Concrete Elephant

A few weeks ago, I was being old and nostalgic about the days of Doctor Who fanzines, especially the ones handed round in the pub I used to frequent. In May 1999, I produced my own - the first issue of a stupid thing called Concrete Elephant. Last week, it raised once again its pachydermatous head...

Written by me
Cover and design by @nimbos
Contributors: Lord of Chaos, @Mogamoka2 and @SophIlesTweets

The Story of Doctor Who

The nice people at Doctor Who Magazine have published The Story of Doctor Who, a shiny, comprehensive guide to the 55-year history of the series. It's perfect for those joining or returning to Doctor Who with Jodie Whittaker's Doctor - and has plenty to delight those of us who think they know it all backwards.

I've written the pieces on the Second, Fourth, Sixth and Twelfth Doctors, and dug out all sorts of stuff that was new to me. In fact, quite a lot of my work right now is looking for new things to say about Doctor Who, with a lot of dogged detective work to make sense of conflicting accounts of how particular bits of the series were made.

My knowing-it-backwards has also informed my watching of Jonathan Creek, which I never really saw when it was on in the 1990s but we're enjoying now on Netflix. The major revelation is how much it owes to Sherlock Holmes, which I'll write something about another time. But the Sixth Doctor is the first person killed in the series; in the first episode of the second series (produced by Verity Lambert), the Fifth Doctor walks under a broken-off piece off the TARDIS. Then, in episode 2.5, when the police arrest Alistair Petrie they also confiscate his VHS of Doctor Who and the Two Doctors.

(That Doctor Who story saw Patrick Troughton return as the Second Doctor, accompanied by Frazer Hines as his companion Jamie McCrimmon. A couple of years ago, I wrote an audio Doctor Who story, The Outliers in which Frazer played Jamie and also recreated Troughton's Doctor, both of them battling a smooth management consultant in space, played by Alistair Petrie.)

Anyway. I am giddy with excitement about new Doctor Who tomorrow. Amid all the flurry of promotion going on, I recommend catching up with this morning's Saturday Live, in which Richard Cole quizzed m'colleague Christel Dee. She talks candidly about growing up in care, how Doctor Who helped her to come out as gay, and her obsession with Ace. I'm a big fan of Saturday Live and a bit thrilled to have got a mention.

Have I mentioned that we wrote a book?

Off air images from The Evil of the Daleks

For my forthcoming book on 1967 Doctor Who story The Evil of the Daleks, I undertook some especially nerdy investigation.

Of the seven episodes of the story, only episode 2 exists in the BBC archive, but from the other six episodes there are a total of 414 off-air photographs (that is, taken of the story playing out on a screen, rather than on set during production). There are four main sources of these images:

• 383 "tele-snaps" taken by John Cura - most of them published as a "photonovel" on the BBC Doctor Who website, and in Doctor Who Magazine's special, The Missing Episodes - The Second Doctor Volume Two
• 26 photographs from episode 1 taken by the story's designer, Chris Thompson and published in issue three of fanzine Nothing at the End of the Lane in 2012
• 2 photographs from episode 4 and 1 photograph from episode 5 taken by fan Terry Reason, published in Doctor Who Magazine #200 in 1993, and again in Nothing at the End of the Lane #3.
• 2 photographs from episode 5 taken by fan Gordon Lengden and now in the posession of Tony Clark, again published in Nothing at the End of the Lane #3

Here are three things I've tried to do with these images to better understand The Evil of the Daleks.

1. THE SEQUENCE OF THE OFF-AIR IMAGES
We know the order in which to view the tele-snaps because they were printed in strips, and we know the order of Chris Thompson's images because the negatives still exist - again, in strips - so it's easy to follow the sequence. But how do we work out the order when we put both sets of images together?

A useful aid is the camera scripts - that is, the scripts detailing how the cameras should cover the action, as used in the studio recording of the episodes. The camera scripts for this story are included on the CD soundtrack in the box-set Doctor Who: The Lost TV Episodes - Collection Four.

As an example, scene 4 of episode 1 is set in the study of an antique shop and according to the camera script began with a tracked-out close-up shot of Waterfield through a magnifying glass. 

