Showing posts with label oz. Show all posts
Showing posts with label oz. Show all posts

Thursday, March 06, 2025

In the Wet, by Nevil Shute

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which would, it seems, be quite unthinkable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the Prime Minister and his party have abandoned it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday, September 01, 2024

Question 7, by Richard Flanagan

Richard Flanagan won the Booker Prize in 2014 for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which was in part based on his father's experience as a prisoner of war in Japan. He's also the author of Death of River Guide (1994), in part based on the author's own experience of a near-fatal accident while out on a kayak.

This new book is non-fiction but revisits the real events behind these two novels, connecting them to - among other things - the history of Flanagan's native Tasmania, the invention of the nuclear bomb and the love life of HG Wells and Rebecca West. It's about the way reality informs fiction and fiction informs reality, and the way the past is present in the now. It's a remarkable, rich and vivid flit through all sorts of bits of history, at once directly, movingly personal and yet about us all.

Flanagan cites in his acknowledgements one key influence: the essay ‘The past is in the present is in the future’ by 18 year-old Sienna Stubbs, which describes her Yolŋu culture's understanding of a fourth tense, beyond past, present and future, in which what was and is and will be are all happening at once. So, all these years later after the real event, Flanagan is still 21 and trapped in his kayak, facing imminent death. And HG is still snogging the teenage Rebecca West. And the bomb is still being dropped on Horoshima.

Some of the history here I've already dug into, having made a Radio 4 documentary about how HG Well's novel The World Set Free, in which he coined the term "atomic bomb", inspired Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard to conceive the chain reaction component that would make such a thing a reality; but the Wells book also made him realise the terrible consequence of such a device used on an urban population. We seem to have worked from several of the same sources, and I'm glad to see that Flanagan, likewise, sees Szilard as both a pivotal and fascinating figure (whereas he makes a single, fleeting appearance in the film Oppenheimer).

Flanagan delves further than we did in our documentary (where we had just 42 minutes, and covered some other ground) to explore the circumstances in which Wells wrote The Wells Set Free and the women he was involved with at the time, as well as pursuing what happened to Szilard and addressing his own efforts to write science-fiction. I've got a copy of Szilard's book on its way and will report back in due course.

So it's a fascinating story being covered here, and yet also beautifully, succinctly told in short bursts that make it difficult to put down when you could just do one more short section. Yet it's also often viscerally shocking, whether detailing the impact of the bomb on Hiroshima or the genocide in Tasmania, or the denouement in which he recounts in detail his experience on the river. Also shocking is his meeting the men who held his father captor, asking one old man to hit slap him in the way he'd slapped the prisoners in his charge. Or there's the racism, sexism and cultural condescension faced while a student at Oxford (p. 231), and then this:

"Meanwhile, the Bullers wandered the Oxford streets, dressed absurdly as themselves or offensively as Nazis and after dinner had the whores in. The Buller B—who would be prime minister wanted me to be his wingman when he ran a second time for Oxford Union president, one more whore. I told him I couldn't stand the Union, that I wasn't a member, and why, in any case, would I bother? B— said when I ran he would help me if I helped him and so I repeated my original answer and B— fif-faf-fuddled because he really had no answer, no one did, he was charming and you couldn't believe a thing he said..." (pp. 233-4)

Sunday, March 03, 2024

The Drifter (STW-9 Perth, 1973-74) episode guide to the series created and written by David Whitaker

The Drifter
was created for STW-9 in Perth, Western Australia, by David Whitaker, a British writer probably best known as the first story editor of Doctor Who and the subject of my recent biography. The series ran for 21 episodes over 22 weeks 1973-74, and I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who can add to the following.

Background

The series owed something to an outline for The Lover dated 4 April 1966 and submitted to the Writers' Guild eight days later. David proposed that this would be filmed in colour, presumably in the style of The Saint or The Baron made for ITV. It would have seen Richard Young travelling Europe and getting into various scrapes and adventures, with David describing the character as a modern-day Casanova (whose unexpurgated autobiography had just begun to be published). 

Richard Young’s itinerant lifestyle follows a fire that killed his parents and destroyed their Sussex home in 1961. This was probably inspired by a real-life fire that swept through the London home David shared with his parents sometime in 1960 or 1961.

The Lover
was not picked up but by 1970 David had reworked the idea in a full movie screenplay, Man on a Tightrope, for Armitage Films — the company that made the low budget science-fiction film Night Caller (1968) and horror Burke and Hare (1972). The main character is Richard Logan, an adventurer who has been living an itinerant life since the death of his wife five years previously in a fire. He’s recruited to expose a criminal gang by the enigmatic Nicholson — a name probably inspired by David’s mother, who was born Nellie Nicholas. The film was never made.

In February 1971, David was in Australia, discussing ideas for TV shows with David Aspinall, assistant production manager at STW-9 in Perth. According to a report in the Australian TV Times on 17 February, David was to write 12 ten-minute plays for the channel in different genres that would help to meet newly imposed quotas on locally produced programmes and could be used to train crews.

Then, in 1973, STW-9 recorded a pilot episode of The Drifter created and written by David, with Aspinall as executive producer. The network duly commissioned a 10-part series and later extended that to 26 - all to be written by David. But before completing this number, the series was cancelled at short notice. 

The Drifter
Regular cast: James Halloran (Alan Cassell), Owen Nicholas (Sydney Davis), Lucie Martin (Helen Naeme), Miss Zeigler (Valda Diamond).

Only the first two of 21 episodes are known to survive, and are currently on YouTube.


The title sequence shows, in a series of still captions, Halloran on his wedding day, then with his wife and two children, then a newspaper clipping tells us his family died in a fire. 

01. If You Can’t Join Them, Beat Them (tx Saturday 15 December 1973)
TV listing: “What do you do with a case full of money and the police breathing down your neck?”

A flight lands at Perth Airport and airline staff have to carry off a drunk, unconscious passenger, who carries a ticket in the name of “J Smith”. This is, in fact, James Halloran, some 18 months after the deaths of his wife and children. 

He wakes to find himself in bed at the home of air stewardess Lucie Martin — and wrongly assumes he picked her up the night before. After this embarrassment, Halloran is visited by Dr Lindeman, a passenger who helped him off the plane. In fact, Lindeman spiked Halloran’s drink and caused the whole distraction as part of an insurance scam.

