"What claptrap!"

My clever uncle Bob has updated his website with details of his latest musical choons. We've swapped notes on our current activities, and in doing so he fondly recalls old-skool, old-man Doctor Who made with cardboard and copydex.

My chums at the BBC Archive are celebrating Doctor Who's 45th birthday with a clear-out of old bits of paper. Learned fellows at the BBC wonder if science fiction might work on the telly and slowly tease out the basis of what might just work as a show...

Here, in 1963, is CE Webber nailing the magic of Doctor Who back before they'd even come up with the TARDIS (except for it's “light-resistant paint”).

“Evidently, Dr. Who's "machine" fulfils mary of the functions of conventional Science Fiction gimmicks. But we are not writing Science Fiction. We shall provide scientific explanations too, sometimes, but we shall not bend over backwards to do so, if we decide to achieve credibility by other means. Neither are we writing fantasy: the events have got to be credible to the three ordinary people who are our main characters, and they are sharp-witted enough to spot a phoney. I think the writer's safeguard here will be, if he remembers that he is writing for an audience aged fourteen... the most difficult, critical, even sophisticated, audience there is, for TV. In brief, avoid the limitations of any label and use the best in any style or category, as it suits us, so long as it works in our medium.”

CE Webber, “Dr. Who” - General Notes on Background and Approach, 1963.

Clever old Red Scharlach notes wryly, of the Audience Research Report for the very first episode, that fans have not changed a great deal in 45 years. The BBC have made a lively, exciting and fun TV show with astounding, broad appeal? What in the name in jibbering flip were they thinking?

These documents are well-known to us fans who stuck it out in the Dark Times; they were picked over in the First Doctor Handbook and the pages of DWM, and then used in the excellent Beginnings DVD documentary. But how fab to see the original bits of paper, tatty and scribbled on and real.

James Bond = FAIL

After the not-so-great Moonraker and Diamonds Are Forever, Bond Book 5 is a bit fab.

Bond himself doesn't appear until page 78 of From Russia, With Love – more than a third of the way through. In that time, a huge conspiracy is set in motion, the full apparatus of Smersh (the Soviet Union’s spy-killing squad) focused on ruining one man.

In the film, the scheme – by SPECTRE not Smersh – is revenge for Bond killing Doctor No. But here it’s not personal; the real target is to embarrass the British Secret Service, and by extension to fray the Special Relationship for sharing secrets with the US. Bond himself is not important and certainly not a hero. One top Russian says of him:

“The English are not interested in heroes unless they are footballers or cricketers or jockeys. If a man climbs a mountain or runs very fast he also is a hero to some people, but not to the masses. The Queen of England is also a hero, and Churchill. But the English are not greatly interested in military heroes. This man Bond is unknown to the public. If he was known, he would still not be a hero. In England, neither open war nor secret war is a heroic matter. They do not like to think about war, and after a war the names of their war heroes are forgotten as quickly as possible.”

Ian Fleming, From Russia, With Love, p. 43.

Their wheeze is to get Bond caught up and killed in a sex scandal, preferably in France where the press is most salacious. The honey trap includes a beautiful girl defector and a code-breaking machine. Bond knows it sounds dodgy but the prize is too much to resist; he heads off on the next flight to Istanbul.

The book is full of fecund exoticism – Istanbul itself, the Orient Express, Bond eating a kebab. As always, this is in sharp contrast to contemporary privations. The world is still deeply scarred by the recent world war.

“The clouds broke up and a distant blue haze, far away to their left, was Paris. For an hour they flow high over the burned-up fields of France until, after Dijon, the land turned from a pale to a darker green as it sloped up into the Juras.”

Ibid., p. 93.

That battered landscape reminds Bond of how much he himself has been ravaged by the last few years. He remembers his teenage self,

“bracing himself against the top of a rock-chimney on the Aigulles Rouges as his two companions from the University of Geneva inclined up the smooth rock towards him [...] If that young James Bond came up to him in the street and talked to him, would he recognize the clean, eager youth that had been him at seventeen? And what would that youth think of him, the secret agent, the older James Bond? Would he recognize himself beneath the surface of this man who was tarnished with years of treachery and ruthlessness and fear – this man with the cold arrogant eyes and the scar down his cheek and the flat bulge beneath his left armpit?”

