George Markstein and the Prisoner, ed. Roger Goodman

George Markstein (1926 — but perhaps 1929 — to 1987) was a journalist and writer, probably best known as script editor of the first 13 episodes of The Prisoner (1967-68). He also appears in the title sequence, as the bald bureaucrat at whom Patrick McGoohan crossly resigns. Ironically, it was Markstein who crossly left the series.

I’ve been interested in Markstein since reading about his falling out with fellow writer David Whitaker when the latter was sent to Moscow in July 1969 on behalf of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain to protest the treatment of Solzhenitsyn. At the guild’s AGM on 31 May the following year, Markstein made a number of claims about what had happened in Moscow, despite not having been there. On at least one point he had to apologise because the source of his claims, writer Lewis Greifer, was there to rebut them. See pp. 333-334 of my book for more.

Greifer also crops up in this slim volume, available to buy from Portmeirion (where The Prisoner was filmed), which sketches a fascinating portrait of Markstein — or rather, of what we don’t know about him. 

“It escapes me why GM’s birthdate should have come so contentious in website discussions,” says his friend Sidney Allinson in the introduction (p. 4). “In fact, he was born in 1926” — though no source is given for this fact — “which would make him about 21 years of age in 1947, which was when I knew him. We both worked as reporters with The Southport Guardian newspaper [in Merseyside.] At the time, for reasons best known to himself, he presented himself as being an American, complete with an authentic-sounding accent.”

We can understand why, in the years immediately after the Second World War, a German-born young man would want to hide his real accent and identity. In what follows, we learn Markstein also presented himself as Canadian though it’s thought he was actually born in Berlin and moved to England with his Jewish mother before the outbreak of war. 

In her contribution to this book, “A Cooler Shade of George Markstein” (pp. 10-17) Catherine Nemeth Frumerman says mother and son moved to London in 1935 when George was about nine, adding that he was born Gustav Georg to actress Grete Maria Markstein — who in turn claimed to be the daughter of Albert Einstein. The source for this is apparently Michele Zackheim's Einstein's Daughter: The Search for Lieserl, which it says here was published by Riverhead Books in 2000. Frumerman says this information may have come from Markstein’s business partner Jacqui Lyons, who is thanked but not directly quoted by Zackheim.

But Ricky Davy in “So Who Was George Markstein?” (pp. 20-52) says Zackheim’s book was published in 1999 and is more sceptical about what is claimed.

“The book is an account of the life [of] a German woman named Grete Markstein, who believed herself to be the daughter of Einstein. Her son, Gustav Georg Markstein, it is claimed, later became George Markstein (via a name change to Herschdoerfer following Greta’s 1935 marriage). Knowledge in the book of this man ends in 1947 in Cheshire, several years after Grete passed away, and no tangible proof is given that George and Georg are the same person, although the tale does have some plausibility.” (p. 22)

Cheshire borders Merseyside, where Allinson worked with Markstein in 1947. So maybe, maybe, he was the same person as Georg. But was he really Einstein's grandson? In fact, Einstein's daughter Lieserl, is thought to have been born in 1902 but to have died the following year. 

This is just one example of competing claims in the book. Central to this is Markstein’s repeated claim to have conceived The Prisoner, based on his knowledge of the real-life Inverlair Lodge, which was from 1941 No. 6 Special Workshop School of the Special Operations Executive (SOE). In contrast, star Patrick McGoohan claimed to have conceived the initial idea as well as to have dictated much of what made it to the screen. 

“Creator of the Whole Fantasy — A Correspondence Between George Markstein & Roger Goodman” (pp. 54-67) details Markstein’s various claims and reproduces several of his letters (and Christmas cards).  “When The Secret Agent Is Whisked Away” (pp. 78-95) is a transcript of Goodman’s interview with Markstein on 19 April 1980 at the ICA in London following a screening of The Prisoner episode Checkmate. Repeatedly, Markstein speaks of television as a collaborative enterprise with no single author  — while reiterating that The Prisoner was his idea. But note the manner in which he doesn’t answer some questions, leaving us to fill in the blanks.

“Q: Mr Markstein, you said earlier on that you felt that the concept of the Village was not as far-fetched as it may have seemed at the time, certainly not today. Do you have any evidence of that?

George: Yes.

Q: You do?

George: Yes.

Q: You are not going to elaborate?

George: I cannot. I am not prepared to discuss certain things, because I cannot.” (p. 94)

It’s a very odd interview, Markstein railing variously against computers and CCTV, the “era of experts” and the state of television at the time, but denying that television has any power to influence the thinking of the viewer. “Never have we had less freedom,” he declares at one point (p. 86), on the basis that we must empty our pockets before getting on a plane and that the Mall in London is closed to traffic.

“Is it because it is a Sunday and the Queen wants to sleep late? The Queen isn’t even in London, she is in Windsor. That’s why I’m against technology. You might ask what has the Queen and Buckingham Palace got to do with technology, but it all ties in. I am against progress.” (p. 86)

Dave Barrie’s “Who Is Number One?” (pp. 75-77) sifts such evidence but favours McGoohan as “the driving force [behind The Prisoner]from very early on” (p. 77). James Follett’s “There's No Mystery” (p. 97) counters that “Patrick McGoohan was not a story man.” The book ends with a quotation from Joan Drummond McGoohan underlining her late husband's central role — cited here under the title “Who knows?” (p. 98)

To be honest, I think identifying who came up with the initial idea is less interesting a question than how it then developed into what we saw on screen week after week, and why Markstein and McGoohan were both so proprietorial about this particular series. The idea that it’s down to a single person seems oddly reductive, making it somehow less. 

As for Markstein, we are told that he was and remains a “sphinx”. Having read this book, I think he’s less enigma as unreliable source. 

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 Furious Masters, by Margot Bennett

This is a review of a comic science-fiction novel from 1968, sort of John Wyndham done as sitcom. Yet in poking fun at the mores and anxieties of its time, there are things here worth a content warning for sexual violence. 

Characters - male and female - repeatedly joke about rape and when one woman is stripped naked and murdered, it's played for comic effect. I'm not sure how much that's the author satirising misogyny of the period or being steeped in it herself and, given the overall light comic tone, I'm not sure how much that's on purpose. There's a lot going on under the surface.

