Amongst Our Weapons, by Ben Aaronovitch

I loved this latest entry in the Rivers of London series, with Detective Constable Peter Grant on the trail of a vengeful angel linked to the Spanish Inquisition (hence the title). The case involves a trip to Manchester and Glossop, and lots of good twists and turns, with Ben - as ever - keeping the magic stuff grounded in the real. Police work is, it seems, based on knowing the nearest location of "refs" (ie coffee and snacks).

What I especially like is how this standalone adventure still moves the series on, with Peter's imminent fatherhood creating ripples for the whole series, and then a quiet word from another character at the end promising more radical shake-ups to come. I also really like the sense of Peter trying to make connections between different magical communities, breaking down the idea so common to fantasy of wizarding as an elite.

The Waterstones edition includes a bonus story, "Miroslav's Fabulous Hand", narrated by Peter's mentor Nightingale and set just before and then during the Second World War. It's thrilling in itself - like an old-school James Bond adventure - but also exciting to see some of Nightingale's early life in more detail. This sort of thing could support a whole novel of its own. (See also what I said about the recent novella, What Abigail Did That Summer.)

By coincidence, I finished this while the Dr is on holiday in Thessaloniki, which is where I was in 2011 when I read the first Rivers of London book. By coincidence, the Dr now works at one of the places featured in this new book. By coincidence, as I was making my way to the Nigel Kneale centenary event last week, I got to the reference on page 218 to "the original Quatermass".

Doctor Who Magazine #577

There's another "Sufficient Data" infographic at the back of the new Doctor Who Magazine, written by me and illustrated by Ben Morris. This one is based on episodes of Doctor Who first broadcast at Easter.

A lot of attention has been given to Doctor Who Christmas specials, but to date 14 episodes have first been broadcast on Christmas Day, while 20 have premiered on Holy Saturday (the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday):

1. 28 March 1964 - Mighty Kublai Khan
2. 17 April 1965 - The Warlords
3. 9 April 1966 - The Hall of Dolls
4. 25 March 1967 - The Macra Terror Episode 3
5. 13 April 1968 - Fury from the Deep Episode 5
6. 5 April 1969 - "The Space Pirates" Episode 5
7. 28 March 1970 - Doctor Who and the Silurians Episode 2
8. 10 April 1971 - Colony in Space Episode One
9. 1 April 1972 - The Sea Devils Episode Six
10. 21 April 1973 - Planet of the Daleks Episode Three
11. 13 April 1974 - The Monster of Peladon Part Four
12. 29 March 1975 - Genesis of the Daleks Part Four
13. 26 March 2005 - Rose*
14. 15 April 2006 - New Earth*
15. 7 April 2007 - The Shakespeare Code
16. 11 April 2009 - Planet of the Dead
17. 3 April 2010 - The Eleventh Hour*
18. 23 April 2011 - The Impossible Astronaut*
19. 30 March 2013 - The Bells of Saint John*
20. 15 April 2017 - The Pilot*

Six of those (marked with an asterisk) were the first of a new series, using Easter as part of the launch. Planet of the Dead (2009) and this year's Legend of the Sea Devils were special, one-off episodes for the Easter weekend. 

Legend of the Sea Devils is the first episode of Doctor Who to debut on Easter Sunday itself. And the 1993 repeat on BBC Two of Revelation of the Daleks Part Four is the only episode of Doctor Who broadcast on terrestrial TV on Good Friday.

Skyward Inn, by Aliya Whiteley

This was the perfect accompaniment to my journey to London and back for the Nigel Kneale centenary, and not only because it fitted the drive time almost exactly.

A long time ago, Jem escaped her home in Devon and young son to cross through the Kissing Gate and journey into space. There she met and bonded with an alien called Isley, then brought him home to run a pub, the Skyward Inn, and reconnect with her own people. But the "brew" that Isley supplies has unusual properties, forging connections across time and memory, even giving visions of the future. As a disease takes hold of the Earth, the community starts to break down, people together and yet somehow utterly alone...

As strange and haunting as Whiteley's previous books, Skyward Inn is full of threat just under the surface, a pervasive wrongness that we can't always quite touch. The last section plays out as a nightmare, as unsettling as any Kneale. It's horrible yet beautiful, too - the prose full of feeling and pathos. We're made to understand why people make the awful choice to surrender entirely to the thing that's happening. The ending hangs on our belief in the strength of a connection between two individuals on separate planets and in different periods of time; it's brilliant.

