Written by Terrance Dicks - pre-orders open

You can now pre-order my new biography, Written by Terrance Dicks, which will be published by Ten Acre Books on Monday, 30 November.

We'll be launching the book at the Portico Library on Wednesday 25 November and I will be signing copies at the Who Shop in London on Saturday 28 November.

Here is the cover of the exclusive hardback edition available from the Who Shop, with cover art by Andy Walker:

Blurb for Written by Terrance Dicks as follows:

“Through the ruin of a city stalked a little boy…”

Terrance Dicks was the bestselling author of 235 books for young readers, and is widely credited for teaching generations of children to read, instilling in them a life-long love of reading.

That would have been achievement enough, but he was also writer, storyliner, script editor and producer of some of the most popular TV shows — best known for his work on Doctor Who, but with credits ranging from The Avengers to Crossroads, and Space: 1999 to the BBC’s ‘Classic Serials’ of the 1980s, including Jane Eyre, Oliver Twist and Vanity Fair.

With access to Terrance’s treasure trove of papers, and new interviews with those who knew and worked with him, Written by Terrance Dicks is the authoritative biography of his life and work. This is Terrance’s own story.

Simon Guerrier has written countless Doctor Who books, comics and audio plays, including the new novelisation The Six Doctors, based on Terrance Dicks's draft script. He's also the author of Sherlock Holmes: The Great War and has produced a number of documentaries for BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4.

Cover photograph by Chris Ridley (c) Radio Times Archive. Cover design by Stuart Manning.

For more, see my list of the 235 books written by Terrance Dicks, with links to detailed posts on individual titles.

Also available, my previous biography, David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television.

War With the Robots, by Harry Harrison

This anthology of eight science-fiction stories was first published in the US in 1962 by Pyramid Publications and the UK in 1967 by Dobson Books. I read a paperback published by Panther, an imprint of Granada Publishing, in 1976. The indicia says it was “made and printed” by Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) in Bungay, and that it is set in Linotype Times. It doesn’t credit the cover artist — though that looks, to my untrained eye, like Chris Foss.

My guess is that these stories were collected in an effort to emulate the success of Isaac Asimov’s anthologies, not least the interlinked robot stories collected in I, Robot (1950), The Rest of the Robots (1964) and The Complete Robot (1982). In revisiting the stories originally published individually in various sci-fi magazines, Asimov revised them and added bridging material to make a more cohesive whole.

The opening “A word from the (human) author” rather suggests this will be something similar, Harrison explaining the history of fictional “robots”, as coined by Karel Capek in his play RUR (1920), then arguing that robots are already with us in the sensing and deciding gadgets we take for granted in our lives, from the automatic alarm clock on. He then, separately, introduces the first story by telling us,

“The first creature from earth to set foot — or treads — on the moon will be robot” (p. 11). 

Indeed, he says, that robot was in the planning stage at the time of writing. So the reader would surely expect the story to follow to address some aspect of this. But “Simulated Trainer” (originally published as “Trainee for Mars” in Fantastic Universe in 1958) is about humans in training to be the first to land on Mars. There’s a fun idea at the heart of it about the psychological impact of knowing, or not, that you’re in a simulation. And there is a robot, in the manufactured Martian creature encountered early on. But it’s not quite what I expected from the author’s note.

“The Velvet Glove” involves robot Jon Venex applying for a job and getting caught up in a drug-smuggling operation. The rather crude analogy being drawn is that robots are not the first demographic group to be treated as slaves. It’s kind of fun, but ends before we get into what I think would be more interesting territory, with a robot working for the intelligence services while also undergoing a political awakening about the lot of its kind…

“Arm of the Law” is much better: a robot worth $120,000 credits is delivered to a police department, and rather than turning a blind eye to the local protection racket, sets out to arrest all the villains. It’s sort of dumping a dorky, literal robot of the Asimov kind into the cynical, morally grey world of Hammett or Chandler. It’s not so vividly, richly told — but good fun.

My favourite, “The Robot Who Wanted to Know”, is about the places reading can take you. One robot, we’re told, has followed a thread of enquiry through available books, and is now an expert of languages. But the robot protagonist follows a different line, into romantic fiction, and then wants to participate so fakes an invitation to a masked ball. The resolution is neat, producing a mechanical fault that also works an analogy.

“I See You” (originally published as “Robot Justice”) is set in a Big Brother-type world of mass surveillance, where no crime goes unobserved and is swiftly punished. The hero-villain who attempted to steal money is sentenced to 20 years of dismal menial labour, objects and gets more penalties added. How can he escape from the all-seeing machine? Again, the resolution works well — what doesn’t a camera look at? — and ends on an arresting cliffhanger, which helps it linger.

‘The Repairman” involves a technician sent to repair a bit of kit on a remote and primitive planet. The kit is vital to interplanetary travel, but the unsophisticated locals have developed a religion around the artefact. So the repairman of the title must dress up as an indigenous creature, complete with spiky teeth and tail, and pretend to be an emissary from their ancestors / gods. It’s all a bit Star Trek, I think, in High Colonial mode. Ho ho, this salt-of-the-earth hero is so much smarter than the silly natives…

One thing of note is that the repairman surveys the area by sending down a “Flying Eye”, effectively a drone camera. In 2022, I got Samira Ahmed to interview Philip Hinchcliffe, former producer of Doctor Who (1974-77), at length, for the release Daleks! Genesis of Terror. He said that on getting the gig in 1974, “I gave myself a crash course in sci-fi I hadn’t read. Most of it was basic stuff: Asimov, Brian Aldiss and other people. And I thought ‘Wow, this is a really interesting story area’.”

As I argued in my essay for The DNA of Doctor Who — The Philip Hinchcliffe Years in 2024,

“Planet of Evil was the direct beneficiary of this: on the DVD, Hinchcliffe says the ‘occuloid tracker’ – what we’d now recognise as a surveillance drone – was his idea, drawn from one of the science fiction stories he’d read. There are, for example: automated flying ‘eyes’ in ‘This Moment of the Storm’ by Roger Zelazny; golden, basketball-like ‘copseyes’ in ‘Cloak of Anarchy’ by Larry Niven and ‘flying eye’ probes in ‘The Repairman’ by Harry Harrison.”

I read the story when researching that piece, but then completely forgot it. “Oh yeah,” I thought when I got to the reference to the Flying Eye this time, but couldn’t remember what happened next. That is not the greatest endorsement of a story.

In fact, there’s a Flying Eye in the next story in this collection, too, “Survival Planet”. This is another High Colonial story, this time about Good Space People visiting a world once ravaged by Bad Space People called Slavers. The primitive-seeming natives have taken steps to protect themselves from the Slavers, and treat the Good Lot as if they’re no different. But the implication, of two adjacent stories with the same kit, is that both occur in the same shared universe. It is the only evidence apart from Harrison’s introductions to each story that these are all connected.

The final story, “The War of the Robots” is not included in the acknowledgments as having been previously published, so seems to be new to this collection — and provided the overall title. It involves the last survivors on one side of a longstanding war, battling to continue in the rising heat of their underground base. Robots don’t suffer the same effects, so the humans withdraw, allowing them robots to pursue their war for them. Only things aren’t quite what they appear and at least some characters discover they have been duped…

There’s something fascinating here, and perhaps more relevant now than when it was first written, about artificial intelligence replacing human workers, with their enthusiastic consent. But Harrison’s introduction to the story is guilty, I think, of the same naive zeal:

“Homo sapiens is a born improver. Everything keeps getting bigger and bigger and better and better … This applies to war too” (p. 149)

The problem, then, is that he’s not at war with the robots.