At 3 am on 16 May, a sonic boom is heard across Yorkshire, trembling windows in Huddersfield and so terrifying the animals at a farm in Highfield-on-Moor that egg production drops by 40%. Two days later, farmer John Holman writes an angry letter to a government department to complain, believing the boom to have been caused by the RAF running exercises. The ministry denies any such exercise has taken place. 

Meanwhile, four precocious students from Oxford - Cressida, Robbie, Sue and David - go hiking across the moor and discover a strange object:

"The main body was a big, squat, metal cuboid, four feet high and over five across. On each side there were three-inch square slots, which on examination appeared to be filled with thick glass. The body was covered by a low pyramid, from which two long cup-ended tentacles projected at different angles. They looked very like aerials. A thick rod rose several feet above the pyramid to support two flat rectangular sheets of metal; one almost parallel to the ground, the other about ten degrees off the perpendicular." (p. 14)

They're soon joined by photographer Henry Brown, who takes atmospheric snaps of Cressida in front of this "spacecraft" and then hurries down to London to sell them to the papers. Soon people are queuing up to see the "Martian" lander, Holman fencing off his land and charging entry. News reporters come by helicopter, the police turn out in force, the local vicar has a moral perspective on all these proceedings, and even the Prime Minister is making pronouncements on TV about what he thinks is going on, based more on what he'd like to think than the evidence on the ground.

In all this frenzy, it takes a while for the students - and the reader - to spot the effects that this lander seems to have on those who get close it. They become more frenzied, angry, violent... The title of the novel refers to the "furious masters of lust and violence" that govern our behaviour.

We get our first clue to what's going on just after Henry photograph Cressida, thrilled by the possibility that these pictures will make him famous. They're also both hot from the walk and the sunny day, and the heat given off by the "spaceship". Henry suddenly changes tack:

"'I wa thinking to hell with fame and what's the hurry [to get to London] and I should pull you down and...' He put his arms around her and rubbed his face against hers. 'And make love to you on this fine bouncy grass.'" (p. 19)

Cressida initially seems keen but then a sheep bleats nearby and ruins the moment. Cressida admits that she likes Henry but thinks they should call the police to inform them about the lander. Henry persists: 

"I should have raped you [but] I'm over-civilised" (p. 20). 

Cressida laughs this off, but it's the first of many casual references to sexual violence. Later, this is linked to sexual liberation - or the lack of it:

"Cressida and Sue ran across the grass to the helicopter.

'Would you have minded being raped?' Sue asked in her shrill, clear voice, as they climbed on board.

'Yes.'

'With your inhibitions, naturally. I would have liked to be raped. It makes a nice change.'

'Being raped by one man is all very well. But I had two after me. And Sabine women aren't in this year.'" (p. 83)

The casual tone of all this is shocking, but surely a conscious choice by the author. In part, it's satirising sexual liberation. It's also not so different with the comments by members of the public from the time responding to the sexual assault depicted in The Forsyte Saga, which are included as extras on the DVD of that serial. But one big element of the novel is competing ideas about the cause of the increasing violence: whether it's something being done to us by the "spaceship" or something inside us all anyway that's been given an excuse to let rip. As Cressida and Sue have this conversation, is it a new or prevailing attitude?

As I said, much of the violence here is played for comic effect. When Cressida rebuffs Henry's advances, he resorts to attacking his own blown-up photographs of her. Another character makes a clumsy attempt to break into the bathroom when she's in there. In both cases, the threat is undercut by the inadequacies of these men. Later, as things get every more frenzied, another woman is stripped naked and murdered in a church as part of a kind of ritual sacrifice, but the vicar and congregation don sunglasses so as not to see anything rude.

A lot of these incidents feel like comic sketches. The novel is often funny and well observed, its targets including the press, police, church and civil service bureaucracy. There are some great one-liners:

"I must say Mars couldn't have chosen a more awkward time for the Minister." (p. 36)

But many of the gags are specifically visual in nature. Margot Bennett has a knack for conjuring vivid, strange images - such as this glimpse of the fauna of another world:

"Could the population of Mars, formerly supposed to consist of small snails, have devised a machine capable of driving human beings mad?" (p. 139)

Often, we "see" the comic events taking place, such as squabbles over who is in charge of a helicopter, or the top secret files raining down from an open window on to people rioting in the street. With its lively characters and set pieces, I could easily see this being dramatised - and perhaps Bennett, a prolific writer for TV, did so too. In fact, one reason I was so keen to read this novel is that it had been suggested to me that it originated in an idea Bennett may have offered Doctor Who. 

Her name is listed in two internal BBC documents, one from 28 February 1964 and one undated but probably from 2 March, with the idea to commission a four-part story from her to cover the potential loss of what ultimately became Planet of Giants. Nothing else is known about what Bennett's story might have involved.

If it was the seed of what became The Furious Masters, I can see why it didn't go any further as a Doctor Who adventure. On 20 February, story editor David Whitaker declined a story by another would-be writer, David Fisher, on the basis that it was set in the 20th century; the production team wanted Doctor Who to visit other times and places. We don't know much about Fisher's The Face of the Fire, other than it involved the effects of a machine discovered under the Wessex Downs. If this didn't meet with approval, the same was surely true of an idea from Bennett about the effects of a machine found on the moors in Yorkshire.

I'm continuing to look into this, and have in sight Bennett's other science fiction novel, The Long Way Back (1955) and her non-fiction The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Atomic Radiation (1964). Note that the latter is from around the time she was mooted for Doctor Who, so perhaps that will provide further clues.

See also:

• Me on The Man Who Didn't Fly, a detective novel by Margot Bennett
• Me on The Victorian Chaise-Longue, a science-fiction novella by Marghanita Laski, another author considered for the first year of Doctor Who
• Buy my biography, David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television
• Memoirs of the Spacewomen, a 2015 radio documentary about the work of Margot Bennett, Naomi Mitchison and Rose Macaulay, presented by Matthew Sweet and produced by Allegra McIlroy

Garry Halliday and the Flying Foxes, by Justin Blake

This is the last of the five Garry Halliday novelisations, published in 1965. That was three years after the last new episode of the TV series Garry Halliday was broadcast and two years after the last repeat. 

