Garry Halliday and the Sands of Time, by Justin Blake

I'm ploughing on with my episode guide to the BBC children's serial Garry Halliday (1959-62), and ahead of an entry there on the fourth of the eight serials, here are some thoughts on the novelisation.

At the end of the third Garry Halliday novelisation, airline pilot and adventurer Garry skis down a mountain in Switzerland in time to catch the elusive criminal mastermind known as the Voice, whose own henchpeople have never seen in person. The Voice is sent to prison - and then promptly escapes.

In this next adventure, the Voice aims to deal with the 10 people who clapped eyes on him during his short time as captive, and thus regain his anonymity. The Swiss police inspector, the pilot of the plane who flew the Voice from Switzerland back to London and some prison staff at Pentonville each go missing for a week or so, and then are found with their memories wiped. As Garry, his trusty co-pilot Bill Dodds and their friend Inspector Potter from Scotland Yard investigate, they too face capture and the same sinister process.

This fourth Garry Halliday serial - broadcast over seven weeks between 5 November and 17 December 1960, never repeated but published in book form in October 1963 - taps into a contemporary fear. Brainwash Culture, Daniel Pick's 2016 documentary for Radio 3, is very good on the history of this, in real life and popular culture (and very useful when I wrote my book on 1967 Doctor Who story The Evil of the Daleks).

In short, during the Korean War (1950-53), reports emerged of coercive techniques being used by Maoist forces. This "brainwashing" was cited to explain why western prisoners of war had apparently aided their captors and why 21 American soldiers asked not to be repatriated. Whatever the truth behind these claims, they informed Richard Condon's 1959 novel, The Manchurian Candidate, in which a loyal American soldier undergoes conditioning that makes him commit treason. An acclaimed film version starring Frank Sinatra was released in 1962, the same year that Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange and Len Deighton's The IPCRESS File were published, both exploring the disturbing ways such techniques might be exploited.

We can see similar ideas being explored in such fare as the 1963 film The Mind Benders, the opening of Ian Fleming's 1964 novel, The Man with the Golden Gun (when James Bond is the victim of such techniques!) and lot of early Doctor Who. It's a particularly effective wheeze in TV and film, where we can see the conflict of "good" characters struggling to fight the conditioning.

Garry Halliday was tapping into the zeitgeist and was perhaps even a bit ahead of the game. But it's odd that the characters we see brainwashed are mostly those we don't otherwise know - the Swiss inspector and prison staff. Inspector Potter, who is also subjected to the technique, featured in the previous serial but played by a different actor, which may have lessened the impact of seeing him "turned" to work for the villains. At one point, Garry Halliday succumbs to the drugged water that begins the brainwashing process but we don't see him act out of character. Bill Dodds is also unaffected. It felt to me a though an obvious bit of drama had been missed.

Then there's the sense of the novelisation patching over holes in the storyline, for example why the Voice can only be recognised by the few people who saw him, rather than from a mug shot when he was arrested.

"What records there were of him had disappeared. There was one newspaper photograph. Even the Voice couldn't get rid of every copy of a newspaper with a circulation of four and a half million. The newspaper picture was blurred and grey on bad paper. It showed a bulky man with an arm over his face. Such as it was, it had been circulated to the police of every country in the world. Most of those to whom if had been circulated had replied, more or les politely, that it seemed useless as a means of identification." (p. 19)

The not quite stated implication is that he has people in the police and in newsrooms who have disposed of the original photographs. The irony, of course, is that very little in the way of visual or written records survive related to Garry Halliday.

That makes it difficult to grasp exactly what this serial would have looked and felt like on screen. As on previous serials, the location filming featured in publicity. In the story, the Voice is working from the fictional state of Balakesh, a short distance from real-life Tripoli. Producer Richard West says in his memoir The Reluctant Soldier & Greasepaint and Girls that he, co-writer Jeremy Bullmore, lead actor Terence Longdon, cameraman Tony Good and West's assistant (which may have been Jean Hart) flew out to Tripoli to film picturesque shots on location, without any idea what the story would entail. The plot would be devised around whatever they shot.

