17 years of new Doctor Who

17 years ago today, on 26 March 2005, Doctor Who returned to TV after an absence of almost as long. That first new episode Rose is still fresh and exhilarating, and readily available on iPlayer. It's easy to imagine someone starting with it now and quickly getting hooked. 

But I wonder how Rose would look to someone coming to it only familiar with Doctor Who from Jodie Whittaker's Doctor. Would it seem so very different? In the intervening years, there have been new lead actors, the move to high definition TV, and there's a lot more CGI - but in its pace and feel and imagination, and in the character and motivations of the Doctor, it's still recognisably the same programme.

How that contrasts with the first time Doctor Who turned 17, on 23 November 1980. The night before that birthday, State of Decay Part One saw the Fourth Doctor and his companions - two aliens and a robot - meeting vampires in a bubble universe, in a clash of old mythology and cutting edge physics. A few weeks before, on 4 November, is was announced that Peter Davison would be taking over the title role in the series, a markedly younger actor than the previous incumbents, promising new life for the then-venerable series. And a little before that, on 25 October, the first episode of Full Circle made a big impression on me; it's the earliest thing I remember.

For a long time, to me Doctor Who before then was essentially myth. My elder siblings shared tantalising memories of Doctor Who stories from just a few years before that I thought I'd never see. Old Doctor Who had been better, scarier, stranger - and theirs. Then came fleeting glimpses of what had been. At the end of 1981, BBC Two repeated some old stories, including ones older than my siblings. I vividly remember the awe with which we met Doctor Who's very first four episodes, relics of another age. 

For one thing, they were so strikingly different from the Doctor Who of 17 or 18 years later. They were black and white, but also dark and spooky and shot in a completely different way: long scenes with lots of close-ups, and little in the way of effects. There was also the character of the Doctor, this grumpy, cowardly, selfish figure - literally a different person, not just played by a different actor.

This extraordinary difference was evident to the people who worked on the programme. Jacqueline Hill, who played Barbara Wright in the first 18 months of Doctor Who, returned to the series in 1980 to play Lexa, an alien priestess. If Billie Piper, who played Rose, were to return to Doctor Who now, I wonder how much she'd share these sentiments:

"We did Meglos in different studios, and of course television had moved on in leaps and bounds so that the technique was completely different. The special effects were a lot more dominant. It was recorded entirely out of order and there was nobody working on the story who could remember as far back as me – which was something of a humbling experience. I did enjoy it very much, though, mainly because the part I played was so very different to the calm and unflappable Barbara. It was a happy reunion with a show that was really only the same show by name alone." (Jaqueline Hill in Doctor Who Magazine #105 (1985)

As it happens, this week I was in London to research more about the early days of Doctor Who and the people who made it - stuff now on the cusp of living memory. Since I was passing that way, I called in at a particular tree.

The Inheritors, by William Golding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"'Mal! Mal! We have meat!' 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Putin's People, by Catherine Belton

This extraordinary, meticulously researched book is an essential read just now. Belton charts the rise and rise of Vladimir Putin from his early days in the KGB to the present day (or 2020, when the book was published), to show where everything going on at the moment came from. There's a lot to take in: the scale of the kleptocracy, the astonishing sums of cash involved, the huge number of people caught up in it.

There's a lot on Russian links to Donald Trump, going back many decades, and lots on Putin's long-standing interest in Ukraine. There's lots on Russian support for Brexit and the corrosive effect of "black money" in London. What a lot of damage has been done; the horror of it all is exhausting.

Pincher Martin, by William Golding

It took a while to get into this 1956 novel by William Golding, and after the first few pages of a man struggling in water mixed up with bits of other stuff - conversations, images of life - I turned to the back cover hoping the blurb might provide a steer on what was going on. What's there contains a whopping spoiler for the end of the novel, and so does what follows here...

The back of this Faber paperback offers no teaser or summary of plot: instead, there are two quotations from reviews praising the "technical wizardry" (Kenneth Tynan in the Observer) and "sustained imaginative intensity" (unknown in the TLS). Tynan's particular praise is for, "the shock ending, which throws a new and doubly alarming retrospective light on the whole book". Rather than illuminate what's happening in the book, the message is to persevere. Which is a little ironic.

Pressing on through page after page, things became more clear. Christopher Hadley "Pincher" Martin has been shipwrecked, his ship torpedoed in what seems to be the Second World War. Martin kicks off his seaboots and struggles through the water to a rough, sheer bit of rock, stunned and exhausted, while bits of his former life flash before his eyes. There's then the promise of a harder, grittier Robinson Crusoe: the rock offering little comfort or useful materials, and Martin already half-mad.  

The glimpses of his life don't make us like him very much: a not very good actor, whose management were going to let go anyway before his call-up; a wannabe writer who has not written anything; a philanderer who once assaulted a woman who spurned him (an event, I gather, based on something Golding really did). Then there's the suggestion that the shipwreck was all his fault for giving the wrong order. There's a sense these privations - exposure, starvation, constipation, hideous sickness - are a punishment. Towards the end, there's a figure on the rock with Martin, suggesting this is some kind of purgatory.

And then the twist, as Martin's body is found on the shore and - in the killer final line - can't have suffered much because,

"He didn't even have time to kick off his seaboots." (p. 208)

Everything that precedes this is the last desperate vision of a drowning, dying man. Those boots, which surely killed him, are even on the cover of my edition, the only part of Martin visible, in a deceptively simple design by Paul Hogarth. Even on the last page I thought I must be missing something, and yet in that final line, what had been unfixed and uncertain all locks into place. 

Disgusted, Mary Whitehouse: Pick of the Week

Our documentary, Disgusted, Mary Whitehouse, has made tonight's Pick of the Week on Radio 4, presented by Geoff Lloyd. Hooray!

It's the second of the five radio documentaries made by me and my brother Thomas, and presented by Samira Ahmed, to have made Pick of the Week - the last was John Ruskin's Eurythmic Girls in 2017.

There's been a fair amount of press coverage of the documentary, too. We were mentioned on the cover of Radio Times, which also described the doc as "exceptional" (see below), and there were write-ups in BBC History Magazine, the Daily Express, Guardian, Herald, Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, Daily Telegraph, Times, Sunday Times, and Total TV Guide.

As well as her blog post, Samira wrote a piece for the BBC website:

• BBC: Was moral campaigner Mary Whitehouse ahead of her time?

Generally, responses have been positive. Mary Whitehouse remains a controversial figure and there are those appalled we made the programme at all and refuse to listen (which is ironic, given what we cover in the documentary). There are those who did listen and still think we're wrong - some because we were too lenient, some because we were too harsh. 

Roger Moore as James Bond

"The frank, uncensored story of what really happens in the making of a super-film," promises the back-cover blurb on Roger Moore as James Bond (aka Roger Moore's James Bond Diary). The star takes us through his 84 shooting days on his first Bond film, Live and Let Die, from Sunday 8 October 1972 when he leaves England for New Orleans to being told, if the rushes turn out okay, that he is done. 

