Bowler Hats and Kinky Boots, by Michael Richardson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, when towards the end of production on the third episode of Season 6, the US network executives thought the series had taken a wrong turn, there was an extraordinary about turn, detailed by Richardson. The producer and script editor were fired and a new crew were brought in, led by Brian Clemens. Under his direction, the three episodes were reworked, they changed the colour of lead actress Linda Thorson’s hair and introduced a new leading character introduced in Mother (Patrick Newall). According to Richardson, Clemens came in with carte blanche to do as he liked and he seems to have spared no one’s feelings where there were things he didn’t like. Basically: high drama.

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

The success of The Avengers depended on how it fared against the competition on US TV. That competition, says Richardson, was Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In and I Dream of Jeannie on NBC, and Gunsmoke on CBS. There’s a reason you’ve probably heard of them: they were the big guns of TV. Against them, The Avengers ranked 69th in ratings. Despite the extraordinary gamble and the work of all those involved, chasing the US market so doggedly also sealed the series’ fate.

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

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

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

Exterminate! Regenerate! by John Higgs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See also:

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

Green for Danger, by Christianna Brand

"'If this were a detective story, he'd be the murderer for a certainty, though,' said Barnes. 'They always pick on the benevolent elderly gent, because you'll never think it could be him!'

'Ah, but nowadays they're more subtle; they know that the reader's wise to that trick and the older and more benevolent a character is, the more he'll be suspected.'

'Perhaps it's gone all the way round and come back full cycle,' suggested Barnes, laughing; 'and elderly gents and paralytics in bath chairs are suspects number one all over again because the reader doesn't think the author would be so obvious. Anyway, this isn't a detective story, and it certainly wasn't old Moon.'

'So that leaves you and me and the three girls,' said Eden, grinning sardonically. 'A charming alternative.'" (p. 216)

My good friend Father Christmas added this to my Mum's stocking based on the blurb, thinking it a suitable present for a former nurse who likes a murder mystery. My Mum's first reaction was, "Oh, I knew her." In 1971-72, my late Dad was a joint junior registrar at Mount Vernon and Middlesex hospitals, working under Brand's husband, the surgeon Roland Lewis.

First published in 1944, Green for Danger involves victims of air raids in 1943 being brought into a military hospital in Kent, where someone bumps off a number of patients and staff. A film version was released in 1946, directed by Sidney Gilliat and starring Alistair Sim as Inspector Cockrill, with action moved forward a year to 1944 and the V-1 offensive, presumably for greater cinematic impact.

The book begins with postman Joseph Higgins pushing his old, red bicycle towards the new Heron's Park hospital to deliver seven letters. They're all from new members of staff and we get a quick glimpse of each character before being told that one of them will, a year later, murder this poor postman.

In Chapter II, we jump forward a year and are quickly caught up in the bustling, bantering hospital on the night of an air raid. The local ARP centre and a pub have been hit, so lots of patients are coming in, wounded and grimy and scared. At the same time, we get more details of stuff going on under the surface - the staff's love affairs and unrequited passions, their terror of the air raids, the people they've already lost. 

Higgins is brought in with a fractured femur, the sole survivor of the ARP Centre. The doctors decide to operate. Higgins and his wife are both nervous but are assured it's a routine procedure. In he goes to theatre, our seven suspects all on duty. By the end of Chapter III he is dead.

At first it seems that no one is to blame - sometimes these things just happen in theatre. Inspector Cockrill is called in as a matter of routine. But he starts to suspect that something more sinister has gone on and then someone else is murdered...

It all moves along breathlessly and the different characters are well drawn, with some suspenseful moments such as when another man goes into theatre with the same suspects on duty, plus the Inspector watching them. The air raids and murder make for a tense setting anyway, and there's something a bit naughty in the staff's complex romantic intrigues, their efforts to solve the mystery for themselves and the games they play with the police officers assigned to watch them. 

Cockrill deduces who the killer is fairly early on but requires more evidence before he can confront them, which is effectively a challenge to the reader to work out what he has spotted from the clues given so far. On more than one occasion, things don't go as he expects - putting lives in danger.

Brand keeps us guessing skilfully. There are some fantastic twists at we rattle towards the conclusion - one section ends with a character springing forward to attack and we think they are the killer exposed. In the next, brief section, the Inspector intercedes to stop this person and then arrests someone else. "Oh, it's them!" we respond to the sudden attack. And then, almost immediately, "Oh, no, it's them!"

In the closing chapter, the survivors compare notes and look towards the future. There are still further twists in the tale. One character seems to be proposing to another - and then it's clear that they aren't. The other character, hopes dashed, 

"stuck our her chin, made a little joke, and nobody knew there was anything wrong at all." (p. 255)

We leave them, laughing and talking, for all we are haunted by the trouble we know lies just under the surface.

Macfest interview with Shirin Shamsi

Tomorrow, as part of Macfest, I'll be interviewing children's author Shirin Shamsi in a free online event. 

Shirin will read her book Zahra’s Blessing - A Ramadan Story, and we'll talk about that and her other work. There will be an opportunity for attendees to ask questions.

The blurb for the event says:

Shirin Shamsi is an award-winning author of children’s books. Born and raised in the United Kingdom to Pakistani immigrants, she moved to the USA with her husband, over thirty years ago, where they have raised three children. Now empty nesters, they live with their cat Bramble in the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois.

With a background in Early Childhood, children have always been Shirin’s priority and focus. She writes with the hope that every child will see themselves represented in books. Having lived on three continents, Shirin sees herself as a global citizen. She feels passionately about sharing stories that represent global themes and diversity; stories that inspire curiosity, compassion, kindness, and empathy.

This is the third Macfest I've been part of. Last year I interviewed Seti Atta about her novel A Bit of Difference. The year before, I interviewed Fatima Manji about her book Hidden Histories.

Death at the Sign of the Rook, by Kate Atkinson

Jackson Brodie, ex-soldier, ex-copper and stalwart private detective, is an unlikely participant in a murder-mystery evening put on by some hammy actors at a stately home. Having established he is there, we track back to follow the line of enquiries and coincidences that lead him to Burton Makepeace, family home of Lady Milton, that particularly dark and snow-stormy night.

Lady Milton was, some years previously, the victim of an outrageous theft, when a painting by Turner was stolen almost out from under her nose by a young woman she employed. Brodie is hired by a completely unrelated family to trace the theft of a completely unrelated painting... by a young woman who is not what she seemed.

I thought the previous outing for Brodie, Big Sky, took a while to get going and was a bit unsubtle about its targets. This is much better at getting things going from the off, while many of the characters here and their motivations are not what they first appear.

Brodie is now in his 60s and a grandfather, but still the sardonic tough-guy of previous outings. The returning characters include Reggie Chase, the teenage orphan introduced in the third Brodie novel, When Will There Be Good News? and now a serving police officer - who takes pride in being mistaken for Brodie's daughter. New characters include a troubled vicar, Simon, who has lost his voice and his belief in God. There's also a beekeeper called Ben, who lost his leg to an IED while on active duty and is now a bit lost himself.