In fact, West says, not having prior permission to film outside the American-run Wheelus Air Base, they were all arrested. On another occasion, locals interrupted filming by throwing rocks. The suggestion is that the guerrilla crew didn't get as much footage as they'd have liked and these frustrations may have coloured the way the Balakesh was depicted.

There had been criticism of previous Garry Halliday serials for stereotypical depictions of silly foreigners. The Arabs here are by turns parochial, corrupt and greedy. Bill Dodds at one point adopts a disguise, half naked and blacked up. The novelisation tells us, not very convincingly, that this was,

"not in the hope of being taken for an Arab but simply so as to make it more difficult for anyone to see him" (p. 105).

Halliday expresses horror at the death penalty being used in Balakesh, though capital punishment wasn't abolished in the UK until 1965 (and not until 2000 for all circumstances). But I think the harshness of the regime is all set-up for the end of the story. The Sheikh allows the Voice to escape into the desert, which is effectively a death sentence. The Voice is last seen wandering lost in the sand with nothing to drink.

There's no mention in the surviving sources that actor Elwyn Brook-Jones was part of the crew out in Tripoli, so I wonder how this haunting scene was conveyed on screen. As with the ski chase at the end of the previous serial, it has the potential for arresting visuals if filmed out on location, and for something much less exciting if realised in studio.

On TV, this wasn't the end of the Voice. Yet by the time the book was published, Brook-Jones was dead and Garry Halliday was no longer being made or repeated. The authors therefore tell us in a foreword that this is the last of Halliday's encounters with the Voice and provide some background to the character. They say this is what Halliday subsequently learned - suggesting that this information was not given in the TV version.

This serial was also the last to feature Bill Dodds and his fiancee Sonya, played by Terence Alexander and his wife Juno Stevas. Sonya has relatively little to do in the story, and based on the novelisation it doesn't look as though the couple were involved in location filming. Oddly, whereas the previous three novelisations were narrated by Dodds, here the story is told in the third person. We're told Bill and Sonya are now happily,

"settled down to domestic life and two kids (at the present count)" (p. 11)

But I wonder how happy things really were as the actors left the series.

Don't Stop the Music, by Justin Lewis

By fun coincidence, I received a copy of this book - recommended to me by various friends since publication last year - two days after happening to meet its author. By another fun coincidence, I've finally read it having just read Question 7 by Richard Flanagan, which explores the idea of the past and present all happening at once. In Don't Stop the Music, the idea is more, I think, that there's an overlapping past.

This is basically a sort of toilet book full of odd bits of pop music history. But the organising principle lifts it into something else. Lewis provides facts for each calendar day of the year, in chronological order. In the very first entry, we learn that on 1 January 1958 Johnny Cash plays his first concert at San Quentin State Prison in California, where future country-and-western singer Merle Haggard is one of the captive audience (the author's pun). On the same day in 1962, the Beatles record five songs for Decca Records, who turn them down. On the same day two years later, the Beatles are at #1 with 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' and the first edition of Top of the Pops is broadcast on the BBC (featuring Dusty Springfield, the Rolling Stones and the Hollies). On the same day in 1990, Florida radio station WKRL plays 'Stairway to Heaven' by Led Zeppelin - and continues to repeat it non-stop for 24 hours.

Note the present tense of all this: these bits of history are still happening now, a sense reinforced by the fact that we can hear the music. In fact, I read this with my phone handy to look up tracks on iTunes - stuff I'd not heard in a while, stuff that was wholly new.

Also, note the range in just this first entry: pop and rock and country, reaching right back to the birth of rock n' roll - and beyond. Other entries bring us up to date, or at least to time of publication. There's also a diversity of entry: some funny, some weird and some poignant.

There's plenty here I didn't know, for example that the launch of Sputnik 2 in October 1957 was timed to coincide with the International Geophysical Year involving 67 different countries. I knew about the IGY from when, more than a decade ago, the Dr worked on a BBC archive project which put old clips and programmes online. One thing she and her team dug out was The Restless Sphere, a programme presented by the Duke of Edinburgh - live - giving an overview of all the work planned. I'd not made the connection between that and the space programme, and I learn from Lewis that the IGY was also commemorated in 1982, in the opening track of Donald Fagen's first solo album after leaving Steely Dan, Fagen looking back to the promise of a future that should have been the then-now.

