I've also written another Who Connections feature for the mag, this time using the song "As Time Goes By" as my starting point, inspired by something my friend Matthew Sweet told me. And Paul Cornell has kindly written in to add some extra facts to my previous Who Connections piece, on Star Trek.
Here is some publicity bits related to The Six Doctors and The Vampire Mutation:
Wake covers a lot of ground, detailing how the story evolved from Terry Nation’s initial wheeze through storyline, draft scripts and production, and what this process of revision by multiple people did to the resulting drama and its meanings. As he says, in this first serial the Daleks are not and never were Nazi analogues; that came later. He makes an argument that they’re something more like ants in an anthill, and provides good evidence.
A lot of what’s here is his analysis of paperwork from the time and old interviews, sources with which I’m very familiar — I wrote the Black Archive book about The Edge of Destruction, the Doctor Who serial that followed this one, and a biography of the story editor on both stories. What strikes me most is how deftly Wake has taken a great wealth of material and written something so concise and pacy. There are lots of big ideas and we rattle through them. Nation would approve.
Wake is excellent on the serial’s debt to Nation’s 1962 dramatisation of “Imposter”, the short story by Philip K Dick, and what we can glean from the RNID summary of the story — a document I’d not been aware of before — that was clearly based on early versions of scripts. He’s also good on citing his sources, so we can check his claims — though it’s a bit jarring to be caught up in some smart, insightful bit of reasoning and then hit my own name. “Oh no, him.”
I particularly liked the analysis of the direction of two key moments: the cliffhanger at the end of episode 1 where Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill) is menaced by a sink plunger and then the sequence in episode 2 where we get a first proper look at the Daleks. Wake is also brilliant in his deductions about the real-world item used for the Daleks’ domed heads, using that to explore the specific aesthetic style of this first iteration of Daleks. I’ll not name the specific style here; that’s worth you paying for the book.
My only quibble, really, is where he says Nation muddled his science, eliding two distinct ideas — that radiation can mutate DNA, and that a species evolves over time through mutations in DNA — so that the neutron bomb makes the Daleks and Thals evolve into very different creatures from what they once were. He also says that real petrified jungles aren’t like the one seen here. I don’t think that’s Nation being wrong, as such. He just didn’t think Earth science applied to his story, where he could set the rules. He said as such in an interview included on the video Daleks: The Early Years (1992):
“You land their ship, the TARDIS, on a planet and from that moment on everything on that planet is your creation. If the rocks talk, fine, that’s my planet. If the creatures have 12 eyes, that’s what happens on my planet. So you have this wonderful freedom to do almost anything you want.”
Nation revelled in things being different and strange, and not as our scientists would think possible. So it was not a mistake but conscious choice. And that meant he could sometimes be ahead of the boffins: as I’ve said before, his Planet of the Daleks (1973) features an “ice volcano” in that “instead of white hot lava … erupts with molten ice” — daft fantasy until, 16 years later, scientists spotted cryovulcanism for the first time in space, and it became science fact.
Wake’s book also prompted what may be a new thought. The appendix discusses a short-lived title for the serial: Beyond the Sun. Wake argues that this suggests a setting far beyond our Solar System, but I wonder if that’s right. “Beyond” means “on the farther side of”; departing from Earth, we’d need to head towards the Sun and keep going past it — to the area of space on Earth’s own orbital path but diametrically opposite. In that sense, Skaro would be a hidden, twin planet of Earth.
We can date the moment this changed: on 23 September 1963, Doctor Who story editor David Whitaker commissioned writer Malcolm Hulke for a story called The Hidden Planet, set on planet in the Solar System previously undetected because it shares Earth’s orbit but is on the far side of the Sun. Unlike Skaro, this would have been a world almost like our own but with a number of notable differences the Doctor and his friends would explore; the setting sparked the story.
The Hidden Planet didn’t make it to the screen, but Whitaker seems to have hung on to the idea: his 1966 story The Power of the Daleks is set on a planet called Vulcan, the name used in (discredited) theories about Earth having a twin.
An early example of the perspective-altering stuff comes on p. 35, where the authors — Graeber an anthropologist, Wengrow an archaeologist — refer for the first time to “American intellectuals” of the 16th and 17th centuries, as opposed to their European counterparts. By this, they mean the indigenous inhabitants of North America who were in in the habit of arguing about abstract ideas.
That term does something extraordinary, putting the debates that follow between the different, clashing cultures on more equal footing. The Europeans assumed they were bringing civilisation to the Americans; Graeber and Wengrow present a compelling argument that in fact American ideas about society and liberty flowed the other way, directly influencing such thinkers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (who admitted as much) and Montesquieu. The point is that, at the time, the Americans lived lives of much greater liberty than anyone in Europe.