On 14 October - Day 2 of shooting - Moore turned 45, the age I am now. There's a lot here about his aches and pains, his need of dental work, the various therapies employed and it's odd to think of myself, old and broken as I am, in better fettle than  Bond. There's also his anxieties and homesickness, and all the business that goes alongside making the movie itself.

"Daily more of the mechanics behind the mystique that is Bond become clear. The actual shooting, the rapport between my countenance and the camera, forms only a fraction of a field of operations which is a constant source of surprise." (Day 10, p. 27.)

The extra-curricular work includes endless press interviews, Moore is increasingly impatient when asked the same question each time: how will his Bond be different from Sean Connery's? There are endless photoshoots, appearances, charity galas, bits and pieces. Then there's the pop concert he goes to, where its announced to the audience that the new Bond is in their midst - and no one seems to care. He's self-effacing about this, and often very funny.

Yet Moore's wife Luisa is annoyed by how much this all encroaches into time he could spend with his children. Then there's the awkwardness of his various love scenes: how Luisa treats him on the days he's got sex on the schedule, the etiquette of what you say to the other actor during and after this stuff. It's Moore's diary, his version of events, but I often found myself wondering how it was for them. 

There's lots, too, that is amazing to see in an official, licensed release. In that sense, the book reminds me of Alan Arnold's absolutely extraordinary Once Upon a Galaxy: A Journal of the Making of The Empire Strikes Back which I now want to read again. Moore is candid about other actors fluffing their lines, mucking up shots or weeping. He cites various mistakes made by producer Harry Saltzman (such as, on page 32, making the wrong call on what the weather would be like, and so losing a day's shooting). There's stuff about Moore's children, such as his son needing an enema for trapped wind, that is personal, embarrassing and hardly relevant to the making of the film. But Moore seems to delight in this kind of thing: the gulf between movie fantasy and prosaic reality.

I wonder how much the cast and crew really enjoyed his constant pranking, which sometimes seems a bit cruel. I'm surprised, too, how little the other producer, Cubby Broccoli, features. Is that because he wasn't on set, or because he kept out of Moore's way, or because Moore had nothing funny or scathing to say about him, or because he knew better than to do so? Again, that's what make this so intriguing: Moore is sometimes brutally candid but we're not getting the whole story.

As early as day 5 we're told of plans afoot for the next Bond film, The Man With the Golden Gun, to begin shooting 18 months later in August 1974, and we really feel the weight and power of the Bond machine. But there's little on how much of a risk this all was, Moore the second attempt to keep the franchise going with a new leading man after George Lazenby had not turned out as hoped.

"The build-up of publicity and advertising for the film is fascinating. I was asking Harry [Saltzman] about the sort of money the Bonds have made in the past and he told me the biggest grosser was Thunderball which has done 64 million dollars to date. Diamonds are Forever, the last before Live and Let Die, had already grossed 48 million and it is only on its first time round [the cinemas]. OHMSS was the lowest and even that grossed 25 million dollars. I just hope ours will be as successful." (Day 52, p. 132.)

There's little sense he felt under pressure, I think because he could see the script and production were all good. But I wonder how Saltzman and Broccoli were feeling, especially given other tensions in the air. This is a film tapping into something of its moment. For example, early on, Moore was horrified to hear Saltzman shouting the N-word on set.

"He was not trying to start a race riot but simply calling to our English props man [by the] nickname he has answered to since the days of silent cinema. I pointed out that it might be better to to find him another name here in the racial hotbed of Louisiana so we have settled on 'Chalky'. As Bond, I make love to Rose Carver, played by beautiful black actress, Gloria Hendry, and Luisa has learned from certain Louisiana ladies that if there is a scene like that they won't go to see the picture. I personally don't give a damn and it makes me all the more determined to  play the scene." (Day 11, p. 31.)

There was more on this the following day: 

"Paul [Rabiger, supervising make-up] agrees with Guy [Hamilton, director], Tom Mankiewicz [writer] and myself that it would have been more interesting if Solitaire, our present leading lady, had been black as she was in Tom's original screen play, but United Artists would not stand for it." (Day 12, p. 33.)

A few days later, Moore reports on an argument on set, the black stunt team having objected to scenes being shot with white stunt performers blacked up (Day 17, p. 44). Two days after this, yet another photocall was the cause of further disagreement when Yaphet Kotto - the actor playing the villainous Mr Big - raised his fist in a black power salute.

"Whether he was serious or not I don't know but the sequel was a scorching row. [Publicity director] Derek Coyte pointed out that the pictures would rouse resentment from the rabid whites and could be seen as an endorsement of black power by militant blacks. We are making anything but a political picture but Derek said the photographs syndicated far and wide would involve us in a controversy which could do nothing but harm. Yaphet was incensed. At midday he and the black stunt men lunched together and during the afternoon Derek Coyte was ostracised by blacks who had previously been pally." (Day 19, p. 50.)

The next day, the black stuntmen were airing their grievances on local TV (p. 51). And these tensions were not confined to Louisiana. Returning to the UK, Moore shares a letter sent to him by a woman from North Wales, outraged by the sight of him pictured with Gloria Hendry as seen in the Daily Express (Day 54, p. 136).

Moore is unapologetic. It strikes me that George Lazenby had seen Bond as reactionary, but there's something here of Bond as progressive, just as they've tried to push things in the recent Daniel Craig films. Hardly perfect, but attempting to steer the juggernaut. 

I think there's something in that, too, when Moore first hears the theme tune for the film. In Goldfinger, Bond mocks the Beatles. Now a Beatle has written his title song, and Moore's response is telling:

"It is a tremendous piece of music and I will stick my neck out and say that three weeks from its release it will be number one in the charts. It's not last year's music, it's not even this year's music, it's next year's." (Day 66, p. 154.)

Doctor Who Magazine #575

The new issue of Doctor Who Magazine features "Silver Screen", in which Rhys Williams and I explore the writing and production design for the first episode of The Wheel in Space (1968) - a story by David Whitaker, designed by Derek Dodd. Rhys and Gav Rymill recreate the sets in CG, and Rhys has done the lion's share on this one - but it was very nice to coast in his wake.

There's also another "Sufficient Data" by me and Ben Morris, this time on the subject of antimatter to mark 40 years since it killed poor Adric.

A Survey of Television, by Stuart Hood

I mentioned Stuart Hood in my last post because I recently saw him in an episode of the BBC's Talkback from 7 November 1967, with six members of the public - including Mary Whitehouse - responding to this passage from his then recently published book:

"If one works in television one most reconcile oneself to the fact that the bulk of audience reaction is from cranks, from the unstable, the hysterical and sick." (p. 38)

For all the caustic tone, Hood's point was that those making television for a mass popular audience really need a sense of that audience's responses, but the means of gauging a reaction are limited. Viewing figures, audience surveys and correspondence can rarely explain the success or otherwise of a programme, let alone offer practical advice on how to improve. Programme makers are more often led by instinct. Committees of public opinion only resulted in bland television no one wanted to watch.