It's a funny and wry, and kept me guessing until the end. The final act, which involves the murder mystery evening where there's also a real dead body and an escaped convict with a gun, is tense and suspenseful while also a glorious farce. The mix of comedy and pathos gives some heft to what might otherwise by a daft runaround. The result is a very satisfying joy.

See also me on the five previous Jackson Brodie novels: Case Histories; One Good Turn; When Will There Be Good News?; Started Early, Took My Dog; Big Sky. And me on Kate Atkinson's other novels: Transcription; Shrines of Gaiety.

An Independent Woman, The Autobiography of Edith Guerrier

An archivist pal asked if I was any relation of Edith Guerrier (1870-1958), the subject of Tirzah Frank’s fascinating “The ‘Boston Marriage’ of Edith Guerrier and Edith Brown”.

I’d not heard of her before but, looking up details, Edith’s great-grandfather was George Guerrier (1771-1824), my direct ancestor — my grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather. My grandfather’s grandfather, William George Guerrier (1827-1920) was the cousin of Edith’s father, George.

Edith wrote an autobiography under the title A Little Woman of New England, which was published as An Independent Woman in 1992. It’s about how, from modest beginnings, she set up  a series of clubs for girls, largely from Italian and Jewish immigrant families. That leads to a long career with Boston Library, included a nine-year campaign to get a Bill passed into law. She meets various famous people such as Louisa May Alcott (hence the original title of this autobiography) and some US politicians who would later be president. It’s an evocative story and full of great historical detail. 

There’s not a lot of detail about her 40-year relationship with Edith Brown, though a couple of things, I think, are telling.

The first meeting with Edith Brown and their setting up home together are described in a chapter titled “A Single Woman”. They’re clearly a close partnership from the off, a duo. In that sense, at least, Edith Guerrier isn’t single. The title is consciously ironic.

Then there’s the following comment towards the end of the book, where Edith Guerrier speaks of her retirement from Boston City Library, mandated when she turns 70:

“In looking ahead, all my plans had been made with regard to the things my dearly beloved comrade and I would do together, but before time came Edith had passed into the next life. After nearly forty years of closest companionship I was left to face retirement alone, never doubting, however, that she still lived vitally and radiantly beyond this bourne of Time and Place.” (p. 127)

Otherwise, there’s not much on the Ediths’ relationship. We hear of their holidays — to Italy, to Amsterdam and Switzerland, an evocative trip to post-war Ypres in 1922 and then England. We learn how these trips inspired their work back in the US, such as in setting up a pottery. But Edith Brown, who went on these trips and led some of the work that followed, is an almost ghostly presence in the text. 

Edith Guerrier names lots of different people: her various relatives, the famous people she encountered, a range of people she worked with or who supported her work. But she is discreet about Edith Brown. And she also, notably I think, doesn’t name the female school friends she went to stay with in her teens, or the cowgirl she once ran away with on a “marauding expedition”.

“I had practically no companions and I longed to become acquainted with a girl about my own age who bought our milk from her father’s ranch several miles out on the high prairie … I had made up my mind that it would be a good thing to see the cowgirl’s ranch and I wished nothing to interfere with the plan.” (p. 45)

It is all, I think, suggestive.

Edith Guerrier is much more interested in demonstrating the impact of a little time and investment on those who don’t have much. We see the impact on her of earning six dollars a week rather than three, and of the $300 she is somehow awarded as compensation for the loss of her great-great grandfather’s ship in the War of 1812 (p. 75). Inheritance, patronage and government grants have a transformative impact on her and her community. 

There’s something, too, about the indirect impact of this kind of initiative. They hoped, for example, that the pottery would make some money. However,

“We learned many useful facts about pottery making and became convinced that the leisurely product of a studio demands rather than provides a steady income.” (p. 96)

But that doesn’t mean it failed.

Annoyingly for my purposes, editor Mary Matson says in her preface,

“I have made excisions. I have omitted her discursively genealogical ‘Part 1’ on the history of her forbears, while making liberal use of the material in my own introduction.” (p. xx)

According to a written account by Edith’s father, the Guerriers are "of Huguenot descent, one of a body settling on the banks of the Thames about 1685.” (p. xxviii). That matches what I’d learned elsewhere, with the first Guerrier, Jean, arriving at the Huguenot church on Threadneedle Street in London on 6 December 1677.

Again according to Edith’s father, her great-grandfather George (my direct ancestor).

 “was a farmer on the Isle of Dogs, and when he died he left considerable property, but [his son, Edith’s grandfather] Samuel Guerrier’s portion of the inheritance was swallowed up in an unsuccessful book publishing enterprise. He pursued clerical occupations, having but a precarious subsistence through many years and finally died in the care of my half-brother Will Guerrier at an advanced age.” (Ibid).

This Will Guerrier (1795-1850) is another of my direct ancestors.

Samuel’s son George (1837-1911), had been a freight clerk when he visited a panorama (presumably in London) showing a rather fanciful view of Mississippi, complete with monkeys. This inspired him to emigrate to the US at the age of 19, in 1856 (pp. 33-35). During the Civil War, he was Second Lieutenant of Coloured Infantry, and fought at Yorktown and the siege of Fort Wagner, and was,

“wounded at Gaines Mill and captured. For six weeks he had lain in Libby Prison, an experience he refused to talk about.” (p. 81)

Edith is sure that this, and other aspects of his war service, ruined his health. Even so, on 2 September 1867, he married Emma Ricketson, the daughter of an abolitionist, who died of tuberculosis when their daughter Edith was three.

Edith says her father was keen that she learn French (but that she never had much success). 

“It may have been because of our French ancestry, and because our name, which according to the family legend was given by a French king to a distant ancestor for prowess on the battlefield.” (p. 59)

I’d like to read more about Edith and her father’s accounts of their — and my — family history. And I wonder if, when the two Ediths were in London in 1922, they looked up some of her relatives there. Her father’s cousin, William George Guerrier, died in 1920, but his son and nine year-old grandson were there. 

That grandson was my grandfather. And I wonder if, just possibly, that man I knew once met Edith.

In the Wet, by Nevil Shute

This is an odd and very racist novel, first published in 1953 but largely set 30 years later. The reprint I read is from 1982, with cover art by George Sharp that conveys a scene in the opening pages but doesn’t really give a sense of this peculiar book at all.

How racist can it be, you ask, given that I often delve into old books (and films and TV shows) that can contain unwitting and/or witting prejudice. In fact, I came to this by chance having read a bunch of books from the same year: Farewell Crown and Good-bye King by Margot Bennett, Hackenfeller’s Ape, by Brigid Brophy and, less recently, Casino Royale by Ian Fleming.

Well, In the Wet features a fair amount of casual racism littered through its pages - more, I think, than those other novels. But on top of that, of the novel’s two protagonists, one insists that his friends, employers and love interest address him by a nickname, which is a word beginning with N.

