Magic Rays of Light, by John Wyver

Rekindling the spirits of lost television

An absorbing new history of the interwar period, gleaned from the echoes left by early, experimental TV

by Simon Guerrier

This history of pre-war television is a strange, compelling treasury of ghosts. For one thing, the interwar period has largely slipped from living memory. Few people remain who can share first-hand the wonders and weirdness of the new technological medium described in these pages. The voices quoted, sharing by turns their delight and exasperation, have passed on. What was seen and felt by television’s first audiences must instead by gleaned from old paperwork and stiffly posed photographs, from which we piece together a tantalising sense of the extraordinary range, innovation and visual richness. Sadly, very little pre-war television survives for us to experience for ourselves. It was broadcast live, released into the air and then gone — literally ethereal.

I’ve been haunted by the ghosts of television since, as a child, I learned that lots of old Doctor Who got wiped. Now, I pine for all kinds of lost treasures — I’d love to see Sean Connery’s first leading role, as a washed-up boxer in Requiem for a Heavyweight (1957), or Peter Cushing in sci-fi detective story The Caves of Steel (1964). I’m fascinated by ITV’s coverage of the Moon landing (1969), as David Frost’s live chat show kept being extended through the night and ultimately ran for 10 hours. The guests included Sammy Davis Jnr, Lulu, Dame Sybil Thorndike and Peter Cook. Ray Bradbury walked out in disgust at the shambles of it all, while others passed out from exhaustion and/or drinking. Meanwhile, on the BBC, Pink Floyd played live in the studio, Judi Dench and Ian McKellen recited moon-themed poetry, and Dudley Moore played ‘Moonlight Sonata’. That’s all missing from the archives, too, but the strangeness of it lingers. This major moment in history, this apotheosis of engineering, and TV met it with music hall.

Whatever my personal wish-list, any discoveries of old TV are revealing. Each year, the BFI hosts ‘Missing Believed Wiped’ to show off the latest finds, and it’s always a thrillingly eclectic mix. The 2025 Missing Believed Wiped included a trailer for Cliff Richard in panto, an episode of a sitcom in which a man tries to pay a bill by writing a cheque on the side of a cow, and brief, glitching footage of Tony Hancock enthusing about pilchards. Television is an immediate, intimate medium, so even random, disjointed scraps provide vivid windows on history. What people wore, or drove, or thought suitable to say out loud at prime-time, are all bracingly alive.

Yet it’s rare for material to be recovered from the earliest days of the medium. The last big discovery was in 1996, when a means was found to decode recordings made in the 1920s and 1930s on standard 78 rpm gramophone records — John Logie Baird, the pioneer of TV, having developed a technique to record but not to play back. The peculiar results of the decoding can be seen in an episode of Tomorrow’s World (tx 28 October 1996) reporting this technical feat at the time, now up on YouTube.

In portrait format, like on a modern smartphone, we see in scarlet and black a flickering, distorted moving image, as if though fluted glass. It’s the face of Baird’s temporary secretary, Mabel Pounsford, captured on 28 March 1928. The report then shows, in the same distorted red-and-black, some of a dance routine broadcast by the BBC on 21 April 1933, with the Paramount Astoria Girls all in a row, their pale legs distinct from dark leotards. In both cases, the 30-line resolution is so poor I’m not sure I would have made sense of what I was seeing if I hadn’t just been told.

We can gain further sense of the limited technology and extraordinary ambition of the early TV pioneers from a 4 April 1970 edition of the BBC programme Review, which reassembled the surviving cast and crew to recreate some of the BBC’s very first TV drama, an adaptation of Pirandello’s The Man with the Flower in his Mouth broadcast live on 14 July 1930. The play was chosen because it involved only three characters in a single set, and ran for just half an hour. But it’s an unsettling, moving drama: the titular man is dying of cancer — the ‘flower’ growing in his mouth — but strikes up conversation with a customer who has an excess of time, in that he’s just missed the last train of the night and now has to wait for the first one of the morning. The TV version wasn’t recorded — it’s one of the many TV ghosts —  but the reconstruction lets us see how it would have looked, how it was put together in the studio and how the technology worked.

The ‘pink’ and black picture — to me, it looks red — was the result of the neon light used on the single camera, which could not move or zoom. Even where a second camera was available, there was no ability to ‘cut’; it took eight seconds to mix between shots, so this was done sparingly. In that sense, I think a lot of television of this period must have been like looking through a hole in the wall, and through fluted glass, at a performance taking place next door.

That makes what the early pioneers managed to achieve all the more amazing. The reconstruction shows how the crew of The Man with the Flower in his Mouth evoked the dramatic grammar of cinema, using differently framed shots without cutting. The sequence begins with a hand-drawn picture of the cafe, and some narration setting the scene. That drawing is then slid out of shot, revealing a close-up of the titular man (Earle Gray), seated and speaking to the customer (Lionel Millard), who is visible in frame. A chequered board then slides in front of the camera, blocking our view briefly while the actors reposition themselves. Then the board slides back to reveal the customer now in shot, further upstage so smaller in frame. After more dialogue, the chequered board slides back into view, the actors quickly change position, and the board slides back to reveal both men in frame. Technologically, it’s very basic; aesthetically, it’s how TV drama is framed today.

John Wyver tells us that this first televised drama by the BBC followed and perhaps drew from the one-act The Queen’s Messenger, broadcast in Washington DC on 11 September 1928. This employed three cameras, cutting between shots of each of the two actors and the feed from a third camera that provided close-ups of relevant props. The BBC, then, were trying to emulate this technical marvel with just a single camera — just as BBC drama now, on relatively modest means, tries to holds its own against the big-budget US networks and streamers.

