British Television Drama — Past, Present and Future (2nd edition), ed. Jonathan Bignell and Stephen Lacey

Following Friday’s post, a bit more time travel via old TV. This book exploring the “golden age” of TV drama — and critiquing that term — transported me back almost 30 years. Many of the contributions here were originally talks given at On the Boundary: Turning Points in Television Drama 1965-2000, an event held at the old Bulmershe campus of Reading University in April 1998, which I attended while an MA student there more than half my life ago.

As well as being in the audience for talks by luminaries such as Tony Garnett and Timothy West, I was among the students sat for dinner with Kenneth Trodd — who, on being told I was studying science-fiction, wanted reassurance that Cold Lazarus hadn’t looked and felt like Blake’s 7. A group of academics who seemed so ancient and wise — and were probably younger than me now —  were patient when I interrupted their conversation about Dennis Potter to ask what they knew about him pitching to write Doctor Who.

The whole event was overshadowed by the recent death of Sydney Newman, effectively becoming a conference about his legacy as Head of Drama at the BBC, 1963-67. But a recurring topic in the bar was the public response to the death of Princess Diana the previous summer — how it affected viewing figures of drama at the time, how it would shape drama to come. One producer said she thought that increasingly risk-averse broadcasters would veto any drama that was not sufficiently respectful to the public mood. 

When, the following year, Queer as Folk contained a scene of characters talking about the death of Diana, it was rude and funny, yet at heart about a shared sense of grief — and the closing joke was about not Diana but Elton John. The friend I watched with was shocked; I could see it navigating the sensibilities I’d heard that producer raise.

Reading the book now has made me acutely aware of what I missed while at the event all those years ago. I had not heard of, let alone seen, many of the dramas cited. I did not know the names of many people there or whose work was being discussed. Now I see I was rubbing shoulders with, perhaps even serving wine to, John McGrath, Irene Shubik and a whole host of others whose work I now know so well through my various bits of research. The things I wish I could go back and ask! 

But telly has always been ephemeral; it is made and then you move on.

There’s lots of fascinating, insightful stuff in the book, both from the conference in 1998 and added new for the second edition (2014). There is lots on the ideology behind what makes it to the screen, the move from schooling the audience in culture to trailing after them as consumers, as well as the respective value accorded to different kinds of drama by a male-dominated, male-centred industry. That’s informed my viewing of the BBC’s Vanity Fair (1987), on which I’ll have more to say in due course.

I was also engrossed by accounts of how developments in technology changed what we see on TV, and its look and feel. Phil Redmond explains how Brookside made use of developments in computer technology and word processing to streamline writing and recording, and dovetails this with the aim of the programme to reflect a fast-changing world. Victoria Byard’s chapter on The Sarah Jane Adventures addresses the way it worked across traditional broadcast TV as well as new digital platforms, and there’s a concluding chapter by the editors on time-shifted viewing and the changing ways that the audience — or audiences plural — are consuming media. Or were, given how much things have moved on in the past decade.

Sarah Cardwell’s chapter compares three different TV versions of Persuasion made over a 36-year period (1971, 1995 and 2007), though I’m not sure I entirely agree that the 1971 one was slow-moving and wordy because of “the technological and institutional context” (p. 86). Compare it to Upstairs, Downstairs or The Stalls of Barchester from the same year and you’d get a very different sense of the way the past could be realised. I think Persuasion was made within a tradition of serialised dramatisations of “classic” novels, what Screening the Novel referred to as a “house style”, resulting in an old-fashioned mode of TV drama even for 1971. The question, I think, is how consciously the people who made it resisted the wider technological and institutional context. 

That’s got me thinking about the way any new dramatisation of a classic novel must balance making the old story relevant to a modern-day audience without feeling too “new”. A common objection to the 2022 Netflix version of Persuasion was that protagonist Anne Eliot directly addresses the audience in the style of Fleabag (2016-19). Obviously, Fleabag didn’t invent talking-to-camera, but that particular series is mentioned in much of the criticism. Such “gimmicks” (Variety) are “jarring” (Vanity Fair) in drama set in the past, resulting in a “disaster of anachronistic dialogue and annoyingly wry glances at the camera” (the Guardian). 

We could point to other anachronisms — the teeth and skin of the actors are too perfect, their costumes look brand new, the whole world on screen is too picturesque, clean and healthy — but that’s the same in most other costume dramas of this sort. That, I think is at the heart of the objection: it’s not about whether it authentically presents the early 19th century, but the expectations we have built up from previous screen dramatisations. Persuasion (2022) does not sufficiently look and feel like old TV.

In fact, I’d argue that the direct address to camera is a neat way of tackling a perennial issue in dramatisation: how to transpose both the content and flavour of narration in the book into dialogue used on screen. In this case, the direct address conveys something of Jane Austen’s use of free indirect speech, which gives the book an intimate, informal, even gossipy style. In that sense, it’s authentic. 

Deep Space Nine: Outside In Can Live With It

I am one of the 171 authors in the newly announced Outside In Can Live With It, an anthology of perspectives on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The book is out on 24 July and available to pre-order now, with proceeds going to the charity Against Malaria.

My contribution, “Red Flags”, is focused on episode #168, ’Til Death Do Us Part. By chance, I wrote it while working on the script for our documentary Terror of the Suburbs, which refers to the BBC sitcom Till Death Us Do Part (1965-71), and I had to pay close attention to the order of the “us” and the “do” in each case.

Which has got it right? 

Well, in fact, neither. I mean, both appear in the solemnisation of matrimony, depending which editions of The Book of Common Prayer and other prayer books you check. But if you’re an awful nerd and feel compelled to trace the phrase back to earliest historical source, you reach the 1549 edition of the Book of Common Prayer, and it says something else.

I N. take thee N. to my wedded wife, to have and to holde from this day forwarde, for better, for wurse, for richer, for poorer, in sickenes, and in health, to love and to cherishe, til death us departe: according to Goddes holy ordeinaunce: And therto I plight thee my trouth.

The suggestion is that it was written as “departe” but heard as “do part”; the sense of being together until death mutating into one of being together until death forcibly separates us from each other. That is subtly different but I think slightly more romantic, which may explain why it caught on.

The “do us part” is surely a latter correction so as not to split the infinitive. 

I decided this wouldn’t do for my entry in the Deep Space Nine book so inflict it on you here.

The Brigadier’s family hatchback

Old TV is time travel. It’s full of extraordinary, telling details, often stuff that the people making the programme weren’t conscious of as they made it. The things they took for granted or didn’t sweat can now seem so vividly odd. They’re well worth digging into. They are history alive.

For example, in the 1971 Doctor Who story Terror of the Autons, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and two of his officers drive a pale blue Austin Maxi, registration POF 61OG, which is involved in an action sequence in Episode 3. The shape of it, the boxy way it moves, the guttural sound of the engine, are all very distinctive of the time. “Gosh,” I thought, watching a bit today while fact-checking something something else, “I’d forgotten cars sounded like that…” 

The sound of the past, once so prevalent and now a detail from history. 

On the commentary recorded for the DVD release, producer Barry Letts and actors Nicholas Courtney and Katy Manning joke about the incongruity of such an ordinary car in the midst of an alien invasion. Basically, they ask, why doesn’t the heroic Brig drive something more, well, manly?