His (white) love interest, Rosemarie Long, is initially wary of using this nickname. “It’s pretty mean to call you that,” she says. “Not many people do that, do they?”

“Everybody,” responds the man born David Anderson, the name that I’ll use here. “I rather like it.” 

David’s grandmother, we learn, was an Australian aborigine from the Kanyu tribe, who “ruled the Cape York Peninsula before Captain Cook was born or thought of.” David is proud of being a “quadroon”, and would rather people called him by the nickname and so acknowledge the colour of his skin, “than that they went creeping round the subject trying to avoid it.” (All quotations from p. 82) Better, it seems, to address the thing head on, in a plain-speaking, no-nonsense way.

Except that one of the first people to refer to David’s skin colour doesn’t realise he is is not white. 

“You don’t look coloured. You look a bit tanned, that’s all.” (p. 70) 

That may account for why David has experienced little in the way of racism in is life, saying that just once, aged 18 and in Sydney, he experienced, “waiters being rude in restaurants, people refusing to sit at table … But it could still happen at any time” (ibid).

We don’t witness racism towards David — in fact, many white characters insist to him that his colour and background are not an issue. But he has internalised prejudice, I think. Now aged 30, he remains unmarried because “the colour makes that a bit difficult” (p. 71). He also assumes that it will bar him from working as a pilot for the Queen. David’s boss, Group Captain Frank Cox, counters that,

“As for the colour, you can put that out of your mind [as] we aren’t asking you to marry into the Royal Family” (ibid).

Which would, it seems, be quite unthinkable.

Then upshot is that the only prejudiced person we meet is the character of mixed heritage, who insists on being addressed by the N-word. That word therefore features frequently, more often than I think I’ve ever seen in one book, in a novel written by a white emigrant to Australia, lecturing us on race and democracy and a whole lot besides. 

Shute does this through parable or satire, in rather the style of News from Nowhere by William Morris (in which a character from 1890 traipses into the 21st century). The mechanism Shute uses to jump 30 years into the future from his own time is quite peculiar.

The novel opens from the perspective of our first protagonist, 63 year-old Father Roger Hargreaves (no, not the one from the Mr Men), who was born in Portsmouth in 1890, ordained in 1912 and has been in Australia on and off since just after the First World War. He’s a no-nonsense type of vicar, living a meagre existence in a town in the midst of nowhere, North Queensland, tending to lost souls. When an old drunk abuses him, Hargreaves offers the man his own modest home for a wash and shave, and then buys him a drink.

This old drunk is “Stevie”, who lives an even more remote existence with a man called Liang Shih, who grows vegetables for the community and shares his opium with Stevie. One day, Liang Shih comes into town to report that Stevie is seriously ill. Hargreaves joins local nurse Sister Finlay in heading out to see the patient. It’s a perilous journey through rain and flood, and Hargreaves is anyway suffering the after-effects of malaria. They find Stevie on death’s door and, unable to do anything themselves for his pain, they let Liang Shih feed him a pipe. A feverish, smoke-addled Hargreaves sits with the dying man in the dark and listens to him murmur something about his life…

We segue, seamlessly, from Hargreaves telling this story on page 60 to the third person account of David Anderson, the man who likes to be known as N—. Hargreaves thinks this is Stevie’s real name. But we are gifted clues over the next 15 pages that something else is going on, before on page 75 there’s a reference to a coin dated 1982. This is all a vision of things to come.

It’s an odd future, one in which the Labour government have been in power in the UK continuously since the end of the Second World War. All buildings are government owned and many houses stand empty because there has been so much emigration to Australia, Canada and other parts of the world, much of it after the stock market crash of 1970.

David Anderson is a pilot with the Royal Australian Air Force who, while stopped off in the UK, is asked to take a posting to fly the Royal family wherever they might want to go. It turns out that the RAAF and Australian government are picking up the tab for the Queen’s because the UK’s mean-spirited Labour lot won’t pay. We come to realise the nightmare prospect — has there every been anything so horrific in all fiction? — that the Queen and her family might be happier living abroad (following the example of the author, who emigrated to Australia in 1950).

The whole thing is a very strange right-wing fantasy of grievances against the left, blaming Labour for post-war austerity and not, er, the Nazis. Rationing is still in place in this 1983, so English people are amazed by David’s access to ham or pineapple, which he gets via airline connections. And yet in this bleak dystopia, posh grocer’s Fortnum and Mason is still open (p. 203), when David wants to buy his love interest a treat. By which he means South Australian sherry.

This imagined austerity is all the odder because Shute must have known while writing this that rationing would soon end in the UK. In fact, bread came off the ration in 1948, clothes in 1949, sweets and sugar in 1953, the year In the Wet was published. All other rationing was ended on 4 July 1954, but it had been a pledge of the Conservatives in the 1950 and 1951 general elections — the latter returning them to power.

When In the Wet was published, Labour had been out of office for two years. That it is railing against a demonstrably unfounded fear is fascinating in the context of having just read How They Broke Britain by James O’Brien, and its account of scaremongering by media and certain politicians in the lead up to the referendum on leaving the EU.

There’s something, too, in the fear of a population of hard-working, aspirational Brits being dogged by the edicts — whims! — of the civil service. I can see echoes of that fear in things being said in the US at the moment as a reason for cutting public services, that idea of government as something that gums up rather than lubricates the workings of the economy. Somehow, despite this, British engineering, radio and TV are still the envy of the world (p. 75), the latter presumably still being made by the bureaucracy of the BBC.

The Labour government seen here, largely in the person of Prime Minister Iorweth Jones, MP for South Cardiff and a former miner, are variously petty, parochial and paranoid. For all they have, for decades, imposed their dreary ideology on the poor people of the UK, they also don’t stand for anything. We’re told that since,

“Communism was no longer politically expedient in England since the Russian war” (p. 93),

the Prime Minister and his party have abandoned it.

His bureaucrats ensure that one flight David pilots — with the Queen on board — is redirected from her usual airport at White Waltham to one in Yorkshire because they don’t have quite the right papers. The monarch suffers the indignity of being sent to the north and then having to catch a train home.

The Queen — newly crowned when the novel came out — is stoical and modest throughout. Among the privations suffered over the years, she has given up Balmoral and Sandringham to the Labour regime (p. 101). This is all in sharp contrast to the accommodating Canadians and Australians who indulge her every need. When her plane stops to refuel on Christmas Island, she admires the single large house there and arrangements are quickly made to build her one of her own. (Christmas Island, we’re told, transferred, along with all Line Islands, to Australia in 1961 (p. 154).)

The “Prince Consort” (p. 113 — and never the “Duke of Edinburgh”, though given that title in 1947) is blond, practical and itching for independent adventure, envious of David’s life and background. When David replies that he was “born in a ditch”, the Prince Consort responds:

“I still say you were born lucky [because] you could choose your life, and make it what you wanted it to be.” (p. 133)

The Prince of Wales — confirmed as “Charles” on p. 115 — is, like his father, a practical sort, an expert on planes and a veteran of the world war against Russia. He’s married with two boys (p. 124), not a bad prediction for 1953. The Princess Royal is married to the “Duke of Havant” and they have a daughter, “little Alexandra” (p. 124).