Target Book Club 2026

Art by 
Gürkan Özer

On Saturday, I was in London to speak at Target Book Club, reading Chapter 4 of my forthcoming Doctor Who novelisation The Six Doctors, which I have adapted from scripts and surviving paperwork from the archive of Terrance Dicks.

You can now listen to that and all the other speakers, care of the Hamster Book Club podcast: Target Book Day 2026. List of speakers and their speakings below.

As well as reading from my book, I also announced that my biography, Written by Terrance Dicks, will be published on 30 November. You can pre-order it now.

00:01:40 “Chapter One” by Bruce Nicholson, read by Una McCormack (a woman!)

00:07:25 “Father in the Mirror” by Julian Richards, about his late father Justin

00:21:54 “Zarbi-Ye-Ye!” by Robert Crighton, on the oddness of Doctor Who and the Zarbi

00:38:24 “And the Mysterious Imagery” by Jason Thompson

00:54:19 “Lyle and a Time Lord” by Matthew Sweet

01:14:21 “Exterminations in the Library” by Gary Brannan, on the archive of Terrance Dicks held at the Borthwick Institute for Archives in York

01:29:17 “The Revolting Rutan Will Not Be Television” by Paul Kirkley

01:43:07 “Literal Targets” by Jonathan Morris, who has posted a transcript and missing bits

01:49:29 “The Stallslady is BBC Enterprises” by Stephen Wyatt on how fans interpret his work

02:02:01 Reading from The Power of Kroll novelisation by Robert Shearman

02: 08:37 “Young Men Are Dying For It” by James Goss, on his novelisation of The Armageddon Factor

02:22:30 “Bargain Hunt / On Target” a game with Steve Cole and 02:32:52 a few words from Albert dePetrillo off of BBC Books

02:36:01 Reading from An Unearthly Child novelisation by Nigel Robinson

02:47:38 Reading from The Six Doctors novelisation by Simon Guerrier

02:59:00 “Drawing Inspiration” by Paul MC Smith

03:14:25 “Et zut! Ca recommence!” by Phil Pascoe

03:28:21 “The Changing Face of Doctor Who” by Andrew Orton

03:43:15 “The Timeless Pieces” by James Cooray Smith

03:53:34 “Revenge of the Blurboids” by John Grindrod

04:11:34 “A New Target At Last” and a reading from The Vampire Mutation novelisation by Steve Cole

[Not included] “The Five-Fingered Bookmark” by Professor Esther MacCallum-Stewart (she was a woman, too!)

Hideous Kinky, by Esther Freud

I can see why this strange, disturbing novel had such an impact when first published in 1992. It’s the semi-autobiographical account of a childhood trip to Morocco in the early 1970s, at once exotic adventure and horror story.

In the opening pages, the young narrator is in a van driving from the UK to Marrakech with her elder sister Bea, unnamed Mum, Mum’s boyfriend John and a silent, sullen woman called Maretta who we then learn is John’s wife. The implication, unrecognised by the narrator, is that Maretta is unhappy with the relationship between her husband and the unnamed Mum. There’s something odd and uncomfortable going on, to be teased out by the reader from the narrator’s account. 

The only words the girls have heard Maretta ever say are “hideous” and “kinky”, which they work into the rules of their game of tag, I think unwittingly taunting her. Then Maretta is seriously ill, and covered in lice, and suddenly we learn that John has taken her back to London. Much later, we briefly hear news that Maretta previously suffered the loss of a child but is now pregnant by John again… We don’t hear of them again.

The point is that the narrator shares with us events as they happen — the chaos and feelings and textures of this adventure with her Mum — but doesn’t quite grasp what they mean. As readers, we must deduce the things not said or understood: connections, desires, what characters are escaping. Bit by bit, we piece together that the narrator’s Mum is as much escaping the “rules” laid down by her strict mother in Tunbridge Wells as searching for some kind of freedom or meaning. Yet she depends — desperately — on the connections she’s escaped, reliant on regular payments sent out by the girls’ father.

The effect, I think, is to invite us to pass judgment. Some of what’s described here is very funny, such as the local women who regularly steal clothes from a washing line, including nappies, and then flaunt them whether or not they fit. The children briefly had a pet chicken while living in a hotel; the chicken stalks the other rooms and shits on people's stuff.

But much of what is described made this hapless parent jittery with apprehension. At one point, Bea is seriously ill and fears all her teeth will fall out, and the adults acknowledge that yes, her lips have gone blue — and don’t do much else about it. On another occasion, Mum gives away the previous talcum powder that prevents the narrator’s rash. The narrator can’t read, is prevented from going to school, and is conscious of missing out.

Then Bea refuses to go with Mum and younger sister on yet another jaunt, so stays behind with a neighbour. When Mum and narrator eventually return, days and days later, Bea is no longer where they left her, has spent time living with a man Mum doesn’t even know, and is now somewhere else, ultimately tracked down to the home of a woman who refers to her as an orphan. 

Part of what makes this all so affecting is that the book offers few clues to the ages of the two children, beyond them being very young. In the film version, Bea is eight — younger than my own daughter now — and her sister Lucy (the unnamed narrator of the book) just six. The book is compelling because I found myself worried for their welfare. 

I couldn’t resist the signed copy of this spied in my local Oxfam bookshop, not least because Esther Freud played Threst, one of the Cryons, in Attack of the Cybermen. As a kid, I used to be terrified of that period of Doctor Who; as an adult, a story about a wayward parent with young children in potential peril is way, way more disturbing…

The School for Scandal and Other Plays, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan

I bought this Penguin Classics edition second-hand an age ago because David Whitaker (about whom I wrote a book, which I never mention) had played Sir Oliver Surface to great acclaim in a 1957 production of A School for Scandal at the Theatre Royal in York, the cast including John Barrie, Derek Martinus and Titus Oates, who later changed his professional name to Simon and was in Doomwatch. 

Skimming through the script of that particular play, I got a sense of the farcical comedy, and the kindly, authoritative role. The book comprises three plays by Sheridan: The Rivals (1775), The Critic (1779) and The School for Scandal (1777). Reading them all now, at a more leisuredly rate and without an agenda, I've been delighted by the modern-feeling pace and the quality of gags. In The Rivals, for example, Lydia races to tidy up her salacious novels before posh visitors walk in, and asks her servant to help:

LYDIA: Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books - quick, quick - fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilet - throw Roderick Random into the closet - put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man - thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa - cram Ovid behind the bolster - there - put The Man of Feeling into your pocket... (p. 48).

Sat in a quiet library last week, "Put The Man of Feeling into your pocket" made me snort out loud.

Likewise, The Critic has an amazing sequence in which abominable playwright Sir Fretful Plagiary insists he never reads reviews in papers. The mischievous Mr Dangle says this is just as well, as the reviews are particularly awful. Plagiary can't resist asking what is said, so Dangle provides a whole page of different example, ripping into every aspect of Plagiary's work, and Plagiary must pretend not to be offended.