The odd thing is that it marks a new beginning, the first adventure not to feature the villainous Voice and the first to feature potential new love interest Vicky Fox. It ends on a bit of a cliffhanger about Garry and Vicky's relationship... 

Whatever the authors might have had in mind, it would have been very different on TV. Here, Vicky is left mourning her brother Nigel who, in giving his life, makes amends for some bad choices. On TV, Nigel survived and was part of the Garry Halliday series for all subsequent adventures.

I was particularly interested to read this novelisation because the TV version is credited to writer David Whitaker - about whom there is quite a good book. There’s no mention of David in the novelisation. He's not there in the indicia, where it is (c) 1965 Justin Blake - the pseudonym of John Bowen and Jeremy Bullmore, creators of Garry Halliday. I’ll dig into why not when I write up the production notes for the episode guide entry on this adventure.

After the events of the previous adventure and the death of the Voice, Garry and his co-pilot Bill Dodds return from Tripoli to their office/home on an airfield in Kent. There they discover that, in their absence, a rival charter airline has taken most of their business, undercutting their prices by 25%. Garry doesn’t exactly run his airline to get rich so the Flying Foxes company must be running at a loss to put him out of business. That means they’ve got money behind them. When Garry looks into it, and watches a flight coming into land (as seen on the cover of the book), he spots something suspicious. Soon, the trail leads him to Rome where a drug developed to prolong life has the opposite effect…

As before, it's a lively, fast-moving, twisty plot involving adventures overseas and some fun, funny set pieces. Sadly, new villain da Rica - aka "the spider" - isn't a patch on the Voice. He's an American hoodlum who takes copious amounts of the BDM drug that he's also involved in smuggling, but there's little sense of a personality. The Voice was so distinctive, he was a selling point for the series; da Rica is a bit generic.

It's odd, too, that the elements set in Rome come so late rather than being part of the sell of the new story from the start. Instead, the opening instalments are set in Kent, around the airfield where Garry Halliday is based and in a nearby lake. It's not especially exciting. When a villain then breaks into Garry's office/home, I was reminded of a similar sequence in the second story - the series repeating itself.

Even so, there's plenty of fun stuff here. One chapter opens by telling us that Bill Dodds "shows enormous intelligence and perspicuity" (p. 25) in what is to follow, underlining his active role in proceedings, and not merely as comic foil. When the plot involves convincing the public that Garry has been killed, Bill gamely heads up to BBC TV Centre and then takes part in a live interview for Tonight in the studios at Lime Grove, with a cameo by real-life presenter Cliff Michelmore. That's not mentioned in the scant surviving paperwork relating to the series - I wonder if it happened on screen?

The supposed death of Garry Halliday causes some problems for the plot. The "death" is contrived to fool da Rica, who duly reads obituaries in the press. But the plot also involves da Rica and his henchperson Luigi not knowing what Garry looks like and so mistaking him for someone else. Presumably at least one obituary ran a photograph.

Similarly, the plot involves smuggled quantities of the age-defying drug, BDM. Before scientific analysis identifies what this is, Garry tries some of it to test that it's not cocaine or heroin - which I don't think is best practice for airline pilots. Other characters also try the drugs. They continue to do so even after it becomes apparent that one batch of the drug is in fact deadly.

The novelisation is surely based on the original storyline and scripts that Bowen and Bullmore delivered before they were reworked by in-house writer David Whitaker, in liaison with uncredited script editor Richard Wade and producer Richard West. It's difficult to know how different the TV version was - though, as I'll detail when I get to the production notes on the episode guide - Bowen and Bullmore clearly felt it departed a great deal from what they'd intended.

But one practical change is evident. In the novelisation, drugs are tested on 20 batches of rabbits, labelled A to J. The chapter "The Secret of Batch J" reveals that one of these batches is deadly. On TV, the same instalment was "The Secret of Batch 3", suggesting a reduced scale, perhaps no more than three hutches, manageable on set.

I wonder, too, how much a moment in which Sonya Delamere - Bill Dodd's fiancee, a returning character who has so little to do in this serial - watches the new girl reflected feelings of the cast.

"The little pang of jealousy Sonya felt was because Vicky was going off to do the kind of thing she used to do herself. But Sonya knew well enough why Vicky had to do it, and being a sensible girl, she stifled her pang, and kept it to herself." (p. 76)

It's an engaging, exciting story but what tantalises me most is how accurate a record it is of the TV version and of what the cast and crew may have felt.

ETA: There's now a full entry on the TV version of this story at the Garry Halliday episode guide.

Dead Lions, by Mick Herron

How do you bring an audience up to speed on the story so far?

I posted in April that the surviving episode of children's adventure serial Garry Halliday (from 1960) begins with a minute-long recap, showing stills of 10 different characters and detailing multiple twists. As I said, we can compare that to the opening moments of a rare, surviving episode of soap opera Compact (from 1962), where there's no narrated recap but everything we need to know is relayed concisely in the opening scene.

The second Slow Horses novel bring us up to speed from the perspective of an imaginary cat stalking the offices of Slough House floor by floor, describing the disgraced intelligence operatives working there. That includes the two new characters replacing characters killed in the first novel. It's a bold conceit for a series grounded in the grubbily, boringly and compellingly real and could fast become wearying. But, kept to just an introductory sequence and used to delineate the distinctive features of each of the main characters, I think Mick Herron gets away with it.

The sequence ends with a pen portrait of slovenly Jackson Lamb on the top floor who would, if the cat really existed, throw it out of the window to its death. The point is that Lamb is quicker and more ruthless than he might appear, and in the story that follows his long experience and cynical perspective mean he's the one intelligence operative not to be fooled...

Once again, the TV version - which I came to first - is a very close adaptation of the book, the main difference that a final confrontation with a baddie involves young River Cartwright in the book and Jackson Lamb on TV. River was the protagonist of the first book and TV series, but we're already seeing the focus shift. It's the same phenomenon, I think, as Captain Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation or President Bartlett in The West Wing. Each was originally envisioned as a kind of guest star who'd appear infrequently to offer wise counsel, while the focus was on the ordinary staff getting into scrapes and adventures. The issue, I think, is that the authority of such characters exerts something like gravitational force, and the more a series continues, the more it is drawn to that power.