Lindeman offers Halloran $10,000 to continue with the plot. It looks as though Halloran will agree but he then shops Lindeman to the authorities. Meanwhile, an enigmatic man called Owen Nicholas collects Halloran’s unclaimed suitcase from the airport and keeps hold of it to use as leverage.

02. Love On Tuesday At Three O’Clock Please (Saturday 22 December 1973)
TV listing: “Owen Nicholas persuades Halloran to answer a risqué advertisement.”

Recorded in studio on 7 November 1973

Guest cast: Lynn Canfield (Jenny McNae), Faith Royal (Adele Cohen), Len (Max Bartlett), Barry (David Lyon), Judith (Olwyn Summers)

Crew: Camera - Tony Graham, Ian Jobsz and Brett Wiley; Lighting - Brian Grosse; Audio - David Muir; Make-up - Pauline Dunstan; Settings - David Crosby; Properties - Noel Penn; Graphics - Victor Longbon; Videotape editors - Ivan De Souza, Jim McLoughlin and Ray Shaw; Floor manager - Mike Meade; Technical director - Kevin Mohen; Director’s assistant - Pat Green; Executive producer - David Aspinall; Director - Brian Green; Producer - John Hanson.

Lynn Canfield is drugged by two men who then undress and photograph her, and later send a blackmail demand. She goes to Owen Nicholas for help, and he uses his leverage to get James Halloran to investigate.

Faith Royal, who runs the escort agency used by Canfield and sent the demand, doesn’t want money; she wants Canfield to recruit further victims. Halloran takes a job with the agency while Nicholas’s secretary, Miss Zeigler, poses as a potential stooge, and together they put a stop to the scheme. Halloran, who is still staying with Lucie Martin, now seems bound to work with Nicholas — who is an associate of Halloran’s father-in-law, and keen to get the drifter back on his feet.

03. Heads I Win, Tails You Lose (Saturday 29 December 1973)
TV listing: “There is always one big winner at the weekly poker game. The Drifter doesn’t want to play, but must put up with the cards he has been dealt.”

04. Life And Death (Saturday 5 January 1974)
TV listing: “Halloran becomes deeply involved with Owen Nicholas — and finds himself investigating an ingenious murder attempt at the hospital.”

05. There’s Always An Angle (Saturday, 12 January 1974)
TV listing: “The Drifter breaks away — at last — and finds himself staying in a motel operating in an unusual way.”

06. Rogue’s Gallery (Saturday, 19 January 1974)
TV listing: “Halloran investigates when Ramon Salamander buys a stolen Renoir.”

Guest cast: Ramon Salamander (Neville Teede), Salamander’s mistress (Vynka Lee-Steere)

A photo of David Whitaker and Vynka Lee-Steere was published in the edition of TV Week for 8 December 1973 (p. 13), suggesting the episode was recorded around this time. The accompanying piece says that Lee-Steere plays the, “mistress of a millionaire armaments manufacturer who is selling illegal arms to subversive organisations”. 

A preview in the Western Australian on 19 January (p. 33) says that Salamander, “is suspected of stealing a Renoir painted in 1874 [and]James Halloran, the drifter played by Alan Cassells is assigned to find out where the Renoir has gone”.

Salamander is also the name of a villain in a Doctor Who story written by David, The Enemy of the World, which ends with Salamander being ejected from the TARDIS just after it leaves Australia… so perhaps this is the same character.

07. Things That Go Bump in the Night (Saturday, 26 January 1974)
TV listing: “Is there a plot afoot to ruin Harry Starr or has a ghost really invaded his new block of flats?”

A photograph in what may be the 15 or 22 December issue of TV Week shows star Alan Cassell with guest star Perth actress Sally Sander, who was presumably a guest star in this or the following episode.

08. The Strong Shall Inherit the Earth (Saturday, 2 February 1974)
TV listing: “Murderer Manny Rossiter escapes while on his way to gaol and plans to kill Owen Nicholas.”

A photograph in the TV Week published the day of broadcast shows Robert Foggetter (presumably as Rossiter) with a gun, leaning over the top of car to take a shot, while behind him there's a man with stocking over his head. The caption says that, “a realistic fight scene, car chase and ambush will be seen in this week’s episode of The Drifter.”

09. With A Little Help From My Enemies (Saturday, 9 February 1974)
TV listing: “Halloran helps a schoolteacher who discovers that one of her pupils possesses dangerous drugs.”

10. Death In The Garden (Saturday, 16 February 1974)
TV listing: “Mary Auben is a nice old lady who lives on a valuable property coveted by a nearby factory.”

The listings magazine also quotes a line of dialogue from the episode, spoken by an unnamed lawyer: “It’s astonishing what an oral life we lead — eating, drinking, talking, smoking, tasting, singing, biting, kissing and some habitual drug users inject themselves under the tongue.”

11. The Body of a Girl (Saturday, 23 February 1974)
TV listing: “Shirley, a 25-year-old prostitute, is in danger when she causes trouble."

12. The Beginning of the End (Friday, 1 March 1974)
TV listing: “Owen Nicholas puts Halloran in the centre of a fierce quarrel between scientific research and conservation.”

A news report in TV Week on 2 March revealed that actress Helen Neeme, playing series regular Lucie Martin, was pregnant — so she may have left the series before the end.

13. A Legal Way to Steal (Friday, 8 March 1974)
TV listing: “Halloran learns of a way to part people from their fortunes. But Owen Nicholas is much too fascinated with the attractive Myra to show interest.”

14. The Death of Janet Halloran (Friday, 15 March 1974)
TV listing: "Halloran receives a phone call from his wife Janet — who was burnt to death in a fire one year ago."

15. The Death of Janet Halloran (part 2) (Friday, 22 March 1974)
TV listing: “What is the organisation FSD and what was its connection with Janet Halloran? What was the secret she could not tell her husband?”

16. Breakdown (part 1) (Friday 29 March 1974)
No listing given.

17. Breakdown (part 2) (Friday, 5 April 1974)
TV listing: “An attractive girl and half-a-million dollars — the Drifter can have both for the price of a bullet.”

Cast: final listing to credit Helen Neene.

