A Hard Day’s Night, by Samira Ahmed

I really enjoyed this engaging insightful study of the first Beatles movie, filmed and released in 1964. It’s the first book written by my friend Samira, with whom I’ve made various documentaries for the BBC, and it’s amazing what she packs into the 128 pages. I thought I knew the film pretty well, but now want to watch it again to pick up on the little details and big connections.

In her “Introduction”, Samira explains some of the cultural context from which the film came, and her own relationship with it. In “Watching A Hard Day’s Night”, she recounts what happens on screen. This is much more than a summary of the plot, chock full of insights about what we see, and things for us to go back and spot, like the cameo by Bob Godfrey (p. 56) — he of Roobarb (1974), Henry’s Cat (1983-93) and the Academy award-winning musical animated biography of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Great (1975).

“Making A Hard Day’s Night” is, as you’d expect, a history of the production, again full of great detail, like the fact that John and Paul so enjoyed the TV play No Trams to Lime Street (1959) by Alun Owen, who wrote the screenplay for this Beatles film, that they wrote four pages of a script in the same style, called Pilchard (pp. 72-73). I was particularly struck by what inspired Owen in setting out to write a film about the Beatles: seeing them in Dublin, he had a sense of them trapped by their commitments, their public, the whole machine (p. 73). 

“A Hard Day’s Night and TV” is about what the film shows us of (fictional) live TV broadcasting, and a kind of light entertainment line-up that was once a staple of telly and is now historical artefact. “Women in A Hard Day’s Night” is a compelling chapter on representation, with particular focus on Millie (Anna Quayle) and the unnamed Secretary (Alison Seebohm). I’m really taken with Samira’s idea of a movie telling the Beatles’ story from the perspective of their wives and girlfriends.

“Reception and What They Did Next” explores the critical response to the film and then what followed: another Beatles movie, Help!, also directed by Lester, and then more disparate projects. The sense is that A Hard Day’s Night was made and released quickly to cash-in on the popularity of the Beatles, assuming that the bubble wouldn’t last, but the film helped to establish them as something more than a flash-in-pan pop sensation. Then there’s a concluding chapter on “Legacy”, which ends on a poignant note.

Samira thinks a key moment in the history of all-things Beatles is the “Beatles at Christmas” season on BBC Two over Christmas 1979, not only because it’s when she discovered them but because it presented a body of work by artists. I looked up the details on Genome and Magical Mystery Tour (1967) was shown at 6.10pm on 21 December; Help! (1965) at 6.35 on 22 December; The Beatles at Shea Stadium (1965) at 5.30 on 23 December, Yellow Submarine (1968) at 5.40 on Christmas Eve and A Hard Day’s Night at 3pm Christmas Day. That they weren’t shown in chronological order suggests a value judgment; they’re in order of ascending quality, A Hard Day’s Night the best.

More of me on Beatles books:

• Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald
• Love and Let Die by John Higgs 

Star Trek 2, by James Blish

This second volume of prose adaptations of TV episodes was first published a year after the first, in February 1968. So says the indicia of my 3rd printing of the US edition, which is marked 50 cents on the spine but bears a sticker giving the UK price of 3/6. According to trade paper the Bookseller, it was issued in this form in the UK in August 1969, a month after Star Trek starting airing on the BBC — and three years before Corgi printed the first UK-specific editions of these Star Trek anthologies.

It looks quite different from the first Star Trek anthology, which boasted artwork by James Bama which had been commissioned to promote the TV show. Rather than commission — and have to pay for — new artwork, this volume features a photograph of what were surely considered the two leads of the series: Mr Spock and Captain Kirk (in that order). The photo is small, contained within a vertical strip of black down the centre of the otherwise white frame. The black strip includes the title “ALL NEW STAR TREK 2 adapted by James Blish”, the photo, and then the boast, 

“THE ULTIMATE TRIP! WORLDS BEYOND TIME! WORLDS BEYOND KEN! BASED ON THE EXCITING NBC-TV SERIES CREATED BY GENE RODDENBERRY”.

The back-cover blurb of the first book focused on three leading characters (Kirk, Spock and Rand), but the back cover here doesn’t name anyone:

“A GALACTIC TICKET TO INFINITE ADVENTURE! Eight journeys into the unexpected with the crew of the starship Enterprise. Travel to the unexplored reaches of outer space, to worlds where Humans are an alien race and the unusual is routine. Astonishing new worlds of strange beings, bizarre customs, unknown dangers and awesome excitement. * A world where war is fought by computers! * A world inhabited by great lizard-like creatures of conquest! * A world ravaged by a relentless plague of madness and death! * A world where life has developed beyond the need for physical bodies! * TRAVEL NOW TO THE BOLD NEW WORLDS OF TOMORROW.”

There’s a second blurb, inside the front page, largely cribbed from the first volume, but now the three leads are Kirk, Spock and Lt Uhura. The latter has usurped Yeoman Janice Rand in her shipmates’ affections but is described in almost all the same words:

“Easily the most popular member of the crew, the truly ‘out-of-this-world’ female has drawn the important assignment of scan engineer on her first mission in deep space.”

There’s no mention that she’s black, or Bantu (the word used repeatedly about her in the first book). Did the publishers fear that mentioning this, or showing the third-lead on the cover, might affect their sales?

The book is dedicated,

“To my new-found relative BARBARA BESADNY and all the other Star Trek fans who wrote to me about the first book”

In later books, Blish referred to extensive correspondence he received about Star Trek, not least once the TV series was cancelled. The first book had been dedicated to Harlan Ellison, a writer on the series, but from now on when Blish dedicated a book it was to female fans. Spock Must Die! (1970) is dedicated “to Kay Anderson”, Star Trek 4 (first published in the US in July 1971) is dedicated.

“To DONNA WOODMAN and the the other new English Star Trek fans”,

Star Trek 9 (1973) is dedicated “To Maire Steele” and Star Trek 10 (1974) “to KARIN who also wanted to set Spock to music”. It gives the impression, at least, of an active, engaged and female-led fandom.

Star Trek 2 boasts the same page count as the first volume (128pp including unnumbered pages), but comprises eight stories rather than seven. They are: Arena (12pp); A Taste of Armageddon (13pp); Tomorrow is Yesterday (15pp); Errand of Mercy (15pp); Court Martial (16pp); Operation — Annihilate! (18pp); The City on the Edge of Forever (17pp); and Space Seed (17pp). 

The original plan had been to pack eighth stories into the first volume, too, and I wonder if Blish and the publishers felt it represented better value to feature more stories. The result, of course, is that the adaptations here are even breezier than before.

The running order seems determined by ascending page count rather than broadcast order or the continuity of the TV series, such as in the use of star dates. Even so, Blish includes a few references in later stories to earlier ones (and to events in the first volume), so there’s a sense of a continuing saga. 

We gain some new information, and some corrections to statements in the first volume. We’re in the 23rd century (p. 114) not the 27th and we’re told more than once that the Enterprise can’t land on planets (not the implication in the first book). Blish also moves events of Tomorrow is Yesterday from the 1960s, as on screen, to 1970 — which he gives as the year of the first Moon landing (p. 28). The same story, but the setting bumped along so it is / was still in the near future.

The Enterprise has a crew of 430 (p. 1), where before the figure was a vague 400+. A quarter of the crew are female, and there are 12 ships like Enterprise in the fleet (both facts from p. 30). Warp Four is 64 times the speeds of light, or “64c” (p. 26), while,

“Warp Eight [is] two factors above maximum safe speed” and “over a hundred times the speed of light” (p. 2).

However, Warp Eight is used only in emergencies and not for long, as it would damage the ship (p. 38).

In one story, Scotty refers to the Enterprise’s protective “screens” (p. 22), but in the next story it’s the more familiar “deflector shields” (p. 31). A single star date is given in the whole book: Lt Col Ben Finney “died” in 2947.3 (p. 59).

Not everything is taken from the TV episodes, or from draft scripts containing extra or contrary details. It’s been fun to spot things that are surely all from Blish. Tomorrow is Yesterday features a character called John Christopher; here, Spock refers to the “popular author” or the same name (p. 33), whom Blish surely knew in person.

Later, in Space Seed, Kirk is annoyed at being asphyxiated twice in the same hour (p. 120), Blish rather hanging a lantern on the repetition in the TV story. He also gives Kirk’s perspective a wry humour, such as his response — in the narration but from his point of view, when Spock tries to use telepathy on a guard holding them both prisoner:

“Nothing seemed to happen for at least five centuries, or maybe six” (p. 16).

I’m sure that scholars before me have dissected these anthologies by what’s in the TV episode, what in a draft script and what Blish threw in for his own amusement. He opens City on the Edge of Forever with a seven-line footnote explaining that it draws from both TV version and draft script (p. 89), apparently the only example where he consciously mashed up the sources. 

My suspicion is that the TV episodes are riddled with continuity errors, where a fact given in one episode doesn’t quite match a fact given in another. We might not notice on first viewing, not least with a week between each episodes. But the brevity of the adaptations here, the speed we can hare through several episodes at once, means we’re more likely to pick up on this stuff. 

The most striking bits of continuity, for me, are those that overlap with the later Star Trek movies of the 1980s — the bits of Trek with which I’m most familiar. In Tomorrow is Yesterday, the suggestion that a pilot from 1970 could travel with the the Enterprise into the future is quickly dismissed as he would be,

“archaic, useless, a curiosity” (p. 35).

But that’s in no way the fate of cetologist Dr Gillian Taylor in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), who finds a useful role in the future. That’s all the more striking because that film clearly drew directly from this episode in its method of time travel by flying the Enterprise close to the Sun (p. 36).

Likewise, in Operation — Annihilate!, the Enterprise fires “two fully armed planet-wreckers” that explode with “atomic fire” and destroy a whole plant, leaving behind a nebula (p. 87). This seems to be standard if rarely used artillery on board but in another episode, The Doomsday Machine (adapted in Star Trek 3) and the movie Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, the very idea of a planet-destroying weapon is a new, horrific kind of menace.

The final story here is Space Seed, which ends with Kirk sending a gang of villains to settle a new world. He worries that this crop from this seed (his words) might one day come looking for him again, which is exactly what happens in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. But in that, the villains are found dwelling on the planet’s surface in their old ship Botany Bay. Here, Kirk sends them down to the planet without their ship, and keeps Botany Bay in tow, thinking it might be of interest to historians. 