The novel ends with another tour of Slough House, this time from the perspective of a mouse. It's effectively the punchline to a book-long joke. I wasn't at first sure whether this was another hypothetical creature but it turns out to be real - and prompts Jackson Lamb to wonder if they need a cat.

Conan Doyle: Mystery and Adventure, by Mark Jones

In 1967, BBC Two broadcast a 13-episode anthology of adaptations of short stories by Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle. The series was variously known as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and The Short Stories of Conan Doyle, and generally well reviewed. What's more, it was the first TV series overseen by John Hawkesworth, who went on to even greater acclaim with The Gold Robbers (1969), Upstairs Downstairs (1971-75) and The Duchess of Duke Street (1976-77), before developing for television The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1984-85), starring Jeremy Brett.

Just one episode of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle survives - the very odd The Mystery of Cader Ifan, which I saw for the first time last week at Kaleidoscope's "The Play's the Thing" event in Birmingham. But Mark Jones' comprehensive study details production of the series, based on Hawkesworth's extensive archive at the BFI, paperwork in the BBC's Written Archives Centre, press reports from the time and interviews with cast and crew. It offers a wealth of detail and insight, with plenty of photographs, clippings and illustrations from the original stories helping to conjure a vivid sense of what has been lost.

As Jones explains, for rights reasons the series had only a limited release overseas, which means there is perilously little chance of copies of the missing episodes ever being found. Doctor Who fans can torture ourselves with the promise that some of the missing 97 episodes might yet be out there, somewhere. There's endless discussion of the various possible leads and of which episodes we'd most want returned - the Missing Episodes podcast is very good on this - which makes me fidgety with stress. It's almost refreshing to start from the basis that stuff has gone for good.

Among the fascinating things here is the influence of other anthologies of old stories, notably Granada's Saki (1962), Maupassant (1963) and The Liars (1966), in which the original sources were reworked so that characters would recur through the run. The BBC's head of serials, Gerald Savory, who'd worked on some of these series, advised Hawkesworth to do the same (pp. 17-19). We then seen the problems this caused for production, with clashing schedules for filming and rehearsals. 

Some practicalities are surprising: on The Lift, it turned out to be easier to film in Paris than in Blackpool. And how extraordinary to see the viewing figures for a "successful" series on BBC Two of the time: an audience of 450,000 watched The Willow House School on 26 February 1967 (p. 154); just 250,000 watched The Mystery of Cader Ifan on 12 March (p. 194). Eleven of the 13 episodes were repeated on BBC One between August 1967 and June 1968, in a mixed up order that played havoc with the continuity of the recurring characters. It would be interesting to know the viewing figures, those these don't appear to survive.

Other things struck me because of overlaps with my own bits of research. In romantic episode The Chemistry of Love, one of the recurring characters, Tom Crabbe (Keith Buckley) goes to a posh reception disguised as the vice-principal of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, one Anton Mikhailovich Asimov. This character is not in Doyle's original story, "A Physiologist's Wife", so is an invention of Hawkesworth and the name of the invented scientist is striking. At the time that the title of the TV episode was changed (2 November 1966, p. 90), production was under way on a Doctor Who story that directly referenced the work of science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov: in Episodes 2 and 3 of The Power of the Daleks, the scientist Lesterson speaks of the Daleks having "positronic" brains. (In Episode 5 of The Evil of the Daleks (1967), positronic brains containing the "human factor" are added to three Daleks.)

Isaac Asimov was a well known figure, with several of his works adapted for British television: "Little Lost Robot" shown as part of Out of this World (1962), The Caves of Steel adapted for Story Parade (1964) and six stories adapted for Out of the Unknown (1965-69, four of them prior to the broadcast of The Chemistry of Love. Why would both Doctor Who and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle connect themselves to Asimov at roughly the same time? My guess is that both were in response to his epic Foundation novels winning the Hugo Award for Best All-Time Series at the Tricon world science-fiction convention in the first week of September 1966. Foundation was originally a series of short stories that the author then reworked, which may have appealed to Hawkesworth doing something with Doyle.  

There's another connection to The Evil of the Daleks, in that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle filmed at Grims Dyke house on 20 January 1967 (p. 171), three months before the Daleks were there; I've added the details to my list of filming at Grims Dyke. There are further connections between Doctor Who and this Doyle series simply because several cast and crew worked on both. Richard Martin, interviewed by Jones on 12 July 2022, recalls using vaseline on "special fronts to the camera" (p. 57) to achieve a ghostly effect on the mummy seen in Lot 249, having pioneered this technique - to resistance from the crew, he says - on Doctor Who (for the strange atmosphere of planet Vortis in The Web Planet). Martin also recalls his working methods:

"I was always fairly well pressed to do the camera script in time. ... I used to go in my study at home and would consume most of a bottle of whisky. I'd be up to four o'clock in the morning, and maybe just have a little bit of rest before having to go in and deliver this script. The real problem was trying to get enough rehearsal time. I'm a rehearsal addict. I love seeing what the actors do with the script and capturing what they do correctly." (p. 57)

In assessing these lost episodes, Jones asks how closely they kept to Doyle's original stories, how effective they were as drama and in conjuring an atmosphere, and how sharply we should feel their loss. My sense is that he'd most like to see the spooky episodes returned. But if we're playing the game of which of thee lost stories I'd most like to see, I'm haunted by The Croxley Master. 

Medical student (and recurring character) Philip Hardacre is a medical student, forced to work for the pompous, lazy Dr Lichfield as the only means to pay his own university fees. Then Philip learns of a boxer pulling out of a forthcoming fight. Encouraged by surgery maid Mary, Philip agrees to take the man's place and go 20 rounds against the "Croxley Master" for a prize of £100. 

