The Masters, by CP Snow

First published in 1951, this is the fourth of Snow’s “Strangers and Brothers” novels, which chart the life of lawyer and scholar Lewis Eliot (the series that originated the phrase “corridors of power”. This one, spanning 1937, begins with Eliot, now based at an unnamed Cambridge college, informed that the beloved master there is dying of cancer — but doesn’t know it himself. The master’s wife, out of love, wants to let him enjoy what life remains.

While Eliot and his colleagues debate the ethics of this, they also discuss which of them will succeed the master — or whether the unthinkable might happen, with someone brought in from outside. Yet when two candidates put themselves forward, the electors are split seven to six. Eliot favours a man called Jago, but others think him too ordinary, his wife too presumptuous and over-bearing. Before the old master is dead, the campaigning starts to get nasty…

There didn’t seem much substance to this not-quite-comedy of manners,

at least to begin with. But as the months pass and word comes through of things seen and heard on the Continent, the petty squabbles, egos and viciousness of this small college become an analogy for something greater — politics and honour and relationships and values in the shadow of looming war. 

It’s also peppered with strange, sad details. There’s a particularly haunting moment relatively late on, when Lady Muriel finally tells her husband the truth, that he will not recover from his cancer. Until this moment, the lie about his condition has been a burden for Lady Muriel and the others in the college, but telling him offers little solace. Though ill and getting ever thinner, the Master had been ploughing on with a book. Now that abruptly halts, because, “It’s hard to think without a future,” he says.

Then there’s what the news does to his relationship with wife:

“But the hardest blow for her was that in looking towards his death, he seemed to have forgotten her.”

Indeed, a close friend, Roy Calvert, reveals to Eliot that the master and his wife have long had problems.

“Theirs had not been a joyous marriage. The Master might have brought happiness to many women, Roy said, but somehow he had never set her free.” (p. 126)

It’s all quietly devastating, but I’m also really struck by that conception of what a good marriage should be — liberating and empowering.

The campaign against Jago is horrible, and reminded me of the villainous Mrs Gamart in The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald, whose malicious campaign is just as destructive. It’s also horribly misogynist, and there’s a lot here about a little world of men, petty and jealous and vain, who are — for all some of them have the potential to be brilliant — are little men. 

I thought one younger member of the group might be different, a scientist called Luke. But then he has some success in puzzling out a new theory, and goes full on Swiss Tony:

“It’s wonderful … when you’ve got a problem that is really coming out. It’s like making love — suddenly you unconscious takes control. And nothing can stop you. You know that you’re making old Mother Nature sit up and beg. And you say to her, ‘I’ve got you, you old bitch.’ You’ve got her just where you want her. Then to show there’s no ill-feeling, you give her an affectionate pinch on the bottom.” (p. 268)

The story ends with with some last-minute shenanigans over who will vote for whom, and the result of the election and the loser being brave. One wonders how agreeably things might continue given the way people have behaved. But the sense from Eliot is that some kind of order had been restored — though, as readers, we know they’re all now under the cloud of war. That’s explored in the next novel in the sequence, The New Man (1954).

Snow then provides a 12-page appendix with the history of his fictional college. A bit to my surprise, I found this compelling. He charts how an informal gathering of locals seeking advantage in trade abroad, which meant learning some Latin and maths, slowly gained structure and architecture. While the colleges and university — the two are apparently distinct — have existed for a thousand years, we’re told that most of its traditions are just a few generations old. The implication is that it’s history is fiction, but it’s an invented place anyway, based on fact.

Star Trek 4, by James Blish

Star Trek is 60 years-old today, sort of. Over the weekend of 1-5 September 1966, its pilot episode The Menagerie was shown to attendees of the 24th World Science Fiction Convention, held in Cleveland, Ohio — says p. 93 of this book. The series proper began with The Man Trap, broadcast on CTV in Canada on 6 September and on NBC in the US two days later. It wasn’t shown in the UK for almost another three years.

Anyway, this fourth anthology of prose versions of TV episodes was published in the US in July 1971 and issued in the UK in October, price 25p (the first Star Trek book in New Pence). It was the last of five Star Trek books available in the UK prior to 8 March 1972, the date on which Doctor Who script editor Terrance Dicks wrote to writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin, asking (among other things) for the return of the Star Trek books he’d loaned them. So, this is my final post on the subject of the influence of these books on Doctor Who of that period.

(For more of this stuff see my posts on Blish’s Star Trek, Star Trek 2, Star Trek 3 and the original novel Spock Must Die!, plus my article “Who Connections — Star Trek”, for Doctor Who Magazine #632 (August 2026), pp. 44-49 and my forthcoming biography Written by Terrance Dicks...)

The cover of Star Trek 4 looks very different from previous books, with artwork depicting the USS Enterprise in space, between two pale blue worlds. For the first time, there’s no artwork or photograph of the main characters — I wonder if, like with the later Doctor Who novelisations, there were issues over fees owed to actors. As with the previous volume, this is “all new award-winning” Star Trek, though that “new” is a little ingenuous: the adventures here were all broadcast on TV at least three years previously.

The book is dedicated “To Donna Woodman and the other new English Star Trek fans”, the author having now settled in the UK and, through these books, found himself the locus of an active fandom determined to see Star Trek resurrected. In his preface, Blish says he receives a lot of letters from fans and uses them to decide which stories to adapt next — suggesting he had free choice, rather than having it imposed by the publisher or rights-holder. 

He tells us that The Menagerie, adapted in this volume, won the prestigious Hugo award in 1967 and City on the Edge of Forever (adapted in Star Trek 2) won in 1968, but that the subsequent cancellation of the series meant there was nothing to nominate for the award in 1970. This is not entirely honest. For one thing, it misses out the 1969 awards entirely, where no Star Trek episodes were nominated. Technically, Star Trek could have been nominated in 1970 — any of the the 11 new episodes first broadcast in 1969 would have been eligible. But for two years running, it seems, the series was on air but not considered good enough by science-fiction fans.

Production on Star Trek ended in 1969, so Blish was faced with a limited number of episodes to choose from for these books, and an even more limited number of good episodes. But he’d also by this point committed to double the number of these books: 

“As matters stand now, there will be at least four more, all within the next year or so” (p. ix).