Space Seed, of course, involves villainous eugenicist megalomaniac who hails from the 1990s, here called Sibyl Khan Noonien— Blish working from draft scripts — and “dictator of his own breed” (p. 116). Our first sight of him presents an exotic mix of different racial characteristics:

“bathed in a gentle violet glow was a motionless, naked man. He was extremely handsome, and magnificently built. His face reflected the sun-ripened Aryan blood of the Northern Indian Sikhs, with just an additional suggestion on the oriental. Even in repose, his features suggested strength, intelligence, even arrogance.” (p. 108)

Here and elsewhere, what a person looks like is an indicator of their character and inner thoughts, which is all a bit racist for a story about eugenicists being bad. Blish also uses “oriental” as a synonym for “alien”:

“The Klingons were hard-faced, hard-muscled men, originally of Oriental stock” (p. 44). 

That surely implies they originated on Earth. In the next book Spock’s quarters are “simple, sparse and vaguely Oriental” (Star Trek 3, p. 106) and here, at the end of Tomorrow is Yesterday, in a sequence not in the TV version, he quotes from “Omar” (Star Trek 2, p. 39); Spock is not only familiar with the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, but on first-name terms with its author.

Dr McCoy refers to “basic humanoid stock” and to the “genetic drift” of a population of colonists who left Earth centuries previously (p. 95). He’s not exactly tactful in his choice of words: elsewhere, he refers to people afflicted by alien parasites as “vegetables” (p. 74). 

The same page features oddly vernacular phrasing from Spock, when he refers to the alien parasites:

"they wanted to brain us” (p. 74).

I also thought Kirk saying “Blooey” and referring to “Miss Uhura” (both p. 27) oddly out of character. It’s from Kirk’s perspective that we first see Edith Keeler in The City at the Edge of Forever. 

“The girl … was simply dressed and not very pretty” (p. 96)

That’s extraordinary for a character played by Joan Collins and with whom Kirk is about to fall in love. Indeed, “No woman was ever loved as much”, we’re told at the end of the story. There’s a tender moment between Spock and Kirk, when the former offers to take his grieving friend to Vulcan, where the nights are long and restful. Kirk responds that they have “all the time in the world” (p. 105).

This isn’t in the broadcast version so must come from Harlan Ellison’s original draft. (I thought, initially, that “all the time in the world” might be Blish linking these tragic events to another grieving hero, but the James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was released in 1969, a year after this book. ETA Steven Flanagan points out that it is the last line of the novel, published in 1963, so perhaps Blish did have that in mind...)

Blish also says that these closing moments are the first time Spock calls Kirk “Jim” (p. 105), a key moment. It’s all a much more emotional scene between the two men than the TV version. I wonder: was Blish responding to those active female fans and what they saw — and wanted to see — in the relationship?

The adventure will continue in Star Trek 3...

Stalky & Co, by Rudyard Kipling

A fortnight ago, I was again at the BBC’s Written Archives Centre to undertake more research for my forthcoming biography of Terrance Dicks. Among the files I looked at were “RCONT22-617-1 Hall James Andew 1980-84” and “RCONT22-90-1 Baron Alexander 1980-84”, which provided some useful material on Terrance’s time as script editor of BBC-1’s Sunday tea-time Classic Serials.

Paperwork I saw at WAC shows that Terrance’s predecessor, Alistair Bell, was still in post as late as 21 May 1980, when he accepted the script for the first episode of Great Expectations, dramatised by James Andrew Hall. This acceptance meant Hall had the go-ahead to write the remaining scripts. Great Expectations was broadcast in 13 episodes between October and December 1981, with Terrance credited as script editor — his first credit on Classic Serials.

Meanwhile, producer Barry Letts commissioned his own dramatisation, Gulliver in Lilliput. As well as writing the scripts, Letts directed all four episodes, broadcast in January 1982.

That left Terrance to find a six-episode story to complete the 22-episode “season”. The earliest document I can find relating to his time as script editor is from his own archive of papers. On 2 June 1980, he wrote a to-do list in a notebook. He had to write The Cop Catchers (the latest novel involving the Baker Street Irregulars), then the novelisation Doctor Who and the Monster of Peladon, then an outline for a never-published original novel. On the next page of the notebook, so on or after 2 June, he listed three potential Classic Serials: The War of the Worlds, “Edwin Drood — solved” and The 39 Steps. He clearly wanted to take the series in a more action-adventure direction.

After some back and forth over suitable, available choices, on 18 September Terrance formally commissioned his first Classic Serial: Stalky & Co by Rudyard Kipling, dramatised by Alexander Baron. He inherited Baron, who’d dramatised Sense & Sensibility for Bell earlier that same year, just the latest in a line of dramatisations and original plays. 

Terrance clearly got on with him: Baron dramatised several more classics for Terrance: The Hound of the Baskervilles (1982); Jane Eyre (1983); Goodbye Mr Chips (1984); Oliver Twist (1985); and the 16-part epic Vanity Fair (1987), the penultimate Classic Serial. He also dramatised a six-part serial for Terrance where the scripts were accepted and Baron paid in full, but the production was then cancelled. More on this in my forthcoming book....

The choice of Stalky & Co at the start of their ongoing relationship is really interesting. It’s a book of stories about three naughty schoolboys at a minor public school in the mid to late 19th century, and not exactly in step with 1980, all punk, Grange Hill (1978-2008) and The Empire Strikes Back. My wife has been entranced by Baron’s later dramatisations for Terrance but this one left her utterly cold. There’s little to like about this cruel, privileged trio in their cruel, privileged world. There are almost no women in it at all. What was Terrance thinking?

Well, Terrance was a big fan of Kipling: as I’ve posted before, Kim was among his favourite books. But that is set in India and told on a huge scale. Stalky & Co was better suited to a TV budget, being set in England, with three principal characters and a smallish supporting cast. 

Perhaps this particular book also offered a twist on Grange Hill, which — as detailed in Box of Delights by Richard Marson — caused a storm of outrage by showing badly behaved school kids at an ordinary comprehensive. Stalky & Co presents badly behaved school kids at a posh, Victorian school, perhaps suggesting a legacy of hijinks, that this stuff is not new. I also wonder if, in 1980, Stalky & Co seemed relevant because of the Thatcher government, elected the previous year, being so full of public school old boys. In that sense, it offers a view of how those leaders, or their kind, were forged.

The stories certainly resonated with later generations of pupils at posh schools. My edition, published in 1950 by Macmillan, boasts a sticker saying it was bought for Brown's House Libray in 1951 and was surely read by students there given that it still included a bookmark of someone’s chemistry homework. I suspect the stories reminded Terrance of his own school, East Ham Grammar School for Boys, to which he gained entry as a working-class boy from East London — an outsider.

As detailed in Baron’s own memoir, he was also a a working-class boy from East London, who joined the Communist Party in his youth. I can see both dramatist and script editor being fascinated by the power dynamics, the anthopology, of this strange, elite world as conveyed in these stories. If so, I think they played that down in the TV version.

At least, I think that sense of anthropological study is more pronounced in the book. The nine stories were originally published separately in magazines, beginning with the two-part “Slaves of the Lamp” in consecutive issues of Cosmopolis: A Literary Review in April and May 1897. Part I involves three schoolboys (Stalky, M’Turk and Beetle), engaged in rehearsals for a school pantomime and getting their own back on a teacher who treats them severely. Part II is set decades later, when Beetle — now a man — hears of his former friend Stalky’s heroic exploits in India, turning the tables on his foes. The implication is that school, and the outwitting of rules and teachers, has been a training ground for the adventure of empire.

To this base, the book adds a further seven stories, all from the schoolboy period. Stalky, M’Turk and Beetle (the latter based on Kipling himself) get into various scrapes. In several episodes they enact a kind of justice or revenge. The man who accuses them of thieving is framed to look like a thief; the master who accuses them of trespass is framed to look like a trespasser; the rival House that accuses our heroes of stinking is made to stink. In one story, a teacher even engages the three boys to deal with a bully.

The boys smoke pipes and sneak alcoholic drinks. Their larks include spitting on wild rabbits, shooting and killing a cat, and stealing and pawning each other’s watches to spend the money on tuck. The sense is that this is all meant to be fun, and its based on close observation of real experience, but I didn’t warm to these boys very much.

Even so, it’s interesting how Baron — and Terrance and the team — approached the dramatisation. In surviving paperwork, Terrance implores Baron to stick as closely as possible to the book, and to Kipling’s original dialogue. Yet there are significant differences. For example, the first TV episode is based on “An Unsavoury Interlude”. In the book version, the three friends are out in the countryside one afternoon. Beetle leaves his friends, and M’Turk and Stalky decide to shoot a rabbit.

“Hi! There’s a bunny. No, it ain’t. It’s a cat, by Jove! You plug first.” (p. 75)

They then hide this cat in the rafters of a rival House, and over time it stinks out the place, making their rivals smell bad. Yet in the TV version, Beetle is with his two friends for the rabbit shoot and, being short-sighted, he shoots a cat by mistake. It’s the same nasty incident, but not so cruel.

The choice of stories to dramatise is also interesting. The TV serial adapted six of the nine stories in the book Stalky and Co, but BBC paperwork shows that rights were agreed — with Kipling’s work still in copyright — to three other stories about Stalky and his friends: “Regulus” (1917), “The United Idolators” (1924) and “The Propagation of Knowledge” (1926). None of these ended up on screen. 

Of the three stories skipped from the original book, “Slaves of the Lamp Part II” was obviously cut because it largely describes events in India, decades after the boys leave school, so would have entailed a different, older cast and expensive location filming. “The Impressionists”, set in the boys’ school days, includes a plot element where the boys lend money to their peers, and there are references to “Shylock” and other antisemitic phrases. I can see why Alexander Baron, born Alexander Bernstein, felt he could skip that story.