This "master" is the tough and dishonest Silver Craggs. Against all odds, and by fighting fairly, Philip knocks out his opponent. Whereupon Craggs' mistress, Anastasia, played by brilliant Alethea Charlton, 

"storms into the ring and lands Philip a tremendous blow on the jaw which fells him to the boards. As Mary and Anastasia start fighting, the two heroes of the fight are forgotten, lying side by side, unconscious on the canvas." (p. 69)

See also:

• Me on The Sign of the Four, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 
• My article "My immortal Holmes" in the Lancet Psychiatry
• My review of 2015 film Mr Holmes in the Lancet Psychiatry
• My novel The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Great War

Doctor Who Magazine #608

The new issue of the official Doctor Who Magazine is out today. My regular Script to Screen feature (pp. 26-30) this time covers the slug-like Mantraps seen in Dot and Bubble, for which I interviewed executive producer Joel Collins and production designer Phil Sims.

There's also a review of Deathworld, the story I script edited for Big Finish, which Jamie Lenman finds "surprising, and really quite touching". In Galaxy Forum, reader Bill Silver says nice things about the work Gav Rymill, Rhys Williams and I did on recreating the sets of missing episodes in the recent special issue.

And I think Eddie Robson's fun "This month in..." column (p. 49) uses an image of Doctor Who creators Sydney Newman and Donald Wilson that I spotted in an old issue of BBC in-house magazine Ariel, snapped on my phone and then cropped - those are Judi Dench's hands (and wine glass) in the bottom left.

Aerial, December 1967

Garry Halliday and the Sands of Time, by Justin Blake

I'm ploughing on with my episode guide to the BBC children's serial Garry Halliday (1959-62), and ahead of an entry there on the fourth of the eight serials, here are some thoughts on the novelisation.

At the end of the third Garry Halliday novelisation, airline pilot and adventurer Garry skis down a mountain in Switzerland in time to catch the elusive criminal mastermind known as the Voice. Until now, no one - not even his own henchpeople - have seen his face. The Voice is sent to prison - and then promptly escapes.

In this next adventure, the Voice aims to deal with the 10 people who clapped eyes on him during his short time as captive, and thus regain his anonymity. The Swiss police inspector, the pilot of the plane who flew the Voice from Switzerland back to London and some prison staff at Pentonville each go missing for a week or so, and then are found with their memories wiped. As Garry, his trusty co-pilot Bill Dodds and their friend Inspector Potter from Scotland Yard investigate, they too face capture and the same sinister process.

This fourth Garry Halliday serial - broadcast over seven weeks between 5 November and 17 December 1960, never repeated but published in book form around September 1963 - taps into a contemporary fear. Brainwash Culture, Daniel Pick's 2016 documentary for Radio 3, is very good on the history of this, in real life and popular culture (and very useful when I wrote my book on 1967 Doctor Who story The Evil of the Daleks).

In short, during the Korean War (1950-53), reports emerged of coercive techniques being used by Maoist forces. This "brainwashing" was cited to explain why western prisoners of war had apparently aided their captors and why 21 American soldiers asked not to be repatriated. Whatever the truth behind these claims, they informed Richard Condon's 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate, in which a loyal American soldier undergoes conditioning that makes him commit treason. An acclaimed film version starring Frank Sinatra was released in 1962, the same year that Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange and Len Deighton's The IPCRESS File were published, both exploring the disturbing ways in which such techniques might be exploited.

We can see similar ideas being explored in such fare as the 1963 film The Mind Benders, the opening of Ian Fleming's 1964 novel, The Man with the Golden Gun (when James Bond is the victim of such techniques!) and lot of early Doctor Who. It's a particularly effective wheeze in TV and film, where we can see the conflict of "good" characters struggling to fight the conditioning.

Garry Halliday was tapping into the zeitgeist and was perhaps even a bit ahead of the game. But it's odd that the characters we see brainwashed are mostly those we don't otherwise know - the Swiss inspector and prison staff. Inspector Potter, who is also subjected to the technique, featured in the previous serial but played by a different actor, which may have lessened the impact of seeing him "turned" to work for the villains. At one point, Garry Halliday succumbs to the drugged water that begins the brainwashing process but we don't see him act out of character. Bill Dodds is also unaffected. It felt to me as though an obvious bit of drama had been missed.

Then there's the sense of the novelisation patching over holes in the storyline, for example why the Voice can only be recognised by the few people who saw him, rather than from a mug shot when he was arrested.

"What records there were of him had disappeared. There was one newspaper photograph. Even the Voice couldn't get rid of every copy of a newspaper with a circulation of four and a half million. The newspaper picture was blurred and grey on bad paper. It showed a bulky man with an arm over his face. Such as it was, it had been circulated to the police of every country in the world. Most of those to whom if had been circulated had replied, more or les politely, that it seemed useless as a means of identification." (p. 19)

The not quite stated implication is that he has people in the police and in newsrooms who have disposed of the original photographs. The irony, of course, is that very little in the way of visual or written records survive related to Garry Halliday.

That makes it difficult to grasp exactly what this serial would have looked and felt like on screen. As on previous serials, the location filming featured in publicity. In the story, the Voice is working from the fictional state of Balakesh, a short distance from real-life Tripoli. Producer Richard West says in his memoir The Reluctant Soldier & Greasepaint and Girls that he, co-writer Jeremy Bullmore, lead actor Terence Longdon, cameraman Tony Good and West's assistant (which may have been Jean Hart) flew out to Tripoli to film picturesque shots on location, without any idea what the story would entail. The plot would be devised around whatever they shot.

In fact, West says, not having prior permission to film outside the American-run Wheelus Air Base, they were all arrested. On another occasion, locals interrupted filming by throwing rocks. The suggestion is that the guerrilla crew didn't get as much footage as they'd have liked and these frustrations may have coloured the way that Balakesh was depicted.

There had been criticism of previous Garry Halliday serials for stereotypical depictions of silly foreigners. The Arabs here are by turns parochial, corrupt and greedy. Bill Dodds at one point adopts a disguise, half naked and blacked up. The novelisation tells us, not very convincingly, that this was,

"not in the hope of being taken for an Arab but simply so as to make it more difficult for anyone to see him" (p. 105).

Halliday expresses horror at the death penalty being used in Balakesh, though capital punishment wasn't abolished in the UK until 1965 (and not until 2000 for all circumstances). But I think the harshness of the regime is all set-up for the end of the story. The Sheikh allows the Voice to escape into the desert, which is effectively a death sentence. The Voice is last seen wandering lost in the sand with nothing to drink.