David and love interest Rosemarie, both working for the royals, repeatedly tell each other that they won’t gossip or talk politics — but do little else. From this, we glean that Australia is thriving thanks to a modified system of voting where citizens can qualify for as many as seven votes.

First there’s the basic vote for everyone at age 21. There’s a second vote for anyone with a university degree, for solicitors, doctors and commissioned officers. A third vote can be claimed by working outside Australia for two years, presumably acquiring a wider outlook in the process. A fourth vote can be won by raising two children to the age 14 without getting divorced. There’s a vote awarded for anyone earning an income above £5,000 a year, and a vote for officials of the recognised christian church including wardens — we’re not told which denominations, and it doesn’t seem to include leaders from other religions. Lastly, the Queen can grant an extra vote, rather like an honour.

David is a three-vote man when we meet him and earns a fourth while in service (guess which one he gets). He insists that this system is far superior to that in the UK (not that he ever talks politics), ensuring a better class of politician is elected — “real men in charge” (p. 89), with less influence from trades unions. The result is a society in which, “everybody’s got the chance to make a fortune and spend it” (p. 72), but there’s no safety net. David says proudly of enterprising souls that might come from England to Australia, “if he fails he may be much worse off” (p. 100).

Whatever the fate of such failures, this is all presented as a great success story — a utopia. Did that really seem viable in 1953? There’s not much of the usual trappings of science-fiction in this future but technology, briefly, gets a mention to magically solve the issues of overpopulation.

“When I was a boy people were still saying that twenty-five million [people in Australia] was the limit. But in my lifetime the Snowy irrigation scheme has been completed, and the Burdekin, and half a dozen others, and now they’ve got this nuclear distillation of sea water in the North, around Rum Jungle, and that’s getting cheaper and cheaper.” (p. 220)

At the end of the book, the Queen appoints a governor-general of England, a move that so horrifies the British public — who still love the royal family really — that the long Labour government is at last topplped. It looks as if the UK will adopt the Australian system of voting, too. David is delighted:

“This is the end of something that began in 1867, when a lot of generous idealists gave one vote to every man.” (p. 229)

So this awful dystopia is not just the fault of the post-war Labour government but stretches back almost a century further to the Second Reform Act which extended the right to vote from 1 million to 2 million of the estimated 7 million working men in the country. Too much, too soon, and the wrong sort of chap getting a say in things, plainly. (But I'm reminded of similar anti-democratic feeling in Goldfinger, by Ian Fleming (1958), in which we learn that giving women the vote has, er, made them gay.)

Anyway, the result is that Rosemarie is no longer rushed off her feet with official duties so can no longer put off David’s advances… Jut as things get going between them, on p. 261 we segue back to Roger Hargreaves and dying Stevie.

Over the next 20 pages, Hargreaves comes to realise what seems so obvious: that Stevie died and was born again, and had a vision of his next life. Hargreaves is then called out to baptise a baby born in a ditch, one David Anderson… We were told that David has been known by his nickname since he was a boy. So I’m left wondering if stoical, practical Father Roger Hargreaves is the one who first furnishes him with it. 

How they Broke Britain, by James O’Brien

This is a righteously angry account of the past 15 years of politics in the UK, under Conservative (mis)rule. O’Brien ends with the disastrous mini-budget announced on 23 September 2022 by Kwasi Kwarteng, Chancellor the Exchequer to Prime Minister Liz Truss. The book is about the cascade of errors and bad-faith actions that, over more than a decade, got us to that point.

It’s divided into chapters covering, in turn, Rupert Murdoch, Paul Dacre, Andrew Neil, Matthew Elliott, Nigel Farage, David Cameron, Jeremy Corbyn, Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss (with an afterword in my paperback edition written in February 2024 about Rishi Sunak). It is necessarily wide-ranging to cover the myriad interconnections between politicians, think-tanks and allies in the media, and between politicians in the UK with movements and cabals abroad. It is densely packed with evidence. The result is engrossing (due to the author) and intensely infuriating (due to what he describes).

One example will give the flavour:

“In August 2019, Thiemo Fetzer, a professor in economics at the University of Warwick, went further:

‘I gathered data from all electoral contests that took place in the UK since 2000, and assembled a detailed individual-led panel data set covering almost 40,000 households since 2009. Through these data, I studied to what extent an individual’s or region’s exposure to welfare cuts since 2010 was associated with increased political support for UKIP in the run up to the Brexit referendum in 2016. The analysis suggests that this association was so strong that the 2016 EU referendum would have resulted in a clear victory for Remain (or the referendum might never have happened) had it not been for austerity measures such as extensive cuts to public spending.’ [Quotation from Thiemo Fetzer, ‘Did Austerity in the UK Lead to the Brexit Crisis?’, Harvard Business Review, 23 August 2019]

In other words, David Cameron and George Osborne created the dissatisfaction and distress that would prompt many people to vote for Brexit. Into this space sashayed the deliberate and deceitful demonisation of workers from other EU countries, perpetrated by Nigel Farage and co., and the unkeepable promises about prosperity punted by the likes of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, drawing on erroneous economic modelling.” (p. 242)

O’Brien is good at making these connections: the way one misguided policy or deliberately cynical action has had far-reaching negative effects. The incidents he describes are usually well known — they were often leading stories on the news — but he shows how they are symptoms of a wider culture of privilege and personal connection. He shows how each headline is an incremental steps towards that mini-budget.

In some ways, I think this book picks up the baton from The Blunders of Our Governments (2013), by Anthony King & Ivor Crewe, but whereas that largely describes a bunch of well-meaning professionals whose fault is unconscious bias, O’Brien digs into something much more pernicious: a protection racket, effectively, to line the pockets of the haves by preying on the have-nots. 

But it is also about the fantasies of those involved: their actions, their supporters, driven by beliefs that fly in the face of reality. The perceived threat of immigration or of public spending, the perceived bias of the media if it is not wholly supportive, a whole pack of straw dogs. Worst of all is the lofty disdain when it all goes wrong, the certainty — despite all evidence — that they will yet be vindicated.

Not delusions of grandeur but delusions of the grand. 

Quoted in the Bookseller

I'm quoted in The Bookseller, in Heloise Wood's piece, 'Carelessness rife' in UK publishing fact-checking as concerns grow over workloads, AI and 'status bias'. You need to register to read it.

As I say, a key issue is the ability to identify credible sources. Ironically - as if I've tempted fate by speaking out - I've recently learned that something I state as fact in my 2023 biography David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television, and which I based on what seemed to be sound evidence, isn't true. More on that, and a full correction, soon.

Children of Ruin, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

"There's always another way, even for you."