Then there’s “The Flag of the their Country”, which may have been skipped for being too polemic. Kipling clearly had something to say about patriotism and heroism, though perhaps not what we would expect. In the story, the local council is keen that the boys should drill (march, exercise etc) to prepare them for the army. Stalky ends up running drill as yet another dodge. The headmaster informs the council that the boys are drilling themselves, and word reaches one Raymond Martin MP, who is so impressed he turns up at the school to deliver a patriotic speech, full of platitudes and cliches. The room full of boys listens “in sour disgust”. To conclude, Martin shakes out a rolled-up Union Jack “and waited for the thunder of applause”. This is how the boys respond:

“They looked in silence. They had certainly seen the thing before—down at the coastguard station, or through a telescope, half-mast high when a brig went ashore on Braunton sands; above the roof of the Golf Club, and in Keyte’s window, where a certain kind of striped sweetmeat bore it in paper on each box. But the College never displayed it; it was no part of the scheme of their lives; the Head had never alluded to it; their fathers had not declared it unto them. It was a matter shut up, sacred and apart. What, in the name of everything caddish, was he driving at, who waved that horror before their eves? Happy thought! Perhaps he was drunk.” (p. 213)

The same story tells us that 80% of the boys in the school were born abroad, and 75% of them are sons of officers in one or other of the armed services, while other stories in the book underline that the boys are largely being readied for military or administrative work in the empire. In “A Little Prep”, which was adapted for TV, we’re told that nine old boys of the school have been killed in India in the past three years, which the current pupils take in their stride. A wounded old boy then visits the school and shares a story about encountering a classmate on the battlefield, where they exchanged their old nicknames:

“I never knew it was one of us till I was right on top of him. There are heaps of Duncans in the service, and of course the name didn’t remind me. He wasn’t changed at all hardly. He’d been shot through the lungs, poor old man, and he was pretty thirsty. I gave him a drink and sat down beside him, and—funny thing, too—he said, ‘Hullo, Toffee!’ and I said, ‘Hullo, Fat-Sow! hope you aren’t hurt,’ or something of the kind. But he died in a minute or two—never lifted his head off my knees.” (p. 178)

In the final story — or the first, in the order that Kipling wrote them — we learn that Beetle ends up getting apprenticed to a newspaper in India, M’Turk leaves school for “Cooper’s Hill”, aka the Royal Indian Engineering College, while Stalky goes to Sandhurst. India is, says Beetle, full of men like Stalky. The boys and their peers are the fuel of the British Empire, so their attitude to the flag is surprising. But it fits with the sentiment in “A Little Prep”, where the hero of the tale is not a soldier but one of the teachers, who puts themselves at risk, without seeking acknowledgement or thanks, to help one of the boys. That is Kipling’s point: Such selfless courage earns admiration; the flag gets nothing at all.

Was that sentiment too controversial, too punk, for a dramatisation in 1982? Perhaps they could have got away with it when the serial was first broadcast, from 31 January to 7 March. But less than a month later it would surely have been unthinkable, given the start of the Falklands War on 2 April.

So, I think Stalky & Co was a more potent, resonant book to dramatise at the time than may first appear. And I think we can see that in the subsequent books dramatised for BBC-1 Classic Serials with Terrance and script editor and producer. More on this to follow...

See also:

• My list of the 236 books published by Terrance Dicks, with links to my longer posts about them
• Me on The Jungle Book by Rudkyard Kipling

Tales of the Suburbs, by John Grindrod

I've had a busy couple of weeks chasing about, and need to write up notes on various things read. Yesterday, I was at Riverside Studios to see the first three episodes of The Daleks' Master Plan in the company of lots of friends, as well as star Peter Purves (who I had the chance to catch up with) and the families of many of those who worked on the episodes. It was all a bit emotional, I think in the best way. Thanks, for ever, to the team at Film is Fabulous.

On Thursday, I had a night out in Manchester to hear Andy Miller interview John Grindrod about his excellent new book, Tales of the Suburbs. I'd heard John read the audiobook version the week before, on my long journey to and from a day's research at the BBC's Written Archives Centre in Caversham. 

It's a fantastic book: observant, funny, smart and often very moving. John begins with a story from his own experience. As a teenager, he once went home with a slightly older man to a posh house in the most respectable bit of suburban Croydon, only to find the man's wife, daughter and mother-in-law waiting up for them. It's awkward and funny, like something from a sitcom or even a Play for Today, but writing about it now, John finds sympathy for each person involved. The point is that the suburbs are full of secrets, arrangements and things not quite what they appear. But it's typical of the witty, wise and empathetic perspective to follow.

In each main chapter, John talks to someone from the LGBTQ+ community about their experience of growing up in suburbia. There are stories from all over the country, covering a range of different sexualities and identities. With hindsight, they can explain the key moments that mattered, that helped or hindered. Sometimes, the events described are harrowing but overall the sense is optimistic: tales of people working themselves out, overcoming adversity, finding peace and happiness and love. Small acts of kindness, of understanding, shape whole lives.

Each interview is followed by a short coda where John shares a story from a little further into the past, in many cases just beyond living memory. These are interesting vignettes but I wasn't sure, at first, how each one connected to the oral history it followed.

But as the book continued I began to spot connections between the individual stories told here. There were themes - of misfits, of loneliness, of the importance of the goth scene. Three of the people interviewed, who all felt so alone, lived within streets of each other and might have offered support if they'd only been aware. Access to information, to representation, is often key. The same support organisations or kinds of intervention crop up time and again. There are patterns. But what those patterns and connections might be are now spelled out; that is left for us. The result is a history that lingers. I've been dwelling on it all week.

Many of those interviewed can see parallels between the way trans people are spoken about now in the press with their own experience of growing up gay under the twin shadows of Section 28 and the AIDS crisis. There is something to be learned from the hard-won lessons of the past.

The result is that these individual stories build up a rich and vivid history - of the last 70-odd years, of the suburbs, of queer people, of what turns out quite often to be common experience among people who felt themselves to be sole misfits. What a privilege to hear their stories, to be in their company. What a brilliant book.

Star Trek (1), by James Blish

Who are the leading characters in the original Star Trek? The front cover of this breezy paperback adaptation of seven early TV adventures boasts artwork showing good likenesses of two leads, Captain James Kirk and Science Officer Spock, plus four generic officers from Star Fleet. 

This is repurposed publicity art apparently by James Bama, commissioned by TV network NBC to help sell the series. (Thanks to Adam at Withnail Books for this fact!)

The back cover then adds a third leading character:

CIRCLING THE SOLAR SPHERE IN SEARCH OF NEW WORLDS AND HIGH ADVENTURE

CAPTAIN JAMES KIRK — Assigned to the top position in Space Service — Starship Command — Kirk alone must make decisions in his contact with other worlds that can affect the future course of civilisation throughout the Universe.

SCIENCE OFFICE SPOCK — Inheriting a precise, logical thinking pattern from his father, a native of the planet Vulcanis, Mr Spock maintains a dangerous Earth trait… an intense curiosity about things of alien origin.

YEOMAN RAND — Easily the most popular member of the crew, the truly “out-of-this-world” blonde has drawn the important assignment of secretary to the Captain of her first mission in deep space.

WITH A CREW OF 400 SKILLED SPECIALISTS, THE MAMMOTH SPACE SHIP ENTERPRISE BLASTS OFF FOR INTERGALACTIC INTRIGUE IN THE UNEXPECTED REALMS OF OUTER SPACE.

It’s just possible that this blurb was written by someone not wholly familiar with Star Trek. These three leads — Kirk, Spock and Rand — are aboard the Enterprise when it “blasts off” (like a rocket) to circle the “solar sphere” (surely meaning to orbit the Sun). Kirk has a top job in “Space Service” not Star Fleet; Spock is from “Vulcanis” not Vulcan and his curiosity is dangerous (like a cat); Rand is the most popular member of the crew (because she’s pretty?) and has lucked out in getting a job as Kirk's secretary.

Of course, Star Trek and its iconic crew weren’t so well established when these words were written. James Blish was approached to write this book before the first TV episode had even aired. According to David Ketterer’s Imprisoned in a Tesseract — a biography of Blish quoted in his Memory Beta entry — the opportunity to adapt eight scripts was first mooted on 26 July 1966, while the first TV episode, The Man Trap, aired on 8 September.

In fact, this book adapts seven of the first 14 episodes, all of which had aired in the US by the time this was published in January 1967. Perhaps a story was dropped from the book because of the speed at which it had to be written: mooted in July, it was on shelves six months later. Perhaps it lost a story because Blish wrote longer adaptations than expected and they had a set page count.

But then there’s the intriguing dedication: 

“to Harlan Ellison, who was right all the time.”

What is that about, then?

Ellison was, like Blish, an established and well-known science-fiction writer, and he was also engaged on this early run of Star Trek. His story The City on the Edge of Forever was first broadcast on 6 April 1967, after publication. It was and is much acclaimed, winning a prestigious Hugo award in 1968. But as Blish explained in his preface to a later anthology of Star Trek stories:

“This award was given, however, not for the script as it ran on Star Trek [on TV], but for Mr Ellison’s original version, which had to be edited for the show—for one thing, it was too long.” (Blish, “Preface”, Star Trek 3 (Bantam, April 1969), p. viii). 

Blish adapted The City on the Edge of Forever in the second anthology, Star Trek 2 (February 1968). According to Marc Cushman’s These Are The Voyages — TOS Season One (2013), Ellison sent Blish the draft script hoping it would be used in preference to the rewrite, but Blish, “with all due apologies to Eliison”, based his adaptation on the rewrite while incorporating some elements from the draft (p. 590).

That implies that it was Blish who made the decision to stick largely to what had been seen on screen. But the dedication in this first volume perhaps suggests something different, that Ellison sent the draft script to Blish for inclusion in this volume, and that Blish agreed that it was better than what would make it to the screen. 

So, did Blish want to adapt Ellison’s draft script for this first collection, only to be told “no” by the producers? That would explain why eight stories were cut back to seven. Was he then able to adapt the story for the second volume on the basis that he stuck closer to the TV version? I find these mechanics of adaptation intriguing, and really ought to read Ketterer’s biography of Blish. I shall add it to the list.

One other thing cited in the Memory Beta entry on Blish, also sourced from Ketterer, is that the experienced, accomplished science-fiction writer was unsure whether to take on the Star Trek anthology at all as the deal was a buy-out rather than royalties. In 1966, the flat fee was $2,000. Today, that’s about $20,000. I am available for writing on similar terms, please and thank you.

According to the indicia, Star Trek was first published by Bantam in the United States and Canada in January 1967. My edition is a 6th printing, the cover and spine printed with the US price of 50 cents. A sticker has been added to this for sale in the UK at three shillings and sixpence, or 3/6. According to trade paper the Bookseller, it was issued in the UK on 21 April 1967 and then again on 18 July 1969, the latter to tie in with the first broadcast of episodes on British television, which began six days previously.

The cover says this is “a chilling journey through worlds beyond imagination … adapted by James Blish.” That got me thinking about what to call this kind of book. It’s not, I think, a “novelisation”, which would imply the different episodes relayed here told a single story. It’s quite common in science-fiction to collect stories originally published separately and, with judicious editing and perhaps some extra scenes, reform them into the chapters of a single narrative.