The book is full of these kinds of connections and juxtapositions. One song or event influences another, or the backing singing of one band then has their own entry as a star. These connections are the point; in the introduction Lewis says the lack of an index is a creative decision as he wanted to ensure the book is "a little more than a dipping-in exercise." What I'd really like instead is a map. 

By another fun coincidence, I've used a similar organising principle for Doctor Who: The Time-Travelling Almanac, which is out next month. My hope there was to conjure a sense of the year as physical journey as we go round and round the Sun, so the anniversary of any particular date is us returning to the same spot. In my book, that then sparks other thoughts and peregrinations, some of them much longer than the entries here. It's a different kind of journey, I think, but starting from a similar place.

Question 7, by Richard Flanagan

Richard Flanagan won the Booker Prize in 2014 for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which was in part based on his father's experience as a prisoner of war in Japan. He's also the author of Death of River Guide (1994), in part based on the author's own experience of a near-fatal accident while out on a kayak.

This new book is non-fiction but revisits the real events behind these two novels, connecting them to - among other things - the history of Flanagan's native Tasmania, the invention of the nuclear bomb and the love life of HG Wells and Rebecca West. It's about the way reality informs fiction and fiction informs reality, and the way the past is present in the now. It's a remarkable, rich and vivid flit through all sorts of bits of history, at once directly, movingly personal and yet about us all.

Flanagan cites in his acknowledgements one key influence: the essay ‘The past is in the present is in the future’ by 18 year-old Sienna Stubbs, which describes her Yolŋu culture's understanding of a fourth tense, beyond past, present and future, in which what was and is and will be are all happening at once. So, all these years later after the real event, Flanagan is still 21 and trapped in his kayak, facing imminent death. And HG is still snogging the teenage Rebecca West. And the bomb is still being dropped on Horoshima.

Some of the history here I've already dug into, having made a Radio 4 documentary about how HG Well's novel The World Set Free, in which he coined the term "atomic bomb", inspired Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard to conceive the chain reaction component that would make such a thing a reality; but the Wells book also made him realise the terrible consequence of such a device used on an urban population. We seem to have worked from several of the same sources, and I'm glad to see that Flanagan, likewise, sees Szilard as both a pivotal and fascinating figure (whereas he makes a single, fleeting appearance in the film Oppenheimer).

Flanagan delves further than we did in our documentary (where we had just 42 minutes, and covered some other ground) to explore the circumstances in which Wells wrote The Wells Set Free and the women he was involved with at the time, as well as pursuing what happened to Szilard and addressing his own efforts to write science-fiction. I've got a copy of Szilard's book on its way and will report back in due course.

So it's a fascinating story being covered here, and yet also beautifully, succinctly told in short bursts that make it difficult to put down when you could just do one more short section. Yet it's also often viscerally shocking, whether detailing the impact of the bomb on Hiroshima or the genocide in Tasmania, or the denouement in which he recounts in detail his experience on the river. Also shocking is his meeting the men who held his father captor, asking one old man to hit slap him in the way he'd slapped the prisoners in his charge. Or there's the racism, sexism and cultural condescension faced while a student at Oxford (p. 231), and then this:

"Meanwhile, the Bullers wandered the Oxford streets, dressed absurdly as themselves or offensively as Nazis and after dinner had the whores in. The Buller B—who would be prime minister wanted me to be his wingman when he ran a second time for Oxford Union president, one more whore. I told him I couldn't stand the Union, that I wasn't a member, and why, in any case, would I bother? B— said when I ran he would help me if I helped him and so I repeated my original answer and B— fif-faf-fuddled because he really had no answer, no one did, he was charming and you couldn't believe a thing he said..." (pp. 233-4)

The DNA of Doctor Who - The Philip Hinchcliffe Years

I've just received my copy of this handsome new book, to which I contributed an essay on the 1975 Doctor Who story Planet of Evil and what it draws from classic works of science-fiction.