The follow-up to Children of Time, first published in 2019, is another epic, mind-expanding treat. That first book ended with the sentient civilisation of giant spiders and the surviving remnants of humanity forging a last-minute peace after thousands and thousands of years. 

This sequel sees some of their descendants (and one surviving character) voyage to a star system with two roughly Earth-like worlds. Humans already reached this place some millennia before, and the new arrivals are faced with the extraordinary consequence of that early intervention. Whereas, in the first book, one ancient human scientist affected the development of spiders, here another human has a thing for the octopus. By the time the spider-human team turn up, the octopuses have their own spacecraft...

I thought this started a bit slowly, retreading what we'd seen before - and then if completely blindsided me. It really picks up as we come to learn that the octopus people are not the only antagonist in this system. The other, relentlessly predatory species - details of whom I'll not spoil here - is absolutely bloody terrifying and a brilliant threat. We jump back and forth a bit in time to understand how this species developed, which only makes it all the more appalling and implacable. 

We, as readers, come to understand the threat while the spiders and humans are still guessing at what it might be, so they plunge headlong into danger. I don't think I've ever read a book that achieves that thing of horror movies of making you want to shout "No!" about what a character is about to blunder into...

As before, a particular strength of all this is the way Tchaikovsky tells chunks from non-human perspectives, the physiology and biology of the observer defining their worldview. The octopus people are intelligent, curious and mercurial, in part because of the way an octopus's limbs can work independently of its central brain. They act, react and emote in a way that's separate from thinking. That presents challenges in communication: it's less a matter of finding a common language as expressing the right complexity of feels.

From the basis of this biology follows a whole load of logically reasoned but extraordinary stuff. I was wowed by descriptions of the octopus spacecraft that are effectively bubbles of water in space, and the practicalities this involves in such matters as docking and airlocks. There's an amazing, nightmare sequence near the end of the novel that reminded me a bit of Dead of Night, in which one character puts up a series of memory-based defences against an attack, each one at a personal cost. We understand the physics of what's happening in terms of computational power and yet the effect is an effective, unsettling noir.

Mel Hudson is again a brilliant reader for the audiobook version, nimbly personifying a large and diverse cast - humans, spiders, octopuses and the things I won't say more of. We're left at an intriguing point at the end and I'm very much looking forward to the third book, Children of Memory.

Lunar New Year Love Story, by Gene Luen Yang and Leuyen Pham

This is fantastic - the moving, funny, emotional tale of teenage Valentina negotiating loss and love. The Dr bought it for me as a Valentine's gift, having had it recommended by a friend, and I ripped through it last night, entranced.

As a child, Valentina loves Valentine's Day more than Christmas and makes cards for her classmates at school, while chatting to her Cupid-like imaginary friend "Saint V". But in her teens, she comes to discover that this close association is the result of a whole load of other things going on in her early life of which she wasn't quite conscious - the statue of St Valentine at the Catholic church that her grandmother attends and some other things I won't spoil.

At the same time, Val, who is from a Vietnamese family, is part of a wider Chinese community in this unnamed part of the US, and takes up lion-dancing in part as a step up from her childhood ballet classes and in part because a particular boy is involved. The lion dance has its own mythology, which interweaves with that of St Valentine. In practice and performance, she learns to keep in time with her co-performer and also to recognise when they're not quite in step.

It's brilliantly well observed, from the cultural specifics (one character takes a rice cooker with them on holiday!) to the cringe of inter-personal politics at school. I laughed out load several times. But it also perfectly captures the raw energy of teenage emotion. Some characters are horribly selfishly but most mean well while doing things that affects others badly. It all feels specific, grounded and real, even though it's about the way that ghosts and spirits haunt our everyday lives and help us to reflect and heal. 

In all, this is a joy to read, beautiful to look at and the coda of a few extra panels placed around the closing acknowledgements and indicia really got me. Wow.

A Masterpiece in Disarray - David Lynch's Dune an Oral History, by Max Evry

On Thursday, 16 January, I received from a kind friend this enormous 500+ page book on the David Lynch version of Dune — a film we both find extraordinary. It’s a beautiful hardback edition, the pages edge-painted in sparkly red (which impressed both my children). I went on to Bluesky to enthuse about this gift and discovered Lynch had died. “He’d appreciated the timing,” responded one of my other pals. 

I started the book that afternoon but, like the film (and the novel it’s based on), it’s a vast sprawling epic and has taken a while to get through, not least because I’ve had a whole bunch of work stuff going on, too. Evry tells us at the start that he ordered the wealth of information so that we can skip to the bits of interest, whether that’s his detailed histories of pre-production, filming and what happened afterwards, the huge oral history of interviews with cast and crew, or the extra stuff like the merchandise and legacy of this peculiar, beguiling movie. I am hardcore and did the whole lot.

At first, I thought the book might have been better edited, even judiciously pruned, as there’s quite a lot of repetition. But as I read, on the repetition became important to our understanding: these are things on which people agree, in contrast to the many points on which there is less consensus. 

Some witnesses, such as costume designer Bob Ringwood, are engagingly gossipy and forthright in their views. Others are more cautious in what they share. That is especially telling when their accounts are combined. For example, there’s the account of one male actor getting into character on set by shouting at and upsetting co-star Francesca Annis. Annis, cited in a contemporary interview (she did not contribute to this new book) declines to name the male actor. But here, publicity executive Paul M Sammon does (p. 223). 

This is immediately followed by a contribution from another cast member, Sean Young, who doesn’t name the male actor or refer to the incident specifically. Yet by placing her words directly after Sammon, the implication is that she’s telling us what happened in response on set.

“As an actor, when I’m working with other actors, we all know who’s the deadwood. We all know who it is. We may not say it, but we’ll avoid them.” (p. 224)

There’s loads I found fascinating here. Val Kilmer and Tom Cruise screen-tested for the lead role of Paul. MacLachlan walked off set several weeks into filming because he’d still not received a contract. The rubberised stillsuits created for Dune were a big influence on Michael Keaton’s costume as Batman — also realised by Bob Ringwood — and superhero costumes ever since. Production on Dune overlapped a bit with Conan the Destroyer, using some of the same locations and sets, and at one point you could see both out in the desert on facing dunes. There’s stuff on the music and marketing and merchandise… There is a lot of detail.

These details could have been summarised or more concisely related but that would be missing a big part of the appeal of this book. A bit like the documentary Get Back where we sit day after day with the Beatles, the joy here is all the mundane, ordinary stuff as well. It’s the granular detail that really opens up the creative process. We gain a strong sense of what Lynch was doing, what he tried to achieve and what exactly went wrong.

A few days after receiving the book, I watched the movie with my teenage son, who had seen the Villeneuve Dune and Dune: Part II but came to this old film wholly new. He enjoyed it, I think, and found it interesting to see a different take on the same material, but his main issue was that the last hour or so is too rushed, too much happening too quickly for it to have an emotional impact. That, I now learn from reading this book, is because the production shot largely in script order; when money began to run out, they ripped our whole pages of what they still had to shoot…

Insights into the production and thus what we see on screen only take up the first half of this enormous volume. Evry has just as much interest in what followed, picking over the way the film was released, seen and received. More than that, there’s the sense of how it has haunted (or not) the people who made it.