Ibid.

I point this out chiefly because it implies Bond gets his scar after the age of 17, while SilverFin has Bond scarred during his first year at Eton. Pedantic sod that I am.

Fleming’s prose is often functional, brutal, yet littered with concise observations and occasional glimpses of poetry. The following, for example, seems to thieve from the famous quote by Viscount Grey of Falloden, watching streetlights being lit just before World War One:

“The great trains are going out all over Europe, one by one, but still, three times a week, the Orient Express thunders superbly over the 1400 miles of glittering steel track between Istanbul and Paris.”

Ibid., p. 150.

Likewise, the Bond girl Tatiana is a surprisingly well-drawn character, with conflicted and developing motives. The film nicely makes her chose between Bond and her country at the end; in the book Bond seems to assume that he’s won her over but we never know quite for sure. She’s a graceful, good looking girl and Fleming makes a point of her classy, royal heritage. But he also likes women to have some kind of flaw. Tatiana’s might be evidence for those who think Bond is a secret gaybo.

“Her arms and breasts were faultless. A purist would have disapproved of her behind. Its muscles were so hardened with exercise that it had lost the smooth downward feminine sweep, and now, round at the back and flat and hard at the sides, it jutted like a man's.”

Ibid., p. 59.

Bond’s sex life is worth a post all of its own. He apparently considered marriage to Tiffany Case (from the last book) but agrees with M that it’s for the best it didn’t work out. But more importantly, his “normal”, “healthy” appetites serve to contrast with villainous extremes.

Fleming apparently found villains difficult to write, but in this he’s created two corkers. Rosa Klebb is a toad-faced, predatory bisexual – one of the cliff-hangers is that she’s a woman, another that she tries to seduce Tatiana. In stark contrast, Red Grant is a handsome if ginger-haired sadist with no interest in sex. You can tell he’s helluva tough because when Klebb punches him with a knuckle-duster he doesn’t even flinch.

Importantly, the villains seem better than Bond. Grant is taller than the six-foot Bond (p. 101), more powerful, more ruthless. Note that unlike the 007 of the films,

“Bond had never killed in cold blood, and he hadn't liked watching, and helping, someone else do it.”

Ibid., p. 141.

The Russians are also better equipped. Bond can’t see any trace of forgery in Grant’s faked documents.

“Bond knew most of the signs to look for in forged passports, the blurred writing, the too exact imprints of the rubber stamps, the trace of old gum round the edges of the photograph, the slight transparencies on the page where the fibres of the paper had been tampered with to alter a letter or a number...”

Ibid, p. 176.

Grant has a copy of War and Peace that shoots people, Klebb has poisoned knitting needles and shoes. Bond might have knives and gold sovereigns hidden in his brief case, but nothing quite so crafty.

“He puffed away at his cigarette. If only it had been a trick one – magnesium flare, or anything he could throw in the man's face! If only his Service went in for those explosive toys!”

Ibid., p. 195.

Spy stories are at their best when pitting one individual against huge odds. What makes this one so exciting is that the hero is so clearly out-matched. In some ways it’s like the creation of Moriarty to destroy Sherlock Holmes: it’s the extraordinary stakes that make this one memorable. There’s incident aplenty – naked wrestling gypsies, explosions and stuff – but even several chapters of train journey, eating meals and looking out the window, feels exciting because we know the jaws of the trap are straining at their springs.

The film version wisely stays faithful to the book. The documentary on the DVD explains where they reordered scenes in the editing to make more sense of the building conspiracy. Richard Maibaum's last minute rewrites – made when filming had already begun – also make more of Grant, brilliantly having him one step ahead of Bond at every turn. Again, this emphasises that Bond is out of his depth. The shooting War and Peace is also replaced with a less silly garrotte-wire hidden in a watch. It tightens up the structure, making more of the book…

And yet the book pulls off a singular coup which the film series never could. Bond seems to have dodged the claws of the conspiracy, but there’s one last brilliant twist in the tale. No film Bond would ever dare go so far as the killing of Bond…

You wouldn’t know it from the book, but James Bond will return in Doctor No.

Monkey see, monkey do

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ibid, p. 62.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Me, 2 April 2008.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stephen Hawking, er, hawking British telephony in 1993.