"Committees are uncreative." (p. 49)

Hood was Controller of BBC Television between 1961 and 1964, then moved to the ITV franchise Rediffusion. His survey of the medium is full of fascinating detail and more of that caustic wit. 

"Scottish Television serves the 4 million people of the Scottish industrial belt, which contains - to judge by the programmes they watch - the most uncritical body of viewers in the British Isles." (p. 25).

On the facts, it's interesting to read that there were, he thought in 1967, 

"some one hundred and ten countries with television service (p. 4),

up from four in 1946. He details how these were, at the time of writing, organised in groups: the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) with associate members from the American networks, Australia and South Africa plus new nations such as Malawi, Chad and Congo; its mirror opposite International Radio and Television Organisation (OIRT) comprising East European countries, Cuba, the Republic of Mali, the Korean People's Republic, China, the United Arab Emirates and the People's Democratic Republic of Vietnam; the Asian Broadcasting Union (ABU); the African Radio and Television Organisation (URNTA). Seeing the members helped me understand why, for example, Doctor Who sold to particular countries and not to others.

Sales could also be affected by cultural differences.

"Maigret was judged unacceptable by the [American] networks not because of the English accents (although they are a stumbling block) nor because of the foreign setting, but because of little incidents which betrayed a different set of television mores. Thus when Maigret had occasion to cross-examine a girl in a maison de passe it was found surprising that no moral attitude was taken towards the little tart. Nymphomania, lesbianism, drug addiction were touched on and accepted as facts of life, neither swept under the carpet nor magnified out of proportion in the context of the plot. Added to all these was the incident in which Maigret and Lucas stood in a courtyard, saw a light come on in a window, watched and waited to be rewarded by hearing the cistern of a lavatory flush." (p. 139)

Hood is even more withering of programmes that do sell to the US: he thought The Saint and The Avengers "anodyne" mid-Atlantic fare, the "triumph" of selling to the American networks,

“only slightly tarnished by the fact that these series have usually been used as cheap summer replacements.” (p. 140)

He's even less impressed by programmes coming the other way: Batman is "subliterate" (p. 160).

For all he is withering about shows he clearly doesn't like, he's good on the way that the structure, tone and content of programmes is set by the structures imposed on television by technology, politics and other forces. He begins with the physics of television itself and the varying methods of producing a moving picture at a distance, and how that dictated form. During the General Strike of 1926, the Government wished to "commandeer the BBC as an instrument of propaganda", which John Reith fiercely opposed.

"His victory was one of the crucial moments in the history of British broadcasting. Both BBC and ITV benefit from his stand to this day." (p. 168)

Then, of Hood's own time at the BBC, there's the way subtle differences between the Royal Charter and the Television Act 1954 dictated the output of the BBC and ITV respectively. Under the Act, the Independent Television Authority - overseeing ITV - had to ensure that,

"nothing is included in the programmes [of an ITV franchise] which offends against good taste or decency (a question-begging phrase) or is likely to encourage or incite crime or lead to disorder or to be offensive to public feeling or which contains any offensive representation of or reference to a living person." (p. 20)

The last part effectively meant that ITV could not engage in the satire craze of the early 1960s: the BBC could screen That Was The Week That Was; on ITV, "it would have been a breach of the Act."

Hood mentions TW3 eight times in the book, suggesting his own reckoning of its significance. There are multiple entries for police series Maigret and business drama The Plane Makers, and for sitcoms Steptoe and Son and Till Death Us Do Part. Surprisingly, there is no mention of other innovative and successful programmes created in Hood's time as Controller: Doctor Who, Top of the Pops and Play School. Perhaps he didn't think much of them; perhaps their significance only became clear when they'd been running for decades.

Hood has plenty to say about sitcoms. In his view, 

"the medium [of television] is a voracious consumer of talent and turns. A comic who might in the [music or variety] halls hope to maintain himself with a polished routine changing little over the years, embellished a little, spiced with topicality, finds that his material is used up in the course of a couple of television appearances. The comic requires a team of writers to supply him with gags, and invention" (p. 152)

The sitcom is a vehicle to enable this: effectively providing the comic performer with a structure for new material based on a familiar form. But whereas drama is innovative, sometimes uncomfortable or shocking, sitcom is part of a type of television altogether more safe. 

"Light entertainment is the most conservative department of television.” (p. 151)

He defines light entertainment as, 

“comedy, quiz games, light musical productions, pop programmes, outside broadcasts from night clubs and variety theatres. Its traditions are mainly drawn from the halls or from radio. They have been adopted television presentation but fundamentally the sequence of song, dance, spot comedian is unchanged.” (ibid)

Perhaps that's why he doesn't think Top of the Pops worthy of a mention. But I also think it's to do with his politics. He had been a member of the Communist Party and was later a member of the Workers Revolutionary Party, and Hood reviewed Asa Briggs' history of the BBC of this period for International Socialism. At the beginning of his Survey of Television, he suggests why a country such as apartheid South Africa may have been slow to embrace TV:

“Television is a great educator. Besides who knows what remarks the coloured citizens of the Republic might feel free to make in the privacy of their homes about the white people on the screen?”  (p. 5)

He's interested, then, in television as progressives, a medium of necessary change. And light entertainment,

“is a non-political tradition. Political satire has been traditionally avoided… It is more likely to be dictated by a determined political neutrality. Much of TV variety is of this inoffensive, traditional nature. It is popular and professionally presented and fundamentally unintellectual.” (p. 152)

This, I think, is why Hood devotes a lot to the advances in news and educational programming - the role of television in explaining politics and shaping the world. It's not that light entertainment couldn't be technically sophisticated - even groundbreaking. I've always heard The Black and White Minstrel Show spoken of in terms of embarrassment, a show that should have been cancelled long before 1978. It's odd to think of it as having been innovative and exciting.

"When The Black and White Minstrel Show won the Golden Rose of Montreux in 1959 there were some European representatives who doubted whether their audiences could follow the speedy cutting and rhythm of the camera work. Such sophistication is now general." (p. 169)

Compare that to the reactionary culture of the news:

"On one point only it seems unlikely that the BBC or ITN will take a step forward - by employing a woman to read the news. For one short period the BBC did employ a woman announcer who was at once intelligent and good looking; but the weight of masculine prejudice among her colleagues was too powerful and the experiment had to be discontinued. So too was ITN's experiment in the use of newscasters in the sense of men who write their own copy and then read it in front of the camera." (p. 108)

This all makes it sound like Hood's survey is of where television has been, but much of this is about where it is going next. He's concerned about TV schedules programmed not by humans but by "crystal clock and computer" (p. 84). There's stuff about the practicalities of 625-line television, brought in by the BBC the year Hood was writing, and the impact of more channels, of colour TV, of satellite broadcasting. The striking thing, in retrospect, and the irony given Hood's politics and predilections, is how conservative he was about the future we've seen come to pass.

Think of the BBC's new promo to mark its centenary this year, #ThisIsOurBBC: the rich variety of programming showcased, the social contract with the audience and nation, news and light entertainment mixed in with the drama, the whole thing posited as direct engagement with the audience, a two-way conversation. I think, from working on our documentary about Mary Whitehouse, that she had a media savvy understanding of the power of television. Ironically, Stuart Hood lacked the same faith.

