As I say, a key issue is the ability to identify credible sources. Ironically - as if I've tempted fate by speaking out - I've recently learned that something I state as fact in my 2023 biography David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television, and which I based on what seemed to be sound evidence, isn't true. More on that, and a full correction, soon.
"There's always another way, even for you."
The follow-up to Children of Time, first published in 2019, is another epic, mind-expanding treat. That first book ended with the sentient civilisation of giant spiders and the surviving remnants of humanity forging a last-minute peace after thousands and thousands of years.
This sequel sees some of their descendants (and one surviving character) voyage to a star system with two roughly Earth-like worlds. Humans already reached this place some millennia before, and the new arrivals are faced with the extraordinary consequence of that early intervention. Whereas, in the first book, one ancient human scientist affected the development of spiders, here another human has a thing for the octopus. By the time the spider-human team turn up, the octopuses have their own spacecraft...
I thought this started a bit slowly, retreading what we'd seen before - and then if completely blindsided me. It really picks up as we come to learn that the octopus people are not the only antagonist in this system. The other, relentlessly predatory species - details of whom I'll not spoil here - is absolutely bloody terrifying and a brilliant threat. We jump back and forth a bit in time to understand how this species developed, which only makes it all the more appalling and implacable.
We, as readers, come to understand the threat while the spiders and humans are still guessing at what it might be, so they plunge headlong into danger. I don't think I've ever read a book that achieves that thing of horror movies of making you want to shout "No!" about what a character is about to blunder into...
As before, a particular strength of all this is the way Tchaikovsky tells chunks from non-human perspectives, the physiology and biology of the observer defining their worldview. The octopus people are intelligent, curious and mercurial, in part because of the way an octopus's limbs can work independently of its central brain. They act, react and emote in a way that's separate from thinking. That presents challenges in communication: it's less a matter of finding a common language as expressing the right complexity of feels.
From the basis of this biology follows a whole load of logically reasoned but extraordinary stuff. I was wowed by descriptions of the octopus spacecraft that are effectively bubbles of water in space, and the practicalities this involves in such matters as docking and airlocks. There's an amazing, nightmare sequence near the end of the novel that reminded me a bit of Dead of Night, in which one character puts up a series of memory-based defences against an attack, each one at a personal cost. We understand the physics of what's happening in terms of computational power and yet the effect is an effective, unsettling noir.
Mel Hudson is again a brilliant reader for the audiobook version, nimbly personifying a large and diverse cast - humans, spiders, octopuses and the things I won't say more of. We're left at an intriguing point at the end and I'm very much looking forward to the third book, Children of Memory.
I started the book that afternoon but, like the film (and the novel it’s based on), it’s a vast sprawling epic and has taken a while to get through, not least because I’ve had a whole bunch of work stuff going on, too. Evry tells us at the start that he ordered the wealth of information so that we can skip to the bits of interest, whether that’s his detailed histories of pre-production, filming and what happened afterwards, the huge oral history of interviews with cast and crew, or the extra stuff like the merchandise and legacy of this peculiar, beguiling movie. I am hardcore and did the whole lot.
At first, I thought the book might have been better edited, even judiciously pruned, as there’s quite a lot of repetition. But as I read, on the repetition became important to our understanding: these are things on which people agree, in contrast to the many points on which there is less consensus.
Some witnesses, such as costume designer Bob Ringwood, are engagingly gossipy and forthright in their views. Others are more cautious in what they share. That is especially telling when their accounts are combined. For example, there’s the account of one male actor getting into character on set by shouting at and upsetting co-star Francesca Annis. Annis, cited in a contemporary interview (she did not contribute to this new book) declines to name the male actor. But here, publicity executive Paul M Sammon does (p. 223).
This is immediately followed by a contribution from another cast member, Sean Young, who doesn’t name the male actor or refer to the incident specifically. Yet by placing her words directly after Sammon, the implication is that she’s telling us what happened in response on set.
“As an actor, when I’m working with other actors, we all know who’s the deadwood. We all know who it is. We may not say it, but we’ll avoid them.” (p. 224)
There’s loads I found fascinating here. Val Kilmer and Tom Cruise screen-tested for the lead role of Paul. MacLachlan walked off set several weeks into filming because he’d still not received a contract. The rubberised stillsuits created for Dune were a big influence on Michael Keaton’s costume as Batman — also realised by Bob Ringwood — and superhero costumes ever since. Production on Dune overlapped a bit with Conan the Destroyer, using some of the same locations and sets, and at one point you could see both out in the desert on facing dunes. There’s stuff on the music and marketing and merchandise… There is a lot of detail.
These details could have been summarised or more concisely related but that would be missing a big part of the appeal of this book. A bit like the documentary Get Back where we sit day after day with the Beatles, the joy here is all the mundane, ordinary stuff as well. It’s the granular detail that really opens up the creative process. We gain a strong sense of what Lynch was doing, what he tried to achieve and what exactly went wrong.
A few days after receiving the book, I watched the movie with my teenage son, who had seen the Villeneuve Dune and Dune: Part II but came to this old film wholly new. He enjoyed it, I think, and found it interesting to see a different take on the same material, but his main issue was that the last hour or so is too rushed, too much happening too quickly for it to have an emotional impact. That, I now learn from reading this book, is because the production shot largely in script order; when money began to run out, they ripped our whole pages of what they still had to shoot…
Insights into the production and thus what we see on screen only take up the first half of this enormous volume. Evry has just as much interest in what followed, picking over the way the film was released, seen and received. More than that, there’s the sense of how it has haunted (or not) the people who made it.
“Dino took him [Lynch] and Raffaella on an impromptu (and speedy) car trip to Venice, arriving directly in St Mark’s Square.” (p. 61).
That’s not technically possible given how Venice doesn’t have roads. Besides, Bob Ringwood then tells us that they all arrived by plane (p. 111).
Since I’m quibbling over small stuff (minuscule!), we’re frequently told of scenes being “lensed” or hear of “lensing” as a synonym for shooting. I don’t think that’s ever in a quotation from cast or crew; it’s a term used by movie journalists rather than those who make movies, not least because you fix or modify a “lens” before you start the action. Referring to Lynch as “the helmer” rather than director is another journalistic cliché, and not quite appropriate in this case since a key element of the story is how Lynch wasn’t in overall charge of what made it to the screen.
At times, the prose is oddly colloquial, too. When discussing the possibility of a director’s cut of the movie, we’re told that Lynch was “initially enthusiastic about taking a mulligan”, which I had to look up (it means when a golfer is allowed to replay a stroke), and then that “the studio refused to pony up the right amount of dough” (both quotations, p. 293). That is quite the mixed metaphor.
