The balloon hoax

Went to see Piccard in Space last night, a new opera by Will Gregory, best known for his work with Goldfrapp. It told the story of Auguste Piccard - inspiration for Professor Calculus in Tintin and, with his brother, for Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek - travelling up to the Stratosphere in 1931, in a balloon of his own design to conduct an experiment on light that would prove Einstein's theory of relativity.

Einstein appeared, wild-haired and womanising, to explain the experiment - though I only understood it because the same light experiment was the subject of Jim Al-Khalili's brilliant documentary, Everything and Nothing, last week.

Piccard got the audience to sing along to the formula for the deviation of time, there were a few good jokes (a big song about a broken barometer leaking mercury that would eat up the aluminium balloon and so kill our heroes undercut by the mercury being 'hoovered' away by low pressure, or Piccard explaining that he is not from Mars but Belgium), and it was all quite fun.

But the departing audience no wiser about what exactly Piccard had proved or how, or even why Newton was made out to be such a villain. So if the plan was to excite and inspire people who wouldn't normally be interested in complicated physics, it didn't exactly work. Worse, the promised Moog synthesisers never really stood out, and I've seen better lab-coated nerdy performances from the Radiophonic Workshop. (That's still a much kinder response than reviews in the Independent and Telegraph.)

But, prompted by the conductor, we followed the performance by traipsing over to Festival Hall to see the real balloon on display. Small, fragile, primitive, making the achievement and the daring to attempt it all the more extraordinary... A real source of wonder.

Mrs King

Very busy with new house and work stuff, but here's the talk I gave on 10 February at the National Portrait Gallery...

Next month, a 29 year-old former accessories buyer for the clothing chain Jigsaw will marry a flight lieutenant from the RAF. But this won't be any ordinary wedding: Kate Middleton is marrying Prince William, second in line to the British throne.

The couple have always attracted attention from the press but the announcement last November of their wedding was something else. Every British paper ran the story on their front page – and all of them had an angle.


"Kate's very special," said the Daily Telegraph, playing up the romance. As with many papers, it highlighted the fact that the engagement ring is the one worn by William's late mother, Diana, Princess of Wales – and skirted over how her marriage had turned out. This is the royal wedding as fairy-tale.

The Daily Mail didn't seem quite so delighted. Yes, the engagement is a cause for celebration, but it's headline chides, "We got there in the end, darling," as if annoyed at having been kept waiting – or as if the happy couple owed it to the paper and the country to get engaged sooner. The Mail was also quick off the mark to use the announcement to flog some commemorative merchandise. It's the royal wedding as product, meeting the demands of its market.

"A royal wedding in the age of austerity," mused the Guardian, taking a step back to place the announcement in its socio-economic context, asking what it said about the state of the nation as a whole. Yes, okay, it's a royal wedding, but what's in it for us?

One paper didn't overtly lead with the happy couple.

There's cheery. At first sight – and in the news-stand next to other papers – this seems completely different: no smiling, happy couple, not even any colour. But what's that down in the corner? "I wish her well," says columnist Julie Burchill, "but Kate Middleton is marrying beneath her."

For all it's doing it's own thing, the Independent is still taking a position on the story. Burchill's column is a reversal of earlier press criticism of Middleton – that she wasn't posh enough for the prince. There were reports in 2007 that she used inappropriate words like “toilet” and “pardon”. Several papers have discussed whether it's appropriate for our future queen to have a job, or that her parents run a small mail-order business.

The key word is appropriate. The papers – and perhaps the rest of us – seem to believe that anyone marrying a king or queen must have an appropriate pedigree, curriculum vitae and vocabulary. But the role of consort has no formal definition, and it's a role that Kate's various predecessors have all struggled with.

I'm going to look briefly at five other people who married kings and queens of England. I'm going to look at how much power and influence they had, and what they might tell us about the role Queen Catherine will play in future.

NPG x36017 Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh
by Dorothy Wilding
chlorobromide print, 1947
11 7/8 in. x 10 in. (303 mm x 253 mm) overall
© William Hustler and Georgina Hustler / National Portrait Gallery, London

This dashing chap is the current consort, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. The photo is from 1947, the year he married the then Princess Elizabeth.

Unlike Kate Middleton, Philip was already royal. Both he and the queen are great, great grandchildren of Queen Victoria. He was born Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, nephew of the then king of Greece. A year after Philip was born, King Constantine was deposed and the royal family had to flee the country. Philip was, famously, carried away in a cot made from an old fruit box.

So he grew up as a prince in exile. He was taught at the Schule Sloss Salem school in Germany, which has been set up by Kurt Hahn after the First World War with the explicit intention of producing leaders for the future. When Philip was 12, Hahn was arrested for criticising the Nazis. After his release he moved to Britain and set up a new Salem school in Scotland – Gordonstoun. The young Prince Philip was one of his first students, and his sons and grandsons also went there.

I wonder how much the prince's exile and education under the Nazi-hating Hahn influenced the consort he became. As I said before, there's no formal definition of a consort's role.

Jeremy Paxman interviewed Prince Philip for his book, On Royalty, published in 2006, and asked him about his role when his wife took the throne. “I did ask various people what I was expected to do,” said the prince. “And?” asked Paxman. “They sort of looked down and shuffled their feet,” (p. 234).

Instead, the prince has been able to make the role his own. I think his education and his family's exile have taught him to be useful, to make a contribution to the advancement of the country and its people. Paxman likens him to his predecessor as Queen's Consort, Prince Albert, and remarks on a similar “Teutonic approach to work”. Paxman speaks of a “more than nominal” involvement in the 800 organisations of which the prince is patron.

We can see the influence of his old school in the Duke of Edinburgh's Award, set up in the late 1950s to encourage the personal development of young people through volunteering, self-reliance, the learning of skills and sport. Since then, some 4 million young people – from all backgrounds – have taken part.

Prince Philip was a thoroughly modern consort, too, championing science and industry. He was the first royal to be interviewed on television, and was also a TV presenter. Watch Prince Philip host a live programme for the BBC's The Restless Sphere series on 30 June 1957.

It's an extraordinary programme. For more than 70 minutes, the young prince single-handedly explains the experiments to be carried out during the International Geophysical Year, including early satellite technology, solar observation and oceanography. It's fascinating to watch him deftly explain complex technical ideas, work the different props, link to and fill time around pre-recorded segments from all across the world, and generally keep the show running smoothly. In another life, he might have presented Tomorrow's World. He cuts a rather dashing figure, a Renaissance man from a far off time when we still just about had an Empire.

But the prince also discusses evidence from different sources around the world that the oceans are rising and glaciers melting – as if the climate were changing. He tells us that more evidence – much more evidence, gathered over many decades – will be needed to know for sure. And over the next decades, he championed that research and concerns about the environment. Watch Prince Philip on breakfast show TV-am in November 1987.

In many ways, the prince was ahead of the game on the environment. Perhaps his position as a statesman without portfolio, constantly meeting experts and representatives in every walk of life, gives him a unique position. He's continually briefed on the latest scientific findings, and he uses his position to share them with the rest of us.

He's still speaking on the subject today, but two things have changed. First, there has been increasing evidence for climate change and increasing numbers of people speaking about it – and against it. It has become more fashionable and political – and the royal family as a whole are expected to avoid political statements.

And secondly, something has changed about the way the royal family is represented.