That may explain why there are just six episodes in this book, so as not to burn through the fuel. But I think it also explains the peculiar choice of first story.

All Our Yesterdays involves yet another time travel portal, on this occasion dumping our heroes back in a superstitious period. Spock gets emotional and snogs a woman because, we learn, he is 10,000 years back in time and that's what Vulcans were like back then — as if the psychology of his people, even on a far distant world, is contagious. There’s no effort to suggest that the same is true of humans. Anyway, the basic wheeze is that Kirk, with his technological gizmos, is accused of witchcraft. There’s a bit of running about. It’s not very good.

The Devil in the Dark is much better. It’s set on the planet Janus — not Janus VI as on TV — which is rich in the element pergium, atomic number 358. Mining operations for this precious resource are halted by a “big and kind of shaggy monster” (p. 23) that kills an engineer. There are references to new sci-fi material teflon (p. 24 and p. 26), a recent real-life invention of the space age, and Kirk is surprised that people here still use old-fashioned technology like fission (p. 27), because the Enterprise gets its energy from antimatter (p. 25). There’s no mention of teflon, fission or antimatter in the TV episodes, so this sci-fi materials stuff must all come from Blish.

At one heroic moment, Kirk says, “I feel the need for a conference” (p. 29), meaning a planning meeting to decide the next move. I tend to think of sci-fi business meetings round a table, all Walter Citrine in space, as a characteristic of The Next Generation, so this early version caught my attention. But “conference” is also the word Doctor Who script editor Terrance Dicks and producer Barry Letts used for their meetings with writers to discuss potential storylines, scene breakdowns and scripts. I’ve seen no evidence of the term being used on Doctor Who before this, so the intriguing thought is they took the word from Kirk to make their natters about plot logic sound a bit more dynamic…

If that’s a bit fanciful, elements of this episode were surely a direct influence on them. The plot, involving the last survivor of an intelligent alien species attacking human miners, only for us to realise the alien is quite nice, surely helped to shape The Curse of Peladon (1972). You can almost hear Spock addressing the Third Doctor in one exchange (though he’s really addressing McCoy):

“No creature is monstrous in its own environment, Doctor. And this one appears to be Intelligent, as well.” (p. 29)

I’ve previously argued that the influence of Star Trek episode Mirror Mirror on Doctor Who story Inferno (1970) must have been via the book rather than the TV episode, given relative dates they were available in the UK. Here, the opposite must be true: scripts for The Curse of Peladon were commissioned on 14 May 1971, after a storyline conference between Dicks, Letts and writer Brian Hayles on 1 March — months before this book was issued in the UK. But The Devil in the Dark was broadcast on BBC One at 17.15 on Saturday 6 September 1969 and repeated on 17 March 1971, the latter just as the plot for The Curse of Peladon was being worked out. So, it was the repeat that influenced Doctor Who.

Hayles said himself that he drew on Conan-Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), with attacks by a mythical creature revealed to be a hoax. Yet his Doctor Who story is much closer to what happens with the Horta here. The whole feel of the Doctor Who story, with a sci-fi trip to a civilisation that feels if not ancient than medieval may mean All Our Yesterdays was also an influence.

Both TV episode and book version of The Devil in the Dark reveal the Horta to be a silicon-based life form, which may have influenced Baker and Martin’s later Doctor Who story The Hand of Fear (1976). Blish thought beyond the surface of this creature, and tells us it has teflon-like internal tubing — a stone on the outside but with circulatory system of molten plastic.

Spock sets out his case for not killing the creature even before he’s learned its soft centre:

“If this is the only survivor of a dead race, to kill it would be a crime against science.”

Kirk seems to find this eccentric: 

“Spock in particular was sometimes inclined to hold his fire when his conservation instincts, or his scientific curiosity, were aroused” (p. 34).

He supports his friend, but is bemused by this hippy/ecowarrior/woke sensibility. I would argue thaty this sensibility is very much in line with the Third Doctor — and a new development compared to previous incarnations. I contend that this Star Trek influenced both the character of the Third Doctor and the adventures he had.

Blish describes something quite different to the blobby creature seen on screen:

“It was huge, shaggy, multicolored, and knobbly with objects which might have been heads, sense organs, hands” (p. 37).

The shagginess is much more like Aggedor in The Curse of Peladon, so perhaps the book informed the design of that story — which went into production after this book was available in the UK. 

The TV episode and the book both reveal the simplistic way in which the Horta communicates with humans: “No Kill” it says (p. 39). Blish suggests in the altar and chamber something of the creature’s culture (p. 40). I think this inspired more than stuff in Doctor Who; amaze amaze, there’s quite a bit of the Horta in Rocky in Project Hail Mary.

In treating the wounded stone creature, McCoy uses thermoconcrete — a fun gag — and gets to use the first iteration of his, “I’m a doctor” catchphrase; in this case, he is not a bricklayer (p. 41). At the end of the story, the Horta and its progeny agree to help the humans with their mining. Spock says the agreement is logical, but I can’t think what’s in it for these indigenous creatures as their world is plundered.

That, I think, is where The Curse of Peladon is notably different from Star Trek. Doctor Who of this period is much more ambivalent about the virtues of the Federation and Earth Empire, which Terrance acknowledged quite openly:

“You can’t just do a kind of old imperial story whereby the galactic federation is coming to Peladon and is bringing the simplistic natives the benefits of civilisation, like Sanders of Africa bringing law and order to Africa. This isn’t how people think any more, even with a family adventure serial. We are all well aware now that what happens when an advanced [people] meet a primitive [one] is not always to the benefit of the primitives.” — Terrance interviewed by John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado for Doctor Who — The Unfolding Text (1983), p. 53.

The next story in the book, Journey to Babel, begins with Dr McCoy asking Spock for a demonstration of the Vulcan salute, which we’re told is “complex” and that McCoy cannot reproduce, making it sound more like the flourish of Arnold J Rimmer in Red Dwarf than the familiar split-fingers thing. Again, I wonder how much Star Trek Blish had actually seen to miss something so well known. 

The concern about such protocol is that Kirk, Spock and McCoy are welcoming aboard a Vulcan ambassador called Sarek. Kirk knows this Sarek is 102 years-old, but not that he is Spock’s dad. The awkwardness that follows is surely because Kirk has been badly briefed; I reckon by AI.