That ambition and competitiveness meant television developed extraordinarily quickly. Wyver charts efforts to televise the Derby, the coronation of George VI and various ballets, in each case explaining how these individual productions helped to progress the medium more generally. By late 1936, when the BBC launched its regular, daily television service, Baird had developed what he called ‘high definition’, 240-line television, which the BBC alternated week in, week out with the rival EMI-Marconi electronic 405-line system. The latter soon won out and remained the standard for TV until the late 1960s (when it was succeeded by a 625-line system as part of the groundwork for colour TV). We can see how radically different, how much clearer and engaging, television had become by the latter half of the 1930s from brief examples, such as in a home cine recording of the coronation on TV, or newsreel reports and documentaries. Film lacks electronic television’s intimacy and immediacy, but Television Comes to London (1936) conjures the excitement of the opening night of the regular service, and lets us see and hear Adele Dixon sing the specially composed song ‘Television’ — with its reference to ‘magic rays of light’ — while also showing a TV camera on wheels tracking her, so we get a sense of how it would have been framed for viewers at home.

The BBC’s demonstration film (1937), used in shops and exhibitions to entice sales of TV sets, gives a sense of the range and breadth of programmes otherwise lost. 

We can sense, too, how appealing this all was from the rapid growth of the audience. It’s thought the first night of the regular service was viewed on 400 TV sets; by September 1939, less than two years later, 20,000 sets had been sold.

Wyver provides a wealth of contemporary accounts to conjure more of what we’re missing. Along the way, there’s loads of fascinating social history: why ballet was so popular in Britain with working-class audiences — the result of Russian emigres putting on relatively inexpensive shows — or why boxing worked so well on TV. The size of the boxing ring suited television’s limited depth of field, while two people with a clear issue to be decided made for good small-screen drama; also, there was a frisson from seeing muscular, bare-chested men in your own living room. That, I think, explains why drama about boxing became such a feature of post-war television — one reason Sean Connery was cast in Requiem for a Heavyweight was that the former Mr Universe contestant looked good in the shorts. But Wyver underlines that this early period contains more than just the origins of later, familiar forms of TV. Lots here is strange and unfamiliar because it didn’t last, such as efforts to establish ‘cinema television’ for large crowds, as a rival to the BBC’s domestic service.

Pioneers made assumptions about the audience watching, given the high price of TV sets. In fact, the relative wealth of different parts of London and so the potential for investing in sets dictated the decision to broadcast from Alexandra Palace rather than Crystal Palace (where John Logie Baird was already based). Though Wyver quotes some working-class viewers, they seem to have been the exception — and were reported in the newspapers for being so. The implication is that programming was designed to entertain and inform middle-class viewers, and aimed less to educate or uplift them as it would post-war.

The audience was also assumed to be white, which informs any sense of the diversity seen on screen. Wyver thinks that Avril Coleridge-Taylor was the first person of colour to perform on TV, in June 1931, and later programming included speakers such as the Jamaican activist and feminist Una Marson. The half-hour variety show broadcast on the first night of the regular service boasted Adele Dixon (as above), then Buck and Bubbles, a Black dance and comedy act, followed by Chinese dancers the Lai Founs — a diverse line-up, as if to get as much of the world into the small frame — but Wyver asks how much these acts would have played to racial stereotypes. Blackface and minstrelling were common and thought uncontroversial, and programming reflected colonial and racial assumptions of the time.

Output also reflected established ideas of cultural value. The classic texts chosen for dramatisation — Shakespeare, Chaucer and Austen — were, says Wyver, from a ‘literary canon [that] had taken form in the later nineteenth century in the complex processes of remaking English identity and the national culture.’ He goes further, arguing that the BBC played an active part in cementing this idea of a national theatre, with texts thought important independent of their box office appeal. He adds television of this period to commercial cinema and nationally distributed newspapers and magazines, the factors that DH LeMahieu, in his interwar history A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars (1998), identified as creating a common national culture.

This cutting-edge technology promised ever more innovation and technical wonder — a medium of the future — and yet there’s a sense that much of the broadcast output was reassuring, even nostalgic. There’s no contradiction in this: Wyver links the idea to the ‘dominant mood’ of ‘conservative modernity’ identified by Alison Light in her Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (1991): modern in form but conservative in effect. I can see that going hand in hand with the popularity of HV Morton’s travelogues of the late 1920s and 1930s, using his modern, affordable motorcar — and encouraging readers to do the same — to take trips into the countryside steeped in nostalgia and whimsy.

In that context, it’s fascinating to see what changed in the lead-up to war. Among the programmes Wyver describes, there are increasing notes of disquiet. A version of Julius Caesar is presented with characters in modern, military uniforms, making a connection to fascism in Europe. There’s a demonstration of anti-aircraft precautions, and an interview with refugees. A photograph on p. 317 shows Neville Chamberlain met by a crowd on the tarmac at Heston Aerodrome on 18 September 1938. In the upper-left of the picture, we can see a television camera, ready to relay the promise of ‘peace in our time’ live to viewers in London, making them part of the moment. 

Today, every beat of a war plays out in real time on TV. As I write this, the BBC boasts live coverage of Iranian strikes on Qatari and Saudi energy sites, and video of a US F-15 fighter jet crashing in Kuwait. The BBC News website offers a wealth of short videos: footage of explosions, vox pops with people on the ground, expert commentary to provide perspective — all in sound and vision. We can pick what to view of this, and in what order, making a story for ourselves.

Things were very different in 1939, when the BBC decided to halt all TV transmissions before any official declaration of war against Germany. Just after noon on Friday, 1 September, the scheduled broadcast of the eight-minute Disney cartoon Mickey’s Gala Premier was followed by closedown. War was declared two days later and the TV service only resumed on 7 June 1946 (when the same cartoon was repeated). This is where Wyver ends his story. He explains the reasons for halting the TV service: it was expensive, still in very experimental form and had a limited audience. Management felt that, with war looming, resources could be better deployed: some 50 TV engineers soon went to work on radar, and electronics companies who’d been manufacturing TV sets moved into such work as military radios and radar screens.

I’d previously read that TV was halted because of the fear of air raids: the TV signals broadcast from Alexandra Palace might guide the Luftwaffe to densely populated north London. Wyver confirms this and then, in the closing pages of his book, shares something extraordinary. The German radio navigation system, Wotan, worked on an operating frequency of 45 MHz. By chance, that was also the frequency of the vision transmitter at Alexandra Palace, which could be used to disrupt the German system. As a result, some broadcasting continued during the war and proved so effective that the Luftwaffe abandoned Wotan. 

It’s left me haunted by one last thought: How many lives did television save?