“To the Jesuits, of course, all this was outrageous. In fact, their attitude towards indigenous ideals of liberty is the exact opposite of the attitude most French people or Canadians tend to hold today: that, in principle, freedom is an altogether admiral ideal” (p. 43).
Even the spaces in which Europeans came to think about and argue over such ideas may have come from America. Later in the book, the authors cite an account of the Creek community as reported by the Jesuit missionary St Jean de Brébuf (1593-1649) in Jesuit Relations of New France 1645-6 (10: 219):
“Each day the adult men of a town would gather to spend much of the day arguing about politics in a spirit of rational debate, in conversations punctuated by the smoking of tobacco and drinking caffeinated beverages.” (p. 463).
It’s brilliantly boggling to think of the coffee houses of Pepys and Johnson, and the coffee shops today where I sometimes take my laptop, as threading back to the prairie. On another occasion, the authors talk about spiritual lives of some groups, where dreams were important and contained hidden truths that the rest of the community would then help to interpret and act on — centuries before European psychologists got into the business of dreams and unconscious desire.
There are plenty more “modern” notions in the historical record. Among the Nuer people of South Sudan studied in the early 20th century,
“it was not uncommon for the local ‘bull’ [leader] actually to be a woman whose parents had declared her a man for social purposes” (p. 97).
On the following page, they speak of eccentric behaviour, cross dressing and “unconventional sexual practices” among leading figures, suggesting a society that embraced tolerance and even celebrated difference. Later, we return to the same community:
“However, most Nuer women were not ‘properly’ married. In fact, the complexities of this system were such that a large proportion found themselves officially married to ghosts, or to other women (who could be declared male for genealogical purposes) — in which case, how they went about becoming pregnant and raising their children was nobody’s business but their own.” (p. 132)
This kind of detail peppers the whole thing. I loved the word “scofflaw” (p. 424) for someone who flouts the rules. I can’t get out of my head the extraordinary idea that the mini Ice Age of the late 1500s and early 1600s was linked to the activity of European settlers in America, where 90% of the indigenous people died and 50 million hectares of cultivated land reverting to wilderness (p. 258). A footnote to this says there were 60 million in America before the Europeans arrived (p. 568). The scale and impact are stunning.
The book is largely about how archaeological and anthropological evidence of this sort, much of it unearthed in the past few decades, largely undermines the narrative of early humanity as seen in “The Dawn of Man” sequence at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968): early man as timid hunter-gatherer, eking out a modest existence on the savannah for hundreds of thousands of years until suddenly, in a moment, learning to use tools to dominate and kill, creating the world we know now.
As Graeber and Wengrow point out, the bare savannah is just where the last surviving hunter-gatherers are able to live today. In ancient times, before the cities, hunter-gatherers would have lived where food was more abundant — the fertile ground, beside rivers and the sea. Admittedly, for Graeber and Wengrow, the assumed narrative is more one of hunter-gatherers suddenly becoming farmers governed by kings, but the domination goes in hand with the patriarchy. They posit three elements of the modern state as we understand it — sovereignty, administration and charismatic competition — and then provide multiple examples of different ways people have reached this, or rejected it out of hand.
For example, they make a compelling case from the surviving pictorial art and other material culture, in the absence of texts, that the so-called Minoan civilisation on Crete was not a patriarchy under a king, but a much more egalitarian society under a community of woman, perhaps priestesses (p. 435). In doing so, they discuss the way commonly used language shapes and prejudices our view, such as early archaeologists labelling part of a complex a “throne room” which immediately suggests a whole load of hierarchical structures for which there is no evidence.
From these myriad examples, they go on to argue that perhaps the “heroic societies” of warrior kings did not grow out of early farmer-settler communities but in opposition to them — among the “barbarians” at the gate or on the boundaries, who would raid the farms. Those bad guys were us all along.
When Wengrow was a guest on an episode of Free Thinking to discuss this and the late Graeber’s other books, host Matthew Sweet spoke of this book as an anarchist history — not something I’d considered as I read it, but which I can see in retrospect. Much of it is about exploring alternative social arrangements, in history and now. The authors argue that many cultures define their own identity in opposition to alternatives they have encountered, doubling down on ideas that they might not have been conscious of until then. They cite an example given by Marcel Mauss, of Abathascan people in Alaska seeing the advantages of Inuit kayaks but refusing to use them, and the Inuit likewise refusing to adopt Abathascan snowshoes.
