day spotting real, wild hippos, giraffes, impalas, zebras, wildebeests, warthogs and what could have been a crocodile but could have been a log. The aunt and uncle apologised for us not seeing rhino and elephant, but we were very happy.

I tried to explain the astonishing vastness of the landscape, like the horizon has been extended twice as far. Various people have told me that once you’ve lived in Africa it gets into your blood, and the mother-in-law still hankers for the continent some 30 years after she left Kenya. I can sympathise. There’s something rich and potent about the brick-red soil, the hugeness of space with its wealth of animals and under the soil in gold and platinum. I guess human beings evolved to best fit this landscape, this climate, this altitude and everything else. We’re already making plans to go back, to see more…

Odd thing. The toilets at the park all offered free condoms. The toilets at Melbourne Zoo had special boxes for disposing of needles. Not sure what this signifies.

My cousin G. took us to a bar in the evening, and made us feel old by not knowing that the Rolling Stones’ “Paint it Black” was more her mother’s generation than mine. I managed three bottles of Castle beer before we were back to the house for a fantastic spread of spare ribs and some kind of sweetcorn bake.

A quiet day Monday, though we visited the barking mad shopping centre / casino of Montecasino. The whole place is made out like an Italian town, and even the trees and ducks in the river are fake. The ceiling is painted so that half of it’s in “daylight”, the rest at “night”, and I can see when it’s really hot outside it makes sense to hang out in a place like this. But with the constant piped pop music and everything a sell, I was wanting to break out after five minutes. My uncle said it was like the village in the Prisoner – like this was a good thing.

The dire warnings about not bringing your guns into the place, and the security check to get through the door, made me ask about guns in the country. Apparently it's a major problem - people getting shot for beeping bad driving or just for being in the wrong place. Driving is mad too - you don't step on the gas when the lights go green, you pause to let people jump the lights. And the taxi drivers have to be seen to be believed.

After a bit of shopping and chasing the dog round the garden, we made our way to the airport. Plane was two hours late because they’d loaded the wrong baggage on the plane. And then the holiday was all over.

In the taxi from Heathrow, as we got caught up in the tailback behind an accident in Chiswick, I thought how small and squished up the road signs and roads and horizon all seemed. And how pale and cold and unambitious the weather seemed. And how relieved I was to get home and to sleep.

Knowledge or certainty?

It was reading Prime Witness that finally prompted me to make an effort with the Ascent of Man. It’s the third of BBC 2’s decades-old, prestigious, full-colour documentaries, following on from Civilisation (a history of western art) and America. And it endeavours to be something quite unlikely: a history of science without all the boring bits.

This is not an easy proposition. Civilisation and America had both involved pointing the camera at pretty objects and landmarks. The Ascent of Man DVD has a single special feature, in which then-Controller of BBC 2 David Attenborough explains that these were easy ways for the Beeb to flog colour telly. You just had to get some respectable presenter to put the glossy shots in order.

Yet science is less about pretty objects and more about ideas and theory. It is not, as Attenborough admitted, ideally suited to moving pictures as distributed by cathode ray. To solve this knotty conundrum, they commissioned the polymath Jacob Bronowski.

His answer was to cover not just what we think of “science” – laboratory experiments in biology, chemistry and physics – but the broader development of thought, art and articulation. As he says late on in the series, “science” is just another word for “knowledge”. This, then, is the history of how we’ve sussed stuff out.

His examples span art and science, poetry and performance and music. There’s stuff about the way churches were built – physically and politically. And he’s good at adding in funny stories and anecdotes about great scientists he has himself known. At one point he says that “all science is analogy” (– which I wished I’d heard when I wrote The Pirate Loop).

To begin, he asks a deceptively simple question: what makes mankind different from other animals. Bronowski’s contention, in the pre-credit tease of episode one, is that while we have discovered the remains of other species, only humanity leaves behind it the remains of things it has made. We do not merely best fit the circumstances of the world around us, we adapt and shape the landscape, use tools to bend it to our will.

The current reckoning is that about 250,000 years ago, the development of skull and brain in Homo erectus enabled the kind of abstract thought needed to shape and use stone tools. The scion of erectus who most embraced the fashionable new Stone Age were a new species, Homo sapiens – that’s us.

As Bronowski argues, for the great majority of our existence as a species, we’ve been wandering about willy-nilly, foraging after undomesticated animals. Bronowski himself visited the Bakhtiari in Iran, to show how the hand-to-mouth existence following and living off the herd means that there’s little space for innovation or thought outside the box.

Some 10,000 years ago or so, people began to put down roots. Bronowski visits the ruin of Jericho to show how the development of common wheat, fresh-running water and such modern technology as walls completely changed human perspective of what could be done with any day. Rather than disputing the Old Testament, as we might expect from a champion of science, he uses the accounts given in the handed-down stories to add credence to his archaeological proof. The harvest, he argues, meant busy times working in the fields and fighting off those who would steal the resulting bounty, but it also left man free to think and talk and try stuff.

It takes two whole episodes to reach this point, establishing the conditions for history and science as we come to know them. A mere 4,000 or so years after man settles down (i.e. 6,000-ish years ago), he invents two things that will again change life quite utterly – bronze and writing.

It’s the breadth of Bronowski’s knowledge and insight that makes this such a compelling series. He links up all kinds of different ideas in ways that are often surprising. For example, we watch a katana being forged in the traditional method, the metal slow-fired and folded, then fired and folded again. Bronowski shows how this method makes a sword that’s both durable and sharp; as if (his analogy) mixing the desired properties of rubber and of glass. This, he explains, was the both cognitive and alchemical leap that – prior to iron and a bit of carbon making steel – mixed tin and copper as bronze and so got mankind out of the stone age.