Mary Whitehouse v Doctor Who

Disgusted, Mary Whitehouse will be broadcast on Radio 4 on Saturday 5 March. Produced by me and brother Thomas, it’s presented by Samira Ahmed who has spent months researching Whitehouse’s diaries, now in the collections of the Bodleian Library in Oxford; Samira has written a blog post about it all. For our programme, we spoke to Whitehouse’s granddaughter Fiona, to critics Michael Billington and Nicholas de Jongh, and to actor / director Samuel West. Oh, and Lisa Bowerman is amazing as Mary Whitehouse.

I’ve spent weeks going through the BBC archives for suitable clips to use. The earliest surviving example is from 5 May 1964, a news report about the Clean-Up TV event held at Birmingham Town Hall, where Whitehouse was one of the speakers. The clip of Whitehouse is brief but quite well known:

“Last Thursday evening we sat as a family and we saw a programme that started at six thirty-five and it was the dirtiest programme that I have seen for a very long time.”

The consensus seems to be that this dirty programme was a Scottish sketch show, Between the Lines, starring Tom Conti and Fulton Mackay. On the edition of 30 April, Conti met an attractive woman at a dance and we then heard his internal monologue. Sadly, the episode seems to be missing from the archive, so we can’t tell how “dirty” it was. We can’t judge the language used, the tone of it, the general effect. 

Surely, one would think, a programme shown at 6.35 in the evening couldn’t be too rude. And yet there’s lots in old telly that was thought innocuous at the time but seems remarkable now. The Wheel of Fortune is an episode of Doctor Who written by David Whitaker and first broadcast at 5.40 pm on 10 April 1965. It includes a scene in which a man called Haroun helps companion Barbara Wright to hide from some soldiers. Haroun leaves Barbara with his young daughter, Safiya, while he goes to look for a safe route out of town. He gives Barbara his knife: if she thinks the soldiers will find them, she is to kill Safiya and then herself. Barbara protests, but Haroun persuades her:

You would not let them [the soldiers] take Safiya?
No, of course I wouldn’t!
Then I'll leave the knife. 

It’s an extraordinary thing to include in a family drama aimed at kids aged 8 to 14, and just one of several examples from early Doctor Who where Barbara is under threat of sexual violence.

Right from the beginning of Doctor Who, there had been questions about how suitable it was for children. Opinion on this was “strongly divided” at the executive meeting of the BBC’s Television Programme Planning Committee on 4 December 1963 - after just two episodes of the series had been broadcast. The following week it looked like the programme might be moved to a later time in the schedule, though this was over-ruled by Head of Drama (and co-creator of Doctor Who) Sydney Newman. 

Then, on 12 February 1964, at the same committee Donald Baverstock (Chief of Programmes, BBC-1, listed in minutes as “C.P.Tel”) thought one scene in The Edge of Destruction - in which the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan attacks a chair with a pair of scissors while in the grip of some kind of madness - might have breached the BBC’s own code on depictions of inimitable violence. Baverstock’s then boss, Stuart Hood, later wrote that the BBC’s code of practice on violence in television, drawn up in 1960, was.

“a remarkably sane and enlightened document, which acknowledged the fact, for instance, that subjects with unpleasant associations for adults will often be taken for granted by children and vice versa. ‘Guns … and fisticuffs may have sinister implications for adults; seldom for children. Family insecurity and marital infidelity may be commonplace to adults; to children they can be deeply disturbing.’” (Stuart Hood, A Survey of Television (1967), p. 90.)

That reference to guns is interesting in the light of Mary Whitehouse’s first-known objections to Doctor Who. Whitehouse believed that depictions of sex and violence on TV had a corrupting effect on the viewer, and led to an increase in sexual and violent crime more broadly. She gave some examples of this in an interview with the Daily Mirror on 29 November 1965:

“‘I know a 14-year-old girl who was so physically affected by a sexy play that she went out and offered herself to a 14-year-old boy. … And I know a boy who listened to a doctor expounding the virtues of of premarital sex and went out and got VD… I mean, where is it going to end? We've even got the Daleks in Dr. Who—a children's show, mind you—chanting 'Kill, kill, kill.' One day a youngster is going to go out and do just that…’ AT this point MRS. FOX said something that sounded like ‘twaddle.’”

That’s Avril Fox, “mother and Harlow councillor”, contesting Whitehouse’s claims. I found several examples of this in the archive, too: Whitehouse claiming to represent the views of ordinary people, and then ordinary people quickly saying she didn’t speak for them. (We use one example in our documentary, from an episode of Talkback on 7 November 1967 in which Whitehouse and other members of the public responded to Stuart Hood and the claims made in his book, not least that most people who write into TV companies are “cranks”.)

I also found several examples of Whitehouse conflating what are surely different issues, such as in this case undercutting her point about protecting children from sexualised content by equating it with the supposed effects of fantasy violence. Yes, children mimic Daleks - that’s part of the Daleks’ appeal - but they don’t then go on to kill people. Suggesting they do undercuts the whole argument; the serious point about sexualised content is also dismissed as twaddle.

There’s a third characteristic: that Whitehouse may have been complaining about something she’d not actually seen. The Daily Mirror interview was published two days after the broadcast of Devil’s Planet, an especially notable episode of Doctor Who in that it killed off a companion. But Katarina is not killed by Daleks; she is ejected from a spaceship airlock. The Daleks do appear, and execute a wicked alien called Zephon, but there is no chanting of “Kill”.

Famously, the Daleks don’t chant “Kill”, but prefer the term “Exterminate”. One Dalek does repeat, “Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill,” in the episode Flashpoint (broadcast 26 December 1964), so either Whitehouse was remembering that untypical sequence from a year before, or she invented the thing she criticised - perhaps repeating what other people said about the Daleks, rather than what she’d observed herself. (As we detail in our documentary, she consciously chose not to see The Romans in Britain at the National Theatre, but led a private prosecution against its director for a scene in it that she considered to be grossly indecent.)

In her later criticism of Doctor Who, Whitehouse was more specific - and effective. Since m’colleague Jonathan Morris wrote about this in more depth in his 2003 feature for Doctor Who Magazine, “Sex and Violence”, a wealth of press clippings have been posted on the Doctor Who Cuttings Archive relating to Mary Whitehouse. Planet of the Spiders (1974) had, she claimed, led to an “epidemic” of “spider phobia” in children. In Genesis of the Daleks (1975),

“Cruelty, corpses, poison gas, Nazi-type stormtroopers and revolting experiments in human genetics are served up as teatime brutality for the tots.” (The Mirror, 27 March 1975)

She was concerned about specific scenes in The Brain of Morbius and The Deadly Assassin (both 1976), and could vividly recall them almost 20 years later when interviewed, on 22 November 1993, for the documentary Thirty Years in the TARDIS. Director Kevin Davies kindly provided me with a longer version of that interview, though we couldn’t make it fit in our programme:

“Now, there’s one particular programme - and I can see it still in my mind’s eye - where Doctor Who, the final shot of the episode, was Doctor Who drowning. And these sort of images, the final shots of the programme, with the image that was left in the mind of the child for a whole week, not knowing whether his beloved Doctor Who or whatever would have drowned or not have drowned. And another programme finished with a girl who was with him, and she had a pincer put around her neck. And the holding of that pincer round her, again, was the last shot. And to me, I think it’s extraordinary that people with the brilliance, in many ways, in making a programme of that kind couldn’t have extended their awareness not only to their cameras or all the rest of it, but to the effect of what they were doing upon the children who were receiving it. That was almost as thought they were a bit dumb in that area.”