I raise this because the book is otherwise so often very good at explaining simply and clearly what were very technical procedures, such as the way the film was financed or the then-pioneering special effects. It makes us understand exactly how ingenious and revolutionary a lot of this stuff was for it’s time, as well as how influential. But also I am a jaded old hack who finds such grammatical stuff distracting and what I really want — in this book, in the film — is to lose myself in the weird, rich world of Dune.
Pedantic quibbling aside, this is an extraordinary, rich and insightful book. I’m tantalised by the details that remain elusive: how much footage actually survives; how possible it would be, with some new effects work, to produce a director’s cut, and how much of a screenplay for Dune II Lynch may have written.
The book ends with a short, sweet interview with Lynch himself, who just wants to say how much he enjoyed working with cast and crew for all he doesn’t much rate the film. My sense is of Evry trying valiantly to keep the call going, to draw more from Lynch and to somehow articulate something of what Dune means to him, the author of this exhaustive book. “Fantastic, man,” says Lynch, cheerily, and ends the conversation.
We’re left hanging. Now we always will be.
See also:
I've written a couple of things:
pp. 18-22 Script to Screen: The Time Hotel
Digging into the design work on the most recent TV episode, I spoke to executive producer Joel Collins, visual effects supervisor Seb Barker, production design Phil Sims, graphic designer Stephen Fielding and assistant graphic designer Sophie Cowdrey.
pp. 48-50 Get Ready to Play
I spoke to the team behind mobile Doctor Who game Lost in Time: Elin Jonsson (Chief Business Officer at East Side Games); Joao Batista (CEO of Bigfoot); Mario A Mentasti (narrative designer at Bigfoot); and Shannon Maclaughlan (BBC Studios).
Then, on p. 32, there's an interview with me (a whole paragraph) about the documentary I've made with Jon Clarke and others for the new Season 7 Blu-ray, with a photo I took on p. 33. More about Terror of the Suburbs another time...
Holiday Sketches: Two Female Artists and an Archaeologist Husband go on Holiday, 1863, is about the trip made to Rhodes (as well as Athens, Ephesos and Istanbul) by artist Ann Mary Severn Newton and the teenaged Gertrude Jekyll, in the company of Mary's husband Charles. He was an archaeologist, the trip related to his work for the British Museum.
You can find the exhibition on the 3rd floor of Senate House, University of London - just as you come out of the lifts, by the library of the Institute of Classical Studies. If you can't make it (and even if you can), the Dr has also produced an accompanying fanzine.
For more of this sort of thing, she previously wrote the book, From the Harpy Tomb to the Wonders of Ephesus - British Archaeologists in the Ottoman Empire 1840-1880 (Bloomsbury, 2008) and continues to dig into all this, especially the life of Mary. You can keep up with her researches on her blog.
The episode includes an interview with me, struggling to remember whatever it was I was thinking at the time - other than "Eeeeeeeee I'm writing a book!"
Last year, I spoke to the same podcast about my 2007 Doctor Who novel The Pirate Loop and, separately, my new book Doctor Who - The Time Travelling Alamanac. And the year before, I spoke to them about David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television.
Yesterday, while searching for something else I came across five one-paragraph ideas for Doctor Who audiobooks that I submitted on Sunday, 15 November 2009, a few hours before settling down to watch The Waters of Mars.
One of the five ideas is striking. I had no idea at the time that Amy’s Choice had been commissioned for the 2010 TV series and this was all a long time before the Dream Crabs featured in Last Christmas (2014). But, by total coincidence, I came up with something a bit similar:
Perfect Worlds
A sort of ghost story. Amy and the Doctor rescue each other from their dreams. After finally leaving the Doctor behind, Amy is back home with her friends – human ones and those she’s met on her adventures with the Doctor. It’s a nice day and there’s a big party. But some of the friends she knows are really dead. And then the Doctor comes to see her. He explains she’s asleep, she’s been bitten by something that’s feeding off her dreams – and is slowly killing her. He’s using a machine to speak to her: and by willing to wake up she can. The Doctor shows her the small, scaly creature feeding on their desires. And it bites him. Amy now has to go rescue him… He dreams of his own home and the thousands of people who he couldn’t save, all living happily together. Amy talks him out of staying.
This happens quite a lot: more than once I’ve been told I can’t do X or Y in a Doctor Who story because someone else is already doing it or something like it in another story I didn’t know about. As an editor and producer, I’ve sometimes had to tell people the same thing. There is a lot of Doctor Who being dreamt up all the time, so it’s not really surprising.
But on this particular occasion I don’t think I was made aware that I’d chanced upon the wheeze of a forthcoming TV episode. And by the time Amy’s Choice was broadcast on 15 May 2010, I’d forgotten having a similar idea.
That’s probably because I was a bit caught up in other things at the time. But it’s also how pitching works: if the people you’re pitching aren’t enthused by what you send in, you send in something else. Ideas are the easy bit. If there’s interest in an idea you then move on to the trickier thing of developing it into a storyline.
But I realise (having had it pointed out) that I then worked some of this Perfect Worlds idea into The Anachronauts, released in January 2012. In fact, another of the pitches sent in with Perfect Worlds was called The Deluge and reworked an outline for a Doctor Who novel I’d submitted in the early 2000s. That idea eventually ended up as The Flood, an episode of my science-fiction series Graceless, released in December 2011.
The three other ideas — Snip! Snip!, 77 Aliens and The Brain Drain — might still find homes somewhere… Never throw anything away, Harry.
This morning, out for a walk, I puzzled over where the wheeze for Perfect Worlds came from in the first place. At the time, one trick I used for sparking ideas was to scan over my shelves of books and DVDs. It wasn’t always to come up with, “A Doctor Who version of X…” Often just being reminded of a scene, a character, a line of dialogue would ignite something.
With that in mind, I think Perfect Worlds was probably inspired by the 1986 movie Labyrinth, especially the “As The World Falls Down” sequence at the ball — hence Amy being at a party — and the bit when Sarah thinks she is back in her room but it’s yet another trick. She has to puzzle out, for herself, the difference between the comforting and the real…
Maybe I’d been told, or picked up somewhere, that the 2010 series of Doctor Who would have something of a fairy-tale feel. If so, I was trying to get myself in the right kind of head space to match that — and that’s why this idea came so close to what they were already doing.
Now Susan is marrying someone else — but, she tells Nancy, she’s received a threatening note from an ex. Susan wants Nancy, who kept notes in shorthand on Susan’s love-life when they lived together, to seek out her exes and find out who is making trouble. It might be the convicted thief Peter or the poet Laurence or the vain actor Mike… Nancy is sure it can’t be Donald.
When Susan is murdered, Nancy’s first thought is to ensure that the police don’t suspect her fiancee. But in tidying up the crime scene to protect Donald, she incriminates herself…
This is a fantastic return to form by Margot Bennett after the disappointment of Farewell Crown and Good-bye King. It’s at least as good as The Widow of Bath and probably better, my favourite of her books that I have read so far. I can see why it won the Crime Writers’ Association ‘Crossed Red Herrings’ award — since renamed the Gold Dagger (and presented to Bennett by JB Priestley) — and why Bennett was, in 1959, elected to the Detection Club. Fast-moving, twisty and suspenseful, this keeps us guessing to the end. Even the very last paragraph takes an unexpected turn.
