Swan Song, by Edmund Crispin

"There could be no doubt, thought Adam, that the death of Edwin Shorthouse was not much regretted by Peacock or anyone else connected with the production. Adam said as much to Fen.

'I know,' said Fen. 'It seems positively indelicate to be trying to discover his murderer.'" (p. 113)

After the events of The Moving Toyshop - or, chronologically, after the events of Holy Disorders since we're told on page 20 of this book that "the business about a toyshop" was "before the war" - the fourth Gervase Fen is another fast-moving, breezily witty adventure. This time, the mystery centres round a new performance of Wagner's Die Meistersinger, the first since the war and with a disquiet about staging work so beloved of the Nazis. We meet the various operatic characters involved in the opera. Then, just as in The Case of the Gilded Fly (where it was the company in a theatre), one of the most odious of this cast ends up dead.

This time, the death looks like suicide but Fen is not so sure, and the attempted rape of one woman, the attempted murder of another and the sudden death of a man are all tangled up in the case. I think it's all a lot better structured than previous instalments, not least in that Fen takes his time to puzzle out what's gone on rather than sussing it early and then declining to share his deductions. 

There's some confounded cheating - on page 189, Fen causes quite a stir (for the characters and this reader) when he announces that one person killed both the dead men. That person doesn't immediately deny it and we're led to believe they are guilty, only for Fen to then unravel what really happened and how this person is in fact innocent.

There's also something uncomfortable in the treatment of young Judith Haynes, the victim of the attempted rape, both in the immediate aftermath of that and what happens later. I don't think it's very well handled, and it also doesn't sit well in what's otherwise a light, comic novel centred on an ingenious double-puzzle.

The adventure and comedy otherwise work very well. Wilkes the old rogue from The Moving Toyshop making a welcome return to further confound Fen's deductions just for the fun of it. And I loved the unnamed burglar who turns up at an opportune moment to help the sleuth break into a smart house.

"'Doesn't look to me,' said the little man disapprovingly, 'as if there's anything worth pinchin' 'ere. What we want is socialism, so as everyone'll 'ave somethink worth pinchin'." (p. 182)

Doctor Who: 1976

After episode 427: (The Seeds of Doom, part six)
July 1976
<< back to 1975

Doctor Who and the Fish Invasion of London

You can establish the credentials of a Doctor Who fan with a few quick questions. Who is their favourite Doctor? What was the first story they ever saw - and do they know the name of it and when it was broadcast? What episode was first broadcast closest to the day they were born - and do they have to work it out or do they already know?

I was born in June 1976 in the gap between the end of Season 13 (The Seeds of Doom, part six, was first broadcast on 6 March) and the start of Season 14 (The Masque of Mandragora, part one, was first broadcast on 4 September). So I like to think that my birth story is the LP Doctor Who and the Pescatons, released that July.

It was the first Doctor Who story produced in the audio format, and starred the two leads of the show at the time (Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen recorded an episode of the educational radio programme Exploration Earth a few weeks before they recorded The Pescatons, but that episode - "The Time Machine" wasn't broadcast until October).

It's a daft old story - a giant space fish invades London before the Doctor and Sarah Jane can defeat it using special sound. Writer Victor Pemberton reused elements (i.e. the whole plot) of his Second Doctor story Fury from the Deep (1968) - which had itself reused elements of an earlier radio play.

Listening to it again, I realised how similar the format is to a lot of the Doctor Who audio adventures I write now for Big Finish. It's two episodes; it's a mixture of narration and dramatised scenes; there's one guest actor; and it tells an ambitious story that the TV show probably couldn't afford to realise while still trying to emulate the feel of the TV show of the time.

The Pescatons has clearly been written with Tom Baker's Doctor in mind - it's full of his eccentricity and strangeness, and the action scenes are more violent than anything from the Second Doctor's time.

But for all it stars Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen as the Doctor and Sarah Jane, their characters don't quite ring true. The tone is really peculiar. The Doctor's narration is oddly jokey delivery, such as in this scene from episode 2:

The creature reared up; its long, pointed teeth moving in for the attack. For one moment, it looked as though the creature was going to ignore me and claw straight into Sarah Jane and the baby. To regain its attention, I had to do just about everything except turn a cartwheel. Thinking about it, I'm not too sure I didn't even do that. Anything I could lay my hands on I threw at it: stones, dustpan bins, milk bottles, even an old boot somebody had discarded in rather a hurry. But still the creature ignored me and slid closer and closer towards Sarah Jane and the baby.