Now, this is an oral history — it says as such on the cover — and memory can be a bit fallible. Evry does a good job in outlining the history as he understands it and then letting the people involved have their say, whether or not that contradicts the “facts” or other contributors. I think sometimes what people say could do with a little more interrogation. For example, we learn how one particular design was inspired by a trip Lynch made as the guest of producer Raffaella De Laurentiis and her movie mogul father Dino. But we’re told that,

“Dino took him [Lynch] and Raffaella on an impromptu (and speedy) car trip to Venice, arriving directly in St Mark’s Square.” (p. 61). 

That’s not technically possible given how Venice doesn’t have roads. Besides, Bob Ringwood then tells us that they all arrived by plane (p. 111).

Since I’m quibbling over small stuff (minuscule!), we’re frequently told of scenes being “lensed” or hear of “lensing” as a synonym for shooting. I don’t think that’s ever in a quotation from cast or crew; it’s a term used by movie journalists rather than those who make movies, not least because you fix or modify a “lens” before you start the action. Referring to Lynch as “the helmer” rather than director is another journalistic cliché, and not quite appropriate in this case since a key element of the story is how Lynch wasn’t in overall charge of what made it to the screen.

At times, the prose is oddly colloquial, too. When discussing the possibility of a director’s cut of the movie, we’re told that Lynch was “initially enthusiastic about taking a mulligan”, which I had to look up (it means when a golfer is allowed to replay a stroke), and then that “the studio refused to pony up the right amount of dough” (both quotations, p. 293). That is quite the mixed metaphor.

I raise this because the book is otherwise so often very good at explaining simply and clearly what were very technical procedures, such as the way the film was financed or the then-pioneering special effects. It makes us understand exactly how ingenious and revolutionary a lot of this stuff was for it’s time, as well as how influential. But also I am a jaded old hack who finds such grammatical stuff distracting and what I really want — in this book, in the film — is to lose myself in the weird, rich world of Dune.

Pedantic quibbling aside, this is an extraordinary, rich and insightful book. I’m tantalised by the details that remain elusive: how much footage actually survives; how possible it would be, with some new effects work, to produce a director’s cut, and how much of a screenplay for Dune II Lynch may have written. 

The book ends with a short, sweet interview with Lynch himself, who just wants to say how much he enjoyed working with cast and crew for all he doesn’t much rate the film. My sense is of Evry trying valiantly to keep the call going, to draw more from Lynch and to somehow articulate something of what Dune means to him, the author of this exhaustive book. “Fantastic, man,” says Lynch, cheerily, and ends the conversation.

We’re left hanging. Now we always will be. 

See also:

• Me on Dune: Part II (2024)
• Me on The Making of Dune (1984), by Ed Naha
• Me on the novel Dune, by Frank Herbert
• "The sleeper must awaken: inside the mind of Dune", my essay for the Lancet Psychiatry

Power of 3 podcast #351: The Time Travellers

The latest episode of Kenny Smith's Power of 3 podcast is about my Doctor Who novel The Time Travellers, first published in 2005 and so 20 years old. (Of no interest to anyone, but I delivered the first draft on 29 April 2005, the day before Dalek was broadcast.)

The episode includes an interview with me, struggling to remember whatever it was I was thinking at the time - other than "Eeeeeeeee I'm writing a book!"

Last year, I spoke to the same podcast about my 2007 Doctor Who novel The Pirate Loop and, separately, my new book Doctor Who - The Time Travelling Alamanac. And the year before, I spoke to them about David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television.

Someone from the Past, by Margot Bennett

Nancy Graham, 26 year-old magazine writer and the narrator of this novel, is out for dinner with her fiancee Donald when they bump into Susan Lampson. Nancy used to share a flat and work with Susan but they’ve not seen each other in a while. To complicate matters, Donald used to go out with Susan and when she left him tried to shoot himself.

Now Susan is marrying someone else — but, she tells Nancy, she’s received a threatening note from an ex. Susan wants Nancy, who kept notes in shorthand on Susan’s love-life when they lived together, to seek out her exes and find out who is making trouble. It might be the convicted thief Peter or the poet Laurence or the vain actor Mike… Nancy is sure it can’t be Donald.

When Susan is murdered, Nancy’s first thought is to ensure that the police don’t suspect her fiancee. But in tidying up the crime scene to protect Donald, she incriminates herself…

This is a fantastic return to form by Margot Bennett after the disappointment of Farewell Crown and Good-bye King. It’s at least as good as The Widow of Bath and probably better, my favourite of her books that I have read so far. I can see why it won the Crime Writers’ Association ‘Crossed Red Herrings’ award — since renamed the Gold Dagger (and presented to Bennett by JB Priestley) — and why Bennett was, in 1959, elected to the Detection Club. Fast-moving, twisty and suspenseful, this keeps us guessing to the end. Even the very last paragraph takes an unexpected turn.

In his introduction, Martin Edwards quotes Bennett herself on what made this and The Man Who Didn’t Fly “my best books”. The latter,

“had an unusual plot and a set of people I believed in. In the same way, Someone from the Past had five characters I might have met anywhere. The best of all my people was the girl Nancy. She was kind and cruel, and loyal and bitchy. She was a ready liar, with a sharp tongue, but she was brave and real. All through my books, the best I have done is to make the people real.” (pp. 9-10, citing John M Reilly (ed.), Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers)

Nancy is a compelling protagonist. We never know what she might do next. She is observant and reckless, intelligent and yet capable of extraordinary folly. Sometimes she tries to fix things in ways we can see (and want to shout) will only make things worse. But we are with her all the way as she faces multiple dangers.

As so often with Margot Bennett, characters attracted to one another bicker and fight, but here the stakes are raised because any one of these men Nancy is winding up could be the murderer. Whether or not they did for Susan, they can be violent with Nancy, or treat her appallingly in other ways. In fact, she is not the only woman here who puts up with variously crap men.

This British Library Crime Classic edition, first published in 2023, is subtitled “a London mystery” and it boasts a few good descriptions of places such as Soho. More than that, it offers an extraordinary snapshot of the mores of 1958, the year the novel was originally published. As well as a lot of smoking and drinking, there’s a surprising nonchalance about drugs. Tired and wound-up after a row with Donald, Nancy tells us:

“I knew I should take a couple of strong sleeping-pills. They would give me four hours’ sleep, and a heavily-doped morning that would make work impossible, unless I took a stimulant. After that, a couple of tranquilizing tablets would level me up for the day.” (p. 37)

She has all of these to hand as, a few pages later, she offers them and “a confidence drug” to her fiancee, who tells her he’s already taken “knockout pills” (p. 45). These, we learn, are “blue things, sodium amytal” (p. 47). Elsewhere, Nancy seems familiar with benzedrine. The drug-taking is part of the plot (one suspect was apparently doped and unconscious at the time of the murder) but also part of everyday life. 