‘“Societies,” wrote Maus, ‘live by borrowing from each other, but they define themselves rather by the refusal of borrowing than by its acceptance. [The Abathascans] reflected on what adopting, or not adopting, snowshoes might say about the kind of people they considered themselves to be.’ (pp. 174-5)
This put me in mind of works on sociology I read 30 years ago as a student, and Louis Althusser’s conceptions (IIRC) of “rapport” — where a person or culture changes their behaviour to be more like another so as to make connection — and “differance”, where a person or culture holds to, or even emphasises, the ways in which they are different. If it’s not a wholly original idea, it’s fascinating to see Graeber and Wengrow apply it to concrete examples, and in the midst of a discussion of different ways of enacting trade, such as in gift giving or — as discussed above — realising dreams.
Among the systems of social governance, I was familiar with gift economies (I once put one on Mars) but the French idea “corvée” was new: otherwise free citizens required to do obligatory labour on civic projects on a seasonal basis. We are told that the Sumerians had a similar concept, “dubsig”, the pictogram showing a person with a basket of earth on their head. The idea was that everyone — from king to the lowliest ordinary folk — were required to muck in with whatever needed doing, such as labouring on building sites (p. 299).
The authors provide evidence that indigenous people captured by Europeans or invited to visit their communities were horrified by what they saw, not least in the inequality of wealth, and that Europeans who experienced life in indigenous communities often didn’t want to leave them. The implication is that intoxicating ideas of freedom, consent, of being able to do things differently or to leave a place where we aren’t happy, spread to Europe and transformed who we are. “Civilisation” wasn’t forged when we started farming; it’s a much more modern invention and what we do now could be different — and better.
An absorbing new history of the interwar period, gleaned from the echoes left by early, experimental TV
by Simon Guerrier
This history of pre-war television is a strange, compelling treasury of ghosts. For one thing, the interwar period has largely slipped from living memory. Few people remain who can share first-hand the wonders and weirdness of the new technological medium described in these pages. The voices quoted, sharing by turns their delight and exasperation, have passed on. What was seen and felt by television’s first audiences must instead by gleaned from old paperwork and stiffly posed photographs, from which we piece together a tantalising sense of the extraordinary range, innovation and visual richness. Sadly, very little pre-war television survives for us to experience for ourselves. It was broadcast live, released into the air and then gone — literally ethereal.
I’ve been haunted by the ghosts of television since, as a child, I learned that lots of old Doctor Who got wiped. Now, I pine for all kinds of lost treasures — I’d love to see Sean Connery’s first leading role, as a washed-up boxer in Requiem for a Heavyweight (1957), or Peter Cushing in sci-fi detective story The Caves of Steel (1964). I’m fascinated by ITV’s coverage of the Moon landing (1969), as David Frost’s live chat show kept being extended through the night and ultimately ran for 10 hours. The guests included Sammy Davis Jnr, Lulu, Dame Sybil Thorndike and Peter Cook. Ray Bradbury walked out in disgust at the shambles of it all, while others passed out from exhaustion and/or drinking. Meanwhile, on the BBC, Pink Floyd played live in the studio, Judi Dench and Ian McKellen recited moon-themed poetry, and Dudley Moore played ‘Moonlight Sonata’. That’s all missing from the archives, too, but the strangeness of it lingers. This major moment in history, this apotheosis of engineering, and TV met it with music hall.
Whatever my personal wish-list, any discoveries of old TV are revealing. Each year, the BFI hosts ‘Missing Believed Wiped’ to show off the latest finds, and it’s always a thrillingly eclectic mix. The 2025 Missing Believed Wiped included a trailer for Cliff Richard in panto, an episode of a sitcom in which a man tries to pay a bill by writing a cheque on the side of a cow, and brief, glitching footage of Tony Hancock enthusing about pilchards. Television is an immediate, intimate medium, so even random, disjointed scraps provide vivid windows on history. What people wore, or drove, or thought suitable to say out loud at prime-time, are all bracingly alive.
Yet it’s rare for material to be recovered from the earliest days of the medium. The last big discovery was in 1996, when a means was found to decode recordings made in the 1920s and 1930s on standard 78 rpm gramophone records — John Logie Baird, the pioneer of TV, having developed a technique to record but not to play back. The peculiar results of the decoding can be seen in an episode of Tomorrow’s World (tx 28 October 1996) reporting this technical feat at the time, now up on YouTube.