We then visit rehearsals for a play, The Spanish Armada, into which the author has inserted a romance between the daughter of the head of the English fort at Tilbury and one of the Spanish sailors, no matter how improbable this might be. This sailor has the most amazing, authentically Spanish name: Don Ferolo Whiskerandos. Scenes of this terrible play out with critics commenting on further outlandish devices: characters telling each other things they already know, or the overuse of research (one character, known to have been a good dancer, duly enters a supposedly tense scene with his toes turned out). You could make a checklist of this stuff and use it to teach creative writing.

The School for Scandal is very Bridgerton, involving society gossips who then get caught up in their own scandals, and various people donning different person to find out what people are really like. The morality is all a bit twisted, which makes it surprising and fun. There is a ridiculous scene involving two people both hiding, separately, in the same room which often seems to have been performed as a standalone scene, such as in the 

The plays are peppered with references to contemporary people and things, which need a bit of explaining in footnotes. I'm not sure how funny these would have been, even at the time - it's a lazy kind of placeholder comedy, where you trick a laugh from the audience by naming something they recognise. Sometimes, Sheridan does something a bit more witty than that, such as in The Critics where it seems the famous actors being praised or critiqued in a scene are the very men who'd have been on stage in it.

For all the wit and zip feel up to date, the plays are oddly unstructured and they each just sort of stop. I was prompted to read up more on Sheridan, and discovered his private life was even more scandalous than the intrigues staged here. What a binfire - and knowing this, you can feel the chaos in his writing.

If We Tolerate This, by Daniel Trilling

On Monday, the Dr and I had a day trip to Oxford. She went to the new Aphrodite exhibition at the Ashmoleon, and I spent an afternoon in a university library reading a 60 year-old pamphlet for a thing I am writing. On the way there and back, we listened to Rory Kinnear reading this short book which seems to have two subtitles: "How the British establishment made the far right respectable" and, "The rise of the far right and what we can do to stop it."

As Trilling argues, what were at the time of the 2010 general election considered rather fringe, extreme views, on immigration especially, have since shifted into the mainstream. He charts why and how, threading together austerity, neoliberalism, unregulated social media and political opportunism more generally. 

Along the way, he asks key questions, such as why there was a sudden surge in the numbers of immigrants attempting to reach the UK by small boats after January 2021, aka the "Boriswave." But he does more than just ask questions; he does his best to provide the answers, too. In answering this question, for example, he explains why efforts by governments both blue and red have struggled to meet their own targets to reduce such numbers (and why such targets were a hostage to fortune anyway). 

It's at once a depressing read and yet also empowering, in part by making sense of the apparent chaos and in part because he identifies a number of positive ways forward. Concise, cogent and pragmatically optimistic, it's a good primer on what the heck is going on, and what we can and should do next.

I'd been keen to read this since meeting author Daniel Trilling at the Festival of Ideas in York earlier this year, where we were both speaking - on YouTube, you can watch him on the panel "Democracy on trial: the promise of democracy" and my talk on writers David Whitaker and Terrance Dicks. But I knew Daniel's work already, not least his brilliant piece on Alexander Baron for the LRB (in case of interest, I've previously written here on Baron's memoir Chapters of Accidents and novel The Lowlife.)

The Doctor Who Production Diary - 2. The Troughton Years, by David Brunt

This engrossing, 774-page brick of a volume details the day-by-day production of Doctor Who in the late 1960s, when Patrick Troughton was the Doctor. It follows the magnificent first volume in perhaps even more exhaustive detail, covering the period Monday 18 April 1966 (when ‘significant’ changes to Doctor Who were mooted, which surely included the recasting of the lead character) to Monday 4 August 1969 (and the issuing of an audience research report on reactions to the final episode of The War Games). I have delighted in every page.

A lot of histories of Doctor Who tend to focus on one given story at a time. Brunt’s approach coveys the dizzying chaos of multiple stories being in different stages of development all at once. Seeing things presented in this way sparks a lot of new thoughts and connections.

For example, The Evil of the Daleks was broadcast as the final story of Season 4, the last episode airing on 1 July 1967. After a summer break, Season 5 began with The Tomb of the Cybermen, the first episode broadcast on 2 September. That gap, I think, helped to hide the fact that these two consecutive serials, recorded back to back, have a number of similar features. The Doctor visits the planet of his enemies and meets a larger-headed leader version whose plan is to brainwash humans. The Doctor defeats the villains but, in the closing seconds of the final episode, we see that something survives… 

That surely can’t be a coincidence, so I suspect story editor and co-writer Gerry Davis consciously sought to mirror the Dalek story in what he wrote for the Cybermen. Something similar then happened in a subsequent Cybermen story, The Invasion (1968), in which the villains are seen stalking around landmarks of London, mirrors something similar in The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964).

Another connection I’d not made before is that the first approval to wipe an original videotape recording of Doctor Who (boo, hiss) was issued on Thursday 9 March 1967 (p. 198), two days ahead of the broadcast of Episode 1 of The Macra Terror, which debuted a new title sequence. It’s boggling — to me — to think that the videotape archive of Doctor Who remained complete for the entire span that the original title sequence was in use. The wiping of episodes and the commissioning of new titles are also both, I think, signs of a production team looking forwards, not back — at a time when they were also jettisoning what had once been a fundamental part of the series format, stories set in the past. It is all part of a consistent mindset.

As with the first volume, I must declare an interest in that I liaised a bit with David Brunt as he assembled this extraordinary compendium. Especially with the later bits, we scrutinised many of the same sources as I worked on my imminent biography, Written by Terrance Dicks. We discussed and debated various points where the sources aren’t entirely clear, and he read over my draft chapters and caught some of my more glaring errors.

As he explains in the introduction here, his approach has been to work chiefly from the BBC paperwork held at the Written Archives Centre in Caversham — his list of the files there that he looked through takes up two whole pages (pp. 771-2). From this, he lays out, as objectively as possible, what happened on what date. Along the way, he makes a number of shrewd deductions to tackle discrepancies in the primary sources or to plug gaps in the record. 

Even so, his emphasis is on evidence from documentation. Where no documents survive, he is warier than me of using things said in later interviews by cast and crew. For example, there are several accounts that script editor / associate producer / producer Derrick Sherwin organised a screening or screenings of the Quatermass serials from the 1950s for himself and his team (Terrance Dicks and Trevor Ray) ahead of commissioning the first Doctor Who stories involving the new Earthbound format. In discussing that with Brunt, we think this must have taken place in late December 1968 — but, unable to be surer than that, he leaves it out of his production diary.

There are a few instances where I disagree with his conclusions — not that he’s wrong, but I interpret things another way. For example, in his entry for Tuesday 18 October 1966, he provides a summary of an early version of Part One of The Power of the Daleks, detailing how it varies from the episode as broadcast. That surviving early script is not dated, but Brunt suggests it’s the version issued to the cast for the start of rehearsals, which began on this particular Tuesday. I think the very different and much wordier version of the Doctor in this script suggests that this is the script written by David Whitaker, before — on Friday 7 October, as detailed by Brunt — Dennis Spooner was engaged to rewrite it. I think a now-lost Spooner rewrite was used in rehearsals, prior to a final (surviving) camera script being drafted.  