It’s no coincidence that this is also the dawn of recorded history – and I’ve heard before the idea that Bishop Ussher’s calculation gives not the date the world was made, but a good approximation of when humans first began to record it. 23 October, 4004 BCE is a rough guess of when pre-history gave way to people keeping records and diaries. The written word enables man to pass on his learning to subsequent generations, so they need not waste time puzzling it out for themselves. In so doing it creates the potential for scientists to climb on to each other’s shoulders.

Once man is mixing alloys and writing, the series comes into its own. Each of the subsequent episodes explores a particular scientific construction – Newton’s mathematics, for example, or heredity and evolution. As part of Attenborough’s brief to provide colourful, arresting images, Bronowski travels the whole world, weaving together all kinds of cultures and stories into his over-all thesis. The images are indelible: a baby being born; a small child taking its first steps; nomadic peoples living the same existence that was humanity’s lot 10,000 years ago.

The music and poetry of the periods in discussion are mixed with wild-eyed modern stuff by Pink Floyd and Dudley Simpson. (I tried to describe Deadly Dudley to the Dr – as an Australian Sir Didymus off of Labyrinth.) Droo fans will also enjoy Brian Hodgson’s trippy sound effects. Surely that’s not the noise that molecules make but some kind of Cyberman gun. The state-of-the-art computer graphics would have been better realised by Kevin Davies and sheets of acetate.

As the series goes on, it becomes evident that Bronowski has an ethical agenda, a morality of science. One episode deals with how the church secretly acknowledged but publicly suppressed Galileo’s observed proofs of Copernicus. The theme returns again and again: Mendel’s studies of heredity being burned by his monastic order, the Nazis burning whole demographic groups.

It’s the best argument I’ve heard to counter the old line that Nazism and the holocaust is what happens when you give free reign to scientists and atheists.

"[It] was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.”

Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, p. 374.

In the broadcast (rather than book) version, he speaks of “despotic belief”, and does so as he steps into the ponds at Auschwitz where members of his own family were butchered. It’s utterly compelling television, more so as the summation of that episode’s whole thesis, that we can never know anything entirely.

That episode, “11. Knowledge or certainty”, is particularly brilliant in explaining the limits of our perception and so of our knowledge. It begins with a blind women feeling the face of an elderly fellow, and telling us what she thinks of him. We then see an artist’s various scribbly impressions of the same man, broad brushstrokes exploring his features.

Bronowski uses this model to explain the limits of our eye sight – “visible” light is only a tiny section of the range of wavelengths. So we run through images of the same man through radio waves, infra red, visible light, ultra violet and x-ray, each filter offering new information and perspective. The last shows us what our eye-sight did not – that’s he’s missing most of his teeth. Yet we still don’t know who or what this elderly man really is.

Bronowski explores gaps in knowledge, and how scientists fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s so they’d be able to keep on asking questions. He speaks of the necessary integrity of science, of people striving for truth that dares confront ideology. The principle of uncertainty established by those fleeing German scientists does not mean that we know nothing, but that we know to build in allowances. The analogy Bronowksi uses is from engineering; a threshold of tolerance.

Scientific thought and discovery thrives where there is tolerance of new ideas and a respect for that integrity. It is not science but dogma when awkward questions are persona non grata. It made me think of Agent Zigzag, and the bureaucracy of the Nazi secret service, where no one could admit to the failings in the system so nothing could be done to fix them.

The episode finishes not, as in the book, with Bronowski putting his hands into the water where the ash of thousands of dead people lie. Rather we return to the old man we’d seen at the beginning. We have seen him through all the wavelengths of light and by touch and extrapolation. But we start to know him, to gain insight into who he might be, when the picture fades to one taken much earlier. When a younger version of him stares forlornly, wan and undernourished, in the striped uniform of the same concentration camp.

It is the sudden spark of cognition, of understanding, that makes it so moving. That episode - not just that scene - is one of the most intelligent and powerful things I've ever seen on telly.

The final episode, filmed mostly in Bronowski’s Californian home, ties up the many disparate threads into a thesis about our future. He talks of teaching in schools and the dangers of ignoring scientific discovery – of downplaying evolution, of not facing uncomfortable truths. Bronowski himself speaks of the end of Western civilisation 50 years from when he’s speaking – or, of the curriculum babies born now will be studying at A-level. The Ascent of Man might continue elsewhere, he says, but the Western – or, more accurately, the English-speaking – claim on it will be a footnote in another culture’s history. By not facing history and not exploring the present, we write ourselves out of the future.

I wonder what he’d make of now. And would a series like this be possible today? Matthew Collings’ recent update of Civilisation only ran for four episodes, which the Dr says is indicative of modern telly’s impatience. I think it may also be that a lot of what he’s addressing and showing onscreen is more readily available to us; a sizeable number of those watching Civilisation back in 1969 would not have seen much of the stuff on it before.

I think there’s a market for a new history of science, one that does not ignore the controversies where evidence meets belief. One that perhaps takes its cue from Bill Bryson’s tolerant and plain English Brief History of Everything (which I see’s been re-released in a lavish and illustrated version, proving again that these difficult theories and ideas can be visualised).

One that asks the simple questions behind all science of tolerance and integrity… Why is it like that? Oh really? It’s an interesting idea, but can you prove it?