In his introduction, Martin Edwards quotes Bennett herself on what made this and The Man Who Didn’t Fly “my best books”. The latter,
“had an unusual plot and a set of people I believed in. In the same way, Someone from the Past had five characters I might have met anywhere. The best of all my people was the girl Nancy. She was kind and cruel, and loyal and bitchy. She was a ready liar, with a sharp tongue, but she was brave and real. All through my books, the best I have done is to make the people real.” (pp. 9-10, citing John M Reilly (ed.), Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers)
Nancy is a compelling protagonist. We never know what she might do next. She is observant and reckless, intelligent and yet capable of extraordinary folly. Sometimes she tries to fix things in ways we can see (and want to shout) will only make things worse. But we are with her all the way as she faces multiple dangers.
As so often with Margot Bennett, characters attracted to one another bicker and fight, but here the stakes are raised because any one of these men Nancy is winding up could be the murderer. Whether or not they did for Susan, they can be violent with Nancy, or treat her appallingly in other ways. In fact, she is not the only woman here who puts up with variously crap men.
This British Library Crime Classic edition, first published in 2023, is subtitled “a London mystery” and it boasts a few good descriptions of places such as Soho. More than that, it offers an extraordinary snapshot of the mores of 1958, the year the novel was originally published. As well as a lot of smoking and drinking, there’s a surprising nonchalance about drugs. Tired and wound-up after a row with Donald, Nancy tells us:
“I knew I should take a couple of strong sleeping-pills. They would give me four hours’ sleep, and a heavily-doped morning that would make work impossible, unless I took a stimulant. After that, a couple of tranquilizing tablets would level me up for the day.” (p. 37)
She has all of these to hand as, a few pages later, she offers them and “a confidence drug” to her fiancee, who tells her he’s already taken “knockout pills” (p. 45). These, we learn, are “blue things, sodium amytal” (p. 47). Elsewhere, Nancy seems familiar with benzedrine. The drug-taking is part of the plot (one suspect was apparently doped and unconscious at the time of the murder) but also part of everyday life.
I’m intrigued by elements of the novel that Bennett may have drawn from her own (fascinating) life, such as her years as a writer for the magazine Lilliput (while her husband Richard Bennett was editor).
“From the moment that I got the job on the Diagonal Press and scrawled out my first paid illiteracies I saw myself as a great writer, one who kept notebooks and would soon be guest of honour at literary luncheons.” (p. 27)
Again, the notebooks are part of the plot but I wonder how much this attitude — to her earlier work and to her career — matched Bennett’s own. When the murder case bears down on Nancy, the publisher she works for offers her a chance to get away with a job in Spain (p. 248). Is that a nod to Bennett’s own history, as she served as a nurse (and publicist) in Spain during the civil war?
Then there is what the novel says about Television, which in those days still had a capital T. Bennett had already made her debut as a TV writer: her one-off drama The Sun Divorce (dir. Philip Savile) was shown as part of London Playhouse on the ITV network Associated-Redifussion on Thursday 26 January 1956, just four months after the launch of ITV. Writing of Someone from the Past must have overlapped with the agreement of rights for a TV adaptation one of her earlier novels: The Man Who Didn’t Fly, starring William Shatner and Jonathan Harris, was adapted by Jerome Coopersmith and broadcast by NBC in Canada on 16 July 1958.
Since it was made and broadcast in Canada, Bennett probably had little involvement in this and she may never have seen it. But, excitingly, we can watch that production of The Man Who Didn’t Fly on YouTube. It even enjoys a bit of a following because it stars both William Shatner and Jonathan Harris, later stars of Star Trek and Lost in Space respectively.
Margot Bennett was soon writing for TV herself, with work on ATV soap opera Emergency-Ward 10, perhaps making use of her own nursing experience. IMDB credits her on 15 episodes of the soap, broadcast between Tuesday 23 September 1958 and Friday 22 May 1959. The implication is that she moved into soap opera soon after completing work on this novel.
By the time she finished on Emergency-ward 10, Bennett had made the switch to BBC — and more prestigious drama — with her six-part adaption of her novel The Widow of Bath, which began transmission on 1 June 1959. But Someone from the Past suggests she was already familiar with the mechanics of BBC television more than a year before that.
In the novel, actor Mike Fenby, presumably used to late nights on stage followed by late mornings (as described in Exit Through the Fireplace), complains of the “brutal creatures” of “Terrivision” who have him up at “ten o’clock” in the morning for rehearsals in Shepherds Bush — which is where the BBC was based.
“And you should see, I really wish you could see, the producer. Temperament! He thinks out the sets with a kind of telescope, and when he wants to concentrate, he blows bubbles. … He has a tin. He shakes the bubbles off with a bit of wire. They help him to relax. When they burst, they cover the floor with slime, like invisible banana skins. There’s practically no one in the cast who hasn’t a sprained ankle or a broken neck. You ought to see us, skidding about the place.” (pp. 39-40).
That “telescope” was a director’s viewfinder, enabling the director to see how much of the actors and set would be visible through different diameter lenses, and to plan and block their shots ahead of studio recording. Viewfinders had been in use since at least 1938: the Tech Ops site boasts a clipping from Radio Times that year, a photo of one in use and some other details. But this is not the sort of thing people outside the world of TV were likely to know about,.
Actor Mike can escape from rehearsals for lunch with Nancy at one o’clock, suggesting “a pub called the Blue Unicorn”, which is surely a play on the real-life White Horse at 31 Uxbridge Road, where I’ve also sometimes met up with actors. (For those with an interest in the drinking habits of old TV people, the late Alvin Rakoff says in his memoir of working for the BBC in the 1950s that after recording at Lime Grove he’d take the crew for a pint at the end of the road, in the British Prince at 77 Goldhawk Road.)
Later, Mike can’t believe Nancy didn’t see his TV performance go out.
“‘I thought you might have been interested enough to watch me on the new medium.’
‘It’s a fairly old medium by now, isn’t it?’
‘But Nancy, this was terrific. I’m a brain surgeon, you see, who takes to drink, and just when I’m having a terrible fit of the stagers, my former loved one is wheeled in with her brains dashed out. I’m supposed to shake so much, the forceps clash together like a steel band as I approach the operating table. The trouble was that I really was shaking so much I dropped the whole kit of instruments on her face. It was Sylvia, you know, she’s got a shocking temper, I cracked the porcelain jacket on one of her front teeth, she’s going to sue me. If I hadn’t got between her and the cameras and ad-libbed, the viewers would have heard every word she said. You certainly missed something. It will be in all the papers tomorrow.” (p. 95)
There’s a lot of interest here (to me): Television no longer a novelty, favouring melodramatic productions in which the viewer might enjoy the emotional crisis of characters in close-up, all within the lively, stressy chaos of live broadcast. The depiction is a bit pointed, even satirical — as is Mike buying up all the papers to bask in the contradictory reviews — but the details are all right, and so surely based on direct observation.