More of this sort of thing by me:

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

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.

Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks, by Terrance Dicks

My first edition paperback of this novelisation, published on 22 July 1976, has clearly been well loved. The pages are dog-eared, the front and back covers are creased and the spine has faded to white, so you can no longer read the title. The effect of this love is that, on my shelf of Terrance’s books, it matches the white spine of Terrance’s previous novelisation, Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen. 

But a pristine copy looks very different. As this image from eBay shows, the spine of the first edition was bright red, the title in white. 

This is very different to Doctor Who novelisations of the time. In fact, it matches the red spines of Terrance’s three Mounties novels; putting his books in order of publication you would see two red spines, then white Revenge on its own, then two more red spines (followed by the purple-spined Doctor Who and the Web of Fear). 

But surely the reason for giving the Mounties novels bright red spines and back covers was to match the distinctive red coats worn by Mounties — so distinctive that they’re key to the plot of the third book. That’s obviously not the case with Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks. Something else is going on.

Here, the spine and back cover match the red logo and title on the front cover, which were unusual for the time: Genesis is the 23rd Doctor Who novelisation published by Target and only the second to feature a red version of the logo. On Doctor Who and the Giant Robot, I think the red logo is there to add some zing to the otherwise muted grey-green colour scheme of the illustration, helping to make the Fourth Doctor’s debut in print stand out as something special. The same does not apply to Genesis.

This is also only the second of 23 Doctor Who novelisations to feature a red spine. On Doctor Who and the Crusaders, that and the colour used for the title match bits of red in the cover illustration showing the clash or armies. Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks was the first novelisation since that book to be set in the midst of a war. In both cases, then, I think the red signifies blood.

Artist Chris Achilleos seems to have known the logo would be red because his cover art is sympathetic: the tunic worn by Davros has a reddish tinge, the inset portrait of the Doctor is sepia tinted rather than the usual black-and-white, and the background of the main image within the border is a brownish-red. 

The illustration is also much simpler and more muted than Achilleos’s previous work for the Doctor Who range: there are no laser blasts, cosmic phenomena or radiating energy. Perhaps he felt the red logo would provide sufficient zing. Or perhaps he took his cue from the dour-looking production stills from the TV story that he used for reference.

Photo reference for the Doctor
image c/o the Black Archive

Photo reference for Davros
c/o the Black Archive

Then again, other evidence suggests that the team producing this book knew it was something different from and more grown-up than the usual fare. The back-cover blurb takes an unusual format:

The place: Skaro

Time: The Birth of the Daleks

After a thousand years of futile war against the Thals, DAVROS has perfected the physical form that will carry his race into eternity – the dreaded DALEK. Without feeling, conscience or pity, the Dalek is programmed to EXTERMINATE. 

At the command of the Time Lords, DOCTOR WHO travels back through time in an effort to totally destroy this terrible menace of the future.

But even the Doctor cannot always win…

The blunt statement of fact at the start of this, giving the location in time and space, underlines that this is a big moment in history. That use of “Skaro” is surely meant to resonate with the reader — a name they would recognise, having been steeped in the lore of Doctor Who by previous books. And how extraordinary to tell us, up front, that this is an adventure in which the Doctor doesn’t win.

This is also the first book Terrance had published since Doctor Who and the Giant Robot to have more than 128 pages; this comprises 144. The very handy Based on the Popular BBC TV Serial by Paul MC Smith gives a wordcount of 33,549 words — some 3,500 more than the novelisations Terrance wrote either side of this. Yet look at the graph I produced before, of the wordcounts of the first 12 Doctor Who novelisations (in dark orange) compared to the second 12 (in light orange). 

The 144pp Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks comprises fewer words than the 128pp Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons and 128pp Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders. It is also noticeably shorter than the novelisations shown above by authors other than Terrance. These aren’t labelled in the graph but are, from left to right, Doctor Who and the Green Death by Malcolm Hulke, then — after the three books by Terrance — Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion by Hulke, Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet by Gerry Davis and Doctor Who and the Ice Warriors by Brian Hayles. They are all 144pp.

I suspect the publishers wanted this book, the third Target novelisation to feature the Daleks, to be just as long — and so more of an event. If not, Terrance could easily have cut this six-part serial down to 128pp, as he did with his next book, Doctor Who and the Web of Fear. Here, the Doctor standing on a land mine, him and Harry escaping the Kaled base only to be immediately recaptured, the two sequences with bitey giant clams, the scene (pp. 94-96) in which Nyder cosies up to Gharman before the scene in which Nyder betrays him... They could all be deleted without harming the plot or structure. In fact, I’m used to versions of this story that excise this stuff — I think I had the condensed, audio cassette version before I saw the condensed, omnibus TV version in 1982, a decade before getting to see the full thing on VHS.

Terrance may well have watched a condensed version of this story as he completed the novelisation. I’ve previously estimated a lead-time to publication of 7.5 months; supporting this, on 28 March 1978, Terrance told the DWAS local group in Surbiton that,

“From when I deliver a manuscript, it takes six to eight months to get the book into the shops.” — David J Howe, “Terrance Dicks Speaks”, Oracle vol 2, no. 2 (November 1978), p. 6.

That means that Terrance probably delivered the manuscript for Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks at the end of December 1975. On the afternoon of Saturday, 27 December, an 85-minute omnibus version of the story was shown on BBC One. 

Perhaps this enabled him to add some visual detail to the manuscript. Even so, it seems he largely worked from the scripts. As scripted, Part One opens with “fog-shrouded desolation”, from which soldiers wearing gas-marks emerge before disappearing back into it. This is how Terrance opens his novelisation, too. But in filming this sequence, director David Maloney decided to start things more arrestingly: the soldiers emerge from the fog and are mown down by machine guns.

Likewise, there’s this stage direction on p. 21 of the camera script for Part One:

“THE KALED TROOPS PULL OFF THEIR GAS MASKS. WE NOW SEE THAT THEY ARE ALL VERY YOUNG, FIFTEEN OR SIXTEEN YEARS OLD.”