A tele-snap shows this, the magnifying glass filling the middle of the lower half of the frame, obscuring Waterfield’s mouth and nose as we look at him face on:

The script says there was then a knock on the door, and the camera was to elevate and track out as Waterfield went to answer it, providing the first establishing shot of the room. That’s what we see in the first of Chris Thompson’s images: a wide shot of the room full of antiques, Waterfield with his back to us as he bends to unlock the double doors in the centre of frame:

We can see Waterfield from head to toe, but with his back to us it’s not clear from this image – as it is in the script – that he’s wearing Victorian clothes. Note that the dialogue in the scene doesn’t refer to what he is wearing: it’s a visual clue to him being out of his own time, bolstered by Waterfield’s later, spoken, mix-up over guineas and pounds.

The next tele-snap is from a moment later: the same camera position but with the door now open. Waterfield has stepped back and to the right, and is in profile as he faces Keith Perry:

The next tele-snap is a close two-shot of Perry and Waterfield as Perry admires an antique that’s apparently just off the left-hand edge of frame. The camera script says this is a clock on Waterfield’s desk, but Waterfield’s desk is later visible on the other side of the room. The dialogue doesn’t say ‘clock’, so Perry might be admiring something else.

Thompson’s next photograph shows Perry in roughly the same position, but Waterfield some distance behind him, on the other side of his desk:

This is almost identical to the next tele-snap, except Perry is bent a little lower to examine whatever antique is just out of shot, and Waterfield is slightly further left behind the desk – the suggestion being that after the previous tele-snap he moved right, off the edge of frame, and then came into shot again behind the desk.

Again, the next of Thompson’s images is almost identical to the next tele-snap, looking down on Perry as he seems to admire the room’s chandelier, and it’s difficult to tell which of the two images comes first. So we need another clue...

The last of Thompson’s images from this scene still has Perry gazing upwards at the chandelier, but we can also see Waterfield standing behind his desk. Since that suggests the camera has pulled back and to the left since the previous two images, we can perhaps work out the order by comparing the position of the leg of Waterfield’s desk to Perry’s shoulder. In the tele-snap, the leg is some distance from Perry; in Thompson’s similar image, Perry’s arm just obscures the very end of the leg; in Thompson’s next image the leg is completely behind him. So, watch the position of the table leg adjacent to Perry's arm:

2. HOW MUCH THE SURVIVING EPISODE 2 HAS BEEN CROPPED

When The Evil of the Daleks was made, the episodes were recorded on two-inch videotape. None of those original recordings survive, but a copy of episode 2 made on 16mm film is held by the BBC, and was used for the commerical releases on VHS and DVD.

To make a 16mm copy from the two-inch videotape in the first place, a film camera was positioned in front of a screen on to which the episode was played from the tape. As Richard Molesworth explains in his brilliant book, Wiped! Doctor Who’s Missing Episodes (Second Edition), ‘the 16mm film recordings were slightly zoomed in ... to ensure that the edges of the screen were never captured’ (pp. 273-4). This means that the existing 16mm episode is a slightly cropped version of the original. Can the off-air photographs tell us how much has been cropped?

Here are two comparisons from the beginning of episode 2, in which a character called Kennedy is cornered by a Dalek.

• Top left: a screengrab from the repeat of this sequence in 1968 story The Wheel in Space episode 6 - where it's shown on the TARDIS scanner screen.
• Top right: a screengrab from episode 2 of The Evil of the Daleks, as featured on the Lost in Time DVD box set.
• Bottom left: John Cura's tele-snap, care of Doctor Who Magazine.
• Bottom right: John  Cura's tele-snap, care of the photonovel on the BBC Doctor Who website.

In this first image, the tele-snaps at the bottom show a slight gap between the top of his head and the upper edge of the frame, while in the episode on DVD the very top of his head is out of frame. The bottom right-hand corner of the tele-snap crops Kennedy’s hand, slightly more of which is visible in the episode.

In this second comparison, we can see more of the upper-most hexagon on the panel behind Kennedy than we can in the episode:

Overall, it’s about 2% from the top and about 1% of the bottom from the total height of the tele-snaps. But when I put this to Steve Roberts, of the Doctor Who Restoration Team which prepared the episode for DVD, he said that:

"The amount of image crop in a film recording is variable. Mostly you’ll find that there is more cropped from the top than the bottom – as demonstrated in your comparisons ... The film recorder camera had to ideally pull-down the next frame – pulling out the registration pins, accelerating it from stationary, decelerating it back to stationary and putting in the registration pins again – in the 1.6 milliseconds of video field blanking. This was extremely difficult and in practice it wasn’t actually possible to do it, which would result in distortion at the top of the image as the first few lines were being recorded to film as the film was still settling to stationary. To avoid this distorted area being seen on subsequent projection, the film recorder would blank the first few lines of the picture so that they were never recorded to film.

