Dead Lions, by Mick Herron

How do you bring an audience up to speed on the story so far?

I posted in April that the surviving episode of children's adventure serial Garry Halliday (from 1960) begins with a minute-long recap, showing stills of 10 different characters and detailing multiple twists. As I said, we can compare that to the opening moments of a rare, surviving episode of soap opera Compact (from 1962), where there's no narrated recap but everything we need to know is relayed concisely in the opening scene.

The second Slow Horses novel bring us up to speed from the perspective of an imaginary cat stalking the offices of Slough House floor by floor, describing the disgraced intelligence operatives working there. That includes the two new characters replacing characters killed in the first novel. It's a bold conceit for a series grounded in the grubbily, boringly and compellingly real and could fast become wearying. But, kept to just an introductory sequence and used to delineate the distinctive features of each of the main characters, I think Mick Herron gets away with it.

The sequence ends with a pen portrait of slovenly Jackson Lamb on the top floor who would, if the cat really existed, throw it out of the window to its death. The point is that Lamb is quicker and more ruthless than he might appear, and in the story that follows his long experience and cynical perspective mean he's the one intelligence operative not to be fooled...

Once again, the TV version - which I came to first - is a very close adaptation of the book, the main difference that a final confrontation with a baddie involves young River Cartwright in the book and Jackson Lamb on TV. River was the protagonist of the first book and TV series, but we're already seeing the focus shift. It's the same phenomenon, I think, as Captain Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation or President Bartlett in The West Wing. Each was originally envisioned as a kind of guest star who'd appear infrequently to offer wise counsel, while the focus was on the ordinary staff getting into scrapes and adventures. The issue, I think, is that the authority of such characters exerts something like gravitational force, and the more a series continues, the more it is drawn to that power.

The novel ends with another tour of Slough House, this time from the perspective of a mouse. It's effectively the punchline to a book-long joke. I wasn't at first sure whether this was another hypothetical creature but it turns out to be real - and prompts Jackson Lamb to wonder if they need a cat.

Conan Doyle: Mystery and Adventure, by Mark Jones

In 1967, BBC Two broadcast a 13-episode anthology of adaptations of short stories by Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle. The series was variously known as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and The Short Stories of Conan Doyle, and generally well reviewed. What's more, it was the first TV series overseen by John Hawkesworth, who went on to even greater acclaim with The Gold Robbers (1969), Upstairs Downstairs (1971-75) and The Duchess of Duke Street (1976-77), before developing for television The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1984-85), starring Jeremy Brett.

Just one episode of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle survives - the very odd The Mystery of Cader Ifan, which I saw for the first time last week at Kaleidoscope's "The Play's the Thing" event in Birmingham. But Mark Jones' comprehensive study details production of the series, based on Hawkesworth's extensive archive at the BFI, paperwork in the BBC's Written Archives Centre, press reports from the time and interviews with cast and crew. It offers a wealth of detail and insight, with plenty of photographs, clippings and illustrations from the original stories helping to conjure a vivid sense of what has been lost.

As Jones explains, for rights reasons the series had only a limited release overseas, which means there is perilously little chance of copies of the missing episodes ever being found. Doctor Who fans can torture ourselves with the promise that some of the missing 97 episodes might yet be out there, somewhere. There's endless discussion of the various possible leads and of which episodes we'd most want returned - the Missing Episodes podcast is very good on this - which makes me fidgety with stress. It's almost refreshing to start from the basis that stuff has gone for good.

Among the fascinating things here is the influence of other anthologies of old stories, notably Granada's Saki (1962), Maupassant (1963) and The Liars (1966), in which the original sources were reworked so that characters would recur through the run. The BBC's head of serials, Gerald Savory, who'd worked on some of these series, advised Hawkesworth to do the same (pp. 17-19). We then seen the problems this caused for production, with clashing schedules for filming and rehearsals. 

Some practicalities are surprising: on The Lift, it turned out to be easier to film in Paris than in Blackpool. And how extraordinary to see the viewing figures for a "successful" series on BBC Two of the time: an audience of 450,000 watched The Willow House School on 26 February 1967 (p. 154); just 250,000 watched The Mystery of Cader Ifan on 12 March (p. 194). Eleven of the 13 episodes were repeated on BBC One between August 1967 and June 1968, in a mixed up order that played havoc with the continuity of the recurring characters. It would be interesting to know the viewing figures, those these don't appear to survive.