I think something quite interesting* is going on here. This car we see on screen isn’t ordinary at all. 

The Austin Maxi was the first car to be launched by the newly formed British Leyland Motor Corporation. That was on 24 April 1969 — less than 18 months before this particular model featured in scenes filmed for Doctor Who in September 1970. It’s brand new — and also more than that, too. 

Around this time, British Leyland’s publicity people seem to have loaned several Austin Maxis to BBC productions, surely as a means of subliminal advertising. The idea, of course, was to make the new model of car familiar to viewers, encouraging them to buy one. In that sense, this is the car of tomorrow — the next model that viewers’ will themselves drive. And that fits with this story, and Doctor Who of the time, being set in the very near future.

That’s why, I think, that in September 1970 it didn’t seem incongruous to the production team for Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart of the UN’s Intelligence Taskforce to drive into battle in a five-door hatchback. At least, it wasn’t incongruous enough for them to put him behind the wheel of something else.

The irony is that the subliminal advertising worked. People did become familiar with and buy Austin Maxis, so this particular model took on a range of associations as an ordinary, family car. It was once the aspirational new car of the future. That it now feels incongruous is a sign of how much we’ve moved on. 

See also

• 15 years of The Coup — or how I gave the Brigadier a knighthood
• My long-ago plan to make him a Lord and all
• More of me wanging on about the Third Doctor’s era of Doctor Who

My family the refugees

On 2 December 1677, a certain Jean Guerier (sic) from Paris was recorded in a list of refugees arriving at the Huguenot Church in Threadneedle Street, London.

That word, “refugee”, was relatively new. According to the OED, it was first used in English in 1628, in specific reference to Huguenots — the Protestant asylum-seekers fleeing persecution in Catholic France.

The “T” in Jean’s listing is for témoignage or “testament”, meaning that when he arrived at the church in London he presented a document to confirm that he was a practising member of the Huguenot church in France.

That the “T” was listed shows that témoignages were important in being granted asylum in England. But not everyone had them — many names in the same list don’t have an accompanying “T”. It seems that some refugees made a point of not carrying them as, in France, being caught with such a document was evidence of trying to escape the Catholic church and state. Penalties included enslavement or execution. 

What courage did it take to acquire this declaration of faith in the first place and then carry it, hidden away somewhere on your person? If Jean got the document in Paris, the place named in the listing, he must have carried it the 125 miles / 200 km to the coast, or about four days’ ride on horseback. Where did he stay along the way? Who helped him or turned a blind eye? What dangers did he face?

Once Jean reached the coast, who took him across to England and how perilous was the journey? There are accounts from the time of would-be refuges drowning in the Channel. Those who made it, often with few possessions, could face a mixed reception.

Officially, the king and Parliament welcomed Huguenot refugees. Charities were set up to support them. But there were also protests and riots against them. Pamphlets accused Huguenots of low standards in morality, housing and hygiene, and of eating strange food.

What did the Huguenots make of London, this utopia of virtue and good health? Sadly, I’ve not seen any accounts from their perspective. Even the log of refugees and their témoignage documents — published as a book by the Huguenot Society of London in 1909 and now available online — is only a partial record. The book explains that the original log got wet, erasing listings on the bottom of each page. The names of members of my family, perhaps ones who traveled with Jean or followed him soon after, may well be lost in these lacunae.

In what survives, we can trace something of the life Jean made for himself in London. There is a listing for a Paul Guerrier, son of Jean and native of (ie born in) London. He was 20 years-old on 24 June 1702, so born c. 1682, five years after Jean arrived. 

The widowed Ester Guerrier listed after Paul, with a témoignage recorded at the Huguenot Church in London on 1 November 1674, is also the first Guerrier ever recorded in England, from when she got married at the same church on 27 September 1654. How Ester and Jean were related isn’t clear and there’s nowhere else we can really go to check. In France, many Huguenots refused to have marriages or baptisms in the Catholic Church and what Protestant records there may have been were largely destroyed.

But the Huguenot Church in London holds other documentation, including baptism records for more of Jean Guerrier’s children: Jacques (on 10 September 1684), Jean Pierre (16 August 1686) and Marie (30 January 1688). Their mother — Jean Guerrier’s wife — is listed as, respectively, “Marie Jenings”, “Marie Jaine” and “Marie Jenngs”, the discrepancy in spelling suggesting some confusion around a foreign name pronounced with an accent. Was she also from France? If so, did she accompany Jean when he escaped from Paris?

There’s no baptism record for Jean’s son Paul and no témoignage listing for Jacques, Jean Pierre or Marie when they reached adulthood (as with Paul). Was Marie Jenings/Jaine/Jenngs Paul’s mother? And what about the Anne Guerrier, listed in attendance at the baptism of Jean Pierre but nowhere else? With partial records, we can only guess connections.

Note that the three children were baptised with French first names, as if to keep some vestige of the culture Jean had left behind. But the Goldsmiths Company has a record of a John Peter Guerrier son of John, which is surely our Jean Pierre and his father Jean. John is listed as a “taylor” based in St Anne’s Westminster; his son was apprenticed as a goldsmith in 1700, aged 14, and allocated his mark in 1717. 

(An article in the Proceedings of the Huguenot Society from 1933 says John Peter was made free in 1716 not 1717, and was then working at the Mitre, on the Strand. His surname was also listed as “Guerrie”.)

Did Jean’s son give the English versions of his own and his father’s names when he signed up with the Goldsmith Company, or did the company impose anglicisation on the teenage apprentice? Why only anglicise the first names and not the Guerrier bit? We don’t know. 

But on 29 September 1698, there’s a record (Pat. Roll. 10. William III part IX) of the denization of Jean Guerrier — not John. Denization was a partial form of citizenship, less expensive than full naturalisation which until 1844 could only be granted to those born outside the country by a private Act of Parliament. Some 21 years after arriving in England with his témoignage document, Jean became a denizen of his adopted country but his children were citizens by birth and adopted English names.

In 1708, a James Guerrier married Hannah Sales in St Clement Danes — then a slum. The groom was listed as “22” but the guess is that this James was Jean’s other son Jacques (b. 1684), so actually 24. Records from the same parish also list an Edward Guerrier. There were so few Guerriers in England at the time — even in the 1881 census, there were just 46 in the whole country — we think Edward was a close relative, perhaps even another brother of James/Jacques, John Peter / Jean Pierre and Paul, ie another son of Jean. 

If so, Jean is my direct ancestor. And if not he's some sort of nth-great uncle.

While Jean’s arrival in London suggests adventure, Edward’s story haunts me. We know little of him except that he was buried at St Clement Danes on 2 October 1730. On 7 February 1732, the Archdeaconal Court of Middlesex recorded his impoverished widow Mary effectively putting up her three surviving sons for adoption. George, Christopher and William Guerrier were given into the charge of guardians David Porter and Jonathan Spalding.

Without that judgment, the boys would surely have starved. But, supported by the local parish, these poor sons of an immigrant prospered. George entered the City of London Draper’s Company as a painter on Grub Street. His son William (born 11 January 1747) was a member of the Painter-Stainer’s guild but seems to have fallen on hard times by the end of his life. William’s son George (born 8 July 1771) was a grazier or farmer on the Isle of Dogs and did well. Indeed, he was the first of a line of successful butchers and cattle salesmen in London, lasting into the 20th century. (George is also the most recent common ancestor I share with Edith Guerrier of Boston.)