“A huffy note enters his voice when he talks about how his family have been treated by the mass media,” says Paxman, who then quotes the prince: “'It is absolutely extraordinary what has happened in the last thirty years. I mean, before that we were accepted as quite normal sorts of people. But now, I mean now I reckon I have done something right if I don't appear in the media. Because I know that any appearance in it will be one of criticism.'”

That's from a chapter in the book called “Gilded but gelded”, all about the royal family's relationship with the press. That's a big subject – too big to get into here, so I'll just recommend Paxman's book. Instead I want to stay on the consort's role and responsibilities – and the fact that Prince Philip says that no one else told him what he was required to do. He has clearly set out to be useful, to help people fulfil their potential and to help the world. But his response to the way the press now responds suggests another motivation.

“I will be criticized for doing something,” he told Paxman. “So I've retreated – quite consciously – so as not to be an embarrassment. I don't want to be embarrassing.”

I mentioned appropriateness before, and I think the other side of that is embarrassment. But embarrassing who? Himself? The queen? The royal family? The nation? And what is the response when you do cause embarrassment?

NPG 5408 Diana, Princess of Wales

by Bryan Organ
acrylic on canvas, 1981
70 in. x 50 in. (1778 mm x 1270 mm)
© National Portrait Gallery, London

Even if she had lived, Princess Diana would not have been a consort – she and Prince Charles divorced in 1996. But, like Prince Philip before her, Diana created her own role and responsibilities as Princess of Wales – and recreated that role on several occasions. She seemed both to embody and challenge our ideas of what a consort should be.

This is a portrait of Princess Diana (currently on view in the NPG's 32). It's quite a surprising choice for the gallery – very unlike the way we might think of Diana from the time, in ballgowns and finery, the fairy-tale princess in that wedding dress. This is a simple portrait, Diana dressed informally in open-necked blouse and trousers. That simplicity contrasts with the setting, the smart, gold-lined door that frames her, the antique chair she's sitting on.

Other portraits of Diana from the time have her looking coyly away whereas here she holds our eye. That chimes with a description in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography of Diana meeting Charles at a polo match in 1980:

“Her directness and sympathy over the death the previous year of his uncle, Lord Mountbatten, caught his attention: she was not afflicted by the usual constraints on people dealing with royalty, and was neither tongue-tied nor overly deferential. Her credentials as a potential royal bride were obvious.”

What were those credentials? Princess Diana was not born a princess, but her father and both grandmothers moved in court circles and she first met Prince Charles when she was 16 – when he briefly dated her sister. She was well off, having inherited a sum from her great-grandmother. She was not academic, having failed her O-levels twice.

She was, says the ODNB, “A popular, essentially jolly girl with a talent for making friends,” and her O-levels didn't matter because, “arguably, none [were] required for girls of her class, who had no need to earn a living; indeed, displays of intellect could be frowned upon by the largely philistine county set”.

She was beautiful, and could play the part of the fairy-tale princess. And she had an ability to talk unaffectedly to anyone, enchanting people who met her. Both things made her very popular with the press and public, and it seemed she might be just the jolt in the arm that the royal family needed.

But when things started to go wrong in the fairy-tale wedding, it all became very different. It's easy to forget the outrage that met the 1992 book Diana: Her True Story by Andrew Morton – which finally blew the lid on the fairy-tale, after all the years of rumour. Diana had rarely been out of the news before, but now the tone of the coverage had changed. There were stories about her various alleged lovers, or the state of her mental health, or just endless photos of her. The ODNB speaks of the constant harassment, where “photographs of Diana angry, or Diana in tears, Diana at the gym or the corner shop, commanded a far higher price than photographs of Diana carrying out public engagements.”

There's an argument that the press wanted to get at the “real” Diana. Perhaps it was payback for the fairy-tale wedding that we'd all been sold turning out not to be true. Perhaps the institution had got caught up in the story and believed their own press but the royal family – as an institution – effectively lied to the nation and, even worse, to the papers.

But it also didn't help that in some ways Diana brought this press harassment on herself. She was interviewed several times by Morton for his book and got her friends to contribute, too. She'd done so on the basis that she could always deny doing so – and that lie, when exposed, damaged her reputation with the Press Complaints Commission, which had tried to defend her from the media scrum over the book. It was also her choice to dispense with her round-the-clock police protection – so she could pursue her private life without constant surveillance. And that left her exposed to the paparazzi.

Perhaps she was not the canniest player, but at the same time, Diana also used the attention of the press to great effect for important causes. The ODNB says that this was part of a conscious effort to refashion her role and responsibilities.

“From June 1987,” it says, “when she visited the first ward for AIDS sufferers in Britain, she associated herself closely with a huge number of causes and organizations devoted to different kinds of sufferers ... Her patronage was widely sought and widely bestowed: whatever disadvantages might accrue from having a notoriously temperamental and, as time passed, increasingly unpredictable royal patron, Diana's name—and more especially her presence—were guaranteed to raise the profile of issues and organizations, and to increase revenue significantly. There was nothing novel about the association of a royal woman with good causes of these kinds: charity was the traditional outlet for women of the upper classes. But Diana brought glamour to the work and a degree of publicity which was never available to her less photogenic but no less hard-working sister-in-law, the princess royal, among others.”

Though Diana charmed those she met, press coverage was as often cynical as it was supportive, questioning her motives, or using the occasion to put questions about her private life. When she told Martin Bashir in a television interview in 1995 that she wanted to be remembered as the “princess of hearts”, many newspapers showed open contempt.

A year later she was granted her divorce and again set about refashioning her role. Diana stepped down from all but six of her charities and asked Prime Minister John Major to make her a “roving ambassador” on humanitarian issues for Britain. When no official role was created for her, she did it anyway: leading a Red Cross mission to draw attention to the devastation caused by landmines. This was a major political issue. The royal family are meant to keep well clear of making political statements – but Diana was no longer part of the family, and had nothing to lose. As the ODNB says,

“Powerful vested interests opposed the landmine ban, and Conservative MPs went on record accusing the princess of being a ‘loose cannon’, interfering in politics beyond her remit, but her championing of the cause was a significant factor in the promotion of the treaty banning the mines.”

And when Diana died suddenly in 1997, the press – and the nation – were quick to forget all their criticism. “Princess of hearts” was how they remembered her. The empathy, the charity, the tragic fate of the beautiful, fairy-tale princess – that's the image of her that endures. And that's why, in the grand narrative spun by the press, it's not odd that Kate Middleton wears Diana's engagement ring.

We've not discussed love. “It's important to understand,” says Jeremy Paxman, “that, in making arrangements for royal marriages, love is not necessarily the prime consideration. If the couple enjoy each other's company, that is a bonus not a prerequisite,” (p. 87).

But I don't think that's true. We want to believe in the fairy-tale. When Diana's engagement to Charles was announced in 1981, the press asked if they were in love. “Of course,” said Diana immediately. Charles' response has been much picked over since. “Whatever love means,” he said.

Was he in love with Diana? Was he in love with someone else? Charles later admitted to infidelity, and there's been speculation that at the time he'd wanted to marry Diana's older sister Sarah, or his current wife, Camilla. The speculation continues that these women were not deemed appropriate consort material – they weren't suitably innocent or pretty or whatever it might have been.

The pervading story seems to be that Charles chose duty over love – and that that was a mistake. So it's interesting to compare Diana with someone else who wasn't quite a consort.