I’m intrigued by elements of the novel that Bennett may have drawn from her own (fascinating) life, such as her years as a writer for the magazine Lilliput (while her husband Richard Bennett was editor).

“From the moment that I got the job on the Diagonal Press and scrawled out my first paid illiteracies I saw myself as a great writer, one who kept notebooks and would soon be guest of honour at literary luncheons.” (p. 27)

Again, the notebooks are part of the plot but I wonder how much this attitude — to her earlier work and to her career — matched Bennett’s own. When the murder case bears down on Nancy, the publisher she works for offers her a chance to get away with a job in Spain (p. 248). Is that a nod to Bennett’s own history, as she served as a nurse (and publicist) in Spain during the civil war?

Then there is what the novel says about Television, which in those days still had a capital T. Bennett had already made her debut as a TV writer: her one-off drama The Sun Divorce (dir. Philip Savile) was shown as part of London Playhouse on the ITV network Associated-Redifussion on Thursday 26 January 1956, just four months after the launch of ITV. Writing of Someone from the Past must have overlapped with the agreement of rights for a TV adaptation one of her earlier novels: The Man Who Didn’t Fly, starring William Shatner and Jonathan Harris, was adapted by Jerome Coopersmith and broadcast by NBC in Canada on 16 July 1958.

Since it was made and broadcast in Canada, Bennett probably had little involvement in this and she may never have seen it. But, excitingly, we can watch that production of The Man Who Didn’t Fly on YouTube. It even enjoys a bit of a following because it stars both William Shatner and Jonathan Harris, later stars of Star Trek and Lost in Space respectively. 

Margot Bennett was soon writing for TV herself, with work on ATV soap opera Emergency-Ward 10, perhaps making use of her own nursing experience. IMDB credits her on 15 episodes of the soap, broadcast between Tuesday 23 September 1958 and Friday 22 May 1959. The implication is that she moved into soap opera soon after completing work on this novel.

By the time she finished on Emergency-ward 10, Bennett had made the switch to BBC — and more prestigious drama — with her six-part adaption of her novel The Widow of Bath, which began transmission on 1 June 1959. But Someone from the Past suggests she was already familiar with the mechanics of BBC television more than a year before that.

In the novel, actor Mike Fenby, presumably used to late nights on stage followed by late mornings (as described in Exit Through the Fireplace), complains of the “brutal creatures” of “Terrivision” who have him up at “ten o’clock” in the morning for rehearsals in Shepherds Bush — which is where the BBC was based. 

“And you should see, I really wish you could see, the producer. Temperament! He thinks out the sets with a kind of telescope, and when he wants to concentrate, he blows bubbles. … He has a tin. He shakes the bubbles off with a bit of wire. They help him to relax. When they burst, they cover the floor with slime, like invisible banana skins. There’s practically no one in the cast who hasn’t a sprained ankle or a broken neck. You ought to see us, skidding about the place.” (pp. 39-40). 

That “telescope” was a director’s viewfinder, enabling the director to see how much of the actors and set would be visible through different diameter lenses, and to plan and block their shots ahead of studio recording. Viewfinders had been in use since at least 1938: the Tech Ops site boasts a clipping from Radio Times that year, a photo of one in use and some other details. But this is not the sort of thing people outside the world of TV were likely to know about,.

Actor Mike can escape from rehearsals for lunch with Nancy at one o’clock, suggesting “a pub called the Blue Unicorn”, which is surely a play on the real-life White Horse at 31 Uxbridge Road, where I’ve also sometimes met up with actors. (For those with an interest in the drinking habits of old TV people, the late Alvin Rakoff says in his memoir of working for the BBC in the 1950s that after recording at Lime Grove he’d take the crew for a pint at the end of the road, in the British Prince at 77 Goldhawk Road.)

Later, Mike can’t believe Nancy didn’t see his TV performance go out.

“‘I thought you might have been interested enough to watch me on the new medium.’

‘It’s a fairly old medium by now, isn’t it?’

‘But Nancy, this was terrific. I’m a brain surgeon, you see, who takes to drink, and just when I’m having a terrible fit of the stagers, my former loved one is wheeled in with her brains dashed out. I’m supposed to shake so much, the forceps clash together like a steel band as I approach the operating table. The trouble was that I really was shaking so much I dropped the whole kit of instruments on her face. It was Sylvia, you know, she’s got a shocking temper, I cracked the porcelain jacket on one of her front teeth, she’s going to sue me. If I hadn’t got between her and the cameras and ad-libbed, the viewers would have heard every word she said. You certainly missed something. It will be in all the papers tomorrow.” (p. 95)

There’s a lot of interest here (to me): Television no longer a novelty, favouring melodramatic productions in which the viewer might enjoy the emotional crisis of characters in close-up, all within the lively, stressy chaos of live broadcast. The depiction is a bit pointed, even satirical — as is Mike buying up all the papers to bask in the contradictory reviews — but the details are all right, and so surely based on direct observation.

Did Margot Bennett have first-hand experience of BBC drama production when she wrote Someone from the Past, more than a year before her first writing credits at the BBC? Her husband had worked in BBC radio since the war and also sometimes wrote for listings magazine Radio Times, such as his interview with Jimmy Wheeler ahead of a TV comedy show in May 1956. Yet it seems unlikely that Margot tours of TV rehearsals through that connection. 

More probable, I think, is this came through her own efforts. Was she meeting with BBC people about writing for TV, and getting tours of production, long before her first screen credit there? Or perhaps, like Nancy, Margot Bennett simply met an actor friend for lunch while they were in rehearsals…

Whatever the case, and for all Bennett might have mocked TV drama, something extraordinary happened after the publication of Someone from the Past. Despite the accolades it won, she never published another crime novel. According to her family (and detailed in the introduction to the British Library edition of The Man Who Didn’t Fly), she didn’t earn enough from novels to continue; crime didn’t pay. Instead, she spent the next decade writing prolifically for TV.

More investigation to follow...

Novels by Margot Bennett:

• Time to Change Hats (1945); Away Went the Little Fish (1946); The Golden Pebble (1948); The Widow of Bath (1952); Farewell Crown and Good-bye King (1953); The Long Way Back (1954); The Man Who Didn’t Fly (1955); Someone from the Past (1958); That Summer’s Earthquake (1964); The Furious Masters (1968)

Non-fiction by Margot Bennett:

• The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Atomic Radiation (1964) 

Orbital, by Samantha Harvey

“Six of them in a great H of metal hanging above the earth. They turn head on heel, four astronauts (American, Japanese, British, Italian) and two cosmonauts (Russian, Russian); two women, four men, one space station made up of seventeen connecting modules, seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour. They are the latest six of many, nothing unusual about this any more, routine astronauts in earth’s backyard. Earth’s fabulous and improbable backyard.” (p. 2)

When this short, 136-page novel won the Booker Prize on 12 November 2024, I saw some commentary that it was clearly a work of science-fiction just not marketed as such — the implication being out of shame. Sci-fi, after all, is genre and lowbrow while this book aspires to art.