There are also collections, such as Stalky & Co by Rudyard Kipling — which I shall blog more about in due course — where what seem to be separate stories involving the same characters are revealed, in the closing instalments, to be thematically connected, the sum of parts having Things To Say. This Star Trek book isn’t doing anything of that sort: it’s an anthology of adaptations of TV episodes.

Fitting seven of them into a slim paperback means they are very breezily told, which makes them quick and engaging — this is a book to hare through. It’s all largely action and dialogue, with little of the inner thoughts of characters or the narrator interposing their view. This is the “Detached Author” as defined by Ursula le Guin in Steering the Craft (p. 58), but it’s also the information you get from a script: what people say, what people do, not what they might be thinking.

The Memory Beta entry speculates on how much, if any, Star Trek Blish might have seen when he wrote this, given that he offers next-to-no description of the regular cast or their ship. Even if he didn’t know the series well, reference photographs could have been provided and the cover art was already available. Rather, I think, this is another sign that Blish worked chiefly from the scripts — which would describe guest characters but not the regulars. In the book, we get a whole paragraph describing Dr Tristan Adams in Dagger of the Mind (p. 28) but Spock’s ears get mentioned once and relatively late, when we’re told a Romulan has ears of the “same shape and cant” (p. 66). 

The only regular to get more description than this is Uhura. Her physical features are often described as “Bantu”, for example:”

“her Bantu face intent as a tribal statue’s” (p. 6).

But, as I noted in my post on Blish’s (later) original Star Trek novel Spock Must Die!, “Bantu” is the name of a group of languages spoken in central and southern African, and used of the people who speak them. Blish uses it as a label for racial characteristics. Later in the same book we’re told that “Uhura has the impassivity of most Bantu women” (p. 56) and also has “large hands” (p. 64).

There’s something a bit more liberated and interesting later on, when a possessed Sulu refers to Uhura as “Fair maiden” and she responds, “Sorry, neither”. But this excellent reply is in the TV version, too. 

There are clearly some differences between events depicted here and as seen on screen, which seems to be because Blish worked from draft scripts not the final episodes. But my nerdy interest is less in how the adaptations differ from the TV versions as the things Blish adds to the lore himself.

The first story in the book, Charlie’s Law — the working title of the TV episode Charlie X— says Kirk has spent “more than twenty years in space” (p. 1). This comes up again in the final story in the book, The Conscience of a King, where we’re told that Kirk was on the planet Tarsus IV 20 years previously (p. 118), when he was a midshipman (p. 128). You currently need to be 17 to join the US Navy; if that still holds whenever these Star Trek adventures are set — see Miri below — Kirk must be about 40, a decade older than actor William Shatner in 1966.

We don’t learn much about Kirk here. In the first story, when he advises precocious, all-powerful teenager Charlie that exercise will keep his mind off girls, Blish adds that this idea was introduced in Victorian England (p. 9), as if Kirk knows all about efforts by 19th century public schools to tackle masturbation by codifying the rules of football.

Second story, Dagger of the Mind, includes Kirk swearing: “Forget the Enterprise [?] Not bloody likely!” (p. 35). His other swears include “Great Galaxy” (p. 89), “Damnation” (p. 103), “Baloney” (p. 105) and “damn well” (p. 123). But there are no bollixes, as in Spock Must Die!

There’s an odd moment where a kind of faucet touches Kirk’s head (p. 35). The word Blish uses instead of faucet is “petcock”, but it’s right at the end of a line and is split on to the next one, with the hyphen after the “t”. That leaves Kirk with a,

“cock on his skull”.

More troubling is how Blish envisions the implanted memory of Kirk’s relationship with Dr Helen Noel. On screen, she says she wishes he cared for her, he says he won’t lie, she says she prefers honesty; then they kiss. In the book, 

“all he had was the memory of having carried her to her cabin that Christmas, of her protests, of his lies that had turned into truth” (p. 33).

Yes, the point is that it’s a false, implanted memory — a violation in itself — but it’s all a lot grubbier and nastier than the fun flirtation on screen.

Third story The Unreal McCoy, the working title of The Man Trap, reveals — I think for the first time — that Spock’s homeworld of Vulcan is in orbit round the (real-life) star 40-Eridani, something I’ve since cited in my own books. Odder is the claim that,

“neither Scotty nor McCoy liked the Vulcanite [ie Spock ... and even Kirk was] not entirely comfortable in his presence” (p. 62).

Also, most of the crew of the Enterprise “had never heard a shot fired in anger” (p. 59).

In the adaptation The Naked Time, which is not nearly so exciting a story as the title suggests, we get our only reference to what the crew of Enterprise wear, as Sulu’s usual,

“velour shirt was off, revealing a black tee-shirt” (p. 80). 

This and a towel round his neck leads Kirk to conclude that Sulu is just back from the gym, suggesting that all the crew do to work out is take off their uniform jumpers. That ship mustn’t half pong.

In Miri, we learn that “the fourth planet of 70 Ophiucus, the computer said, had been the first extrasolar planet ever colonised by man… more than five hundred years ago” p. 92. This was in “the early 2100s” (p. 93), so events of this story take place in the 2600s, some 300 years later than the series on screen.

A conversation also takes place between Kirk and another character that doesn’t happen on screen. I will have more to say about that elsewhere.

Finally, there is The Conscience of the King, where 19 year-old Lenore’s interest in Kirk and his kissing her is a bit less ick on screen with 30 year-old Shatner than the older c. 40 year-old Kirk here. But what also really strikes me is that the book ends without a coda promising more adventures. 

But the story continues in Star Trek 2…

The Uses of Literacy, by Richard Hoggart

“If we want to capture something of the essence of working-class life … we must say that it is the ‘dense and concrete life’, a life whose main stress is on the intimate, the sensory, the detailed, and the personal” (p. 87).

This ur-text of what’s now called cultural studies is divided into two parts. First, we get 140 pages on the working-class Leeds where Hoggart grew up before the war, and the attitudes and outlooks of his people. This covers everything from the expected roles of mothers and fathers respectively to the focus on what he calls “the personal and the concrete” in the little pleasures taken wherever possible. Hoggart paints a vivid, tactile portrait of a place and time. But there’s a sense of loss, too: it’s a world of which he is no longer part, because of where reading has taken him.

Then there’s more than 160 pages on how things are changing post-war, which he links directly to what working-class people are reading. There’s lots here on magazines, newspapers and what he thinks of as trashy literature — he does not hide his distaste for the lurid covers and cheap newsprint of crime, sci-fi and sex pulp fiction that offers “sensation-without-commitment” (p. 242). He dismisses this as read by adolescents and those on National Service, and is especially disparaging of,

“American or American-type serial books of comics, where for page after page big-thighed and big-bosomed girls from Mars step out of their space machines, and gangsters’ molls scream away in high-powered sedans [which is] bad mass-art geared to a very low mental age” (p. 177).

He’s just as withering about the kind of airbrushed, big-bosomed covers of pulp fiction, often illustrated by or in the style of Alberto Vargas (who Hoggart refers to throughout as “Varga”, for example on p. 227). But he fails, I think, to adequately explain why this kind of stuff might appeal to particular readers, in the way we find in George Orwell’s famous essay. “Good Bad Books” (1945). Hoggart dismisses it all as masturbatorial — and feels the need to explain the service term “wank” on p. 220. 

I think we can understand the attraction of cheap, convenient sensation to teens and servicemen with limited money. If you’re stuck in school or National Service, bored, trapped and frustrated, how thrilling to read of people who take action, break rules and escape. It satisfies in a way that perhaps “good” or canonical literature does not. (I wonder if the illicit thrill of rule-breaking in fiction can also serve a social purpose, shoring up those rules in real life.)

Hoggart is more nuanced when it comes to popular songs, admitting that old tunes and lyrics have an effect on him that makes it hard to be objective (p. 199), and that,

“we remember the best songs from a large number of weak ones” (p. 200).

He can see the stuff is not very rich or good or worthy (in his terms), but it conjures something for him, writ through with keenly felt memory and association. My suspicion is that he found it easier to scorn pulp fiction and comics because he’d not grown up on them. They were not of the world he knew, so they are invaders.

His argument is that improvements in education, literacy and welfare haven’t necessarily seen improvements in reading. Indeed, he thinks reading rates are high, quoting sales figures for magazines and newspapers that seem incredible now. He also cites a Gallup poll from 1950, in which 55% of respondents said they were currently reading a book (p. 301), but slightly spoils this high figure by muttering that it gives no sense of the quality of the books being read. 

This is all part of his thesis that culture is becoming more homogenous and less granular and specific; we are reading more of fewer titles, pitched to a mass-market audience, an identikit culture. He puts particular blame on advertising for this effect, but does not, as he surely would had this book been written just a few years later, cite television as a factor. There is little sense, either, of this being part of a wider social or political development, or even construction of power, though he does mention Alex Comfort on p. 172 — presumably in reference to his book Authority and Delinquency (1950). 

As Hoggart admits, his observations and conclusions are drawn mostly from his own experience as a grammar school boy rather than on broader empirical evidence such as a survey or wider study. But the book chimed with a generation of readers who saw themselves in what he described. I think that rather proves his thesis: his personal, concrete experience had wide-reaching appeal to readers.

Perhaps the most haunting passages are where, towards the end, he describes “the Uprooted and the Anxious” (p. 262) population, largely comprising grammar-school pupils, whose cleverness and reading severed them from their working-class communities. Hoggart describes them — himself — as prone to insecurity and being alone (pp. 264-5). He explains, convincingly, how a bookish boy would grow up studying diligently in the home, so largely in the company of his mother and other women of the family, while the menfolk would go out to work or the pub, and other boys would be out playing (pp. 266-67). This, he argues, shapes a whole outlook for life: what we read shapes who we are.

Given this and his argument that our reading is getting worse, we are left on a pessimistic note. It’s interesting to read, in the interview from 1990 included at the end of the book, that Hoggart thought things improved in the 1960s with a flowering of rich culture, but saw further stagnation in the 1980s.

The Uses of Literacy was first published in January 1957 and widely reviewed and debated in the following months. I wonder if and when it was read by Terrance Dicks, about whom I'm writing a biography. At the time of publication, Terrance — a working-class grammar school boy from East Ham in London — was just coming to the end of his three-year degree in English on a scholarship at Downing College, Cambridge. There, he was taught by FR Leavis, whose close scrutiny of literature for clues about wider social and economic life was surely a big influence on Hoggart’s approach here. Surely his book was discussed at Downing by the final-year students. As I read it, I wondered to what extend Terrance would recognise himself and his world in these pages? 