Did Margot Bennett have first-hand experience of BBC drama production when she wrote Someone from the Past, more than a year before her first writing credits at the BBC? Her husband had worked in BBC radio since the war and also sometimes wrote for listings magazine Radio Times, such as his interview with Jimmy Wheeler ahead of a TV comedy show in May 1956. Yet it seems unlikely that Margot tours of TV rehearsals through that connection.
More probable, I think, is this came through her own efforts. Was she meeting with BBC people about writing for TV, and getting tours of production, long before her first screen credit there? Or perhaps, like Nancy, Margot Bennett simply met an actor friend for lunch while they were in rehearsals…
Whatever the case, and for all Bennett might have mocked TV drama, something extraordinary happened after the publication of Someone from the Past. Despite the accolades it won, she never published another crime novel. According to her family (and detailed in the introduction to the British Library edition of The Man Who Didn’t Fly), she didn’t earn enough from novels to continue; crime didn’t pay. Instead, she spent the next decade writing prolifically for TV.
More investigation to follow...
Novels by Margot Bennett:
Non-fiction by Margot Bennett:
“Six of them in a great H of metal hanging above the earth. They turn head on heel, four astronauts (American, Japanese, British, Italian) and two cosmonauts (Russian, Russian); two women, four men, one space station made up of seventeen connecting modules, seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour. They are the latest six of many, nothing unusual about this any more, routine astronauts in earth’s backyard. Earth’s fabulous and improbable backyard.” (p. 2)
When this short, 136-page novel won the Booker Prize on 12 November 2024, I saw some commentary that it was clearly a work of science-fiction just not marketed as such — the implication being out of shame. Sci-fi, after all, is genre and lowbrow while this book aspires to art.
Having read it, I don’t think that’s true. Yes, it is set in the future — just — given that it includes the launch of the first crewed mission to the Moon in more than 50 years. In real life, Artemis III is currently scheduled to land the first woman and next man on the Moon in mid 2027 (I suspect it may be delayed). The typhoon that here devastates Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines is also a thing still-to-come — but given recent news of extreme weather in the UK and abroad doesn’t seem very distant.
More than that, I’d argue that the technology here, the apparatus of the world depicted, is as it currently exists. There is no “novum” or new wossname to differentiate this world from our own, a novelty whose consequence we then explore. Instead, the launch of the Moon mission, the typhoon and other things — such as the death of one astronaut’s mother down on Earth — help to clarify the sense of scale, distance, remoteness and connection of these six people aboard the small, creaky H. It shapes how we observe them and what they, in turn, observe.
The unnamed H space station here is not, explicitly, the International Space Station — which, in real life, has been permanently occupied by humans since 2 November 2000. But the tech and practicalities are the same. The novel details 24 hours on board, in which the H makes 16 orbits of Earth. We cover the crew’s schedule: scientific experiments, exercise regime, sleeping and toilet arrangements, a shared movie. We dig into their thoughts and fears and dreams. There’s a thing about exactly who and what is being observed in Las Meninas, the painting by Velázquez, as seen in a postcard on board the H. We skip occasionally back to Earth to get a contrasting viewpoint: the dying mother thinking of her daughter in space, the people sheltering from the devastating typhoon that, from orbit, looks serene.
In all this, I’m struck more than anything by a profound sense of fragility: the six people in their slowly eroding H; the people on Earth under threat from the elements; our relationships and loved ones and inevitable loss. So much meaning, all gained by taking a vantage point that provides perspective.
My copy of the book, published (very quickly!) after it won the Booker Prize, includes an afterword from the author which is just as insightful as the novel itself. It’s largely on the subject of what words can do and add and illuminate, as the poorer relation of music, but she also addresses the issues of sci-fi:
“Perversely, perhaps, though Orbital is a book about space, its blueprint wasn’t 2001 or Dune, but A Month in the Country. I thought to myself: I want to write A Month in the Country in space.” (p. 143)
This seems to have been inspired by online videos of the Earth seen from the ISS:
“There’s never a bad view. You never think: oh, this is the boring bit, more ocean, more desert, blah blah; never, no — every view begs for your fresh attention.” (p. 141).
How brilliant and how true, putting in words what I realise I’ve long felt but never consciously articulated. In fact, how extraordinary to look from an orbiting space station — at an altitude of between 413 and 422 km above mean Earth sea level — yet gaze right into my head and explain to me what it is I can see.
Some other books I've read recently:
On pages 36-39 of the new DWM, there's my latest "Script to Screen" feature, this time on Babystation Beta - the space station seen in 2024 episode Space Babies. It's a companion piece to the coverage of that episode I wrote for issue #604 in May. In this case, I spoke to art director Jon Horsham and VFX supervisor Jim Parsons, as well as director Julie Anne Robinson.
Also this issue, my former script editor Jacqueline Rayner says some nice things about my 2011 audio Doctor Who story The Cold Equations. If that's of interest, in 2021, I was a guest on the Gallifrey's Most Wanted podcast talking about this story and the trilogy it was part of.
“The funny thing is that getting the morning-after pill the first day of a zombie apocalypse is really no easier or harder than on a previously average day. No bigger a deal, the obstacles are just… different. More slow-moving, brain-eating hordes, sure, but fewer overtly religiose or obstructive pharmacists. The baseball bat I brought to use in case of the former was also effective on the triple-lock cabinets erected by the latter.” (p. 224)
This is a rich, intoxicating anthology of 19 short stories and musings. Several of the stories are set in the near future, such as the one in which the invention of new kinds of artificial dick leads, through one thing and another, to the collapse of capitalism. Other stories spiral backward — to the pogrom in York in 1190, to The Black Cap gay pub, to the narrator’s own history. There are ghost stories and ghostly stories, and a lot of it is strange and unsettling.
The last story, Dune Elegies, is one of several set in a bleak near-future, a world just beyond our current grasp. The narrator, “terfed off” their own radio show, takes up residence in a lighthouse near the stone mirrors at Denge and continues to transmit a podcast, but with a pervasive sense of lost connection. The narrator is unable to recall the names of Conrad Veidt and Derek Jarman while detailing their importance in queer history — we fill in the blanks as readers. Then there’s a response from listeners to the podcast, transmission of which triggers something in stones taken from the area, wherever they might be now. It’s such an odd, beguiling idea, the sort of story that sits with you long afterwards.