There's no mention in the surviving sources that actor Elwyn Brook-Jones was part of the crew out in Tripoli, so I wonder how this haunting scene was conveyed on screen. As with the ski chase at the end of the previous serial, it has the potential for arresting visuals if filmed out on location, and for something much less exciting if realised in studio.

On TV, this wasn't the end of the Voice. Yet by the time the book was published, Brook-Jones was dead and Garry Halliday was no longer being made or repeated. The authors therefore tell us in a foreword that this is the last of Halliday's encounters with the Voice and provide some background to the character. They say this is what Halliday subsequently learned - suggesting that this information was not given in the TV version.

Bill Dodds and his fiancee Sonya Delamare, played by Terence Alexander and his wife Juno, had also left the series, their last appearance at the end of the fifth serial. In this, their penultimate adventure, Sonya has relatively little to do, and based on the novelisation it doesn't look as though the couple were involved in location filming. Oddly, whereas the previous three novelisations were narrated by Dodds, here the story is told in the third person, as if preparing the way for his exit. We're told Bill and Sonya are now happily,

"settled down to domestic life and two kids (at the present count)" (p. 11)

But I wonder how happy things really were as the actors left the series.

Don't Stop the Music, by Justin Lewis

By fun coincidence, I received a copy of this book - recommended to me by various friends since publication last year - two days after happening to meet its author. By another fun coincidence, I've finally read it having just read Question 7 by Richard Flanagan, which explores the idea of the past and present all happening at once. In Don't Stop the Music, the idea is more, I think, that there's an overlapping past.

This is basically a sort of toilet book full of odd bits of pop music history. But the organising principle lifts it into something else. Lewis provides facts for each calendar day of the year, in chronological order. In the very first entry, we learn that on 1 January 1958 Johnny Cash plays his first concert at San Quentin State Prison in California, where future country-and-western singer Merle Haggard is one of the captive audience (the author's pun). On the same day in 1962, the Beatles record five songs for Decca Records, who turn them down. On the same day two years later, the Beatles are at #1 with 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' and the first edition of Top of the Pops is broadcast on the BBC (featuring Dusty Springfield, the Rolling Stones and the Hollies). On the same day in 1990, Florida radio station WKRL plays 'Stairway to Heaven' by Led Zeppelin - and continues to repeat it non-stop for 24 hours.

Note the present tense of all this: these bits of history are still happening now, a sense reinforced by the fact that we can hear the music. In fact, I read this with my phone handy to look up tracks on iTunes - stuff I'd not heard in a while, stuff that was wholly new.

Also, note the range in just this first entry: pop and rock and country, reaching right back to the birth of rock n' roll - and beyond. Other entries bring us up to date, or at least to time of publication. There's also a diversity of entry: some funny, some weird and some poignant.

There's plenty here I didn't know, for example that the launch of Sputnik 2 in October 1957 was timed to coincide with the International Geophysical Year involving 67 different countries. I knew about the IGY from when, more than a decade ago, the Dr worked on a BBC archive project which put old clips and programmes online. One thing she and her team dug out was The Restless Sphere, a programme presented by the Duke of Edinburgh - live - giving an overview of all the work planned. I'd not made the connection between that and the space programme, and I learn from Lewis that the IGY was also commemorated in 1982, in the opening track of Donald Fagen's first solo album after leaving Steely Dan, Fagen looking back to the promise of a future that should have been the then-now.

The book is full of these kinds of connections and juxtapositions. One song or event influences another, or the backing singing of one band then has their own entry as a star. These connections are the point; in the introduction Lewis says the lack of an index is a creative decision as he wanted to ensure the book is "a little more than a dipping-in exercise." What I'd really like instead is a map. 

By another fun coincidence, I've used a similar organising principle for Doctor Who: The Time-Travelling Almanac, which is out next month. My hope there was to conjure a sense of the year as physical journey as we go round and round the Sun, so the anniversary of any particular date is us returning to the same spot. In my book, that then sparks other thoughts and peregrinations, some of them much longer than the entries here. It's a different kind of journey, I think, but starting from a similar place.

Garry Halliday episode guide

I've posted the first two entries in what I hope will be an exhaustive guide to Garry Halliday, a BBC serial about the adventures of an airline pilot created by Justin Blake (i.e. John Bowen and Jeremy Bullmore), that ran between 1959 and 1962.

The BBC made 50 episodes, only one of which survives. But Doctor Who was devised to fill the same Saturday teatime slot and I think owes a significant amount to Halliday, which I'll tease out as I go through the history.

As with Doctor Who, there were novelisations of Garry Halliday's TV adventures. I now have copies of all five Garry Halliday books, and have already posted reviews here of the first three of them:

• Garry Halliday and the Disappearing Diamonds (1960)
• Garry Halliday and the Ray of Death (1961)
• Garry Halliday and the Kidnapped Five (1962)

Slow Horses, by Mick Herron

River Cartwright is a nepo baby in MI5, his grandfather a retired top spook. But River cocks up a big operation and, in disgrace, is assigned to Slough House with all the other service failures — the so-called "slow horses". There, he's given such menial jobs as listing the contents of a journalist's rubbish bin... But then a young man is kidnapped by extremists and the slow horses might be his only hope of surviving.

The TV version sticks closely to this thrilling, dour and often funny spy caper so I knew pretty much what was coming. A few things are different just because the book is set around the time of publication in 2010, in the shadow of the then-recent 7/7 bombings in London.

That made me think about the context of the references to real people, such as Russell T Davies being named in a newspaper masthead (p. 28) — presumably in a story about what he was up to immediately post-Doctor Who. On another occasion, we're told that the head of Slough House, Jackson Lamb, resembles and could be played by Timothy Spall (p. 32), which is jarring now Lamb has been brought so soddenly to life by Gary Oldman. 