Other things struck me because of overlaps with my own bits of research. In romantic episode The Chemistry of Love, one of the recurring characters, Tom Crabbe (Keith Buckley) goes to a posh reception disguised as the vice-principal of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, one Anton Mikhailovich Asimov. This character is not in Doyle's original story, "A Physiologist's Wife", so is an invention of Hawkesworth and the name of the invented scientist is striking. At the time that the title of the TV episode was changed (2 November 1966, p. 90), production was under way on a Doctor Who story that directly referenced the work of science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov: in Episodes 2 and 3 of The Power of the Daleks, the scientist Lesterson speaks of the Daleks having "positronic" brains. (In Episode 5 of The Evil of the Daleks (1967), positronic brains containing the "human factor" are added to three Daleks.)

Isaac Asimov was a well known figure, with several of his works adapted for British television: "Little Lost Robot" shown as part of Out of this World (1962), The Caves of Steel adapted for Story Parade (1964) and six stories adapted for Out of the Unknown (1965-69, four of them prior to the broadcast of The Chemistry of Love. Why would both Doctor Who and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle connect themselves to Asimov at roughly the same time? My guess is that both were in response to his epic Foundation novels winning the Hugo Award for Best All-Time Series at the Tricon world science-fiction convention in the first week of September 1966. Foundation was originally a series of short stories that the author then reworked, which may have appealed to Hawkesworth doing something with Doyle.  

There's another connection to The Evil of the Daleks, in that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle filmed at Grims Dyke house on 20 January 1967 (p. 171), three months before the Daleks were there; I've added the details to my list of filming at Grims Dyke. There are further connections between Doctor Who and this Doyle series simply because several cast and crew worked on both. Richard Martin, interviewed by Jones on 12 July 2022, recalls using vaseline on "special fronts to the camera" (p. 57) to achieve a ghostly effect on the mummy seen in Lot 249, having pioneered this technique - to resistance from the crew, he says - on Doctor Who (for the strange atmosphere of planet Vortis in The Web Planet). Martin also recalls his working methods:

"I was always fairly well pressed to do the camera script in time. ... I used to go in my study at home and would consume most of a bottle of whisky. I'd be up to four o'clock in the morning, and maybe just have a little bit of rest before having to go in and deliver this script. The real problem was trying to get enough rehearsal time. I'm a rehearsal addict. I love seeing what the actors do with the script and capturing what they do correctly." (p. 57)

In assessing these lost episodes, Jones asks how closely they kept to Doyle's original stories, how effective they were as drama and in conjuring an atmosphere, and how sharply we should feel their loss. My sense is that he'd most like to see the spooky episodes returned. But if we're playing the game of which of thee lost stories I'd most like to see, I'm haunted by The Croxley Master. 

Medical student (and recurring character) Philip Hardacre is a medical student, forced to work for the pompous, lazy Dr Lichfield as the only means to pay his own university fees. Then Philip learns of a boxer pulling out of a forthcoming fight. Encouraged by surgery maid Mary, Philip agrees to take the man's place and go 20 rounds against the "Croxley Master" for a prize of £100. 

This "master" is the tough and dishonest Silver Craggs. Against all odds, and by fighting fairly, Philip knocks out his opponent. Whereupon Craggs' mistress, Anastasia, played by brilliant Alethea Charlton, 

"storms into the ring and lands Philip a tremendous blow on the jaw which fells him to the boards. As Mary and Anastasia start fighting, the two heroes of the fight are forgotten, lying side by side, unconscious on the canvas." (p. 69)

See also:

• Me on The Sign of the Four, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 
• My article "My immortal Holmes" in the Lancet Psychiatry
• My review of 2015 film Mr Holmes in the Lancet Psychiatry
• My novel The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Great War

Doctor Who Magazine #608

The new issue of the official Doctor Who Magazine is out today. My regular Script to Screen feature (pp. 26-30) this time covers the slug-like Mantraps seen in Dot and Bubble, for which I interviewed executive producer Joel Collins and production designer Phil Sims.

There's also a review of Deathworld, the story I script edited for Big Finish, which Jamie Lenman finds "surprising, and really quite touching". In Galaxy Forum, reader Bill Silver says nice things about the work Gav Rymill, Rhys Williams and I did on recreating the sets of missing episodes in the recent special issue.

And I think Eddie Robson's fun "This month in..." column (p. 49) uses an image of Doctor Who creators Sydney Newman and Donald Wilson that I spotted in an old issue of BBC in-house magazine Ariel, snapped on my phone and then cropped - those are Judi Dench's hands (and wine glass) in the bottom left.

Aerial, December 1967

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. Until now, no one - not even his own henchpeople - have seen his face. 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 around September 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 in which 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 as 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 that 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.

Bill Dodds and his fiancee Sonya Delamare, played by Terence Alexander and his wife Juno, had also left the series, their last appearance at the end of the fifth serial. In this, their penultimate adventure, Sonya has relatively little to do, 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, as if preparing the way for his exit. 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)