More stuff you should fork out for, sorry

As Herr Arnopp reports, there are now copies out of Doctor Who: Christmas Round the World. My story, "Do you smell carrots?", is set in Reading and features the words "Jawa", "helicopter" and "lion".

Authors include my chums James Moran, Kate Orman, Eddie Robson, William Potter and some other people who don't seem to have websites. Or perhaps I just don't like them. The wretches. Especially that Joff Brown.

It's a weighty tome all told - at 304 pages I think it's the porkiest Short Trips yet. Exactly right for laddering a Christmas stocking.

And the Big Finish website also features a cheeky new ad for Home Truths, performed by the marvellous Jean Marsh. As well as co-creating The House of Eliot and Upstairs, Downstairs, she was a Doctor Who Companion. (No sniping at the back, yes she was.) I've heard it and couldn't be happier.

Damaged goods

This blog has been a casualty of my chasing around on a number of projects, some of which are very exciting indeed. Announcements in due course...

Took the Dr to see Quantum of Solace on Friday, and generally agree with Millennium's glowing review. It's all played brilliantly, it looks absolutely gorgeous but I'm not quite convinced by the frenetic edit. Watching Nimbos' Blue-Ray Casino Royale earlier this week (cor!), Codename Moose noted how well told the action sequences are. They're fast and complex and intricate, but every shot is framed perfectly, and in any given instant you know exactly where you are.

Quantum of Solace continually loses you in the midst of action. There's an opening car chase where someone loses their driver-side door, and it took me a moment to realise who. There's a scene of Bond and a villain swinging from ropes where you're not sure which is which.

I'm a bit disappointed that we didn't learn the real name of Mr White – or “Ernst”, as he is to his mother. Nor do I really see the point of keeping the gun barrel to the end. But hooray for MK12's opening sequence: different but very pretty.

Also, ignore the fools who say this isn't really a Bond film. Or that it's the first direct sequel to the previous film. There are no gadgets in Doctor No - “Q” is in it but he's not called that and he only gives Bond a new gun. From Russia, With Love is a direct sequel to that first film, too – with the Doctor's buddies out for revenge. Quantum of Solace is, then, continuing a back to basics exercise, not just getting back to the Bond of Fleming's novels but the films as they began.

I've also read SilverFin, the first of Charlie Higson's Young Bond novels, which I enjoyed a great deal. The mad plot about eels and special serum is at the dafter end of Fleming (and more like the barking end of Sherlock Holmes). But it's a fun adventure.

A bit like River Phoenix in The Last Crusade, there's fun seeing Bong get his scar and learning to drive. In fact, Uncle Max explains to Bond for at least two pages exactly how a car engine works. I'd have loved this boy-stuff detail in my teens. It could almost have done with an Eagle cutaway.

Though we're never told the date in the book itself, the internet says this is set in 1933 – and Bond born in 1920. I think that's out by at least two years.

“[Moonraker] makes Bond 37 in a book first published in 1955, and possible set a bit earlier. He can't then be born any later than 1918.”

Me, 14 March 2008.

I'm now well into From Russia, With Love, and will report back as soon as possible. (I've also got notes on Baboon Metaphysics and a handful of other stuff. But you'll have to be patient.)

Recent telly

A few pals speak of being at the “DVD boxset” stage in life. Some have kids, some can’t be fagged going out of an evening. I’m just a bit rubbish following telly as it airs. I either forget or something comes up in Real Life or I’m racing to meet a deadline.

The recent, needed lull in my writing commitments means I’m gulping down great swathes of the goggle box.

I've just got through the second series of The Wire – as leant by Codename and Mrs Moose. Having beaten the Barksdales last year, our gang of shades-of-grey cops are variously investigating the Baltimore docks, looking into murders and drugs and the union. The Barksdales are licking their wounds, either weathering prison or trying to restart their business. And slowly, very slowly, it’s all coming to a head…

As just about everyone on the planet has enthused, The Wire is a brilliant series. Funny and smart and rude and surprising, the serious, clever and violent adult stuff is nicely balanced with bits of slapstick and silliness, the stupid everyday things people say and do. If you’ve seen it you already know this; if you haven’t I don’t want to say more for fear of spoiling its wonders.

But I’d be quite happy were Idris Elba to be the next Doctor Who.