Back in 1976, and following her criticism, the last shot of the drowning scene was cut from the master tape of the episode by the programme’s then producer.  On the 30 Years documentary, a subsequent producer says he secretly hoped Mary Whitehouse would complain about his Doctor Who because it was always good for viewing figures; yet her complaints about violence in the series in his time overseeing the series were used as justification when the programme was then taken off the air. Today, Doctor Who isn’t shown so early in the evening and - I’d argue - is marketed much less as a show for children. I find myself wondering how much that sort of thing is in the shadow of Mary Whitehouse.

Going through her diaries, I found a number of other things. There’s the entry in the 1985 diary where she has two concerns about recent television: her discussions with Michael Grade, then Controller of BBC-1, about violence in the recent season of Doctor Who and the legal judgment on yet another private prosecution she’d brought, this time about the broadcast on Channel 4 of a controversial film set in a borstal. So the page is headed “Dr. Who - SCUM”

And another one I noted. On 18 March 1982, the legal case against The Romans in Britain was withdrawn. Mary Whitehouse was on that evening’s Newsnight to discuss the case, and spent most of her time correcting what she felt were errors in the reporting. Then, interview done, the cameras wheeled away to the other side of the studio for further discussion of the case, with Joan Bakewell speaking to Sir Peter Hall from the National Theatre and Sir Lois Blom-Cooper.

Again, Whitehouse thought what they said was wrong. In her diary, she says she asked the presenter who’d just interviewed her if she could intercede. The presenter checked with the producer who said no. So Mary Whitehouse heckled anyway.

“Whereupon the cameras came chasing across the studio, like a lot of Daleks, leaving Joan Bakewell and her guests in darkness! … I came fully onto the screen as I was saying my bit.” (Mary Whitehouse, diary entry for events of 18 March 1982, written on the page for 10 March 1982)

I was really struck by that moment - and that telling word. Alas, as the Daleks close in on Mary Whitehouse for this hero moment, she’s not clutching her lapels.

Doctor Who: Chronicles - 2007

The latest issue of the Doctor Who: Chronicles (from the makers of Doctor Who Magazine) is focused on the year 2007, which in a weird, sci-fi wossname is now somehow ancient history.

For his article on the Doctor Who books published that year, Mark Wright spoke to me about writing The Pirate Loop, the one with the space-pirate badgers. The Dr still thinks that book is the best thing I've ever written, so it's been 15 years all downhill.

The Franchise Affair, by Josephine Tey

I've been meaning to get to this mystery novel for years. The Dr is a fan of Josephine Tey, and also of Nicola Upson's series of novels in which Tey is herself the detective. 

Some time ago, we watched the 1988 TV version of The Franchise Affair, which was the last TV work overseen by Terrance Dicks and the second of two adaptations of Tey that he produced for the BBC's "Classic Serials", effectively putting this mystery writer in the same bracket as Dickens, Bronte and Thackeray. I wonder why, of all mystery writers, Dicks chose her to make canonical... 

Robert Blair is a partner in a legal firm whose "business is mostly wills, conveyancing, and services", based in the smallish town of Milford. One morning he's rung up by Marion Sharpe he has seen around the town and asked to sit in on an interview with the police. Blair heads to the Franchise, a sizeable house now past its prime, which Sharpe and her mother have recently inherited and where they live in genteel poverty. Then the police arrive with a 16 year-old girl covered in bruises. She says the Sharpes kidnapped her, held her hostage for weeks, and inflicted ruthless beatings...

It's refreshing to have a mystery that's not a murder, and the general feel of the book is unsettling intrigue. It's as much about how the neighbourhood reacts to these two women from the Franchise, and there are plenty of shrewd observations, such as when Blair speaks to a waitress. 

"'We were all discussing that case on Friday [says the waitress]. Imagine beating her half to death like that.'

'Then you think they did?' [asks Blair.]

She looked puzzled. 'The paper says they did.'

'No, the paper reports what the girl said.'

She obviously did not follow that. This was the democracy we deified.

'They wouldn't print a story like that if it wasn't true. It would be as much as their life's worth. You a detective?'

'Part time,' Robert said.

'How much an hour do you get for that?'

'Not nearly enough.'

'No, I suppose not. Haven't got a union, I suppose. You don't get your rights in this world unless you have a union.'

'Too true,' said Robert. 'Let me have my bill, will you?'

'Your check, yes." (p. 130.)

In this, there are hints of a generational divide, and an inrush of Americanisation, perhaps the result of the recent war. The book was first published in 1948 (mine is a battered copy from the following year), but there's little on the war specifically - no mention of Blair having served, for example, or that some of people's strange behaviour may be the shadow of trauma.

In fact, it's all rather lightly played, and straightforward. Blair remains convinced of the Sharpes' innocence and even falls for Marion. I was braced for some last twist or reversal that never came. It's a comic novel in many ways, with something of Wodehouse in the reactions of Blair's maiden aunt.

"A fortnight ago you would never have dreamed of putting a parcel of fish down on polished mahogany and forgetting all about it." (p. 162)

But I really felt for the Sharpes, facing prosecution and a violent response from their neighbours. I think that may be because I'm also deep in research at the moment about a real court case, the one brought 40 years ago by Mary Whitehouse against the director of the National Theatre production, The Romans in Britain - of which more anon.

And so I think the thing that really lingers from this is Marion Sharpe's sympathy at the end of the novel for the mother of her accuser, a connection felt across the gulf of the two sides.

The Animals in That Country, by Laura Jean McKay

Jean's life is a bit of a mess. She wants to be a ranger in the wildlife park where she works, but can't get her qualifications - and is secretly drinking and, worse, keeps telling visitors what the animals all say, against all the rules about anthropomorphising them. The boss of the park - who is also the mother of Jean's granddaughter - is running out of patience. And then a new kind of flu hits Australia, and suddenly all the animals talk...

This is a strange, unsettling book, initially about a pandemic (by coincidence, apparently, despite all its similarities to Covid) and then something more profound. Animals communicate in myriad ways - gesture and scent as telling as sound. Some of what they say is quite disturbing. Beloved pets turn out to be crazy, driven mad by having their wildness constrained. There's something of that, too, in the humans, Jean's wild excesses barely kept in check - and she's not alone. She has a secret drinking buddy at work, and is having an affair with an otherwise gay man. From the evidence here, we are messy creatures, all of us bad dogs and cats. People are animals, driven by hunger and lust and excreta, things of flesh and need. What follows is visceral and vivid, so the effect is like an extended dream, verging on nightmare.