I didn’t know any of this until a few years ago. The history of my own distinctive surname was lost in a lacuna, not least because my paternal grandfather was estranged in his teens from that side of the family. He handed down next to nothing of any family lore he may ever have gleaned. 

Thanks to Micol at the Huguenot Library, part of the National Archives in Kew, for helping me untangle all this, and my distant Guerrier cousins who walked the path before me.

Screening the Novel — The Theory and Practice of Literary Dramatization, by Robert Giddings, Keith Selby and Chris Wensley

Published in 1990, this short, 174-page book examines the process of adapting “classic” novels for the screen. “Intended for a general as well as an academic readership”, says the back-cover blurb, it begins with chapters on what is lost in dramatisation, the issues involved in recreating the past authentically and the traditions of the BBC’s Classic Serial, which had (it says) been a fixture of the schedules since a six-part adaptation of Trollope’s The Warden in 1951 (p. 100).

There are then two chapters on dramatisations of Great Expectations by Dickens — mostly focused on the film version directed by David Lean (1946) — and three chapters covering the BBC Classic Serial’s 16-part dramatisation of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1987). 

The latter include interviews with producer Terrance Dicks and others involved in production and promotion of the serial. These interviews were conducted by Chris Wensley in autumn 1987 and spring 1988, so offer a perspective from and soon after broadcast. Had the interviews taken place a month or two later, the perspectives might have been very different. In the summer of 1998, BBC management decided, rather abruptly, to cancel the Classic Serial altogether just as production was getting under way on the production to follow Vanity Fair. The dramatisation of The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey, broadcast in September and October 1988, was the last in the 37-year run. Screening the Novel doesn’t address the cancellation but provides insights into why that happened, which I can match up to other stuff I have been reading. 

Vanity Fair was well received critically, with several examples cited in this book. However, viewing figures, averaging 5m per episode, were down on previous Classic Serials (p. 165). This, the authors suggest, was because the “cynicism and sexual innuendo” of Vanity Fair did not “suit all Sunday teatime family audiences” (p. 166). That suggests the Classic Serial was usually “cosy”, “safe”, even “conservative” — or at least that was the perception.

The format of Vanity Fair is criticised by the authors: 16 episodes too much of a commitment for the audience, the half-hour duration of each episode not long enough to satisfy. At the time Screening the Novel was written, the hope was that a repeat re-edited as 10x 50-minute episodes would prove more successful. However, this version never materialised.

But whatever the faults of Vanity Fair, a lot of the criticism here is directed at the Classic Serial generally. The first chapter of Screening the Novel gives an overview of what it calls the “literature/screen debate”, largely taken up with the critique in Jonathan Miller’s book Subsequent Performances (Faber, 1986) of the inability of screen versions to match the richness and interplay of prose. 

I’ve got but have not yet read this book by Miller, who’d previously adapted several works for the screen: Alice in Wonderland (BBC, 1966), Whistle and I’ll Come to You (BBC, 1968), Take a Girl Like You (film, 1970) and six Shakespeare plays (BBC, 1980-82). The sense I get (for now) is that Miller felt that his screen adaptations of Shakespeare were more successful than those earlier works. Indeed, he wasn’t alone in seeing a fundamental difference in form, as Screening the Novel tells us that, 

“Within the BBC, a clear distinction is made between ‘adaptation’ and ‘dramatisation’. An ‘adaptation’ is the preparation of a television version of a work which is already in dramatic form, for example a stage play. A ‘dramatisation’ is the preparation of a television drama from a work which was not previously in dramatic form, for example a prose narrative.” (p. 24n)

Miller sees dramatisation as of less value than adaptation and even actively damaging to the source work. Screening the Novel cites his own examples of the richness and interplay of the prose in Great Expectations before he then concludes:

“There is no way in which a film could do justice to this artful alternation between indirect and direct speech. And in the dismal realisations of Dickens that now infect the screens of domestic television we are assaulted by pretentiously picturesque usurpers.” (p. 20, citing Miller in Subsequent Performances, p. 240). 

He doesn’t say which “dismal” TV productions he means but it’s pretty obvious given that Dickens was the Classic Serial’s “bread and butter and jam”, according to Terrance Dicks (p. 139). As script editor, Terrance oversaw TV dramatisations of Great Expectations (1981), Dombey and Son (1983) and The Pickwick Papers (1985); as producer, he oversaw dramatisations of Oliver Twist (also 1985) and David Copperfield (1986, the year Miller’s book was published). Screening the Novel asked Terrance for his response.

“TD: I actually had that argument with Jonathan Miller at the Edinburgh Festival. He argues that the dramatization of a novel inevitably damages the original, that future readers are corrupted and previous readers are disappointed. I think it’s nonsense, basically. As I said, he gave this idea in a speech at the Edinburgh Festival where I was also appearing on another panel and I was in the audience and leapt up and said, ‘I am the producer of the BBC-1 Classic Serial and you have been trying to put me out of business for the last hour!’ — which got a nice laugh. What I said was that I thought that we had three classes of viewers. People who knew and loved the book and could then compare our version. People who had not read the book but would see it on television and would then be led to go to the book and read it: obviously it’s not for nothing the publishers do tie-in editions. There is always a huge upsurge in libraries when anything appears on television, a lot of people go to the book, so we gain readers.” (pp. 101-2)

Screening the Novel provides evidence to support these claims. Joanna Webb, promotion manager at Pan Books, says the company had been selling “about fifty copies a month” of Vanity Fair before it brought out its tie-in edition with the TV serial. Having paid the BBC between £3,500 and £4,000 — “which for us is a lot of money” — for the “exclusive use of the photograph of the cast in the production on the cover”, Pan hoped for “fifteen to twenty thousand extra sales” but actually sold “thirty thousand … during August and September [1988]” (pp. 117-8).

There’s evidence from a librarian of a corresponding surge in loans of Vanity Fair (p.168). The authors also quote a 1985 study led by by Dr JM Wober at IBA Research Dept into the reading habits of viewers of dramatisations. Of 3,000 people surveyed, some 46% — or 1,380 — bought or borrowed a book having seen it dramatised, though one quarter of these (some 345), “admitted to reading [only] half or less than half of it” (pp. 22-3). That still leaves more than a third of those surveyed — 1,035 of 3,000 — who bought or borrowed the book and read most if not all of it.

In his response to Miller’s criticism, Terrance says the third type of viewer were those who had not and never would read the original book but would gain something of it from seeing the dramatisation. There’s a sense in all this of imparting, through the screen, the value of the book and of reading. I can understand Terrance’s enthusiasm here as a child from a modest, working-class background whose love of reading led to grammar school, Cambridge and escape. “I got caught in an educational updraft,” Terrance told Toby Hadoke in 2013 of the Butler Education Act 1944, which came into force just before Terrance turned 11 in 1946. “Anybody with a bit of promise was shoved on.” I think he saw the Classic Serial as a means to share the benefits he himself had enjoyed, shoving on a mass audience.

But such a paternalistic view was rather outmoded by the late 1980s.