But Terrance didn’t like that kind of abstract analysis. He preferred things to be more concrete.

The Croquet Player, by HG Wells

This short, 82-page novella first published in 1936 was recommended to me after I posted about the 1934 and 1941 editions of A Short History of the World and Wells’s anxieties about where things were headed. I tracked down a first-edition copy, and read it in a single sitting earlier this week. It has haunted my imagination ever since.

The blurb is as follows:

“In a cafe at Les Noupets, as he comfortably sips his vermouth before lunching with his aunt, the narrator is accosted by a voluble stranger who tells him a strange and terrible story of the haunted countryside of Cainsmarsh, and of how he was finally driven to leave it and put himself in the hands of nerve-specialist. The narrator, already disturbed and frightened by the tale, meets the nerve-specialist next day and the mystery, instead of being solved, broadens and deepens until it embraces the whole world.

This is Mr Wells at his very best, and he could have hardly have chosen a more appropriate moment at which to give us this intriguing story.” (Back-cover blurb of first UK edition, Chatto & Windus, 1936)

The story comprises four chapters. In the first, “The Croquet Player”, the unnamed narrator tells us of two strange people he’s encountered, and that he’ll share what they have each told him in an effort to get it straight.

“It was a sort of ghost story they unfolded” (p. 1).

Having promised us something unsettling, he then sets a scene rather out of PG Wodehouse. The narrator and his aunt, Miss Frobisher, are at Les Noupets to play croquet because they don’t care to be seen playing tennis as it is too popular, while golf.

“we find mixes us up with all sorts of people” (p. 7). 

This snob was educated at Harton and Keble, now lives with his aunt at Upper Beamish Street in an unnamed part of Hampshire, and is, he tells us himself,

“just a little inclined to be what the Americans call a sissy [ … with … ] soft hands and an ineffective will” (p. 5).

He is, in short, an unlikely figure to get caught up in a ghost story or strange adventure. He is a comic character, a recognisable type to ground the story in something real before the horror strikes. My first thought was that Wells was doing a kind of fish-out-of-genre story, putting the least likely or least equipped sort of character into an established kind of set-up. That can be very effective, like doing a Chandler-esque thriller but making the protagonist a baffled stoner, as in The Big Lebowski.

In chapter 2, “The Haunting Fear in Cainsmarsh”, the narrator is out on the terrace when he meets nervous young Dr Finchatton, who tells him about his practice in Cainsmarsh where everyone is beset with a strange, low-level sickness that leaves them perturbed, with visions of ghosts from under the ground etc. It is brilliantly unsettling for being so underplayed, reminiscent of MR James, Lovecraft or The Woman in Black.

In chapter 3, “The Skull in the Museum” Finchatton traces the pestilence to the local museum in Cainsmarsh, which holds the newly found skull of some early version of man — I suspect inspired by the contentious real-life “discovery” of Piltdown man. The implication here is that in unearthing the skull they have unleashed an ancient curse, or rather an ancient perspective — a savage, violent, early version of humanity.

Things then step up: heading home, Finchatton finds the body of a dog that has been beaten to death, then learns that the kindly old vicar Rawdon who advised him earlier in the story has attempted to murder his own wife. Finchatton shares with the narrator his theories about the influence of “primordial Adamite” (p. 55) on everyone in the region, including himself.

“And then Finchatton said a queer thing. ‘Little children killed by air-raids in the street.’” (p. 56)

This incongruous reference brings a tale of ancient horror suddenly into the present. Air-raids weren’t a new idea in 1936; London was bombed in the First World War, and Wells had explored the idea in science-fiction novels including The War in the Air (1908), The World Set Free (1914) and The Shape of Things to Come (1933), the latter made into the influential film Things to Come (1936). 

But the haunting image here of children killed in the street is apparently a response to contemporary events and the civil war in Spain, a year before the bombing of Guernica. The sense is, then, that the curse has already spread far and wide from Cainsmarsh.

I’ve seen this kind of thing done elsewhere, not least in Quatermass and the Pit (1958-59), where the discovery of an ancient skull produces nightmare visions and we learn our deep-seated violence is an ancient inheritance. I’d understood that to be a direct response to the Second World War and the Holocaust, not least given that writer Nigel Kneale was married to Judith Kerr, a Jewish refugee from Berlin, and his mother-in-law was a translator during the Nuremberg trials. So, for me, it’s extraordinary to see the same kind of idea being articulated before the outbreak of war. 

Wells then goes in a different direction. Chapter 4, “The Intolerable Psychiatrist”, flips the whole tale. The narrator meets with Finchatton’s nerve specialist, Norbert, who tells him that Finchatton’s story isn’t true. There is no such place as Cainsmarsh, and the young doctor was practising in Ely.

Yet, says Norbert, the sickness is real: he’s seen loads of people having similar delusions and nightmares, which he thinks is a response to the mounting tensions in the world, implicitly the rise of fascism and the threat of another world war. People are gripped by a nightmare of things to come.

I put this to my friend Niall Boyce, who shared with me an even earlier version of something similar — the vivid, precognitive nightmare experienced by Carl Jung in 1913:

“In October, while I was alone on a journey, I was suddenly seized by an overpowering vision: I saw a monstrous flood covering all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. When it came up to Switzerland I saw that the mountains grew higher and higher to protect our country. I realised that a frightful catastrophe was in progress. I saw the mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilisation, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood. This vision lasted about one hour. I was perplexed and nauseated, and ashamed of my weakness. Two weeks passed; then the vision recurred, under the same conditions, even more vividly than before, and the blood was more emphasised. An inner voice spoke. ‘Look at it well; it is wholly real and it will be so. You cannot doubt it.’ 

That winter someone asked me what I thought were the political prospects of the world in the near future. I replied that I had no thoughts on the matter, but that I saw rivers of blood.” (CG Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Flamingo, 1961) p. 199.)

Three years after these dreams, with the First World War in progress, Jung first used the term “collective unconsciousness”, in part drawn from Freud’s idea of the “primal horde”, where part of us, deep in the consciousness, will always be archaic, primitive, wild. I think that’s exactly what Wells is drawing on here, initially as a kind of ghost story.

In the story, Norbert argues that the mounting sense of disquiet, the shared nightmares, are a response to looming threat, implicitly of a new war, but originate in the primitive parts of our consciousness. He  appeals to the narrator:

“‘In a little while,’ he said, ‘there will be no ease, no security, no comfort any more.’ (Thank Heaven! he did not say I was ‘living on the brink of a volcano’.) ‘There will be no choice before a human being but to be either a driven animal or a stern devotee to that true civilisation, that disciplined civilisation, that has never yet been achieved. Victim or vigilante. And that, my friend, means you!” (p. 78) 

The narrator has, he admits, been “hypnotised” by all this. Yet when challenged by the psychiatrist, he shakes him off, because he has and appointment to keep with his aunt, playing croquet. He does not succumb to primitive consciousness; he simply ignores the threat.

I said at the outset that the narrator is like something from PG Wodehouse and to a post-war reader the ending reinforces that idea, given Wodehouse’s behaviour in the early part of the war. Of course, Wells could not have known that at the time of writing, but it is another example of his eerie prescience. 

There’s also something more profound in all this: that idea of people unable to face up to challenges and threats, determined to deny them, avoid them or conjure nightmares of something else. That’s coloured my sense of the news this week, with politicians of various hues determined to ignore or underplay climate change. How strange to read a book published 90 years ago and find it is pointedly now. 

The Croquet Player is dedicated “To Moura”, ie Russian translator and double-agent Countess Moura Budberg, with whom Wells had a long-standing on-off relationship. She’s a fascinating character, and given her experience in the Russian revolution, I can well understand why she might sympathise with a story / view of human psychology like this. 

I wonder how much of this strange, haunting story is the ghost of a conversation between Wells and Moura, horrified by a future they could so plainly see coming.  

The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe

I read this compelling account of the early days of the American space programme — and the egos involved — an age ago, before my 2009 trip to Cape Canaveral, and have seen the film version a few times. But I looked up a detail the other week and got caught up again. 

Wolfe tells us in his foreword that the book was inspired by a simple question:

“What is it, I wondered, that makes a man willing to sit up on top of an enormous Roman candle, such as a Redstone, Atlas, Titan, or Saturn rocket, and wait for someone to light the fuse? I decided on the simplest approach possible. I would ask a few astronauts and find out. So I asked a few in December of 1972 when they gathered at Cape Canaveral to watch then last mission to the moon, Apollo 17. I discovered quickly enough that none of them, no matter how talkative otherwise, was about to answer the question or even linger for more than a few seconds on the subject at the heart of it, which is to say, courage.” (P -4)

He persists in his investigation all the same, and the promise is of stuff about Tough Men Who Don’t Talk Emotions, alongside lots of Detail About Engineering. Yes, there is a lot of that stuff in what follows, but not to begin with. Chapter 1 opens, instead, on a domestic scene, wives ringing one another to find out what people might have heard. It’s ordinary, relatable, with a growing tension as we realise that a plane has crashed and the wives are trying to work out who has lost their husband.

Having explored the social networks and the psychology of all this, we then follow the efforts to recover the crashed plane and what little remains of the pilot, the state of the body described in horrific, visceral detail. It’s emotive and arresting, and I lacked the velocity to escape it. So I’ve read the whole book again.

There are effectively two stories here: first, the breaking of the sound barrier by Chuck Yeager on 14 October 1947; then the Mercury space programme (1958-63), from the recruitment of the seven pilots, the first American chimps and humans in space, through to the appointment of a second wave of pilots (including Neil Armstrong) for the subsequent Gemini and Apollo programmes that would take astronauts to the Moon.

There’s some amazing stuff, like Yeager being invited to the US premiere of David Lean’s film The Sound Barrier (1952, released in the US the following year). The film claims the British broke the sound barrier first and did so by “reversing the controls”. Yeager found this outrageous, and was then horrified to discover that people thought he was only the first American to break the sound barrier, have copied this manoeuvre from the British.

“The last straw comes when he gets a call from the Secretary of the Air Force.

‘Chuck,’ he says, ‘do you mind if I ask you something? Is is true that you broke the sound barrier by reversing the controls?’

Yeager is stunned by this. The Secretary—the Secretary—of the US Air Force!