The book owes something to Jamaica Inn, and is about the cross-pollination cultures. At its heart is the colonisation of another, populated world, its native people not resisting human invasion. As with previous Whiteley, that passivity is deeply unsettling. But this is all mirrored with an incursion by humans from across the boundary wall round Devon (now known as the "Western Protectorate"). There's lots on "good" immigrants bringing needed skills and expertise, deemed more worthy of acceptance than other individuals. There's lots on dysfunctional families and how we choose our connections. There's lots about how we interact and are shaped by interaction. We are our connections.

• On The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley

Nigel Kneale: A Centenary Celebration

What a thrill to be at the Picturehouse Cinema in Crouch End yesterday, in the shadow of Alexandra Palace, for the centenary celebration of writer Thomas Nigel Kneale, born 28 April 1922 - and not 18 April as some parts of the internet insist. This point was made by MC Toby Hadoke in his opening introduction to the day's festivities. And that, I think, was the theme of the day: to get this right. All credit to everyone involved.

The first panel, "Nigel Kneale, Quatermass and the BBC", was chaired by Kneale biographer Andy Murray and featured Dick Fiddy from the BFI, Toby Hadoke and comedian Johnny Mains - the latter daring to admit that he doesn't much like Doctor Who. Kneale famously hated that series, but many of us got into Kneale's work via Doctor Who. I've been trying to puzzle out why, and think a lot of fandom - of anything - is trying to recapture the strong feelings of our past. For those thrilled and terrified by Doctor Who as kids, Kneale offers a grown-up version of those feelings, and - since he was so often borrowed from - an understanding of how they were kindled.

The panel was a good, breezy introduction to Kneale and the impact of his work on television in the 1950s, though a lot of the ground here was familiar to me from Toby's recent Radio 4 Extra programme, Remembering Nigel Kneale, and Cambridge Festival's "Televising the future: Nineteen Eighty-Four and the imagination of Nigel Kneale". I'd also just read Andrew Pixley's 1986 interview with Kneale.

Next up, we watched the extraordinary opening episode of The Quatermass Experiment from 1953 (available on the Quatermass Collection DVD set). It's a while since I'd last seen this, and I'd forgotten how blurry, clunky and techbnobabble-heavy its early scenes are as we watch serious, posh scientists at their desks in a tracking control room. But that soon gives way to the extraordinary sight of a house half-demolished by the world's first crewed space rocket. We see before the characters on screen that there's an old woman trapped in the exposed upstairs; she's played by Katie Johnson who two years later was the similarly dotty Mrs Wilberforce in The Ladykillers, only without her scene-stealing cat. It's just one of a number of well-observed comic characters enlivening the serious horror plot, adding a touch of realism - and fun - to the fantasy.

Having read The Intimate Screen by Jason Jacobs, I can understand why The Quatermass Experiment made such an impact: an original drama for television, rather than an adaptation of a stage play or book, that makes full use of the strengths of the medium to conjure an intimately creepy atmosphere. It's so busy, so populous, so nakedly ambitious - and all broadcast live. All these years later, it is thrilling. No wonder it stuck so powerfully with those who saw it at the time. As several panelists said, Quatermass was a thing that terrified our parents, that we first heard about from them decades afterwards - a folk memory of horror. (My mum says the girls at her school would make a lot of noise at the start of each episode, so the grown-ups in charge would not hear the warning of it not being suitable...)

Next up was Tom Baker in a bookish office to narrate Kneale's short story "The Photograph", in a 1978  episode of Late Night Story - a sort of grown-up Jackanory. It's an unsettling story about a sick child, but I was mostly struck by how little Baker blinked throughout what seemed to be a single take (and presumably involved him reading the story off an autocue). 

Then Douglas Weir discussed the the new restoration of Nineteen Eighty Four (1954). The audience gasped at a particular example showing Peter Cushing's Winston Smith walking through Hampstead. The version screened by BBC Four a few years ago had Cushing moving through what looked like silver fog; the restored version shows him moving between trees, individual leaves crisp and clear. (I'm on the new Blu-ray release, by the way, just about audible asking Toby Hadoke and Andy Murray the question about Kneale's never-made scripts.)

Next was the panel "From Taskerlands to Ringstone Round – Nigel Kneale in the 70s", chaired by Howard David Ingham with panelists William Fowler, Una McCormack and Andrew Screen. I've been guilty of overlooking Kneale's 1970s output - The Stone Tape (1972), which I'd at least seen, and the anthology series Beasts (1976), which I haven't yet. That led into a screening of Murrain, Kneale's contribution to a 1975 anthology, Against the Crowd (included on the DVD release of Beasts).