Likewise, Brunt thinks “on or around” Tuesday 20 February 1968 that Terrance Dicks was interviewed for the job as assistant story editor on Doctor Who, and at the same attended the video playback of the most recently recorded instalment of Doctor Who, Episode 6 of The Web of Fear. My sense from Terrance’s own (brief, not entirely clear) accounts of what happened is that this playback was among the first things to happen once he’d been appointed.

This isn’t meant to quibble — it’s a delight to engage with this stuff and puzzle out the nuances as best we can. Brunt’s different perspective has made me look again at what I’ve come up with and in a couple of places I’ve been able to correct small details in my own book, just in time. What’s more, something here prompted a new line of thought and on Monday I’m off on a research trip to dig out what I hope will be new information for an article in DWM...

I look forward eagerly to the next volume.

Doctor Who Magazine #635

The new issue of the official Doctor Who Magazine is out today, and comes with a free Target novel: Doctor Who - At Childhood's End by Sophie Aldred.

In among the other treats, Chris Bentley talked to me about my forthcoming audio novel The Missing Hour, which is released next week. And on p. 8, reader Lloyd Peterson from New Jersey, USA, responds to my recent article about Star Trek. It's nice to make such far-reaching connections...

Trailer for The Missing Hour

Big Finish have posted a three-minute excerpt from my forthcoming, six-hour Doctor Who audio novella, The Missing Hour, which is due for release in full on 22 October.

To hear the excerpt, read by Barnaby Edwards, visit The Missing Hour page on the Big Finish website and click "Listen to the trailer" or "Download Trailer" just below the cover image.

The Moonlandings, by Reginald Turnill

I greatly enjoyed this exhaustive memoir of the US space programme written by BBC aviation correspondent Reg Turnill — a familiar face from my childhood, reporting on space stuff for children’s shows Newsround and Blue Peter. The book covers what Turnill calls the “first era of manned spaceflight” (p. 393), from Alan Shepard becoming the first American in space in 1961 to Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz in the mid-1970s.

By working from his archive of paperwork and scripts, which I suspect may include programmes no longer held in the BBC archive, Turnill provides a lot of detail about the flights themselves, and what did and didn’t go right. He tells us he couldn’t, at first, shake the hand of Wernher von Braun because of the man’s involvement in the wartime bombing of London — Turnill and his family lived in Sydenham. Over time, their relationship mellows and Turnill quotes from this own lengthy, revealing interviews with von Braun, yet remains unsure about his legacy. 

We learn, too, of the celebs at the launch of Apollo 11 on 16 July 1969: former President Lyndon Johnson, Vice President Spiro Agnew, air pioneer Charles Lindbergh, rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth and science-fiction writer Arthur C Clarke — the latter stopping by Turnill’s news desk to rehearse what he was going to say on screen to Walter Cronkite at CBS. 

We’re also told who wasn’t there — Nixon attended the launch of Apollo 12, in the cold and rain, but no others. John Freeman, former presenter of the BBC programmes Panorama and Face to Face, was now US ambassador and had been to the launch of Apollo 10. To explain why he turned down the invitation to the next one, his spokesperson responded, “When you’ve seen one Apollo launch, you’ve seen them all” (p. 231). Turnill clearly finds that indifference amazing.

I’m especially, nerdily, thrilled by all the mechanics of the TV and radio coverage, the way improvements in satellite and camera technology shaped what could be shown, and the gossip about “the BBC’s never-ending internecine warfare” (p. 389) between three of its own departments: News and Current Affairs, which Turnill worked for, and Outside Broadcasts were both based in Lime Grove, while Science and Features, led by Richard Francis and Aubrey Singer, was at Kensington House.

The different teams were instructed by the BBC’s director-general to collaborate on the Mercury 9 launch in 1963, but Turnill explains that this, “was really a victory for Science and Features, who could not now be excluded” (p. 82). Francis quickly set about organising a big TV special.

“Robin Day, newly recruited from Independent Television News to Paul Fox’s Current Affairs team, who were the principal customers for Outside Broadcasts facilities, happened to be in New York working on a political contribution to Panorama. He was told to drop everything and stand by to ‘anchor’ live TV coverage via satellite.” (p. 82)

But Day declined, knowing nothing about spaceflight, so Turnill got the gig. 

He and Francis seem to have got on well enough until October 1968 and the launch of Apollo 7. Turnill describes Francis arriving at Cape Kennedy with a “posse” of assistants and secretaries to mastermind the TV coverage, and maddening the team back in London by adopting “space-speak”: “affirmative” and “negative” instead of yes or no, “go” and “no-go” when something was or wasn’t possible. Then, on 20 December, Turnill felt it his duty to share a weather report that suggested there would be little to see of the launch of Apollo 8. Francis felt this cost them a million TV viewers on the BBC at lunchtime on Saturday 21 December (a few hours before the broadcast of Episode 8 of Doctor Who story The Invasion). Decades later, Turnill was unapologetic about what he had done:

“I had no guilty conscience even when the launch weather and the view of lift-off were spectacularly perfect!” (p. 156)

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he was squeezed out of the TV coverage of Apollo 11 the following summer.

“The reason I was unemployed at this supreme journalistic highlight of my career was that the BBC’s ‘Apollo Studio’, at Shepherds Bush for TV, and at Broadcasting House for radio, had insisted on taking over the launch coverage. The studios were packed with ‘experts’ who had to be given something to do, and once again it had been a case of ‘leave the facts to us, Reg. We’ll just come to you with the question: What’s the atmosphere at the Cape?’ Since most of the experts had never been near America’s space programme, I was well aware that they would call upon me for tougher explanations than that if anything went wrong.” (p. 234)

Turnill was clearly hurt and frustrated at being squeezed out, and annoyed by TV executives wanting him to emphasise drama — he tells us there was no real risk to the lives of the Apollo 13 astronauts (!) so is withering about Burke crossing his fingers on TV. He also says a key problem was the focus on live pictures, with better-quality colour or film images of no interest to the editors because they arrived half-an-hour later than the less good live images. The sense is that the public appeal of the spaceflights — or, in some cases, the lack of it — was shaped by the coverage on TV, which was in turn led by the prejudices of the execs. Turnill says he was “baffled” by such decisions, then adds,

“TV executives tend to have literary rather than scientific backgrounds” (p. 189).

He refers to the “experts”, in quotes, as “superfluous” (p. 261), and claims they had no or little knowledge of spaceflight, not least because they’d not been to the Cape. That’s not true of James Burke, who Turnill mentions just twice in the whole book, who pre-filmed a series of reports at different NASA facilities and was very good on technical detail. I would like to cross-check the account here with Burke’s own memoir from 2019, James Burke: Our Man on the Moon.

Turnill does not name at all the other members of the TV crew covering Apollo 11, such as Patrick Moore, Cliff Michelmore and Michael Charlton. Charlton reported from Houston, and Moore was hardly inexpert in matters of space — the Apollo astronauts made use of his maps of the Moon. So it’s a rich text, full of fascinating detail and stuff that isn’t quite as straightforward as the author makes out. I found it utterly compelling.