Terrance tells us, on p. 21 of the novelisation, that when the Kaled soldiers remove their gas masks, they look “little more than boys”; on screen, the actors are young men. We can also see Terrance embellishing details in stage directions. For example, on p. 25 of the camera script for Part One, the Doctor is taken to a headquarters, some distance from the front lines, where he meets Ravon,

“A YOUNG OFFICER OF EIGHTEEN, SLIGHTLY BETTER DRESSED THAN THE TROOPS WE HAVE THUS FAR SEEN”

In the novelisation, Terrance underlines this: Ravon is “a tall, very young officer, elegant in his gold-braided uniform”, and we get a wry comment from the Doctor’s point of view:

“He noticed that the guards were smartly uniformed here, their weapons modern and well cared for. Strange how all wars were the same, thought the Doctor. The staff back at HQ always had better conditions than the men actually out fighting…” (p. 23)

There are other examples of Terrance working from the script. Chapter 10 ends as per the script of Part Five, with the Doctor asking his friends if he has the moral right to destroy the Daleks, and not — as per broadcast — with him being throttled by some slime; again, a last-minute change made by the director. 

But Terrance doesn’t simply copy out what’s in the scripts. For example, on p. 1 of the camera script for Part Five, the Doctor tells Davros that,

“The Dalek invasion of the planet Earth in it’s [sic] year two thousand was foiled because of the attempt by the Daleks to mine the core of the planet…. The magnetic properties of the Earth were too powerful.”

Terrance amends this slightly:

“The Dalek invasion of Earth in the year Two Thousand was foiled because of an over-ambitious attempt to mine the core of the planet. The magnetic core of the planet was too strong, the human resistance too determined” (p. 103)”.

The repetition of “of the planet” is a bit awkward, but look what else he’s done. In the script and TV version, the Daleks were defeated by natural, intangible forces. In just a few words, Terrance has made that defeat the result of two other things: the Daleks’ over-reaching themselves and human agency. In his version, the bombast of the Daleks was thwarted by heroic action.

Note that Terrance keeps the year in words, as per the script — for all he puts it in capitals — and does not amend the date. The date given in the script surely came from writer Terry Nation, perhaps having checked his own story outline for 1964 TV story The Dalek Invasion of Earth, which was originally to be set in the year 2000. That date features in some other production paperwork and was used in the TV trailer to promote the serial ahead of broadcast. 

But at some point the production team pushed the story further into the future: in Nation’s draft script for the first episode, the Doctor’s friend Ian finds a calendar dated 2049; in the camera script and episode as broadcast, the calendar is dated 2164. The late 22nd century is therefore the date more usually ascribed to the serial. For example, the Radio Times special published to mark 10 years of Doctor Who says the story takes place in “London in 2164” (p. 9), but see my post on the economics of the Daleks for more on invasion dating.

Intriguingly, no date is given for the events of the Dalek invasion in the summaries included in The Making of Doctor Who (1972) and The Doctor Who Monster Book (1975). But when Terrance wrote his novelisation, Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth (1977), he included the calendar and date of 2164 (p. 21), as per p. 16 of the camera script. The implication is surely that he’d not read that script prior to this, as he would otherwise have included this detail in his previous books, such as the novelisation of Genesis.

That’s interesting (to me) because Terrance was scheduled to novelise The Dalek Invasion of Earth before he even began work on novelising Genesis of the Daleks. The list of “Advance information on Doctor Who books in preparation” reproduced on p. 92 of The Official Doctor Who Club vol. 2 by Keith Miller, begins with The Green Death by Malcolm Hulke, due for publication in “Aug 75”; though the list itself is undated, it was surely written before that date. It includes the following:

The Cybermens [sic] Revenge [ie Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen] Apr 76

Genesis of Terror [ie Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks] May 76

Carnival of Monsters Jun 76

The World’s End (Dalek Invasion of Earth) Jul 76

The Web of Fear Aug 76

Planet of the Daleks Sep 76

No authors are ascribed to these but they were all ultimately written by Terrance. The schedule changed, with the novelisations of Carnival of Monsters and The Dalek Invasion of Earth pushed back to 1977, and other books added before them. But by the time Terrance started work on the novelisation of Genesis of the Daleks, around December 1975, The Dalek Invasion of Earth had been on the schedule for months.

This all rather implies that the story had been selected and presumably cleared with Nation’s agent without Terrance having read the scripts. The selection of stories to novelise was therefore done on the basis of what Terrance and the editorial team remembered as being good and/or key stories, rather than by reading the scripts to be sure. 

Anyway, back to what Terrance wrote in this ‘ere novelisation…

As we’ve seen, by working from the camera scripts rather than the episodes as broadcast, Terrance omitted some of the more violent moments seen on screen — such as the machine-gunned soldiers in the opening moments. But that doesn’t mean he presents a bowdlerised version of the TV story. We could certainly understand why Terrance or his publishers might have wanted to do so in books aimed at readers aged 8-12, not least given the concerns raised when this serial was first broadcast. For example, Mary Whitehouse gave her view between broadcast of Parts Three and Four:

“Cruelty, corpses, poison gas, Nazi-type stormtroopers and revolting experiments in human genetics are served up as teatime brutality for the tots.” (The Mirror, 27 March 1975, c/o Cuttings Archive) 

But Terrance didn’t censor Genesis of the Daleks. In some places, he makes things more harrowing than on screen, such as when a shell of poison gas is fired at the Doctor and his friends, and there’s only one place for them to get gas masks:

“It wasn’t particularly pleasant grappling with the stiff, cold corpses, but things were too desperate for any fastidiousness” (p. 20)

There’s more on similar lines a bit later:

“Sarah had one of the most horrifying awakenings of her life. Buried beneath a pile of rapidly stiffening corpses, she could feel her face wet with blood. At first she felt confusedly that she must be dead too, or at least badly wounded.” (p. 33)

This, I think, is similar to what we saw in Terrance’s novelisation of Revenge of the Cybermen, where by describing events from the perspective of Sarah (or Harry), they become more horrible and haunting.

Yet Terrance also makes things more palatable by making the Doctor less brusque than on screen. On p. 17, he has the Doctor apologise to Harry and Sarah for the predicament they find themselves in. He then explains the situation and “seemed so genuinely distressed” that his friends assure him it is all right and that they will gladly help.