These references add verisimilitude to the grubby, kitchen-sink reality. But that only makes it all the odder when Herron draws so closely from a real person to describe a fictional cabinet minister:

"Peter Judd. PJ to his friends, and everyone else. Fluffy-hair and youthful at forty-eight, and with a vocabulary peppered with archaic expostulations — Balderdash! Tommy-rot!! Oh my giddy aunt!!! — Peter Judd had long established himself as the unthreatening face of the old-school right, popular enough with the Great British Public, which though him an amiable idiot, to make a second living outside Parliament as a rent-a-quote-media-whore-cum-quiz-show-panel-favourite, and to get away with minor peccadilloes like dicking his kids' nanny, robbing the taxman blind, and giving his party leader conniptions with off-script flourishes. ('Damn fine city,' he'd remarked on a trip to Paris. 'Probably worth defending next time.') Not everyone who'd worked with him thought him a total buffoon, and some who'd witnessed him lose his temper suspected him of political savvy, but by and large PJ seemed happy with the image he'd either fostered or been born with: a loose cannon with a floppy haircut and a bicycle." (p. 187)

This amiable bungler — played by Sam West on TV — turns out to be more right wing and ruthless than he first appears. He's ambitious, too, with his eye on further power. Well, we've been there, done that now.

There are a lot of machinations here, the security service riven with people plotting and counterplotting, betraying their friends to further their own careers or to cover their behinds. Management and "joes" learn to apply one of two protocols to any given situation:

"Moscow rules meant watch your back, London rules meant cover your arse." (pp. 253-254)

Here, London rules are most in play. In fact, save for the kidnapping in Leeds, River visiting his grandfather just outside Tonbridge and a sequence in Epping Forest, this is all set in London. Like le Carre, the focus is on activity here, carried out by our people, rather than external antagonists. There's something of The Sandbaggers about the whole thing, too: a focus on spycraft as office job that makes it suit a TV budget.  

Some small things are different from the TV version, such as details in prose being rendered in dialogue on screen. The TV version includes flashbacks to elucidate Catherine Standish's past but doesn't show us River Cartwright's childhood or some of the other history shared with us in the book. The kidnapped young man is, on TV, held in a house on an anonymous street; in the book it's the more definite Roupell Street near Waterloo, a place I know very well having once worked just round the corner. (And, er, from the Dalek battle there, too.)

But more than anything, knowing the TV version made me conscious of how frequently Herron uses ploys to hold our attention. There are continual cliffhangers, sometimes contrived by telling events out of chronological order, withholding bits of information or suggesting that one thing has happened then — a few pages later — revealing something else. In some cases, these ploys wouldn't work on TV where we can see what's happening, such as when Herron delays telling us the gender or ethnicity of particular characters, then makes that a surprise.

These methods make for a compelling read, though much of the trick here depends on the reader not knowing what will happen next. I wish I'd read this before I saw the TV version and need to hurry up reading the next ones in the series so I can get to later books unspoiled.

David Whitaker postscript / Terry Nation party

You can now download for free the four-page postscript to my biography of David Whitaker, detailing some of the things I've learned since the book was published last November.

The postscript is included in The Who Shop's exclusive paperback editions of the book, and will be added to future versions of the standard paperback at some point.

To accompany the release of the postscript yesterday, I posted a thread to both X (formerly Twitter) and BluSky, and here it is in full:

Terry Nation and pals at Lynsted Park, source

Writer and Dalek creator Terry Nation was born on 8 August 1930. OTD in 1964, he hosted a big birthday party at his newly acquired home, Lynsted Park — an Elizabethan mansion in Kent.

You can watch footage of Nation interviewed at home by Alan Whicker in 1967 on the BBC website. But my interest is in that party.

This party haunts my imagination, symbolic of Nation becoming a big showbiz success story after years of toil in light entertainment.

But, like most of these things, the more I’ve looked into it, the richer and stranger the story gets.

I wonder about the logistics. Did Nation provide everyone’s drinks? Was good laid on as well? Given Lynsted Park was quite remote, was there a lot of drink-driving back to London?

But also, who was at this party? While in the Doctor Who production office, Nation sent an invite to actress Carole Ann Ford. (The office kept a copy: Nation to Ford, 31 July 1963, WAC T5/648/2 General)

Nation was at the time hard at work writing The Dalek Invasion of Earth, the serial that would see Ford leave Doctor Who after a year playing the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan.

On the DVD / Blu-ray commentary for The End of Tomorrow (the fourth episode of The Dalek Invasion of Earth), Ford and her colleagues recall Nation’s lavish birthday bash.

In fact, Ford remembered that Nation’s grand new house was in a bit of a state. In particular, she recalled that the swimming pool couldn’t be used; it was full of rubbish. 

Co-star William Russell said Nation told him that he hadn’t bought the house because he was suddenly rich from inventing the Daleks (whose debut story had concluded earlier that year).

Instead, Nation said he’d taken out an ‘enormous mortgage’ as a spur to keep busy writing. It was a means to success, rather than a marker of success having been accomplished.

Who else was at the party? Given that Ford and Russell were there, Nation probably invited Doctor Who’s other stars — William Hartnell and Jacqueline Hill.

Hill’s husband Alvin Rakoff told me he remembered going to Lynsted Park but wasn’t sure if it was for this particular party.

Producer Verity Lambert also remembered being at the party, according to the DVD/Blu-ray commentary. 

Nation’s invitation to Ford said story editor David Whitaker could help her find the house, implying Whitaker was there, too.

At the time, Whitaker was working with Nation on the new Dalek TV story. They were also co-writing The Dalek Book for publication in September. (And Whitaker was novelising the first Dalek TV story.)

Given all these Doctor Who luminaries at the party, they surely tuned in to watch that evening’s episode — the first instalment of The Reign of Terror by Dennis Spooner.

(To this, my esteemed publisher Stuart Manning added: "Hazel Peiser, the partner of would-be Doctor Who Meets Scratchman director James Hill, recalls attending a party at Nation's mansion where the guests watched Doctor Who go out on TV. James was working on The Saint around that time, so it probably checks out.")

Spooner shared an agent with Nation, who’d recommended him to Whitaker. Two days before the party, it was confirmed that Spooner would join the BBC staff to shadow then succeed Whitaker.

The chances are that Spooner was at the party, too. In his biography of Nation, Alwyn Turner says Roger Moore also attended *one of* Nation’s parties at Lynsted Park, wearing a blue jumpsuit.

I like to imagine them all there together: the current Doctor Who, the future James Bond plus Jackie Hill — who was responsible for Sean Connery’s first big break. For more on the latter, see my post on I’m Just the Guy Who Says Action, by Alvin Rakoff. 