In portrait format, like on a modern smartphone, we see in scarlet and black a flickering, distorted moving image, as if though fluted glass. It’s the face of Baird’s temporary secretary, Mabel Pounsford, captured on 28 March 1928. The report then shows, in the same distorted red-and-black, some of a dance routine broadcast by the BBC on 21 April 1933, with the Paramount Astoria Girls all in a row, their pale legs distinct from dark leotards. In both cases, the 30-line resolution is so poor I’m not sure I would have made sense of what I was seeing if I hadn’t just been told.
We can gain further sense of the limited technology and extraordinary ambition of the early TV pioneers from a 4 April 1970 edition of the BBC programme Review, which reassembled the surviving cast and crew to recreate some of the BBC’s very first TV drama, an adaptation of Pirandello’s The Man with the Flower in his Mouth broadcast live on 14 July 1930. The play was chosen because it involved only three characters in a single set, and ran for just half an hour. But it’s an unsettling, moving drama: the titular man is dying of cancer — the ‘flower’ growing in his mouth — but strikes up conversation with a customer who has an excess of time, in that he’s just missed the last train of the night and now has to wait for the first one of the morning. The TV version wasn’t recorded — it’s one of the many TV ghosts — but the reconstruction lets us see how it would have looked, how it was put together in the studio and how the technology worked.
The ‘pink’ and black picture — to me, it looks red — was the result of the neon light used on the single camera, which could not move or zoom. Even where a second camera was available, there was no ability to ‘cut’; it took eight seconds to mix between shots, so this was done sparingly. In that sense, I think a lot of television of this period must have been like looking through a hole in the wall, and through fluted glass, at a performance taking place next door.
That makes what the early pioneers managed to achieve all the more amazing. The reconstruction shows how the crew of The Man with the Flower in his Mouth evoked the dramatic grammar of cinema, using differently framed shots without cutting. The sequence begins with a hand-drawn picture of the cafe, and some narration setting the scene. That drawing is then slid out of shot, revealing a close-up of the titular man (Earle Gray), seated and speaking to the customer (Lionel Millard), who is visible in frame. A chequered board then slides in front of the camera, blocking our view briefly while the actors reposition themselves. Then the board slides back to reveal the customer now in shot, further upstage so smaller in frame. After more dialogue, the chequered board slides back into view, the actors quickly change position, and the board slides back to reveal both men in frame. Technologically, it’s very basic; aesthetically, it’s how TV drama is framed today.
John Wyver tells us that this first televised drama by the BBC followed and perhaps drew from the one-act The Queen’s Messenger, broadcast in Washington DC on 11 September 1928. This employed three cameras, cutting between shots of each of the two actors and the feed from a third camera that provided close-ups of relevant props. The BBC, then, were trying to emulate this technical marvel with just a single camera — just as BBC drama now, on relatively modest means, tries to holds its own against the big-budget US networks and streamers.
That ambition and competitiveness meant television developed extraordinarily quickly. Wyver charts efforts to televise the Derby, the coronation of George VI and various ballets, in each case explaining how these individual productions helped to progress the medium more generally. By late 1936, when the BBC launched its regular, daily television service, Baird had developed what he called ‘high definition’, 240-line television, which the BBC alternated week in, week out with the rival EMI-Marconi electronic 405-line system. The latter soon won out and remained the standard for TV until the late 1960s (when it was succeeded by a 625-line system as part of the groundwork for colour TV). We can see how radically different, how much clearer and engaging, television had become by the latter half of the 1930s from brief examples, such as in a home cine recording of the coronation on TV, or newsreel reports and documentaries. Film lacks electronic television’s intimacy and immediacy, but Television Comes to London (1936) conjures the excitement of the opening night of the regular service, and lets us see and hear Adele Dixon sing the specially composed song ‘Television’ — with its reference to ‘magic rays of light’ — while also showing a TV camera on wheels tracking her, so we get a sense of how it would have been framed for viewers at home.
The BBC’s demonstration film (1937), used in shops and exhibitions to entice sales of TV sets, gives a sense of the range and breadth of programmes otherwise lost.
We can sense, too, how appealing this all was from the rapid growth of the audience. It’s thought the first night of the regular service was viewed on 400 TV sets; by September 1939, less than two years later, 20,000 sets had been sold.
Wyver provides a wealth of contemporary accounts to conjure more of what we’re missing. Along the way, there’s loads of fascinating social history: why ballet was so popular in Britain with working-class audiences — the result of Russian emigres putting on relatively inexpensive shows — or why boxing worked so well on TV. The size of the boxing ring suited television’s limited depth of field, while two people with a clear issue to be decided made for good small-screen drama; also, there was a frisson from seeing muscular, bare-chested men in your own living room. That, I think, explains why drama about boxing became such a feature of post-war television — one reason Sean Connery was cast in Requiem for a Heavyweight was that the former Mr Universe contestant looked good in the shorts. But Wyver underlines that this early period contains more than just the origins of later, familiar forms of TV. Lots here is strange and unfamiliar because it didn’t last, such as efforts to establish ‘cinema television’ for large crowds, as a rival to the BBC’s domestic service.