‘No, sir,’ he says, ‘that is… not correct. Anyone who reversed the controls going transonic would be dead.’” (p. 62)

Wolfe reports everything in a hard-boiled journalistic style, with an eye for human foibles — ego, hubris, jealousy, anger, lust and foolishness. It’s a little as though Dashiell Hammett had written a history of rockets. He’s good on the culture — the hard drinking, hard driving astronauts, the way they were wooed by sponsors and politicians, the conflict between perceived glamour and the reality. We get to know these different people and what makes them tick. Mission accomplished on that score.

There are also some notable absences. Frustratingly, there are no footnotes or index so we must take Wolfe’s claims on trust. But there are also some big things missing from the story here that I’ve seen picked up elsewhere. For example, there’s this reference to the partying going on at Cape Canaveral in 1960.

“There were NASA people and the contractors and their people, and there were the Germans. Although they scrupulously advised publicity, many of Wernher von Braun’s team of V-2 experts had important jobs at the Cape and were happy to find a fraternal atmosphere in which they could take off their official long faces and let the funny bone out for a tap dance or two. And many were the midsummer nights in Cocoa Beach, nights so hot and salty that the No See’um bugs were sluggish, when sizzling glüwein materialized as if from out of a time warp and drunken Germans could be heard pummelling the piano in the cocktail lounge and singing the ‘Horst Wessel Song’!” (p. 167)

This is a rare mention by Wolfe of von Braun and the Germans working on the space programme, with little to suggest any moral objection to the involvement of former Nazis. I’ve seen that addressed in, for example, the non-fiction Moondust by Andrew Smith, the novel Moonglow by Michael Chabon and the TV series For All Mankind. This is an example, I think, of Wolfe being like the journalists he decries more than once as behaving like “Victorian gents” in the way they reported the space programme, discreetly skipping unpalatable details to present a romantic story.

At the end of the book, he discusses the political pressures involved in recruiting Ed Dwight to the Mercury programme, as the first black astronaut. With other astronauts, Wolfe shares their perspective on events, their frustrations at being pawns in political games; we don’t get that with Dwight. Wolfe also doesn’t say that Dwight’s career was then halted by the end of the Mercury programme — though Dwight finally made it into orbit in 2024. 

The book ends, instead, at the end of 1963 with the Mercury astronauts receiving an award from the Society of Experimental Test Pilots that makes them feel as though they have, finally, been accepted by their peers as proper pilots. There’s the sense of things changing gear as Mercury is superseded by the next stages of the space programme. But I’m struck by Wolfe also closing the curtain on another key moment in history:

“When Kennedy was assassinated on November 22 by a man with Russian and Cuban ties, there was no anti-Soviet or anti-Cuban clamor in the Congress or in the press. The Cold War, as anyone could plainly see, was over.” (p. 435).

That seems a remarkable claim to make in 1979, the time of the coup in Afghanistan. For a book all about the importance of precision, it’s not quite correct — not quite the right stuff.

Box of Delights, by Richard Marson

I’ve greatly enjoyed this enormous, 540-page oral history of children’s television on the BBC between 1967 and 1997, published by Ten Acre Books (who also publish me).

A lot of the people and shows referenced here are very familiar; this is the TV output on which I grew up. It’s a thrill to find out what went on behind the scenes of Blue Peter, Newsround and Jackanory and dramas such as Grange Hill and The Box of Delights, not least when what we’re told is a bit salacious. The job tended to involve long hours and lots of chain-smoking for not much money. There was an enviable degree of creative freedom, but some extraordinary clashes of ego and personality, and occasional bust-ups. 

While much of it is about the practicalities of making television for a mass audience, it’s really the story of the people involved. Several of the many contributors are unguarded in what they say about former colleagues, particular shows and even the children who took part. We learn, for example, that one girl looked like a hippo on screen and that a particular group of children who appeared on The Really Wild Show smelled so strongly of cannabis that it confused a sniffer dog.

One constant theme, I think, is the sink-or-swim method of recruitment. The process of finding presenters and child actors often involved people already know to the producers: relatives, colleagues working in the office, people they happened to meet during filming (an example of the latter: Blue Peter presenter Simon Groom). Yes, there was some auditioning, too, but it all feels a bit haphazard, with a tendency to cast particular “types”. Once they’d got the job, some onscreen personalities were clearly not well supported, either. There was not much duty of care.

Some stories here are shocking, such as the claim that no women wanted to work with Rod Hull and Emu as he/they would assault them, or the account of one (former) child actor who almost drowned while filming. I had no idea that Blue Peter presenter Diane Louise Jordan faced so many challenges, in part because of things going on in her life off-screen. And there’s something a bit sacrilegious about some colleagues airing their dislike of Floella Benjamin (pp. 281-2).

A few things prompted me to look up further detail. For example, the book details the impact on the cast and crew of Record Breakers when presenter Ross McWhirter was murdered, but doesn’t tell us why the IRA targeted him. Reading up on McWhirter’s political views and associates only makes it more extraordinary that he and his twin brother Norris were fixtures of children’s TV.

Inevitably, I think, some of the later material here hit less hard as it concerns shows and personalities whose names I didn’t recognise, from a time long after I’d outgrown children’s TV and had not even a passing acquaintance with what was on. It’s all good material, just without the same emotive impact for this particular reader. I suspect different parts of the book will hit differently, depending on the reader’s age.

This isn’t meant as criticism; it’s just that this book has made me think about my own relationship with and response to all the culture spawned from the BBC’s East Tower. The book is just as rich and varied and nuts.

*

For my own purposes, researching the life and career of Terrance Dicks, it was interesting to see what the book says about The Bagthorpe Saga, a six-part dramatisation “completed … for transmission” by Christmas 1980 and broadcast between 25 March to 29 April 1981.

“The first two novels in Helen Creswell’s The Bagthorpe Saga — a humorous series about an eccentric and dysfunctional family living in the country — were adapted by James Andrew Hall. Andrew (as he was known) was a writer then very much in vogue. In the spring of 1979, he had generated a good deal of publicity with his controversial and autobiographical Play for Today, Coming Out [tx 10 April 1979], the angsty story of a homosexual writer and the various men in his life. He was also a regular contributor to the Sunday classic serials. ‘I enjoy writing for kids,’ he said. ‘I think it helps that I haven’t got any of my own. I’ve never really grown up in some respects. When I’m working on an adaptation, [it’s] with a mental note to be true to the other writer’s work, which is always difficult — don’t impose too much of yourself on it, which is not always easy. I just type everything out — tippy tap tip tip tip.” p. 236.

This is welcome detail as I’m currently a bit short on material related to James Andrew Hall; last summer, the BBC’s Written Archives Centre declined me permission to go through the files they hold on him. 

But I know he and Terrance enjoyed a successful collaboration over several years. Terrance inherited him (and Alexander Baron) on the Sunday classic serials. Hall had been working in television since the mid 1960s, while also publishing novels. But he’d only recently worked on the Sunday classic, dramatising The Mill on the Floss (1978-79) and The History of Mr Polly (1980), both produced by Barry Letts. He must have followed Bagthorpe with his 13-part dramatisation of Great Expectations, which began broadcast on 4 October 1981 and was the first of the classics script edited by Terrance. 

Hall went on to dramatise Dombey & Son (1983), The Invisible Man and The Prisoner of Zenda (both 1984) for Barry and Terrance. Then, when Terrance took over as producer, Hall dramatised Brat Farrar and David Copperfield (both 1986), as well as The Franchise Affair (1988). The latter was Terrance’s final production and the last Sunday classic serial produced by the drama department.

In some sense, he was victim of a coup. Two weeks after The Franchise Affair concluded, the same Sunday evening slot boasted the first episode of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. As Marson says in his book, this was the first Sunday serial made by the children’s department since 1962 (p. 410). I wonder how long the coup lasted. There were more Chronicles of Narnia in 1989 and 1990 but did children’s continue to make Sunday classics beyond that? I need to investigate…

While his regular gig on the Sunday classics came to an end, James Andrew Hall continued to work for the children’s department; Marson says his scripts for the dramatisation of Black Hearts in Battersea (1995-96) by Joan Aiken under-ran (p. 504).

Richard has been very helpful in answering my various questions about aspects of all of this; more to follow in my own book.

The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book, by Terrance Dicks and George Underwood

For the time being, this will be the last of my long posts on the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks. I need to focus on some other projects, not least my forthcoming biography of Terrance, which is due for publication later this year. Thanks for your ongoing interest and support.

The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book was the third of three books by Terrance published by Target on 16 December 1976. I’ve addressed them in the order I think they were written: the manuscript of the revised version of The Making of Doctor Who had been approved by 22 April that year; Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars must have been delivered by the end of May, given my estimated 7.5-month lead time for novelisations; then there was this relatively late commission.

The evidence for that lateness includes the fact that Target did not feature The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book in lists of forthcoming publications such as the one published in fanzine TARDIS, vol 1, no. 8 (July 1976), which cites every other title planned for 12 months:

The Dinosaur Book is also missing from the list of other Doctor Who books available featured in Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars; this is not a list solely of novelisations because The Making of Doctor Who is included. 

The suggestion is that when this novelisation was in lay out, Target still weren’t sure whether the Dinosaur Book would be ready in time for publication on the same day.

This is also the first, and only, Doctor Who book written by Terrance that does not have his name on the cover: he is credited on the title page inside. Given his renown by this point, as script editor and writer on the series, and author of 13 novelisations as well as other Doctor Who titles, my suspicion is that this is evidence of rush.

Then there’s what George Underwood, illustrator of The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book, told me when I interviewed him last month:

“I looked it up in my job book. It was [done] in August [1976].” 

In that single month, George produced all 32 illustrations: 28 double-page spreads and three single-page images in monochrome pencil, plus the cover art in acrylic colour (the pale blue background done with an airbrush). 

“Man, the hours I must have put into it!”

The limited time in which he completed this colossal undertaking suggests a late commission for the book as a whole. For comparison, I’ve worked on some books where we talked to the illustrator more than a year before publication.

The tight turnaround surely explains why the book wasn’t illustrated by Chris Achilleos, already busy producing book covers for Target. I put that to George:

“Yeah, Chris did a lot of Doctor Who stuff. I’m sure they’d have gone to him first. Then they needed someone else, so they’d have asked around and my agent at the time must have sold me to them. They decided to use me."

George had some history with dinosaurs, having previously provided the mind-bending artwork for My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair... But Now They're Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows (1968), the debut album of Marc Bolan’s band, Tyrannosaurus Rex.

“That had creatures in it but there I used Gustave Dore’s engravings as inspiration. So this was different.”