There’s some fun stuff about Spock’s people, such as that a Vulcan teddy bear, a sehlat, is alive and has six-inch fangs (p. 51). (No, even I think it’s going too far to suggest that that could have been an influence on the troll doll in Terror of the Autons.)

Sarek is one of a number of delegates squabbling over whether to allow planet Coridan to join the Federation. The issue is that, 

“Coridans have a nearly unlimited wealth of dilithium crystals, but are underpopulated and unprotected. This invites illegal mining operations.” (p. 52)

Of course, the Federation is acting entirely altruistically and it’s just one heck of a coincidence that its fleet of starships run on exactly these crystals. One delegate, a Tellarite, is then murdered and we must work out the culprit. That is all very The Curse of Peladon, though Journey to Babel was first broadcast in the UK on Monday, 22 June 1970, a month after scripts had been commissioned for that Doctor Who story.

There are some notable details here: McCoy can give Kirk orders; Spock trusts McCoy, “to McCoy’s obvious startlement” (p. 58); and Spock insists on observing protocol even if means doing so at the expense of his own father (p. 59). Spock’s relationship with his father doesn’t seem logical in the slightest, but hush, you’re spoiling the story.

At the end, Spock exposes the real villains — smugglers from Orion trying to cause chaos and play off both sides (p. 66). There’s something of that in The Curse of Peladon and another Doctor Who story, Frontier in Space (1973), though I think the latter owes more to the James Bond film You Only Live Twice (1967). In fact, I wonder if that film inspired elements of this Star Trek.

The Menagerie begins with a 15-line footnote explaining that Blish felt it too confusing to adapt the broadcast version, which added lots of new material involving Kirk etc to the untransmitted pilot episode which had Spock under the command of a different captain. Instead of all the dramatic business of Spock-now facing court martial, Blish simply adapted the script of the pilot, in the process restoring the original ending not seen on broadcast. 

Reading it now, with these episodes readily available to watch or rewatch, that means the adaptation offers intriguing details about the original conception and development of this key story. But I can a Star Trek fan of the time feeling a bit short-changed to lose half the TV story — including all the “proper” bits of Star Trek, such as Kirk, McCoy etc. Our relationship to the book is different when it is the only permanent record of ephemeral TV.

Blish says that The Menagerie was the only two-part Star Trek story of the orignal run because the producers didn’t feel it worked. That is odd because it works very well, I think. Indeed, some of my favourite moments of later iterations of Star Trek are its cliffhangers.

The story begins in the aftermath of the Enterprise’s maiden battle, somewhere around Rigel VIII, with Spock still limping from whatever was involved (p. 69). Blish underlines how remarkable it is that Pike doesn't think twice about leaving the Enterprise in the command of Number One — a woman. She is,

“Slim and dark in a Nile Valley sort of way, she was one of those women who always look the same between the ages of twenty and fifty, but she had a mind like the proverbial steel trap, and Pike have never seen her shaken in any situation” (p. 70).

But Blish doesn’t think — or have the authority — to provide her with a name. (In the TV series Strange New Worlds, the character’s name is Una, which is a nice play on “number one” but also in rightful homage to my pal Una McCormack, and surely the coolest thing ever to happen to a TV tie-in writer.)

Blish refers to the “dematerialization of the Transporter” (p. 72). This sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole. The TARDIS is said to “dematerialise” (or it is “dematerialising” or has “dematerialised”) in dialogue used in TV stories The Time Meddler and The Myth Makers (1965), The Daleks Master Plan (1965-66) and The Smugglers (1966). My guess is that that was the influence of story editor Dennis Spooner, picked up by his immediate successor Donald Tosh. But the word then fell by the wayside.

But then the term was picked up again by Terrance Dicks in exactly the period of Doctor Who that I think was influenced a lot by Star Trek. Not only does the TARDIS dematerialise, it boasts a dematerialisation circuit. In that sense, the word is used in dialogue in Terror of the Autons, The Mind of Evil, The Claws of Axos and Colony In Space (1971), Day of the Daleks and The Time Monster (1972), The Three Doctors (1972-73), The Green Death (1973) and Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974).

That can’t come from this book, which was published after those 1971 episodes. But perhaps Terrance took the word “dematerialise” from the Star Trek episode Return to Tomorrow, where Scotty uses it to refer to the transporter. That episode was first broadcast in the UK on 17 August 1970, just as scripts for Terror of the Autons were being finalised. Yes, yes, it’s a stretch, but I’m rather delighted by the thought that such a potent word in Doctor Who might have been pinched from the opposition.

Whatever the case, the fantasy realm Captain Pike encounters here is described as, “almost like that of an Oriental potentate” (p. 84); the latest example in these books of Oriental to mean “alien but sexy". There seems a genuine risk that Pike might give up Star Fleet and go with these fantasy slave traders, even before, “Pike saw another girl, nude, her skin green” (p. 85) which tempts him further. This is Vina, her name surely taken from Weena in The Time Machine by HG Wells. Like Pike, she seems quite keen on the fantasy, protesting, “No, let us finish” (p. 86) when it threatens to stop.

At the end of the story, Pike escapes the fantasy world and Vina, but his experience affects how this captain, in charge of a crew of competent people not judged by their sex, now views some members of his crew:

“Pike could not resist stealing a quick look from Number One to [Yeoman] Colt, wondering which of them, in other circumstances, he might have picked.”

Nicely, Blish ends with a twist on this, empowering the two women:

“When he found them both looking at him as if with the same speculation, he turned his eyes determinedly to the viewscreen and banished the thought” (p. 93).

In his afterword, Blish notes that it was decided that this dynamic of captain and two potential love interests would not sustain many episodes of the TV show so it was abandoned. In other changes, he says, Number One was demoted and became Lt Uhura, Colt became Janice Rand, medical officer Boyce becames McCoy, and Tyler became Sulu.

“The net effect was to make the new officers more interracial than before” (p. 94).

He concludes that he sometimes gets letters criticising his adaptations for being different to those as broadcast — presumably from fans with audio recordings of the episodes. He says, “I had to make my own judgment of what would best serve the authors’ intents”, showing fidelity to what was in their heads, if not what they typed.