[12 April, no episode shown as it was Good Friday; a movie was broadcast instead]

18. Black, White and Red (part 1) (Friday. 19 April 1974)
TV listing: “Someone turned Rod Taylor into a living vegetable because of his fight for a principle and nobody wants Halloran to find the truth.”

19. Black, White and Red (part 2) (Friday, 26 April 1974)
No listing given.

Guest cast: James Setches, Andrew Carter, Frank McKallister.

20. The Valley of the Shadow (part 1) (Friday, 3 May 1974)
TV listing: “When Captain Keith Colby is invalided out of the army he asks the Drifter to help him find the man who tried to kill him.”

The 4 May edition of TV Week (p. 61) includes a photograph with the caption that, “Scriptwriter David Whitaker created a role for himself in a recent episode of The Drifter. He appeared as a businessman (right) with actors Laurence Hodge (left) and Norman Macleod.” The caption doesn’t say which episode this is from. David Whitaker kept a copy of this photograph and one of him being made-up for the part, presumably by Pauline Dunstan (credited at the end of episode 2).

21. The Valley of the Shadow (part 2) (Friday, 9 May 1974)
TV listing: “The Drifter is involved in a bizarre case of revenge against Keith Colby.”

Star Alan Cassell, quoted in TV Week on 25 May, said that,“Ironically, the episode I enjoyed most was the last one [as] I finally got myself into bed with a bird and there was a realistic fight scene that worked very well. … The fight was in fact so dynamic, a fellow actor ended up with two stitches in his lip.”

But he’d also had no warning of the cancellation. A total of 21 episodes had been broadcast over 22 weeks. The press referred to tentative plans to make further episodes at a later date, in colour. This doesn’t seem to have come anything.

On 3 October 1979, David wrote a synopsis for a novelisation of his Doctor Who story The Enemy of the World, adding the first name “Ramon” to the villainous Salamander, underlining the link between him and the character of the same name in The Drifter.

Thursday, November 09, 2023

David Whitaker seen on television

In August 1964, Doctor Who's first story editor, David Whitaker, wrote up a CV for his new agent, Beryl Vertue, ahead of leaving his staff job at the BBC to go freelance. That CV is a key source in piecing together David's wide-ranging career. Before becoming a writer, David had been a professional actor and his CV refers to acting work in both radio and TV - but without saying what this involved.

We know David worked for BBC Radio in Belfast while working on stage at the New Theatre at Bangor, 1954-55, but not the productions or roles. In October 1955, he was one of four unnamed sailors in The Voyage of Magellan produced by Rayner Heppenstall.

As per the Radio Times listing, this play was repeated. That may explain why a recording of it survives - made for this repeat and retained in case of further broadcast. As a result, this is one of two known records of David's voice, and although he's part of the ensemble rather than playing a named character, we can identify him in the crowd thanks to the other recording we have of him. I'll come to that in a moment.

Sadly, the BBC's Written Archives Centre (WAC) in Caversham does not hold paperwork relating to The Voyage of Magellan to give us more information, such as whether it was first broadcast live or recorded in advance. Details of this and any other roles David might have had on radio are not included in the "radio contributions" files for David held by WAC, which instead cover writing work he did for television outside his staff job.

As for the TV acting work he did before 1964, no details are known to survive - though I take an educated guess in my biography, David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure in Television. But once he'd left his staff job at the BBC, David made a number of other appearances on TV...

Alys and Alan Hayes alerted me to the fact that, on 30 June 1967, David and his wife June Barry were among the celebrities gathered for the 1,000th episode of BBC Two's arts discussion programme Late Night Line-Up. For this, guests from previous episodes (including David Attenborough, Jonathan Miller, Robert Morley, Nyrie Dawn Porter and Ned Sherin) were entertained by comedians Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, assisted by a pre-Monty Python Terry Jones. This programme survives in the BBC archive. Here are two screenshots:

Terry Jones (standing) serves Peter Cook and (his back to us) Dudley Moore, while John Hopkins (with beard) looks on, David Whitaker and June Barry beside him.

Peter Cook standing over Dudley Moore, while John Hopkins, David Whitaker and June Barry watch.

The bearded man sat next to David is the playwright John Hopkins, with whom David worked and corresponded in the BBC script department while they were both on staff there. Hopkins wrote the screenplay for the James Bond film Thunderball (1965), which originally included a reference to Daleks:

BOND (grunts) The Daleks have taken over! 

Here's Hopkins again later the same year that he sat next to David, having just won an award for his script for Talking to a Stranger (available on YouTube), starring Judi Dench - seen second from the left:

TV Awards, 17 November 1967
Eric Portman, Judi Dench, Sydney Newman, Donald Wilson, Basil Coleman, John Hopkins

In the middle of the picture are (in glasses) Sydney Newman, leaving his job as BBC Head of Drama after five years, and beside him tall Donald Wilson, Newman's former head of serials. These two men created Doctor Who and I'm not aware of any other photograph of them together.

Back to David. On 5 March 1969, he was one of the hosts of the Writers' Guild awards held at the Dorchester Hotel in London. The moment that he announced the plaque for 'Best British Light Entertainment Script' awarded to the writing team behind Marty [Feldman] was captured on film and opens the surviving documentary One Pair Of Eyes: No, But Seriously, first broadcast on 7 June. It's the second surviving example of David's voice and you can currently view this on YouTube, but also here is a screenshot:

David Whitaker and Marius Goring
Writers' Guild Awards, 5 March 1969

Beside David is Marius Goring, the actor who'd played a villain in David's TV serial The Evil of the Daleks (1967) and his film Subterfuge (1968, but not released until 1971).

In 1972, David had a cameo role in The Far Country, his own adaptation of the Nevil Shute novel, produced by Eric Tayler for ABC in Australia and first broadcast on 9 February that year. Sadly, David's appearance is not included in the surviving footage from the serial.

Two years later, David wrote another role for himself in the STW-9 series he originated, The Drifter. Again, sadly, this doesn't survive but David's role was covered in the local listings magazine:

'Photo News' from (Australian) TV Week, 4 May 1974

David kept this page from the listings magazine and was also sent the original photograph, plus another one showing him being made-up for this role.

Laurence Hodge, Norman MacLeod and David Whitaker in The Drifter (1974)

David Whitaker made-up for The Drifter (1974)

Although he lived for another six years, these are the latest dated photographs of David Whitaker.