As well as what’s happening, there’s the way these stories are told, dense with allusion and word play, poetry and punning. There are references to films and TV shows, novels and academic texts — I’d have quite liked a bibliography and/or end notes for further reading. It’s not just that stuff is referenced; it is toyed with and spun. For example, one passage about the lives of particular pirates includes the phrase “our flag means life” (p. 229) reversing the title of the 2022-23 TV series while at the same time making a connection to its own exploration of sexuality and identity.
We frequently explore derivation and etymology, how meaning is constructed, generating history and identity. With that in mind, I think the cut-up technique of quotations and references may be a way of shaking things up to create new meanings and ideas. That took me back into my own past when, as a university student some three decades ago, I got hooked on linguistic relativity and the so-called “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” that language shapes or even determines our thoughts and perceptions.
(In fact, it’s an axiom, not a hypothesis, and not one put forward by the linguists Sapir and Whorf as such, who never wrote together. But perhaps that makes it more fitting as a label, evidence that we need a name, any name, to be able to remonstrate with an idea.)
It’s not just about words in the stories here: in dreams of being Joan of Arc and her insistence on wearing trousers, or in detailing why Artemis wore a short skirt, we’re exploring the construction of gendered and non-gendered identities.
By chance, I was reading this as I saw the new documentary From Roger Moore With Love, which details how movie-star “Roger Moore” was an invented persona; Moore learned to play this persona and then, from The Spy Who Loved Me, applied that to his role as James Bond. At one point, Moore’s friend Christopher Walken says this shouldn’t be a surprise because we’re all self-invented people — there’s a point in our lives, perhaps more than one, where we choose who we are. How fascinating to see archive interviews with Moore uncomfortable with the violence and misogyny of Bond or — in an episode of Hardtalk which so yielded something new from its subjects — voicing concern about the “heroic” image of his Bond wielding a gun. I’m not sure I’d have picked up on that if I’d not been reading this book…
Like the world of James Bond, the stories in this book are frequently lusty, even graphic. But Bond is about gratified desire, sex just part of the mix with exotic locations, stylish clothes, fancy food and gadgets. In the book, desire is, I think, less external but bubbling up from within. There’s a lot here on the bloody, visceral heft of bodies — of ourselves not just as contracted identities but as physical things.
“What it means to be in a body, differently, is what the Crusades take aim against,” (p. 61).
So much of this book is exploring that haunting idea, the half of the sentence before “is” and the sentence as a whole.
You can buy Truth & Dare by So Mayer direct from Cipher Press.
In February, I posted on Twitter/X some thoughts about Adventures in Type and Space, slightly revised here for clarity:
I’ve been utterly spellbound by this beautiful, brilliant book. It goes in big on a very small subject — the 30 seconds or so of opening titles at the start of each episode of old Doctor Who. But it’s just as thrilling and rich as those sequences, and so much more than simply a history of who made them and how. It’s funny and profound about the process of creating art and what’s going on in the artist’s head. Along the way, we learn the role of God and Fra Angelico in the whizzy opening titles for Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor, and what a CGI artist “sees” in their head as they tap out the code. There are connections to Alien, Bladerunner and Points of View, and everything you could want to know about the typeface Futura. Like the titles themselves, this is an extraordinary visual treat, all the more wondrous the closer you look.
My contribution to that original book was to supply a photograph of Sid Sutton from when I interviewed him at home on 2 May 2017 for Doctor Who Magazine's special The Essential Doctor Who: Adventures in Space. Another of my photographs and some previously unpublished bits of the interview feature in this new supplement.
There is also a long interview with Sid culled from multiple sources, plus an interview with his two sons - who both work in design - and with Sid's collaborator Terry Handley. Again, there's a wealth of detail here: how exactly things were done, using what bespoke equipment and in what premises, and what to look for in the familiar titles that reveal this painstaking process. (Clue: keep you eye on the question marks.)
There's also a revealing interview with Colin Baker as he's shown the myriad different elements Sid employed to create his Doctor Who opening titles. A video of this conversation is also available:
There's some revealing stuff here and not just about the way the titles were made. Baker compares his Doctor, and his plan for revealing this incarnation's true persona, to Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice.
"[We] don't want him anywhere near our heroine. But it turns out he's the only truly decent person in the story. Everything he's done, which others have found objectionable, has been for the benefit of third parties, not himself." (p. 37)
There's a sense that these opening titles are invested with great meaning by interviewer Graham Kibble-White, who was 11 when Colin Baker became the Doctor. The conversation is an attempt to explore what meaning they hold for Baker - very different as an actor on the other side of the screen and yet no less significant.
The separate versions of Aventures in Type and Space and The Sid Sutton Collection are now sold out but compendium edition Adventures in Type and Space: The Complete Collection is available to buy from the Ten Acre Films site.
For those who might not know, in 1985, the Observer magazine sent Douglas Adams, best-selling author of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and zoologist Mark Carwardine to Madagascar to look for the endangered aye-aye lemur. Enthralled by this encounter, they followed it up in 1988 with a longer trip looking for a range on endangered species including the northern white rhinoceros and the kakapo. That trip led to a BBC Radio series first broadcast in 1989 and the book published a year later. In 2009, Stephen Fry and Mark Cardwardine made a TV series retracing the original trip.
Fry's introduction to the 2019 edition of the book included things I didn't know, not least that one inspiration for a lengthy trip around the world looking for different endangered species was Adams's tax situation. By spending a year out of the UK, he saved himself a six-figure sum. We learn, too, of Fry's own role in the original endeavour, as house-sitter for Adams and the emergency contact when things went awry.
The main body of the book is a masterpiece, at once killingly funny and shrewdly, beautifully observed. Much of it has long been lodged in my memory; many speak of Adams's ability to correctly predict the future but he's also skilled and sharing ideas and stories in ways that stick. One thing, I think, I'd not picked up on previous readings is how much this is about human foibles and bureaucracy. By detailing all the things that get in the way of Adams and Carwardine getting to see these creatures - of Things Getting Done - these frustrations illuminate the problems faced by conservationists.
Mark Carwardine's last word updates the one in my dog-eared paperback and makes depressing reading: one of the species he and Adams went to see is now officially extinct, another is near as dammit, and the rest all teeter on the verge of extinction, along with countless others. What a world we are passing on to our children.
See also:
“How can we trap them?” (p. 589)
But something goes wrong with the experiment. Instead of monkeys, the nanovirus sets to work on another population on Kern’s World: the spiders. Over thousands of years, alternating been chapters set on the planet and chapters involving the last human survivors of Earth, we follow what happens nexts…
This is an absolutely brilliant book, epic and thrilling and rich. It’s the sort of novel you want to hare through to find out what happens next and yet never want to end. It’s big on ideas and emotion. For all the enormous scale — it sprawls across space as well as time — it is grounded in compelling characters, human and spider. Their respective civilisations are very different from our own, yet we’re drawn in by relatable fears and desires, tensions and challenges.