There are so many variables. Cura’s monitor would be over-scanned too, there would be some overscan and blanking in the film recorded as discussed and there’s always some overscan at the telecine stage – where film recorded on location is played into the studio recording of the episode – to avoid the ragged edges of picture appearing in the video frame."

So the existing episode is missing material from the top and bottom of the frame, but we can’t be sure how much is missing, and some of it might have been missing on the original two-inch videotape.

3. ANIMATING THE OFF-AIR IMAGES
Lastly, in several cases, two separate off-air images are almost identical - some where John Cura took two "tele-snaps" in very quick succession, and other where two photographers happened to capture the same instant.

But that means we can return something of the missing story to life:

Thanks to Simon Belcher for technical brilliance, Tom Spilsbury and Peter Ware at Doctor Who Magazine and Richard Bignell at Nothing at the End of the Lane for sharing images, and Steve Roberts for his patience in untangling my muddled thinking.

Genre Reader interview

Me and Scott Andrews - who I killed all those times in The Time Travellers - have been ably interviewed by Will Barber-Taylor for the Genre Reader site - largely about my novella Fall Out, which follows on from the mayhem in Scott's School's Out.

Being both Professionals and Professional Liars, Scott and I manage to get through the whole Ordeal without letting on that we are, in fact, Sworn Enemies.

Nine Worlds and Worldcon

Next week I'll be at the mahoosive science-fiction convention, Nine Worlds. The week after I'll be at the even more humungous Loncon. On the off-chance you care, here's where I'll be and when…

Nine Worlds

(My schedule on the Nine Worlds site.)

Time Travel (Books)
Friday 8 August 11.45 - 13.00
This is a message from your future self: go to this panel!
Panel: Paul Cornell, Lauren Beukes, Kate Griffin, Fabio Fernandes, Simon Guerrier

(The Dr will be delivering Monsterclass: Archaeological world building at 3.15.)

Writing for Transmedia: ideas that cross formats and boundaries (Books/Creative Writing)
Friday 8 August 18.45 - 20.00
Because a story can also be an app, computer game, vlog, fanvid, web series, docu-drama, interactive ebook, diary comic, inter-sensory experience or any other format currently existing or yet to exist not listed here. Kind of against the spirit of the thing, if you ask us. Guess you’ll just have to go to it in person.
Panel: Barry Nugent, Anna Caltabiano, Simon Guerrier, Adam Christopher

Anytime, Anywhere (Doctor Who)
Sunday 10 August 10.00-11.15
The Doctor can travel anywhere in time and space, and the pure historical story was a regular occurrence in the early days of the show, but has been seen only once since 1966. Would a pure historical work in today’s Doctor Who? Is there any time or place the Doctor should go that he hasn’t yet? Which historical figures does he really need to get around to meeting?
Panel: Simon Guerrier, Adam Christopher, Joanne Harris, Anna Jackson

A Handy Guide to the Wilderness Years and Beyond (Doctor Who)
Sunday 10 August 13.30 - 14.45
Doctor Who isn’t just a telly show, it’s also books, audios, comics, webcasts, and computer games. In the nineties, these non-telly sources were the only place you could get (official) new Doctor Who stories. For telly fans looking to step into the worlds of book and audio, where do you even start? Our panel talks about the highs and lows of non-telly Who, and where you can find the good stuff.
Panel: David Bailey, Sarah Groenewegen, Rebecca Levene, Simon Guerrier, David McIntee

Representation of Gender Roles (Doctor Who)
Sunday 10 August 15.15 - 16.30
From rejection of the fifties ‘feminine mystique’ to Sarah Jane’s explicit rejection of seventies patriarchy. Ace and Rose are working class heroes. Madame Vastra and Jenny are a married interspecies couple who fight crime, and aliens, in Victorian London. How successfully does the show challenge prevailing gender norms? Where does it succeed best? Where could it do better?
Panel: Simon Guerrier, Angela Blackwell, Una McCormack, Amy

Loncon

(My schedule on the Loncon site)

Children's something or other
Thursday 14 August 14:30
I've been asked to talk to a children's workshop about what I do. Lucky them.