Pioneers made assumptions about the audience watching, given the high price of TV sets. In fact, the relative wealth of different parts of London and so the potential for investing in sets dictated the decision to broadcast from Alexandra Palace rather than Crystal Palace (where John Logie Baird was already based). Though Wyver quotes some working-class viewers, they seem to have been the exception — and were reported in the newspapers for being so. The implication is that programming was designed to entertain and inform middle-class viewers, and aimed less to educate or uplift them as it would post-war.
The audience was also assumed to be white, which informs any sense of the diversity seen on screen. Wyver thinks that Avril Coleridge-Taylor was the first person of colour to perform on TV, in June 1931, and later programming included speakers such as the Jamaican activist and feminist Una Marson. The half-hour variety show broadcast on the first night of the regular service boasted Adele Dixon (as above), then Buck and Bubbles, a Black dance and comedy act, followed by Chinese dancers the Lai Founs — a diverse line-up, as if to get as much of the world into the small frame — but Wyver asks how much these acts would have played to racial stereotypes. Blackface and minstrelling were common and thought uncontroversial, and programming reflected colonial and racial assumptions of the time.
Output also reflected established ideas of cultural value. The classic texts chosen for dramatisation — Shakespeare, Chaucer and Austen — were, says Wyver, from a ‘literary canon [that] had taken form in the later nineteenth century in the complex processes of remaking English identity and the national culture.’ He goes further, arguing that the BBC played an active part in cementing this idea of a national theatre, with texts thought important independent of their box office appeal. He adds television of this period to commercial cinema and nationally distributed newspapers and magazines, the factors that DH LeMahieu, in his interwar history A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars (1998), identified as creating a common national culture.
This cutting-edge technology promised ever more innovation and technical wonder — a medium of the future — and yet there’s a sense that much of the broadcast output was reassuring, even nostalgic. There’s no contradiction in this: Wyver links the idea to the ‘dominant mood’ of ‘conservative modernity’ identified by Alison Light in her Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (1991): modern in form but conservative in effect. I can see that going hand in hand with the popularity of HV Morton’s travelogues of the late 1920s and 1930s, using his modern, affordable motorcar — and encouraging readers to do the same — to take trips into the countryside steeped in nostalgia and whimsy.
In that context, it’s fascinating to see what changed in the lead-up to war. Among the programmes Wyver describes, there are increasing notes of disquiet. A version of Julius Caesar is presented with characters in modern, military uniforms, making a connection to fascism in Europe. There’s a demonstration of anti-aircraft precautions, and an interview with refugees. A photograph on p. 317 shows Neville Chamberlain met by a crowd on the tarmac at Heston Aerodrome on 18 September 1938. In the upper-left of the picture, we can see a television camera, ready to relay the promise of ‘peace in our time’ live to viewers in London, making them part of the moment.
Today, every beat of a war plays out in real time on TV. As I write this, the BBC boasts live coverage of Iranian strikes on Qatari and Saudi energy sites, and video of a US F-15 fighter jet crashing in Kuwait. The BBC News website offers a wealth of short videos: footage of explosions, vox pops with people on the ground, expert commentary to provide perspective — all in sound and vision. We can pick what to view of this, and in what order, making a story for ourselves.
Things were very different in 1939, when the BBC decided to halt all TV transmissions before any official declaration of war against Germany. Just after noon on Friday, 1 September, the scheduled broadcast of the eight-minute Disney cartoon Mickey’s Gala Premier was followed by closedown. War was declared two days later and the TV service only resumed on 7 June 1946 (when the same cartoon was repeated). This is where Wyver ends his story. He explains the reasons for halting the TV service: it was expensive, still in very experimental form and had a limited audience. Management felt that, with war looming, resources could be better deployed: some 50 TV engineers soon went to work on radar, and electronics companies who’d been manufacturing TV sets moved into such work as military radios and radar screens.
I’d previously read that TV was halted because of the fear of air raids: the TV signals broadcast from Alexandra Palace might guide the Luftwaffe to densely populated north London. Wyver confirms this and then, in the closing pages of his book, shares something extraordinary. The German radio navigation system, Wotan, worked on an operating frequency of 45 MHz. By chance, that was also the frequency of the vision transmitter at Alexandra Palace, which could be used to disrupt the German system. As a result, some broadcasting continued during the war and proved so effective that the Luftwaffe abandoned Wotan.