Next up is The Enterprise Incident, the first adaptation in these books of a third season episode, in which Kirk is working under sealed orders that seem irrational. To keep the secret, he plays up to being “irritable and snappish” as if fatigued (p. 95), to the extent that when Spock questions his behaviour, Kirk responds, “you pointy-eared turncoat” (p. 104).

All of this is because the Federation are sending Kirk on a secret mission to meet a Romulan Commander, an otherwise unnamed woman Kirk thinks, “beautiful, aristocratic, compelling” (p. 99). Like Vina, she soon slips out of her clothes:

“Compared to her appearance in uniform, she seemed now to be wearing hardly anything, although this was in part an illusion of contrast” (p. 109).

We’re also told that, “Vulcans were cyclical in their mating customs, and immune to sexual attraction at all times” (p. 115). That’s clearly not true of the half-human Spock here, who is interested in the Commander.

We learn Spock has been in Starfleet for 18 years (p. 104). He kills Kirk again (p. 107) — a fact spoiled by the Radio Times listing for this episode: Spock “is eventually forced to eliminate his commander with the Vulcan death grip!” (Radio Times #2498, 25 September 1971). I can see why that description would make the casual viewer want to tune in.

The Enterprise achieves Warp Nine while shrouded by the Romulan cloaking device (p. 114), a piece of technology that seems to work very well and is extremely useful; the Enterprise never uses it again. Likewise, the Romulan Commander is a striking woman with a connection to Spock — just the sort of character deserving of a rematch. We don’t see her again, either.

Finally, there’s A Piece of the Action, involving a cargo cult based on Chicago gangsters — and on a particular book, Mobs of the Twenties published in New York in 1993 (p. 121). It’s a fun idea for a story from the 1960s adapted for prose in the early 70s to hinge on a text from the near future but about the past, seized upon by an even more distant future.

In the TV episode, Kirk makes up a card game he says is played on Beta Antares IV. Blish adds that Antares is, in fact, not a double star — so this is Kirk being clever (and certainly not wrong about basic astronomy), saying something his friends will know to be false as a kind of signal to them (p. 124).

Blish also adds a reference to “klee-et”, which he explains is a Vulcan word meaning “prepare to engage”, and refers us in a footnote to the episode Amok Time in Star Trek Three (p. 124, yes spelling out the ordinal) — the first time a footnote appears in these books of adaptations of episodes, having been used a lot in original novel Spock Must Die!

Again, the morality here is a bit suss, Kirk using a show of force from the Enterprise to put down the gangsters. Basically, the Federation is a bigger hoodlum than they are. But I’m struck by a notable absence in these four books: apart from Errand of Mercy in Star Trek 2, they’ve avoided all the TV episodes that work as analogies for the contemporary conflict in Vietnam. At university 30 years ago, I read with great interest H Bruce Franklin’s “Star Trek in the Vietnam Era” in Science-Fiction Studies vol 21, no 1 (March 1994), pp. 24-34, which demonstrates how select episodes of Star Trek reveal changing attitudes to the real-life conflict. Was there an active choice made not to adapt the stories that touched on contemporary geo-politics? Again, I’m curious who decided or imposed the episodes to be adapted.

As a permanent record of the TV episodes, these books must have had a formative influence on early Star Trek fandom in the US and the UK. I wonder how much they influenced a sense of the “best” episodes, or most worthy ones, filtered by the selection process and Blish’s own prejudice as an active member of the community at the World Science Fiction Convention. How much did he impose on fans?

I think this stuff was hugely influential on Doctor Who — both on TV and and on its own nascent fandom. Doctor Who surely took the idea of the Doctor as diplomat from Star Trek. He’s got his own elegant way of fighting — CTRL+F “Vulcan neck-pinch”, CTRL+R “Venusian aikido”. But the Doctor doesn’t kill his best friend the Brigadier, let alone kill him twice. And there’s nothing about the Doctor having alien hormones or a previously unmentioned wife. At least not for the time being.

My abiding thought is how much these breezy adaptations of TV episodes must have influenced Terrance Dicks’s approach to the novelisations of Doctor Who, and even the fact that such books existed at all. Star Trek 5 by James Blish was published in the US in February 1972 and issued in the UK in June that year. Thereafter, Corgi published UK editions of the Star Trek books by Blish. That was surely a vote of confidence in a market for such titles, even with no new Star Trek being made on TV. That must have helped support the case for a new line of Doctor Who novelisations launched by Target in 1973.

I shall return to those Doctor Who novelisations in due course, with a long post picking up where I left off. Coming soon: Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters…

Doctor Who and the Missing Hour

Big Finish have announced details of my new six-hour audio novel, Doctor Who - The Missing Hour, to be released in October.

June 1940 and the island of Malta is under constant bombardment.

Flight officer Roddy Wright is one of a handful of Hurricane pilots helping to defend the island. He knows the odds are against him.

So, too, does his daughter. In fact, Barbara knows that there are just days - hours - until her father goes missing in action.

She can't alter history. But until that fateful hour, how can she resist spending more time with the father she lost so long ago? What could possibly go wrong?

It is written by me from a storyline by Fio Trethewey, and narrated by Barnaby Edwards. Sound design and music by Richard Fox, script editor Roland Moore, producer David Richardson, senior producer John Ainsworth and executive producers Jason Haigh-Ellery and Nicholas Briggs. The splendid cover art is by Sean Longmore. 

Roddy takes his name from Roderick Malachi Seaburne Rayner (1918-82), a Hurricane pilot in the Battle of Britain and my great uncle.

The Mystery of the Missing Diamond, by Terrance Dicks

First published in July 1982, this 56-page novel began a trilogy that Terrance Dicks wrote for Pepper Press, whose children’s editor, Brenda Gardner, he’d previously worked with on the Target Doctor Who books. Gardner went on to set up her own company, Piccadilly Press, for which Terrance wrote more than 100 books, including more adventures for Oliver and his friends. The seventh and last in the series, Gupta’s Christmas, was published in September 1985.