Doctor Who: Fandom for the Whole Family
Thursday 14 August 16:30 - 18:00, Capital Suite 10 (ExCeL)
Doctor Who is an international cult hit phenomenon that began when the First Doctor landed the TARDIS on British soil in the 1960s and captured the hearts and minds of a generation. The Doctor's companions, from Susan to Adric, from Zoe to Amy, have often been teenagers or children, a surrogate 'family' that brings the family together as our Doctors regenerate into our children’s Doctors—generation after generation. What is it about Doctor Who that attracts younger fans? Why do they identify with a thousand year old Time Lord? What was the Doctor like when he was a teenager? Panelists discuss the ageless and timeless appeal of Doctor Who, especially among younger fans and their families.
Panel: Jody Lynn Nye, SJ Groenewegen, VE Schwab, Kathryn Sullivan, Simon Guerrier

Awards and Their Narratives
Sunday 17 August 10:00 - 11:00, Capital Suite 10 (ExCeL) 
As one of Saturday's panels discussed, many factors come into play when judges or voters decide which books to recognise with awards. But what happens afterwards, over the years, as the list of winners grows? As an award develops a "canon", patterns will emerge, different maps of what we should be valuing in science fiction and fantasy. This panel will discuss the maps drawn by different genre awards -- from the Hugos to the Clarkes, from Tiptree to Translation, from Aurealis to BSFA -- and the ways in which readers make use of them.
Panel: Tom Hunter, Simon Guerrier, Stan Nicholls, Dr Tansy Rayner Roberts, Tanya Brown

Kaffeeklatsch (no, I'm not sure either)
Sunday 17 August 18:00 - 19:00, London Suite 4 (ExCeL)
Simon Guerrier, Greer Gilman

On the appeal of the Escapist

Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000) is an extraordinary joy of book, one I shall buy for friends and relations for some time to come.

It's the tale of two teenage boys in the late 1930s, one a fey dreamer who's grown up in New York, the other his cousin who's just escaped the Nazis in Prague. Together, they create a new superhero comic, imbued (though they're not quite aware of it) with their own hopes and fears. "The Escapist" is a huge success, at least in terms of sales, but the boy still have battles to fight - Clay with his whole identity, Kavalier in trying to rescue his family from Europe...

We follow their efforts to produce good work and not be ripped off by the management, and see them fall in love, suffer the most terrible calamities and live through momentous history. It's a huge book - 636 pages, spanning more than a decade, epic in scale and geography but also great on the tiny detail. We're peppered with all sorts of data on the comics scene and New York and culture and world of the time. Stan Lee has a cameo role, as does Orson Welles.

It's funny and moving and utterly absorbing - one of those rare, perfect books that you want to race through and yet don't ever want to reach the end.

Then, in the last section, it pulls an extraordinary trick of making you aware of the themes underlying all that's befallen our heroes. It's the coming-of-age for these two geeky kids but there's something more profound. This is the story not only of the Escapist but the escapist artform.

"Having lost [things he's lost], the usual charge leveled against comic books, that they offered merely an escape from reality, seemed to Joe actually to be a powerful argument on their behalf."

Michael Chabon, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), p. 575.

The defence of the escapist could have brought the whole thing crashing down, but its expertly done. I thought, as I started it, that it was ironic that a book about trash culture form had won such a serious accolade as the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2001. That validation of the form is not only well deserved, it's also the whole point.

Doctor Who: 2007

Episode 733: Blink
First broadcast: 7.10 pm on Saturday 9 June 2007
<< back to 2006

The Doctor explains in Blink

Blink is something special in Doctor Who. For some it's the best ever episode, for others it's the one to show someone who's never seen the show before and ensure they're hooked.

I don't think the latter is quite right. A bit like City of Death (1979), part of the brilliance of Blink is how it plays with expectations and clichés, and the usual form of Doctor Who. If we know Doctor Who, it's more rewarding. That's why it helps that it's some way into the run - it wouldn't work earlier on in Season 3; it wouldn't work in Season 1.

(Much better, I think, for a novice to begin with season opener Smith and Jones, but surely a novice ought to start from Rose.)