Tuesday, April 18, 2023

David Whitaker at 95

David Whitaker
in Australia, early 1970s
On 18 April 1928, 95 years ago today, David Arthur Whitaker was born in Knebworth.

In 1963, David became the first story editor of the new science-fiction series Doctor Who, and oversaw of 53 consecutive episodes. 

(Two of those weren't broadcast: the unbroadcast pilot was rewritten and re-rerecorded as the broadcast An Unearthly Child, and the two episodes Crisis and The Urge to Live were, after they'd been recorded, edited down into a single episode. I'm not counting the re-recording of The Dead Planet in this total because, so far as we know, the production team worked from the same script so it didn't need David's attention.)

(Also, David didn't receive credit on The Edge of Destruction or The Brink of Disaster because he was the credited writer on those. There's no story editor credited on The Powerful Enemy or Desperate Measures, either, and he may well have written these while still employed as story editor. But paperwork suggested his editorial duties concluded with the episode before that, Flashpoint, so that's where I'm stopping this count. Phew.)

David is also the credited writer on 40 episodes of Doctor Who - more than anyone else in the 1960s, the fourth most prolific TV writer of old-skool Doctor Who (after Robert Holmes on 64, Terry Nation on 56 and Malcolm Hulke on 45 if we count his co-written episodes as 0.5).

Of the 97 missing episodes of Doctor Who, David Whitaker was the credited writer on 18. (John Lucarotti was credited on 11, some co-written, Brian Hayles on 9, Ian Stuart Black on 8.)

David also wrote two of the first three Doctor Who novelisations, co-wrote two of the first three Dalek annuals, co-wrote the first Doctor Who related stage play, polished one of the two Dr. Who movies and probably wrote the bulk of the long running Daleks comic strip.

It's the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who this year, so where was David Whitaker on this day in 1963, his 35th birthday? Well, he was in (or just about to go to) New York in an effort to sell a musical he'd written, Model Girl, with composer George Posford.

Excerpt of letter from David Whitaker
to June Barry, 30 April 1963

Going round the various showbiz houses to schlep his play, he was introduced as, "David Whitaker who drinks sherry."

He returned to the UK around 14 May, presenting his fiancee June Barry with an antique phone, a gift for the flat they were in the process of agreeing to rent after their forthcoming wedding on 8 June.

June Barry in the
Daily Mirror, 3 August 1963

Yes, that's the same top (and same flat) as seen in a 1965 photo shoot of June and David conducted for TV World - the Birmingham-region version of TV Times.

David Whitaker and June Barry
at home, c. May 1965

Daily Mirror, 3 July 1963
(Doreen Spooner, the Daily Mirror's 'camera girl', who took the photo of June with the phone, had the previous month made front-page news with this extraordinary scoop, sneakily shot from the door of a pub toilet.)

David died in 1980 aged just 51. He was still working on Doctor Who. This form recently came to light, proof (at last!) that he'd been working on a novelisation of his 1967 TV serial The Evil of the Daleks.

I wrote a book about The Evil of the Daleks. Later this year, I've got a book out about another of David's Doctor Who stories, The Edge of Destruction.

You can learn more about David Whitaker in the documentary I worked on with splendid Chris Chapman and Toby Hadoke, on the Season 2 box-set released last year.

And I'm currently writing a ginormous biography, David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television, to be published by Ten Acre Films later this year. I'll end with this lovely note from David to a young Doctor Who fan in 1964...

Letter from David Whitaker
to Doctor Who fan Ian

Tuesday, April 19, 2022

The Far Country, by Nevil Shute

This is a very odd love letter to Australia, begun soon after the author emigrated there in the summer of 1950 and published in 1952. I borrowed my mum's battered, second-hand first edition, long missing the original dust jacket and relinquishing its spine as I read it.

In Australia, sheep farmer Jack Dorman finally pays off decades of debt and - despite a large tax bill to come - realises he is now wealthy. His wife Jane is worried about her elderly Aunt Ethel back in England, who she's not seen in 32 years (when Ethel was the sole member of Jane's family to back her relationship with Jack). Jane intuits that Ethel is short of money, so the Dormans, who've regularly sent Ethel letters and cake mix, now send her £500.

Things are far worse than they could imagine, and Ethel is starving to death in her nice house in Ealing, having sold most of her furniture and anything else of value from her days abroad. Ethel's granddaughter, Jennifer Morton, finds her in this state and cares for the old woman in her last days. But the book is pretty blunt about what has done for this poor woman: having once lived a rather grand life in Petersfield and then as a dutiful wife of empire out in Burma, she's been left destitute and unnoticed by, er, the new National Health Service. The independence of India has also meant the end of her pension. It's as if no one was neglected before the NHS; that before the welfare state there was no need of welfare. Or perhaps there's something more sinister: that if only we still had an empire and people knew their place, this sort of thing wouldn't happen to someone of her class.

The war is also to blame, but the privations suffered in England - which are ever increasing, long after the end of the war - seem to be the fault of the post-war government so far as the author is concerned. Jennifer works for a ministry, and we're told,

"It was manifestly impossible for anyone who derided the Socialistic ideal to progress very far in the public service; if a young man aimed at promotion in her office he felt it necessary to declare a firm, almost a religious, belief in the principles of Socialism." (p. 91)

It's quite a claim, but really it's Shute who is being unfairly partisan. The sense is of an old, glorious England now lost to the awful unfairness of egalitarianism. Dying, Ethel tells Jennifer,

"It's not as if we were extravagant, Geoffrey and I. It's been a change that nobody could fight against, this going down and down. I've had such terrible thoughts for you, Jenny, that it would go on going down and down and when you are as old as I am ... you'll think how very rich you were when you were young." (p. 71)

When the old woman dies, Jennifer's father goes through her things and finds a telling document - a recipe for a cake given to Ethel on her wedding day.

"What a world to live in, and how ill they must have been! His eyes ran back to the ingredients. Two pounds of Jersey butter... eight weeks' ration for one person. The egg ration for one person for four months... Currants and sultanas in those quantities; mixed peel, that he had not seen for years. Half a pint of brandy, so plentiful that you could put half a pint into a cake, and think nothing of it. ... He had eaten such cakes when he was a young man before the war of 1914, but now he could hardly remember what a cake like that would taste like." (p. 77)

The irony, of course, is that this woman starved to death, with only the cake mix to sustain her.

