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

Doctor Who Magazine #632

The new issue of Doctor Who Magazine is out today, and features another Who Connections piece by me, this time on Star Trek (pp. 44-49), examining how and when it first influenced Doctor Who and when, exactly, Doctor Who then influenced Star Trek. For this, I spoke to Star Trek books writers Diane Duane and Barbara Hambly, and to Jean-Marc Lofficier.

If this is of interest, you might like to read my posts on the anthologies Star Trek by James Blish, Star Trek 2 by Blish, the original novel Spock Must Die! by Blish, and also The Disappearing Future edited by George Hay.

The new issue of DWM also includes a glowing review by Jamie Lenman of Space Security Service - Bret Vyon Lives, the audio set on which I am producer and co-writer, which is released by Big Finish next week.

I took pictures of the Star Trek and early Doctor Who novelisations to illustrate my article, and here are some of them for those that like that sort of thing.

Talk on David McKee, Mr Benn and Elmer

You can now watch my talk, "The David McKee Sketchbook - The Origins of Mr Benn and Elmer", on YouTube:

The talk was given on Friday evening for the friends of the St Barbe Museum + Art Gallery in Lymington, which is home to the exhibition "Elmer and Mr Benn: the magic of David McKee" until 6 September. It's a lovely exhibition, full of amazing original artwork - so bright and colourful in real life, and full of detail and interest. I would like to stand at the back and watch the expressions on people's faces as they enter.

I helped write some of the panels for the exhibition, as well as a piece for the Sunday Telegraph, "Where the strange, secret world of Mr Benn came from".

NB in the Q&A at the end of the talk, I mention Ralph Steadman when I of course mean Gerald Scarfe! But another example of how people working on these different things kept an eye on each other's work: Cliver Juster (film editor and producer on Mr Benn and the King Rollo Films output) told me that Oliver Postgate was a big fan of Towser.

Talk on David Whitaker and Terrance Dicks

The talk I gave on Doctor Who writers David Whitaker and Terrance Dicks for the York Festival of Ideas earlier this month is now up in full on YouTube for your delight:

The books mentioned at the end are my biography David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television (2023), and my archive-investigating analyses of the Doctor Who stories The Evil of the Daleks and The Edge of Destruction for the Black Archive range. 

It is my 50th birthday today, so you should buy at least one of these.

My new biography, Written by Terrance Dicks, will be out later in the year. I am busy writing it right now.

Telegraph article on Coronation Street's dry-run episodes

I am in the Telegraph again, this time with a piece about the photographs that recently came to light of the never-broadcast dry-run episodes of Coronation Street before the series aired.

• The secret Coronation Street pilot episode lost for 66 years (£).

For this, I spoke to actors William Roache and Anne Cunningham, who appeared in the dry-run of Episode 1 before going on to star in the series, as well as John Tomlinson from Corripedia, former Corrie archivist Daran Little who wrote The Road to Coronation Street (2010), Katherine Balmer from Shutterstock which posted the images and fan Lewis Pringle who spotted their significance.

There were two things I didn't have space to get into in the article. First, Shutterstock captioned these images "telesnaps". But "tele-snaps", with a hyphen, were the brand name of the service offered by John Cura, who took photographs of TV programmes as they aired to provide cast and crew with a permanent record of productions otherwise lost to the ether. These images of the dry-run were produced in-house by Granada Television, not by Cura, so they're technically not tele-snaps.

Normally, us historians of TV refer to images of this sort not by Cura are referred to as off-air images. But these dry-runs weren't broadcast so the images aren't "off-air", but taken from internal monitors in the Granada building. So: what should we call them? Daran Little called them "screen grabs", which I've not been able to better as yet.

Secondly, the first image in the sequence is a title card saying "Coronation Street" in what appears to be the TV set. That suggests that the dry run was missing the iconic opening shots of real-life Archie Street in Salford, which John Tomlinson thinks was filmed later. He says the dry run probably lacked the famous theme music, too, quoting an interview with composer Eric Spear: "They’d left the music to the last minute," Eric Spear said in 1965. To inspire him, the director took Spear to Archie Street, in the rain. "Suddenly the sun broke through the clouds and the director said, 'That's the music I want'." [Source]

Presumably, in response to the dry run, the producers felt that a filmed sequence was needed to help convince viewers that this was a real street and not just a TV studio, with the music setting the bitter-sweet tone. That helped make the programme more convincing and compelling as soon as it started.

A Hard Day’s Night, by Samira Ahmed

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

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

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

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

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

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

More of me on Beatles books:

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

Star Trek 2, by James Blish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The book is dedicated,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"they wanted to brain us” (p. 74).