The wheeze is to show what happens when the Doctor isn't around to stop the monsters - an idea used again to great effect in the following year's Turn Left. Instead, here it's up to two ordinary people - Sally and Larry - to work their way through the clues.

Since they're not familiar with the format of Doctor Who like we are, we're often a few steps ahead of them. We know to be worried as they walk into danger. We know to shout at the screen. Our own knowledge of the series makes the episode more scary.

But, on first viewing, even we are lost in the intricacies of the plot. A story like this depends on a sort of contract between writer and viewer. We agree to accept the strange, confusing world we've been landed in on the promise that it will be explained. In fact, we're given all the clues we need to solve the mystery - we just don't realise it yet.

The best example of that is right at the end, when it seems the Doctor has abandoned Sally and Larry, the TARDIS dematerialising round them, leaving them to the mercy of the Angels. It's heart-stopping stuff, the Doctor seemingly callous, Sally and Larry with no chance of escape...

But, once the solution is presented, it seems to desperately, wretchedly simple. We realise it's clearly been signposted all the way through the episode. Of course that's how to get out it.

My chum James Goss once described the six episodes (including Blink) that Steven Moffat wrote for Russell T Davies as,

"perfect puzzle boxes, full of heart and drama but also where every single bit of the mystery is in place like clockwork."

That "heart and drama" is exactly right. The Doctor and Martha appear in just three scenes of Blink but we get a great sense of their relationship. I can readily imagine a whole episode - or series - of them stranded in the 1960s, an exasperated Martha forced to take a day-job to support his building contraptions that might help them get home.

Best of all is how concisely the complex plot is spelled out in simple terms. So much of Doctor Who is exposition, building worlds and politics and problems from little more than words. There are tricks to getting through it - the Doctor says it at great speed, or peppers it with odd asides full of jokes and weird mental images, or the companion shares some of the burden.

Blink does a trick with exposition that still utterly thrills me. It's so simple, so quick, so what a real person would say. The Doctor holds up an all-important gadget, vital to him solving the problem at the heart of the episode. And explains:

"It goes ding when there's stuff."

Next episode: 2008 

Doctor Who: 1992

After episode 695 (Survival, part 3)
Resistance is Useless, first broadcast 3 January 1992
<< back to 1991

Confessions of an anorak
Resistance is Useless (1992)

Who was Doctor Who for?

As I've argued so far, by 1992 it was no longer on telly, no longer for children and - in the New Adventures books - being written for and by fans. I was thrilled by those books for their bold take on Doctor Who and the feeling I got from reading them (and pitching my own paltry efforts to the poor editorial staff) of being part of a community.

But not everyone shared that excitement. Plenty of fans didn't like the books: indeed, editor Peter Darvill-Evans felt moved to defend the range in Doctor Who Magazine #200 (cover dated 9 June 1993):

"I've just received another letter of complaint. 'Why are the New Adventures so awful?' is the opening line..."

In the letters pages of DWM, and in the ever more professional-looking fanzines, there were earnest debates and essays about the relative merits of the range and what constituted proper Doctor Who.

Though new adventures for the Doctor were limited to books and comic strips, he was then suddenly back on TV. On 3 January 1992, BBC Two broadcast Resistance is Useless as a lead-in to a series of repeats of old Doctor Who. Nowadays we're used to clips shows and Doctor Who being repeated but at the time this was very unusual: it was the longest series of repeats in 10 years.

Yet while the Five Faces season of repeats in 1981 - and the Monsters repeats in the 1980s - had been aimed at a mass audience of general viewers, the 1992 repeats seemed to target a more select group.

It's weird watching Resistance is Useless now: the clips themselves are full of excitement: monsters, deaths and strangeness, the Doctor being brave and funny. There's a madcap mix of the scary and daft that makes up much of Doctor Who. The programme does a great job of selling the prospect of full episodes, even if those episodes are nearly 30 years-old and in ropey black and white.

But, undercutting the actual evidence of the thrilling nature of Doctor Who, the clips are presented by a croaky-voiced anorak, imparting nuggets of trivia.

"Everyone knows that TARDIS is an acronym for Time And Relative Dimensions [sic] In Space but not many people know why this Type 40 TARDIS, which the Doctor stole from the Time Lords, is shaped like a police telephone box. Well, that's due to a malfunction of the chameleon circuit which enables it to change its shape and blend in with its surroundings. It jammed in London in 1963, the date of the first episode. It's interesting to note that a horse named Call Box won a race at Doncaster on that very day."