To begin with, the heart of the book is Jean's relationship with her granddaughter Kim, who seems to be offer Jean her one hope of salvation - she'll be a better person for Kim. There's then a resounding awfulness when Kim goes missing, but on the quest to retrieve her that follows Jean forms a bond with one of the wildlife park's residents, a dingo called Sue. What's extraordinary is how much we get into Sue and other animals' heads, how much we understand - before the gut-punch ending when it's made plain how little we can know about what really goes on in someone else's skull. That's what this is about: our connections and lacks of connections, human or otherwise.

It's an often funny and sometimes uncomfortable read, sort of Shameless and Ridley Walker and The Road all in one, with something of the setting of Mad Max. But that tantalising sense of understanding animals makes it like nothing else. I can see why this won last years Clarke Award. 

Starlight Days, by Cecil Madden

Cecil Madden was "the world's first television producer", according to the cover of this memoir edited by his granddaughter, Jennifer Lewis and published in 2007, 20 years after his death. Madden begins with that first broadcast: having been in BBC Radio since 1932, in 1936 he was given nine days' notice to put together the very first television programme, made at Alexandra Palace and seen on TV sets demonstrated at the Radio Show at Radiolympia from 26 August.

“I decided to put on a variety show, and there was no time to waste. I phoned a songwriter, Ronald Hill, and commissioned a new song. He came up at once with ‘Here’s Looking at You!’ a title that was an inspiration. Titles are very important and I decided that our whole show should be called ‘Here’s Looking at You’. This move intrigued the press and cheered the radio industry.” (p. 8)

There were 20 performances of this show, running until 5 September. Madden then produced the magazine programme Picture Post, broadcast on 8 October. Television began officially on 2 November, though Madden recalls of that opening night,

“Frankly, it was pretty dull.” (p. 72)

What follows is a not always chronological memoir of those early days, battling to make the new medium exciting and inventive. Staff swapped roles, taking turns to direct as,

“it brought endless new ideas and trained everybody” (p. 71)

There's lots here I'd already gleaned from The Intimate Screen about the intimacy that TV provided between programme maker and viewer, but this is a first-hand account, much of it listing productions and the people involved, some of it not listed on IMDB. Madden says that,

“Planning the television schedule there was never any doubt in my mind that the emphasis should be on drama.” (p. 74)

‘A play a day’ was the target we set ourselves at the outset, and so it turned out. The process nearly killed everyone. But this was something I was particularly proud of.” (p. 104)

He says the first TV drama was Marigold (featuring John Bailey), and the first whole play - rather than just an excerpt - was Priestly's When We Were Married in 1938. The regular Sunday-Night Play began that same year and was still running in 1963. The first weekly drama was Ann and Harold.  

There's a little on what makes a good drama, such as this observation from GK Chesterton in a letter he wrote to Madden:

“Those who despise detective stories are so stupid they do no even see what is wrong with detective stories. There is no reason why a shocker should not deal with the highest spiritual problem; where it will always, perhaps, fall short of the first rank is in this, that in a great story the characters make the story: in a detective story the story makes the characters. It is made up backwards. Many police novels are quite good, the characters real, the conversation convincing. But the characters have been created to do something, preferably something atrocious, and the convincing talk leads up up to a conviction.” (p. 63)

By the time war started - and the television service stopped - there were 30,000 sets in viewers' homes (p. 117). During the war, Madden returned to radio, broadcasting to the world from the underground Criterion Theatre in Piccadilly, where he was also air-raid warden. There, Madden discovered 10 year-old Petula Clark (p. 158), discovered and named the Beverley Sisters (p. 232) and was the last civilian to see Glenn Miller alive (p. 236). (In other firsts, he was also responsible for the first signature tune used on radio, which he devised as a way to hide the cough with which an unnamed presenter always started (p. 57)).

There are plenty of insights about wartime London: the social mix of people in the shelters, the poor laying down beside those in fur coats (p. 145); the stables near the Windmill Theatre in the centre of town, with horses that needed rescuing during a raid (p. 169); the incongruous image of Vera Lynn bedding down on a mattress in the makeshift underground studio for a nap ahead of a 2am broadcast (p. 155).

Madden tells his own "bomb story", of being caught in a raid in south London where, with hat, umbrella and gas mask, he hurled himself over a garden fence and thus survived. But, he says, everyone had such bomb stories - and he collected them from people he worked with and shares them here. It's a remarkable collection of first-hand accounts of strange, scary moments - but it occurs to me that people looking up family history or doing other research wouldn't think to check a memoir of TV production, which doesn't have an index. So here is a list of those people whose bomb stories Madden gives from p. 165 onwards, in the hope this blog post then turns up in searches:

Margaret McGrath (showgirl and actress); Charmian Innes (comedienne); Joan Jay (soubrette and dancer); Valerie Tandy (dancer and comedienne); Bob Lecardo (acrobat); Frank Dei (organist); Alan Bixter (pianist and accompanist); Sandy Rowan (comedian); Nick Tanner and Norah Crawford (veterans of wartime entertainment touring with BEF); Fred Wildon (“old-timer” and concert party manager); Gaby Rogers (composer, arranger, pianist); Vicki Powell (actress, dancer, singer); Penniston Miles (musician); Jack May (comedian); Nat Allen (band leader, accordion and bass player); Mary Barlow (revue singer); Jack Warman (character comedian).

After the war, Madden returned to TV. He had a short stint on children's television, working at the newly acquired Lime Grove Studios, and was then from 1951 Assistant to the Controller of Television Programmes - he describes this as being "kicked upstairs". He was still talent spotting: it's not listed here, but I know from other research that he got Delphi Lawrence her first work in TV. His memoir says he was the first person to suggest that TV should cover sport, leading to Sportsview (p. 283); he was also directly involved in the televising of an excerpt from Look Back in Anger, despite the trepidation of the play's writer and director, and this was just one of a number of stage productions that were "made" by TV. For more on this, see John Wyver's piece on Cecil Madden's memoir for Screen Plays - Theatre Plays on British Television.

Sadly, Madden's account rather tails off towards the end. There's alas no assessment of his achievements or the changes in television - or culture more generally - which I'd hoped for. There's little on the transformation in the medium brought by ITV (though it does get a mention), or in BBC drama under Sydney Newman (who is not mentioned at all). I'd hoped for something on how the old guard responded to or felt about these seismic shifts. Oh well.

Madden left the BBC in late 1964 at the same time as controller Stuart Hood. An obituary included as a coda says he then set up BAFTA. A postscript from Madden's daughter adds that the Beverley Sisters continued to visit him in old age - and that they always dressed the same.

Sad Little Men, by Richard Beard

This very timely memoir is about the damage done by public schools, especially to boarding pupils separated from their parents at an impressionable age, and how that traumatic damage might explain some of what's happening in Downing Street at the moment.

As an adoptive father, I've read quite a lot of stuff to do with attachment and its lasting effects - how not having basic needs met at an early age can affect a child's physical development, their brain chemistry, their whole future. Beard's thesis is more about ideology, the institution shaping an outlook. 