David Simeon - who sadly couldn't be at yesterday's event - plays a vet called to a small village by a farmer played by Bernard Lee from the James Bond films. The farmer has some sick pigs and his water supply has dried up, plus a young boy in the village has had something like flu for a month. The farmer and the villagers think this all the work of a local woman, played by Una Brandon-Jones (who I recognised at once as Mrs Parkin in Withnail & I). The villagers want the vet's help in dealing with her; he's determined to champion science over superstition, insisting that "We can't go back" to the old ways. It's a compelling piece: real, sometimes funny and increasingly sinister. With a start, I recognised some of the scenery: the Curious British Telly site says Murrain was recorded in Wildboarclough, not far from where I now live. A local film for this local person, indeed.

Then Matthew Sweet chaired a panel on "Kneale on Film" with panelists Jon Dear, Kim Newman and Vic Pratt. This covered a lot of stuff I didn't know about: Kneale's work on the movie version of stage plays Look Back in Anger (1959) and The Entertainer (1960), and the mutiny-at-sea story HMS Defiant (1962) - all a long way from the weird-thriller stuff. Because of that, I'd not been much interested; the panel made me want to look them out and understand the weird stuff in context. I want, too, to see his last work, a 1997 episode of legal drama Kavanagh QC.

A clip from the movie version of The Quatermass Xperiment ((1955) showed infected astronaut Victor Carroon (Richard Wordsworth) stalk a Little Girl (Jane Asher), who offers it imaginary cake. Asher then joined us to discuss this early role and her later, more prominent part in The Stone Tape (1972) - which was then shown in full. I'd seen this before, but it was fascinating to see beside Nimbos, who didn't know what was coming, and in the context of the day's other offering. Again what struck me was how funny it was, especially the visual gag of Reginald Marsh's hands being outlandish colours as he experiments with dyes. Toby Hadoke pointed out that Neil Wilson appears as a salt-of-the-earth security guard having been seen as a salt-of-the-earth policeman in The Quatermass Experiment, so I wonder how much Kneale consciously used the same actors over the years.

This was followed by a live reading of Kneale's 1952 radio play, You Must Listen. Mark Gatiss played the lawyer who has a new telephone installed in his office, only to find he can hear a young woman talking sauce to an unheard lover. Again, it's very funny, the lawyer embarrassed and outraged but the telephone staff all keen to listen in on this rude stuff. And then, as before, it becomes ever more sinister as we realise this saucy woman is an echo from the past. In that sense, it dovetails with The Stone Tape from 20 years later, and with elements of the other stuff we'd seen. How well chosen all these examples were; we could see we were engaged in an experiment ourselves, to trace the resonant echoes of Kneale.

By this time Nimbos and I were flagging as the short breaks between screenings had not been long enough for us to eat any food, and I was getting a bit wobbly. So we sadly missed the panel on “'The inventor of modern television': Kneale’s influences and Legacy" chaired by Jennifer Wallis with panelists Stephen Gallagher, Mark Gatiss, Andy Murray and Adam Scovell. The day ended with a screening of the movie Quatermass & The Pit (1967), and then much natter in the bar.

It was all a bit overwhelming. There was the sheer amount of stuff covered and shown, but also the way the selection encouraged us to tease out shared themes, techniques, stylistics. Then there was the visceral thrill of being in company, catching up with so many friends. I had a long drive home today, passing close to Wildboarclough and its Murrain, brain abuzz from things learned and spotted and argued. That's the thing about Kneale, who died in 2006, and the stuff he wrote that was largely screened long before I was born... 

It is potent. It is alive.

The Far Country, by Nevil Shute

This is a very odd love letter to Australia, begun soon after the author emigrated there in the summer of 1950 and published in 1952. I borrowed my mum's battered, second-hand first edition, long missing the original dust jacket and relinquishing its spine as I read it.

In Australia, sheep farmer Jack Dorman finally pays off decades of debt and - despite a large tax bill to come - realises he is now wealthy. His wife Jane is worried about her elderly Aunt Ethel back in England, who she's not seen in 32 years (when Ethel was the sole member of Jane's family to back her relationship with Jack). Jane intuits that Ethel is short of money, so the Dormans, who've regularly sent Ethel letters and cake mix, now send her £500.

Things are far worse than they could imagine, and Ethel is starving to death in her nice house in Ealing, having sold most of her furniture and anything else of value from her days abroad. Ethel's granddaughter, Jennifer Morton, finds her in this state and cares for the old woman in her last days. But the book is pretty blunt about what has done for this poor woman: having once lived a rather grand life in Petersfield and then as a dutiful wife of empire out in Burma, she's been left destitute and unnoticed by, er, the new National Health Service. The independence of India has also meant the end of her pension. It's as if no one was neglected before the NHS; that before the welfare state there was no need of welfare. Or perhaps there's something more sinister: that if only we still had an empire and people knew their place, this sort of thing wouldn't happen to someone of her class.