The implication is that Doctor Who appealed chiefly to dreary nerds.

That same presumption seems to be there in the BBC Videos of the time. Doctor Who sold well on VHS, often appearing in the top 10 charts, competing well against movies. But who did the people producing the videos think they were selling them too?

In March 1992, The Pertwee Years offered tantalising clips and three episodes from the third Doctor's era - at a time when it seemed impossible that all his episodes would one day be available to buy. It includes an episode from the story Inferno - one of my brother Tom's favourites.

In it, the Doctor steps sideways in time to an England ruled by dictatorship, and meets sinister versions of his friends Liz and the Brigadier. The exterior scenes shot round the Kingsnorth industrial estate have a particular, eerie bleakness. But (as Tom pointed out to me) the episode chosen for the video - episode 7 - shows little of this atmospheric stuff: we glimpse the alternative Liz and are then back to reality.

Why choose this episode? It's the least atmospheric, exciting and strange of the whole story. But, as Jon Pertwee says on the tape, it's of interest because it includes the final appearance of the original TARDIS control console prop. I'm sure the anorak would approve.

I don't mean to criticise the people who produced these videos and programmes: they made judgements based on the perceived market. As we saw last time, the audience for Doctor Who had got older and more niche. If these teens and grown-ups were going to justify time and money spent on a daft old family show, perhaps it's no wonder they took it rather seriously, and mined it for ever more trivia.

At least, that's what I think I was doing at the time. My name first appeared in Doctor Who Magazine in 1992 (alongside Tom Spilsbury who is now editor):

Me and Tom Spilsbury in the letters page of
Doctor Who Magazine #186 (1992)

I glimpse in that letter an oleaginous teen trying to get in with the grown-ups. That painful eagerness to please is also there in the 'stories' I wrote at the time - I still have a box of them, but no, you're not getting a look. They're not exactly stories anyway, as any plot has been squeezed out by all the references to past Doctor Who adventures, grown-up science-fiction and other books I thought of as worthy. I genuinely thought the more clever references I crammed in, the better the story got - but I was being semiotically thick (sorry).

I was so keen to win acceptance and justify my sticking with Doctor Who that I rather lost track of its appeal in the first place. What I wasn't writing, what it never seemed to occur to me to write until years later, was stories that were scary and exciting and fun.

Nightshade
by Mark Gatiss
- via Virgin Territory

But if did occur to Mark Gatiss. His first Doctor Who story, the novel Nightshade, was published in August 1992.

"The book moves at a cracking place, full of drama. It’s built up of dialogue and action sequences, so reads like the novelisation of a TV story. It’s brief compared to many of the later books – only 228 pages – and keeps the reader on tenderhooks right until the end. The fact that it’s set in the days up to Christmas 1968 lends a significant atmosphere of invaded cosiness, as well as establishing a strong sense of time and place."

Me, "Attack of the Memory Cheats", a review of Doctor Who: Nightshade, posted 31 August 2006.

(Thanks to Jonathan Morris for the scan from DWM.)

Next episode: 1993

Some photos

Four images for your delight and excitement.

1. Bernice Summerfield toy

A fantastic surprise present from Monster Maker yesterday, a custom-made toy of Bernice Summerfield in the cat-suit she wears when drawn by the splendid Adrian Salmon.

Benny's creator, Paul Cornell, is also in receipt of a more old-skool Benny, as off the cover of the novel Love and War. Apparently, there is also a toy of her in Frontier in Space style shoulder pads.

2. Moo

Nimbos has been raving about the glories of online printer Moo.com for some time, and I've envied his collection of prettily printed, prettily packaged cards and stickers. So, with permission from Red Scharlach for the use of her picture of Archibald the space-pirate badger, I have got some new business cards done. And they are a magnificence of beautiful, tactile coolitude. I want to hug them and squeeze them and call them George.

3. The Guardian

You can now order my Doctor Who story The Guardian of the Solar System, out in July. And this is the magnificent artwork by Simon Holub.

4. Acrostic apostles


And the church down the road has new signage.

Both cutting the cake and eating it

Neal Stephenson's Anathem is a typically robust brick of a novel, 937 pages packed with action, maths and top facts. It was a Christmas present, though the weight of thing put me off starting it until my long flight out to Florida.