Having read it, I don’t think that’s true. Yes, it is set in the future — just — given that it includes the launch of the first crewed mission to the Moon in more than 50 years. In real life, Artemis III is currently scheduled to land the first woman and next man on the Moon in mid 2027 (I suspect it may be delayed). The typhoon that here devastates Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines is also a thing still-to-come — but given recent news of extreme weather in the UK and abroad doesn’t seem very distant.

More than that, I’d argue that the technology here, the apparatus of the world depicted, is as it currently exists. There is no “novum” or new wossname to differentiate this world from our own, a novelty whose consequence we then explore. Instead, the launch of the Moon mission, the typhoon and other things — such as the death of one astronaut’s mother down on Earth — help to clarify the sense of scale, distance, remoteness and connection of these six people aboard the small, creaky H. It shapes how we observe them and what they, in turn, observe.

The unnamed H space station here is not, explicitly, the International Space Station — which, in real life, has been permanently occupied by humans since 2 November 2000. But the tech and practicalities are the same. The novel details 24 hours on board, in which the H makes 16 orbits of Earth. We cover the crew’s schedule: scientific experiments, exercise regime, sleeping and toilet arrangements, a shared movie. We dig into their thoughts and fears and dreams. There’s a thing about exactly who and what is being observed in Las Meninas, the painting by Velázquez, as seen in a postcard on board the H. We skip occasionally back to Earth to get a contrasting viewpoint: the dying mother thinking of her daughter in space, the people sheltering from the devastating typhoon that, from orbit, looks serene.

In all this, I’m struck more than anything by a profound sense of fragility: the six people in their slowly eroding H; the people on Earth under threat from the elements; our relationships and loved ones and inevitable loss. So much meaning, all gained by taking a vantage point that provides perspective.

My copy of the book, published (very quickly!) after it won the Booker Prize, includes an afterword from the author which is just as insightful as the novel itself. It’s largely on the subject of what words can do and add and illuminate, as the poorer relation of music, but she also addresses the issues of sci-fi:

“Perversely, perhaps, though Orbital is a book about space, its blueprint wasn’t 2001 or Dune, but A Month in the Country. I thought to myself: I want to write A Month in the Country in space.” (p. 143)

This seems to have been inspired by online videos of the Earth seen from the ISS:

“There’s never a bad view. You never think: oh, this is the boring bit, more ocean, more desert, blah blah; never, no — every view begs for your fresh attention.” (p. 141).

How brilliant and how true, putting in words what I realise I’ve long felt but never consciously articulated. In fact, how extraordinary to look from an orbiting space station — at an altitude of between 413 and 422 km above mean Earth sea level — yet gaze right into my head and explain to me what it is I can see.

Some other books I've read recently:

• Truth & Dare, by So Mayer
• Last Chance to See..., by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine
• Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
• Hackenfeller’s Ape, by Brigid Brophy
• Farewell Crown and Good-bye King, by Margot Bennett

Truth & Dare, by So Mayer

“The funny thing is that getting the morning-after pill the first day of a zombie apocalypse is really no easier or harder than on a previously average day. No bigger a deal, the obstacles are just… different. More slow-moving, brain-eating hordes, sure, but fewer overtly religiose or obstructive pharmacists. The baseball bat I brought to use in case of the former was also effective on the triple-lock cabinets erected by the latter.” (p. 224)

This is a rich, intoxicating anthology of 19 short stories and musings. Several of the stories are set in the near future, such as the one in which the invention of new kinds of artificial dick leads, through one thing and another, to the collapse of capitalism. Other stories spiral backward — to the pogrom in York in 1190, to The Black Cap gay pub, to the narrator’s own history. There are ghost stories and ghostly stories, and a lot of it is strange and unsettling.

The last story, Dune Elegies, is one of several set in a bleak near-future, a world just beyond our current grasp. The narrator, “terfed off” their own radio show, takes up residence in a lighthouse near the stone mirrors at Denge and continues to transmit a podcast, but with a pervasive sense of lost connection. The narrator is unable to recall the names of Conrad Veidt and Derek Jarman while detailing their importance in queer history — we fill in the blanks as readers. Then there’s a response from listeners to the podcast, transmission of which triggers something in stones taken from the area, wherever they might be now. It’s such an odd, beguiling idea, the sort of story that sits with you long afterwards.

As well as what’s happening, there’s the way these stories are told, dense with allusion and word play, poetry and punning. There are references to films and TV shows, novels and academic texts — I’d have quite liked a bibliography and/or end notes for further reading. It’s not just that stuff is referenced; it is toyed with and spun. For example, one passage about the lives of particular pirates includes the phrase “our flag means life” (p. 229) reversing the title of the 2022-23 TV series while at the same time making a connection to its own exploration of sexuality and identity.

We frequently explore derivation and etymology, how meaning is constructed, generating history and identity. With that in mind, I think the cut-up technique of quotations and references may be a way of shaking things up to create new meanings and ideas. That took me back into my own past when, as a university student some three decades ago, I got hooked on linguistic relativity and the so-called “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” that language shapes or even determines our thoughts and perceptions.

(In fact, it’s an axiom, not a hypothesis, and not one put forward by the linguists Sapir and Whorf as such, who never wrote together. But perhaps that makes it more fitting as a label, evidence that we need a name, any name, to be able to remonstrate with an idea.)

It’s not just about words in the stories here: in dreams of being Joan of Arc and her insistence on wearing trousers, or in detailing why Artemis wore a short skirt, we’re exploring the construction of gendered and non-gendered identities.

By chance, I was reading this as I saw the new documentary From Roger Moore With Love, which details how movie-star “Roger Moore” was an invented persona; Moore learned to play this persona and then, from The Spy Who Loved Me, applied that to his role as James Bond. At one point, Moore’s friend Christopher Walken says this shouldn’t be a surprise because we’re all self-invented people — there’s a point in our lives, perhaps more than one, where we choose who we are. How fascinating to see archive interviews with Moore uncomfortable with the violence and misogyny of Bond or — in an episode of Hardtalk which so yielded something new from its subjects — voicing concern about the “heroic” image of his Bond wielding a gun. I’m not sure I’d have picked up on that if I’d not been reading this book…

Like the world of James Bond, the stories in this book are frequently lusty, even graphic. But Bond is about gratified desire, sex just part of the mix with exotic locations, stylish clothes, fancy food and gadgets. In the book, desire is, I think, less external but bubbling up from within. There’s a lot here on the bloody, visceral heft of bodies — of ourselves not just as contracted identities but as physical things.

“What it means to be in a body, differently, is what the Crusades take aim against,” (p. 61).

So much of this book is exploring that haunting idea, the half of the sentence before “is” and the sentence as a whole.

You can buy Truth & Dare by So Mayer direct from Cipher Press.