During the gas attack, our heroes are set upon by soldiers. Terrance tells us that,

“The Doctor and Harry closed ranks to defend Sarah. They put up a splendid fight. Harry had boxed for the Navy in his time and he dealt out straight rights, lefts and uppercuts in the best traditions of the boxing ring. The Doctor fought in a whirl of long arms and legs, using the techniques of Venusian Aikido to drop one opponent after another” (p. 21)

The word “splendid” makes this all sound quite fun, not the confused, brutal scramble on screen. In this version, Harry is more competent and heroic than seen on screen, and the Doctor is more Jon Pertwee than Tom Baker. It’s a moment of Genesis of the Daleks as if script edited by Terrance, not by Robert Holmes. While the Fourth Doctor on-screen in this period can be sombre and brooding, we’re told here that, “Characteristically, the Doctor wasted no time in regrets” (p. 104). He is a man of action.

There’s another example later, when the Doctor tells Harry to go first into the ventilation shaft of the Kaled bunker — even though there might be dangers lurking. On screen, this is played rather at Harry’s expense. Here, we have Harry’s perspective that if the Doctor really suspected any danger, he would of course go first himself. As with the change in Doctor Who and Revenge of the Cybermen where Terrance has the Doctor call Harry an “idiot” rather than the more unpleasant word used on screen, the change makes both the Doctor and Harry more heroic. 

Sadly, I don’t think the same is quite true with Sarah. She’s brave and resourceful as on TV, and yet there’s an odd moment in the novelisation when she asks the Doctor if he really needs to go back to the Kaled bunker to complete his mission, given the evident dangers. He says he must, not least to recover the Time Ring with which they can get back to the TARDIS.

“That was reason enough to convince even Sarah” (p. 93).

It’s an oddly uncharacteristic bit of self-interest. Until this moment, Sarah had been heading to the Kaled bunker anyway, and later she is the one who insists the Doctor completes his mission while he dithers over morality. 

There’s another bit of sexism earlier on, when the Doctor is told that “Davros is never wrong — about anything”, and responds, “Then he must be an exceptional man” (p. 31), assuming a gender. Terrance should have know better, having previously made a joke of this sort of assumption in  his own TV story Robot. 

Better, I think, is Terrance’s handling of the Thal woman Bettan, and the way in which she is persuaded by the Doctor to fight back against the Daleks. When they meet, the Doctor is a prisoner — and enemy — of her people, but we’re told she finds him “curiously compelling” (p. 86) and pauses to speak with him about the friends he has lost in the war. We’re then told Bettan is “an efficient and hard-working young woman, with an important official position” (p. 87) and plenty of work to do, yet she can’t help thinking of this strange, charming man and what he told her. It all helps to explain how, when they meet again, the Doctor is able to persuade her to join him (p. 90).

While the Doctor charms Bettan, he is more withering about other characters, for example diagnosing Ravon’s “basic insecurity” (p. 24) in needing to boast to his prisoners. That’s similar to what Terrance did with Broton in Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster, covering the slightly clunky exposition by making it a point of character.

That said, there aren’t many examples of particularly well-chosen words here, as there are in Terrance’s previous novelisations. The Doctor attempting to befriend the Kaleds by speaking in German, “Kamerade” (p. 30) is as per the camera script. Terrance refers to the sucker arm of a Dalek as a “tactile organ” (p. 43), which makes it sound more like a tentacle than a stick with a sink plunger. Sometimes his descriptions are vague, such as when “some kind of field communications equipment” (p. 23) is swiftly followed by “some kind of central command post” (p. 24). Or there’s this:

“Harry and Sarah ran to the doors [of the bunker] and held them back by force. The Doctor came tearing along the tunnel, a patrol of Daleks close behind him. Just as their strength failed, the Doctor reached the fast-narrowing gap and squeezed through.” (p. 137) 

He mentions a patrol of Daleks then refers to “their strength”, but means the strength of Harry and Sarah from the previous sentence. This lack of clarity is very rare for Terrance and may mean the book was written and edited more hurriedly than usual.

More typical of Terrance is the eating. The TV story has a fun scene in which the Doctor is horrified, during an interrogation, not to be offered tea. That is retained here. But Harry also wants “a bite to eat” (p. 73) before he and the Doctor go in search of the missing Sarah. Priorities, man! She’s more important than a sandwich! 

When the Thals destroy the Kaled dome, they celebrate with “wine” (p. 85). I should like to know more about the viticulture of Skaro. In fact, some of the most interesting additions here are to the lore of Skaro and the Daleks. Here, we learn what happened to disfigure Davros:

“An atomic shell struck his laboratory during a Thal bombardment … His body was shattered but he refused to die. He clung to life, and himself designed the mobile life-support system in which you see him” (p. 42)

This makes explicit what is implicit in the design seen on screen, that the Daleks are an extension of Davros’s own life-support system, but there’s also the suggestion, I think, that the conception of the Daleks is Davros imposing what happened to him on everybody else. The atomic shell was presumably radioactive, which may mean Davros has — or had — cancer, so the conception of the Daleks was born out of a sense of his own body wasting away. They are an embodiment of his own desperation to survive.

As on screen, we’re told that Davros has been researching for 50 years (p. 70). Even if he began in his teens, he must be pushing 70. Did the atomic shell strike when he was a young man, so he’s spent 50 years developing Daleks, or did the strike happen some way into his career and diverted the course of research?

There’s a clue in the broadcast Part Two, in which Davros says he has been working “for some time” on the “Mark III project”, which Ronson confirms is a “Mark III travel machine” — later named a Dalek. Three stages of the project does not suggest it has been going on for very long.

But it seems that before working on travel machines, Davros looked at organic methods of getting about. That, at least, is the conclusion of the Doctor, Sarah and Harry when they encounter giant clams. On screen, Harry says Davros “obviously” rejected these for being too slow-moving. 

In the novelisation, it’s the Doctor who ventures this theory, but says “maybe” rather than “obviously”. Terrance also omits the references to the “Mark III” project and machine. That suggests a conscious decision to keep the genesis of the Daleks a bit vague. 