First, there's the long-term damage done by hiding how upsetting it was/is to be separated from parents and home; tears - his own or his mother's - were likely to be mocked. The result is more than empathy being seen as weakness.

"Don't make a fuss about nothing, and by refusing to fuss we turned the concerns of others into nothing. Everything could be nothing, up could be down, right could be wrong. The truth could be a lie and one thing could always be another." (p. 96)

Beard refers (after Andrew Motion) to the "skin" or outer later projecting what the child thinks others want to hear: letters home saying school is "fine" and "nice", perhaps even that it is better than being at home. This is a kind of masking, and I'm aware how damaging that can be. Masking takes effort and cannot be sustained; meltdowns and explosions often follow, apparently from nowhere. By encouraging masking, you encourage the eruptions.

Beard joins that idea of the "skin" to the way he was taught. It's telling that he feels such affinity with accounts of public school by George Orwell and Roald Dahl, the same experience and culture persisting over decades, whereas my brothers and I all had different experiences of being at the same school. One explanation for this is that few of Beard's teachers had qualifications; several had been through the same system and merely passed on what had been meted out to them. And what Beard was taught was a way to project himself, with confidence and long words. He was taught rhetoric, vocabulary, the primacy of Latin:.

"Aged thirteen, my diary reads as the prime minister speaks now, in his mid-fifties." (p. 101)

The ideas being taught were just as much about posture: history lessons that saw only confidence and glory in Empire; debates that "bravely" argued in favour of racism. These boys flirted with - even embraced - such ideas, because to say the supposedly unsayable is a show of strength.

I'm struck by what happens to those who flout the rules in these strict institutions. A young David Cameron went through a rebellious phase and was caught smoking spliffs.

"With drugs, as Cameron discovered, if the school caught us first we were beyond the reach of the law. In these instances the police were rarely involved, and therefore in the bigger picture we learned that for people like us the law was negotiable." (p. 165)

Right there, the indoctrination of "us" and "them".

It's a memoir, a personal take, and Beard admits that lockdown has restricted his ability to research the subject more widely. I'd have liked a bit more thoroughness in the presentation - page references for the books and papers he cites, interviews with the current staff rather than chance encounters as he walks the grounds, and a bit more science. But I'm really taken by his idea of how to measure a good school: not (just) in examination results but in the longer term, looking at later-life breakdowns, divorces and suicide, and damage inflicted on others.

The sense, I think, is of more than sad little men. The feeling is of an institutional hollowing out. There's an abysmal emptiness here, all mask and nothing within.

Doctor Who Magazine #574

After some time off to make room for the Christmas quiz (and answers), the new issue of Doctor Who Magazine features another Sufficient Data infographic, written by me and illustrated by Ben Morris. 

This one marks 50 years of Day of the Daleks and owes a little to the blog post I wrote a while ago on the economics of the Daleks.

Silverview, by John le Carre

Julian Lawnsdsley has set up a bookshop in a small town, escaping from the evils of the City. One potential customer is a peculiar old man who claims to have been a friend of Julian's father - though Julian's father was meticulous in keeping records and there's no reference to this man. The old man, Edward, has a modest proposal for Julian: to establish in the basement of the shop a club, a society, a Republic of Literature. Oh, and there are maybe some errands that perhaps Julian could help with...

As always, le Carre quickly ensnares us in his world of secrets, conflicted loyalties and keenly observed detail. How deceptively easily he makes it look. There's wry humour and that awful sense of loss - this is all familiar territory, comfortingly unsettling. However, this, le Carre's last novel and published posthumously, is also noticeably slight: 207 pages in relatively large type. Perhaps Julian volunteers a little too easily to help Edward. Perhaps there's something overly convenient, too, in the way he's so quickly taken in by Edward's family - tested by Edward's wife, bedded by Edward's daughter. Perhaps it doesn't add up to a whole huge amount that we've not seen before.

But perhaps none of that really matters one jot. It's good; it's arresting; it's a last taste of this world. Towards the end, when things close in on Edward, it all gets suitably tense. There's the constant sense of horror under the surface. And it's full of haunting moments: an interview with a married couple where they know it's more that just an idle chat; posh dinner with a dying woman; a meeting amid bird life and the ghosts of Cold War at Orford: 

"'We are famous for our bird life here, actually, Julian,' he announced, with proprietorial pride. 'We have lapwing, curlew, bittern, meadow pipit, avocets, not to mention duck,' he declared, like a headwaiter reciting the day's specials. 'Look now, please. You hear that curlew calling to her mate? Follow my arm.'

Julian made a show of doing so, but for some minutes he had been able to follow only the horizon: the remains of our own civilisation after its destruction in some future catastrophe. And there they stood: distant forests of abandoned aerials rising out of the mist, abandoned hangars, barracks, accommodation blocks and control rooms, pagodas on elephantine legs for stress-testing atom bombs, with curved roofs but no walls in case the worst happens. And, at his feet, a warning to him to stick to marked paths or reckon with unexploded ordnance." (p. 159)

In fact, it's all about ghosts: the legacies of old wars, old trauma, old connections and betrayals. There's also the ghost of the author, of course - or authors plural. Le Carre's son Nick Harkaway gave a moving interview last year about completing the book in the absence of his late parents. And there's another ghost for me; this is the first le Carre in a long time that I've bought for myself, not borrowed from my father. The loss is keenly felt, but communing with these spirits one last time I am more than anything grateful.

Few Eggs and No Oranges: The Diaries of Vere Hodgson 1940-45

Wartime Britain, which I read last month, referred to these diaries by Winifred Vere Hodgson (1901-79), who lived at 56 Ladbroke Road when war broke out and then moved to a flat at no. 79. This was a few streets from David Whitaker, the Doctor Who writer and story editor whose life I'm currently researching. In September 1939, 11 year-old David was living with his parents and older brother in the lower part of 9 St Ann’s Villas. I hoped these diaries might give me a better sense of his wartime experience.

They certainly do that. Hodgson wrote her diaries to share with family abroad, letting them know about life in London during the Blitz and the welfare of various relatives there and in Birmingham, too. We get to know these people - and feel the loss of those who die. Hodgson also updates us on various neighbours and friends, and keeps up with the latest news. She's got a keen eye for telling detail - about the war, about London, about extraordinary times.

Two things really help in her perspective. First, there's her job at the Sanctuary at 3 Lansdowne Road, run by the spiritualist Greater World Association Trust and doing a lot of good work during the war sorting out money, food and clothing for anyone in need. That gives Hodgson an insider's view of just how much damage was done by the bombing, the lives lived among burned-out buildings, the character of endurance. She skips days in her diary as she throws herself into the annual fund-raising fair, and despite the privations of war there's a sense of the community coming together and helping out. Every year through the war, there's more damage, more rationing, more difficulty - and yet they raise more money each time.

Secondly, Hodgson previously worked as a teacher in Italy - she once shook hands with Mussolini, she tells us, whose daughter was a pupil. As she follows news of allied troops ascending through Italy, she peppers her diary with first-hand knowledge: the landforms, tunnels, buildings and art being fought over, what it all actually signifies.