Ethel leaves her new money to Jennifer, making the girl promise to use it to visit Jane in Australia, and perhaps look for a better life there - like the one Ethel once knew in England. The doctor who treated Ethel is also leaving the country for a better life but Jennifer has reservations about leaving her elderly parents. Others suggest Australia will "probably be all desert and black people" (p. 95), or make an economic case for the value of migrants as an investment made by a particular country.

"For eighteen years somebody in this country fed you and clothed you and educated you before you made any money, before you started earning. Say you cost an average two quid a week for that eighteen years. You've cost England close on two thousand pounds to produce. ... Suppose you go off to Canada. You're an asset worth two thousand quid that England gives to Canada as a free gift. If a hundred thousand like you were to go each year, it'ld be like England giving Canada a subsidy of two hundred million pounds a year. It's got to be thought about, this emigration." (p. 89)

Despite this, Jennifer sets off to Australia for a temporary visit, certain she will then return home. At 24, she has never eaten grilled steak until boarding the ship - which comes as a great surprise to the Australians (p. 135). She in turn thinks very highly of their modest work in farming and producing food. A lot is made of the virtue of hard graft. The Dorman's have become wealthy after 32 years of toil, and repeatedly say they're glad that wool prices will soon fall so that their children don't end up too indolent. At the end of the book, Jennifer is appalled by a man visiting a doctor in the NHS wants,

"medicine and a certificate exempting him from work because he couldn't wake up in the morning." (p. 314)

Yet on the very same page, Jennifer organises things so that the doctor in question can have more lunches and dinners away from his patients, helping him to bunk off. And then,

"She was staggered to find out how much her mother's illnesses had cost, how much her father had been paying out in life insurance premiums for her security (pp. 314-5)

- presumably under the old, unjust system that the NHS replaced.

In Australia, there is no desert and there are no aboriginal people, though migrants from eastern Europe are treated as a lower order. Jennifer is welcomed by the Dormans, and cannot persuade their young daughter that a trip to England will only be a disappointment. Then there's a serious accident and no doctor available to help two men desperately in need. Carl Zlinter, a Czech immigrant working the land, was a doctor in his own country before serving with the Nazis, but he is not allowed to practice in Australia without retraining for three years. With the men in desperate peril, Jennifer assists Zlinter in carrying out highly risky operations to save the two men's lives, but one of them doesn't survive.

As an inquest looks into this and threatens to deport Zlinter, he gets closer to Jennifer, and is also haunted by the discovery of a gravestone bearing his own name and place of origin. It's for a man who died some decades previously, on the cusp of living memory. Zlinter is soon on the trail of the surviving, elderly people who might have known his namesake and can shed light on his story...

This particularly struck a chord because I'm researching the life of David Whitaker, who in 1971 adapted this novel for Australian TV (broadcast on ABC in 1972). Just as with Zlinter, I've been tracking down surviving paperwork and trying to speak to now-elderly people who might remember my man. There are many parallels between The Far Country and Whitaker's life. In 1950, he was living with his family in Ealing, streets away from the fictional address of Aunt Ethel. The house may also have had relics from India, where Whitaker's mother was born. The age difference between Zlinter and Jennifer is similar to that between Whitaker and his first wife June Barry. As with Jennifer, June Barry returned to Australia leaving Whitaker to work in Australia, with a shadow over their future together...

In fact, for all Jennifer clearly falls for Australia, there is plenty here to count against moving to this far country. There's the boredom of life on the farms, especially for the lone women keeping homes there. There's palpable danger given the lack of qualified doctors and the frequent risks of fire. There's also the philistine culture. Zlinter isn't the only one whose skills are overlooked in Australia. He buys a painting of Jennifer from Stanislaus Shulkin, a plate layer on the railway line who was once professor of artistic studies at the University of Kaunas. 

Perhaps there's something here of the author: an engineer who also wrote novels, at once dirty-handed grafter and lofty man of arts. But surely it can't be a virtue to overlook the talents of Zlinter and Shulkin; it's squandering the investment, just as Shute argued before.

For all Australia offers a future to those prepared to work, Zlinter and Jennifer's happiness is secured by an inheritance that comes quite by chance and to which they're not entitled, requiring Zlinter to transact business with some slightly dodgy characters. He and Jennifer agree to keep the details secret - implicitly because they know that this is wrong. It's a necessary cheat because (just as with the Dormans), the rewards take a long time to win if they're to come at all. There are plenty of characters for whom things haven't worked out.

One reading of all this might be that Shute sets up an initial prejudice - bad old England against verdant, rich Australia - which he then proceeds to complicate and pick at, resulting in a richer, more complex portrait. But if so, the case is made in bad faith and the result is a very odd book.

Tuesday, February 08, 2022

The Animals in That Country, by Laura Jean McKay

Jean's life is a bit of a mess. She wants to be a ranger in the wildlife park where she works, but can't get her qualifications - and is secretly drinking and, worse, keeps telling visitors what the animals all say, against all the rules about anthropomorphising them. The boss of the park - who is also the mother of Jean's granddaughter - is running out of patience. And then a new kind of flu hits Australia, and suddenly all the animals talk...

This is a strange, unsettling book, initially about a pandemic (by coincidence, apparently, despite all its similarities to Covid) and then something more profound. Animals communicate in myriad ways - gesture and scent as telling as sound. Some of what they say is quite disturbing. Beloved pets turn out to be crazy, driven mad by having their wildness constrained. There's something of that, too, in the humans, Jean's wild excesses barely kept in check - and she's not alone. She has a secret drinking buddy at work, and is having an affair with an otherwise gay man. From the evidence here, we are messy creatures, all of us bad dogs and cats. People are animals, driven by hunger and lust and excreta, things of flesh and need. What follows is visceral and vivid, so the effect is like an extended dream, verging on nightmare.