The war is also to blame, but the privations suffered in England - which are ever increasing, long after the end of the war - seem to be the fault of the post-war government so far as the author is concerned. Jennifer works for a ministry, and we're told,

"It was manifestly impossible for anyone who derided the Socialistic ideal to progress very far in the public service; if a young man aimed at promotion in her office he felt it necessary to declare a firm, almost a religious, belief in the principles of Socialism." (p. 91)

It's quite a claim, but really it's Shute who is being unfairly partisan. The sense is of an old, glorious England now lost to the awful unfairness of egalitarianism. Dying, Ethel tells Jennifer,

"It's not as if we were extravagant, Geoffrey and I. It's been a change that nobody could fight against, this going down and down. I've had such terrible thoughts for you, Jenny, that it would go on going down and down and when you are as old as I am ... you'll think how very rich you were when you were young." (p. 71)

When the old woman dies, Jennifer's father goes through her things and finds a telling document - a recipe for a cake given to Ethel on her wedding day.

"What a world to live in, and how ill they must have been! His eyes ran back to the ingredients. Two pounds of Jersey butter... eight weeks' ration for one person. The egg ration for one person for four months... Currants and sultanas in those quantities; mixed peel, that he had not seen for years. Half a pint of brandy, so plentiful that you could put half a pint into a cake, and think nothing of it. ... He had eaten such cakes when he was a young man before the war of 1914, but now he could hardly remember what a cake like that would taste like." (p. 77)

The irony, of course, is that this woman starved to death, with only the cake mix to sustain her.

Ethel leaves her new money to Jennifer, making the girl promise to use it to visit Jane in Australia, and perhaps look for a better life there - like the one Ethel once knew in England. The doctor who treated Ethel is also leaving the country for a better life but Jennifer has reservations about leaving her elderly parents. Others suggest Australia will "probably be all desert and black people" (p. 95), or make an economic case for the value of migrants as an investment made by a particular country.

"For eighteen years somebody in this country fed you and clothed you and educated you before you made any money, before you started earning. Say you cost an average two quid a week for that eighteen years. You've cost England close on two thousand pounds to produce. ... Suppose you go off to Canada. You're an asset worth two thousand quid that England gives to Canada as a free gift. If a hundred thousand like you were to go each year, it'ld be like England giving Canada a subsidy of two hundred million pounds a year. It's got to be thought about, this emigration." (p. 89)

Despite this, Jennifer sets off to Australia for a temporary visit, certain she will then return home. At 24, she has never eaten grilled steak until boarding the ship - which comes as a great surprise to the Australians (p. 135). She in turn thinks very highly of their modest work in farming and producing food. A lot is made of the virtue of hard graft. The Dorman's have become wealthy after 32 years of toil, and repeatedly say they're glad that wool prices will soon fall so that their children don't end up too indolent. At the end of the book, Jennifer is appalled by a man visiting a doctor in the NHS wants,

"medicine and a certificate exempting him from work because he couldn't wake up in the morning." (p. 314)

Yet on the very same page, Jennifer organises things so that the doctor in question can have more lunches and dinners away from his patients, helping him to bunk off. And then,

"She was staggered to find out how much her mother's illnesses had cost, how much her father had been paying out in life insurance premiums for her security (pp. 314-5)

- presumably under the old, unjust system that the NHS replaced.

In Australia, there is no desert and there are no aboriginal people, though migrants from eastern Europe are treated as a lower order. Jennifer is welcomed by the Dormans, and cannot persuade their young daughter that a trip to England will only be a disappointment. Then there's a serious accident and no doctor available to help two men desperately in need. Carl Zlinter, a Czech immigrant working the land, was a doctor in his own country before serving with the Nazis, but he is not allowed to practice in Australia without retraining for three years. With the men in desperate peril, Jennifer assists Zlinter in carrying out highly risky operations to save the two men's lives, but one of them doesn't survive.

As an inquest looks into this and threatens to deport Zlinter, he gets closer to Jennifer, and is also haunted by the discovery of a gravestone bearing his own name and place of origin. It's for a man who died some decades previously, on the cusp of living memory. Zlinter is soon on the trail of the surviving, elderly people who might have known his namesake and can shed light on his story...