It’s left me haunted by one last thought: How many lives did television save?
More of this sort of thing by me:
If this is of interest, you might like to read my posts on the anthologies Star Trek by James Blish, Star Trek 2 by Blish, the original novel Spock Must Die! by Blish, and also The Disappearing Future edited by George Hay.
The new issue of DWM also includes a glowing review by Jamie Lenman of Space Security Service - Bret Vyon Lives, the audio set on which I am producer and co-writer, which is released by Big Finish next week.
I took pictures of the Star Trek and early Doctor Who novelisations to illustrate my article, and here are some of them for those that like that sort of thing.
You can now watch my talk, "The David McKee Sketchbook - The Origins of Mr Benn and Elmer", on YouTube:
The talk was given on Friday evening for the friends of the St Barbe Museum + Art Gallery in Lymington, which is home to the exhibition "Elmer and Mr Benn: the magic of David McKee" until 6 September. It's a lovely exhibition, full of amazing original artwork - so bright and colourful in real life, and full of detail and interest. I would like to stand at the back and watch the expressions on people's faces as they enter.
I helped write some of the panels for the exhibition, as well as a piece for the Sunday Telegraph, "Where the strange, secret world of Mr Benn came from".
NB in the Q&A at the end of the talk, I mention Ralph Steadman when I of course mean Gerald Scarfe! But another example of how people working on these different things kept an eye on each other's work: Cliver Juster (film editor and producer on Mr Benn and the King Rollo Films output) told me that Oliver Postgate was a big fan of Towser.
I've contributed the first article, "The Doctor's Doctor" (pp. 6-11), looking at why so many of the other actors who've played Doctors Who cite Troughton as their favourite, and what that reveals about what he brought to the role.
Many thanks to Charles Norton, who helped me check the veracity of one of the interviews with producer Innes Lloyd.
Since those days, I’ve followed with great interest David’s extraordinary conjuring, the fictional county / borough / municipal authority — I’m not really sure what — that is somehow a blend of MR James and Devil’s End from Doctor Who, the woods from X the Unknown, the village from Went the Day Well and a whole hotchpotch of everything else. Hookland is an at once recognisable, vividly real place and frustratingly intangible, a manifestation of social media, constructed from hints and citations. It is brilliantly beguiling.
Now, at last, comes a first Hookland book, largely comprised of ‘Remembering Differently: the Fortean and Folklore Origins of Hookland’, a talk David gave to the London Fortean Society on 28 April this year. In addition, he tells us about the inspiration behind some of his ‘contributors’ (Emily C Banting, C Josiffe and CL Nolan), recounts his real-life meeting with JG Ballard, details how Hookland is not influenced by anything so obvious as public information films, and provides an A-Z of various influences and interests. The latter includes, on p. 51, a reference to me that makes me wonder what on earth I must have said, in a rare moment of coherence.
Just as Hookland is familiar and strange, I’m knitted from many of the same elements that made David and his realm — he’s a little older than me, so TV stuff he watched on broadcast I saw later on video — and yet I also had a markedly different, less precarious childhood. It strikes me that we are from two very different worlds, but Hookland is a name for the fog between time zones, the imaginative space in which we are able to meet as fellow travellers. In fact, quite a lot of my lasting friendships were forged in different iterations of that same rich, creative fog.
As always, time spent with David has got me feverishly thinking, and making connections in what I am writing now that I had not seen before. More to follow...
“Something grabs the back of her shirt and Cora can’t scream, all her words extinguished in her chest. This is when she dies. The weak link, the boring character in a horror movie who nobody liked anyway, the one with no defining traits, a name no one can remember.” (p. 160)
This deliciously horrible thriller won the Shirley Jackson Award over the weekend. It was first published last year as Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng, but the Hodder & Stoughton paperback I read is just Bat Eater — on the cover, on the title page and in the indicia, but not in the closing Author’s Note. How ironic to erase the main character’s name from the title of her own story, given what it’s about.
Cora Zeng is an anxious young Chinese American woman living in New York in 2020, during the Covid pandemic. She works as a cleaner of crime scenes with two other Chinese American misfits, Yifei and Harvey, and she’s grieving the death of her half-sister Delilah, who Cora witnessed being pushed in front of a train by a white man who used the term “bat eater”.