In 1986, Gardner told the Bookseller that she thought the Ask Oliver books were suitable for children up to the age of 10, and were a response to Terrance not being able to find suitable reading for his own youngest son — also called Oliver. Gardner’s responses in that interview are really interesting on why the books Terrance wrote for her appealed to young readers, and how unusual it was for someone to write for this particular age group:

“It’s important for children of this age who have begun to read to have books which they can actually finish … That’s a very great achievement for a child—actually to be able to say, I’ve read a whole book.”

“I think children who are grappling with early reading find it easier if they can go on to other books with a character already formed in their minds.”

“Writers are often not attracted to write for this age range simply because it isn’t as prestigious as fiction for older children. There’s no kudos in it, really; there are no major awards for books for this age range, for example.” — Tony Bradman, “Problems for the five to eights”, Bookseller, 15 March 1986, pp. 1066-67.

Ask Oliver has a similar set-up to Terrance’s already established and ongoing range of Baker Street Irregulars books for slightly older readers, published by Blackie & Son (where the publishing director who got Terrance involved was Richard Henwood, also ex of Target). As with the first of that series, The Case of the Missing Masterpiece, this first case involves a theft from a local amenity (there an old house open to the public, here a museum) which four local kids investigate because they want to be like Sherlock Holmes. 

What’s different is that the adventures of the Baker Street Irregulars are narrated by Rob, the leader of the gang and the one who is a fan of the Holmes stories. Here, the gang is led by proactive Pete, it’s cheerful Gupta who knows his Holmes, and Oliver is “the youngest and smallest of Pete’s gang”, as the back-cover blurb puts it. As with the Baker Street Irregulars, there is also a Girl One, in this case Vicky, “a quiet, rather serious girl” (p. 6).

Oliver is small, quiet and often overlooked. 

“He didn't talk much but he thought a lot. Oliver noticed things.” (p. 6)

This made me think of Bill Roach, the bullied schoolboy in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy whose watchfulness is spotted by Jim Prideaux. But I think the plot here owes much more to Beau Geste (1924) by PC Wren; as this book was published, Douglas Camfield was busy directing a TV version of Beau Geste, broadcast later in the year. Terrance was script editor.

Like Beau Geste, the plot here involves the theft of a diamond where we're invited to guess who took it, but in fact the real mystery is revealed to be something else. Here, the diamond was “given” (p. 10) to the present museum owner’s great grandfather by an Indian sultan — which may be an homage to the classic Holmes adventures The Sign of the Four (1890). (The TV version of Beau Geste followed the TV version of The Hound of the Baskervilles, also script edited by Terrance, so I think this stuff was all in his head.)

The children get involved because the disappearance of the diamond leads to the police taking in museum attendant Mr Morrison. His previous kindness to the children means that they — and therefore we — think he must be innocent. But Oliver observes what the others have not: that Morrison wasn't arrested (p. 16).

There’s some typically Terrance stuff in the use of food: “doughnuts are very consoling in times of trouble” (p. 14). It’s a shame Vicky’s usefulness to the plot involves her pretending to be younger than she is, and ditzy, and threatening to blub, to get a hotel clerk to share the information the gang needs (p. 28). Cornered by adults, Gupta tries to bluff his way out by pretending to be the son of a sultan (p. 35). It’s a bit… at best, cliched and simplistic.

Facing further peril, Vicky won’t hide with boys in the toilets — “she didn’t think it would be proper, even for a detective” (p. 39). That feels a little too much like a 50-something male writer safely at home at his keyboard, and not what a real girl facing danger would say. Terrance often writes bolshier female characters, sometimes a bit over-zealous and wreckless in their efforts to be just as good as the boys. This feels a bit less rich.

For all that, it’s a fast-moving, twisty and ingenious story. As with The Casing of the Missing Masterpiece, our heroes circumvent genre cliches by going to the police, and are concerned by what their parents will think — so it all feels grounded in the real. The story is broken up by lots of illustrations by Valerie Littlewood, and is divided up into five chapters. 

The penultimate chapter even lists clues we should go back and check for, with hints to help us solve the case. We’re an active participant as reader. The blurb asks, “Can you guess who did it before Oliver”, promising that, “Clues are given in the story to help you solve the mystery” — and encouraging young readers to play along. 

In fact the revelation is that this is a why rather than who dunnit. 

“If no one could work out how it had been stolen, no one would worry about what had been stolen. The theft somehow made the diamond look real.” (p. 53).

Effectively, it turns the game we’re playing isn’t the one we initially thought. I’d have loved that as a kid, and eagerly moved on to the gang’s next adventure…

I’ve written lots more posts on the 235 books by Terrance Dicks. My biography Written by Terrance Dicks will be published soon.

Star Trek 3, by James Blish

This third volume of breezy adaptations in prose of Star Trek episodes was first published in the US in April 1969, by which point the TV series had been cancelled. It was issued in the UK in August of that year, with a sticker saying “3/6”, just weeks after the series began broadcast on Saturday teatimes in what was usually the Doctor Who slot. I read it, along with Star Trek, Star Trek 2 and the original novel Spock Must Die! earlier this year as research for my forthcoming biography Written by Terrance Dicks, and I’ve also written a piece on the cross-pollination of these two series, “Who Connections — Star Trek”, for Doctor Who Magazine #632 (August 2026), pp. 44-49.

The cover takes the same format as Star Trek 2, though with a black background rather than white. Whereas that previous book featured a photo of two leading members of the cast, this has three — presumably to match the title. The three leads of the series here are Kirk, Spock and Uhura, making the latter a selling point. Indeed, the first interior page lists the main characters as Kirk, Uhura and Spock, in that order, and describes her thus:

“Lt. Uhura—Unbelievably beautiful, she is the most popular member of the Enterprise crew and also one of the most brilliant scan engineers around.”

The front cover notes Star Trek is now “award-winning” and promises “mind-reeling” and “eerie excursions into galaxies of probability”, and the back cover promises journeys into “the supernatural”. I’m not sure there are galaxies, plural, or forays into the supernatural. There’s a lot of cod psychology of various kinds, including Spock getting horny.

Blish’s preface, written in 1968, addresses the “award-winning” claim on the cover. First, he explains for the lay reader the annual “World Convention” of science-fiction fans — admitting that, at the time he wrote this, it had only been held outside the US on one occasion — and Worldcon’s Hugo awards for best sci-fi of the previous year. The Star Trek episode The Menagerie was nominated for “best dramatic presentation” in 1967, and in 1968 all four of nominees were from Star Trek; City on the Edge of Forever won. However, Blish adapted that story in Star Trek 2 (using elements from the draft script that didn’t make it to the screen), so this new volume presents the three other nominees — The Trouble with Tribbles, The Doomsday Machine and Amok Time. 