He’d also produced artwork for his friend David Bowie, such as the rear sleeve painting for the album David Bowie (1969, now better known as Space Oddity), and colour hand-tinting Brian Ward’s black-and-white photography for the covers of albums Hunky Dory (1971) and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972). He also produced gatefold artwork for a planned Ziggy-related live album that ultimately wasn’t realised.

In the summer of 1976, George was a jobbing freelance illustrator and took work as it came.

“I was doing a lot of commercial work just to pay the rent, so I was happy when this came in. Book covers and illustrations were much more enjoyable to work on than advertising, where often an agency came up with awful ideas you then had to solve. I can come up with my own ideas! I didn’t have much to do with the negotiations. The money was probably okay.”

Having been taken on by Target,

“I’d have gone into the office [at 123 King Street in Hammersmith] at least once. I worked for [art directors] Brian Boyle and Dom Rodi on other things as well, but I don’t remember which of them was on this.” 

No designer is credited in the book itself, but some sources credit Frank Ainscough, who later oversaw the Doctor Who Discovers series of books; George didn’t recognise that name. This suggests that Rodi oversaw the Dinosaur Book but followed the style Boyle established in The Doctor Who Monster Book (where he is credited).

George told me that he “may have met” Target’s children’s books editor Elizabeth Godfray but had no direct dealings with writer Terrance Dicks. 

“The BBC sent me some great [photographic] shots of the Doctor in various poses as reference. I had to find ways to manipulate those and fit them into the backgrounds with the monsters, to make it look as if the Doctor was there. That was important, to give the right sense of scale.”

When Terrance worked on The Doctor Who Monster Book, he sourced photographs from the BBC himself and wrote his copy to fit them. He seems not to have been involved in commissioning artwork, such as the cover. Indeed, in several interviews Terrance said he’d sometimes be asked by editors what he wanted on the covers of his books, and never knew what to say.

I asked George if he’d been given much of a brief for the illustrations in the Dinosaur Book; I wondered if he was told something like, for example with the spread pp. 38-39, “We see a Polacanthus, like the one on p. 32 of the Ladybird Dinosaurs.” But George said:

“Not that I remember. And I remember doing quite a lot of research myself, checking out other illustrators’ versions of dinosaurs. I already had some reference books at home, encyclopaedias and didn’t the Reader’s Digest do stuff as well? For that particular job, I might have gone out and bought a book on dinosaurs but I’m sure I had some at home which had been given to my children."

On the Love in the Time of Chasmosaurus site, Marc Vincent identified the two key sources for George’s artwork in The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book: Album of Dinosaurs written by Tom McGowen and illustrated by Rod Ruth (Rand McNally, 1972) and Dinosaurs written by Colin Douglas and illustrated by BH Robinson (Ladybird Books, 1974). There is a full LITC post on The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book. 

As that post says, some of the images in the Dinosaur Book are very like the sources they’re drawn from:

Cover of Album of Dinosaurs (1974)
art by Rod Ruth
 

“Tyrannosaurs rex”, in
The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book,
art by George Underwood
after Rod Ruth

Or, see the Stegosaurus here:

Stegosaurus and Antrodemus
by BH Robinson from
Dinosaurs (Ladybird, 1974)

“Allosaurus v Stegosaurus” in
The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book
Art by George Underwood
after BH Robinson

George openly acknowledged this in a 2016 interview:

“That was the only way I could do it. It’s not like there were any walking around my back garden at that time. Any artist who does a dinosaur book has to look at what’s been done before. It’s impossible to make anything up.” (George Underwood, interviewed by Graham Kibble-White, “Scary Monsters”, The Essential Doctor Who — Adventures in History (June 2016), p. 91.

Of course, he was under extraordinary pressure to deliver a lot of work in a short amount of time. And he wasn’t alone in this; as we’ve seen in previous posts, Chris Achilleos appropriated material from other artists in his cover art for Target Books, such as Daleks from the comic TV Century 21 and Omega’s hands from an issue of The Fantastic Four. I’ve spoken to a few artists who say this sort of thing was quite common in commercial illustration.

But look at this example:

Tyrannosaurus rex
by Rod Ruth
Album of Dinosaurs (1972)

“Fighting Tyrannosaurus”
The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book
Art by George Underwood
in part after Rod Ruth

See what George also adds: another Tyrannosaurus of matching type, but from the opposite angle, and a curled up Anatosaurus — consistent with his standing Anatosaurus on pp. 26-27. If he uses the same posture, he changes skin texture, tone and other details. Elsewhere, he changes posture to a greater or lesser extent, or provides wholly new compositions.

George also supplied his own characteristic features, such as the “pie-crust” spines seen on these Anatosaurus and other dinosaurs in the book (and noted by Mark Vincent as distinctive). Then there are his unique creatures:

“Compsognathus”
The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book
Art by George Underwood

This portrait of Compsognathus seems to be entirely George’s own creation, as he explained to me:

“It’s not very different from a modern lizard. They’d sent me that photograph of the Doctor in kneeling position, and that led what I could do. Sometimes you just had to make it up. Especially the colouring.” 

Sarah and the Doctor examine a clue
Black Archive: Planet of Evil

*

George wasn't the only one who had to work quickly: Terrance had lots of other work on at the time. As well as the two books published on the same day as this one, he wrote an episode of the TV series Space: 1999. The treatment for this, then called Brainstorm, is dated 4 March 1976 and the final shooting script — renamed The Lambda Factor — is dated 6 August, with a series of amendments made during September and October as it entered production.

His next novelisation, Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters, was published on 20 January 1977 so, based on my estimated lead time of 7.5 months, was delivered around the end of June 1976. He followed this with Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth, presumably delivered at the end of August as it was published on 24 March 1977.

What’s more, on 22 July 1976, Terrance sent an extensive pitch for a non Doctor Who project to Carola Edmonds at Tandem Books. In his covering letter, he said that he would be away on holiday until mid-August. In summary:

4 March — Treatment for Space:1999 episode Brainstorm

22 April — MS of The Making of Doctor Who approved by the publisher

≅ end of May — delivers Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars

≅ end of June — delivers Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters

22 July — synopses and sample chapters for original book project for Tandem; heads off on holiday

6 August — “Final” shooting script for Space: 1999 episode The Lambda Factor (presumably delivered before 22 July but now approved by production team) 

≅ end of August — delivers Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth (presumably written on holiday)

Somewhere into this we must fit The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book, a non-fiction title entailing research as well as writing. I’ve plenty of experience in typing multiple projects at once and the prospect of squeezing a whole extra book into the above schedule doesn’t half make my head swim.

Can we narrow down any further when Terrance wrote this book? Given that it’s missing from the list published in TARDIS, I think it must have been commissioned no earlier than June 1976 and was written June-July, perhaps overlapping with Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters. 

That novelisation may have been written first, and perhaps even inspired this new book. This is all highly speculative, but my current line of thought is as follows:

A number of things may have inspired The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book. First, The Doctor Who Monster Book, published just before Christmas 1975, sold extremely well, Target boasting 150,000 sales by summer 1977 (Bookseller, 30 July 1977, p. 425). By the summer of 1976, Terrance and his publishers would have known it had been a success. If they could produce a new book in a similar format in time for Christmas 1976, they might replicate that success.

What would this new book entail? Well, The Doctor Who Monster Book focused on the fictional monsters of the TV series. The follow-up would focus on real-life monsters. Dinosaurs are popular with children anyway, so a Doctor Who dinosaur book would surely have wide appeal. A book children might buy for themselves, and a book an adult would buy for a child they knew (or suspected) liked Doctor Who, dinosaurs or both.

Terrance already understood the crossover appeal of dinosaurs. It was the basis on which, as script editor, he commissioned the TV story Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974). His eldest son Stephen remembers being taken by his dad to see the dinosaurs at London’s Natural History Museum, as well as to see the film One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing (1975) — one of the first projects on which actor Jon Pertwee worked after leaving Doctor Who. 

Perhaps the response of his children to these trips inspired Terrance to suggest a Doctor Who dinosaur book. Perhaps someone else came up with the idea, to which he was receptive.

Then there was the format. The Doctor Who Monster Book was a 64-page “magazine format” title, the colour cover artwork reproduced in a pull-out poster, and the rest of the book comprising black and white text and illustrations. That’s the format of the Dinosaur Book as published, too.

But The Doctor Who Monster Book comprised photographs from TV stories alongside repurposed artwork by Chris Achilleos from the covers of novelisations (and one piece by Peter Brooke). This included cover artwork from four books not yet published when the Monster Book came out. 

It occurs to me that the initial idea may have been to do something similar with the Dinosaur Book. That’s because, around the time that this new book was devised, Achilleos was commissioned for his third cover to feature prehistoric creatures: the plesiosaur on Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters follows a Tyrannosaurus rex on Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters and the kklaking pterodactylus on Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion.

What’s more, the novelisation Doctor Who and the Sea-Devils is about (fictional) creatures from the same time as the dinosaurs, and Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster has a dinosaur-like antagonist (a fact referenced in the Dinosaur Book as published). Did Achilleos or someone at Target realise they had five pieces of artwork that would suit a dinosaur-themed Doctor Who book?

Dinosaurs had appeal in their own right. But also, as with the Monster Book, each piece of reused artwork would, effectively, advertise an existing novelisation, increasing sales all round. Ker-ching.

I think that makes sense as the starting point for this project. But, given the late commission and the problems experienced the previous year on The Doctor Who Monster Book, it would have soon become evident that there wasn’t time to clear the rights for a wealth of photographs from the TV series. Instead, they would need to increase the proportion of or entirely use new artwork.

Achilleos was the obvious choice to provide this additional work, alongside his existing dinosaur-related covers. That would be consistent, Target clearly had a good, long-standing relationship with him, and his work seems to have been in favour with the production team on Doctor Who and other parts of the BBC (where I’m aware of complaints about artwork, it involved the work of other artists). 

At the same time, I can see why Achilleos, offered the chance to produce almost a whole book’s worth of new illustrations in a single month, politely declined. Having met Chris a few times, I can well imagine his pained expression.

In that case, the decision was made to find another artist to turn round this project quickly. And that fits with what George Underwood told me, above.

*

Whatever the case, Terrance had to research and write this new book pretty quickly. We don’t know the sources he worked from, but I wonder if taking his son to the Natural History Museum was part of the legwork on this book. 

The 52-page Ladybird Dinosaurs book keeps us waiting: after spreads on early life in the sea, amphibians and early reptiles, life in the sea and the air, and then modern humans discovering footprints and “bones” (not fossils) from which we can piece together the forms of ancient animals, the first dinosaurs appear on pp. 26-27, exactly halfway through. 