That murder is described in shocking, gory detail and the novel doesn’t hold back on what Cora’s job involves. It is a literally visceral novel, all wet and tender. Cora is haunted by the death of her half-sister, and then haunted by a hungry ghost. She and her co-workers then realise there’s a pattern to the crime scenes they’re cleaning, which seems to be linked to the ghost. To make sense of this, Cora must explore aspects of her own identity and cultural history. There is more than one way to deal with jiāngshī, not all of them successful.
This is a brilliant, compelling novel, especially good on character so that — despite the quote above — we really feel the loss of people. It was interesting to read this so soon after The Lost Voices of Pompeii by Jess Venner, which attempts to return voices to the voiceless victims of a tragedy. There’s something similar going on here, too.
At one point, Bat Eater also reminded me of the most haunting bit in the film Halloween (1978), when Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) runs to a neighbour’s house for help, and though we can see the neighbour through the window, he doesn’t answer the door. For all the film is about a violent serial killer, it’s that small moment of ordinary indifference that has always stayed with me. It’s the same here: for all the supernatural stuff going on, what makes this so powerful, so disturbing, is the horror or ordinary people.
Arturo Gerace is 14, and has lived his whole life in a ramshackle old house — a castle — on a little island, where the only other distinguishing feature is a prison. The previous owners of the house banned women from it, and Arturo has grown up with little female contact beyond a dog who died giving birth to a litter that didn’t survive either.
So when Arturo’s wandering father returns home with a new wife, Nunziatella, who is only two years older than Arturo, she makes quite an impression. Arturo is variously angry, jealous, contemptuous and lusty. Meanwhile, his father disappears for months on end — and turns out to have some kind of relationship with one of the inmates of the prison. Arturo’s mother also died in childbirth, and his feelings for this perfect woman he never knew informs a lot of his outlook and unconscious desires.
First published as L’isola di Arturo in 1957 and translated for this edition by Ann Goldstein in 2019, there’s a lot going on here that isn’t quite spelled out — because Arturo, narrating, hasn’t quite figured it all out for himself. At first it seems quite simple but there are depths and undercurrents: Arturo misreads people’s words and actions, assuming for example that Nunziatella does not reciprocate his feelings because she tells him “no”.
In some ways, Arturo and Nunziatella are just as much inmates as the men in the prison, and then there’s wandering Wilhelm, the paterfamilias, who escapes whenever he can. The Freudian psychology running through a lot of the novel is very of its time (see, for example, my piece for the Lancet Psychiatry on the Freudian influence on Frank Herbert, author of Dune.)
It feels relatively timeless until the last part of the novel when Arturo, turning 16, learns there is going to be a world war. When the prisoner is released, turns up at the house and helps himself to food left our for Arturo, there’s an uncomfortable confrontation — when Wilhelm gives his verdict of his son, and Arturo storms out, meaning to sign up to the army. The book ends with him leaving the island for the first time without looking back, off to an uncertain fate.
As I read the novel, I wasn’t sure there was much to it — it seemed to keep promising something about to happen, and then never quite deliver. But in retrospect I’ve been picking over what characters said and did and must have been thinking, making sense of the real story going on under the surface. Then haunting thought is that Arturo, going to war, did not live to do the same.
I would like to read more of and about Elsa Morante; Penguin Classics published a new edition of her debut novel Lies and Sorcery in April and is reissuing History in November.
“refusal to treat gaps in the evidence as dead ends,”,
while seeing,
“absence as production space” (p.18).
This is very much my wheel-house — I’ve written books about absences in the historical record relating to old Doctor Who serials: The Evil of the Daleks (1967), where just one of the seven episodes survives; and The Edge of Destruction (1964), where no production file and very little paperwork survives.
After a scene-setting introduction, each chapter of The Lost Voices of Pompeii follows one of seven people in the 24 hours before the eruption of Vesuvius. There’s some overlap between the lives of Petrinus the slave, Julius Felix the businesswoman, Aulus Umbricius Scaurus the everyman, Umbricia Forunata the matriarch of a working poor family, Euxinus the innkeeper, Amisusius the priest of Isis, and Gaius Cuspius Panda the politician. The structure reminded me a little of 253 by Geoff Ryman, with the same sense of these individual lives connecting into something bigger and more profound.
We see some of the same events from their different perspectives, so understand what a business deal or prayer or shopping trip mean depending on class and status. It’s a good way to explore the intricacies of Roman society. The book is peppered with photographs and footnotes, underlining the fact that this is based on the real, and I found it a bit strange to visit the real-life house of Julia Felix having just read about her.