Oddly, he doesn’t include The Menagerie here (it’s in Star Trek 4, about which more anon). And though Blish notes that City on the Edge of Forever also won an award voted for by TV writers (a Writers Guild of America award for “best episodic drama on television; the episode The Return of the Archons was also nominated), it’s the accolade from the science-fiction fans that he clearly thinks most worthy of note. That’s despite feeling that, “s-f fandom and Star Trek fandom do not seem to overlap very much, certainly by no more than 10 per cent” (p. viii).

Blish goes on to say that he’d received more mail about his two Star Trek books than for the rest of his writing career (27 novels over 20 years, including a Hugo award winner), and then answers a number of frequently asked questions — no, he can’t supply photographs of or access to the actors; yes, there is a book about The Making of Star Trek and yes, he is writing an original Star Trek novel. From this, we get a nebulous sense of early Star Trek fandom, casual viewers hungry for information and communion.

The first story in the book is The Trouble with Tribbles from the script by David Gerrold, which got its own book in 1973. Blish starts by telling us that we don’t know where tribbles originate from, describing what they look like — “a cross between an Angora cat and a beanbag” (p. 1) — and that they are harmless. He underlines that point, setting up the harm to come.

The story twice mentions the Organian treaty with the Klingons from a previous on-screen adventure, Errand of Mercy, which is as per the TV episode. That episode was included in Star Trek 2 but there’s no footnote back to it as there would be from Spock Must Die! onwards. Indeed, I think Blish introduced footnotes with that novel to give his own, original story a sense of authenticity. Perhaps the references to the treaty here prompted him to revisit it in the novel. 

Then there’s stuff not in the TV episode. On screen, early on, Kirk asks under what authority Nilz Baris has put a whole quadrant on defence alert, and is told Baris is Federation Undersecretary in Charge of Agricultural Affairs. “That gives him the authority,” says Spock, on screen. But in the book, Kirk counters that it is, “A position with no military standing of which I am aware” (p. 3) — suggesting that Kirk and the Enterprise are part of the military. As per the original version of the script, the book version features Koloth, the Klingon from Errand of Mercy. That may mean Blish was working from draft scripts.

Other than that, the adaptation has Spock remark on an unusual monicker — “His name is Cyrano Jones, of all things” (p. 9) — which seems oddly out of character (who is he to judge?). And there’s an odd bit of character work:

“Uhura had never shown the faintest sign of sentimentality before, but [with the pet tribble] she seemed to be far gone in gooiness” (p. 7).

Not for the first time, I wonder how much Star Trek Blish had actually seen when he wrote this.

Next up is The Last Gunfight, the TV episode Spectre of the Gun, in which our heroes find themselves in Tombstone on 26 October 1881, taking the place of the real-life notorious gunfighters — by coincidence, something that also happens in the Doctor Who story The Gunfighters (1966). 

Perhaps there is some direct crossover between this episode of Star Trek and Doctor Who. I wonder if the idea here, of god-like beings who intend to execute a person by putting them in a fantasy world drawn from their own memories, influenced Bob Baker and Dave Martin when they conceived Deathworld, the initial idea that became The Three Doctors (1972-73). Blish says the events are drawn from Kirk’s “ancestral memories—archetypes drawn from the collective unconscious” (p. 25), a concept not used on screen (but an element in Doctor Who and the Silurians (1970)). He also adds a reference to the events of City on the Edge of Forever (p. 26), again without a footnote, and tells us McCoy hails from Atlanta (p. 28).

When Chekov is apparently killed, Kirk finds his science officer’s cold response hard to take, thinking that he’ll “never get used to Spock’s hidden emotional life” (p. 31). Spock, out of character, refers to McCoy as “Bones” (p. 34), and adopts a Scottish accent to achieve rapport with Scott, “his voice suddenly taking on a dark, Caledonian color, as deep as that of a prophet’s” (p. 35). (Do prophets have dark, deep voices?) It’s an example of Spock’s psychological knowledge of, and love for, his various human shipmates, which earns the following response from Kirk — again not heard on screen:

“Privately, and for no other ears than yours, I think you are a sentimental bag of mush” (p. 37).

The Doomsday Machine features Brand, not Matt, Decker — I assume some relative of the Will Decker in the first Star Trek movie. The story involves an ancient, alien weapon able to destroy whole planets, but we’ve already had a story, Operation — Annihilate! in Star Trek 2, in which the Enterprise could itself do that. I think this story must have influenced the Doctor Who adventure Colony in Space (1971), about an ancient, alien weapon able to destroy a whole star, not least because it was novelised as Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon.

Scotty’s fluctuating accent is acknowledged here; we’re told he gets more Scottish when things are serious (p. 50) — in Spock Must Die! it is a sign of him being under stress. It’s also interesting that when Kirk is teleported, the room he was in, “faded around him” (p. 51) — we see it from his perspective, something rarely done on screen.

Assignment Earth begins with references to Kirk’s two previous experiences of time travel (in City on the Edge of Forever and Tomorrow is Yesterday, both in Star Trek 2). The plot involves the Enterprise travelling back from the 23rd century to Earth in 1969 to prevent Gary Seven and his cat from sending a rocket off course — the implication being to start a war. That was surely an influence on what became Day of the Daleks (1972), in which guerrillas from the 22nd century travel back to c. 1980 to blow up a man they think responsible for starting a war. In both cases, the action taken to prevent catastrophe is what causes it. I wonder, too, if the description here of the incongruous Gary — “a man impeccably dressed in a twentieth-century business suit” had an influence on the appearance of the Time Lord at the beginning of Terror of the Autons (1971).

On the same lines, I wonder if Mirror Mirror inspired some of The Curse of Peladon (1972), as it involves a storm stranding the Enterprise landing party on a planet that has firmly declined an invitation to join the Federation. The storm affects the teleport, sending Kirk to “another dimensional plane” (p. 71), where he meets alternative versions of his friends, including a bearded Spock, living in a tyrannical regime. As I argue in my piece for DWM, this was surely an influence on the Doctor Who story Inferno (1970), and script editor Terrance Dicks must have taken the idea from this prose adaptation because the TV episode Mirror Mirror wasn’t broadcast in the UK until the summer of 1970, when Inferno was in the midst of being shown.