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

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

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

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

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

The adventure will continue in Star Trek 3...

Doctor Who Magazine #628

The new issue of the official Doctor Who Magazine is out today, featuring an exclusive extra comic and a  preview of the two episodes of The Daleks' Masterplan thought lost since 1965 which will be up on iPlayer from tomorrow. Exciting.

I've also contributed the first of a new series, "Who Connections" (pp. 30-33), this initial one inspired by a the chance discovery of an extraordinary connection between Stooky Bill - the puppet seen in The Giggle (2023) - and a character from a Doctor Who story more than 40 years before. There is also mention of Star Trek and EastEnders.

Star Trek (1), by James Blish

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

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

The back cover then adds a third leading character:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But then there’s the intriguing dedication: 

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

What is that about, then?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“cock on his skull”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the story continues in Star Trek 2…

Spock Must Die!, by James Blish

A matter transporter in Star Trek works like a fax machine that destroys the original. That, effectively, is the case put by Dr Leonard McCoy at the start of this original Star Trek novel:

“Every time we put a man through the transporter for the first time, we commit murder” (p. 6).

The adventure that follows seems to suggest he is right. The crew of Enterprise is alerted to an emergency on the planet Organia (previously seen in the TV episode Errand of Mercy, the first to feature Klingons). Our heroes are keen to investigate but even when travelling at a breathless Warp 6, Organia is six months’ flight time away. 

Scotty and Spock plan to get round this by extending the range of the transporter using tachyons and hand-waving. If things go to plan, the person who steps into the transporter will remain on Enterprise but a perfect duplicate will be created on Organia, able to carry out reconnaissance and report back. They will then remerge with the tachyon universe for reasons of plot convenience — we wouldn’t want two versions of the same person, would we?

However, something goes wrong and there ends up being two identical Spocks on Enterprise. Captain Kirk names them “Spock One” and “Spock Two” and determines that one must be destroyed. That decision is made before we realise that one of the Spocks is evil and working with the Klingons, but we don’t know which. Both Spocks behave in ways that seem out of character, so how can Kirk deduce who to kill?

This is a fun, fast-moving and exciting adventure. For all it is told on an epic scale over a six-month period (from star date 4011.9 to 4205.5), it feels like a TV episode of Star Trek from the original series. The high-concept idea at the heart of it, the high-emotion stakes and the, ahem, questionable science and ethics all feel authentic. It presumes we are familiar with the TV show, too, as there are no descriptions of characters — not even mentioning Spock’s ears.

This may have been in response to the first original Star Trek novel, Mission to Horatius by Mack Reynolds (1968), which was written expressly for children and is generally considered to be not very good. More than that, the then producers of Star Trek complained about the racially coded ways in which Sulu and Uhura were described. I wonder if in writing Spock Must Die!, the second original novel, James Blish was instructed not to describe them at all.

Referring to Uhura as “the Bantu girl” (p. 9) conveys something of her ethnic background, though it’s not very specific — Bantu languages are spoken over a very wide area. It’s not a connection gleaned from TV episodes, either, but lore surely added by Blish based on “uhura” being a Bantu word (for “freedom”). Yet the same reasoning would make Kirk and McCoy both Scottish. Even so, other writers seem to have picked up on this and referred to Uhura as Bantu in later novels etc. 

That’s also true of another bit of lore here. On p. 2, Kirk recalls McCoy’s reasons for joining Star Fleet (a divorce) and the name of his daughter, Joanna. This isn’t from a TV episode; the character Joanna McCoy was devised for TV and then not used, yet she was added to the series “bible” issued to writers and is mentioned on p. 124 of The Making of Star Trek by Stephen E Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry (1968). Blish must have drawn from one of these sources and decided to make Joanna canonical. She has since appeared or been referenced in various novels and other media. Spock Must Die! might not be the first original novel of Star Trek but it is the first that other writers then built on. 

Then there’s stuff where Blish applies fixes to things seen and heard on screen. For example, he tells us that Montgomery Scott’s Scottish accent, “came out only under stress” (p. 3). On another occasion we’re told that Scotty’s,

“English [accent] was as high, white and cold as his terminology” (p. 71).

I’m not sure Scotty ever sounded English on TV. Besides, Blish pointing out the inconsistency made me spot when he is inconsistent himself, such as when Scotty starts all Brigadoon and then trails off:

“An’ it’s oft before lang an’ lang that I’ve cursed the designer who thought it’d be cute to put no pockets in these uniforms” (p. 99).