NPG P265 Wallis, Duchess of Windsor; Prince Edward, Duke of Windsor (King Edward VIII)
by Cecil Beaton
bromide print, 1937
9 in. x 6 5/8 in. (230 mm x 168 mm)
© V&A Images

When Edward VIII gave up the throne to marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, it was largely sold as romance. He chose love over the crown. Like Diana, Edward was a popular figure, photogenic and beloved of the press. Like Diana, his empathy with his people could lead to controversy. “Something must be done,” he said on seeing the collapse of industry and mass unemployment in Wales – and that innocuous, humane statement caused a scandal.

But the British press were discrete about his love life. We know now he had a number of affairs in the late 1920s and early 30s, but the press at the time paid no heed. Even when his relationship with Wallis became more serious – and their yacht trip round the Mediterranean was followed with keen interest by the world press – the British newspapers said nothing.

When Edward chose to give up the throne, the “abdication crisis” proved little of the sort. “Reading the official papers and the private diaries,” says Paxman, “what is striking is how, in the end, the king's determination to marry his divorced American mistress came to turn simply on the question of how it might be managed,” (p. 209).

That says a lot about how the royal family's relationship with the press has changed. But why was Wallis not a suitable consort for the king?

The official reason is that she was a divorcee. At the time, divorced people could not remarry in the Church of England – which made it tricky for the head of the church to marry a divorcee. The irony being that the Church of England was created to grant Henry VIII a divorce from his first wife so he could marry someone else.

But there were other issues with Wallis. The ODNB says that she “impinged on the performance of [Edward's] duties” as Prince of Wales. She was bossy, and had an abrasive irreverence towards Edward's position and the royal family generally. She came from a poor background and she was American.

And she didn't want to be queen. “All the indications,” says the ODNB, “are that she enjoyed her role of maîtresse en titre [chief mistress] and would have been satisfied to retain it ... Once Mrs Simpson realized that marriage to her would cost the king his throne, she tried to change his resolve. Anticipating much hostile publicity when the story broke in the United Kingdom, she retreated first to Fort Belvedere, and then to the south of France. From there, in a series of distraught telephone calls, she tried to persuade Edward not to abdicate, even if this meant giving her up. She accomplished nothing; this was the only subject on which she was unable to dominate her future husband.”

But if Wallis was thought unsuitable then, it's nothing to how she's thought of now. In the last six months, she's been depicted in three period dramas.

In Any Human Heart on Channel 4, she and Edward swan round a golf course, pushing in front of other golfers and pinching their cigarettes. In Upstairs, Downstairs on BBC One, she nearly causes a diplomatic incident in 1936 by turning up at a party with the Nazi Ambassador to Britain, von Ribbentrop. It's heavily implied that she and Ribbentrop are lovers, even that Wallis is a fascist sympathiser. She's briefly in the film The King's Speech, where Edward accuses his brother of heading a plot to usurp him. I gather, too, that Madonna is working on a film in which Wallis is seen cheating on Edward.

These are not flattering portrayals, and the received wisdom seems to be that Wallis was a bad influence on Edward, promiscuous, greedy, silly, even dangerous. Edward was naïve, or stupid, for marrying for love – or at least for loving this particular woman. The story goes that it is a good thing Wallis wasn't queen. And that instead we got this lady:

NPG x12135 Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother by Cecil Beaton
bromide print on white card mount, 1939
9 7/8 in. x 8 in. (252 mm x 203 mm)
© V&A Images

As with Wallis, Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon didn't choose to be queen. She was already married when her brother-in-law abdicated, and her husband became George VI. But even when he'd just been Duke of York, she had “had her doubts and reservations about her suitability for public life and perhaps about her feelings for” him and “apparently turned down his first two proposals of marriage” - so the ODNB says.

She was the first non-royal to legally marry a royal prince since James II in the seventeenth century. But her in-laws, George V and Queen Mary, “thought that this pretty, natural, level-headed, and unassuming young woman would be a good partner for their unconfident son.” And that's exactly the role she played as consort.

Taking the oath of accession, the new king said he took on his responsibilities “with my wife and helpmate at my side”. Perhaps tellingly, at his coronation, “Elizabeth's throne ... was placed level with the king's. Later, in 1943, she was appointed a councillor of state, allowing her to deputize for the king in official matters—the first queen consort to fulfill the role—and she also held investitures on her own.”

The ODNB discusses at length the treatment of the abdicated King Edward, and the decision to deny his wife the title of “her royal highness”. The same title was, of course, stripped from Princess Diana when she divorced Charles. Though, “there is no reason to believe that [Edward's sister-in-law, Queen Elizabeth] was directly responsible for the decision,” says the ODNB, “her opinion on the matter may be imagined. She saw Mrs Simpson as an interloper who had disrupted both the public position of royalty and private relations within the royal family. In the queen's view Mrs Simpson's actions had forced an unexpected and unwelcome change to her settled family life and had imposed ultimate burdens on her husband [which may have contributed to his early death]. To a woman who placed the highest value on responsibility, whether to family or nation, Mrs Simpson's irresponsibility, as she saw it, could not be tolerated, nor should it be rewarded.”

She was also fiercely protective of her husband. According to Walter Monckton, Edward's representative in the negotiations about what his role might be as Duke of Windsor, George VI was not against Edward taking on some minor royal functions – effectively swapping roles with his younger brother. “But in Monckton's opinion ‘the Queen felt quite plainly it was undesirable to give the Duke any effective sphere of work’. She thought the duke ‘was an attractive, vital creature who might be the rallying point for any who might be critical of the new King who was less superficially endowed with the arts and graces that please,” (cited in Lord Birkenhead, Walter Monckton, p. 169).

If Elizabeth had little choice about becoming queen, she also had little choice in her responsibilities during her husband's reign, which was so dominated by the Second World War – the lead up to it, the war itself and the immediate aftermath. In Paris in 1938 to help reinforce the Anglo-French alliance, it was Elizabeth's stylish white outfits – designed by Norman Hartnell – that won the admiration of the press. She was similarly praised for her style the next year in the US, and the king and queen's stay at President Roosevelt's home in Hyde Park has been cited as “a significant moment in the developing ‘special relationship’ between the two nations and one of the most important royal visits in the history of the modern monarchy”.

When the war began, Elizabeth and her husband famously refused to leave London, and she would not countenance her daughters being sent away to Canada. When Buckingham Palace was bombed, she said she was glad: “Now I can look the East End in the face”. As the ODNB says, “she reached out to the British people, sharing their experiences in a way that royalty had never done before. Interestingly, she chose not to appear in uniform during the war and came to symbolize the virtues of normality and peace.” The royal family also apparently conformed to wartime rationing.

Perhaps Elizabeth only chose her role and responsibilities after her husband's death. There's evidence that Winston Churchill advised her in her bereavement, “but it seems equally likely,” says the ODNB, “that the strength of character and the imagination required to play this new role came also, and quite naturally, from Elizabeth herself. She had no wish or aptitude for the role of retiring dowager. Comfortable with her people, adaptable, and with an unaltered ethic of service, she returned to public duties in May 1952.”

NPG x34768 Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother
by Cecil Beaton
bromide fibre print on white card mount, 1970
8 7/8 in. x 8 5/8 in. (226 mm x 218 mm)
© V&A Images

As Queen Mother for the next fifty years, she was patron of more than 300 organisations and charities. She was chancellor of the University of London for 25 years and colonel-in-chief of 13 regiments. She also lived lavishly, employing a large staff and entertaining on a grand scale. She apparently ran up debts of £4 million at Coutts Bank.