It’s not just box sets. I have also been watching telly LIVE. Little Dorrit is am impressively grimy, dirty adaptation – and the trailers keep suggesting a sapphic something involving Freema Agyeman. What is not to like?

Dickens is particularly good on the petty viciousness people heap on one another, the debilitating effect of gossip, the decades wasted on silly intrigues. The Dickensian world is a ruthless, brutal place, everyone on the brink of ruination. Yet because he populates his stories with such comic archetypes, it's very easy to over-play. Actors pull on frock coats and mad facial hair and prance about doing funny voices.

Far better is to play against the comedy, to pretend you're not comic characters at all. That way – as in the books – the comedy works to underline the awful things befalling the weakest characters. And that's why The Muppets' Christmas Carol is the best ever adaptation of Dickens.

Also, in Little Dorrit Andy Serkis plays another compelling grotesque. I'd like to see him play something heroic. In fact, I’d be quite happy were he the next Doctor Who.

The new series of Spooks unleashed two thrilling episodes this week, featuring Richard Armitage as a new character. The Dr was very pleased with the important plot point that he's got William Blake tattoos (and so had to take his top off).

For all it's good fun with lots of chasing, there were lots of silly things. If you're sneaking around someone's bedroom while they're asleep in bed, it's probably best to switch your mobile-phone-cloning machine to silent rather than letting it bing. And the Prime Minister would be committing political suicide if he cancelled Remembrance Sunday.

Armitage is looking pretty buff having spent eight years in a Russian prison. Also, his debrief seems to consist of being asked “Are you a double-agent?” - to which he answered “Yes”. He hangs round the office waiting for a cup of tea, and then is quickly part of the next mission. The writers should look at The Man With The Golden Gun (the book) for what happens when James Bond comes out of the cold...

Yes, I appreciate they sort of address some of that in episode two. But not really very much. Again they ask him if he's a double-agent, again he tells them yes. So they let him back on the mission again. Still, I wouldn't mind if Armitage was the next Doctor Who.

Incidentally, I also saw Mark Lawson talking to John le Carre with its top fact that the word le Carre invented for a “Russian asset” – mole – came from The Wind In The Willows.

And then there's Dead Set, in which zombies get into the Big-Brother. It's impressively violent and grisly, though the quick cutting means you're not always aware quite how grisly it is. The Dr missed one episode so I explained about Davina being stabbed through the back of the head, the lamp-pole bursting out of her eye... And realised it was far more horrid telling it than it had seemed on the screen.

It licked along quickly, never explaining how the zombies came to be or suggesting any solution. Horror can often be just a sequence of horrific events, bludgeoning against your eyeballs. But this managed to be smart and funny, keeping us guessing right up to the end.

Oh, and I’d be quite happy were Kevin Eldon the next Doctor Who.

Return of the Decemberists

Surprise package in the post this morning; a new set of Doctor Who paperbacks. It's five months since the last box set. This one features The Pirate Loop, Trevor's Wishing Well and Jim's Peacemaker squeezed in with Terrance's Revenge of the Judoon.

Only saw Jim on Thursday this week, to discuss things that have not yet been announced. I had two cappucine and a chocolate muffin. That was a good day, as it happens. Later, me and Codename Moose met with someone who might deign to employ us in the future on stuff that would be very exciting indeed. But more of that if/when it happens.

Today I am meant to be finishing off my tax return. Got a couple of introductions to write for something, and Leslie wants something for a fanzine. Have notes on an on-spec script to write up and send off, another script project to get moving, and then there is The Novel. And I'm expecting rewrites on three things to come in at any moment...

More importantly, I've been invited for tea and cake at four. So better get a move on.

The nuclear ‘pool

Having rattled through The Ghost, I’ve since rattled through The H-Bomb Girl by Stephen Baxter. I loved his The Time Ships (a sequel to The Time Machine by HG Wells), and this is a similarly thrilling adventure of freewheeling paradoxes.