The plot of Spock Must Die! is woven from the established lore of the TV series, so that there are frequent footnotes telling us to refer to specific novelisations (also written by Blish). He shares a number of facts about the operations of Star Fleet, such as that there are 17 Federation starbases (p. 8), the Enterprise has a crew of more than 430 (p. 22) and that more than a third of them are female (p. 109).

We learn that Uhura is fluent in Eurish, the language of James Joyce (pp. 48-49), that Kirk practices his quick draw in the mirror (p. 61) and that, according to McCoy,

“The retraining of left-handed children to become right-handed — in complete contradiction to the orders the poor kids’ brains are issuing to their muscles — badly bollixes up their central nervous systems, and, among other bad outcome, is the direct and only cause of habitual stuttering” (p. 64).

Scotty also uses the term “bollixed”, on p. 99 and p. 103, a term never used on screen (until Miles O'Brien says “bollocks” in an episode of Deep Space Nine). Spock has a a gift for “telempathy” (p. 115), i.e. picking up on someone else’s feelings from a distance, predating Counsellor Troi’s own similar gifts in Star Trek: The Next Generation. At the end of the book, the Klingons and their worlds are banned from spaceflight for a thousand years (p. 112), and Uhura learns that a lieutenant at Star Fleet wants her to teach him Eurish. Her response is:

“I hope he’s cute” (p. 117).

It’s a cheery note on which to close this perilous adventure, and we leave the Enterprise to continue its voyages. The irony is that on screen these had already ended; the last episode of Star Trek was filmed in January 1969 and the series was formally cancelled the following month. The indicia of this battered paperback says it was first published in the USA and Canada in February 1970, and that this is a second printing. Mine is a US edition, with the price of 60¢ printed on the spine. Yet I think it may be a UK-issued edition.

I’ve seen some accounts say that this novel and Blish’s novelisations of multiple TV scripts of Star Trek were not available in the UK until the Corgi editions first published in 1972. So I was a bit surprised by the author’s note at the start of Spock Must Die! First, he suggests that this original novel,

“might make a television episode, or several, some day. Although the American network (bemused, as usual, by a rating service of highly dubious statistical validity) has canceled the series, it began to run in Great Britain in mid-June 1969 [actually, 12 July], and the first set of adaptations was published concurrently in London by Corgi Books. If the show is given a new lead on [sic] life through the popularity of British reruns, it would not be the first such instance in television history.” (p. -1)

I don’t think Corgi published new versions of the book at this stage; instead, they seem to have distributed Bantam-published US stock with a sticker added giving a price in shillings and pence. I’ve got a copy of the first novelisation, with 50¢ printed on the cover and a sticker for 3/6 to one side (see image, right). 

So, when were Star Trek books available in the UK, exactly? I looked up the details in trade magazine the Bookseller:

Star Trek (aka Star Trek 1) by James Blish, comprising 7 TV stories

• Published in the US by Bantam tab 50¢, January 1967
• Issued in the UK by Bantam at 3 shillings and sixpence, 21 April 1967 (source: Bookseller, 15 April 1967, p. 1,938).
• Issued again in the UK by Bantam at 3/6, 18 July 1969 (source: Bookseller, 12 July 1969, p. 134), to coincide with Star Trek first being aired in the UK for the first time, from Saturday 12 July.

Star Trek 2 by James Blish, comprising 8 stories

• Published in the US by Bantam at 50¢, February 1968
• Issued in the UK by Bantam at 3/6, August 1969 (source: Bookseller, 16 August 1969, p. 1,384), alongside Star Trek 3.

Star Trek 3 by James Blish, comprising 7 stories

• Published in the US by Bantam at 50¢, April 1969
• Issued in the UK by Bantam at 3/6, August 1969 (source: Bookseller, 16 August 1969, p. 1,384), alongside Star Trek 2.

Spock Must Die! by James Blish, an original novel

• Published in the UK by Bantam at 60¢, February 1970
• Issued in the UK by Bantam at 4 shillings, April 1970 (source: Bookseller, 25 April 1970, p. 2,174).

Star Trek 4 by James Blish, comprising 6 stories

• Published in the US by Bantam at 75¢, July 1971
• Issued in the UK by Bantam at 25p, October 1971 (source: Bookseller, 23 October 1971, p. 2,076).

Star Trek 5 by James Blish, comprising 7 stories

• Published in the US by Bantam at 75¢, February 1972
• Issued in the UK by Bantam at 25p, June 1972 (source: Bookseller, 24 June 1972, p. 2,696).