But while for any other royal that might have earned the displeasure of the nation – or the press – the Queen Mother never seemed to lose favour. Perhaps it was her cheery, ever-smiling attitude to her public duties. She clearly worked hard as the grandmother of the nation. And she was also discreet – giving one interview when first engaged. Woodrow Wyatt would later reveal that she had “conservative opinions” but she never voiced them openly. Whatever her opinions of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor she never spoke about the abdication – and she attended both of their funerals.

The Queen Mother's own funeral in 2002 was a major event. A quarter of a million people filed past her coffin as it lay in state. She lived a remarkably long life and her popularity never wavered, even as it did for the rest of her family. Why? What did the Queen Mother do that the others didn't? Why do we remember her so fondly? What could Kate Middleton learn from her?

There's duty, hard work and the charitable causes. There's the empathy with the people. But other consorts had that. There's a loving relationship with the king. A bit of style doesn't go amiss either. A twinkle in the eye will more than make up for a slightly naughty gambling habit.

But I think the Queen Mother's chief asset was her discretion. She never spoiled the mystique of royalty, she never told tales and she never got caught up in politics. More than that, by keeping her mouth shut she never said anything embarrassing.

The Duchess of Cornwall at Dundurn Castle
by Ibagli, 5 November 2009
From Wikipedia

When the press speak to Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, it’s as if they only want to catch her out. What does she think of Kate? What does she think of the student protesters? Why was her window open? If she says something innocuous it’s reported that she doesn’t care. If she says something more fun it’s reported that she’s not funny. The woman cannot win.

She does the charities and good causes. She supports her husband. And she keeps a relatively low profile. I discovered while preparing this talk that the Portrait Gallery holds no photographs of her, let alone a portrait.

We still don’t know what role Camilla will play when her husband becomes king. The couple have said that she won’t be a queen – but is that up to them? According to the law, as soon as the present queen dies, Prince Charles automatically becomes king and his wife queen. At the moment, Camilla is also the Princess of Wales because she's the wife of the prince – but she or those around her choose not to use that title. So maybe she'll choose not to be called queen, and maybe she won't be crowned when Charles is. But, technically, she'll still be queen.

And why shouldn’t she be queen? There are strong feelings on the subject. Some feel it wouldn’t be appropriate because she’s a divorcee – though so is her husband. Some feel it’s not appropriate given that she and Charles had an affair while he was still married to Diana. So Camilla not being queen is a sort of punishment for how Diana was treated. Or maybe its punishment for the embarrassment caused by the whole “Squidgy” business.

Would it have been different had Charles married her in the early 1970s? Would Camilla have been made a fairy-tale princess and received the same adulation as Diana? Would she have suffered the same problems, too? Or is there something about their different personalities and ambitions that means things would always have been different?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. But it makes me wonder again how much a consort – or almost-consort – gets to define their own role and responsibilities, and how much they just react to us, as a nation, as perhaps voiced through the press. There’s no formal definition of a consort’s role, but we seem to know instinctively what is appropriate, what is embarrassing, and what makes our blood boil.

So we don’t know what kind of consort Kate Middleton will be. We don’t know how much say she’ll have in her role and responsibilities. But we will know when she gets it wrong.

• See also: my talk on 10 people in the National Portrait Gallery's collection that Doctor Who has met

Gone to the dogs

Review I wrote for Vector last April:

Blonde Bombshell by Tom Holt

George Stetchkin is a brilliant programmer and a not so brilliant drunk. He's on the trail of some bank robbers who've used teleport technology – which, of course, hasn't been invented. Lucy Pavlov is the mega-rich inventor of world-changing technology but she keeps having dreams about unicorns. And Mark Twain is the impenetrable alias of a very smart bomb. He's been ordered to destroy the Earth by a planet of dogs.

Blonde Bombshell is a rich, dizzy adventure chock-full of big ideas, all fighting for the readers' attention. That desperate effort to dazzle and amaze makes it pretty hard going. There are plenty of jokes but few that make the reader really laugh. Instead, you can hear the arched eyebrow all the way through, a comedy more droll than funny.

There are the painful puns and word plays: the neolithic period on the planet of the dogs is called the Bone Age and they've got a 'T'erier class' of space ship. There's lazy stuff about George being drunk or hungover at the wrong moments. Characters wilfully misunderstand simple statements and events.

Then there are the tortuous analogies, such as 'harder to swallow than a nail-studded olive', 'like trying to build a sandcastle out of semolina pudding' and, 'memories limped home like the survivors of a decimated army.' I quite liked, 'weird as two dozen ferrets in a blender', but the 'two dozen' blunts its simple, vivid effect.

The writing is often too fussy, the jokes too awkward and contrived. Though Mark Twain is as nicely inconspicuous a name as Ford Prefect, the arched style is more Robert Rankin than Douglas Adams. (I've never got Rankin's appeal, either.)

The characters are all rather generic – the drunk and rude but brilliant programmer, the icy, super-rich heroine, the machine that wants to live. There's some nice stuff between Mark and Lucy as they realise they fancy one another, but their own autistic behaviour and the arched tone of the writing makes it difficult to empathise with either of them. The book is big on ideas but leaves the reader rather cold.

Which is a shame because the story itself is often rich and surprising, and Holt keeps the plot moving quickly. There are some great ideas – the dog catching a stick that then lifts it off into space, the fresh, dead octopus that's so much more powerful than the aliens' computers. There are plenty of fine set-ups and revelations.

I didn't like the book at all to begin with, but having persevered for the first 100 pages, the plot then engaged my attention. The disparate strands and concepts are all neatly brought together by the end. But it could be – it ought to be – so much better, and would have been with a firmer editorial hand. As it is, too many bad and overworked gags stop the story from really blowing our brains.

A new chapter

It seems no time at all since I was blogging that we'd bought a flat. Ah, the happy, bouncy fellow that I was back then...

Tomorrow, the Dr, the dim cat and I move out after a little over five years. It's the longest I've lived anywhere since moving out of my parents' place roughly half my life ago. It's the first place I've owned, and the first place that's really felt like my own home. There's a lot of good memories bound up in the place. We've had some very good parties, done all sorts of repairs and renovations to make it our own, and it's all a bit sad to be going.

But a sadness also hangs over the place where we thought we might have children and then spent months hiding when that didn't work. So this move also means drawing a line under the fact that we can't have children of our own.

We're moving to a house - though it's not much bigger than the flat - where I'll have a sundial and shed. The plan is to get the place in order while we press on with our efforts to get approved for adoption. (I'm probably not going to go into all of that here.)

So. Five and a bit years ago we got our keys, and then the Dr and I and Mr and Mrs Brown sat on the floor in our new, unfurnished living room and ate fish and chips from the place round the corner. Tonight I'll trudge home from work to pack the rest of the boxes and dismantle the computer and desk.

Then first thing tomorrow the van arrives to spirit our lives off to whatever happens next...

Doctor Who: Portraits in time and space

On Thursday next week, 10 February, I'll be speaking at the National Portrait Gallery on five people who have married Kings and Queens of England and will discuss how much power and influence they had on society. "Mrs King" starts at 13:15 in the Ondaatje Wing Theatre.

I gave a talk last year on 10 famous historical figures in the Portrait Gallery's collection who've also met Doctor Who on screen. Never got round to posting that, so here it is now:

Portraits in Time and Space


What an image! The Daleks and Winston Churchill – two such icons!