1962. Laura Mann is 14 years-old and not happy at having to move to Liverpool when her Mum and Dad split up. Dad’s staying at his army base in High Wycombe, and Mum’s got a fancy man, the American soldier Mort who she knew during the war. But as Laura starts school, gets teased about her accent and looking a bit like their spiky headmistress, the world is facing a crisis. The Americans and Russians are at loggerheads in Cuba and threatening nuclear war. And in a murky cavern in Liverpool, Laura’s about to hear a band called the Beatles…

The lurid pink cover (which got a few odd looks on the train) and the teen-protagonist might put some adult readers off. But this is a compelling, complex and richly drawn adventure. It’s surprisingly violent and harrowing in places.

Baxter’s Liverpool is full of telling detail, from the names of contemporary shops and products to people’s assumptions about class and race and sexuality. He deftly describes and explains the world and worldview in a way that only becomes intrusive when a character from 2007 starts harping on about mobile phones and laptops.

I’ve sometimes found Baxter’s other books a bit cold and clever. Like a lot of sci-fi, his world-building is masterful but the characters are sometimes just background to the thrill of all the physics, convenient triggers for the plot. Here, though, he takes his time setting everything up before the plot kicks in.

To begin with, it’s a fish-out-of-water, North and South sort of thing with the girl from the Home Counties struggling to survive the dark and brutish scallys. It’s got the teen-angst feel of Tracy Beaker or the first episode of Byker Grove. Even at the end, the book hinges on Laura’s relationship with her parents, the new perspectives she has of them and of herself as an adult.

But an early reference to another Liverpool band, John Smith and the Common Man, is a fun nod to where the story’s going to go.

SUSAN: I-It's John Smith and the Common Men. They've gone from 19 to 2.
BARBARA: (Not understanding a bit of it.) Hmm. (She looks puzzled.)
IAN: (Laughing.) "John Smith" is the stage name of the honourable Aubrey Waites. He started his career as Chris Waites and the Carollers, didn't he, Susan?
SUSAN: You are surprising, Mr. Chesterton. I wouldn't expect you to know things like that.
IAN: I have an enquiring mind…(Motions to the loud radio.) and a very sensitive ear.

Anthony Coburn, Scene 4 of Doctor Who’s first episode.

As the plot gets going, it seems Baxter is doing what Steven Moffat said of Russell T Davies’ Doctor Who: you create interesting characters and melt them. The vivid description of nuclear holocaust and its long-term effects reminded me of Threads. Importantly, the horror and complex plot stuff works because of our investment in and sympathy for a wide range of characters – real and invented.

It’s a quick, compelling read with constant revelations and twists. It’s similar in tone and in some plot gimmickry to my own The Time Travellers but also kept me guessing. But it does end a little abruptly – there’s the last revelation and a big bang and then that’s sort of it. Baxter ties up all the plot strands but I felt a bit short-changed. Perhaps an epilogue set a few years later might have helped. Having invested so much in these people, seen everything they have been and might have been through, it’s unsettling not to know how they ended up.

Iris and Iris

Big Finish have posted the blurb and cast for The Two Irises, written by me. It's out in April (or, as part of a boxset in February). And it may well be the silliest thing I've ever written - which is saying something.

A new adventure for eccentric adventurer, Iris Wildthyme and her companion, Panda in their time travelling London double-decker bus!

Panda wakes from a near death experience to find that Iris has sacrificed herself to save him. There’s a new Iris on the bus – and she is a he!

The new teetotal and decidedly male Iris sets course for the war-torn earth of the 22nd century, where “his” old enemies the Naxians are lying in wait…

The cast is Katy Manning (Iris Wildthyme), David Benson (Panda), Dan Hogarth (Iris Wildthyme), John Dorney (Roger the Naxian), Scott Handcock (Barry). I'm hoping to hear the dialogue edit later today.

The spectre of defeat

Awake at five this morning as the Dr thumped around getting ready for her cab to the airport. She and the mother-in-law are now be in Cairo, visiting the pyramids and stuff. I will be holding the fort, attending to the cat and doing my tax return. Oh joy.

I’ve not made it through to the third round of the British Short Screenplay Competition, but the script is going somewhere else now and my name’s in for a couple of things that might be nice if they happen. On we plod.

In the meantime, I’ve promised all the days I can spare to one freelance gig which is keeping me busy. After a whole summer of writing from home, it’s odd to be commuting again. If nothing else, I am wolfing down whole books.