There’s then a chapter on what happens to these people in the hours after the eruption, and a chapter on the longer-term aftermath. It’s a moving story, but then I also found Pompeii by Robert Harris (2003) and the TV mini-series The Last Days of Pompeii (1984), bits of which we watched at school.
What’s different is how much more firmly Dr Venner bases her story in fact. That includes some relatively recent new assessments — that the eruption did not take place on 24 August 79, but was later in the year (she suggests 24 October), and that fewer people died than once thought. She gives a figure of between 1,600 and 1,700, or between 9% and 11% of the population (p. 19). (That will be of some solace to Donna Noble, I thought, as we watched The Fires of Pompeii after our trek around the town.)
Dr Venner argues that her “critical fabulation” gives a voice back to the voiceless. I really like the way she explains, in the footnotes, where she’s based things on evidence and where she has embellished things. I can see she’s also tried to make this relevant to now, so there are referencing to upselling, personal brands and so on. I wonder how much those and this fictionalising approach will date over time.
We were in Naples for three nights. On our first evening, we went to the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, where I was stunned by the frescoes. They’re were once displayed like works of art in a gallery, but now they’re vivid evidence of people’s ordinary / extraordinary lives.
That was a good grounding before a long, hot day at Pompeii itself. I’d seen photos and footage of the site but being there I was knocked out by the scale — a whole town, with main thoroughfares and back streets, whole chunks of it still buried. Waiting in a shady spot at one end of the forum for the Dr to catch us up, it struck me that it was of a similar scale to the Winchester, where I grew up, once a Roman city.
The following day, we explored Herculaneum, which I think the children preferred because there were fewer herds of tourists and more cats.
The reason he's become immortal, or whatever it is he's become, is that Maw is a pressganged pilot through arcspace, which normally drives people insane or makes them and their ships disappear. For some reason, it has made him something unsettlingly other. He calls himself a monster.
At the same time, Maw's people have been visited by god-like beings who warn of the death of a star in 200 hundred years time which will wipe out a sizeable chunk of the galaxy, including populated worlds. The oppresive regime has time to prepare, but instead decides to suppress news of this announcement. The undying Maw carries out assignments, falls tragically in love, and all the while the clock is ticking to the inevitable foom...
This is space opera on mind-bending scale, and yet it's about something we have seen and continue to see in our own lives here on mundane Earth - the ways people deal with, or refuse to even recognise, crisis. There's loads of strange and haunting stuff going on: the exact nature of what has happened to Maw, and what he now is and can do; the efforts of communities to preserve something of themselves before it is all lost; the way we live with impending and actual loss.
The result is something big on ideas but also very emotional. It is thrillingly exciting on an epic scale and yet also very personal, which is a natty trick to pull off so well. One key element is an unrequited love story where completely understanding the perspectives of both parties doesn't make it any less heartbreaking.
The stuff about the weird effects on pilots in arcspace reminded me of the classic "Scanners Live in Vain" by Cordwainer Smith (1950). In the deaths and resurrections, there are echoes of North's brilliant The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. But, brilliantly, it remained surprising right up to the last page.
I knew Justin, first, for his brilliant, brilliant debut novel Theatre of War (1994), which is so smart, funny and surprising. He found clever things to do with companion Bernice Summerfield being an archaeologist, and it’s really good on what history actually is. But for all it’s keenly intelligent, it’s also great fun.
By mid 1999, I was in correspondence with Justin as he patiently read and gently rejected my pitches for Doctor Who novels. He was always encouraging, on one occasion recommending that I read Story by David McKee before trying again, on another telling me that a thriller plot like I had in mind needed to feel— as the reader read the book — like a zigzagging path, lurching in different, surprising directions. But at the end, when the reader looked back the way we’d come together, they should see it had really been one long, straight avenue, the ending inevitable.
He bent the rules to commission my first book before the particular range was brought to an end. There would always be “just a few notes”, often saying what he liked as much as what he wanted changed.
When I had a bit of a bruising, unhappy experience on a writing project nothing to do with Justin, he insisted on buying me lunch so that he could share — off the record — his own similar, bruising experience of some years before. He was so funny about it, so at ease, and lifted off all the weight I’d not even been conscious of carrying.
I saw his patience, his generosity, his intelligence and mischievous sense of fun on numerous occasions. It’s why he is such a keenly felt loss.
The books mentioned at the end are my biography David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television (2023), and my archive-investigating analyses of the Doctor Who stories The Evil of the Daleks and The Edge of Destruction for the Black Archive range.
It is my 50th birthday today, so you should buy at least one of these.
My new biography, Written by Terrance Dicks, will be out later in the year. I am busy writing it right now.