To begin with, the heart of the book is Jean's relationship with her granddaughter Kim, who seems to be offer Jean her one hope of salvation - she'll be a better person for Kim. There's then a resounding awfulness when Kim goes missing, but on the quest to retrieve her that follows Jean forms a bond with one of the wildlife park's residents, a dingo called Sue. What's extraordinary is how much we get into Sue and other animals' heads, how much we understand - before the gut-punch ending when it's made plain how little we can know about what really goes on in someone else's skull. That's what this is about: our connections and lacks of connections, human or otherwise.

It's an often funny and sometimes uncomfortable read, sort of Shameless and Ridley Walker and The Road all in one, with something of the setting of Mad Max. But that tantalising sense of understanding animals makes it like nothing else. I can see why this won last years Clarke Award. 

Thursday, October 01, 2020

DWM special on production design

The latest special edition of Doctor Who Magazine is devoted to production design. Among the delights are some things by me:

Dr Who and the Daleks (1965)

Bill Constable was responsible for the look of the original Peter Cushing movie. I spoke to Bill's daughter Dee - who shared some previously unseen artwork from the film - and biographer Olga Sedneva, as well as Dr Fiona Subotsky, whose late husband Milton produced the movie. (Fiona also wrote Dracula for Doctors, which I read last year.)

The Evil of the Daleks (1967)

With the help of original production designer Chris Thompson, Gav Rymill and I have attempted to recreate the sets from the missing first episode of this classic Dalek story.

Michael Pickwoad (2010-2017)

To accompany a "new" interview with the late, great Michael Pickwoad, Sophie Iles and I interviewed his daughter Amy, who worked with him in the art department on Doctor Who.


Saturday, January 26, 2013

Something really solid to bite on

In a British Red Cross shop, the Dr found me a lovely 1956 World Books monthly edition of Nevil Shute's Requiem for a Wren (1955) - at least, it would have been if the price sticker hadn't torn the cover. I loved Shute's bleak tales of earnest people facing all the horrors that life can fling at them when I'd borrowed them from the shelves of my late grandfather's house. On the Beach (1957) is an especially extraordinary post-apocalyptic miasma of despair.

In Requiem for a Wren, Alan Duncan (no, not the MP for Rutland & Melton) returns home to the family farm at Coombargana, outside Melbourne. Alan is a war veteran who lost both feet in a plane crash, but the shadow that really hangs over him is the death of his brother Bill, killed in Normandy helping to prepare for the invasion. Alan has spent the years since the war struggling to get used to his disability, and also trying to track down Janet Prentice, Bill's girlfriend who Alan met only once.

When Alan arrives home to the farm, he finds his elderly parents quietly distraught over the suicide of their maid. As Alan concludes late in the book, 
"a war can go on killing people for a long time after it's all over."
Nevil Shute, Requiem for a Wren (1955), p.246.
We follow Alan's efforts to piece together what happened to Janet, and failure to track her down. With Janet's faith in providence and justice, and the grief not merely for the war dead but also the excitement and freedom of the war, it reminded me a lot of Graham Greene's The End of the Affair (1951), and it has the same chilling bleakness that lingers long in the mind.

There's plenty to like here: the stark, no-nonsense prose, the eye for quirks of character and speech, even the way on page 216 Janet contracts "it would" as "it 'ld" - with a space and an "l". She and the other Brits all speak in the clipped accents of In Which We Serve and A Matter of Life and Death, and are admired for their steely, practical manners through the conflict.

Throughout the book, it's underlined how much better it is to be doing things rather than dwelling on the past, and of the despair that sets in when there's nothing to be done. That's laid out early on, for instance, when we learn that Alan's younger sister,
"had picked up with a chap called Laurence Hilton who worked for the B.B.C. and put on plays for the Third Programme. She married him in 1947 and had not been home since; they had one child, rather an unpleasant little boy ... She seemed happy with [Laurence] and had adopted most of his views, including the one that Australia was a cultural desert that no decent person would dream of living in. His earning capacity, of course, was quite inadequate for the life they wished to lead. They have a very pleasant house in Cheyne Walk overlooking the river where they entertain a lot of visitors from ivory towers, and Coombargana pays.
I annoyed Laurence very much one day by referring to my father as a patron of the Arts. I'd probably have annoyed my father too if he'd known."
Ibid., p. 13.
Much later we learn that Alan's sister felt little of the war's effect at home in Australia - if anything, the prospect of doing war work in industry gave her and her friends the excuse to escape home, live in the city and go to more parties. There is a gulf between them on Alan's first return home - her flighty and silly, he morose with his injury. That helps us to understand her and her choices, but it also comes late in the story and so doesn't redeem her.

In contrast, there's Janet, and Viola Dawson and the other girls Janet served with in the Wrens. Janet takes great pride in cleaning and expecting guns and ensuring everything works properly for when "the balloon goes up". She's also a very good shot - which is also the start of where things go wrong.

At one point, Janet is involved in what might be a case of friendly fire (Shute nicely makes the dilemma more difficult because we're never quite sure). In need of someone to talk to, and with Bill out on operations, Janet goes to see her father - an Oxford professor who missed serving in the first war but has just been called up to help with the Normandy landings. His glee over this means Janet can't bring herself to share her own woes. As she says, her father is having the time of his life:
"'You know,' he said in wonder, 'really - I believe I am. It's having to do with things, I suppose, after spending one's life dealing with ideas. It's having something really solid to bite on. Something definite to do."
Ibid., p. 108.
When Bill dies, his colleague Albert Finch writes to Janet to tell her. There are three short, matter-of-fact paragraphs - Albert isn't allowed to say how Bill died - and the last is that Albert will have to shoot Bill's dog unless Janet can find a place for it. Again, it's a blunt and practical concern, but it's an awful thing to put on her, and we really feel the pressure and guilt as she struggles to convince her superiors to let her keep a dog where she's stationed; we also feel the desperate relief when something gets arranged. Shute perfectly judges the awfulness of something so simple and real, and the whirl of emotions under the stiff upper lip.

But there's also something darker going on about the shared experience of war. On Alan's first return home after the war, he's morbid and drinking too much. His father comes to meet him at the harbour to drive him back to the farm (it's a long way, but Alan is too fearful of flying). On the way, Alan's father matches his son's heavy drinking and they share war stories. It's a mark of understanding between them, a strong and male bond in the face of such horror. But it's also telling that for all he experienced in the first war, Alan's father was delighted by his sons both joining up.