The Daleks are the number one bad guy in Doctor Who, the first monster the Doctor met on screen, back in 1963. It was their success that made the TV show a hit, and the Doctor's been battling them ever since.

Meanwhile, Winston Churchill was voted "Greatest Briton of all time" in a national poll conducted by the BBC in 2002. Yet Churchill is a complex and controversial figure. Mark Gatiss, who wrote the episode Victory of the Daleks, admitted on Doctor Who Confidential that,

"Churchill is a mass of contradictions, which is partly the reason we're still so fascinated by him ... He's an extraordinary figure: brave, tenacious, a brilliant speaker ... He was simultaneously illiberal and curiously liberal in some ways ... He's not a universally loved figure at all."

A modern Doctor Who episode is only 42 minutes long. With a plot and Daleks and explosions and jokes to cram in, there's hardly time to present a detailed critique of a contentious historical figure. Instead, we are presented with a sketch, an impression – a portrait.

I'm going to discuss ten people to be found in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery that the Doctor has also met on screen. I want to know how – and why – these people are presented to us on canvas and in the TV show. What can these portraits tell us about the people themselves and the times they lived in – and what do they tell us about ourselves?

Sir Winston Leonard Churchill

by Cecil Beaton
Bromide print, 1940
National Portrait Gallery x40055

Here's a classic pose of Churchill in 1940, soon after becoming Prime Minister during the Second World War. There he is working, serious, ready to offer his blood, toil, tears and sweat to the country. A portrait of the war leader.

Note also the cigar in his hand and the spotty bow-tie. They're important props in the image of Churchill. He was relaxed about being caricatured by cartoonists, writing in 1932 that,

"One of the most necessary features in a public man's equipment is some distinctive mark which everyone learns to look for and recognise. Disraeli's forelock, Mr Gladstone's collars, Lord Randolph Churchill's moustache, Mr Chamberlain's eyeglass, Mr Baldwin's pipe – these properties are of the greatest value ... I have never indulged in any of them."

As John Cooper explains in his book Great Britons, which accompanied the BBC series, Churchill went on in that article to say that,

"without thinking, he had once donned a minuscule hat and been photographed, giving the cartoonists their 'distinctive mark'. From them on, hats became his signifier for cartoonists ... By 1940 the material was all there: cigars, bow-ties, hats and sticks and his 'pouting cherub' expression; the addition of wartime details such as gas masks, siren suits and the V sign completed the repertoire, producing a popular image of vigorous defiance, laced with humour and sufficient eccentricity to be noticeable, but not dysfunctional."

John Cooper, Great Britons - The Great Debate (2002), p. 136.

Winston Churchill
by Robert Elliot
bromide print, 26 July 1943
National Portrait Gallery x17071

It's this popular archetype of Churchill that we see in Doctor Who. He chain-smokes, he jokes, he charms the ladies and demands the best from everyone.

There's no time to get into the less savoury side of Churchill's character. For example, Mo Mowlam, who championed Churchill in the BBC's Great Britons series, had to concede that, even in his finest hours during the Second World War.

"Churchill was an instinctive, daring, often infuriating war leader. He was rude and unpleasant to his staff, who struggled to keep up with his limitless capacity for hard work and hard liquor."

Mo Mowlam, 'Winston Churchill', in Ibid., p. 127.

His listing in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is a whopping 33,000 words long. As that says, in the biographies after his death, Churchill was accused of,

"racism, militarism, and sympathy with fascism. Hitherto acclaimed as the saviour of his country, he was now accused of leading Britain into a war that fatally undermined its power."

Paul Addison, ‘Churchill, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer (1874–1965)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, May 2010, accessed 28 June 2010

And Churchill was acutely aware of how he was seen – and how he'd be remembered.

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill
by Graham Vivian Sutherland
pencil and wash, circa 1954
National Portrait Gallery 6096

This is a sketch of a portrait of Churchill by Graham Sutherland, commissioned by the Houses of Parliament to mark his 80th birthday. Churchill hated it – claiming that "it makes me look half-witted which I ain't". We've only got the sketch because his wife had the painting destroyed. As John Cooper says,

"The problem was, presumably, that [Churchill] came up against an image of himself as an old, worn man, battered by time and circumstances, no longer a political force but a spent one, the bulldog of the 1940s now a frail geriatric."

Ibid., p. 134

Portraits, like Doctor Who, present an impression of their subject. The artist or photographer show us a particular pose or angle or idea. The "problem", if it is one, with Sutherland's portrait is that it showed the old man, warts and all, rather than the myth. Writer Mark Gatiss said that for his Doctor Who episode he wanted to "get the Churchill from the posters" from the war:

"in the end it came down to printing the Churchill of legend."

That's not to say that portraits are in some way deceitful if they show the legend rather than the real man. A portrait doesn't just tell us what someone looked like. They give us an impression of the subject as a living being. What it felt like to be in their presence. And what they wanted us to feel.

Look at those two photos of Churchill again: two very different portraits of the same man in his prime. He smiles in one, he stares in the other. Both give us a tantalising sense of the man. We can see the light in his eyes, the mischief, the intelligence. Look at the women and children so delighted to see him in the picture on the left – his smile reflecting theirs. The picture on the right is more imposing – he stares directly at us, as if asking what we want, why we've interrupted his important work. Perhaps there's a place for us that big empty table. He offers hope, but he expects us to muck in.

Is this tantalising impression enough, though? Surely the huge entry in the Dictionary of National Biography can tell us more about the man than a couple of photos.

That very point was raised just over 150 years ago when the House of Lords discussed the creation of a National Portrait Gallery. On 4 March 1856, Lord Stanhope cited a letter from the historian Thomas Carlyle:

"Often I have found a portrait superior in real instruction to half-a-dozen written biographies ... I have found that the portrait was as a small lighted candle by which the biographies could for the first time be read, and some human interpretation be made of them."

Cited in Brian Harrison, 'Why biography matters to us', Ibid., p. 23.

Portraits give us a fleeting impression of the real, historical person. The best portraits make it a vivid impression, an insight, bringing the subject alive. It might even inspire us to investigate the subject further.

That's something the producers of Doctor Who have clearly considered. Mark Gatiss was interviewed by Doctor Who Confidential at the Churchill War Rooms, where much of his story was set. "I would be very, very, very happy," he said,

"if people who watched it and enjoyed the episode then come here to find more about it ... Our fictionalised version, I'd like to think in the best possible way, sort of opens a door to finding out the history."

The BBC's official Doctor Who website links from the episode to an archive collection of tributes and biographies by people who knew the real Churchill. I've spoken to teachers who've used the episode as a spring-board for school lessons – in some cases the children demanded it.

And it's not just the children who find it a spring-board. I find myself puzzling over the fact that in this episode the Doctor and Churchill are already old friends – Churchill even has the TARDIS' phone number. For my own sad amusement – and because I write spin-off Doctor Who books for a living – I've spent far too much time wondering when they first met and what adventures they might have had together. [Since I gave this talk, Gatiss has revealed these adventures in The Brilliant Book of Doctor Who 2011.]