More of this sort of thing:

• Carrying the Fire by Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins
• The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
• Apollo 11 graphic novel by Fitch, Baker and Collins 
• Moonglow by Michael Chabon

The return of Play School

Yesterday, the BBC announced the return of children’s TV series Play School after 38 years. The news prompted me to look out the piece I wrote in 2019 for the magazine TV Years (from the team behind TV Choice), in which I interviewed series creator Joy Whitby and presenters Carol Chell and Carol Leader. I grew up on Play School and wanted to know what it and they had done to me...

With the kind permission of editor Graham Kibble-White, here it is as published, including the pages designed so beautifully by Richard Atkinson.

Ready to play?


Generations of children grew up with Play School – but what were they learning? We spoke to original producer Joy Whitby and presenters Carol Chell and Carol Leader


INTERVIEWS BY SIMON GUERRIER
(originally published in TV Years #4 — Classic Children’s Television (2019), pp. 70-73)

Joy Whitby: ‘We were pioneers’

‘Are you an exhausted parent of a child under the age of five?’ asked Radio Times in April 1964. ‘If so, Play School may be just what you are looking for.’ The programme would, it promised, ‘use all the advantages of television to do the job of a nursery school in its own exciting way,’ and children would ‘benefit from the leading authorities on nursery education.’ Parents were assured the presenters were, ‘young and resourceful men and women, most of them with children of their own.’

If today that sounds rather worthy, Play School was revolutionary for its time. ‘Yes, we were pioneers,’ says creator and first producer Joy Whitby. ‘I started my career in radio, on the children’s programme Listen With Mother. I learned a lot from that, and then from having to write a report on Watch With Mother, which consisted mainly of puppet shows such as Andy Pandy and The Woodentops, all on film. My report was fairly critical, because there was no new thinking going into these programmes. They had that “kindergarten smile” approach, which tended to talk down to children, like saying, “puff puff” instead of “train”. The nanny we had at home talked to my boys as grown-ups from the start, and I’d seen how that helped their development.’

Joy’s insights impressed Michael Peacock, BBC2’s newly appointed Head of Programmes. ‘He also had small sons and was very aware of the dearth of nursery education for children under five. He allocated 25 minutes from Monday to Friday to serve this audience and wanted somebody to devise the programming. I was lucky to get the job.’

‘I was really starting from scratch,’ Joy admits. ‘I went to the government office overseeing young children’s education, and they directed me to Nancy Quayle, who became our consultant – everyone knew her as “Q”. She was an ex-teacher and very knowledgeable about learning through play, though the title, Play School, preceded her. Then I got Marjorie Fisher, who was an expert on picture books, and Wendy Duggan was an expert supplier of animals – I remember her house was full of birds in cages. I didn’t want to say, “I’ve got children so I know all about it.” But of course, I knew what had worked with my own, like opening up an old clock or melting soap into water to create a kind of bubble bath with a straw. All those sorts of things from personal experience I fed into the programme.’

Joy’s sons weren’t the only family members to influence Play School. ‘My husband also worked for the BBC on a programme called Tonight – sort of the forerunner of Newsnight. Cliff Michelmore famously presented that, but he was one of a team. So I set up an inter-changing roster of presenters for Play School, which had many advantages. It meant we weren’t dependent on any single person who might decide to leave, and there was built-in variety. We had the same two presenters Monday to Friday, then two more the following week. I was also keen they came from different backgrounds. Marla Landi was Italian and her English was sometimes rather broken, but her charm was what mattered. We also had one of the first black presenters for children – Paul Danquah, from Ghana.’

‘I looked for people who could bring different skills to the programme. Actor Brian Cant applied for an audition and was given a cardboard box and told to row out to sea. He improvised an imaginary fishing rod to catch an old boot full of custard. And he made you believe it, even as an adult. Then there was a play I went to because I thought an actress might be right for us. The audience was spellbound by someone else, a singer, so immediately afterwards I went backstage and asked him to be in Play School. That was Rick Jones, from Canada.’

Carol Chell: ‘People put their children in front of the television — we were known as “25 minutes’ peace”!’

Carol Chell was in the play Pink String And Ceiling Wax when she heard, via a friend who was going out with one of Play School’s directors, about auditions. Having improvised a hat out of napkins to be worn by doll Jemima, she was given the job and made her debut appearance on 28 February 1966.

‘My first week, I was on with Eric Thompson,’ Carol tells TV Years. ‘I was just out of theatre, so it was quite a shock to be in this tiny TV studio at Riverside [in London]. Of course, I’d learned all my lines but Eric didn’t look at his script and ad libbed away. Recording was stop and start, so that was OK, but in later years we had to do it with as few stops as possible and many times just went straight through as if it was live.’ She laughs. ‘That was a huge pill without autocue.’

Even so, Carol was with the programme for 22 years, appearing in 763 episodes – more than any other presenter. ‘Yes, it overtook me,’ she says. ‘I enjoyed it so much. I still did the odd bit of theatre but my love was for the children and this very special programme. We all adored doing it and I worked with some lovely guys – it was always a boy and girl presenting each week, but the next week you came in you were with a different boy. We had such fun, which I think came across on screen.’

Joy Whitby left Play School – and the BBC – in 1967, following Michael Peacock to London Weekend Television. The format of the programme was gently revised, losing the themed days such as dressing up on Tuesdays and pets on Wednesdays. What other changes did Carol see? 

‘It was very low key to begin with,’ she says. ‘By the time I left, it was very glossy and slick, and I felt we were doing real performances – proper acting. But it was always charming, wasn’t it?’

She emphasises how much stayed the same over the years. ‘We always had that connection to the child watching: what Joy said, talking to children in an adult way with intelligence. Lots of young mums would come up and say, “You’ve taught me how to speak to my child!” There were no pre-school play groups when I started, and many parents were desperate for help. We showed them how to get the nursery rhymes and stories going. It helped when I had my own children!’ 

‘Of course,’ Carol continues, ‘we couldn’t rely on parents actually watching. A lot of people just put their child in front of the television – we were known as “25 minutes’ peace”! At one point, our producer told us to imagine we were talking to a child all alone at the top of a high-rise building. We could still make a connection, we could still involve them. “Why don’t you sing along?” I’d say, or, “You could do that, couldn’t you?”’ 

Does that mean Play School was ‘progressive’? She takes a moment. ‘I don’t know. I think we moved with the times. We certainly tried to be as diverse as possible – we’d cover Diwali, or have African storytellers come in, and later we replaced Hamble with a black doll, Poppy. And I did a course in Makaton, the sign language, and brought that into the programme. I’m very proud of that.’ 

Carol is also very proud of fellow presenter Floella Benjamin, who since leaving Play School has campaigned tirelessly for causes related to children and young people. ‘She’s our greatest ambassador,’ says Carol, ‘and that’s led to her being in the House of Lords. The stuffy old men there go jelly-kneed when they see her! And that helps her get things done – for children and for children’s television. She’s changing the world!’

Carol Leader: ‘Television can be cut-throat, but in’ Play School I was genuinely supported by other people

Carol Leader presented Play School between 1975 and 1988, and then, in the Nineties, trained as a psychotherapist. ‘I was in my early 40s, and less comfortable crawling around on the floor pretending to be a dragon,’ she explains. ‘I was also busy as an actor but as a result of being in therapy for some time, I was finding the roles I was given unfulfilling and wanted to do a job where I was myself – as my work in Play School had encouraged. Many actors go into therapy for their own personal reasons but also because the two worlds are not that different – actors are always trying to delve into their own inner world or think about different emotional landscapes for the parts they play. Personally, therapy started to pull me in a different direction. So I left acting behind.’