At the time of the party, Moore was the star of The Saint, for which Nation wrote (for higher fees than Doctor Who). A week after the party, Whitaker met Saint script supervisor Harry Junkin. 

A week later, Whitaker met with Leslie Charteris, creator of The Saint, to discuss a potential musical. Nothing came of these meetings but they were surely instigated by or through Nation. 

(Whitaker refers to both meetings in letter to his new agent, Beryl Vertue, at Associated London Scripts, on 14 August 1964, a copy held in Doctor Who production file WAC T5/648/2 General)

In throwing the party and in putting Whitaker and Spooner up for potential jobs, Nation was sharing his largesse. He could afford to be generous — couldn’t he?

As I imagine that party, I wonder what was going through Nation’s mind and how much he felt able to enjoy it himself. He’d certainly had a good few months since the debut of the Daleks.

‘The Daleks have transformed Mr Nation’s life,’ reported Andrew Duncan in Women’s Mirror just over a year later on 30 October 1965, ‘and he could eventually make £1 million from them.’ (NB, he hadn’t yet.)

Then Duncan quoted Nation’s own insecurities about this success. ‘I’ve got this enormous fear that one day a man is going to come and take back all the money.’

Wrights and Chestertons in Kensington

I was in London for a bit on Saturday to attend the live recording of the final Eggpod, where I caught up with several good friends. Having allowed a bit of extra time for the usual snafu of trains, I had half an hour to retread a couple of streets relating to David Whitaker and the early days of Doctor Who.

Doctor Who is generally seen as the creation of BBC head of drama Sydney Newman and his head of serials, Donald Wilson. As detailed in the production diary, having agreed a format for the new series in May 1963, on 4 June Wilson sent Newman an outline for the first four-part serial, The Giants, written by staff writer CE Webber. The Doctor's companions in this were school pupil Sue and her teachers Lola [McGovern] and Cliff.

Newman objected to this storyline and another staff writer was brought in to write the first story. In Coburn's first draft script (reworking CE Webber's original), Lola became Miss McGovern and Cliff became CE Chesterton, with Sue now "Susan Forman" and established as the Doctor's granddaughter. 

In Coburn's next draft, Miss McGovern became Miss Canning and Susan became Susanne Forman, though it was also revealed that she was in fact an alien princess called Findooclare. Story editor David Whitaker wasn't sure about this last element, as he explained in an undated note to producer Verity Lambert. But he added that Coburn "agrees to the change of any names we wish." 

By the time the episode was recorded in September, the characters were established as Susan Foreman (granddaughter of the Doctor but her origins left a mystery), Barbara Wright and Ian Chesterton. 

A detailed analysis of these different drafts was published in Doctor Who Magazine in 2013, written by my friend Graham Kibble-White (who I sat with at Eggpod on Saturday). This included an interview with the son of the late Anthony Coburn, in which Stef Coburn claimed that his (Catholic) father had based the character of the Doctor on his "cultural hero St Paul" and had named one school teacher after another of his heroes, the flamboyant writer GK Chesterton. The feature went on to speculate that GK Chesterton's The Ballad of Saint Barbara (1922) was an influence on the name of Ian's colleague.

I'm not so sure about this, not least because the characters in Doctor Who aren't really anything like St Barbara, GK Chesterton or St Paul. In researching my book on David Whitaker, I walked the streets of Kensington where he'd lived for much of his life, and spotted an alternative. I contend that this fits with Whitaker's note to Lambert, which implies that they - not Coburn - changed the characters' names.

On 8 June 1963, Whitaker married actress June Barry, who lived with her mum in Cheniston Gardens, W8 - the doorway in the extreme right of this picture I took on Saturday. 

But what’s that straight ahead?

Turn left up Wrights Lane and you’re heading north, just a hundred yards or so to Kensington High Street. That's in the direction David lived at the time (with his parents, on nearby De Vere Gardens), and also in the direction of Peel Street, home to David’s brother Robert and his wife Barbara…

In making the shortish walk to Peel Street, you cross Kensington High Street and on to Hornton Street, home to this well-established estate agent. 

In 1963, it was based at 116 Kensington High Street, so would have been even more prominent. David Whitaker and his bride may well have used Chestertons, their local estate agent, to find a place of their own to live - after their wedding, they moved to Russell Gardens Mews and lived there until 1970.

Keep going up Hornton Street and you get to a road running parallel to Peel Street; there's a plaque at no. 32 Sheffield Terrace marking the fact that GK Chesterton was born there on 29 May 1874. So Chesterton in Doctor Who may well have been named after the writer, but through this local connection.

All of this is a stone's throw from St Mary Abbots Church: 

This is where David and June married, James Beck and Trevor Bannister among their ushers, Alethea Charlton their bridesmaid - as seen in the film clip included in our Looking for David documentary on the Doctor Who Season 2 collection. Charlton, of course, played Hur the cavewoman in Coburn's opening serial for Doctor Who.

I'd not been inside the church before Saturday (it was closed when I was last there as Covid restrictions still applied), which also isn't featured in the wedding film. It is pretty fancy. Information displayed there says Richard Attenborough was once one of the parishioners.

That church is opposite a department store with the same name that Doctor Who producer John Nathan Turner later used to describe hyper obsessive fans. Hello.

Is that you, Maureen?, by Jeremy Swan

This is a sharp, funny memoir by someone behind a glut of much loved children's TV, including Jackanory, Rentaghost and Round the Twist. It's available for pre-order and published on 29 July but I got to read it early so as to compile the index.

Swan's life and career makes for an extraordinary, enjoyable read. How fantastic to learn that the producer of Galloping Galaxies also worked on The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Working on this has been a pleasure; but the fact I worked on it excludes me from offering a review.

So, instead, an observation as a stable mate. I particularly enjoyed the way that, by chance, this new book overlaps with others already published by Ten Acre Films. Swan worked closely with Biddy Baxter and got sacked from his one day on early Doctor Who. He took the BBC's directing course and remained good friends with Andrew Morgan, who directed two of Sylvester McCoy's adventures in time. And he worked with several people who feature in my book on David Whitaker, such as producer Chloe Gibson.

• You can buy Is that you, Maureen? from the Ten Acre Films website.