One clever way in which we are ensnared is that Tchaikovsky retains a number of characters through the enormous span of the novel. Humans are stored cryogenically or by other means (it would be a shame to spoil exactly how), so sleep for thousands of years and then awaken for the next chapter, catching up as we do on what’s changed in the meantime. With the spiders, Tchaikovsky repeats a number of names among different generations, so we follow the adventures of various Portias, Biancas and Fabians, some the descendants of others. In effect, we inherit a connection each time. That in turn matches something the spiders can do in inheriting memories and “understandings”, so it’s a structural device that also helps us understand the psychology of these creatures.
The alien perspective rendered as normal and humanity seen as other is an old trick from science-fiction, one I first encountered in the opening chapter of Malcolm Hulke’s novelisation Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters (1974), which involves a similar clash between human civilisation and a species of intelligent “monsters” with just as much claim to the world. But the span of the novel, that long view of developing society and culture seen through a few long-lived characters so that each challenge is deeply affecting, is reminiscent of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy. In some respects, this is the Mars trilogy with monsters, which I mean as the highest praise.
The audio version is expertly narrated by Mel Hudson - who makes the various characters distinct and recognisable. I’m pleased to see she has also narrated the two subsequent novels in the series, Children of Ruin and Children of Memory. I will not leave those so long.
Darrelhyde attempts to fight the bureaucracy and rouse the interest of the press in his efforts to save Percy. When this fails, he teams up with a young pick-pocket called Gloria to free Percy from his cell…
This short (125 page), funny novel begins with a neat reversal, describing the behaviour of a particular species of ape which, we come to realise within a few sentences is us. I’ve seen this kind of anthropological inversion done elsewhere, such as in David Attenborough’s Life on Earth (1979), where the final, 13th episode looks at human beings from the same objective viewpoint it has applied to other creatures.
This sort of thing is quite common in science-fiction, too; our ordinary, unthinking behaviour suddenly strange. (I’m near the end of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s amazing Children of Time and will have more to say in due course…)
While the conceit only lasts for those first few pages, we frequently see events from Percy’s perspective. The effect of this inversion is, said a review in Time quoted in the front flap, “a pointed and amusing satire”, while the Herald Tribune thought it, “a brilliantly accomplished small book which widens out into large meanings.”
The lightness of touch surprised me given what I know about Brophy’s later campaigning on the issue of animal rights. Her name came up when I was looking into issues of personhood and reading around the documentary Project Nim, which I reviewed for the Lancet.
The novel was apparently inspired by Brophy’s time living close enough to London Zoo to hear the cries of captive animals. She later wrote a piece, “The Rights of Animals” (1965) for the Sunday Times, subsequently republished by the Animal Defence and Anti-Vivisection Society, and contributed to such publications as Animal, Men and Morals (1971) and Animal Rights: A Symposium (1979).
I’m also aware of Brophy’s effective campaigning in other areas. With Maureen Duffy she was instrumental in seeing the Public Lending Right enshrined in law, so that authors receive payment for their books being borrowed from public libraries. I’m a direct beneficiary, a fact I have to declare at each meeting of the British Library’s advisory committee to PLR. As I linger over the complimentary sandwiches, I think of Brophy and Duffy and all they achieved.
Yet this novel is not a polemic or even particularly campaigning; indeed, an anti-vivisectionist is one of the targets for satire here. Colonel Hunter of the League for the Prevention of Unkind Practices to Animals is more keen to collect and share photos of animals in distress than to stop such things actually happening. There are no goodies or baddies, just a lot of different frail and fallible people with their foibles.
Elsewhere, a newspaper won’t get involved because they’ve already decided to support the nascent space programme and run a “Space corner” each Saturday. This, we’re told is,
“For the kids. It does them less harm than sadistic comics.” (p. 43)
That’s a sign of the time in which this was written; the anxiety about American comics warping impressionable minds led to the creation of the far more wholesome, home-grown Eagle, launched in 1950. This novel is a counterpoint to the optimistic future lavishly displayed each week in the Eagle’s cover strip Dan Dare. The idea that the space programme could conscript an ape from the zoo is perhaps informed by the shadow of war. The professor’s boarding house and the niceties of dinner with his sister all seem from another age.
It’s been interesting to read this, by chance, after another novel from the same year. It is very different to Farewell Crown and Good-bye King, more in tune, I think, with something else from 1953: Nigel Kneale’s TV serial The Quatermass Experiment has a similar ambivalence to the space programme and the costs involved. But what really struck me about this novel was how modern it feels. I can see why it still felt relevant enough in 1979 to be republished in hardback — the edition I read.
One reason for that is the treatment of impulse and desire, whether ape or human, unworried by social convention. At one point, Gloria daydreams of an encounter with an imagined, handsome young man, who she tellingly gives the name of the aged professor. When, in reality, a young man then asks her out, the relationship lasts only briefly.
“I wasn’t flash enough for her,” (p. 124).
Percy being at liberty transforms his sex drive but his freedom is short-lived. Kendrick, the young man from the space programme, has to hastily improvise an alternative to using Percy that further blurs the distinction between primitive ape and sophisticated human. There’s something both comic and disturbing in all this. When Percy returns to his enclosure of his own volition, Gloria asks what he’s up to.
“Darrelhyde repressed the first word that came to mind. ‘Mating,’ he answered.
“Oh.” Perhaps with cold, Gloria shuddered, and then giggled slightly. “Aren’t animals awful?” (p. 92)
Pages 28 and 29 relive the experience, in May, of watching season opener Space Babies for the first time, my son the then 12 year-old Lord of Chaos keen to see it at midnight - especially if we had crisps. Then, on page 68 and 69, we mark the 40th anniversary of The Who Shop on 2 December, with an interview with owners Alex and Kevan.
The plot is quite involved so I’ll endeavour to explain the set-up. In the first chapter, we meet wealthy Barry and Vanessa Bone as they return home late from a posh party, arguing about the cheque for £2,000 that Barry has just given Roger Maple. The money, insists Barry, is as an investment in a new railway in an eastern European country called Ardania, where copper has been found; Maple is a friend of the local king.
A young woman called Kate Browning returns home from the same party and admits to her sober, level-headed sister Julia that she overheard Maple and the Bones, got mixed up in their conversation after she claimed to know the king as a friend of a friend, and has herself invested £100 in the scheme. Yet Kate believes that the money is an investment in a deal to distribute Ardanian oil.
Vincent and Frances Roydon were also at the party. Vincent is features editor of the Vigilant newspaper, which is ironic as he, too, has been hoodwinked by Maple, investing £250 that he can ill-afford in what he thinks is a paper-making scheme to exploit Ardania’s plentiful soft woodlands.
In the second chapter, we meet Maple himself, calling in on his old friend Duncan Stewart, an impoverished documentary film-maker who finds £250 to invest in what Maple describes as a scheme to dam Ardania’s Lixaman Falls and supply hydroelectric power across the border.