As a psychotherapist, can Carol explain how Play School affected the millions of young children who watched it over the years? She considers carefully. ‘I would have thought that I and the other presenters provided a relationship with each child watching that treated them as an equal, that was good fun, and encouraged and helped them to play – which is where all real learning comes from at that early age. We helped them play with toys, and to understand that they could sort out a problem by seeing how a toy dealt with it. Looking through the windows, we taught them about the real world outside.’

Carol says if she ever watches old episodes of Play School now, it seems very slow compared to modern TV. ‘But I think that was beneficial, too,’ she says. ‘A lot of children’s television today gives too easily and doesn’t invite the child to respond in return. We know, both educationally and therapeutically, that that’s important. Slowing things down creates an atmosphere that’s good for reflective thinking. Those supportive, creative experiences help to form a child’s inner world, which has a massive impact on character development. These things go very deep into a child’s psyche. If they go in in a good way, they become what in my trade we call a good “object” – held as a good experience that can help when times are more difficult, or just there as a good thing for the child. A child with bad objects or experience carries with them a very different internal world.’

So it’s little wonder that people who grew up watching Play School look back on it with such affection. ‘That’s right,’ says Carol. ‘I mean, I carry Play School in me, too. A lot of theatre and television jobs can be cut-throat and competitive, but I remember Play School as a really good experience – I was genuinely supported by other people, I felt they liked my work and that I had a contribution to make. So I hold it as a very good object. And there’s another thing in the theory: if you have a good enough experience, you don’t necessarily feel you want to hold on for ever. I got to a point in my life where I thought, ‘I’ve really loved this but I’m now getting too old.’ Play School was such a good experience I was able to leave it behind.’

See also:

• Samira Ahmed and Graham Kibble-White interviewed Joy Whitby at length earlier this year for an episode of their podcast Through the Square Window. 
• Carol Leader has written further on the link between Play School and psychotherapy in Television and Psychoanalysis: Psycho-Cultural Perspectives (eds. Caroline Bainbridge, Ivan Ward and Candida Yates; Routledge, 2013).
• Me on the book Box of Delights — The Story of Children’s Television 1967-1997, by Richard Marson
• My Social Care Today interview with Julian Bashford, producer of Boo Snoo, on making TV for neurodivergent children
• My book David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television (2023) 

Typhoon, by Qaisra Shahraz

Last night, I was at Chorlton Library to interview writer Qaisra Shahraz as part of Chorlton Book Festival. It was the first time we’d met in person, although we were fellow jurors a few years ago on the First Novel Award for the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, and Qaisra has involved me in online events for the Muslim Arts and Culture Festival (Macfest). She told me in advance she would read from her second novel, Typhoon (2003), so in preparation I read that, as well as some of her short stories and a chunk of her first novel, The Holy Woman (2001), and dug through some old interviews and reviews.

Typhoon opens on a Tuesday in May 2002 in the village of Chiragpur, Pakistan, where the local qazi or judge is dying, but causes a stir by asking to see two particular women before he dies. We then jump back 20 years to understand why. In May 1982, a young woman called Gulshan is woken in the night by her husband is sneaking out of bed. Without him knowing, Gulshan follows him outside and sees him passionately embrace another woman — one she recognises as a recent arrival to the village from the city, and whose modern ways have already aroused some comment. Gulshan returns home, tells her mother Hajra what she’s seen, and Hajra goes out to see for herself. 

Soon, the local gossips have got wind of what’s going on, and it’s like a typhoon has whipped up. Hajra demands than the local qazi pass judgment… But what Gulshan and Hajra witnessed going on isn’t quite what they think…

Typhoon is a fast-moving, engaging story with lots of tension and emotion, and some great twists along the way. It involves a huge cast of different characters, and several plots going on at once. For example, there’s also the story of a rich young widow who refuses to remarry, and the strain on the qazi’s granddaughter of leaving her husband to come tend to the dying man. This means we often witness particular events from one character’s perspective, then have what we think happened challenged or shifted by someone else.

Some pivotal scenes are told very visually. For example, one key moment towards the end of the story — which I won’t spoil, but involves a woman at a well — is conveyed by describing the surface of the water being disturbed, and I had to read it again to ensure I’d understood what was happening. It’s a powerful moment, and a key one to the novel, but it’s rendered in a kind of cinematic prose.

Qaisra told me last night that this kind of thing was, in part, informed by her time working on the TV drama Dil Her to Hai (The Heart It Is), broadcast in Pakistan in 2003. Based in Manchester, she wrote the scripts in English and they were translated into Urdu by the production team, who also made some amendments and even added whole scenes to better showcase the leading actors. In Typhoon, she adopted some of the visual storytelling she’d developed in the series, but exerted more control over characters and story.

I think we can also detect some of the tensions experienced in working in TV in a particular line from the novel:

“The TV people forgot that there were people living out in the countryside whose problems and lifestyle needed to be reflected” (p. 69).

Qaisra kindly gave me a couple more of her books last night, so I’ll get to those in due course…

The Coral Bones, by EJ Swift

Three woman, separated by 250 years, are drawn to the same stretch of the Great Barrier Reef. In the present day, marine biologist Hana Ishikawa is working on a laboratory project to artificially evolve corals that will be more resilient to climate change. She also sets out in scuba gear to document the extinction of the coral out in the sea, bracing herself to dip under the water to see the damage done. Then a dead man is discovered in the water, his body painted in different colours as some kind of warning. The death creates headlines, and then the man’s widow gives Hana her late husband’s research, which includes old scientific papers about the waters where he was found, written by…

Judith Holliman is 17 when, in 1839, she convinces her father — a captain in the navy — to let her go with him on a voyage to chart the waters off northern Australia. Judith is an avid naturalist having read the books in her father’s library, but her options are limited due to her sex. How can she ever hope to be taken seriously, let alone be published? Things aren’t helped by the ship’s on-board naturalist, Mr Pook, treating her with such disdain…

And then, towards the end of the 22nd century, Telma Velasco is employed by a government agency to track down rare animals held in captivity, in a heat-ravaged world where climate mitigation is just beginning to have an impact. She is also grieving — or failing to properly grieve — the loss of a grown-up daughter in a wildfire. But then Team gets the most extraordinary tip-off…

As with the author’s When There Are Wolves Again, this is a brilliant book. Like that novel, it involves two women battling to respond to the debilitating effects of climate change, and begins in the present day and extends into the future. In doing so, it explores what we’re going to have to live through and what things might be done to protect ourselves and the environment. It is by turns devastating and full of hope. But here, there’s a third woman, writing in 1839, just after Darwin has published a report of time on the Beagle but before he’s worked out his ideas of evolution by natural selection. I think that would help win over readers who would not normally venture into sci-fi.

The three women are very different in themselves, a fact underlined by the audio version having three narrators, Anna Burnett, Brigid Lohrey and Kate Winter. The three protagonists live in very different times, facing very different social pressures. Yet all three share a passion for the natural world, a horror at its destruction, and are constrained in what they can do. It it seems impossible that any of them might have a happy ending. 