In other places, he adds to the lore. While the Kaleds understand and favour democracy (as on screen, but pp. 116-117), Terrance adds a suggestion of the way power is organised among the Daleks:

“One of the Daleks seemed to be speaking for the others, as if they had already evolved their own leaders” (p. 137)

That word “evolved” is interesting; it suggests leadership developed by nature not vote. In this Dalek’s final speech, vowing to emerge from the buried bunker stronger than ever, Terrance adds under promise / threat:

“We shall build our own city” (p. 139).

That’s surely joining up this story to the first TV appearance of the Daleks, when they are trapped within the confines of their own city. Yet there is no helpful footnote here, telling us to “See Doctor Who and the Daleks” — perhaps because Terrance only put in such references to his own books. Even so, I wonder if the conscious effort to be more vague about Dalek origins was a way of better joining up these two books.

Thinking about this sort of thing makes me realise something odd about Genesis of the Daleks — on TV and in the book. The war between Thals and Kaleds has been fought for thousands of years, but their domed cities are within walking distance of one another. There’s no suggestion that a night passes while the Doctor and co make this journey. The Doctor and his friends are not not trained walkers, so their maximum range in a day — not counting mountain-climbing, attacks by Mutos or giant clams — is probably a maximum 40 km / 25 miles, or about the north-south diameter of London, between Enfield and Croydon.

Another thing I noticed by studying TV version versus book is the irony of poor Ronson, who saves the Doctor and Harry from being the first victims of a Dalek — and then, later in the story, is the first person ever to be exterminated. Terrance didn’t pick on this irony, but he did add a nicely menacing touch not in the TV version: here, Davros claims that it was Ronson who gave the Thals the chemical formula they needed to destroy the Kaled dome (p. 85). It’s a classic technique of the tyrant, accusing someone else of the crime you yourself committed.

At the start of the story, the Doctor is given three ways in which to complete his mission successfully: avert the creation of the Daleks altogether, affect their genetic development so that they become less aggressive, or discover some inherent weakness that can be used against them. He fails on all counts. At the end of the story on TV, Sarah acknowledges this: “We failed, didn’t we?” The Doctor’s response comprises the last words of the story:

“Failed? No, not really. You see, I know that although the Daleks will create havoc and destruction for millions of years, I know also that out of their evil must come something good.”

This is, of course, great comfort to everyone who has ever suffered under the Daleks. It’s also… well, a bit of an anti-climax.

The novelisation tackles this head on, not least by warning us in the blurb, before we’ve even started reading the book, that “even the Doctor cannot always win”. But Terrance also works to make those closing sentiments of the TV serial work a little more effectively. In recruiting Bettan, in getting her to team up with the Muto Sevrin, there’s a sense of him galvanising people to stand up up to the Daleks. 

He underlines this in what the Doctor says when dithering over his right to destroy the Daleks. 

“the evil of the Daleks produced counter-reactions of good” (p. 120)

Terrance also adjusts those closing words from the Doctor. His response to Sarah’s question is that they’ve “not entirely” failed, as they’ve given the Daleks “a nasty setback” (p. 139). This is a “kind of victory”, which is also the name of this closing chapter, and surely an echo of “A Kind of Justice”, the epilogue to the second Mounties novel with its shock last twist. 

The closing words of the novelisation modify the last words of the serial:

“Disappointed, Sarah? No, not really. You see, although I know that Daleks will create havoc and destruction for untold thousands of years… I also know that out of their great evil… some… great… good… must come” (p. 140)

Again, a well-chosen word can make a significant difference to the stakes. The Daleks’ evil and the potential good have both become greater than on screen. It doesn’t entirely fix the anti-climax, but it’s a much more satisfying end. 

One of the best ever Doctor Who stories on TV and Terrance simply, subtly improves it.

*

I’m very grateful to those who have kindly chipped in to support these long, long posts on the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks. Writing them takes time and incurs some expenses, but I’ll press on while that support continues. 

Next time: counting the cuts when a six-part serial is squeezed into 128 pages, with Doctor Who and the Web of Fear… 

Oh, and also announced today: the family of Terrance Dicks have donated his archive of papers to the Borthwick Institute. 

The Lowlife, by Alexander Baron

Harryboy Boas is a working-class gambler in Hackney. While his sister has married well and moved to Finchley, Harryboy still haunts the streets he knew as a kid, where hopscotch  is still played in the same place, for all that the squares have been rechalked, sometimes on new tarmac. We feel the thrill of his addiction to gambling, and the shame of it, too. But he presents a good front to the woman he pays for sex, and to the uptight family that have just taken rooms in the shabby house he’s renting.

Then, almost 100 pages in, we learn something else about Harry that helps explain what makes him tick. Before the war, he lived in Paris with a girl there. He thought about marrying her but when war broke out he went home to London. Only later, much too late, did he receive a letter saying she was pregnant. He and she are Jewish — and we never learn her fate.

So, he stalks the streets of London haunted by the Holocaust. He takes each day, each bet, as it comes, and tries not to get involved in anything more complex. But the little boy in the room downstairs has taken a shine to him…

The foreword to this edition is by Iain Sinclair, who — with filmmaker Chris Petit — visited Baron at home in Golders Green in 1992:

“The elderly author, unpublished since 1979, when his Spanish novel, Franco is Dying, met with the indifference that seems to be the lot of any awkward cuss who refuses to step aside when his humber’s up” (p. vi).

Characters in the novel might well speak of protagonist Harryboy as an “awkward cuss”, but we’re privy to his rich inner life, his passions for gambling, books and women, his strong survival instinct paired with a self-sacrificing moral core. He’s a loner in many ways, and one reason is because he is bookish.

“Among the uneducated (which frankly is what you would call the general population where I live) the serious reader is a lonely person. He goes about among the crowds with his thoughts stuffed inside him. He probably dare not even mention them to his nearest pals for fear of being thought a schmo. There’s a hunger in his eyes for someone to talk to.” (pp. 63-64)

Harryboy reads a great range of books. “Chandler and Hammett are my favourites,” he tells us (p. 63), at a time he’s working through everything by Zola. He holds forth on Upton Sinclair, HG Wells and George Simenon, and later on Nat Gould, Edgar Wallace and Damon Runyon. On p. 148, he’s reading Theodore Dreiser, on p. 211 he cites a poem by John Masefield. There are women writers, too:

“We were both at that time searching out psychological thrillers at the library, the kind the Americans do well, Vera Caspary, Patrica Highsmith and so on.” (p. 134).