The obvious influence, of course, is the 1956 movie Forbidden Planet, which the BBC broadcast at 6.35 pm on Wednesday 6 November 1974 - just right to inspire the development of the Doctor Who stories that became Planet of Evil and The Brain of Morbius. I dig into that and also how the same film influenced early Doctor Who as well as other sci-fi such as Star Trek (citing the excellent ‘Gene Roddenberry’s Cinematic Influences’ by Michael Kmet from 2013) and Star Wars (see the 2012 Wired interview, ‘Ben Burtt on Star Wars, Forbidden Planet and the Sound of Sci-Fi’ y Geeta Dayal).

Hinchcliffe says on the documentary made for the DVD release of Planet of Evil (by my friend Ed Stradling) that he suggested the ‘flying eye’ drone seen in the story, having read of something similar in a science-fiction story at the time. The Dictionary of Surveillance Terms in Science Fiction at the Technovelgy site helped me suggest some candidates for that story.

I also mention Isaac Asimov’s own timeline-of-the-future for his various short stories and novels, which I drew from ‘A page from Isaac Asimov’s notebook’, Thrilling Wonder Stories, vol. 44 #3 (Winter 1955), p. 63.

Edited by Gary Russell and published by Gareth Kavanagh at Roundel Books, you can buy The DNA of Doctor Who - The Philip Hinchcliffe Years from the Cutaway Comics site.

Garry Halliday episode guide

I've posted the first two entries in what I hope will be an exhaustive guide to Garry Halliday, a BBC serial about the adventures of an airline pilot created by Justin Blake (i.e. John Bowen and Jeremy Bullmore), that ran between 1959 and 1962.

The BBC made 50 episodes, only one of which survives. But Doctor Who was devised to fill the same Saturday teatime slot and I think owes a significant amount to Halliday, which I'll tease out as I go through the history.

As with Doctor Who, there were novelisations of Garry Halliday's TV adventures. I now have copies of all five Garry Halliday books, and have already posted reviews here of the first three of them:

• Garry Halliday and the Disappearing Diamonds (1960)
• Garry Halliday and the Ray of Death (1961)
• Garry Halliday and the Kidnapped Five (1962)

Slow Horses, by Mick Herron

River Cartwright is a nepo baby in MI5, his grandfather a retired top spook. But River cocks up a big operation and, in disgrace, is assigned to Slough House with all the other service failures — the so-called "slow horses". There, he's given such menial jobs as listing the contents of a journalist's rubbish bin... But then a young man is kidnapped by extremists and the slow horses might be his only hope of surviving.

The TV version sticks closely to this thrilling, dour and often funny spy caper so I knew pretty much what was coming. A few things are different just because the book is set around the time of publication in 2010, in the shadow of the then-recent 7/7 bombings in London.

That made me think about the context of the references to real people, such as Russell T Davies being named in a newspaper masthead (p. 28) — presumably in a story about what he was up to immediately post-Doctor Who. On another occasion, we're told that the head of Slough House, Jackson Lamb, resembles and could be played by Timothy Spall (p. 32), which is jarring now Lamb has been brought so soddenly to life by Gary Oldman. 

These references add verisimilitude to the grubby, kitchen-sink reality. But that only makes it all the odder when Herron draws so closely from a real person to describe a fictional cabinet minister:

"Peter Judd. PJ to his friends, and everyone else. Fluffy-hair and youthful at forty-eight, and with a vocabulary peppered with archaic expostulations — Balderdash! Tommy-rot!! Oh my giddy aunt!!! — Peter Judd had long established himself as the unthreatening face of the old-school right, popular enough with the Great British Public, which though him an amiable idiot, to make a second living outside Parliament as a rent-a-quote-media-whore-cum-quiz-show-panel-favourite, and to get away with minor peccadilloes like dicking his kids' nanny, robbing the taxman blind, and giving his party leader conniptions with off-script flourishes. ('Damn fine city,' he'd remarked on a trip to Paris. 'Probably worth defending next time.') Not everyone who'd worked with him thought him a total buffoon, and some who'd witnessed him lose his temper suspected him of political savvy, but by and large PJ seemed happy with the image he'd either fostered or been born with: a loose cannon with a floppy haircut and a bicycle." (p. 187)

This amiable bungler — played by Sam West on TV — turns out to be more right wing and ruthless than he first appears. He's ambitious, too, with his eye on further power. Well, we've been there, done that now.