Hana, for example, is so overwhelmed by grief for the coming apocalypse, the sixth major extinction event on Earth, that she breaks up with her pregnant partner — unable to contemplate the world in which they’d be bringing up a child. Judith is on a last adventure before she is inevitably sent to London where her mother will find her a husband. Telma is so beaten up by grief and loss she can’t face her surviving family, including a new grandchild.

As the story continues, there are hints of links between these three women, and the chance to work out what became of Judith and Hana after their own accounts end, teased from clues in the later-set stories. It’s beautifully done, teasing us with pain and loss to come for these people we’ve come to like. They’re each well drawn characters, with foibles of their own: flawed humans, in the face of insurmountable odds and loss, trying to do the right thing and save something of our world. I didn’t want it to end.

Arise to Conquer, by Wing Commander Ian Gleed, DFC

A friend recommended this extraordinary first-hand account of the Battle of Britain by one of the Hurricane pilots, written soon after the events of the summer of 1940 and published in 1942. That was just as well, as Wing Commander “Widge” Gleed was killed in action the following year. I got hold of a first edition, yet knowing his fate casts a shadow as I read it. His friends are shot down, he’s in a serious accident, he wonders about his odds, and won’t make long-term plans... 

The book begins on the morning of 3 September 1939, with Gleed woken by his batman, going for breakfast with other pilots, then to check his plane out on the ’drome before listening to the Prime Minister’s announcement on the radio. Yet war doesn’t kick off immediately — the expected Blitz doesn’t come, at least not at first.

“For days there had been no action” except instructions on what to do in an air raid, the business of blacking out building and vehicles, and ominous warnings of fuel rationing that is bad news for one friend, Micky, who owns a rather fuel-thirsty Buick.

The commanding officer knows Gleed as “Leeds” (p. 14), his fellow pilots called him “Widget” or “Widge”; of the latter, he claims “I don’t know why” (p. 15), but Wikipedia suggests it was because he wasn’t very tall. He must have known that but chose not to say, the first of several examples of him not being entirely honest with the reader.

Given a forty-eighter, or 48 hours’ leave, he heads to Herne Bay with his girlfriend Pam, where they sail his boat to Broadstairs — where she lives — without formal permission to be in the water, running the risk of being apprehended or hitting mines. They chance their luck anyhow and, “It was a wizard day,” he says (p. 19) — an adjective he uses a lot. So here he is, cheerful, optimistic, a bit gleefully mischievous. 

Yet this scene and several that follow read very differently when we know Pamela didn’t exist. Gleed later claimed he invented a girlfriend for the book because reader’s like a romance. But in later years, some people who knew Gleed claimed he was gay. So I found myself reading the frequent references to Pam wondering if she was entirely invented, and how much she might stand in for someone else, a man Gleed was close to but did not dare put in print.

For example, Gleed has a last weekend with his parents in Finchley before being posted to France. His mum has amassed a great wealth of supplies for him to take, including two rolls of loo paper; his father — a veteran of the First World War — knows he’ll want to travel light. Meanwhile,

“Daphne, my sister, ‘phoned up Pam for me, and asked her to come and stay the night with us—rather a tall order for her, as she was at home at Broadstairs. She said that she would be arriving at Victoria at ten that evening, and would I meet her?” (p. 24)

He and Pam stay up until the early hours talking, and in the morning Mum can barely keep the tears back, Daphne has to blow her nose a lot, “and Pam and Dad smiled.” If Pam never existed, did something like this still play out, with Daphne — perhaps knowing more than Mum and Dad about the nature of the relationship — inviting someone else?

Then there are some other encounters. In France, Gleed arrives in Merville to find the place crowded with troops and refugees, but he finds a house with a huge double bed going spare, and offers to share it with another pilot, John Banks:

“He was a young boy, who was looking very tired … After asking the lady of the house to wake us at four-thirty, we retired to our room with a couple of candles, stripped and leapt into bed naked. … In two minutes I was asleep.” (p. 40).

In Lille, Gleed and another pilot are the only ones not to befriend the local sex workers and find a double room together (p. 26). It’s at least suggestive.

These infrequent moments aside, the bulk of the book is vivid descriptions of battle in the air. He gives a really good sense of the nerves before a flight and the eagerness to get airborne and have a crack at the enemy. Then, when specks of black appear in the sky, we’re suddenly “Tally-ho” and into the frantic business, the breathless style often passing into internal dialogue and the present tense. Brrrrrrrrm! he tells us, and rat tat tat, rat tat tat.

There’s a lot of slang — Gleed feels the need of footnotes to explain “bull” (red tape),  “flap” (a fuss), “a bind” (a chore), “bumf” (paper), “duffs up” (conditions becoming hazy or cloudy; by extension “duff” means anything going wrong), “force-lob” (forced landing), “piece of cake” (easy), “gong” (medal). I wonder how much war films are to blame for much of this passing into common use. He uses “wizard” a lot, and also “old boy” — the latter still a favourite of my paternal grandfather, who was also in the RAF in the war; it's how he addressed me in my teens and twenties. 

Gleed uses “damned” and “bastard” but there are several instances of a censored “b——s”, not least in referring to the enemy. There are also footnotes for the technical terms used by the RAF: “gen” (genuine information, to be relied on), “black-out” (rendered unconscious by by pulling too quickly out of a dive or turning too quickly), “perspex” and “glasshouse” (the hood of the cockpit), and “super-readiness” (pilots sitting in their planes so they can be airborne in 15 seconds). Pilots shout “Contact” to ground crews when their planes are starting up, and wish one another “Good hunting”. A system for producing a little extra speed is known as a “tit”, which results in an extraordinary sentence in the midst of one scrap:

“I was balls out with the tit pulled” (p. 79).

He’s good on other details: the role of batmen in running round after their pilots, getting them washed and packed and fed; the different types of Hurricane screw; the physical impact of flying (lots of sweating, plus sore arms); and the nature of tests conducted on pilots — a naked examination where Gleed is worried about having dirty feet, then a sight test involving being able to discern tiny letters or figures on a colour background, then blowing a bubble of mercury up a tube and holding it there, as seen in The Right Stuff. 

There’s also good detail on what pilots do in their time off. There’s a lot of drinking — one evening involves, “sherry, champagne and port; then, after that, beer” (p. 15). Once promoted to Wing Commander, Gleed is a bit more careful:

“We all drank orange squash, much to Robbie’s disgust. I was strict about that, as we had a long time to wait, and it’s so damned easy to drink quietly away, not noticing how many beers you have; by the time midnight came we would have been in no condition for a ground-straff. So orange squash it was.” (p. 93)

We learn the pilots share a copy of the book Gone With the Wind (p. 55), read detective novels and magazines, and go to the flicks or the theatre — after getting his gong from the King at Buckingham Palace, Gleed has lunch at the Savoy and then sees Cottage to Let. Pilots lark about, build model aircraft, eat lots of bacon and eggs and worry about getting their tea. It’s a convivial fraternity with Cock, Robbie, Dusty, Watty, Dinky, Beaver, Dickie, Rubber, etc — and so all the more shocking when some of these chaps don’t come home. There’s a poignant chapter in which a few men attend the funeral of one man, Squadron-Leader “Shuvvel” Forbes, killed in the big blitz on 14 August 1940. He’s from New Zealand so has no relatives nearby; his colleagues fly in for the ceremony, place their wreaths and then fly back to HQ ready for the next scrap, trying not to think too much about their own mortality.