He had an adventurous life in his youth, but there's also a sense of destiny about Churchill, as if someone had tipped him off early on about the role he'd play as leader of the nation in its time of need. In the early 1930s, he was one of the first to speak out against the Nazis and appeasement. But even before that, there's this picture:

Statesmen of World War I
by Sir James Guthrie
oil on canvas, 1924-1930
National Portrait Gallery 2463

This is Guthrie's huge, iconic portrait of the statesmen of World War One, dramatically lit under the Winged Victory of Samothrace, and painted between 1924 and 1930. Churchill is at the centre, caught in a shaft of light, looking directly out at us – the only one of the statesmen who does. Perhaps Guthrie chose Churchill as a focus because he had been the youngest member of the War Cabinet in 1914-15 – with a career still before him, the young Churchill represented the future. But the eerie light and and the strong contrasts between light and dark make this an even more eerie foreshadowing of the future. It's almost as if the painter or the subject knew.

Let's return to what I said earlier about these historical figures being a spring-board for school lessons. When Doctor Who began in 1963, it had something of an educational remit. Stories would alternate between the past and the future. In the first story, the Doctor meets cavemen, in the fourth story he meets Marco Polo and Kublai Kahn. We visit the Aztecs and France in the Reign of Terror – where the Doctor meets Robespierre and his companions glimpse the young Napoleon Bonaparte – and then they're in Ancient Rome and meet Nero.

Richard I
by Carlo Marochetti
bronze statue (1860 copy of 1851 original)

Then the Doctor meets this chap. This is a nineteenth century bronze statue of Richard I – the Lionheart, romantic hero of the Crusades. There's triumph and majesty in that pose. And also, the statue itself has its own mythology. In the Blitz, a bomb lifted the statue up into the air, but it survived with only a little damage to the sword – which you can still see today. The pose of the sculpture and what happened to it in the war both play into national myths of brave, defiant Englishness – the same national myths that embrace Churchill. There's more myth-making going on, too. Richard is stood outside the Palace of Westminster, as if linking his heroism to modern democracy, though he died 15 years before the signing of Magna Carta. It's not a portrait of the real man, but of a legend we want to be true.

But the Richard that the Doctor meets is very different from this image. He's trying to broker peace with the Saracens, by marrying his sister Joanna to the brother of his enemy, Saladin. This is a portrait of Richard playing against the mythology – a man desperate to make peace rather than holy war. The story also shows us a sympathetic Saladin.

This is a very different kind of Doctor Who story from the Churchill one. It's 45 years older, for one thing, and television drama has obviously changed. It's in black and white, noticeably much slower in pace than the show today, and there are no monsters, so there's more time to explore character. This is a complex portrait of Richard and the Crusades, especially for tea-time family viewing. It engages our interest by playing against what we think we know about the man.

The formal way the king speaks is also interesting – that's not accurate twelfth century speech. The TARDIS doesn't just land in the past and future, it lands in particular genres, or types of story. The look and feel of this story, and comparing it to other BBC productions of the time, it's almost as if the Doctor has landed in a previously unknown historical play by Shakespeare. At the very least, while the portrait of Richard the peace-maker might not be immediately familiar to the general public, the feel of the story is. The trappings of Shakespeare and serious BBC drama add authority to the character of the king and the issues in the story.

Shakespeare appeared in Doctor Who just two stories later, in the first episode of The Chase. Like Churchill and Richard I, Shakespeare is a national icon, someone we learn about at school. It's a rather nervous, weedy Shakespeare here, an ordinary man not a superstar, scared of being called to see the boss. It's a comic glimpse of Shakespeare, getting the inspiration for one of his plays from Queen Elizabeth I, but one that makes us feel we know him.

The casting and costume seem to be based on this portrait:

William Shakespeare
attrib. To John Taylor
oil on canvas, feigned oval, (c. 1610)
National Portrait Gallery NPG1

This is the “Chandos Shakespeare”, or NPG1 – the very first portrait in the National Portrait Gallery's collection. Shakespeare was enjoying a renaissance in popularity in the mid-nineteenth century when the Gallery was established, and he's since become an iconic figure of the nation. I could write a whole separate talk on whether and why Shakespeare remains relevant today. Instead, I want to focus on why we see him in this story.

In the story, the Doctor and his companions are watching television, but a special television that lets them see moments in history. They choose iconic moments: this scene, Lincoln giving his address at Gettysburg, and a clip of the Beatles. This was broadcast in May 1965, when the Beatles were working on the film and album Help! They were a big, popular band, but perhaps not yet the icons they would be. So it's a joke, but a prescient one, when the Doctor's companion Vicki, from the future, calls the Beatles “classical music” and has been to the Beatles museum in Liverpool.

And that joke says something about our place in history. It makes a connection between a famous historical figure and ones from the present day. Our own times and contemporaries can be just as worthy and extraordinary as the mythic figures in history. Our own time will be judged by the thing we all do now.

Queen Elizabeth I (The "Ditchley portrait")
by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger
oil on canvas, circa 1592
National Portrait Gallery 2561

Doctor Who's version of Queen Elizabeth also matches the portraits from her time – severe and icy and a bit frightening. Here she is in 1592 – a few years before that scene in Doctor Who was set. She's a huge, imposing figure, trampling land under her feet.

In the days before paparazzi and the internet, portraits like this one were sent round the country so the Queen's subjects could see what she looked like. Portraits were a way of making a connection with ordinary people – and showing them how important the subject is.

Shakespeare and Elizabeth have both been in Doctor Who more recently. Let's ignore the fact that The Shakespeare Code (2007) is in colour, filmed on location, and is all a bit faster and busier. Because the modern episode is effectively playing the same gag as the old one, showing us where Shakespeare got his inspiration, getting a joke in for those who know their Bard, and bringing the 1590s to life. They even do the same joke about modern celebrity, comparing Shakespeare not to the now-historic Beatles but to JK Rowling – there's a portrait of her at the NPG, too.

But we're presented with very different portraits of Shakespeare and Elizabeth. Shakespeare is bolder, sexier, more instinctive. Elizabeth is still icy and frightening, calling the Doctor her "sworn enemy" and demanding, "off with his head". Yet it's suggested in a later episode that the reason the Doctor is her sworn enemy is that they used to be married, and that she's not really the “Virgin Queen” we think. This is surely playing on recent popular depictions of the historical figures and their sex lives in films like Shakespeare in Love – also filmed at the Globe Theatre – and Elizabeth.

That's also true of Queen Victoria as she appeared in the series in 2006. The grieving widow, on retreat in Scotland, owes something to the film Mrs Brown. She's 60 years old, has been widowed for 18 years and still isn't over the loss of Albert. No one, bar John Brown in the film or the Doctor in the episode, dares to mention it. She's shocked at first, appalled by their rudeness, and then drawn to them by their concern. John Brown and the Doctor both rekindle something in Victoria, which is at the heart of the story and the portrait of her.

Admittedly, the Doctor Who episode Tooth and Claw also sees Victoria fighting ninjas and werewolves – she herself shoots a would-be assassin. That's not quite what we expect from her. The Doctor and his companion Rose bet each other that they can get Victoria to live up to expectation and say the words, “We are not amused.” But even when she does say it, there's a twist: she's so unamused by everything that's happened that the Doctor and Rose are banished from the kingdom. As a result, the portrait of Victoria is not simply made up of "distinctive marks" and catchphrases, she's a woman who thinks and feels and is constantly surprising.

The real Victoria can also be surprising. Working on this feature, I'd built up a mental image of Victoria from various biographies.