Viola Dawson tells Alan,
"until we're dead, we Service people, the world will always be in danger of another war. We had a good time in the last one. We'll none of us come out into the open and admit it. It might be better for us, if we did. What we do is to put our votes in favour of re-armament and getting tough with Russia, and hope for the best ... For our generation, the war years were the best time of our lives, not because they were war years but because we were young ... Everyone looks back at the time when they were in their early twenties with nostalgia, but when we look back we only see the war. We had a fine time then, and so we think that if a third war came we'd have those happy, carefree years all over again. I don't suppose we would - some of us might."
Ibid., p. 185.
The ending is a little glib, and in the last two pages Alan turns things round to win the girl. It doesn't sit true with the bleakness of the rest of the book, and a note of uncertainty - that he hopes to win the girl but doesn't know if he can - would maybe have sat better. But apart from that, it's an enthralling, disturbing read.

I also liked the ad on the back cover for the next titles in the World Books monthly series. How strange to see a James Bond book being sold without mention of Bond.

Saturday, September 11, 2010

"There are more wild horses in Australia than any other country."

YouTube now boasts two clips from Rode Trip, the documentary made by my brother/boss following two people riding across Australia on horses they tamed themselves. (I was script editor on the film and did a day's interviewing for it.)



Tuesday, August 05, 2008

Atlatl and Jodrell Bank

The Dr came home from work last night with a fun top fact. Woomera - the Australian home to the British rocketships during the 1950s and 60s, and famous for looking right through the Vogan demolition fleet in the first episode of Hitchhiker - is named after device the Eora people there used for lobbing things.

How marvellous. It's like called Cape Canaveral "Trebuchet" or "Firework".

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

The last leg

Dr on the RocksSo where were we? Oh yes, I was blogging from our hotel in the Sydney Rocks, while the Dr was exploring the roof-top hot-tub. I went up to join her and we enjoyed the view, choosing to ignore the ominous low and dark cloud out to sea.

This proved to be a mistake as it meant that as we went out to meet Dr Who author Jonathan Blum for tea in Darling Harbour, I was only wearing Birkenstock flip-flops, shorts and tee-shirt. And so got soaked when the heavens opened. There was thunder. There was lightning. There was a river of water higher than the pavement. There was me and the Dr diving into a posh wine bar, looking like drowned and under-dressed rats, texting Jon to come join us.

He did, and when the sky had cleared he took us squelching for tea in Darling Harbour. I had a pizza and shared a bottle of fizz, and we talked a bit of shop and to Jon’s wife Kate Orman by phone, and then me and the Dr squelched back to our hotel, cold and damp but well-fed.

Two tier architecture in SydneyThe next day was a bit over-cast, but we explored the Rocks and took pictures. Again we were struck by the Manchester-ness of the lower-tier architecture, with sparkly skyscrapers behind.

Not that I'm sure the photo right really shows that adequately. You'll just have to take my word for it.


Sydney Observatory, with bollockWe nosed round the observatory that’s so very like the one in Greenwich – though they call the time-keeping bollock on the roof a “time ball”.

Bought a postcard of the upside-down Moon.

Upside-down Moon

Thence a long walk to Darling Harbour again for pancakes with Jon, followed by a trek round the Maritime Museum. The Dr dared suggest it’s better laid out and interpreted than the one she used to work at herself, with plenty of personal stories and artefacts to bring the Big Ships And Stuff to life.

Just time for a beer in Edinburgh Castle (a pub) before the train back to the airport, and we got back to Melbourne in time for me to grab a quick beer with the sister’s boyfriend.

Tiger, tigerOn Thursday, I managed to cock-up the trams to Melbourne Zoo, but we got there eventually. Had a great afternoon of cooing at the creatures and taking photos. The highlight was probably seeing the smallish, cuddly-looking Sumatran tigers getting fed. The keepers poked a syringe of milk through the gaps in the fence, and the tigers lapped away like little kittens. They had to chase the syringe as the keepers moved it around, and they were then touching the tigers’ paws as they poked them through the fence. Just the game I play with the Dim Cat at home through the banisters.

Also good were the apes:

Am I ginger?

Baby ape

Kangaroos chillin' in the Outback ZoneThe zoo is laid out in regions, so the tigers and apes from East Asia are amongst Asian trees and buildings, while the marsupials are all in a bit that feels very outback. The koalas hid in the tree and it’s illegal in Victoria for people to handle them anyway, so I didn’t take any pictures. The wombats were all cuddled up in the dark, looking snug and comfy. Again I couldn’t get pictures of them.

Then we trammed back into town and made our way to the Ian Potter Centre. There were fun exhibits of aboriginal artworks and a thing on black in fashion which was very goth and the Dr. Then there was pizza, and we bumped into the sister’s boyfriend again by chance, who spared time for a chat as I accompanied him up to the bike shop.

Wicket T WarwickIn the evening, me and the English girls (the Dr, the sister and Erykah) descended en mass on poor old Ian and Mrs Mond for wine and clever bloody Joe Lister on the telly. Couldn’t have been a better last night in Oz, with splendid company and many laughs. Ian even showed us the Wicket T Warwick costume he’d been made to wear on his stag do.

Up early Friday for a very long flight to South Africa, where again I didn’t fit. My auntie met us at the airport, and explained the various things we were driving past on the way back to her house. She dealt very well with what were probably two zombies. I was much tickled, though, that they call traffic lights “robots” – and didn’t know that it’s the Czech word for serfdom.

On Saturday, the auntie and uncle laid on an extraordinary trip round Soweto, with local guide Ken Dalgliesh. No, not the one I used to have a poster of. He’s studied and written on the history of the collection of townships that now has a population of 4.9 million, and is also up to his eyeballs in projects to help and support the poorer bits.

So we went to the market opposite the Hani-Baragwnath hospital, biggest hospital in the southern hemisphere, and the Dr and I braved the protein-rich mopane caterpillars that are a local stable. Past the chicken stranglers and heaps of freshly butchered, fly-covered meat, we ventured into a shebeen (pub) to share a carton of the yeasty, frothy Jo’Burg beer which was home-brewed in the days of Apartheid, when the locals were not allowed the “white man’s” beers. It’s thick, heavy, low-alcohol stuff that reminded me a lot of freshly-squeezed milk. The locals seemed very interested in my hat.