It’s a diverse list of names but I wonder if they’re united by a naturalistic style, a focus on — or unwillingness to avoid — the grit and dirt of life.

That’s the kind of view we get of post-war London, particularly in all the stuff about the short-term investment in renting squalid building, which the council will surely soon condemn, to the new waves of immigrants. Sinclair says in his introduction that “Baron foresees Peter Rachman”, who died in 1962 — the year before The Lowlife was published — but became notorious as a slumlord after his death as the Profumo scandal broke. That makes the book exactly of its moment.

But I’m not sure this is a social realist or kitchen sink novel. It’s more of a thriller, the stakes every building against Harryboy, caught against his will in different, conflicting loyalties. There’s a theft, a chase and a violent punch-up, We really think at one point he is going to lose an eye.

And yet for all its an adventure, it feels very real — and is full of shrewdly observed detail. Many Londoners, Harryboy included, take the changing demographics of London in their stride, but Baron is good on the prejudice, too. It’s most directly seen in snobby neighbour Evelyn Deaner. At one point, we catch her horrified by the hats on women in the Daily Mirror.

“Can you imagine me wearing one? I think they must design these hats for exhibitionists.”

Then, from nowhere, she is “fighting for breath” in fury that their landlord let a room to a black couple.

“‘You know’ — she turned to me — ‘there’s only one water-closet in this house.’” (p. 125)

Later, she’s sure, on no grounds at all, that this couple eat “tinned cats’ mean” (p. 147) and mean to serve it to her son.

When Evelyn’s husband Vic tries to quell what Baron calls these “spasms of hate”, Evelyn tells him he doesn’t know what he’s talking about because he’s out of work all day.

“Suppose that man cam home early. Eh? Have you thought of that?” 

And then, almost immediately:

“Please don’t tell me now that I’m prejudiced. I know there are good and bad. … What do you think I am — one of those colour-bar people? [But] this man is a labourer.” (p. 126)

It’s all unfounded and in her head; she’s conscious of it being unfair; it’s about class as much as ethnicity. There’s a lot bubbling up here, and Harryboy then makes his own connection:

“Sure, I nearly added, and these haters of life, they can even murder babies. Because that moment brought back to me like a twitch of pain in the head my fear that a little son of mine might have been packed into a dark, suffocating, sealed trunk for five days and nights and sent to the furnaces.” (p. 133).

It’s the mechanics of prejudice observed and relayed by a Jewish veteran of the war. The connection haunts him, and it haunt us, too.

I'm now reading Baron's autobiography, more of which anon...

Prisoners of War, by Terrance Dicks

This is an unusual book by Terrance Dicks. Alongside his wealth of Doctor Who novelisations and novels — more of which in due course — he tended to write books in series: there are multiple volumes about T.R. Bear (a bear), Sally Ann (a rag doll) or Goliath (a dog); for slightly older readers, the Baker Street Irregulars and The Unexplained ran to more than 10 books each. Even his non-fiction books tended to be in runs.

Prisoners of War, first published by Methuen in 1990, is not only a standalone novel, I think it’s also more autobiographical than any of Terrance’s other books. It’s set in the spring of 1944, with young Tony Dent — ie Terry Dicks — starting a new school at “Grendon Moor” in the north of England, where his dad, a sergeant, has been posted to the local prisoner-of-war camp.

Tony’s mum and dad, Bill and Nell, have the names of Terrance's parents, and also their temperaments and backgrounds. The following, for example, matches a description Terrance gave elsewhere about the real-life William Henry Dicks:

“Dad … was what you might call unpolitical. Back in London, he belonged to the Liberal Club, the Labour Club and the Conservative Club, all at the same time. He said the company was better at the Labour Club, the beer was better at the Liberal Club, and the Conservative Club had the best billiard table. Dad could get on with anyone, anywhere, any time.” (p. 56)

Bill is a bit of a wheeler-dealer, able — in the midst of rationing — to acquire champagne for a party, or bacon and eggs for his wife. When posh Lady Carrington screams at him because his army truck has upset the gravel on her drive, Bill easily charms her, and lies to her too, so as not to land her husband in trouble for not passing on “her orders” about where they should park (p. 24). He’s a loveable rogue, good in a crisis and, when needed, in a fight.

While there’s lots on the “happily incompatible” relationship of Bill and Nell, and Tony’s issues fitting in at a new school, the main story involves his burgeoning friendship with a German prisoner, about which both feel conflicted, and the machinations of a Nazi officer in the same camp. There’s also a romantic subplot for Tony — we’re told in the closing chapter that he goes on to marry Lucy Carrington.

Tony shares traits with young Terrance:

“What with being an only child, and our being shunted about so much, I was a keen picturegoer and what my family called a big reader.” (p. 48)

But Terrance turned 9 in April 1944 and though we’re not told Tony’s age, he’s surely older than this given what happens here and that he is taller than his dad (p. 100). There's some other fudging of real-life, in that the imposing headmaster Dr White is surely based on the real-life Dr Whiteley, headmaster of East Ham Grammar School for Boys, where Terrance was a pupil after the war. This is a fictional adventure story grounded in various odd bits of real life — and that’s what makes it so effective. The suspense and moral complexity feel real.

In fact, it’s not quite a standalone novel as it surely follows Terrance’s short story “London’s Burning”, first published in the anthology Streets Ahead — Tales of City Life, also published by Methuen and a year before this novel came out. (Around this time, Methuen published new editions of Terrance’s Baker Street Irregulars books, too). 

Streets Ahead was edited by Valerie Bierman, who Terrance had known since 1980 when she invited him to be a guest at the Edinburgh Book Fair and later Edinburgh Book Festival. She says in the introduction that she approached 10 well-known novelists and asked them to write “a story on any theme that interested them — provided it had a city as a background” (p. 7); the results were almost all based on personal experience and connections to the cities they describe. So, the brief inspired something more personal than usual from Terrance. In fact, I think we get some of his best and most vivid writing: 

“Most mornings we’d make ourselves late for school by hunting for shrapnel, chunks of ragged metal fragments, all that was left of the exploded bombs. Stamp collecting was nowhere that year.