“As Ien Ang (1991) has described [in Desperately Seeking the Audience (Routledge, 1991)], the BBC moved from a conception of a disciplined audience (where programme types, levels of intellectual content and scheduling patterns would gradually school the audience to listen or watch in a particular way) to a conception of the audience as citizens or consumers exercising a free choice.” (Jonathan Bignell and Stephen Lacey, British Television Drama — Past, Present and Future (2nd edition, 2014, pp. 11-12.)

So the Classic Serial was seen as at once “schooling” the audience — ie it was worthy and hard work — yet also bland, safe and easy. As well as the criticisms of the form made by Jonathan Miller, Screening the Novel cites Hanif Kureishi:

“It’s as if the real passion of the writers … gets lost in the peripherals which are to do with the look of the thing, and with the kind of softening out and flattening out that you get … it’s as if the stories are pulled out, whereas the ideas are left behind.” (p. 100)

A footnote on page 119 says Kureishi made these comments about the Classic Serial on an edition of The Media Show, shown on Channel 4 in May 1987. IMDB suggests this was actually episode S1E7 of The Media Show, broadcast 10 June 1987 — and that Terrance Dicks was on the same programme. I’d love to know more about this.

Screening the Novel also addresses the look or house style of the Classic Serial, dictated by studio and outside broadcast recording on videotape. Again, there is the sense of this being an outmoded form, with film productions becoming synonymous with “quality”. Given all this, we could understand the Classic Serial being cancelled on aesthetic grounds, a relic of an old way of making TV and simply no longer relevant.

Except that Terrance Dicks later gave very different reasons for the end of the Classic Serial. In 1992 — four years after leaving his staff role as producer and so off the BBC leash — he was asked at a Doctor Who convention about the cancellation and potential resurrection of Doctor Who. His answer put that in the context of the wider BBC. Science-fiction, he said, was much like costume drama.

“The two things are expensive. I’ve always working in the wrong areas, you know! And the classic serial, which I used to produce, eventually the BBC stopped making, not because it wasn’t popular, not because it didn’t sell overseas, not because they weren’t good shows. Everybody thought they were wonderful, and the jewel in the crown of the BBC. They just did not have the money.”

This was because, he said,

“No politician wanted to up the licence fee because it was unpopular, and so the BBC found that its income was shrinking and that its output wasn’t. Ultimately, you try and do cheaper and simpler programmes, but at the end of the day, the only way you really save money is by not making the programmes.” (Michael Procter, ‘Terrance Dicks interview’ (26 September 1992), published in Celestial Toyroom #191 (vol. 18, no. 1), January 1993, p. 8.)

I’m watching Vanity Fair at the moment. Four episodes in, it’s a confident, bold production, textured and nuanced and rich. It’s also very relevant to its late ‘80s audience, being all about money. Given the plot, it’s ironic that the BBC couldn’t afford to make programmes of this sort any more. And then there’s this, amid the praise cited in Screening the Novel:

“The Listener for 17-24 December [1987] informed its readers that Vanity Fair was chosen by the Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, as his ‘programme of the year’, and the Daily Mirror on 9 January 1988, that the Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher, had asked the BBC to send her video cassettes of all 16 episodes for her Christmas viewing.” (p. 167)

Enjoying but not paying for lavish entertainment is exactly what happens in Vanity Fair, such as when a young, unscrupulous gentlemen encourages his friends to join him for an evening at Vauxhall Gardens, then contrives to have someone else pay. From today’s perspective, that link couldn’t be more on the nail, as the rogue’s name is George Osborne.

For more of this sort of thing, see Billy Smart’s interview with Terrance Dicks about the Classic Serial from 2015.

For more from me on the history of TV, see my book David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television, and these old blog posts:

• Writing for Television by Sir Basil Bartlett (1955)
• A Survey of Television by Stuart Hood (1967)
• The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, vol. V: Competition by Asa Briggs (1995) 
• The Intimate Screen by Jason Jacobs (2000)

Brat Farrar, by Josephine Tey

We know from the off that Bartholomew “Brat” Farrar is a crook. He’s a young American hustler, sometimes working as a groom or blacksmith, or anything else to get by. Importantly, he’s also got good manners, thanks to having been brought up in a better kind of orphanage. 

A nefarious friend thinks Brat looks rather like Simon Ashby, the heir to a great estate in England who is just about to come into his inheritance at the age of 21. Simon was a twin, but his slightly older brother Patrick disappeared at 13, apparently taking his own life soon after the tragic death of the twins’ parents in a plane crash. The nefarious friend knew this family and — for a fee — provides Brat with all he knows about them, meaning Brat can pretend to be the long lost, prodigal heir.

Some people believe at once that Patrick has walked back into their lives. Others don’t and are hostile. Several people aren’t sure. As Brat inveigles himself into the family, he convinces at least some of the doubters — but also starts to form attachments with these likeable people. Can he go through with defrauding them? 

It’s all brilliantly suspenseful, even before an attempt is made on Brat’s life. And then he starts to suspect a dark secret at the heart of this respectable family, a longstanding injustice that he alone can uncover. Only he can’t do that without exposing the truth about himself…

Its ingenious and effective, making a compelling protagonist out of the most unscrupulous rogue. Unlike Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley the interloper here is not a monster. There’s something more nuanced and interesting going on, and we’re rooting for Brat all the way.

The characters (expertly realised in this audio version by Carole Boyd) and their world are vividly realised: Brat (and we) must negotiate the complex web of connections between this rich family, their staff and the local community. There’s a lot about horses, on which the estate’s fortune depends. It’s quite a trick to make this so utterly compelling to a reader who has never been in the saddle. The different personalities of horses, the psychology of getting them to do what the rider wants and the thrill of competition are all used to great effect. And in the understanding of horses, we come to understand these people — and uncover the long hidden secret.

Tey tells us from the start that Brat is not Patrick Ashby but towards the end she withholds key information to keep us in suspense. It’s cheating, I think, but of the best kind — like a conjuring trick. At the start, there’s little chance of a happy ending. Things then build and build until that prospect is impossible. 

And yet, with a flourish, the last pages neatly tie it all up. It’s a thrilling story, arrestingly told, and we leave it wholly satisfied.

One more thought: I wonder if this was an influence on Saltburn. 

See also:

• Me on The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey

Cat Gamer vol 1, by Wataru Nadatani

I read this fun, cutesy manga to check it was suitable for the nine year-old Lady Vader. It’s like visiting the inside of her brain.

Riko is a studious, bustling office worker but won’t socialise with colleagues or tell them anything about her life outside work. On the dot of five she rushes home to lose herself in computer games, losing hours to these epic adventures.

Then one day a security guard comes into the office with a stray cat he found in the car park, and Riko falls for it at first sight and takes it home. She will treat the cat like a quest in one of her games: she will max up this cat.

Things do not run smoothly. The cat is manic, interrupts Riko’s games and won’t stay still long enough to be photographed. But Riko gets help from a nice young woman at the pet shop and some very patient vets, and she and the cat generally have a good if chaotic time.

It’s nicely observed and very warm-hearted, with Riko anxious and socially awkward but brought out of herself by this cat (whether she likes it or not). They’re both great characters. Each chapter is told from Riko’s perspective but with a coda from the point of view of the cat.

By the end of this first book, the cat has a name and an online profile of cute pics — but Riko’s colleagues have found the site and are close to realising that this is Riko’s home. Will she die of cringe?