It might have his voice but this doesn't sound like the Doctor. Today, that sort of thing would usually be picked up and corrected by the script editor and producer, or caught by the unblinking eye that we refer to, in hushed whisper, as "Cardiff". I suspect the Doctor making jokes while a baby was in danger would also be cause for concern.

I don't mean this as any kind of judgement on The Pescatons, just to note the historic moment and show how things have changed. After all, how can you not love a story in which the Doctor saves Sarah Jane and a baby from a giant alien fish by singing "Hello Dolly!"?

Next episode: 1977

AAAGH! at Eurovision

Here's another AAAGH! by me, this one from issue #217 of Doctor Who Adventures, on sale two days before the Eurovision final. Art by Brian Williamson, edited by Paul Lang and Natalie Barnes and posted here by kind permission.

Tomorrow: A good AAAGH! goes to war!

The balloon hoax

Went to see Piccard in Space last night, a new opera by Will Gregory, best known for his work with Goldfrapp. It told the story of Auguste Piccard - inspiration for Professor Calculus in Tintin and, with his brother, for Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek - travelling up to the Stratosphere in 1931, in a balloon of his own design to conduct an experiment on light that would prove Einstein's theory of relativity.

Einstein appeared, wild-haired and womanising, to explain the experiment - though I only understood it because the same light experiment was the subject of Jim Al-Khalili's brilliant documentary, Everything and Nothing, last week.

Piccard got the audience to sing along to the formula for the deviation of time, there were a few good jokes (a big song about a broken barometer leaking mercury that would eat up the aluminium balloon and so kill our heroes undercut by the mercury being 'hoovered' away by low pressure, or Piccard explaining that he is not from Mars but Belgium), and it was all quite fun.

But the departing audience no wiser about what exactly Piccard had proved or how, or even why Newton was made out to be such a villain. So if the plan was to excite and inspire people who wouldn't normally be interested in complicated physics, it didn't exactly work. Worse, the promised Moog synthesisers never really stood out, and I've seen better lab-coated nerdy performances from the Radiophonic Workshop. (That's still a much kinder response than reviews in the Independent and Telegraph.)

But, prompted by the conductor, we followed the performance by traipsing over to Festival Hall to see the real balloon on display. Small, fragile, primitive, making the achievement and the daring to attempt it all the more extraordinary... A real source of wonder.

"Come, do your husband's bidding!"

To the posh singing last night as a first birthday treat for the Dr. Scarlet Opera's Orfeo ed Euridice is on until Saturday at the Bridewell Theatre and very good it is too.

For those who don't know their Greek mythology (or haven't read the Sandman comic), Orfeo has just married Euridice when she only goes and dies. He's a bit miffed about this, so heads down to the Underworld to grab her back. The deal is he can lead her up to Earth again so long as he doesn't look at her until they both back out in the open. And he's not allowed to tell her why he can't look at her, either. So all the way up, she's wheedling and nagging. And he can't help but glance round...

The 1762 operatic version by the splendidly named Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck plonks on a deus ex machina happy ending which maybe misses the whole point (and I presume means this Orpheus doesn't get torn apart by Crazy Ladies). It's a smallish show - three leads and a chorus of five. But that suits baroque opera well, and means the voices and diction is all quite distinct.

It's also an effectively simple production. The only set is a lot of dry ice and a line of hanging branches, through which ghosts can step eerily. The performers wore simple robes, and when the chorus appear as the Furies they've got hoods and masks that made me think of ninjas. Orfeo wears a small dagger in his belt which, until he then wants to use it in Act Three, I thought was some kind of compensation for his being played by a lady.

Oh yes: Orfeo and Euridice are both played by ladies. There is girl-on-girl kissing and everything. Bargain.

Afterwards there were drinks and much earnest discussion of how women are judged by their bits, and then a long trek home through the pouring rain. We got chips and soaked but had a splendid night.

Am off to Brussels tomorrow in the next stage of the Dr's birthday. But two bloggers to follow just at the moment: George Orwell blogs from this day in 1939, on the declaration of war. It's worth working through his earlier posts on the lead-up, too. He's got a canny eye for detail as he scans the various papers, and he also let's you know what the weather's like.

Meanwhile, yesterday in 1666, Samuel Pepys was woken to news of London going up in smoke. It's a terrific, vivid bit of reportage. Though no mention of the role played by the Terileptils.