There are a lot of machinations here, the security service riven with people plotting and counterplotting, betraying their friends to further their own careers or to cover their behinds. Management and "joes" learn to apply one of two protocols to any given situation:

"Moscow rules meant watch your back, London rules meant cover your arse." (pp. 253-254)

Here, London rules are most in play. In fact, save for the kidnapping in Leeds, River visiting his grandfather just outside Tonbridge and a sequence in Epping Forest, this is all set in London. Like le Carre, the focus is on activity here, carried out by our people, rather than external antagonists. There's something of The Sandbaggers about the whole thing, too: a focus on spycraft as office job that makes it suit a TV budget.  

Some small things are different from the TV version, such as details in prose being rendered in dialogue on screen. The TV version includes flashbacks to elucidate Catherine Standish's past but doesn't show us River Cartwright's childhood or some of the other history shared with us in the book. The kidnapped young man is, on TV, held in a house on an anonymous street; in the book it's the more definite Roupell Street near Waterloo, a place I know very well having once worked just round the corner. (And, er, from the Dalek battle there, too.)

But more than anything, knowing the TV version made me conscious of how frequently Herron uses ploys to hold our attention. There are continual cliffhangers, sometimes contrived by telling events out of chronological order, withholding bits of information or suggesting that one thing has happened then — a few pages later — revealing something else. In some cases, these ploys wouldn't work on TV where we can see what's happening, such as when Herron delays telling us the gender or ethnicity of particular characters, then makes that a surprise.

These methods make for a compelling read, though much of the trick here depends on the reader not knowing what will happen next. I wish I'd read this before I saw the TV version and need to hurry up reading the next ones in the series so I can get to later books unspoiled.

The Hobbit, by JJR Tolkien

Last night, I finished reading this to Lady Vader, having read it to the Lord of Chaos about five years ago and having had it read to me by my late dad when I was of a similar age. I've read this book countless times, have seen the films and various versions on stage. This is the first time I've read the coo-posh Folio edition that my dad gave me and the Dr long ago one Christmas, illustrated by Eric Fraser. That was a kingly gift!

A few things strike me this time round. First, the number of times that Bilbo Baggins is referred to as "queer", Tolkien of course meaning strange or eccentric. I don't think I've ever seen a reading of Bilbo as gay but there are various bits of circumstantial evidence here and The Lords of the Rings to support it. That in turn informs a story about close male friendships, through thick and thin.

The older I get, the more fascinated I am by Gandalf, this benign, wise figure trying to sort out a hundred different bits of shit all at once. Having never had much interest in the expanded lore, this time I hung on all the little hints about what Gandalf gets up to after leaving Bilbo and the dwarves at Milkwood, and goes off to deal with a Necromancer. I now know from the film versions of The Hobbit what that's alluding to, which had always passed me by before. If I ever have a spare moment - not likely, mate - I'd like to know more about what Tolkien wrote about that and exactly when, given his revisions to the first edition of The Hobbit to better fit its sequels.

I was conscious, too, this time of the voice of Gandalf, which I so associate with my dad's reading and then, in respectable second place, Ian McKellen. Reading The Hobbit this time, I was also struck by the difficulty of distinguishing voices - the gruff-voiced dwarves, with the especially gruff-voiced Thorin, as distinct from gruff Beorn or gruff Bard or gruff Smaug. But on the whole this is a story that really works read aloud. The only thing, I think, that benefits from seeing the words on the page is all the riddling with Golem. There, for the reader to play along, it helps to pick back over the words as one might scrutinise the clues in a crossword.

But whereas The Lords of the Rings is about a fellowship of disparate characters, all very different and distinct, the main cast of The Hobbit is harder to distinguish.