We toured through the various areas of the townships. After the fall of Apartheid, the inhabitants were given the plots of land on which they had their small and basic shacks. In the posher bits, they’ve since extended and enhanced these basic facilities, so you’ll see lavish properties and exquisitely manicured gardens bolted on to the side of a crude oblong of breeze blocks. I assume this juxtaposition is better than demolishing such a reminder of their history, and also serves to show how far the inhabitants have come – and in such a short time.

The aunt and uncle were most surprised by the low walls and lack of armed guards and electric fences that are everywhere in their bit of town. Only recently one of their friends was bound, beaten and robbed by a gang described as “militant”. Incidents like that seem pretty regular, too – they and horrendous car crashes are talked about in the way we might talk of a bad morning on the Tube.

Perhaps Soweto is just a safer, happier place with less divide between the well-off and poor. Or perhaps it has always been self-policing, so that no one would dare risk being caught stealing or anything else. I assume we only saw the tourist-friendly bits of Soweto anyway.

But our tour did include the poorer bits, and we stopped off at a community centre (oddly, built by an American basketball charity) which our guide Ken was very involved with. The smiley, happy children hanging out there quickly threw together a performance of dancing and singing, and were keen to get us dancing too. It was all so impromptu and lively. We also met the old lady who has run the place since its most basic beginnings back in 1954. She’s still the one everyone goes to when approving any new developments or projects.

The main part of the tour, though, was following the route of the march on 16 June 1976, when schoolkids with an average age of 13 protested at having to be taught at least 50 percent in Afrikaans – a language they and many of their teachers did not even speak. The subjects chosen to be taught in Afrikaans were history, geography and mathematics, further disenfranchising the country’s black majority. The kids acted independently of their parents, who they saw as subsumed into the Apartheid regime because they accepted it. And in the Catholic church where many of the kids first assembled that morning, we counted the bullet holes in the ceiling and saw the broken edge of the altar where the camo-wearing South African police had tried to scare them off.

The kids were not scared off, and we followed the route to Vilkazi Street where the police dogs (or, some sources say, a single dog) were set on them. The dog was killed, and then the police started firing into the ranks of children…

One boy, Hector Pieterson, was shot in the back, and a photo of his wounded body being carried by another boy came to embody the massacre. The picture (see the last link) is a classic “pieta” in structure, a tragic emblem that fuelled a tide against the regime. But our guide, though understanding this focus, was keen to acknowledge the other 20 people who died that day – not all of them black – and to talk of the wider context.

We stopped at Vilkazi Street to see the memorial to Hector, and then to the larger memorial with a museum to one side. The museum was full of different perspectives and ideas, if a little text-heavy. It was an intensely moving, fascinating place – so much so that the Dr was quite quiet for the rest of the evening. Seeing it makes it all the more remarkable that the fall of Apartheid didn’t descend into a bloodbath. Those we spoke to all credited that to Nelson Mandela; and they expressed concern that there was still the risk of major violence. There was much discussion (not all of which I followed) about how the BEE policy, despite its best intentions, had widened, not helped, an epidemic skills gap in the country. They await the forthcoming elections with some anxiety.

In the evening we went out to a place near to where my aunt and uncle live for some food. And again it messed up our preconceptions and prejudices about the place. There was a mix of white and black people there, and me and the Dr were both struck by how much more integrated Johannesburg is than either Australia or LA, where the races seemed to much more stick to their own. Even the airport at Johannesburg had hefty tomes trying to reconcile the past (including a book by the Dr’s PhD supervisor); we saw no acknowledgement at all in LA or Australia of their own contributions to racial history. But then I also can’t see the UK producing anything so self-critical on, say, the history of Northern Ireland.

Wild warthog at PilansbergOn Sunday, we had a two-hour trip to the 55,000-hectare Pilanesburg game reserve to the north of Johannesburg and spent the day spotting real, wild hippos, giraffes, impalas, zebras, wildebeests, warthogs and what could have been a crocodile but could have been a log. The aunt and uncle apologised for us not seeing rhino and elephant, but we were very happy.

The Dr surveys the vastness of AfricaI tried to explain the astonishing vastness of the landscape, like the horizon has been extended twice as far. Various people have told me that once you’ve lived in Africa it gets into your blood, and the mother-in-law still hankers for the continent some 30 years after she left Kenya. I can sympathise. There’s something rich and potent about the brick-red soil, the hugeness of space with its wealth of animals and under the soil in gold and platinum. I guess human beings evolved to best fit this landscape, this climate, this altitude and everything else. We’re already making plans to go back, to see more…

Odd thing. The toilets at the park all offered free condoms. The toilets at Melbourne Zoo had special boxes for disposing of needles. Not sure what this signifies.

My cousin G. took us to a bar in the evening, and made us feel old by not knowing that the Rolling Stones’ “Paint it Black” was more her mother’s generation than mine. I managed three bottles of Castle beer before we were back to the house for a fantastic spread of spare ribs and some kind of sweetcorn bake.

The Dr in the villageA quiet day Monday, though we visited the barking mad shopping centre / casino of Montecasino. The whole place is made out like an Italian town, and even the trees and ducks in the river are fake. The ceiling is painted so that half of it’s in “daylight”, the rest at “night”, and I can see when it’s really hot outside it makes sense to hang out in a place like this. But with the constant piped pop music and everything a sell, I was wanting to break out after five minutes. My uncle said it was like the village in the Prisoner – like this was a good thing.

The dire warnings about not bringing your guns into the place, and the security check to get through the door, made me ask about guns in the country. Apparently it's a major problem - people getting shot for beeping bad driving or just for being in the wrong place. Driving is mad too - you don't step on the gas when the lights go green, you pause to let people jump the lights. And the taxi drivers have to be seen to be believed.

Storm, who I chased round the gardenAfter a bit of shopping and chasing the dog round the garden, we made our way to the airport. Plane was two hours late because they’d loaded the wrong baggage on the plane. And then the holiday was all over.

In the taxi from Heathrow, as we got caught up in the tailback behind an accident in Chiswick, I thought how small and squished up the road signs and roads and horizon all seemed. And how pale and cold and unambitious the weather seemed. And how relieved I was to get home and to sleep.