For my purposes, there's the sense of the nightly lottery as London is attacked. I spent a lot of time checking her reports of bomb damage against a street map, trying to judge - just as she does in her diary - how bad things really are, how close the bombs are to her home, how much danger she might be in. There's a good sense, too, of the over-fatigue that resulted from night after night of Blitz, as described as well by Judith Kerr in Out of the Hitler Time.

There's lots on what ordinary people did to prepare for the Blitz: on 1 July 1940, Hodgson had respirator drill at Kensington Town Hall; the next day she reported on shelters being built all over Kensington and the new orders that people were to continue in their work until they heard gunfire. On 11 July, she had a practice session in a chamber of tear gas and sat through lectures on gas. Four days later, there was a trip to the Gas Cleansing Station at Earls Court, then on the 18th she took a course on Fire-Fighting at the Convent of the Assumption on Kensington Square, in which she had to climb and drop from a 10-foot wall.

Then there's the things she finds surprising: on 14 August 1940, she was amused to hear people took shelter under dining tables in their homes (something she would herself do later). Or, after a night out to a play in Birmingham on 7 September 1941:

“In London theatre-going at night can be a nightmare in these difficult days." (p. 208)

That was not due to the bombs, but the lack of street lighting and buses to get safety home. A year later, on 13 September 1942, she was struck that,

“Nobody dresses in London these days, even at the smartest places.” (p. 315)

On 7 December 1944, she found it remarkable that,

“A [horse-drawn] Hansom cab is seen periodically doing duty round here. I gaze at it with great satisfaction. I never rode in one. They had just gone out when I had money to do such things. We also have to taxis..." (p. 544)

Yet working animals were a familiar sight to her. On 9 July 1944, she says - to show how life was going on as normal - that,

“Our milkman comes round as usual with his white pony.” (p. 494)

And I'm struck by her reference to Shepherds Bush, a shortish walk from where she lived, as,

 “the next village to Notting Hill” (p. 565).

That sense is there in her local shops, all within walking distance: the Polish greengrocer who lets her have an extra orange, the cobbler, the cat-meat seller, the Mercury cafe where she sometimes has lunch alongside ballerinas from the Rambert school at the adjacent theatre. 

As with Wartime Britain, several things here chime with the current pandemic. For example, on 5 July 1944, Hodgson is,

“Very sorry for children who have to take exams in Air Raid Shelters, not able to concentrate after a bad night.” (p. 491)

But I was looking specifically for anything that might echo in David Whitaker's later work on Doctor Who. A few things resonate. On 7 August 1940, Hodgson remarked on the great many refugees now in Kensington, because of "everybody leaving Gibraltar and Malta" (p. 28), and there are later references to  refugees - these ones and more - grubbing along and needing support. That put me in mind of the Doctor and Susan as we first meet them, and also the Thals in the first Dalek story. Then, on 18 April 1943 Hodgson reported that the previous evening, 

“Marie and I went to Petrified Forest. Setting in Arizona. All very exciting." (p. 379)

On 20 August 1944, she remarked of the new plague of V1 pilotless planes that,

“These Robots have changed everything. The Germans can, in the future, in complete secrecy underground, prepare in the years to come, more of such things and launch them on an unprepared world. … Men will perish under the machines that he has made.” (p. 517)

But when a few weeks later there was a lull in the bombing, it was more unnerving, as she reported on 3 September:

“Here we are at with the end in sight - and we are intact. The silence at the moment is / uncanny. After listening to sirens on and off all day and all night for ten weeks, it seems strange without them. Have we finished with them?” (pp. 526-527)

London is eerily silent at the beginning of The Dalek Invasion of Earth... Maybe Whitaker (and Terry Nation) didn't draw on this kind of stuff consciously - or at all - but it's made me think about the tone of the first two Dalek stories, and how much they're grounded in something that feels real, at least compared to third story The Chase, which Whitaker wasn't involved in. I need to think a bit more on this but that's where I am at the moment.

Oh, and then there's this from 30 November 1940 where, as Hodgson and her colleagues at the Sanctuary are busy with their charitable work, they compare notes on the previous night's Blitz: 

“From Mrs Whittaker we heard that part of the roof of the Daily Telegraph had gone. Everything was so hot no one could go near.” (p. 100)

That might just be David's mother.

The Autobiography of Mr Spock, edited by Una McCormack

My last night out in London before lockdown in 2020 was to attend a signing for my chum Una's book Picard: The Last Best Hope, which ably bridges the gap in events between the movie Star Trek: Nemesis and the TV series Star Trek: Picard. Last month, back in London for the first time in more than a year, I met up with Una and got her to sign a copy of her latest genius effort.

The Autobiography of Spock is another extraordinary thing, perfectly weaving together the different threads and revelations from a great multiplicity of texts on screen: stuff revealed about Spock's background in the original Star Trek TV series, all the stuff about his dad in Star Trek: The Next Generation, the never-previously mentioned brother in the movie Star Trek V, the never-previously mentioned sister in Star Trek: Discovery, the stuff in the 2009 reboot movie and bits gleaned from Star Trek: Picard. In the acknowledgements, Una mentions a number of Star Trek books and novels she's borrowed from, too, and the essays on Romulans by Michael Chabon and on James T Kirk by Erin Horakova. I'm sure there's more, and part of me would love to see a version of this autobiography with footnotes that cite all the sources.

But that would perhaps break the spell. Given so much material to choose from, some of it contradictory or at least inconsistent, it's remarkable how cohesive this book is. That's partly due to the structure, each chapter focused on someone that Spock loved, enabling Una to focus on particular, telling moments in the long life in which Spock prospered. Given such a famously logical, aloof character, a focus on his love life is initially surprising but it really works, in part because this is love in the broadest sense - the subjects include Spock's parents, his sparring partner Dr McCoy and even the starship Enterprise. But it also works because it's at the heart of what the book is addressing: Spock coming to accept his hybrid nature as half-human, and his emotional side. There's a lot on searching for and accepting the truth - of situations, or events, of ourselves. Spock is honest about failure, about when he's got things wrong. There are passages in this that change my sense of what's happening in the things I've seen on screen.

The point is that it doesn't feel like a jigsaw. There's fun to be had in spotting the sources - when mention is made of the expression on Kirk's face on seeing Spock mind-meld with a whale, I know exactly what that's from and exactly that expression. But this is not simply a list of references to events in episodes and movies. It's a story, Spock's story, full on fresh insight and perspective - and lots of original material. We find out what happened to other characters from these episodes and movies, the aftermath of events seen on screen. I'd love to see more of Saavik and Valeris on screen after what we're told about their later lives here.

Una says in her acknowledgements at the end that, for all the many actors who have portrayed the character,

"There would of course be no Spock without Leonard Nimoy, and I hope his voice sounds true upon these pages."

It really does, and the result is like hearing again from an old friend. In spending time inside the head of this beloved character, I've come to know him better, and to feel his loss all the more.