At first, I thought it was running along the same lines as my great favourites A Canticle for Leibowitz and Riddley Walker: the people of a post-apocalyptic Earth struggling to put the world back together, making sense and science from the fragments left of the past. For the first 200 pages that's exactly what it is, detailing young Erasmus' life in a Concent, caught up in chores and philosophical discourse, and cut off from the world and his family outside.

But there's quickly hints of something going on in that external world which will will affect the young scholars – and might even lead to a fourth great Sack of the concents. Erasmus is soon on a peregrination into the dangerous exterior, trying to make unravel what's happening.

Without giving too much away, the quest and mystery are suitably thrilling, while allowing much discussion of Big Ideas. A lot of that discussion – on mathematical proofs, on etymology, on perception – is engrossing.

Admittedly, one chapter is more than 100 pages of one great conversation over dinner. It's broken up with trips to the kitchen (where people comment on the conversation), and notes on the food, but it left this reader rather weary. Especially since it's right in the midst of some very exciting stuff involving explosions and – hooray! – unexpected ninjas.

But generally, what makes this – and Stephenson's work as a whole – so compelling is the deft mix of the action and theory. There's the dizzying wheeze that our brains, by being able to imagine other worlds and circumstances, work at the level of quantum uncertainty – that we flicker between possible Narratives and even physically rewrite the past.

(See also the Telegraph's recent list of the top 10 weirdest bits of physics.)

There's a nice idea on page 102 that becomes integral to the plot: there are no new ideas, and the order's job is not to invent new philosophies but to tend, nurture and preserve the wisdom and insight (“upsight” in the book) of the past, like gardeners.

I also thought Stephenson's invented lexicon – the glossary lasts for 19 pages – might lose its appeal pretty quickly, but it's nicely woven through the story. Usually, we learn the meaning of a word just in time for it to become pertinent, so that the invented etymology is a kind of foreshadowing, adding layers and depth to the plot.

It's a gripping adventure, and there's loads I'm still picking over – the plot, its ramifications, even just some of the top facts. It's a geeky, lively, often funny book, full of great characters and moments. And it's got the best, most satisfying end of any of Stephenson's novels.

It's just a bit too long, with a wearying intensity that means it sometimes feels like homework – or, perhaps, as if we're part of the Concent ourselves. But then Stephenson's recent Baroque Cycle – which I loved – also demands a great deal of effort from the reader. This is not an author for the faint of heart; but he's also massively rewarding.

(See also Stephenson's lecture on the geeks inheriting the Earth and my thoughts on his novel, Cobweb.)

No second chances

As I type these words, I'm listening to the first episode of a 1989 radio series. It's on radio and it's 20 years later, but the series is called “Last Chance to See...” Even more ironically, the BBC are also showing a new TV version, retracing the steps of the radio series and which I've been eagerly anticipating since I first heard mention of it in January.

As I said then,

“The Observer sent [Douglas Adams] and a zoologist, Mark Carwardine, to Madagascar to write a Sunday supplement feature of the endangered aye-aye. Adams had such a nice time that (when he'd finished his commitments to Dirk Gently) he and Cawardine then swanned off round the world writing up other endangered species. There was a Radio 4 series, apparently a CD-rom and a book - my favourite of all Adams' efforts.”

Stephen Fry takes the tall, wordy, clumsy place of the late Douglas Adams. Nicely, he was living in Adams' house while Adams made the original trip.

Adams almost drowned slipping off an island in the original version, and Fry doesn't manage much better. But it manages to mix the new style of documentary on TV, where some Know-Nothing Celeb goes out to Discover Something, with the old-skool method (looked down upon by idiots) where the presenter is a bit of an expert already and has Something to Tell Us.

Carwardine is a dryly funny, enthusiastic native guide and there's a nice bit of intercutting of our two presenters' video diaries where they both worry the other will think them stupid. Between them, it's like a day-trip with two nerdy boys, teasing each other about urban myths and practicalities, and what happens if you pee in a particular lake.

The radio version had wry footnotes read by Peter Jones, as he'd done in Adams' Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In the TV version we get Stephen Fry (who took Jones' part in the movie of Hitch-Hiker) and some graphics that suggest the ecosystem is all made of clockwork. The diddle-ow(g)! chord that precedes these bits sounds a bit like the diddle-ow(g)! from the Eagles' “Journey of the Sorcerer”, also the theme tune to Hitch-Hiker.