I’m hoping LadyVader enjoys this enough to justify getting the next volume so I can find out.

The Legend of Nigel Kneale: 1. The Creeping Unknown

An absolutely packed deluxe 4KUHD and Blu-ray edition of The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) is now available to preorder direct from Hammer. It will be released on 9 June. Order now to avoid disappointment.

Among the many, many treats listed on the Hammer site is this:

The Legend of Nigel Kneale: The Creeping Unknown. Who was Nigel Kneale? Toby Hadoke investigates the man and his influence in part one of a brand-new two-part documentary.

Produced by me and my brother Tom for Eklectics, and directed by Jon Clarke and edited by Robin Andrews, this authoritative new documentary includes expert analysis from Dr Tom Attah, Joel Morris, Andy Murray, Brontë Schiltz and some other people I won't mention just yet to add a bit of suspense.

Toby Hadoke, is of course, an authority on all things Nigel Kneale and Quatermass and I'm looking forward to his imminent book.

Sirens of Audio podcast: Jean Marsh remembered

The Sirens of Audio podcast has put out a special tribute episode to the late Jean Marsh, who died just over a week ago at the age of 80. Hosts Dwayne and Philip speak to Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred about working with Jean on the 1989 Doctor Who story Battlefield, then interrogate me at some length about the trilogy of audio plays I wrote for Jean starting with Home Truths.

The episode is available wherever you get your podcasts, and there's also a video version on YouTube.

In 2023, I was interviewed by Dwayne and Philip about The Anachronauts - another Doctor Who audio story I wrote for Jean. Last week, I also spoke to the Power of 3 podcast about my work with Jean Marsh.

The Go-Between, by Osman Yousefzada

Something a bit different for Easter: this Sunday at 2 pm, I'm interviewing author and artist Osman Yousefzada about his extraordinary memoir, The Go-Between, at a free online event as part of Macfest. 

• Sign up for free tickets at Eventbrite

Blurb as follows:

Join Osman Yousefzada, an internationally renowned artist and writer.

He will discuss his Memoir The Go-Between reviewed by Stephen Fry as ‘one of the greatest childhood memoirs of our time’. The book is narrated through the eyes of a child, trying to make sense of the adult world. 

His visual art practice, has been shown internationally and his works explore themes of rupture, migration, intergenerational tacit knowledge, and these conversations take forms in sculpture, textiles and installation work. Yousefzada says ‘he copies his mother to become an artist. 

Hosted by: Simon Guerrier, writer, producer, author of Sherlock Holmes - The Great War (Titan, 2021) and chair of the Books Committee for the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain.

ETA: I made some notes in advance of the interview and present them here, revised to incorporate some of what he told me.

Osman is roughly my age, born in Birmingham to migrant parents from Pakistan. His mother could not speak English; his parents were both illiterate in English and their mother tongue of Pashto. The Go-Between movingly tells the story of Osman's childhood and adolescence, as part of a strictly observant Muslim household and community in Birmingham in the 1980s. It’s honest and insightful, often funny and sometimes harrowing. I found it compelling.

Particularly effective is the way it’s almost all told from his childhood perspective, as he understood things (or didn't) at the time. In this way, he is direct witness to evocative sights, textures and flavours - and to threats of violence inside and outside the home - but takes all these things as they come, without judgment. When, for example, he describes a sleepover with other boys where they gang up and pull down his trousers. He describes the adults taking this seriously but doesn't quite understand why. We, as readers, do.

That’s not to say this memoir is uncritical. We can, I think, infer what he feels now in many cases. More than that, in telling this story of an insular way of living, Osman is also constantly making connections. For example, one chapter tells about about girls who “come of age” (reach puberty) and are withdrawn from school and view, and in some cases sent away to Pakistan, as dictated by their fathers and the other men of the community. Then Osman, who is not allowed to watch TV and rarely looks at a newspaper, spots headlines about Margaret Thatcher.

“She herself had been sent away, from her house at Number 10, by her very own men.” (p. 224)

Osman is a shrewd observer, the memoir pepper with vivid, telling detail. He's also had access - for a time - to a rarely glimpsed hidden world. His original title for the book was  “God and Jelly” but I think The Go-Between is a better fit. So much of what he describes here is a world of strictly observed binary divisions: Muslim and non-Muslim, immigrant and born-here, white and non-white, male and female, the rules in the house and for navigating outside...

Near the end of the book, he describes a formative time as an art student in London, going out to clubs with his friend Emma, where he, “saw genders become fluid” (p. 340). Throughout this story, he has been fluid, somewhere between the two binaries - a boy among the girls and women, a child of his parents’ community and the world outside it. But he’s not alone: other children must navigate the nuances between these two worlds, there are his mother’s friends who wear lipstick or go without a veil, whose husbands - gasp! - serve them tea.

By conveying the vibrant colour and texture of his early life, he demonstrates that none of us live in black and white.

Power of 3 podcast #378: Jean Marsh

The latest episode of the Power of 3 podcast is a tribute to brilliant, Emmy award-winning actress Jean Marsh, who sadly died last week at the age of 90.

As part of this, co-host Kenny Smith interviewed me about working with Jean on five Doctor Who audio productions for Big Finish, recorded between 2008 and 2012. What a happy, creatively satisfying time that all was. I'm so grateful to Jean and to everyone else involved.

We also hear from Jean herself, with a full hour of her being interviewed on stage by the great Jeremy Bentham at a convention in 2003. It's lovely to hear her on such sparkling form, exactly as sharp, incisive and impish as I remember her. 

My tedious nerd brain delights at tales of location filming in Death Valley for The Twilight Zone and on the origins of Upstairs, Downstairs. She says her catsuit as Sara Kingdom in Doctor Who was brown (43.41) and that she was asked to stay on beyond her nine episodes in The Daleks' Master Plan but declined (46.26).

If you like that sort of thing, you can also watch Jean Marsh interviewed alongside Clive Swift by Matthew Swift after a screening of the Alfred Hitchock film Frenzy at the BFI on 31 August 2012. I was there, the last time I saw her and just before she fell ill. Hail and farewell, Jean. 

(Image shows Simon Holub's magnificent cover artwork for Home Truths, the first thing I wrote for Jean Marsh.)

Death at the White Hart, by Chris Chibnall

This is ideal holiday reading, a fast-moving, relatively concise murder mystery from the creator of Broadchurch and in a similar style. It begins with a man driving back home into Dorset at 2 am discovering a body on the road. This body is striking: a naked man in an old sack, trussed to a wooden chair with antlers fixed to his head. 

The discovery is made on page 3 but it's not until page 42 that we discover who has been murdered. The effect is to make us lean in, to read more carefully for clues about who this might be. We interrogate all that happens in the meantime as we meet a wealth of different characters from Fleetcombe and nearby Bredy - including a beleagured delivery driver, a trans barber and a refuge from Ukraine who has married one of the locals. As Russell T Davies says in his back-cover blurb, it "feels like it's set right now."

Detective Sergeant Nicola Bridge has her own secrets to be uncovered over the course of the story. Of course, she already knows them but we don't - another effective bit of suspense. Her relationship with eager-to-please young Detective Constable Harry Ward is immediately endearing. I suspect it's probably quite easy to write world-weary detectives with difficult home lives but it's quite a skill to write them with such warmth.