New, Corgi-editions of these books were then published in the UK 1972, with Corgi editions of Star Trek 6-11 to follow.

We know Doctor Who script editor Terrance Dicks — about whom I'm writing a biography — had a collection of Star Trek books which he loaned to his writers. For example, on 8 March 1972, he wrote to Bob Baker and Dave Martin with notes on a storyline and added, “Where are my Star Trek books?” (source: p. 102 of the “09-04 The Mutants Production Documentation” PDF included on the Doctor Who Season 9 Blu-ray box-set).

Now I know what books those were, I can better trace the influence of Star Trek on Doctor Who in the early 1970s. More on this to follow.

• See also: me on Doctor Mirabilis by James Blish (1964)

Doctor Who missing episodes found - in the Telegraph

I've written a piece for the Telegraph about the thrilling discovery, announced today, of two episodes of Doctor Who that have been lost for the past 61 years. They are, as I'm sure you're aware, The Nightmare Begins and Devil's Planet, aka episodes 1 and 3 of The Daleks' Master Plan, which will be up on iPlayer for us all to watch from 4 April.

In December, I wrote a piece for the Telegraph on episode 7 of the same story on its 60th anniversary. An age ago, when the last discoveries of lost Doctor Who were made, I wrote a blog post about why finding missing episodes is such a thing.

See the Film is Fabulous website for more details about the new discovery, and to donate to their valiant work. They have also posted an interview with Peter Purves about the find. It is rather moving to see Peter's delight. 

I also enjoyed the special episode of the Doctor Who Missing Episodes Podcast about these finds. You might also like the special episodes from Dalek 63•88, one on The Nightmare Returns and one on Devil's Planet.

Oh, and these newly discovered episodes include the first appearance of Bret Vyon as played by Nicholas Courtney. Later this year, thanks to Big Finish, Bret Vyon lives.

DWM The Yearbook 2026

The latest Doctor Who Magazine special edition is out today, The Yearbook 2026. Among its wonders is something by me:

How You Watch Who (pp. 46-50)

Simulcasts on iPlayer and spoilers on social media have changed the way we watch and engage with Doctor Who - but how? Simon Guerrier investigates...

For this, I spoke to several different fans: 26 year-old Erica Tucker (watching since Rose in 2005); Sam Ripley, Luc Fawcett, Alfie Giffen and Charlie Gaskin from Warwick University's Who Soc; his great eminence Jeremy Bentham; and 9 year-old Olivia who has been watching since The Church on Ruby Road in 2023.

Jeremy boggled my mind by telling me that there are only four episodes of Doctor Who he's not seen - ones he missed on original transmission that are now among the 97 episodes currently missing from the archive. I list what those four are in the article. 

But since then I've spoken to someone who has seen every episode of Doctor Who. Yes, I am arranging for the preservation / scanning of their brain...

Box of Delights, by Richard Marson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blake's 7 in the Telegraph

I've written a piece for the Telegraph about Blake's 7 (£), in response to yesterday's story in Deadline about a new reboot which is being led by directors Peter Hoar and Michael Bouch, and my friend / sometime boss Jason Haigh-Ellery from Big Finish.

The editor thought better of my original title, "We can dance again."

ETA, the piece was also published in the print version of the Daily Telegraph on 24 January under the title "My open letter to the makers of the new Blake's 7 reboot" (Review, pp. 8-9.

In 2008-09, I was partly involved in a previous effort to reboot Blake's 7, and wrote The Dust Run and The Trial, a two-part audio story that starred Carrie Dobro and Benedict Cumberbatch. 

Since then, I've written and script-edited a number of Blake's 7 audio plays for Big Finish, featuring cast members from the original TV series. Here is the full list:

• The Dust Run and The Trial (B7 Media, 2009), later broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Extra and released as part of A Rebellion Reborn (Big Finish, 2013)
• The Turing Test, featured in The Liberator Chronicles Volume 1 (Big Finish, 2012) 
• The Magnificent Four, featured in The Liberator Chronicles Volume 2 (Big Finish, 2012)
• Logic, featured in The Liberator Chronicles Volume 5 (Big Finish, 2013)
• Spy, featured in The Liberator Chronicles Volume 7 (Big Finish, 2014)
• President, featured in The Liberator Chronicles Volume 8 (Big Finish, 2014)
• Remnants (Big Finish, 2015)
• The Offer (as script editor), featured in The Terra Nostra (Big Finish, 2022)
• No Name, featured in Allies and Enemies (Big Finish Productions, 2022)

We could be heroes. Or villains.