The Ghost by Robert Harris was a birthday present from a fellow writer. We never learn the name of the protagonist who narrates the story, which is apt in that he’s a ghost writer, the anonymous shadow helping former Prime Minister Adam Lang finish his autobiography.

There’s already a full draft, compiled by a loyal staffer of Lang’s who has died in mysterious circumstances. Our man’s more used to ghosting the memoirs of old rock stars, freely admitting he knows nothing about politics. But with Lang’s former foreign secretary and the international crimes court accusing Lang of war crimes, our man better bone up quick.

It’s a great shocker, full of excitement and intrigue. I read it in just four sittings because – after a slowish start – I couldn’t put it down. It has lots to say on writing-for-hire and hack work and process. There’s some great stuff with the protagonist completely failing to spot the danger he’s in (you keep wanting to shout “behind you!”). And there are also some great little details, like the Prime Minister’s security heavy reading Harry Potter. It’s a lively, exciting and intelligent read and comes recommended.

But there’s something about it that really bugged me, a constant distraction from the thrilling plot. A lot of the reviews of the book have concentrated on how much Adam Lang and his wife owe to Tony and Cherie Blair. It might be them in silhouette on the cover. The characters have similar backgrounds and quirks.

I think this is the weakness of the book. However shrewd these observations of the real former Prime and Mrs Minister, they’re wrapped up in a potboiling thriller, a conspiracy that’s patently not real. The real intrudes on the story.

“Harris, at one time a leading supporter of new Labour, had unprecedented access to Blair during the 1997 election campaign and during his heady early days of government. But his support withered over the Iraq war and Blair’s relationship with George Bush.”

Brendan Bourne, “Harris points pen at a leader very like Blair”, The Sunday Times, 19 August 2007.

As a result of Harris’s insider knowledge, we’re constantly second guessing the real writer. If Lang’s having an affair in the book, does Harris knows something about the Blairs’ sex lives? How much of the book’s conspiracy is real?

And where does it stop? If Lang = Blair, does it follow that X is a reference to Robin Cook, or Y is based on Peter Hain… The whole thing becomes a salacious guessing game, like something out of Popbitch: who is Harris satirising now?

Lang would have worked better as his own man, evidently not Blair yet faced with the same world and choices. That way the sharp contrast makes us think through the issues rather than the gossip. As it is, the book is a personal attack on individuals. And the attack fails because whatever real criticisms Harris might have to make, they’re all mixed up in an unreal, blockbuster plot.

The same is true of To Play The King (the TV version as I’ve not read the book). House of Cards worked because, by not being about any specific, real politicians, it was about all of them. Once you’d seen these fictional people being all smiles as they stabbed at each other, it changed how you saw the real politicians going about their business. But when Michael Kitchen comes in doing an impression of Prince Charles, our attention is all on his performance, judging how well observed, sympathetic or insightful it might be. It’s about him, not the story.

As a result, I kept thinking as I read The Ghost of Andrew Cartmel’s Under the Eagle. The play covers similar ground to this – a British Prime Minister compromised by his relationship with the US, the difficulties of his marriage, the thorny issue of rendition… Both feature an outsider – a ghost writer, a comedian – staying a night with the PM as all hell breaks loose.

But Cartmel’s characters are original creations, so our focus is broader. And just because of that, the points made hit harder. People in The Ghost keep insisting that the whole war crimes thing “isn’t personal”. It’s a shame Harris himself didn’t feel the same.

The geeks shall inherit the earth

Ooh! Found an online video of Neal Stephenson discussing The Fork: Science Fiction versus Mundane Culture, which was part of the Science Fiction as a Literary Genre symposium I went to in May. (You might just spot the back of my head in the video.)

It's a fascinating - and funny - discussion of the way sf and geekery had inviegled itself into the rest of the world. I'd quote worthy chunks of it here but there isn't a transcript and I'm blogging this during my lunchbreak. So just watch the damn thing.

(I did mention it before in my review of Indiana Jones and the Nineteen-Fifties.)

The symposium, incidentally, was at the Royal College of Surgeons, downstairs from the cool museum of dead things in jars. I was a bit disappointed we didn't all lie down, drinking kylixes of wine with rude pictures at the bottom. These academics don't know their history.

Doctor Who in Crystal Palace

For my own amusement, chiefly, here's two Doctor Who magazine covers showing the Doctor's pretty friends larking about in my hood.