Queen Victoria
by Alexander Bassano
half-plate glass negative, 1882
National Portrait Gallery x95819

There she was, the Widow of Windsor, sulking in all her imperial finery for the last 40 years of her reign, longing to be out of the limelight. Then I found this one, from 1879 – the same year as her meeting with the Doctor:

Princess Beatrice of Battenberg; Queen Victoria
by Arthur James ('A.J.') Melhuish
albumen cabinet card, 1879
National Portrait Gallery x76537

It's very unlike other portraits of her from after the death of her husband. Here, she's simply holding her daughter's hand and smiling. She's suddenly alive – a real person, not a cliché. She clearly didn't spend every moment of those 40 years being miserable. It's not just that I have to reappraise my image of Victoria, it also makes her far more interesting. As Carlyle said,

"one portrait, superior in real instruction to half-a-dozen written biographies..."

That's five of the ten people on my list, so what have we learned so far? Doctor Who is not very consistent. Take his relationship to British rulers. Churchill and Richard the Lionheart value the Doctor's counsel; Queens Elizabeth and Victoria make him an outlaw. Then there's the historical figures themselves. How accurate can they be? Can we really believe that the Shakespeare seen in 1965 and the one in 2007 are the same man?

But perhaps it's more important that they're not consistent. We can see from these episodes how the popular impression of Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare have changed in the last 45 years. They're both national icons, so does that tell us something about how our view of ourselves and our national character has changed, too? The Shakespeare of 2007 is brasher, sexier, more confident and less dignified than the version from 1965. Is that true of the country?

I should also say that for a long period in it's history, Doctor Who didn't meet eminent figures from history? The first Doctor continued to meet them – such as Catherine de' Medici and Wyatt Earp – but when he regenerated in 1966, so did the series. The second Doctor still visited the past, but it was one generally being threatened by monsters rather than real historical figures and events. For the next decade and a half the Doctor would name-drop friends like Lister, Lord Nelson and Marie Antoinette – but we never saw them on screen.

I think there's an important difference between the Doctor mentioning that he's met someone famous and us seeing them on screen. When the Doctor says he took a medical degree under Lister or was a personal friend of Lord Nelson he elevates those figures. He name drops them because they're important. So even if he jokes about the famous people he's met, just mentioning them at all makes them more eminent.

But when he meets them on screen, something else happens. We get a glimpse of the real person, more vivid than the biographies. We might see aspects of them that we don't expect, or we might have our sense of the person confirmed. But living and breathing and alive before us, we witness their eminence for ourselves. We see them being great and worthy figures in history, rather than just taking the Doctor's word for it.

At least, that's how it works in principle. Two eminent figures from British history appeared in the series in 1985, and I think they're the exception to the rule.

In The Mark of the Rani, the sixth Doctor meets George Stephenson, railway engineer and inventor of the Rocket. He's the only scientist in my list – which is perhaps surprising for a show like Doctor Who. The Doctor is constantly battling monsters and superstition with “science”. I'll get on to why I think real scientists don't feature that much shortly.

In the story, Stephenson is planning to gather a meeting of various scientists and engineers, but the village keeps being attacked by angry thugs – who are assumed to be Luddites, protesting changes to traditional life wrought by industry and machines. It soon turns out that the thugs are really the victims of a rival Time Lord – one of two causing trouble in the area.

Though The Mark of the Rani is fun, there's not a great deal on insight into Stephenson as a character – he's a rather well-meaning, but dull figure in the story. We see him working on his machines and discussing them with his financier, but there's little in the story about science and invention – other than it generally being a good thing.

This is interesting, because in stories with with other historical figures, much is made of the contribution they've made to history, as we'll see in a moment. That said, we do see Stephenson working on his machines, getting his hands dirty. He also speaks with a northern accent – something we don't get from this rather austere portrait.

George Stephenson
by Henry William Pickersgill
oil on canvas, circa 1845
National Portrait Gallery 410

He doesn't exactly look like a man who gets his hands dirty.

Also in 1985, the Doctor met HG Wells. The gag of the story is that the Doctor taking Wells about the TARDIS and introducing him to monsters inspires Wells as a writer. This portrayal of Wells is at best disingenuous. Surely his scientific romances – The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man and so on – inspired the Doctor's adventures, not the other way round. There's also little sense of the real Wells in this depiction.

Herbert George Wells
by Mayall & Newman Ltd
cabinet card, late 1890s
National Portrait Gallery x13211

This is the real Wells from the same period. He was known as “Bertie” - never Herbert. Before he wrote his novels, Wells worked in a draper's shop – and was sacked for being “too common” - he later used that experience for his novel Kipps. He was, according to one biography,

“dirt poor, shabbily dressed and permanently hungry”.

John Lloyd and John Mitchinson, The QI Book of the Dead (2009), p. 144.

A sporting injury at school had left him with lung problems that the doctors suspected were tubercular. He wasn't given long to live. This gave his life a great sense of urgency – and he threw himself into educating himself, writing novels and womanising. The man Doctor Who shows as a timid, superstitious fool would in reality later state, "I can't bank on religion. God has no thighs and no life." Admittedly, his womanising came after his marriage at the age of 25 – after the events of the Doctor Who story. And watching this episode as an eight year-old, made me look out a copy of The Time Machine. But though the idiot Herbert is quite fun, surely the real man would have made for a more interesting and involving story.

I feel that Doctor Who's Wells and Stephenson are both missed opportunities – they're used because they are eminent men in our history, but there's little sense of why they were eminent. We see Churchill and Richard the Lionheart being great leaders, and Shakespeare is a genius who can stop monsters with his words.

The Doctor briefly met Einstein in a 1987 episode, though again there's no great insight into the man's character. In the 1996 television movie, he name-dropped Puccini and Marie Curie.

But when the series came back in 2005, meeting real people became a key ingredient in the show. Every year, there are cameos from real, living people – such as Patrick Moore, Ann Widdecombe, Richard Dawkins and Andrew Marr – and there are episodes devoted to real, historical characters. I think that's for important reasons, which I'll come to in a moment.

In The Unquiet Dead, the third episode of the new series, the Doctor met Charles Dickens. Uniquely, Dickens appears in the Portrait Gallery collection, as does the actor playing him, Simon Callow. Like Wells, the Dickens in Doctor Who brushes over much of the real biography. The story is set in 1869, the year before Dickens died. There's a line about his unhappy home life, but Dickens is on sparkling form, and even saves the Doctor at the end.

But the real Dickens was nowhere near as energetic in his last year. Four years previously, on 9 June 1865, he was involved in a serious train crash at Staplehurst. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,

"Dickens himself was unhurt but very badly shaken, not only by the accident itself but also by the experience of working for hours afterwards among the injured and the dying."

Before the crash he had been prolific, but over the next five years he slowed right down; completing Our Mutual Friend and six segments of his never-finished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The crash continued to haunt him – it's influence can be seen in his short story The Signalman, which the Doctor says is the best short story ever written.

Dickens continued to give highly dramatic readings of his work – as we see him do in the TV episode – but his health was fast deteriorating and he had to cancel a tour in April 1869 after what may have been a mild stroke. He'd have been ill and pallid and crippled with gout when the Doctor met him. Here he is in 1867 – two years before that.