But more than that, Hitch-Hiker delighted in skewering our perspectives of our relative unimportance and ignorance about the universe around us. “Last Chance to See...” does something similar, but it counts the awful cost of our stupidity – and it's all real. It is, as I said before,

“amiably, compellingly harrowing. There aren't many other books like that.”

As with the original, the joy is not just in them poking their noses at rare species, but in what they spot along the way. Adams has a superb way with analogy that can wholly change how you see how things work. This, too, has asides where Carwardine goes to look at a snake in a tree or warns of vampire bats. In just making the practicalities of getting to see the creatures part of the story, it suggests a complexity of territory, teeming with competing interests and needs. Man and animals and economics and everything co-mingle, spin off each other, a rich density of co-dependent stuff.

It's also got a serious message about the industrial scale destruction of habitat and whole species, and I'm interested to see what the series will say about What Can Be Done. But, one episode in, this is superb.

I'm also dead excited about the start of Derren Brown's new set of events, which begins later this evening with him predicting the Lottery numbers. I've been hooked by Brown's antics since earlier this year, and blogged about his book.

And, speaking of documentaries, I also really enjoyed A Portrait of Scotland, in which Peter Capaldi traced the particular Scottishness of the history of portraiture and the particular portraitness of the history of Scotland. Not really a subject I knew much about before, which is what made the programme so appealing.

It covered a lot of ground at a steady, even pace, full of detail and insight. It also gave a nice portrait of its presenter – losing his glasses, discussing his own past and asking smart questions about the paintings. Capaldi's passion for the subject and his technical skill in drawing and the techniques involved in painting took me completely by surprise – I thought he'd be one of these Know-Nothing Celebs but he turned out to have Something to Tell Us.

This unexpected second skill is what the French refer to us Le Violon d'Ingres – because the great painter was also a mean fiddler, which seems very unfair to us ordinary mortals. I'd like to think that there was some kind of trick to it, that perhaps it's all down to Capaldi having appeared in two things written by my chum James Moran.

Perhaps I, too, could seem all clever if I'd only acted for James....

The Firemakers

In Reading, yesterday, there was the impressive sight of two geeks attempting a barbecue. I can do typing. I can do reaching things from shelves. Beyond that, I am pushing my luck...

First, there was an attempt to fix-up the proper barbecue to its gas cylinder. But there were two gas cylinders: one propane, one butane. Could we remember which one would evenly cook a burger and which would just explode? No. So we consulted the women and they explained, "The blue one".

So then we needed to fit a regulator to the butane cylinder. This helps regulate the amount of gas as it comes out, and stops the thing exploding. You attach the rubber hose to the regulator, then fit the regulator to the cylinder, and then fit the other end of the hose to the barbie. Easy.

We scoured the shed for the hose, bought especially for this purpose. Couldn't find it, so checked with the women. One of the women looked quickly into the shed and spotted it, right in front of us.

I managed manfully to fit the hose to the regulator. It's not easy, because the nozzle of the regulator is all notched and bobbly to make it impossible for the hose to slip. Or, indeed, fit on.

Then we tried fitting the regulator to the cylinder. Hmm. Except, as the internet tells us:

Gas bottles come in a variety of different sizes and, confusingly with different regulator fittings. The clip-on regulators used for barbecues are blue for butane, with a standard internal valve size of 21mm. Propane regulators are red with 27mm in internal size. That means that it is not possible to connect to a propane bottle using a butane regulator or vice versa.

Infomania: Barbecue gas - butane or propane?

Guess which we had.

So, Plan B. We had some disposable, "instant" barbecues in little foil trays waiting on standby. And, with a bit of sliced genius, put them on the shelf of the proper barbecue so it looked like we were doing this properly. Soon the barbie was going great guns, flames licking up into the sunlight.

And then we spotted a small error in our thinking.

With the help of a woman with tongs, we got the cardboard off before the whole thing exploded. And then managed to cook the food pretty well. Though I did manage to throw some sausages on the floor. And sunburnt my arms a fair bit. All of this achieved without recourse to any booze.

Ho hum. Think I shall spend the summer indoors, typing. Not that I've got all the much choice...

"Mozart and an army of vampires"

The Den of Geek site has interviewed me about writing Doctor Who and Primeval tie-in stuff: part one and part two.