This one shows Doctor Who's granddaughter Susan, played by Carole Ann Ford. She's being a cave-woman in homage to the very first Doctor Who story, which featured cave men who've forgotten how to make fire. It's from a special photo shoot for the Radio Times special commemorating 10 whole years of Doctor Who, back in 1973. In the larger version of the picture, you can see Crystal Palace's monsters behind her.

And this one shows Sophie Aldred as Ace in a specially commissioned shot for DWM. Local magazine The Transmitter has just done a cover shoot of models taking tea with the monsters, which reminded me of this.

Win my book!

The latest podcast of impossible things features a competition to win copies of Doctor Who - How the Doctor Changed My Life. And also interviews with me and some of the authors.

Gotta be larger than life

As well as jamming lasagne and booze down my head-hole, Psychonomy leant me comics on Saturday. The collected edition of DC: The New Frontier comes in two volumes – a bit odd considering it's just a six-issue run. Both volumes together aren't nearly as thick as DC's famous Watchmen.

In other ways, it's very reminiscent of Watchmen. It plays on twee nostalgia for the golden age of comics – all beefcake heroes and gee-golly earnest dialogue. The wheeze here – as with Watchmen – is that, as well as super villains, our heroes get entangled in real historical events. That makes the familiar archetypes problematic. The civil rights movement and the Cold War muddy up simple gradations of “good” and “bad”. Our heroes are faced with – and commit - “necessary” evils, the moments of bloody violence all the more shocking for being side-by-side with the cheesy clichés.

Like Watchmen, we reappraise the characters as we go, learning about them, seeing them change – getting the kind of development that's still pretty rare in the medium. Like Watchmen, the heroes must unite to stop the world being destroyed by a vast monster from hell, an End of Level Baddie that doesn't talk back and they have just have to Kill.

What this ostensibly has over Watchmen, though, is that it's not specially invented heroes here. It's Superman fighting in Korea, Batman being charged of UnAmerican Activities, Wonder Woman stitched up by Nixon. New Frontiers is a radical new origins story for the Justice League – that is, the gang of space heroes comprising Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and a whole bunch of their less-famous friends.

And that's where I found it difficult. There are a hell of a lot of less-famous friends crammed in here, and it's kind of assumed you know who they all are. One whole plotline revolves around a guy whose dad flew with Chuck Yeager but who keeps being cut out of the action. Only late on – when he gains super powers – did it occur to me that all the stalling would seem more clever had I recognised his name. He introduces himself early on as Hal Jordan – real name of Superman's less-famous friend, Green Lantern.

The comic is playing, probably cleverly, on the expectation of readers who already know Hal's name. But I didn't, so it kind of whooshed me by. Likewise, I assume the hero John Henry is some other DC character I'd just never heard of, or he’s related to one or somehow cleverly mirroring someone else... No, I didn't need anyone to explain.

This is something that Neil Gaiman's 1602 could have floundered on. The wheeze there is packing all Marvel’s famous characters into Elizabethan England – so the X-Men are hunted as witches, and so on. Gaiman wisely chose to focus on the more famous Marvel heroes. A gag of a spider not biting Peter Parker works because even relative comic-book dunces know the basic premise of Spider-Man.

New Frontiers works well at mixing the complex comic continuity with real and complex history. The bizarre clash of black and white heroism with murky politics gives the story real frisson. But often the clashes are just too bizarre. When the vicious thug Batman suddenly reveals that he didn't fall out with Superman, it works as a nice character thing. But when that about-turn also shows him teamed up with a mad-keen, cart-wheeling Boy Wonder, even Superman boggles:

Superman: “Bruce, you're such a cynic. Which begs the question, what's with the new look and the sidekick?”

Batman: “I set out to scare criminals, not children. As for the boy... Well, I guess we're just two lost souls who found each other.”

Darwyn Cooke, DC: The New Frontier, Volume II, chapter 11.

Okay, so he didn’t beat up on Superman, but we’ve seen him terrorising criminals and breaking a guy’s wrists. Having bedded the story in complex history, Robin feels a glibly, awkwardly shoehorned in.