All in all, this is an invaluable primary source. For all that bits may be invented, it conjures the sounds and atmosphere. The tone of it, the I-say-you-chaps, is very like the other books I’ve read on the subject and the films of the time, though I think anyone writing about the Battle of Britain or the pilots of the time — my forthcoming Doctor Who — The Missing Hour involves Hurricane pilots on Malta around this same period — may find it too easy to fall into pastiche. That would be a pity given that this book, this record of a man on borrowed time, is so bracingly alive.

I have also been recommended Flying to the Limit (1996) by Roland Beaumont, who flew with Gleed. More on that to come...

Jean Steps Out, by Jean Kitson

Published this month, Jean Steps Out: The Memoirs of a Yorkshire Actress in Rep 1946-1959 is an account by Jean Kitson (1928-2020) of her years with Harry Hanson’s Court Players in Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield, Keighley, Chester, Stockport and Swansea. It’s been published by her son David, who provides notes, a list of his mother’s known stage performances and biographies of the other actors in the company. That includes Jean’s sometime boyfriend, David Whitaker, about whom I wrote a book.

Jean and David were both in the cast of Murder at the Vicarage at the Prince’s Theatre, Bradford, performed during the week of 19-24 February 1951, and rehearsed the week before. They remained in Bradford for the next couple of months and then both transferred to the Theatre Royal, Leeds, their last known credit together Night Call, which ran from 24 to 29 November 1952. In the new year, David joined the Hanson company in Stockton-on-Tees and Jean rejoined the company in Bradford.

This memoir is an engaging account, full of anecdotes about the practicalities of repertory theatre: what exactly an assistant stage manager does, and how they move up to full actor; the fact Harry Hanson wouldn’t allow prompting of lines in actual performances; his kindness and support in turning up for shows across the country; the fact he chose the plays he thought his audience would pay for, imposing them on his companies. 

For a researcher like me, it’s useful to know what Jean got paid — having left school, she was on 25 shilling at week at a mill office in Morley, then £2 a week at the Inland Revenue, then £4 a week as ASM at the Theatre Royal in Leeds, so joining the theatre was a step up from ordinary work. Still, there were privations: the cold, the struggle to find costumes and props, even the accommodation. For a season of plays in south Wales, Jean had to share a bed with leading lady Joyce Cross (p. 21).

Yet this is a cheery account of a fondly remembered period. Jean’s enthusiasm for her days in rep is matched by her delight in the later success of many actors she worked with — Billie Whitelaw, Peggy Mount, Patricia Pilkington (ie Pat Phoenix), Francis Matthews and Bryan Mosley, as well as future Labour MP Gerald Kaufman. I was particularly interested to read more about names that are perhaps less well known but are familiar to me from the cast lists and reviews of David Whitaker’s own stage plays, such as Cissie Ashley, Lawrence Storm and Frank Senior.

And then, at the end, the book includes a QR code with a link to an audio recording of Jean and (it’s thought) John Whyte in a scene from the play Jean Steps Out and with John Roberts in a scene from Quiet Wedding, both recorded in 1948. The former is rather risqué — Basil calls the bluff of his fiancé’s flirtatious sister Jane by turning up in her bedroom one night. The accents are cut-glass, a hint of the north-east still discernible under vowels stretched by elocution. It’s a vivid bit of social history, suddenly alive — and gave me shivers.

Sadly, for my purposes, there’s no mention in what Jean wrote of David Whitaker, as either actor or boyfriend, but Jean’s son David has kindly told me what his mother told him. Indeed, he got in touch because he recognised his mother in one of the photos included in my biography. The memoir provides some context for that picture:

“During the summer months many of the towns we played on organised Sunday afternoon fetes and galas. Celebrities were sought on these occasions, not only to perform the opening ceremony but to crown the Carnival Queen and sometimes judge a fancy dress competition. Not having access either to Royalty or the film industry the organisers looked closer to home, and that’s where the Court Players came in handy.

“We girls always thought it was well worthwhile. I’m not sure the men were quite so enthusiastic but they gallantly came along as escorts ... For us it was a rare opportunity to dress up glamorously, be picked up with some ceremony at the Stage Door and whisked away to a summer afternoon of festivity.” (p. 66)

So here is David Whitaker, on his feet and in mid-flow, in the summer of either 1951 or 1952, presumably in Leeds. Jean is beside him in the white hat. There is a prize cup on the table in front of them, about to be awarded. David and Jean are both 23 or 24 in the picture.

Sadly, Jean probably didn’t know that David immortalised her in the names of the protagonists of his episode of Public Eye (1968) — Valerie and Eric Kitson, played by Sheila Fearn and Edward Fox.

See also:

• Jean Kitson at Theatricalia
• David Whitaker at Theatricalia

Written by Terrance Dicks book launch, 25 November

The Portico Library in Manchester will host the launch of my new biography, Written by Terrance Dicks, on the evening of 25 November. I'll be in conversation with Portico Library trustee Esther Lisk-Carew from Manchester Metropolitan University, discussing Terrance's life and career.

• Buy tickets for Written by Terrance Dicks: Book Launch with Simon Guerrier

As well as his prolific contribution to Doctor Who and the 235 books he published, Terrance was also script editor and producer of the BBC's classic serials in the 1980s. At the event, the Portico Library will display some first editions of some of the books he saw dramatised, including Jane Eyre and Oliver Twist. 

I'll also be at Target Book Club in London on 24 October. More events and details relating to the book, including how to pre-order it, to follow soon. You can already pre-order my novelisation The Six Doctors and Steve Cole's novelisation of The Vampire Mutation, both based on papers I uncovered in the course of researching the biography.

(Yes, 25 November is the anniversary of the UK broadcast of The Five Doctors.)

The Great Dictator, by Matthew Sweet

The Dr and I had a lovely time this week in That London, at the launch for this new biography of Barbara Cartland by our pal Matthew. What joy to catch up with old mates and natter to new people. 

The book is magnificent, in part because its subject is so extraordinary, at once compelling and alarming. I found the accounts of her brothers’ wartime experience especially moving, and the attempts to cash in on the family connection to Princess Diana particularly cringe-inducing. But the book is also peppered with other, extraordinary lives — the various scrapes of Commander Glen Kidston, which begins with him as a 16 year-old naval cadet being torpedoed and rescued twice in one morning in 1914 (p. 146), or the amazing locked-room mystery of a man who somehow fell from a plane (p. 148). 

As ever, Matthew has an eye for the telling detail, the incongruous and absurd — such as the promotion to give away Cartland’s books to customers of a particular butcher. As he says, she’s a major figure of the 20th century, so her life is a kind affords a new history of that period, stranger than we might expect.

It is also a new experience to be papped.

London, UK. 9 September 2026. (C) Simon Guerrier, writer, attends the launch party of The Great Dictator: A Life of Barbara Cartland by Matthew Sweet (Hodder & Stoughton) taking place at The Warburg Institute in Woburn Square. Guests were encouraged to wear pink to honour Barbara Cartland. Credit: Stephen Chung / Alamy Live News

See also: me on Bookish Volume II by Matthew Sweet.