In fact, Chibnall is great on all these different characters - immediately real and distinct, and liable to clash. Often, people turn out to be more than they appear: the last person we'd expect turns out to have been having an affair with the victim, while another character who initially seems lazy turns out to be proactive in a particular way, greatly aiding the enquiry.

It's not exactly a cosy crime novel given the constant sense of threat in this quiet community, such as organised crime, domestic violence or when a convicted criminal catches up with a grass. One thread to the story is a century-old crime and gross act of injustice, but really the focus here is on what happens next, such as whether a relationship can survive or a character stay in their home. There's a constant, uneasy feeling of things about to kick-off.

Then there's the reasoning behind the murder itself, which is relayed over more than one chapter to give it full, devastating effect. I was completely blind-sided by the identity of the murderer and yet it all makes perfect, awful sense. In people's tragedies, in their friendships, in the bittersweet final pages, Chibnall is really good with people.

My one note is that what this lacks of the "right now" is any mention of the weather, so much part of daily conversation in real life and requiring last-minute changes of plan. How different things might have been for characters sneaking out at night and/or starting fires if there were torrential rain. Without enough rain, setting fires could quickly spread - as we've seen in recent days. I'm acutely conscious of this having read the book on holiday in Rhodes, where unseasonably cold, wet weather meant less time to enjoy this on the beach. I finished it in the dark on the flight home late last night, its effect very different out of the sunshine.

The Martian Conspiracy, by Mary Robinette Kowal

Hello from the island of Rhodes, where we are having a short break, retreading the footsteps that the Dr and I took 25 years ago on our first ever holiday together, and also tracing the path of Mary and Charles Newton, the artist and archaeologist who were here in 1863, as detailed in the Dr's exhibition.

I shall post a bit more about what we've been up to but the weather has been odd. We left bright, warm sunshine in Macclesfield (!) to find it grey and rainy here. It's raining again as I write this but he sun has been out pretty solidly, if often accompanied by an icy breeze. The guy serving us in the nice restaurant we went to last night pointed out the snow-topped mountains across the water in Turkey. Until a couple of years ago, he said, that would have been unthinkable in April. Now it seems to be normal, and the locals and the tourist trade are adjusting.

That chimes with this 'ere book that I bought specially for the holiday, the fourth instalment in the Lady Astronaut series I have avidly followed from the start (see my posts on The Calculating Stars, The Fated Sky and The Relentless Moon). In the first of these, in 1952, a meteor strikes Earth and obliterates Washington DC. In this new book, we've reached 1970 where there is ever more evidence of massive, devastating change to the climate as a direct result of the blast and all the material thrown into the atmosphere. A powerful lobby tries to downplay the evidence and just continue as before.

This is all in the background as the new novel is set on Mars - and in Martian orbit - with the now 48 year-old Dr Elma York and her husband Nathanial part of the crew working to establish the first permanent settlement in time for more arrivals.

A lot of the story here is about the logistics of the operation - the priority list of tasks that need doing, ensuring people get fed when there are limited resources. There are also the interpersonal politics of lots of gifted, ambitious people from different countries and cultures. Elma must navigate one character's odd, awkward sense of humour, another's preferred pronouns and the objections of some fellow crewmembers to being referred to as "colonists" given the precedent set on Earth. There are competing egos, and the issue of how much independence they all have from their supposed line of command back home - if Earth even is home any more.

There's also an ongoing mystery about what exactly happened on the First Expedition to Mars, involving some of the people Elma lives and works with who really don't want to talk about it. As Elma worries at that, there are plenty of new challenges: her period is late, then a change of leadership on Earth wants all  female crewmembers to leave the Martian surface, then there's a serious incident that risks lots of people's lives...

It's largely another engaging, emotional and thrilling read. What a delight to be back in Elma's company again and catch up with her various friends and colleagues. I was fascinated, too, by the notes at the end explaining what the fiction owes to fact, in both real space history and ideas about future missions to Mars.

It's interesting, too, to revisit this alternate history of the space programme in the light of the TV series For All Mankind, which does a number of similar things, such as giving real people from our own timeline more to do in space. I think the big difference is that the Martian residents here comprise a lot of married, heterosexual couples. In all the discussions of birth control and non-penetrative sex due to limited numbers of condoms, there's very little about what crewmembers might get up to if they're not married or don't have their spouse with them in space. What if someone is gay or has an extra-martial hook-up? The crew are diverse but the sex, apparently, isn't. 

Now, Elma - who narrates the story and provides our frame of reference - admits to being a bit naive about some stuff relating to sex. Indeed, her advice to other couples turns out to be medically wrong and causes something of a crisis. So the absence - the blindness - is in character for the narrator. I can also see it being addressed in subsequent instalments, as more and more people reach Mars. 

At least, I hope it is. Because with Earth facing catastrophe, it's not just a question of who is deemed fit - and by who - to go to Mars. It's about who gets to have a future.

Space Security Service

Big Finish have announced that June 2025 will see the release of Space Security Service, a series of audio adventures produced by me and starring Jane Slavin and Joe Sims. Press release as follows:

The Space Security Service return!

Jane Slavin and Joe Sims star as Anya Kingdom and Mark Seven in two brand-new box sets of full cast audio drama from The Worlds of Doctor Who, coming soon from Big Finish Productions. 

They’re the guardians of the Solar System and Earth’s first line of defence. But now the agents of the Space Security Service face their greatest ever threat… 

Having joined David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor in the popular Dalek Universe series, the heroes of the Space Security Service will soon defend the universe once again in their own exciting adventures. Jane Slavin will return as Anya Kingdom, a special agent from the 41st century, alongside Joe Sims as her android colleague Mark Seven. 

These star-spanning escapades will take inspiration from the imaginative creations of Terry Nation. Nation devised the Space Security Service for the 1960s Doctor Who TV serials Mission to the Unknown and The Daleks’ Master Plan, and expanded upon them in the Dalek annuals and comics, as well as a never-made TV spin-off series, The Daleks. 

The fast-paced new adventures will see Anya and Mark encounter monsters from across the universe, from Voord in the Thames to a rogue Thal scientist. 

There are two box sets of The Worlds of Doctor Who – Space Security Service to look forward to, each comprising three thrilling episodes of full-cast audio drama. The first volume, The Voord in London, is due for release in June 2025; details of the second volume, due out in January 2026, will be announced at a later date.

Space Security Service: The Voord in London is now available to pre-order for just £19.99 (as a digital download to own), exclusively from Big Finish. But see the bargain offer below for both sets.

The three episodes in this first box set are: 

• The Voord in London by LR Hay 
• The Thal from G.R.A.C.E. by Felicia Barker 
• Allegiance by Angus Dunican 

Producer Simon Guerrier said: “This series has long been in the works – arguably since Terry Nation tried to launch his Daleks TV show back in the 1960s. We've taken that as our cue and come up with a fast-moving, fun series of adventures for Space Security Service agents Anya Kingdom and Mark Seven, who were such a hit in the Dalek Universe range. 

“We start with Anya back in London in the 20th century, working undercover as a police officer on the trail of one group of aliens - and then getting caught up with another. Soon the action moves to... well, just wait and see!” 

Big Finish listeners can save money by pre-ordering both volumes of Space Security Service in an exclusive multibuy bundle for just £38 (download to own). 