I suspect my problem is that I'm less impressed by this squeezing in of so much continuity, though I can see it would reward more DC's faithful readers. New Frontiers is reminiscent of Watchmen, but it's not quite as smart and lacks the moments of meekness and humour that counterpoint all the muscular hero stuff. More than that, by creating its own superheroes and history, Watchmen need only refer to continuity when it suits the story.

New Frontiers is great in places and a very involving read. But its very selling point – that it uses DC’s own canon of heroes – is what makes it not quite work.

Clang!

I love a good name-drop, but I love a bad one better.

"Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose ... This has always struck me as one of the cleverest lines ever to turn up in a pop lyric. I first heard it one night in December 1968, when Lou Reed took me down to a club in Greenwich Village to hear a new singer called Kris Kristofferson. After we heard the set, we went back to Max's restaurant and I didn't actually meet Kristofferson until nearly three years later, when I came upon him crawling through the dog-flap at Janis Joplin's house, not long after her death, and just before her version of his song Me and Bobby McGee became a huge hit."

Germaine Greer, "Who needs monuments to freedom when you can listen to Me and Bobby McGee instead?", The Guardian, Monday October 6 2008.

It is, as you'll have guessed, the opening salvo for a piece discussing architecture.

Echo

I was in the South Wales Echo yesterday. Oh yes.

We hold the line

Ah, bliss. A couple of nice days off really not doing very much. I'm almost all of the way through the extraordinary, compelling The Writer's Tale, a year-long interview with Doctor Who's re-animator, Russell T Davies.

It's packed with detail and insight about the process of writing: the crucial thinking stages, the desperate panic, the ruthless single mindedness (i.e. the collateral damage done to home life), the four-in-the-morning despair... We see when and how decisions were made, who suggested what bits and how the whole vast production team is constantly driven to Try And Make It Better. I am utterly in awe.

Benjamin Cook is an exceptional interviewer, continually challenging Russell on what he says, digging deep into the marrow of his brain. If brains had marrow in them. Their frame of reference is dizzying, taking in everything from Skins and Corrie to The Cherry Orchard and Six Characters In Search Of An Author (the new version of which, incidentally, discusses David Tennant as Doctor Who and Hamlet).

It's less an interview then, as a chance to eavesdrop a long-running conversation between two very smart people. They're such warm, good-humoured company it is a pleasure to nestle beside them. I have taken it with me to the shops and the pub, sneakily reading bits while no one is looking. Which isn't easy since it's a great heavy brick of 512 pages. And desperate as I am to get through it, I don't want it to ever end. Just 100 pages to go...

Meanwhile, work begins to whisper at me from the darkness. Off to discuss a documentary project this afternoon, then back at the freelance coal-face on Monday. And I've got 10 days to finish a thing as-yet-unannounced plus an outline for something else. Got a TV spec script thing to look over again, and a different script thing has nosed its way back into my thinking. And of course there is The Novel, which I promised myself I'd have a draft of by the end of the year.

Every fibre of my being shrieks, “Get on with it, man!” So I'm now going to watch a DVD.

Idling

Today's itinerary: this evening = pub.

I have handed in Slitheen and all is well with the world. Got up late (the drilling next door didn't start until eleven today, hooray!), watched The Last Sontaran on iPlayer (hooray!), think I might now go to the gym to stretch myself back into shape... And then I might pay a cheque in and do the washing up and perhaps even find myself a copy of Russell's big book of writing.

But there is nothing especially urgent needing doing. There's still plenty to be written and sorted out, and my tax return waves a tentacle from its dark corner. But nothing as especially urgent as it's been the last few months. So I am taking a whole day off to go out and enjoy the sunshine.

Oh. What happened to the summer?

I am the law

Typing away to finish Slitheen and listening to lots of radio. The news is full of bail-outs and a bloke called Judd Gregg - and I keep picturing old stony face.

Eat my shorts

I said I'd been busy... Details have been announced for the next two Doctor Who Short Trips books.

Christmas Around the World, edited by Xanna Eve Chown, features my story "Do you smell carrots?" - which had its exclusive world premiere at 11 am last Sunday, in front of as many as three faithful listeners. The book is out later this year.

Indefinable Magic, edited by Neil Corry, features my story "Pass it on". It's also got several efforts by the no-longer first-time authors from How The Doctor Changed My Life. Hooray! It's out in March next year.