Charles Dickens
by Jeremiah Gurney & Son, or by George Gardner Rockwood
albumen print, arched top, 1867
National Portrait Gallery, x9057

Doctor Who's Dickens and Wells might not adhere to the real biography, but they do so for different reasons. Mark Gatiss, writer of the Dickens episode as well as the Churchill one, is again printing the legend. A Dickens like he really was at the end of his life wouldn't be much good for fighting monsters in an adventure story, and it's not exactly tea-time telly for all the family. Instead, Gatiss takes dramatic liberties to present an impression of Dickens rather than a warts-and-all portrait of his final year. There are nods to Dickens' unhappy home life, his exhaustion and illness, but the main thing is the adventure.

It's not just that the Doctor meets Dickens: he's landed in the midst of a Dickensian story. There are ghosts, it's set at Christmas, and the tired, bitter old man is made to embrace life once again – all echoes of A Christmas Carol.

The same thing is true of Agatha Christie when she appeared in the show. Writer Gareth Roberts based the story on a real incident in Christie's life. As the fact file on the official Doctor Who website tells us,

"Agatha Christie really did disappear for ten whole days in 1926, although her car was found in a chalk pit, not next to a river. Some claim she had suffered a breakdown, while others said it was all a publicity stunt."

But the Doctor Who episode isn't exactly a testament to documentary realism. Here's what Christie looked liked in 1932:

Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie (née Miller)
by Bassano
half-plate glass negative, 15 January 1932
National Portrait Gallery, x30728

Again, Doctor Who provides an impression of the woman based on her work as much as her life. The story is a fun, summery murder mystery, with celebrity cameos and the Doctor gathering all the suspects to the drawing room to explain whodunnit. It's as if the TARDIS has landed not in a real 1926 but slap in the middle of an adaptation of one her novels, shown on prime-time ITV.

Donna even remarks on it: "Agatha Christie didn't walk around surrounded by murders," she says. "I mean, that's like meeting Charles Dickens and he's surrounded by ghosts...at Christmas."

It's interesting that the new series has concentrated so much on writers – Christie, Dickens and Shakespeare have all appeared, and head writer Russell T Davies even considered a Christmas special with the Doctor teamed up with JK Rowling.

Why writers? Well, Doctor Who has often been described as a writer-led show – each week it creates a whole new world, so it needs lots of imagination and new ideas. I also think it's easier for the Doctor to influence a writer without doing their work for them. See him with George Stephenson, struggling not to let himself take over the inventor's work – Stephenson has to puzzle it out for himself. I'd like to think that the reason we've seen so few real scientists in Doctor Who is not because of some prejudice on the part of the writers about the people in history they think are important, but because brilliant scientists are trickier to work into stories.

I would also recommend a spin-off CD, Bloodtide, by Jonathan Morris, in which the sixth Doctor meets Charles Darwin while he's formulating his theories on evolution. It's a rare example of real scientific history being worked into Doctor Who.

But why has there been this return to eminent historical figures appearing in Doctor Who? I think these real people help ground the Doctor's adventures in reality. In the same way that his companions are from our own time, and have families and jobs and houses we can relate to, the more we see reality, the more we'll buy into the crazier stuff in an episode. Agatha Christie is real, so the episode can get away with the murderer turning out to be a giant wasp. Just about.

Also, real historical figures mean there's more threat in episodes set in the past. In the Dickens episode – the first of the new series to travel back in time – we're told the future can be rewritten, the world we know could be lost. The very idea of Churchill and the Daleks is exciting because we know that didn't happen, so we don't know what's going to happen next.

The Doctor doesn't want to change history – he says there are fixed points in time that need protecting. An episode like The Waters of Mars was a neat twist on the figure from history. Lindsay Duncan played an astronaut from our future – but a woman the Doctor knew as a key figure in history. Could he save her from her famous death or was he duty bound to walk away? Did the same rules apply to a story set – to us – in the future?

I also wonder if meeting figures in history changes how we view the future, too. How much is our response to meeting Elizabeth X shaped by having seen the Doctor with Elizabeth I and Victoria?

The final person in my list of ten is the only one who's still alive. She's appeared, briefly, in two Doctor Who stories.

Queen Elizabeth II; Prince William of Wales; Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother; Prince Charles
by John Swannell
pictograph, 2000
National Portrait Gallery, x88877

Here's a portrait of the Royal Family. It's quite a formal composition, everyone in their best clothes and stood up straight. Just as Doctor Who has fondly mocked Shakespeare and Dickens, the Queen has also been used for comic effect. In the 1988 story Silver Nemesis, the gag is that the Doctor doesn't recognise her when he saunters round Windsor Castle as if he owns the place (though he has talked about her earlier in the same episode). The joke is that she's important – the Doctor should know who she is. Look at the portrait: basically, she rules.

In the 2007 episode Voyage of the Damned we learn – from Bernard Cribbens – that whereas everyone else has left London in fear of alien invasion, the Queen has remained at Buckingham Palace. She's defiant and proud, harking back to George VI not leaving London during the war. It also reveals something about Bernard Cribbens' character – he's proud of the Queen for staying put. It's part of her iconic image.

Later in the episode, the Doctor narrowly saves Buckingham Palace from being destroyed by an alien spaceship. We see the queen in pink dressing gown, pink slippers and curlers, waving a thank you. It's not like the portrait, it's a rather affectionate view of her. More so, when we learn what was originally planned for that scene.

Cut to save money was the spaceship destroying Buckingham Palace just after the Queen had got outside. The original version of the script describes a "LOW ANGLE, the old woman standing now framed against the sky. She waves an angry fist in the air". "Damn you, aliens," the Queen would have said, "Damn you!"

How much do we know our Queen? She doesn't give interviews. She's still alive so doesn't yet appear in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. We're left with glimpses of her at public events and in portraits. And it's from these that we build up an image of her – one surely more likely to wave a cheery thank you than shake an angry fist at the sky.

The script of Voyage of the Damned describes "an old woman in a nightie and curlers". It's at odds with the formal, regal portraits of the Queen on our stamps and money. And it gives us a tantalising glimpse of the Queen as a real person.

The Royal Family: A Centenary Portrait
by John Wonnacott
oil on canvas on foamboard, 2000
National Portrait Gallery, 6479

Another portrait of the Royal Family from 2000, but the composition is completely different – they're more relaxed, less formal. They're wearing the same sort of posh clothes as the previous portrait, they're in the same kind of expensive room. But just the way they're standing completely changes the impression. It's more fun, more intimate, we can believe they're a family like ours.

And that's what portraits do – here and in Doctor Who. We're able to relate these eminent people to ourselves by looking them in the eye.

I'll finish with an impression of what the Queen is like. While researching his book On Royalty, Jeremy Paxman attended the State Opening of Parliament and saw the Queen discussing horses with a "splendidly spurred official in charge of her transport". She reminded him of his own elderly mother who was also keen on horses.

Paxman has a reputation as a fearless interviewer. And yet, when the Queen glanced in his direction, he says:

"For an instant we had eye contact and I thought with utter horror, 'Oh no! She's going to talk to me!' I wanted the ground to swallow me, anything to avoid finding something to say to this particular old lady."

Jeremy Paxman, On Royalty, p. 23.

Later in the book, Paxman asked a dozen other people what they'd felt on meeting the Queen:

"The most frequently used word in response was 'thrilled'. 'I'd expected her to be a snob,' said a youth on a catering course, 'but she wasn't.' The commonest observation was the surprised discovery that she was 'human.'"

Ibid., p. 217.

The surprised discovery that the Queen is a human being! Now there's a twist worthy of Doctor Who.