All the above prices (including pre-order and multibuy bundle discounts) are fixed for a limited time only and guaranteed no later than August 2025. 

The director of Space Security Service is Barnaby Kay, the script editor is John Dorney and the cover art is by Grant Kempster. 

Bowler Hats and Kinky Boots, by Michael Richardson

I’ve completed Part One of this enormous, comprehensive and highly readable volume, the 350 pages that cover production of the 1960s TV series The Avengers. The book goes on to cover the stage and radio versions, The New Avengers TV series, the 1998 movie and a whole load more besides — all beyond the scope of my latest research project. I hope to come back to this stuff another time.

In what I’ve read, Michael Richardson lays out an astonishing compendium of facts. If you want to know the make and registration of any vehicle in an episode, the make and calibre of any weapon or the identity of real-life locations, it’s all here. He’s clearly had access to production files and scripts, though it’s not always clear when the behind-the-scenes detail comes from contemporary paperwork or the later memories of cast and crew. As always with this kind of endeavour, I yearn for extensive footnotes spelling out the sources — which, admittedly, I’ve not always been able to include in the books I write myself.

In writing my own books, I’m acutely conscious of not simply listing a series of what took place on what date; the trick is to bring the material alive, to humanise it, teasing out the different personalities of those involved and the bigger story going on. There’s lots of that here and a lot that is suggestive. No one seems to have a bad word to say about gentlemanly Patrick Macnee, the actor in the leading role of not-always gentlemanly agent John Steed. His co-stars Honor Blackman (who played Cathy Gale) and Diana Rigg (Emma Peel) also meet with universal praise. With everyone else, I think Richardson frames things in the best of light but we can quite often read between the lines…

Again and again, I was astonished by the story being told here. There are often creative sparks and clashing egos. But even the hard numbers cited tell their own eye-popping tale.

I already knew that producers Sydney Newman and Leonard White at the ITV franchise ABC conceived The Avengers as a vehicle for actor Ian Hendry, keen to keep him under contract when another show, Police Surgeon, ended prematurely. What I didn’t know — what I can hardly get my head round — is that, from initial conception, it took just six weeks to get the first episode into production (p. 22). 

The idea you could have an idea for a series and get it made so quickly is unthinkable now. At the time, there were others working in television who would have found it unthinkable, too. No wonder there was a culture clash when Newman moved to the BBC and it took months to get Doctor Who started.

What was created so quickly remains compelling more than 60 years later. The first 15 minutes survive of Hot Snow, the first episode of The Avengers (1961). We see Ian Hendry established as a hard-working, cool young doctor with a nice fiancee — who is then shot and killed. It’s a cliche to kill a woman as an inciting incident like this but we at least get to know her first (it’s not simply her smiling at the camera while in bed), and her death is the pay-off to a very suspenseful sequence where she and Hendry chatter happily as they move round their home / office, oblivious to the villain who has broken in and keeps just out of sight (to them but not the viewer).

It’s slick and edgy and exciting, and then stops abruptly because the last two-thirds of the story are missing from the archive. The script included on the DVD box-set reveals what happens next: when the police seem unable to solve the crime, Hendry’s character investigates. In so doing, he meets the enigmatic John Steed (Macnee), who helps him uncover a plot to smuggle heroin, avenge the murder and bring the villains to book. Over subsequent weeks, Steed would call on him again…

Richardson is good on the logistics of production. At this stage, the actors would spend 10-14 days rehearsing each episode, with time out to film particular sequences that would lend a credible air or reality. They’d then spend a day at Teddington Studios, where after technical rehearsals they would perform the episode — “as live” if recorded in advance but often broadcast live. The episodes were made using electronic cameras and recorded on videotape, with its characteristic fluid and intimate feel. I’ve watched a lot of old telly, and The Avengers isn’t perfect — Richardson lists exactly when you can spot boom microphones in shot or actors fluff their lines — but it’s an ambitious, accomplished slick programme of its type.

That was recognised at the time. Made by and shown on the ITV franchise ABC, The Avengers did well in its first year. But, for reasons that Richardson explains, star Ian Hendry’s other commitments meant he wouldn’t be available for a second run. That could well have been the end of this series — a footnote in TV history rather than the icon it became.

Instead, the production team decided to make enigmatic Steed the lead character and introduce some new costars. For three episodes, scripts written for Hendry were given to Jon Rollason, playing an almost identical character. Richardson seems to suggest there was never any thought that they might extend Rollason’s contract — he was just a stopgap while they readied scripts for the two favoured candidates to take the supporting role. Honor Blackman was contracted for six episodes as Mrs Cathy Gale, the tough anthropologist widow of a white settler in Kenya killed by the Mau Mau. Julie Stevens was contracted for six episodes as singer Venus Smith, the scripts contriving means for her to perform numbers in each of her adventures. Blackman, of course, had her contract extended — and became sole costar to Macnee in Season 3 (1963-64).

Richardson explains why The Avengers proved such a hit, the way those involved made it something different and distinctive and fun. He tells us that the budget fro Season 3 was £5,100 per 50-minute episode (p. 79), still recorded basically “as live” on videotape at Teddington Studios. That budget is not too far from the £2,300 allocated to each 25-minute episode of Doctor Who being made by the BBC at the same time. But the team behind The Avengers had ambitions to sell their series to mainstream US networks, which required a higher resolution than could be achieved by videotape production in the UK at the time.

So, Season 4 of The Avengers (1965-66) was made on film. Each episode still took about a fortnight, but was now made bit by by, with about five minutes filmed per day. Instead of completing an “as live” production with a pretty much finished product, the film then needed editing and dubbing. It was all a much more time-consuming and expensive process — allocated £25,000 per episode and closer to £29,000 in practice (p. 132), more than five and a half times per episode compared to Season 3.

What astounds me is that they could find the investment to do this without a US sale agreed in advance, all on a gamble. They had made most of Season 4 before that the deal was agreed, with production taking place on The Danger Makers, the 20th of 26 episodes, when on 25 November 1967, the sale to the American ABC network was announced. (Yes, confusingly, a series made by the British ABC was sold to a US network with the same name.) The deal entailed making the next season in colour, with a corresponding rise in budget.

Seasons 5 and 6 cost £50,000 per episode (p. 191 and p. 264) — more than the combined budget of 12 episodes of Doctor Who, still being made in black-and-white and on videotape at the same time. All eight episodes of the Cybermen invading contemporary London in The Invasion, plus all four episodes on the alien world of The Krotons, and you pay for a single colour episode of The Avengers in late 1968. Which was still a year before ITV even began broadcasting in colour. It’s a gobsmacking amount of money. The gall of it! The chutzpah!

That money came with conditions: the US network had a say in casting the successor to Diana Rigg and in the style and tone of the series. This then led to problems.

When towards the end of production on the third episode of Season 6, the US network executives (and several people in the UK) thought the series had taken a wrong turn, there was an extraordinary about turn, carefully detailed by Richardson. The producer and script editor were fired and a new crew were brought in, led by Brian Clemens - who had left the series earlier that year under what may have been a bit of a cloud. With Clemens back in charge, all three episodes were reworked to a greater or lesser extent, the team changed the colour of lead actress Linda Thorson’s hair and introduced a new leading character in Steed's boss, Mother (Patrick Newall). According to Richardson, Clemens came in with carte blanche to do as he liked and he seems to have spared no one’s feelings where there were things he didn’t like. Basically: high drama.