This particularly struck a chord because I'm researching the life of David Whitaker, who in 1971 adapted this novel for Australian TV (broadcast on ABC in 1972). Just as with Zlinter, I've been tracking down surviving paperwork and trying to speak to now-elderly people who might remember my man. There are many parallels between The Far Country and Whitaker's life. In 1950, he was living with his family in Ealing, streets away from the fictional address of Aunt Ethel. The house may also have had relics from India, where Whitaker's mother was born. The age difference between Zlinter and Jennifer is similar to that between Whitaker and his first wife June Barry. As with Jennifer, June Barry returned to Australia leaving Whitaker to work in Australia, with a shadow over their future together...

In fact, for all Jennifer clearly falls for Australia, there is plenty here to count against moving to this far country. There's the boredom of life on the farms, especially for the lone women keeping homes there. There's palpable danger given the lack of qualified doctors and the frequent risks of fire. There's also the philistine culture. Zlinter isn't the only one whose skills are overlooked in Australia. He buys a painting of Jennifer from Stanislaus Shulkin, a plate layer on the railway line who was once professor of artistic studies at the University of Kaunas. 

Perhaps there's something here of the author: an engineer who also wrote novels, at once dirty-handed grafter and lofty man of arts. But surely it can't be a virtue to overlook the talents of Zlinter and Shulkin; it's squandering the investment, just as Shute argued before.

For all Australia offers a future to those prepared to work, Zlinter and Jennifer's happiness is secured by an inheritance that comes quite by chance and to which they're not entitled, requiring Zlinter to transact business with some slightly dodgy characters. He and Jennifer agree to keep the details secret - implicitly because they know that this is wrong. It's a necessary cheat because (just as with the Dormans), the rewards take a long time to win if they're to come at all. There are plenty of characters for whom things haven't worked out.

One reading of all this might be that Shute sets up an initial prejudice - bad old England against verdant, rich Australia - which he then proceeds to complicate and pick at, resulting in a richer, more complex portrait. But if so, the case is made in bad faith and the result is a very odd book.

• Me on Requiem for a Wren, by Nevil Shute

What Abigail Did That Summer, by Ben Aaronovitch

Oh what joy, a Rivers of London adventure we could share with the ten year-old as we drove down to my mum's for the Easter weekend. We thought we'd try it and see how he got on - and how suitable the content might be - and very quickly he was hooked.

Abigail Kamara is Peter Grant's 12 year-old cousin, as featured in several of the books about Grant, a London copper who investigates weird bollocks. This novella is what happens while Peter is away in Hereford (during the events of Foxglove Summer), looking into the disappearance of a bunch of kids her own age from Hampstead Heath. There's some suggestion this is going to riff on Pied Piper of Hamelin but it goes more The Stone Tape, but full of the usual smart, funny observation that makes the main series so compelling. There's a posh boy called Simon who prefers climbing trees to school work which particularly struck a chord.

Shvorne Marks is an excellent reader, with dour footnotes provided by Kobna Holbrook-Smith (who usually narrate's Peter's audiobook adventures). What strikes me is how easily Abigail could lead further adventures - as could many of the other rich and well-drawn characters in the series. Ben has created a whole world, one that could survive the death or retirement of its lead character. I'm all too aware off that as I begin Amongst Our Weapons...

On other titles in the series:

• Lies Sleeping
• The October Man
• False Value

Sci-fi Bulletin interview re Mary Whitehouse

Samira and I were interviewed by Paul Simpson at Sci-fi Bulletin about our recent Radio 4 documentary, Disgusted, Mary Whitehouse. 

• Archive on Four: Interview: Samira Ahmed and Simon Guerrier
• Our documentary: Disgusted, Mary Whitehouse

This week, BBC Four has also broadcast a very good two-part TV documentary on the same subject, Banned! The Mary Whitehouse Story. Having spent weeks going through the archives looking for good material, it's interesting to see which bits of old footage they've used - and the different choices / potential afforded by telling a story visually.

Doctor Who Magazine #576

The new issue of Doctor Who Magazine is devoted to forthcoming Easter TV special Legend of the Sea Devils, but there are a couple of bits from me.

First, there's a tribute to the actor Henry Soskin who, as Henry Lincoln, co-wrote The Abominable Snowman and The Web of Fear, and - under another pseudonym - The Dominators. Lincoln then want on to investigate the Knights Templar, and co-wrote the best-selling The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. It was a fun challenge to dig through the various things said about - and by - him to piece together the true story was; how very fitting for him, I thought.

Then the latest instalment of Sufficient Data is on the different cat badges worn by the Sixth Doctor, as always illustrated by the amazing Ben Morris.

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.