I thought it was all wonderful. But my mum and dad didn’t and now I can see why.

One morning I woke up to find a gaping, smoking hole where the end house in the street used to be. A nice family called the Strettons, cheerful dad, pleasant mum and two little girls. They’d just moved into the house and done it up and they were pleased as anything with it. Now there was no more house and no more Strettons.” (“London’s Burning”, Streets Ahead, pp. 77-78)

Given the danger, the unnamed narrator is taken by his mother — Nelly (p. 78) — to stay with her cousin on a farm some 50 miles outside London. Homesick, he runs away and arrives back in London as the bombs are falling. It’s a thrilling, concisely told story, running just 11 and a half pages. At the end we're told that the narrator’s dad “finished up Quartermaster-Sergeant in an army camp in the North, and after a time Mum and I moved up to join him” (p. 85).

That matches Tony Dent’s experience in the novel:

“Mum had tried a sort of private-enterprise evacuation on me when the bombing first started, packing me off to relations in the country. I’d hated it so much I’d run away after a couple of weeks.” (Prisoners of War, p. 22.)

They’re surely the same character, but how much of this was based on Terrance's own real experience?

Sadly, Prisoners of War doesn’t seem to have made much of an impact. I’ve found little in the way of press coverage about it, and Terrance didn’t write another book for Methuen after this, though he did contribute a short story to another Bierman anthology, No More School? (1992).

But I think this novel may have influenced something else. It was published in June 1990, and that same month Terrance received a letter from Peter Darvill-Evans, editor at Virgin Publishing, to confirm a new range of original Doctor Who novels. Terrance was invited to come up with a story involving a villain created for the range, the Timewyrm, but was otherwise free as to plot and setting. His synopsis, delivered in August, began with a compelling image:

“The Doctor in erratic pursuit of the Timewyrm finds himself attending the 1950 [sic] Festival of Britain. He realises when and where he is when they emerge from the TARDIS to the South Bank and see the Skylon, the tapering tower that is the symbol of the Festival. It’s there all right — but there’s a swastika on top!” (“Doctor Who: The New Adventures — Exodus of Evil by Terrance Dicks”, storyline received by Virgin Publishing, 23 August 1990).

Just as with Prisoners of War, this was an adventure story based on his own experience, grounding things in the real:

“I actually remembered going to the Festival of Britain with a school party in 1951, so it was fun to bring that in. I remember it rained all the time.” (Andrew Martin, “Terrance Dicks — Writing the Past, Present and Future”, TV Zone Special #5, p. 23.

That’s exactly what we see in what he wrote:

“Beside a broad and sluggish river, a group of concrete pavilions huddled under a fine drizzling rain. A tall slender tower soared gracefully into the mists towards a grey and cloudy sky.” (Terrance Dicks, Timewyrm: Exodus, 1991).

As in the synopsis, this London has fallen to the Nazis and the Doctor and Ace are soon arrested. The Doctor not only escapes but convinces the Nazis that he's a senior officer, commandeering a car and swanning about like he owns the place. It’s deftly both great fun and also tense and suspenseful.

When I first read Timewrym: Exodus in the summer of 1991, I knew this was also riffing on what the Second Doctor does in pretending to be a German office in TV story The War Games (1969) — co-written by Terrance and his friend Malcolm Hulke.

But now, reading Prisoners of War, I can see he was drawing on an older source. In this wheeler-dealer Doctor, there's something of Terrance’s dad.

• I’ll be giving a short talk on Terrance Dicks at the Target Book Club event on 19 July

See also

• Doctor Who and the Wheel in Space by Terrance Dicks
• Doctor Who and the Time Warrior by Terrance Dicks

The New Forest Murders, by Matthew Sweet

The wife and children were generous with my annual appraised (or "Father's Day"). I got a lie in, a badge of a smiley fried egg, a copy of my friend Matthew Sweet's new novel and - best of all - the chance to sit and read it. What joy.

"There is a village in England that all us know, even if we have never set foot there. The village that comes to our minds when we think of cricket on the green on a Sunday in July; when we see a honeysuckled cottage painted on the lid of a tin of biscuits; when we put our hands together and say, 'Here's the church and here's the steeple.'

"It really exists." (p. 125)

This village is in the New Forest, near where I grew up. Characters speak of the bright lights and bustle of Southampton, where I went to school. But this particular village is familiar from a whole load of other sources, too - Larkwhistle here in 1944 owes something to Bramley End in Went the Day Well (a film released in 1942 but set after the end of the Second World War, so told to us from the future). Meanwhile, local pub the Fleur-de-Lys is straight out of Doctor Who and the Android Invasion (1975), in which the real-life East Hagbourne doubled for fictional Devesham.

It's a mix of spy story, murder mystery and romance, neatly acknowledging its sources from the dog called Wimsey after Dorothy L Sayers's detective to more than one Sherlock Holmes reference. 

"That's a bit dog-that-didn't bark, isn't it?" (p. 154)

The blurb of the book says it is "perfect for fans of Agatha Christie's Partners in Crime". The church of St Cedd surely owes something to Dirk Gentley's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams, and at one point there's a joke from Doctor Who and the State of Decay; I think the author of that story, Terrance Dicks, would have loved this. 

As for the plot: it's 1944 and Normandy has been invaded, the last act of the war under way. But Jill Metcalfe and her father then receive bad news from a rather good-looking American officer, Jack Strafford. While they're reeling from the shock, word comes of a dead body under a tree. It's not just any body, or just any tree - and soon Jack and Jill are working together to solve a murder and to catch a spy, which may or may not be related...

The book rattles along - I finished it in a day - by turns funny and real and harrowing. You feel the loss, and the great depths of emotion in this apparently quiet, conventional setting. Oh, and the back-flap tells us what is surely another influence on this: Matthew's forthcoming book The Great Dictator (haha!) is a biography of Barbara Cartland.

Green for Danger, by Christianna Brand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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