By this point, says Richardson, The Avengers was being sold to 70 countries and ABC in the US moved it to a primetime slot at 7pm on Mondays. On 28 March 1968, the Stage called “it the most successful British television series ever to appear on the American network” (p. 293). But this high-profile position and dependence on American investment was also its downfall, which came swift and sure.

The success of The Avengers depended on how it fared against the competition on US TV. That competition, says Richardson, was Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In and I Dream of Jeannie on NBC, and Gunsmoke on CBS. There’s a reason you’ve probably heard of them: they were the big guns of TV. Against them, The Avengers ranked 69th in ratings, respectable - even remarkable - for a UK-made series and yet not enough in its own right. Despite the extraordinary gamble and the work of all those involved, chasing the US market so doggedly also sealed the series’ fate.

News broke in the Daily Mail on on 24 January 1969 that the ABC network in the US had decided not to take any more episodes. Despite sales by now to 90 countries (!), the loss of the US network deal made the series no longer viable, given the enormous costs of production. The end came brutally fast: just a month later, on 28 February, Macnee and Thorson filmed their last scenes as Steed and Miss King. 

Steed, at least, would return a few years later. But the end of the initial run feels so abrupt, so frustrating, so wrong. Like the death of the fiancee in the very first episode, it’s utterly compelling. I want to dig in more. In fact, I’ve some threads to follow up now as part of ongoing research into something not yet announced. I hope to have more on the personalities involved, the crises and the drama...

Cue dramatic music by Johnny Dankworth and cut to the ads.

Exterminate! Regenerate! by John Higgs

This magnificent book is officially out next week but I've just received mine, and a proof copy found its way back in time to me at the end of last year. I couldn’t put it down.

It’s an absorbing, engaging and gossipy history of all of TV Doctor Who (1963 to now), full of new insight and detail. John takes an unflinching, warts-and-all approach, at times detailing bad — sometimes shocking — behaviour by people involved in making the show and also by its fans. Some moments here make for very uncomfortable reading. But while unflinching in addressing these elements, the book on the whole is a joyous celebration and cultural history of a British institution, shrewdly picking out why this knockabout series has had such lasting, wide-ranging impact.

So much is squeezed into 400 pages: it feels both comprehensive and breezy, and therefore bigger on the inside. I love that equal weight is given to each era of the series, and how non-judgmental John (usually) is of any given period: he’s an objective observer, so we can judge for ourselves. 

As a hardcore nerd writing books and for Doctor Who Magazine, and popping up on documentaries, I know quite a lot of the source material used here, which means I’m in awe at how John has come up with something fresh. Repeatedly, I thought, “Oh, I’d not considered it like that before…” It’s a provocative read and I don’t always agree with John’s conclusions. But then that’s part of the fun — a book to grapple with and argue over, and be part of.

The link between the Doctor’s relationship with his granddaughter in the first year of the series and Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop (pp. 52-56) is particularly inspired. If John is right about this, it may well have been influenced by the BBC serial version that ran for 13 episodes 1962-63, with Patrick Troughton as Quilp, Ron Grainer providing music and Betty Blattner supervising make-up. 

The idea of the Time Lords being, effectively, the BBC (introduced p. 107 and returned to several times) is also brilliant. The thing about the snow globe commissioned by director Ben Wheatley (p. 339) is completely new to me and magnificently boggling. 

And I’m really taken by the idea of Doctor Who as “megafiction”, almost as if its huge volume, longevity and reach mean it has passed the point of singularity. Here, feel it … It’s alive.

See also:

• In his book The KLF - Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds, John discusses the alchemical magic brought to Doctor Who by original story editor David Whitaker (and, in the edition, cites me)
• Me on Love and Let Die by John Higgs

Socks (2023-25)

Some very sad news. On Monday, the vet called to say that one of our two cats had been brought in, having been hit by a car. Poor old Socks did not survive the encounter. It's been a horrible shock and the kids have been distraught.

Socks, who was not quite two years-old when he died, and his sister Mittens came to live with us in September 2023. They were both manic - "They don't sleep!" we were told by the rescue place from which they came. Since then, Mittens has mellowed but Socks dug into the wild-eyed madness.

There was the time he leapt from the top of the stairs at the main light in our hallway, sending all the bits of the chandelier-effect lampshade everywhere in an almighty crash. There was his habit of biting my feet if I ever stopped moving about. On the morning of New Year's Day, when we were all a little fragile, he brought the Dr a live pigeon and let it go in our bedroom... 

The number of daft things he did. The speed at which he burned through his nine lives.

Then there's all the comfortable, companionable stuff. He liked to curl up in a cardboard box beside me as I worked. He slept each night on the Dr's feet. He had a selection of sunny spots in the garden to laze about in. 

I miss the patter of his feet at a little before 5 pm each evening, in the never-dimming hope that his dinner might just once be early. We all miss him just being around. What a character. What a keenly felt loss. 

Smith and Sullivan: Reunited - Blood Type

Big Finish have announced the forthcoming release of Doctor Who audio series Smith and Sullivan: Reunited, for release in July 2025. The three stories include Blood Type, written by me.

Blurb for the set as follows:

Sarah Jane Smith: investigative journalist; Dr Harry Sullivan: UNIT operative. Together, they journeyed to the stars with the Doctor. But when the adventures end, what can they do?

Find more...

Reunited in the chaos of 1980s London, Sarah and Harry find danger and darkness lurking beneath the metropolitan veneer of wealth and technology. With trusty super-computer K9 and the brilliant Lavinia Smith alongside, new adventures are just beginning...

The other stories in the set are The Caller by Tim Foley and Union of the Snake by Roland Moore. Sadie Miller plays Sarah Jane Smith, Christopher Naylor is Harry Sullivan, John Leeson is K9 and Annette Badland is Sarah's Aunt Lavinia. More details to come...

Cinema Limbo: Observe and Report

I'm the guest on the latest Cinema Limbo podcast, this time - for my many sins - to discuss the 2009 black comedy Observe and Report, starring Seth Rogen and Ray Liotta. 

Spoiler: this is not exactly my cup of tea.

• Cinema Limbo: Observe and Report (2009)

You can also listen to the previous episodes I've been on:

• Cinema Limbo: The Last Wave (1977)
• Cinema Limbo: Give My Regards to Broad Street (1984)
• Cinema Limbo: The Wicker Man (2006)
• Cinema Limbo: Smoke (1995)
• Cinema Limbo: King Kong (1976)
• Cinema Limbo: Ryan's Daughter (1970)
• Cinema Limbo: Highlander II - The Quickening (1991)

Remembering / Forgetting The Savages

The animation of otherwise-missing 1966 Doctor Who story The Savages is out now. It includes Stuart Denman's 100-minute documentary Remembering / Forgetting The Savages, in which Toby Hadoke explores in depth the history, context and meaning of this lost adventure.

I'm one of the punters involved, asked about such things as The Joy of Sex and the Doctor's reacting vibrator (yes, really). 

The Savages sees the departure of companion Steven Taylor, played by Peter Purves. You can find out what happened to him next in the audio stories The War to End All Wars, The Founding Fathers and The Locked Room.