By now the reader is sure of what Duncan only suspects: that all of this is a scam. Maple conspicuously leaves the remains of a letter from a mystery woman, Elvira, in Duncan’s wastepaper bin and then heads off to meet his wife, Jenny Maple, so they can leave the country.
He promptly disappears. Jenny tells Duncan that her husband stood her up but she refuses to go to the police, even as days turn to weeks without word from him. Duncan instead meets the other hoodwinked investors and together they investigate what has been going on. Their first move is to try and meet up with Ardania’s former king, now living in London under the name Mr Forster and busy trying to agree the sale of his unrivalled collection of paintings by Vermeer…
Even so, the novel is full of brilliant details and Bennett shows her usual sharply observational eye. Roger Maple, before he disappears, is a beguiling rogue with a neat line in tradecraft. For example, he advises Duncan Stewart not to buy beer on credit from his local shop:
“It gives you a reputation of being hard up, and in your own street, too.” (p. 22)
It doesn’t matter that Duncan is hard up; the important thing is appearance. Maple instead recommends being bold and try cashing a cheque for £100 in the same establishment to give a contrary impression. Then there’s the artful way Maple gives the names of his other investors — Bone, Browning and Roydon — to sufficiently impress Duncan that he wants to put in money himself, while thinking this is his own idea (p. 28). In doing so, the author also provides Duncan with leads to follow when Maple disappears, bringing the different investors together to compare stories and so form a bond. That is elegantly, effectively done.
Speaking of bonds, I wondered at first why Duncan was so easily taken in by Maple, given he’s such an evident rogue. How did these two so very different men ever become friends? Just as I wondered this, the answer came: on p. 34 we’re told that they were in the army together. The implication is that this formed an unshakeable bond between two people otherwise from completely different worlds. Now I wonder how relatable that would have been to readers of the time, so soon after the end of the war and with National Service ongoing. I’m aware that the services threw together people from different backgrounds and classes who might never otherwise have met. But I’d never thought of the lasting relationships so created, akin to friends made on holiday that you can’t then shake, but with a stronger, faced-death-together connection.
Another contemporary insight is Duncan’s own frustrations. As a filmmaker, he’s keen to find truth, avoid cliche and to document ordinary, real life. There's a sequence late on where he’s being briefed on an advert for serial. When he offers his view on how to lift this above cliche, he is told “This is meant to be an advertising, not an art film” (p. 166) — though the implication is that his suggestions will be taken on and will prove effective.
This and the sequence where Roydon is faced with the sack, apparently on the whim of the publisher, may reveal something of the real-life experience of the author, or her husband who was editor of Lilliput between 1943 and 1950, when Margot wrote regularly for it. How much could the Bennetts do what Roydon does here, his threat to take a scoop to a rival publication earnings him promotion and a raise? My guess is that this was wish fulfilment, even revenge for real life.
On another occasion, Duncan rails against the nannying welfare state, in much the way as might the protagonist of novels from the same year such as Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale or Nevil Shute’s time-travelling In the Wet.
“‘I can’t leave the country, drive a car, open a shop, buy a pound of butter, not without permission. There are places where I can’t cross the road until a policeman lets me. I know I’m a man and not a unit,’ he said satirically, ‘because I’m allowed to register a vote for Holborn Borough Councillors. I’d like to do something more. I’d like to find Roger and not just run bleating to the police. I’d like to be a man on my own.” (pp. 62-63)
But Duncan isn’t alone; the whole wheeze of the book is that it’s an investigation by a group of amateur detectives, all from different backgrounds but linked by common cause. Though Duncan crave adventure of a John Buchan/Richard Hannay sort, it is Roydon who enjoys racy antics abroad.
There are lots of fun supporting characters, best of all Derek Vaughn, the burglar battling with his own conscience. Here’s a typical monologue from him, all sex and violence and comedy:
“When I was a lad, I was one of the roughest types on God’s earth. I’ve done five years for rapping a harmless old woman on the head. But I used my time to educate myself, and before the end I was the prison librarian. Some of the least educated men used to be great readers They’d get me to mark off the dirty bits for them, and even if it was just the lights going out or a description of a woman’s brassiere they’d read it till the page dropped off. That way, sir, I gradually got a lot of them interest in literature for its own sake.” (pp. 73-74)
Something of this echoes in a later sex scene just kindling as a chapter ends:
“She drew his hard, reluctant body closer to her and held his head against her soft, generous breasts. She soothed him with her loving, expressive hands until he was utterly relaxed in the ambience of her kindness. He was weak, and knew for the first time the peace that comes from abandoning the painful disguise of strength.” (p. 217)
How different, I thought, to the gruff, masculine perspective of bonking in Fleming or Shute, sex as surrender rather than attack. And yet, this sex is also victory, an accomplishment and something got away with for the lover who is married to someone else.
That is more interesting than the way the novel ends for Duncan, rejected by one woman so he immediately proposes to another. We leave him and his fiancee on an ostensibly happy note, but the cold exchange of one woman for another simply doesn’t sit right. The Widow of Bath neatly tied up all the threads of its plot and added an unsettling coda to haunt us after the close of the book. The ending here is is unsettling because it is unsatisfactory, not quite tying things up. The basic trick behind this novel isn’t as clever or as satisfying as her last book, and it’s not quite so well done.
Bennett followed Farewell Crown and Good-bye King with two novels both published in 1955 which I’ve already read: unconventional mystery The Man Who Didn’t Fly and the science-fictional The Long Way Back; my friend Matthew Sweet calls the latter her masterpiece. I’ll be back to read what’s considered the best as well as the last of her detective novels, Someone From the Past (1958).
Session 1, which was dedicated to the memory of Rory Clark, began with Jo Griffin telling us about the restoration work done on LWT comedy series The Complete and Utter History of Britain (1969). Two episodes of this were previously known to exist, then last year the whole lot was suddenly up on Britbox, to the amazement of my archive telly pals. It turns out that the other episodes had been misfiled, all as “episode 2”.
We watched episode 6 of 8, originally transmitted on 16 February 1969. Colin Gordon is the straightman, a sort of news anchor bridging comic skits based on historical moments, all in chronological order. In this case, we covered from Guy Fawkes (here lighting a fireworks display of Catherine Wheels) to Oliver Cromwell (being interviewed on a chat show, insisting he is popular while the audience throws things).
It was often very funny, such as the expert historian describing the execution of Charles I who ends up killing a member of the audience, or Michael Palin’s impression of David Frost as he interviews Terry Jones as Cromwell... as Edward Heath. Best of all, the episode ended with a sort of trailer for the next one, with a load of quick-fire visual gags. It was also often very well staged and shot, notably in the fun sequence of a witch (Jones) getting her spells wrong.