Terrance gets down to business much more quickly. The introduction (pp. 6-7) begins with a breezy, 

“Hello! I’m the Doctor. If you’ve been following my adventures, you’ll know I’ve met some pretty fearsome monsters in my travels around the Universe.”

This direct address to the reader — implying that the Doctor knows we are watching him on TV — immediately makes us part of the adventure to follow. The Doctor mentions some of these monsters he’s encountered — Daleks, Cybermen, Ice Warriors and the Loch Ness Monster — then says,

“You once had more than your share of monsters right here on Earth.”

A pedant (hello) might point out that the Doctor had, at the time this was written, encountered Daleks, Cybermen, Ice Warriors and the Loch Ness Monster on Earth. But he’s talking native species, conjuring a lost world quickly and vividly. 

“Huge, terrifying creatures with savage fangs and claws. Monsters of all shapes and sizes, on land, in the seas, and even in the air.”

This “Age of the Monsters” ended before the arrival of human beings — “Perhaps it’s just as well!” — but, he says, left traces:

“fossils, bones, even footprints, and your scientists have done a pretty good job of reconstructing what they looked like.”

That “pretty good job” nicely gets across the idea that all knowledge is provisional, and that the way we imagine the dinosaurs has developed over time — and may yet still change. A nice bit of hedge-betting, too. And then, after just this single page of set-up and what I think is the Doctor’s signature in Tom Baker’s handwriting, we go meet the dinosaurs.

“The Age of the Dinosaurs” boasts the heading of pp. 8-9 in big capital letters. The Doctor stands, hands in pockets, just in front of the TARDIS, beaming at the wondrous sight of two great Apatosauruses in a lake. 

“Here we are in the Age of the Dinosaurs,” says the Doctor as tour guide, landing us right in their midst. There’s then some further hedge-betting:

“We’ve travelled back one hundred and eighty million years in Time — give or take a million of two!” (p. 8).

The Doctor explains that we’ll need to hop back and forward in time a bit on this tour to “see a good selection.” The language he uses is interesting; while some dinosaurs are ferocious, these first ones on our tour are “very peaceful, placid”, that last word as per Part Two of Invasion of the Dinosaurs:

DOCTOR WHO:

Apatosaurus, commonly known as the Brontosaurus. Large, placid and stupid. That's exactly what we need. 

The newly regenerated Fourth Doctor repeated the phrase “large, placid and stupid” in the first episode of Robot, written by Terrance, so I don’t think the use of the word here is a coincidence.

But is the joke at the end of this first spread also a coincidence? The Doctor tells us that many dinosaurs’ names are “fine old tongue twisters” (but, unlike the Ladybird Dinosaurs and most modern dinosaur books, there’s no guide to pronunciation). Then he adds:

“Still, I suppose such impressive creatures deserve impressive names. It wouldn’t seem right to call a Dinosaur Fred, or Bert…” (p. 9).

As with all licensed material, the text of this book must have been approved by the production team on TV Doctor Who, including script editor Robert Holmes. A couple of years later, he made use of the same joke in the TV series, delivered by the same Doctor:

DOCTOR WHO: What's your name?

ROMANA: Romanadvoratrelundar.

DOCTOR WHO: By the time I’ve called that out, you could be dead. I'll call you ‘Romana’.

ROMANA: I don’t like ‘Romana’.

DOCTOR WHO: It's either ‘Romana’ or ‘Fred’.

ROMANA: All right, call me ‘Fred’.

DOCTOR WHO: Good. Come on, Romana.

Robert Holmes, The Ribos Operation Part One, tx 2 September 1978

The tour continues: Coelophysis is a “little chap” who,

“Nips along on those two back legs with tail stretched out, like a kind of giant bird. His bones are hollow too, just as a bird’s are” (p. 11).

This is on the cusp of something most children now take as read: that birds evolved from the dinosaurs. Later, we’re told that while Pterodactylus “looks and acts like a bird, it’s a reptile right through” and “really isn’t a bird”, but Archaeopteryx is “a reptile that’s actually managed to grow some feathers” but will “take quite a few million years to evolve into the birds you know today” (p. 21).

In fact, the choice of dinosaurs depicted here is very of the time in which it was written. There are obviously the big names — Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus rex, Stegosaurus — and he doesn’t mention Brontosaurus, covering Apatosaurus instead as the then more accurate term. But there’s no Velociraptor of Spinosaurus, which I think are now de rigeur in dinosaur books. There are few specimens found outside the US and UK. I wonder how much the choices of specimen matched the displays at the Natural History Museum at the time.

Having introduced us to Apatosaurus, Terrance gets some narrative going: p. 13 ends with the Doctor noting that one Apatosaurus has seen something of concern. We turn the page and there’s an Allosaurus charging into view. Turn the page again, and the Apatosaurus is feasting on the neck of the poor Allosaurus. 

Next page, and we jump in time and space, to see an Allosaurus more evenly matched against a Stegosaurus. Terrance seems keen on even matches — on fair fights — and later we see Tyrannosaurus rex versus Tyrannosaurus rex, and Triceratops versus Triceratops. 

Once we get beyond “Allosaurus v Stegosaurus”, the tour jumps about quite a bit, with diversions for creatures in the air and sea. The latter includes Plesiosaurus, though notably without any mention of the Doctor meeting one of these animals in Carnival of Monsters. Indeed, beyond the introduction there is no mention of events from TV adventures; the fiction and fact are kept entirely separate.

The Doctor notes that Polacanthus has “special claim to your [ie the reader’s] interest” (p. 39) as it it is from what is now England and Northern Europe. It’s an odd bit of flag-waving, not least because the Doctor / Terrance doesn’t make the same point in the entry on Iguanodon (p. 22); he tells us that this was one of the first dinosaurs that humans knew about, but doesn’t mention that remains of it, Megalosaurus and Hylaeosaurus — the three animals for which the word “dinosaur” was originally coined — were all found in the UK.

As with his novelisations, Terrance uses everyday analogies to convey ideas simply. Apatosaurus is “as big as a train, but it’s a very slow train” (p. 12) and also as big as a herd of elephants (p. 13); Ankylosaurus is “the armoured tank of the Dinosaur world” (p. 25); Anatosaurus is the dinosaur equivalent of modern-day platypus (p. 26); Compsognathus is “hardly as big as a chicken” (p. 49). When the Doctor examines a Protoceratops egg, he asks us:

“How about one of these, lightly boiled for your breakfast?” (p. 29).

There are some odd things, too. We’re told Tyrannosaurus rex “stands a good six metres high” — metric — and “weighs nearly eight tons” — imperial (p. 42). I suspect a modern edit would get Terrance to look again at the sentence,

“One good bonk from an Ankylosaurus could send the hungry carnivore limping away” (p. 25).

But on the whole, the book gets across a lot of information — and wonder — in a concise and engaging way. It really does feel as if we’re in the company of the Doctor, and I love the idea that, just once, we get to be his companion. And then the book does something brilliant, a proper Doctor Who twist…

I said that the Ladybird Dinosaurs book doesn’t show any dinosaurs until we’re halfway through. We get just seven spreads of dinosaurs, with pp. 42-43 devoted to Archaeopteryx, and the next spread “The first mammals”, including a Megatherium shown — as per the display at the Natural History Museum and the sculpture in Crystal Palace Park — on its hind legs, reaching up to eat the branches from a tree. 

The Ladybird book then covers “More mammals”, “The first horses”, “The woolly rhinoceros” and “The wooly mammoth” — the latter shown hunted by humans. Finally, there’s a sabre-toothed-tiger.

This, I think, influenced the end section of The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book, but Terrance makes it all more dramatic. First, there’s the spread “The End of the Dinosaurs”, where the Doctor — shown sat brooding beside a huge dinosaur skeleton, not entirely unlike the one in One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing — shares some theories about how dinosaurs died out. Cold temperatures, lack of appropriate food, not protecting their eggs, and some mysterious disease are all mooted. Of course, this book was published long before the Alvarez hypothesis, the scientific idea that inspired the Doctor Who story Earthshock (1982), though a line in that story echoes what the Doctor says here:

“Perhaps one day I’ll come back in the TARDIS and find out what really did happen…” (p. 53).

The next spread is devoted to Megatherium, and here the Doctor is part of the classic way of depicting this animal: he is holding the tree branch from which the great creature is feeding, while up on its hind legs. The Doctor tells us some facts, such as that this is an ancestor of the sloth, then warns us about the next specimen on the tour:

“Now it’s time to move on again. Around half a million years ago an entirely new creature was on the scene. It was the fiercest and most dangerous killer ever to walk the Earth…” (p. 55).

That’s quite a claim after Tyrannosaurus rex. We turn the page, to “An Animal Called Man”. The same gag was done later by David Attenborough in the series Life on Earth (1979): after 12 episodes observing different animals in the wild to tell the story of evolution, the 13th episode applies the same observational techniques and objective style of narration to humans in everyday, modern life. 

The next spread in the Dinosaur Book is a naked man, bare bum to the fore, spearing a Smilodon, “a giant sabre-toothed cat” which now “won’t have much to smile about” (p. 58). The next spread shows humans hunting a Mastodon clearly based on the image in the Ladybird book. The use of Megatherium, Mastodon and Smilodon suggests Terrance himself drew from the Ladybird book for this last section of the (text of the) book, but while that book is setting out chronological context, Terrance makes it a story with a twist.

Terrance used a version of this twist again in his short story, Doctor Who and the Hell Planet, published in the Daily Mirror on 31 December 1976, a fortnight after publication of this book. You can read the whole story at the Cuttings Archive. My suspicion is that this story was written to tie into and promote The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book, given the connection in setting and twist, though there’s no plug for the book in the paper. 

Nerd that I am, I find myself wondering if the events of the short story occur during the tour the Doctor gives us in the Dinosaur Book, which would mean we — the reader — are there, too, a bona fide companion.

It’s a beguiling idea. In fact, Terrance ends the Dinosaur Book with the prospect that we might enjoy further adventures with the Doctor.

“Perhaps we could take another trip some time? Just keep an eye out for an old blue police box. I gather your police aren’t using them any more. So if you do see one, it’ll probably be my TARDIS… Goodbye!” (p. 64).

How brilliant, how tantalising. What an extraordinary and odd book, and how much I’ve enjoyed digging into its past. 

*

Thanks to George Underwood, to Nicholas Pegg (author of The Complete David Bowie) and to palaeontologist Dr David Hone for answering my questions in preparing this post. All errors by me. Brush your teeth.