McCoy refers here to Spock as “Spocko” (p. 82) and Kirk says of Uhura “Good girl” (p. 76) — neither of them in the TV episode. I was taken by Kirk referring to one of his alternative counterparts as “Mr Pseudo-Sulu”, and describing Pseudo-Chekov’s “lubricious expression” on seeing Uhura (both p. 79) — a rare bit of Blish enjoying the kind of well-chosen words that feature in novelisations by Terrance Dicks. He tells us the Enterprise is a “fifty billion credit starship” (p. 75) and adds some psychology:

“Evidently this universe had never discovered that men pay more attention to a machine when its voice is feminine” (p. 74). 

Friday’s Child is another story about a planet with valuable mineral deposits the Federation is keen to get its mitts on for the indigenous people’s own good. Blish gives us a history of Ceres, then explains that it’s not the dwarf planet (he calls it an asteroid) of the same name in the Solar System. The people of Ceres seem primitive but are descendants of space-travelling humans from Earth, so must have regressed in just a few generations.

There’s a fair bit of male gaze here — a meal is “served by a most scantily clad Cerean girl of whom it was impossible not to be aware” (pp. 87-88). McCoy also refers to “basic humanoid stock” and “genetic drift" (p. 95), what with being an old racist. As well as English, he speaks Vulcan, Old High Martian, medical Latin, Greek, Fortran and Vegan (p. 91). 

The story here is all about a woman, Eleen, who doesn’t want to care for her new baby, due to various things that have been going on. The Enterprise crew are surprisingly judgmental and unsympathetic. “We intend to keep both you and your baby alive, whether you want it or not,” McCoy tells her (p. 94). Kirk tells her, just as sternly, that she is required to look after the child because of her traditions, which he’ll “enforce … if I have to” (p. 99). Ick.

The book concludes with Amok Time, which begins with Spock throwing soup at Nurse Chapel (in the TV episode he just declines it). His quarters are, says Blish, “simple, sparse and vaguely Oriental”, while his reading screen shows an image of “the head of a very young girl, no more than a child” (p. 106) — who turns out, thankfully, to be a grown-up he’s known since childhood. As per the TV episode, his request for shore leave has been declined, but he’s not revealed the medical condition that would surely justify his workplace making reasonable adjustments. This sort of thing wouldn’t happen in the Next Generation, where the Enterprise has office managers.

Blish tells us that Spock’s normal pulse rate is 240 bpm and he has non-existent blood pressure and green blood (p. 107), information not featured in this TV episode but taken from The Naked Time. As I say in my DWM piece, I think the first UK broadcast of that episode, on 19 July 1969, inspired the lines in Spearhead from Space about the Doctor’s own pulse rate, though it may have been taken from this book. Kirk assumes that Vulcans breed “eugenically” (p. 106), and I realise that Pon-farr, as described (p. 109) is basically periods for men. 

The arena on Vulcan is described as being like Stonehenge (p. 110); I wonder if that’s the result of Blish having recently moved to the UK. As per the TV episode, we’re told T’Pau is the only person ever to turn down a seat on the Federation Council, though it’s not clear why. Spock’s childhood pal T’Pring, “no child now”, is still referred to as a “girl” (p. 111). T’Pau sets out the stakes of the duel to follow in much more on-the-nose language than broadcast:

“Are you prepared to become the property of the victor? Not merely his wife, but his chattel, with no other rights or status?” (p. 112)

McCoy refers to this as “hanky-panky”.

Then Kirk and Spock fight to the death. Oddly, Blish chooses to narrate this from Kirk’s perspective, which undercuts the tension — and the “death” of Kirk on screen. Instead, we have Kirk listening to Spock’s remorse at having killed him.

Still, killing Kirk seems to end Spock’s manic sex drive, like some kind of sexual release. I also wonder how the Vulcans will react when they learn Kirk has survived the ordeal: wouldn’t they demand a rematch? It all ends happily and a cured, unsexed-up Spock praises Nurse Chapel’s “very good plomik soup” (p. 117), providing closure. The Enterprise heads off to further adventures…

Bookish Volume II, by Matthew Sweet

Harold Terence Sneed is found in his parlour in Borough, stabbed through the ribs. The irony is that he’d just conducted a seance; one of those present at that attempt to reach the spirit world is the cause of Sneed now passing on.

Maxie Kleinmann is an elderly tailor on Jermyn Street who claims to have killed the man found dead on his shop floor, with a single punch to the throat. And when Gabriel Book takes Jack Blunt to Germany to trace the death of a man very close to them both, there are soon more murders…

I’ve not yet seen the second series of Bookish, of which this is a novelisation, but the book is a delight. I noted of the first volume that it provides some clues to when Book’s adventures are set which we don’t glean from the TV episodes. Here, the three cases all take place in the autumn of 1946, the second story — Dead Man’s Whistle — between 23 October (p. 125) and 8 November (p. 201), and the last one, Killer Nacht, on and around 6 December. Indeed, the first case, Memento Mori, takes place soon after the end of the last series (in September), as there are newspaper headlines about it.

As before, the book is bookended by a brief glimpse of the future, two years on from last time, with a letter from Book in Los Angeles to Nora dated 13 February 1964 and her reply from the following day — meaning that, away from the fog and cold of London, he missed The Edge of Destruction go out.

There are a number of Doctor Who references in the book — Sneed is named after the undertaker in Gatiss’s first Doctor Who episode, and there’s an appearance by Luigi Rossini (Lew Russell) and his circus from Terror of the Autons, and a Chinese fowling piece.

In fact, the book is chock full of references — to books, to real crimes and odd bits of history such as the sad death of Eleanor Marx (the doctor who attended her, and lived just round the corner, was the dad of Ernest Shackleton). I should dearly love footnotes, and a reading list.

I’ve seen the series described as cosy crime, and can see it being just the thing for Sunday evenings in the Call the Midwife slot. There’s a steely edge to some of this stuff, and a pathos which Mark Gatiss has always been so good at. The last episode, in particular, ends with some real tension on the heartstrings — and leaves me baying to know more.

But I note that one of the regular characters is not mentioned in correspondence from 1964. Is that a clue about what’s to come?

The Burial Tide, by Neil Sharpson

She wakes to the sound of singing, and finds herself in the dark. To begin with, she doesn't have a name or any memory - but Mara has been buried alive. Forcing her way out of the coffin and up through the wet ground, she finds three more fresh graves besides her one, and a community who aren't entirely forthcoming about what's been going on...

This is a brilliant, fast-moving and properly horrible novel, sort of John Carpenter's The Thing set on Craggy Island. Each short chapter is from the perspective of one the small group of characters and labelled with their name. In the opening pages, when Mara can't recall who she is, her chapters don't have titles; later, when some stuff happens that I won't spoil, there's a chapter title with multiple names. It' a simple but effective way of underlining the horror.

The small island community, off the Irish mainland, feels at once very specific and completely ordinary, which grounds the more outlandish elements of the story in the stolidly real. Mara quickly makes friends with two young people who are, each in their ways, not quite part of the island community. The three friends share a quirky, flirty relationship, and it's often funny. We like them, we want to be part of their gang, so any threat to them feels all the more visceral.

Like Mara, we have to puzzle out who these people really are, and why they're so guarded about the secrets they're keeping. There are some compelling mysteries to unpick - why one young man hides his horrible scars, why a woman immediately lies about the death of someone else, who it is lying in those three other graves and how they really died. Even Mara is not what she, at first, appears.

While the story is told from the perspectives of its characters, and so see things from inside their heads, it's often a very visual story, full of moments that would work well on the screen. I think there's an excellent, breezy horror movie to be made from it. In fact, it's so lucidly told in dialogue and visuals that I almost feel I've already seen it.

What's particularly brilliant is that all the different threads are neatly tied up by the end, and the book doesn't outstay its welcome. The result is compelling and deliciously horrible, but satisfying, too. We're left with an image at once satisfying and haunting, as one prominent character forgets the awful events they've been part of and so are set free. 

Doctor Who Magazine #633

The new issue of the official Doctor Who Magazine boasts some exciting news: my novelisation Doctor Who - The Six Doctors will be published on 21 January, followed by Steve Cole's novelisation Doctor Who - The Vampire Mutation on 4 March. Both are based on newly discovered paperwork in the archives of the late Terrance Dicks, which I worked my way through last year. I say a little about that in the news story, and will have more to share in due course.

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:

When There Are Wolves Again, by EJ Swift

This novel won the Clarke Award last week, and well deservedly. It's the tale of two women, Lucy and Hester, between 2020 and 2070, from Covid lockdown through the climate emergency to a... well, that would be sad to spoil.

Lucy is six when we meet her, sent to bubble with her grandparents in their house in Herne Hill, where she falls for the teeming life in the garden. She seems to be, though I don't think it's ever quite stated, neurodivergent, and this exasperates various grown-ups around her in ways we only glean. We often have to read between the lines with Lucy to why others behave as they do.

Hester is a few years older than Lucy and, when we meet her, in Ukraine to record a documentary about the wild dogs of Chernobyl, once the pets of the people who had to flee the nuclear disaster. While there, Hester adopts - or smuggles out - a wolf/dog and, back in the UK, falls on difficult times. Then her documentary does well and she can look for other projects to document. That includes efforts to rewild the heat-ravaged country.

As with Octavia E Butler's The Parable of the Sower, it's unsettling to start a story in the past, catch up with the present and then simply keep going, as speed - it's almost like we've taken flight. Swift is very good at keeping us grounded. For all the details of buildings made of mycelium, people flying to Mars and other sci-fi innovations, things feel ordinary and real.

For all there are exciting moments, what really makes this work is the characterisation, of the two protagonists and those they encounter. Sometimes there are big dramatic moments, sometimes personalities just clash, or people are a bit over-tired. Yet Swift makes us want to spend time with these people, whether they're in a fight or just nattering in the firelight. When people and dogs, inevitably, die we really feel their loss.

Lucy and Hester have frequent near-miss encounters, and by the end are aware of one another though they haven't met. We get to know their families, their conflict, their heartbreaks, and there's the antagonist of people in denial about climate change and the urgent action needed to mitigate its effects. It's sometimes funny, sometimes thrilling and horrific, and shot through with warmth and humanity. I really liked it.

I'm not sure I was aware of it while reading, but looking back I think it's a novel exploring the idea of redemption - that we can do something to repair the damage we've done, to our world, to our communities, to each other. Friends fall out and make up again, a brother and sister come to uneasy terms about an inheritance, a violent bad guy is faced, and nature is restored.

Along the way, there's lots about our individual and collective relationship with nature, and ideas about how things might be, if not fixed, then made better. That includes gas dirigibles instead of airplanes, rewilding on an epic scale, and a huge programme in transferring private land to the common people. It's not easy, but the effort and the progress made gave me hope. How strange, how uplifting, to read a book about coming catastrophe and feel we might get through it, if we change how things are done.

Black Archive: The Daleks, by Oliver Wake

I greatly enjoyed this shrewd, wide-ranging exploration of the seven-part Doctor Who serial variously known as Serial B, The Mutants or The Daleks. First broadcast over the winter of 1963-64, it introduced us to the outer-space robot people of the planet Skaro.

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.

The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow

It took some time to read this long, densely written “new history of humanity”, as it is subtitled, but this is a volume to savour not to rush through. Every few pages, there’s some boggling new idea, challenging notions of early humanity and our journey to “civilisation”, and thus who we are now. I’ve very grateful to Una McCormack, who recommended it in her essay in Writing the Future (2023).

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. 

• See also: me on Uncivilised, by Subhadras Das

Magic Rays of Light, by John Wyver

Rekindling the spirits of lost television

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 hold 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:

• My book, David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television
• ‘Where the strange, secret world of Mr Benn came from’, for the Telegraph
• ‘The secret Coronation Street pilot episode lost for 66 years’, also for the Telegraph
• On The Intimate Screen — Early British Television Drama by Jason Jacobs
• On Writing for Television, by Sir Basil Bartlett
• On Starlight Days, by Cecil Madden