(ETA: I misunderstood some of what we were told. Seven episodes were made of the series but the first two episodes were then edited together, making a broadcast series of six. We saw the final, sixth episode, the closing sequence therefore trailing an unmade second series to come. The six broadcast episodes survive, as do the first two episodes in their original form before they were cut down, making a total of eight surviving episodes.)
Afterwards, Michael Palin and producer Humphrey Barclay were interviewed on stage. Palin seemed gratified by the response — not least because, on broadcast, John Cleese rang him up to say the series wasn’t very good. Instead, Cleese invited Palin and Jones to collaborate on something else, which of course ended up being Monty Python. Palin was funny about this and the context in which the programme was made, and classy in acknowledging the excellent job done on restoration by Jo Griffin and her team.
Next up was a compilation provided by my mate Ed Stradling from TV Ark of some otherwise missing telly he’s found by looking through old VHS tapes. This included Andrew Sachs as Manuel from Fawlty Towers chaotically cooking paella on Pebble Mill At One, and a bit of a New Year’s Eve programme from the late 1970s, with two comedians dragged up as Scottish policewomen trading bawdy jokes in front of a police box that then dematerialises.
(ETA: The comedians were apparently Jack Milroy and Rikki Fulton, at the time known for playing teddy-boys Francie and Josie; the policewomen in the sketch were Nancy and Rosie. This all went over my head.)
This was followed by an episode of trendy magazine programme A Whole Scene Going from 16 February 1966, in which a documentary crew visited three contrasting parties — one very posh and staid, another more down at heel — followed by a studio interview with the hosts, one of them a young Annie Nightingale. They discussed what made a good atmosphere and how to cope with people being drunk and sick. It was a fascinating snapshot of the time, loaded with assumptions about class and status, and all achingly awkward.
So was an interview with Dudley Moore and Shirley Anne Field, who answered “Agony Aunt” style questions about dating, such as whether it was all right to kiss at the end of a first date. Marianne Faithful was filmed at home and then live in the studio, responding to fans’ repeated displeasure that she’d got married and had a baby. Presenters, guests and audience were all so oddly nervy, none of them knowing quite how to be in front of a camera, the way people now take for granted. The sense was of precocious, well-spoken children, squirming in their seats while nervously seeking approval.
We finished the first session with an episode of Six More Faces of Jim, in this case The Face of Fatherhood from 15 November 1962. The wheeze of the series (and the preceding Six Faces of Jim) was that each episode featured Jimmy Edwards as a different role and situation — effectively a series of sitcom pilots. This episode was a bit different: a TV version of the radio skit The Glums from the 1950s, with Mr Glum (Edwards) seeking to thwart the engagement of his son Ron (Ronnie Barker) to Eth (June Whitfield). It was fun, though I felt that it maybe under-served Edwards by having him play so closely to type.
Eth is a spirited character, laying down the law to Ron and snapping back at selfish Mr Glum. That, I think, was particularly notable after the lack of speaking women’s roles in The Complete and Utter History and the rather demure women in Scene (at one point, an audience member complained that Marianne Faithful’s marriage meant he could no longer consider her angelic, and she nodded along rather than punching him).
With barely enough time to wolf down a burrito, we hurried back in for Session 2, this time comprised of material recovered by Film is Fabulous. I’ve long been in awe of this project, which is really focused on ensuring that film collectors leave provision so that their collections don’t end up as landfill. But that has in turn led to a scheme to catalogue the contents of a number of collections, which has led to the discoveries of some otherwise missing telly.
John Franklin and Simon Nicholls from Film is Fabulous gave us some background and announced some new finds: a Jackanory-style programme called Storyteller from September 1956 presented by Elizabeth Beresford years before she created the Wombles and illustrated by Tony Hart; and three episodes of Douglas Fair Banks Junior Presents, also from the late 1950s.
We were then treated to something called Disc Jockey from 1960 or 1961: a series of filmed performances of pop songs, all in very good quality. Jimmy Lloyd performed “I Double Dare You” on a set that looked like a New York apartment, with well dressed young people smouldering at one another, including a black man and white woman. Another song saw Frank Ifield getting very close to a young woman in a coffee bar. Later, a young woman at the window of her house in America sang about liking the young man loitering outside though her parents wouldn’t approve. For all the lightness of the pop song, behind her there was a rifle on the wall suggesting the risk posed to the would-be amore. The whole lot felt potent and rich, and I’d love to know more about this programme.
This was followed by a series of clips from found programmes, including a thrilling sequence from Mogul: Is That Tiger, Man? (30 April 1966) in which Tiger (Michael Coles) dons scuba gear to fix an oil-pipe in shark-infested waters while being taunted by gruff bully Peter Thornton (Ray Barrett) and cooed over by Steve Thornton (Justine Lord). When the sharks come close, Tiger surfaces too quickly and gets the bends; Thornton coldly insists he be thrown back into the water to recover. This and the scene of Alec Stewart (Robert Hardy) was all of the cross business-tycoon type that I remember once being so much part of TV drama until it was basically killed off by parody in A Bit of Fry and Laurie’s John and Peter (“Dammit John!”) — but what we saw here looked great.
We then got an episode of Tom Jones! (with exclamation mark) from 3 April 1967, comprising songs sharing a given theme, in this case Work. This ranged from a daft sequence of professional dancers fooling about in a kitchen to Jones as a miner, or working on a chain gang, or driving a truck while singing “Hard Day’s Night”. Yet when guest Maxine Brown sang about a woman’s (domestic) work, the gag was that Jones was doing the dishes, coming on with a tea towel which Brown handed back to him at the end of their flirty duet.
Finally, there was an episode of The Basil Brush Show from 20 November 1970, the CSO effects evidence that it was originally made in colour, for all it survives in black and white. The oddest thing about this, I thought, was how poorly it was pitched to the live audience of children (in their school and cub scout uniforms, all dressed up to be on TV). As Mr Derek (Fowlds) struggled not to corpse, Basil rattled off quips at the expense of women, trades union and foreigners. For example, when told he talks too much, he says it’s an inherited trait because his father was an auctioneer, his mother a woman. “Fucking hell,” responded the bloke just in front of me.
Some of the jokes earned a laugh, from the audience on screen and at the BFI, but it was notable how much less a response it got than The Complete and Utter History earlier that same afternoon. Discussing this afterwards in the bar, I wondered how much it was following the conventions of stand-up, taking as read How Jokes Are Done. So often, what makes old telly so extraordinary is the way it reveals these kinds of now-lost convention, things once taken for granted, perhaps not even thought of, that now seem so peculiar. Puzzling over these things is what makes an event like this so compelling. Television is such an intimate, immediate form, we have a particularly vivid means of travelling back in time.
Thanks to Robert Dick and Ian Farrington for catching some of what I missed, and to Dick Fiddy and the team at the BFI.
See also:
