A Riot of Writers, by Terrance Dicks

First published on 16 July 1992, this was the second of a series of illustrated, non-fiction comedy titles written by Terrance Dicks for Piccadilly Press. 

Terrance had written numerous children’s books for Piccadilly since it was launched in 1984, and before that worked with the company’s founder, Brenda Gardner, at both Target Books and Pepper Press. This run of comedy titles seem to have been a conscious effort to try something a bit different, aimed at a broader and more grown-up audience than the usual fare. 

The first, Europe United (published 10 October 1991) was well timed given the imminent signing of the Maastricht Treaty, and was well received, too. In the Sunday Times, Harry Enfield called it, “The best Eurobook … bright and amusing … intelligent and great fun.” In the Guardian, Stephanie Nettle said it had, “A snappily amusing style”. They’re cited on the back of this follow-up.

As with Europe United, A Riot of Writers was illustrated by Ray Jelliffe, a former creative director in a large advertising agency who now, in his retirement, kept busy illustrating books and greetings cards. My suspicion, based on previous books by Terrance, is that the writer didn’t brief the illustrator. Instead, Jelliffe would have received the manuscript and then devised his cartoons, as a sort of commentary on the text.

The book is a guide to what Terrance calls “Eng Lit”, as though this is revision for an exam. It provides potted biographies of 30 writers, from Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400) to Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961), or to JRR Tolkien (1892-1973) if reckoning by the subject latest to die. Of this 30, there are four entries on women: Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters (sharing a chapter), George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. 

It’s interesting to compare Terrance’s choice of canonical authors with the much shorter list compiled by FR Leavis, Terrance’s tutor at Downing College, Cambridge, in the 1950s. In The Great Tradition (1948), Leavis decided that the canon of Great Authors comprised Austen, Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad, though he also allowed a single book by Dickens, Hard Times. Terrance skips James and Conrad entirely, and clearly doesn’t think much of Eliot, though conceding that Middlemarch is a “masterpiece”.

Throughout, the style is chatty and irreverent, reminiscent of the later Horrible Histories books by Terry Deary (the initial pair of which were first published a year after this book, in June 1993). The humour is a bit end-of-the-pier, akin to Terrance’s early days in radio comedy, and sometimes a bit bawdy. For example, in the entry on Byron, we’re told:

“Fashionable hostesses were delighted to have him — and not just for dinner” (p. 46).

There are jokes, too, about bisexuality and homosexuality (the Bloomsbury group, for example, had enjoyed a “gay old time”), which all seems a bit mature for a title from a children’s publisher by a well-known children’s author, even if this isn’t explicitly marketed as a children’s book. It’s a kind of humour, and a book, from another time.

Terrance acknowledge’s Kipling’s chauvinism, and provides examples, but his attitude to Carrie Kipling is a bit judgemental.

“Kipling married Carrie — or perhaps she married him. She certainly ran his life from then on, doing his accounts, fixing his appointments, protecting him from visitors” (p. 120).

The sense is of a domineering figure, rather than this being something Kipling might welcome, or need. There is something similar going on in descriptions of both Chaucer’s Wife of Bath (p. 3) and Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth (p. 7) as being “an early feminist” — the gag feels all the more condescending because it’s repeated so soon. 

The only mention of Henry James in the whole book is his reference to George Elliot as “magnificently ugly” (p. 83). Yes, this is Terrance reporting what was said at the time, but other authors are are not judged on their looks. In his entry on George Bernard Shaw, for example, he could have cited the famous story about Isadora Duncan suggesting that a child of theirs would inherit her beauty and his brains; Shaw quipped that it might be the other way round.

Terrance mentions that The Invisible Man by HG Wells was adapted for television, but not that he worked on this production. Several of the authors in his canon here were dramatised under Terrance’s era as script editor then producer of the BBC-1 Classic Serials: Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Doyle, Kipling and Wells. 

I’ve seen paperwork in which Terrance says he didn’t think Austen was suitable for the Sunday teatime serial, so it’s interesting to see here his evident admiration of her work. He also admires Shaw for the strident women at the forefront of many plays. Terrance, of course, borrowed from Pygmalion in Doctor Who, with the character arc of Jo Grant. Like Eliza Doolittle, Jo outgrows her tutor and leaves him heartbroken. But Terrance often downplayed his role in that and the creation of Sarah Jane Smith, who began life stridently championing women’s lib to sisters in the middle ages and in outer space. 

He also quotes a line from Shaw’s Arms and the Man with approval — it’s a very Terrance sentiment:

“You can always tell an old soldier … The young ones carry pistols and cartridges, the old ones grub” (p. 108)

There’s a joke on p. 10 at the expense of Jonathan Miller, who had repeatedly criticised the Classic Serials, Terrance apparently still rankled about it. Some of what’s here helpfully confirms my theories about Terrance’s views on particular authors or modes of writing. I’m delighted to find, for example, that he did have a contemporary drama in mind when commissioning his first Classic Serial, Kipling’s Stalky & Co:

“The Grange Hill of its day, it was severely criticised for the ‘horrible vileness’ of its picture of English public school life” (p. 121).

His thoughts on other writers are interesting, too. While Terrance was at Cambridge, his tutor FR Leavis published DH Lawrence, Novelist (1955), and I’ve evidence that Leavis passed on his enthusiasm for Lawrence to his students. Yet Terrance was not persuaded, or reassessed Lawrence in the years afterward.

He speaks — presumably from first-hand experience — of the “well-thumbed, smuggled-in copies” of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that were all that were available until Penguin published its paperback edition in 1960. Then he shares his judgment: 

“Lawrence describes their love-making in graphic detail, using well-known four-letter words in the process. Despite its lurid reputation Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a worthwhile attempt to describe physical love in plain and honest language. To be honest, it doesn’t really work. Tweeness keeps creeping in. The couple refer to their respective naughty bits as ‘John Thomas’ and ‘Lady Jane’ and there’s an incident with a daisy-chain you’ll never see demonstrated on Gardeners’ World.” (p. 145)

Then there’s his assessment of Lawrence as a whole:

“He was a genuine pioneer, and his reputation has suffered ever since. Despite some weird, almost fascist ideas about the deep dark stirrings in the blood, and the need for an intellectual elite, Lawrence at his best is a wonderful writer. The characters he creates, their emotional relationships and the worlds they live in are real and solid, completely convincing.” (p. 144)

There are several places here where I disagree with Terrance and a couple of occasions where he’s misremembered the details of a classic text (he says, of The Time Machine, that the Eloi prey on Morlocks, not the other way round). But this is a fascinating account of what Terrance thought constituted great writing: basically, a good story grounded in real characters and real situations. For example, he suggests that the power of The Hobbit, and why it still sits above its many imitators, is not the epic imaginative fantasy, but the relatable stuff.

“Small, tubby and timid, caught up in the wars of great men and magical beings, the hobbit makes the most reluctant of heroes. All he asks is to survive and to get home to a blazing fire, a pipe, a flagon of ale and four square meals a day.” (p. 149)

It’s exactly what I’ve seen in his Doctor Who novelisations. You can judge the best of English literature by its meals.

***

For more of this kind of thing, see my big list of the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks, with links to posts about them. My biography, Written by Terrance Dicks, will be published by Ten Acre Books later this year.

Here are some posts about books by authors in Terrance’s canon of Eng Lit:

• Agnes Grey, by Anne Brontë
• The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë
• David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens
• Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens
• The Sign of the Four, by Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Jungle Book, by Rudyard Kipling
• Kim, by Rudyard Kipling
• A Short History of the World, by HG Wells

Stalky & Co, by Rudyard Kipling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See also:

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

Pretty ugly - piece on Daumier for Art UK

Art UK has posted a new piece by me, "Pretty ugly: Honoré Daumier drawing for print".

If that sort of thing is of interest, here are 10 posts with me rabbiting on about pictures:

• Daumier, by Sarah Symmons
• Don Quixote by Cervantes and Rob Davis
• Van Gogh's paintings in Doctor Who
• Augustus John by Michael Holroyd
• Seurat and the Science of Painting, by William Innes Homer
• Mr Lear – A Life of Art and Nonsense, by Jenny Uglow
• Manet to Picasso at the National Gallery
• Sickert in Venice at Dulwich Picture Gallery
• Mrs King, my 2011 talk for the National Portrait Gallery
• Doctor Who: Portraits in Time and Space, my 2010 talk for the National Portrait Gallery

Kim, by Rudyard Kipling

I said a couple of years ago that the experience of reading A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles was a bit like a conversation with my late father, as it was the last novel he finished reading and the last book he recommended to me before he died. I’ve felt something similar reading Kim by Rudyard Kipling. 

As with Bellarion by Rafael Sabatini, this was a childhood favourite of Terrance Dicks, about whom I am writing a biography (in case I’ve not mentioned that fact). Kim was also a favourite of my late grandfather, who served in India in the 1930s. He enthused to me more than once that he’d been in Lahore and seen Kim’s gun.

First published in 1901, Kim is the classic tale of a streetwise young orphan boy who we first encounter, in the opening sentence and “in defiance of municipal orders”, sat astride the great gun Zam-Zammah, which is mounted on a brick platform outside the Lahore Museum. We’re then told that whoever holds the gun holds the Punjab, so that it is “always first of the conqueror’s loot”, and that 12 year-old Kim has taken his seat on it by dethroning another boy.

In just these first three sentences, we see Kim defy instructions in a region clearly subject to strict controls; this region is subject to conflict and changing regimes; there is some parallel implied between such conflict and Kim’s own spats with other children. Character, place, context, analogy, intrigue — deftly hooking our interest.

A big appeal of this book, I think, is the way it so simply and vividly conjures a sense of India. There are no long speeches or info-dumped bits of narration to explain what things are, how they work or what the author thinks of it all. Instead, it’s conveyed by a steady flow of small nuggets, almost like asides. These engage all the senses: colour, smell and texture, as well as the idiosyncrasies of the spoken word — the way one character says “thatt” with a closing double-T, or “veeree” and “effeecient”.

This immersive world we hear and smell and taste is lively and often comic. Yet Kim navigates the complex bustle of it all with pluck and skill, an Indian Artful Dodger. At first that seems to be because this is the world he grew up in as an orphan; his engaging cheekiness is a strategy to survive, “Friend of all the World” (the phrase used about him a lot) because he has no family to fall back on.

But then, a few chapters in, he learns his past: Kimball O’Hara is the white son of a dead Irish soldier and — to the Indians — a Sahib. Though he still lives among Indians, and often passes for one, even his closest Indian friends acknowledge this difference. On learning of Kim’s background, the old lama to whom he has been chela or assistant insists that the boy must now have an education, and of the highest quality. This is more than selfless piety; there is something magical in what happened next. Until now, the old man has has needed Kim to beg food and lodgings for them both; now the lama convinces Colonel Creighton of the British Army that he can pay for the best schooling money can buy — and the money duly arrives.

Creighton is another benevolent figure, though very different in background and attitude to the lama. Hetakes Kim under his wing, organises school and extracurricular lessons in spycraft, but also turns an indulgent eye when need be. This happens not least in school holidays and when Kim’s formal schooling ends, whereupon he slips off his restrictive English clothes, adopts his former attire as a native and heads off for more adventures with the lama. 

Such changes of outfit, referred to as disguises, are highly effective. Even the shrewd lama doesn’t recognise Kim when he is thus transformed. On another occasion, Kim helps an agent working for the British to escape from enemies in close pursuit by hurriedly whipping up some make-up from left-over ash and other oddments.

This kind of thing is a staple of adventure fiction. Sherlock Holmes is also a master of disguise — he can pass anywhere in the capital and is apparently a Friend to all of London. Or there is James Bond, who, in short story “For Your Eyes Only”, can pass fluently as an American so long as he doesn’t use the word “actually”. In the Bond film You Only Live Twice, screenplay by Roald Dahl, Bond is made-up in yellowface so he can live undercover on an island in Japan within plain sight of the baddies.

Admittedly, the bad guys don’t seem remotely fooled and there’s an attempt on Bond’s life on his first night on the island. Likewise, in his introduction to my Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition of Kim, Edward Said is not convinced by Kim’s own prowess at disguise, or by claims of real-life white protagonists doing this sort of thing.

“Was there ever a native fooled by the blue or green-eyed Kims or [TE] Lawrences who passed among the inferior races as agent adventurers? I doubt it” (p. 44)

This reminded me of real-life agent Colonel Bailey, undercover in Central Asia just after the First World War, with the Bolsheviks in hot pursuit:

“I decided to go to the house of an engineer named Andreyev whom I had met once or twice in the early days of my time in Tashkent and who, I thought, would be sympathetic. The house stood in a small garden. I walked up and rang the bell. The door was opened by a girl whom I had also met previously. I hoped she would not see through my disguise of beard and Austrian uniform. She gave no sign and said she would call Andreyev. I said to him in Russian: ‘Do you know who I am?’ He replied in English: ‘I suppose you are Colonel Bailey.’ ‘It is clever of you to recognize me,’ I said. He replied: ‘The girl who opened the door told me who you were.’ This was bad new as she was famous for being the most unrestrained chatterbox in the town.” (FM Bailey, Mission to Tashkent, p. 134)

That real-life memoir is packed with incidents in which things go badly wrong, or don’t work out as planned, or chance conspires against Bailey and his compatriots. He damages his leg; he is told what he needs is a massage, but the only masseuse is a terrible gossip who will surely blow his cover; he perseveres with a limp but it makes him distinctive. In a lot of this, Bailey scrapes through as much by luck as judgment.

In Kim, chance is at the service of our hero. By chance, he happens into the very regiment in which his late father served, which by chance includes officers who knew Kimball O’Hara Senior and feel an obligation to his son. On several adventures, he by chance bumps into people he already knows who can help him. A secret message is given to him just in time not to fall into the hands of an enemy; he delivers it just in time and to the right person. It has exactly the expected effect.

It is all a bit straightforward in a book so full of colour and incident, and so many richly drawn characters. Kim has two plot threads going on at once: he aids the old lama in looking for a river as seen in a dream, and he is educated as a British subject and potential spy. While Kim’s three years at school mean a pause in his travels with the lama, there’s little sense of the two threads, the two very different worlds Kim is part of, ever being in conflict. That’s partly because Kipling glosses over Kim’s schooling, more interested in what he gets up to during the holidays and afterwards. (My sense from Stalky & Co is that Kipling saw school as something to be endured rather than enjoyed.)

In fact, there’s no sense here of any innate conflict in the fact of the British being in India. When we met an Indian officer who was an eye-witness to the real-life uprising of 1857 (here, the “Mutiny”), he speaks of a “madness” that consumed his fellows so that they killed the Sahibs’ wives and children. It was an aberration, without cause. There’s no suggestion, no contrary voice, here or anywhere else in the novel that perhaps not everyone is happy with the British presence in India. Agents of other nations, such as the French and Russians, must be stopped, but the British are entitled.

Without that tension, there is nothing to stop Kim from achieving both his aims: the lama finds his river and Kim serves the mother country by foiling a Russian plot, providing evidence on paper of what the villains were about. The sense is that he will continue to flourish in both worlds. I wonder what became of him: aged 15 years and eight months when the novel was published in 1901, he would have been 63 at the time of Partition in 1947. What kind of eye-witness account would Kim have offered?

In his introduction, Edward Said compares Kim to contemporary novels such as Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, in which the protagonist has optimistic dreams and ideals to begin with but is crushed by grim reality. Kim undergoes no such disillusionment. Indeed, he goes to posh school, is trained and works as a spy, and yet remains largely unchanged. At the end of the novel, he is still the cheeky boy who sat astride the gun at the start; he’s just learned a few more tricks.

In opening, I said that the novel simply and vividly conjures its setting, but in being so uncritical it is highly simplistic. It badly lacks some voice of dissent, some challenge to the worldview. In stark contrast to the perils of real-life Mission to Tashkent, in Kim the Great Game of Imperialism in India is literally that — a game in a kind of playground version of India, with dressing up and puzzles as diversions from boring old school. 

I can also see why that proved so intoxicating to generations of readers, not least those directed into certain kinds of schools to be shaped into certain kinds of servants of Empire. The idea that they might escape for occasional larks, that they might endure the process unchanged, that the world awaiting them could be exciting and fun…

It’s not true. But it’s a very good trick.

(I’ve further thoughts on why this book appealed so much to Terrance Dicks in particular, and what he drew from it in his own writing and in editing other people’s work; I’ll save that for the biography…) 

See also:

• Me on The Jungle Book by Kipling

The Great March West, by Terrance Dicks

This book has been more of a challenge than previous entries in the list of 236 books by Terrance Dicks. It is not as well known as many of his other titles, so let’s get ourselves up to speed care of the back-cover blurb:

“Rob MacGregor wants desperately to leave home and join the new Canadian Mounted Police Force. Their first expedition is to raid Fort Whoop-Up, centre of the thriving but illegal whisky trade, and Rob determines to go with them.

He becomes a spy for the Mounties and quickly discovers that their scout is a traitor, in league with the Indians, and treacherously planning the massacre of the whole expedition. Rob’s near death at the hands of the Sioux, his perilous fight with Running Fox, and finally the attack on the fort, bring the story to a thrilling climax.

This is the first of a new exciting adventure series featuring MacGregor of the Mounties.”

The tenth novel by Terrance Dicks was his first original published work of fiction, in that it’s not based on pre-existing material as with his novelisations. It was released on 28 January 1976, simultaneously in hardback by Allan Wingate’s imprint Longbow and in paperback by Tandem’s imprint, Target. 

(These subsidiaries were all part of Howard & Wyndham, who seem to have set up multiple companies, imprints and whatnot with the sole purpose of vexing your humble scribe.)

When exactly did Terrance write this book?

Our first clue comes from an interview with him in issue 3 of the US/Canadian fanzine Mark II (ed. Lora Lyn Mackie aka Lyn Nicholls), published in the first couple of months of 1980. Asked about the Mounties books, Terrance said: 

“The inspiration was not mine, but the first Target editor’s, Richard Henwood. I have great affection for the books, and enjoyed writing them and was very pleased that they were well received in Canada.”

As we’ve seen, Henwood left Target in April 1974 — Terrance had a meeting with Henwood’s successor, Mike Glover, on 30 April. So the Mounties series was conceived a good 18 months ahead of publication.

This, of course, coincided with Terrance leaving his staff job at the BBC as script editor of Doctor Who. My guess is that Henwood came up with the idea of the Mounties books to support Terrance in his new freelance career. 

The series may also have been part of a drive by the publishing house to expand into further English-speaking territories. Target opened offices in South Africa, New Zealand and Australia, their addresses given in the back of Doctor Who and the Giant Robot, published 13 March 1975. Perhaps the company, or Henwood, had an eye on the Canadian market; perhaps they thought Westerns featuring a policeman in the service of Queen Victoria might do well in other Commonwealth countries.

Whatever the case, either this new series of books was formally commissioned by Henwood before he left the company or Terrance, at that first meeting with Glover, had to convince him to continue with the project. 

I’ve worked on stuff commissioned by one person but delivered to their successor. In my experience, they honour whatever was agreed with all the best intentions. But sometimes there is a tendency for stuff they commissioned themselves, even subsequently, to take precedence. 

The outcome of that first meeting with Mike Glover was that Terrance started work on the novelisation Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons, which he delivered at the end of May 1974. In June, he met with Glover again to discuss the ongoing Doctor Who list, and the decision seems to have been made there for him to write Doctor Who and the Giant Robot next, which would be brought forward in the schedule and published before the book he’d just delivered. He and Glover were understandably keen to get a Fourth Doctor novelisation on the shelves as close as possible to the broadcast of his first story on screen.

If we apply the same 7.5-month lead-time as per later books (detailed in a previous post), Terrance must have delivered the manuscript for Doctor Who and the Giant Robot around the end of July 1974. As I said in that previous post, I think he delivered his next novelisation, Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders, months later at the end of February 1975, as it was published 7.5 months later on 16 October 1975. As detailed in that post, I think Terrance was pretty busy throughout the rest of 1975. The big gap in his schedule is in late 1974 and that first month of the new year.

Into that gap, we can add the Doctor Who stage play Seven Keys to Doomsday, which must have been completed by the end of November at the very latest, given that casting was complete by 5 December, according to a report in the Stage (p. 5).

We also know from Terrance’s spiral-bound notebook how long it took him to write his third Mounties novel: he’d begun work on War Drums of the Blackfoot by 6 October 1975 and it existed in uncorrected draft form by 17 November. I think he delivered the corrected manuscript at the end of November, meaning that he took about two months to write this original novel, while each Doctor Who novelisation took him a single month.

Put all of this together and my working theory is:

≅ end of Jul 1974: Terrance delivers manuscript of Doctor Who and the Giant Robot

≅ Aug-Sep: writes and delivers the first Mounties novel, The Great March West

≅ Oct-Nov: writes and delivers the stage play Seven Keys to Doomsday

≅ Dec-Jan: writes and delivers the second Mounties novel, Massacre in the Hills, perhaps bearing in mind notes on the first one

≅ end of Feb: delivers Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders

Things may have overlapped a bit more than this. Seven Keys to Doomsday was the more time-critical assignment, as it opened at the Adelphi Theatre in London on 16 December 1974, more than a year ahead of the first Mounties book being published. Terrance might well have written a first draft of Seven Keys to Doomsday, then worked on the two Mounties books, with time off to attend to rewrites, rehearsals and whatever else needed doing on the stage play.

I’m still searching for clues and welcome any tips on paperwork or interviews that help nail down the timeline.

But I think this rough working theory helps to explain one of the odder things about Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders, which opens with a prologue set in the Amazon. Professor Clifford Jones is concerned that the local Indians are on the “warpath” (the word used by his wife), and that he’ll soon have to use his revolver. It’s completely out of character for the softly spoken hippie peacenik of the TV serial The Green Death. But this is, I think, an echo of the Mounties books Terrance had been working on immediately before this. 

Just for a moment, Jo Grant is married not to Cliff but to Rob MacGregor, hero of the Mounties. In turn, when at the start of The Great March West a man is fatally wounded, a Doctor is sent for (p. 18) — with a capital D. It is bleed-through of fictional worlds, or iterations of the Terrance Dicks expanded universe.

This rough timeline also means that the Mounties books were commissioned by Henwood, okayed or honoured by Mike Glover, but received by Elizabeth Godfray, who became editor of the Allan Wingate / Tandem children’s titles in January 1975 (having been PA to Henwood and Glover respectively). “I just carried on what they had been doing in terms of sequels and whatever,” she told The Target Book. “All the contracts had been made, there were certain titles in the range that were going to carry on, not just Doctor Who but Agaton Sax, Terrance Dicks’ Mounties series, and so forth. I wasn’t there as editor for very long, and I recall that all the titles had been decided” (p. 37).

That suggests that all three Mounties books were commissioned at once, by Henwood / Glover. Henwood had launched the Doctor Who titles in batches: three titles published together on 2 May 1973, then pairs of novels scheduled for 17 January, 18 March and 17 October 1974. Perhaps that’s what he had in mind with the Mounties, so publication had to wait until Terrance had delivered two or more manuscripts. In fact, by the time the first Mounties book was published, Terrance had delivered the third Mounties novel, fitted in around his commitments to the now very successful Doctor Who novelisations.

Interestingly, the Mounties books were launched to stand on their own. The paperback of The Great March West makes no mention of the Doctor Who novelisations; it only mentions the next two Mounties titles under “Coming shortly” (it doesn’t even use the same “in preparation” as the Doctor Who books). 

The hardback mentions in the author biography on the inside back flap that Terrance wrote the Doctor Who books, and lists his three most recent titles among books also available in the Longbow hardback imprint (alongside The Story of the Loch Ness Monster by Tim Dinsdale, The Creep-Crawly Book edited by Lucy Berman, and The Pony Plot and The Secret of the Missing Foal by Sara Herbert). That is not exactly using the popularity of Doctor Who and the novelisations as a means to sell this new line.

Art director Brian Boyle also seems to have been keen to distinguish the Mounties books from the company’s Doctor Who titles. The cover artwork is very different, eschewing the comic-book style of Chris Achilleos and Peter Brookes (both taking their cues from Frank Bellamy), in favour of a painting of a scene as if captured by camera, in a robust, action-adventure style.

The Target logo on my paperback obscures the signature of the artist but DWM writer Russell Cook has been kind enough to let me see a hardback, in which we can clearly see the word HAYES in the bottom left. That matches other signatures by the same artist, Jack Hayes, much in demand at the time for book covers, especially with romantic / historical subjects.

“In the early 1970s he illustrated paperback covers for Corgi and Fontana on titles as wide-ranging as The Long Wait and Kiss Me, Deadly by Mickey Spillane (both 1970), Too Few For Drums by RF Delderfield, Only the Valiant and Great Legends of the West, both by Charles Marquis Warren (all 1972), The Gallows Herd by Maureen Peters and Steamboat Gothic by Frances Parkinson Keyes (both 1973).” — Bear Alley. 

His other work includes covers for the Angelique series in the mid-1970s and the lavish cover and internal illustrations for the New Oxford Illustrated Bible (1969) — see examples. I think the latter is in the “historicist” tradition of Biblical and classical art: bold and expressive composition, muscular figures like something from classical sculpture, all bright colours and idealised forms.

To a certain degree, that’s what we see in the cover of this first Mounties book. The image shows clean-shaven, immaculate Rob MacGregor grappling with, but dominating, a scruffier man called Nolan. In the background, we see more uniformed men on horseback — because the whole point of this series is that these are Mounted Police — and the ruined gate of Fort Whoop-Up. The sky behind them is bright white and blue.

The scene chosen is from late in the book, p. 124 of 128. That’s because Rob doesn’t get his distinctive uniform until the last few pages; before this, he was not a Mountie and wouldn’t look nearly so idealised or heroic.

We see his left side: red coat with leather strap over his left shoulder, the left leg of his blue trousers with bright yellow vertical stripe, and left calf-length boot. The whole of his left hand, in a white glove is visible. We can also see the fingers of his right, gloved hand.

That’s also what we see of the Mountie on the cover of Maintain the Right, a non-fiction account of the first 25 years of the Mounties published in 1973, to mark their centenary. I don’t think it’s a coincidence, because this is the book Terrance clearly drew from for his novel — as I’ll come to.

The artwork for that history was by Gordon Maclean / Harvey Brydon Productions. It’s a less dynamic image, the officer upright and still. The moustache makes him look older than young Rob, the landscape behind him is dark, with buffalo framed against an ochre sky. It’s a less relatable image than the cover of the The Great March West, which looks familiar to us from Westerns.

Maintain the Right was written by Ronald Atkin, the then Sports Editor of the Observer, and dedicated to his sons, “Tim and Michael, who like adventure stories.” It’s a collection of extraordinary adventures spanning the first 25 years of the Mounted Police, from the brutal “Cypress Hills Massacre” that led to the formation of the force, to an extraordinary murder case in 1900 solved by the patient, dogged piecing together of clues.

We can doggedly piece together the bits of this book that Terrance cribbed for his novel. For example, here’s what Atkin says of George Arthur French, first commanding officer of the Mounted Police, setting out from Dufferin on his Great March West on 8 July 1874:

“With a keen sense of occasion he had mounted his six troops of fifty men on horses of different colours. In A Division they rode splendid dark bays, the men of B Division had been allocated dark browns, C were on bright chestnuts, D had greys, E were on black horses and light bays” (Maintain the Right, pp. 19-20).

Here’s Terrance opening Chapter 4 of The Great March West:

“Commissioner French sat straight-backed on his horse and looked proudly before him. Three hundred scarlet-coated horsemen were drawn up in columns, waiting for the march to begin. The sun reflected the dazzling white of gauntlets and helmets, and glinted from the gleaming brass chinstraps and highly polished boots.

“The men were divided into six troops, each troop with its own colour horse: dark bays for ‘A’ Division, dark browns for ‘B’, chestnuts for ‘C’, greys for ‘D’, blacks for ‘E’ and light bays for ‘F’” (p. 40).

Rob, initially refused entry into the Mounties, has to make do with driving oxen alongside them. Atkin tells us that the Mounties faced mosquitos, lack of water, thunderstorms and other hazards on the march, but that, 

“The heaviest set back was the blow to their dignity when French ordered them to take turns driving the ox teams” (Maintain the Right, p. 64).

On p. 47 of the novel, Rob befriends a Mountie called Henri Dubois who cooks him a meal of “many fine frogs”. This is taken from a real incident, when a Frenchman call d’Artique, “adjusted himself to the food shortage” faced on the march by,

“catching frogs in the swamps with a whip and sharing the feast with some initially dubious friends” (p. 65).

At one point, Atkin says Commissioner French thinks the guide is misleading them (p. 72), which Terrance makes a big part of his novel. Real people — Commissioner French, Assistant Commissioner Macloed, Chief Crowfoot, the Indian scout Jerry Potts — are all as described in the history book. The details of guns used by the Mounties — a six-shot Adams .45 calibre revolver and single-shot Snider-Enfield carbine — are also as per Atkin.

But Terrance omits many of the privations faced by the Mounties, not least the problems of lice.

“There was much suffering and cursing until the force was paraded naked and each policeman rubbed down with juniper oil. They also learned from their half-breed drivers how to remove the lice from their clothing by placing them on anthills” (p. 69)

The ending is also very different. The Great March West was conducted with the aim of closing down Fort Whoop-Up, the well-defended stockade that was the centre of the illegal whisky trade. In reality, when the Mounties arrived, Assistant Commissioner Macleod and Jerry Potts rode up to the gate and — to their surprise — were invited inside for dinner. There was no sign of any booze, which had all been moved out long before.

In the novel, Macleod invites Rob MacGregor — who has just exposed the treacherous guide — to ride with him to the gate of Fort Whoop-Up. The men inside refuse to open up, mocking the two Mounties for their smart uniforms. Macleood retreats, telling Rob he was ordered to try a peaceful approach first. Then he orders the Mounties’ field guns to fire.

Blasting through the gate, the Mounties take the fort but the men inside insist they have no whisky. It would be a serious error to have attacked an innocent settlement, but Rob uses his wits to deduce where the booze is hidden. That done, he has a fight with one of the villains and brings him to justice. It’s all much more dramatically satisfying than what really happened. 

Terrance also adds plenty of his own invention to the historical facts. When forced to fight with an Indian, Rob decides to do so bare-handed rather than with a weapon, correctly guessing the effect this will have on those watching. Challenged to a duel by another Mountie, he apologises for any offence — and so becomes good friends with his rival. Twice, he goes swimming naked — once, while being watched by the Indians. A guest of the Indians, he eats a meal of puppy. He learns to drive two oxen by yelling “gee” and “haw”. None of this stuff comes from Atkin.

The philosophy, too, is pure Terrance. Macleod tries to enter Fort Whoop-Up on friendly terms; he only attacks when given no choice. Early on, Rob is advised by his “laconic” grandfather that he must make a choice about joining the Mounties or not; but neither will be easy. These are the kinds of “moments of charm” we seen in Doctor Who overseen by Terrance. 

Another note he gave his writers was to show a clash between characters, neither of whom are necessarily wrong. Here, the book opens with “cheerful and optimistic” Rob and his father who thinks “life was a battle”. Later, Rob must acknowledge that the Indians comprise individuals holding different views. I’ve more to say on the representation of Indians, and the language used about them, when I post about the next two Mounties books.

But perhaps the most notable difference between this first Mounties novel and the non-fiction book Terrance drew from is the women in them.

Atkin depicts a male-dominated world, but there are constant references to the “Great Mother”, aka Queen Victoria, respected by the Indians. We hear from several Indian squaws, there’s a scandal involving the wife of Commissioner Herschmer, and there are a couple of women journalists reporting on the Yukon gold rush, both of them extraordinary characters. Not exactly loads of women, but some notable examples.

Yet in this first Mounties novel, Rob comes from an all-male home, living (and bickering with) his father and grandfather. There is a reference to a place called Old Wives Creek (p. 54) before we briefly witness a “crowd of women and children” (p. 56). And that’s it.

I think that’s to do with the perceived market for these old-fashioned adventure stories aimed at boys aged 8-12, though that is really no excuse. And it’s in marked contrast to Terrance’s later original novels, such as The Baker Street Irregulars (commissioned by Richard Henwood) and Star Quest (from the same publisher as the Mounties books), which feature groups of heroes with a mix of boys and girls. Indeed, Terrance’s last original novels were aimed specifically at girl readers, with Cassie and the Riviera Crime and Nikki and the Drugs Queen Murder both published in 2002.

More on this to follow, as I work through the next two Mounties novels...

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Thanks to everyone who has supported this series of posts. They take time and there are expenses, so do consider making a contribution.

Next episode: the second Mounties novel, Massacre in the Hills (and then, for those of limited patience, it is Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen...)

David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens

It's been fun to revisit this novel as part of my research into the BBC-1 Classic Serials of the 1980s worked on by Terrance Dicks. He was the producer of a TV dramatisation this broadcast in late 1986 which was nominated for a BAFTA. 

(Tedious nerd bit because this is how my brain works: the director was Barry Letts, Terrance's former boss on both Doctor Who and the Classic Serial, and the cast included Stephen Thorne (who I interviewed), Terence Lodge and Christopher Burgess from their time on Doctor Who. Then there was Sarah Crowden, whose father met with Letts in 1974 to discuss taking the role of the Fourth Doctor. 

I'm conscious, too, of Terrance and Barry Letts working on this stuff from their office in 509 Union House at the BBC, upstairs from the crises affecting Doctor Who (producer John Nathan Turner in room 304, his script editor in 312), with David Copperfield broadcast over the same weekends as The Trial of a Time Lord. Did they trade ideas for casting? Here we have Owen Teale, fresh from Doctor Who and the Vengeance on Varos. And there's a nod to future Doctor Who, too, with Simon Callow fresh from A Room With A View, the film that made his name, here as one of Dickens's best known characters, Wilkins Micawber, 20 years before taking the role of Dickens in Doctor Who...)

Anyhow. The novel is the autobiography of a fictional character who has a number of resemblances to the real-life Dickens. We follow David Copperfield - also known as "Master Davy", "Daisy" and "Trot" in different phases of his life - from birth through school and different jobs and two marriages, to established and successful writer. I'd have liked more on what he saw and felt in his time as a parliamentary reporter, not just how long it took to learn shorthand, because I've done the same job. But an impression can be gleaned from what David says when he moves on:

"One joyful night, therefore, I noted down the music of the parliamentary bagpipes for the last time, and I have never heard it since; though I still recognize the old drone in the newspapers, without any substantial variation (except, perhaps, that there is more of it), all the livelong session." (Chapter 48, Domestic)

As well as David, we follow the lives of a huge cast of characters around him, not least his school friend Thomas Traddles and early crush Emily, his nursemaid Clara Pegotty, aunt Betsey Trotwood and the feckless but well-meaning Micawber, always determined that something will turn up. In this version, engagingly narrated by Richard Armitage, Micawber is a broad Brummie, which produced some odd mental images as I listened to this in the wake of the death of Ozzy Osborne.

(More of how my brain works: early on, Clara takes young Master Davy to visit her brother, Daniel Peggoty, who lives in a converted old boat on the beach at Yarmouth. There's a long description of this cosy if eccentric home:

"Over the little mantelshelf, was a picture of the ‘Sarah Jane’ lugger, built at Sunderland, with a real little wooden stern stuck on to it; a work of art, combining composition with carpentry, which I considered to be one of the most enviable possessions that the world could afford." (Chapter 3, I Have a Change)

I said before that I think Terrance Dicks might have got the word "capacious" from Charles Dickens; could he also have swiped "Sarah Jane"? (Sarah Jane Smith was, of course, played on screen by Elisabeth Sladen. When she died in 2011, the new companion being devised for Doctor Who was renamed in her honour; Clara was Sladen's middle name.))

Anyhow again. The novel boasts some memorable villains. First, there's David's cruel, violent and manipulative stepfather Edward Murdstone and his sister Jane. Then there's schoolmate James Steerforth, who - brilliantly - Davy is taken in by but we and other characters see through. (In the TV version Terrance oversaw, Steerforth's mother is played by Nyrie Dawn Porter, surely as a kind of a clue to the viewer of moral corruption in the family, given Porter's association with The Forsyte Saga (1967)).

Then there's the ever 'umble Uriah Heep, in whom David spots wickedness long before Micawber lays out, at length, exactly what Heep has done. I don't think David gets better at recognising wrong 'uns - he is still drawn to Steerforth even after knowing the truth about him. I think in part Steerforth's posh, wealthy charm makes him more agreeable to David, so there's some snobbery in his distrust of Heep. But I also think, as others have observed, that Heep is in some ways a dark reflection of David himself: a young man of humble background trying to establishing himself and with an eye on his boss's daughter that might not be wholly appropriate...

If there's a failing here, it's how good and noble David is throughout; loving, patient, tolerant, hard-working, forgiving, blah blah blah. He speaks of his hatred for Heep, but I think that is intended as another signifier of virtue. It makes David rather insipid as a character but also, given how close much of this is to the real life of the author, it kept feeling like self-justification. 

The TV version swaps some stuff around, I think to tackle some of this beige. In the book, David and his former schoolmate Traddles are reunited with Micawber and, in chapter 28, they all have dinner at David's, the meal "mutton off the gridiron" plus "a bowl of punch, to be compounded by Mr Micawber". On screen, the bowl of punch is brought forward; it is David's first meal with Micawber, and they drink it instead of a solid meal. In both, the point is to show David and his friends making the best of things, and enjoying themselves, with only limited means. But I think the TV version has added tension because it's not right to be serving such a "meal" to children. That focus on "tension points" is, I think, very Terrance Dicks...

See also:

• Me on Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens
• Me on Dickens, by Claire Tomalin

Chapters of Accidents, by Alexander Baron

As expected, Alexander Baron’s autobiography confirms that various elements of his novel The Lowlife (1963) are based on real life: his own, his relatives’, his neighbours’. That image that so struck me of the continually rechalked squares for hopscotch, is mentioned here on p. 350. In fact, the autobiography — written in the 1990s — draws from his novels to recall events otherwise since forgotten, quoting From the City, From the Plough (1948) to recount Baron’s direct and harrowing experience of the D-Day landings.

The autobiography covers his early life as a working class boy from a non-practising Jewish immigrant family in Hackney up to the sale of his first novel. One note describes the sounds of East London between the wars:

“‘Won’t you buy my pretty flowers?’, ‘I’ve been 7 years in prison…’. Other ballads — Victorian London, Dickens’ London — continued until the war scattered a way of life in 1939.” (p. 344)

It’s not the only reference to Dickens. For example, while his father read science books by such authors as James Jeans, Baron and his mum would visit the library on Northwold Road each week “with oilskin shopping bags”, where Baron read huge, bound volumes of adventure stories by GA Henty and Percy Westerman before progressing to PG Wodehouse’s PSmith.

“about one of the vast army of clerks which still existed, now swelled by women typists, who were the cleverer children of working-class families which were proud of their status (escaped!) Although almost all worked for wretched wages, often in Dickensian offices.” (p. 349)

Baron read some Dickens at this point, citing Barnaby Rudge and,

“its effect on me as a small boy — lurid, a phantasmagoria, those Gordon Riots — the unspeakable ecstasy of reading books you cannot understand when you are small” (p. 347),

He also speaks of the “effect on me” of The Pickwick Papers, while David Copperfield was a formative read later, while he was stationed in Southampton as a soldier during the war. I’m fascinated by all this because he later dramatised Oliver Twist for the BBC, broadcast in 12 episodes in 1985. The novel was first published in 1838 but I wonder how much Baron and producer Terrance Dicks (born in East Ham, 1935) were conjuring the London of a hundred years later; the one they’d both known as children.

As with Terrance, cinema was another key influence on Baron — he explains, pp. p. 347-48, how it shaped the structure of his writing. But his literary interests had another powerful consequence: it was on a trip to a library while still at school that he was first enthralled by the communists. Though he didn’t join the Community Party officially at that point— they thought it better he didn’t so he could infiltrate the Labour youth movement instead — he was a keen adherent. They even sent this schoolboy revolutionary on an errand to France.

“It was of all days Yom Kippur, the supreme Jewish fast. My parents had taken my sister to the East End to visit my grandparents. I left a note on the kitchen table, ‘Gone to Paris. Back Monday.’ The reader would have to understand the nature of the times, the moeurs of a working-class Jewish family and the particular character of my parents to appreciate what a bombshell that was going to be for them, how incredulous they would be.” (p. 168).

When he returned, all that his parents asked of him was whether he had a nice time (p. 170).

There’s something a bit Boy’s Own adventure about much of this stuff, with brassneck and dodges and pluck — such as his role in the Labour League of Youth’s weekly street-corner meetings.

“I was too shy to speak at these, but I was given the job of heckling our own speakers to draw a crowd, which I enjoyed.” (p. 147)

It’s in the mode too, I think, of Kipling’s schoolboy stories, Stalky & Co, which Baron dramatised for the BBC, the first time he worked with Terrance Dicks. 

On another occasion, Baron explains how one night he escaped a gang of young Fascists keen to beat him up by running on to Hampstead Heath then lying down with his arms around himself, so that he resembled one of the other copulating couples (p. 156). It’s another funny dodge — but a bit less heroic than what happens in The Lowlife, where the main character evades his pursuers thanks to a native grasp of London buses and trains, then beats them up single-handed.

Things become more serious as the war approaches. Baron speaks of his own horror at having to recruit men to fight in the Spanish Civil War — and his relief that he never succeeded. At the same time, he says how easily he might have done in Spain what a contemporary did, working for the Republican Army’s secret police (Servicio de Informaction Militar), befriending young soldiers and then reporting those who criticised the party. He cites another case, another friend, who was accused of writing “calumnious letters” home and seems to have been shot.

“I am an old man now but I am ridden by the memory of these distant events, of him and of Monty, the one murdered by the secret police, the other in their ranks, both brave, honourable in intent and so alike; and I am all the more fervently relieved that I did not send Bill Featherstone or anyone else to fight where I did not go myself.” (p. 181)

In all this and what follows, Baron doesn’t mention Malcolm Hulke, who must have been in and out of the King Street HQ of the Communist Party around the same time, and who he might just have bumped into after the war when they both worked in management at the Unity Theatre. Baron says that while he was at Unity,

“we wiped out a large and chronic debt, which must have been a feat unique both among fringe theatres and organisations of the left.” (p. 332)

In part, this organisation was because Baron avoided the “tantrums and cliques” of the actors; as with his reticence at public speaking cited before, he seems to have been a bit quiet and shy.

“My own nature kept me apart from a crowd who were serious in their intentions but involved with all the scattiness and temperamental quirks that are to be found in theatricals.” (Ibid.)

There’s also the suggestion that he’d not been well after the war, suffering from some kind of PTSD. The war certainly had a profound effect on him, not least in undermining his communist zeal. There was no single cause but that loss of faith went in tandem with his new-found interest in writing. Soon after the war, he had a chance meeting with his old friend Ted Willis — who had also left the party to become a writer. Baron tells us that,

“This was a drastic step for a member of the inner core [of the party], since writing was regarded at King Street as a trifling and contemptible occupation.” (p. 331).

They referred to Ted as a “deserter”. Later, Baron explains why it was thought so contemptible, quoting what he was told by his former mentor John Gollan:

“What does a writer do, even a good writer, even one of ours? He describes the world. You are one of the people who have to change it. And one day to run it.” (p. 336)

I wonder how convincing Baron found this? Earlier, he speaks of the,

“Communist ability to show a fair face in any company, display charm, patience, reasonableness and willingness to listen and a persuasiveness that provide irresistible to many.” (p. 208)

If his first novel had not been a success, how easily might he have been drawn back into the fold?

For all he was compelled to write a novel based on his own wartime experience, Baron put it away in a drawer and says he later showed it to Ted Willis unwillingly. It was Willis and his wife who submitted it to Jonathan Cape, and Cape’s wife who came up with the title under which it was published. 

Baron tells us that he thinks much of history is accidental like this — hence the title of this autobiography. But I think something else is going on: this is a bildungsroman, showing the development of a man’s character through his experience and choices. When he bumps into Ted Willis after the war, its because Baron has chosen to buy a typewriter — that choice surely compelled the conversation that followed. Willis, facing the opprobrium of his former comrades, must have been glad to find in Baron a fellow scribe. And what Baron went on to write was infused with all the things he’d soaked up in Dickens and cinema and the life he’d lived.

His escape was no accident at all.

Screening the Novel — The Theory and Practice of Literary Dramatization, by Robert Giddings, Keith Selby and Chris Wensley

Published in 1990, this short, 174-page book examines the process of adapting “classic” novels for the screen. “Intended for a general as well as an academic readership”, says the back-cover blurb, it begins with chapters on what is lost in dramatisation, the issues involved in recreating the past authentically and the traditions of the BBC’s Classic Serial, which had (it says) been a fixture of the schedules since a six-part adaptation of Trollope’s The Warden in 1951 (p. 100).

There are then two chapters on dramatisations of Great Expectations by Dickens — mostly focused on the film version directed by David Lean (1946) — and three chapters covering the BBC Classic Serial’s 16-part dramatisation of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1987). 

The latter include interviews with producer Terrance Dicks and others involved in production and promotion of the serial. These interviews were conducted by Chris Wensley in autumn 1987 and spring 1988, so offer a perspective from and soon after broadcast. Had the interviews taken place a month or two later, the perspectives might have been very different. In the summer of 1998, BBC management decided, rather abruptly, to cancel the Classic Serial altogether just as production was getting under way on the production to follow Vanity Fair. The dramatisation of The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey, broadcast in September and October 1988, was the last in the 37-year run. Screening the Novel doesn’t address the cancellation but provides insights into why that happened, which I can match up to other stuff I have been reading. 

Vanity Fair was well received critically, with several examples cited in this book. However, viewing figures, averaging 5m per episode, were down on previous Classic Serials (p. 165). This, the authors suggest, was because the “cynicism and sexual innuendo” of Vanity Fair did not “suit all Sunday teatime family audiences” (p. 166). That suggests the Classic Serial was usually “cosy”, “safe”, even “conservative” — or at least that was the perception.

The format of Vanity Fair is criticised by the authors: 16 episodes too much of a commitment for the audience, the half-hour duration of each episode not long enough to satisfy. At the time Screening the Novel was written, the hope was that a repeat re-edited as 10x 50-minute episodes would prove more successful. However, this version never materialised.

But whatever the faults of Vanity Fair, a lot of the criticism here is directed at the Classic Serial generally. The first chapter of Screening the Novel gives an overview of what it calls the “literature/screen debate”, largely taken up with the critique in Jonathan Miller’s book Subsequent Performances (Faber, 1986) of the inability of screen versions to match the richness and interplay of prose. 

I’ve got but have not yet read this book by Miller, who’d previously adapted several works for the screen: Alice in Wonderland (BBC, 1966), Whistle and I’ll Come to You (BBC, 1968), Take a Girl Like You (film, 1970) and six Shakespeare plays (BBC, 1980-82). The sense I get (for now) is that Miller felt that his screen adaptations of Shakespeare were more successful than those earlier works. Indeed, he wasn’t alone in seeing a fundamental difference in form, as Screening the Novel tells us that, 

“Within the BBC, a clear distinction is made between ‘adaptation’ and ‘dramatisation’. An ‘adaptation’ is the preparation of a television version of a work which is already in dramatic form, for example a stage play. A ‘dramatisation’ is the preparation of a television drama from a work which was not previously in dramatic form, for example a prose narrative.” (p. 24n)

Miller sees dramatisation as of less value than adaptation and even actively damaging to the source work. Screening the Novel cites his own examples of the richness and interplay of the prose in Great Expectations before he then concludes:

“There is no way in which a film could do justice to this artful alternation between indirect and direct speech. And in the dismal realisations of Dickens that now infect the screens of domestic television we are assaulted by pretentiously picturesque usurpers.” (p. 20, citing Miller in Subsequent Performances, p. 240). 

He doesn’t say which “dismal” TV productions he means but it’s pretty obvious given that Dickens was the Classic Serial’s “bread and butter and jam”, according to Terrance Dicks (p. 139). As script editor, Terrance oversaw TV dramatisations of Great Expectations (1981), Dombey and Son (1983) and The Pickwick Papers (1985); as producer, he oversaw dramatisations of Oliver Twist (also 1985) and David Copperfield (1986, the year Miller’s book was published). Screening the Novel asked Terrance for his response.

“TD: I actually had that argument with Jonathan Miller at the Edinburgh Festival. He argues that the dramatization of a novel inevitably damages the original, that future readers are corrupted and previous readers are disappointed. I think it’s nonsense, basically. As I said, he gave this idea in a speech at the Edinburgh Festival where I was also appearing on another panel and I was in the audience and leapt up and said, ‘I am the producer of the BBC-1 Classic Serial and you have been trying to put me out of business for the last hour!’ — which got a nice laugh. What I said was that I thought that we had three classes of viewers. People who knew and loved the book and could then compare our version. People who had not read the book but would see it on television and would then be led to go to the book and read it: obviously it’s not for nothing the publishers do tie-in editions. There is always a huge upsurge in libraries when anything appears on television, a lot of people go to the book, so we gain readers.” (pp. 101-2)

Screening the Novel provides evidence to support these claims. Joanna Webb, promotion manager at Pan Books, says the company had been selling “about fifty copies a month” of Vanity Fair before it brought out its tie-in edition with the TV serial. Having paid the BBC between £3,500 and £4,000 — “which for us is a lot of money” — for the “exclusive use of the photograph of the cast in the production on the cover”, Pan hoped for “fifteen to twenty thousand extra sales” but actually sold “thirty thousand … during August and September [1988]” (pp. 117-8).

There’s evidence from a librarian of a corresponding surge in loans of Vanity Fair (p.168). The authors also quote a 1985 study led by by Dr JM Wober at IBA Research Dept into the reading habits of viewers of dramatisations. Of 3,000 people surveyed, some 46% — or 1,380 — bought or borrowed a book having seen it dramatised, though one quarter of these (some 345), “admitted to reading [only] half or less than half of it” (pp. 22-3). That still leaves more than a third of those surveyed — 1,035 of 3,000 — who bought or borrowed the book and read most if not all of it.

In his response to Miller’s criticism, Terrance says the third type of viewer were those who had not and never would read the original book but would gain something of it from seeing the dramatisation. There’s a sense in all this of imparting, through the screen, the value of the book and of reading. I can understand Terrance’s enthusiasm here as a child from a modest, working-class background whose love of reading led to grammar school, Cambridge and escape. “I got caught in an educational updraft,” Terrance told Toby Hadoke in 2013 of the Butler Education Act 1944, which came into force just before Terrance turned 11 in 1946. “Anybody with a bit of promise was shoved on.” I think he saw the Classic Serial as a means to share the benefits he himself had enjoyed, shoving on a mass audience.

But such a paternalistic view was rather outmoded by the late 1980s.

“As Ien Ang (1991) has described [in Desperately Seeking the Audience (Routledge, 1991)], the BBC moved from a conception of a disciplined audience (where programme types, levels of intellectual content and scheduling patterns would gradually school the audience to listen or watch in a particular way) to a conception of the audience as citizens or consumers exercising a free choice.” (Jonathan Bignell and Stephen Lacey, British Television Drama — Past, Present and Future (2nd edition, 2014, pp. 11-12.)

So the Classic Serial was seen as at once “schooling” the audience — ie it was worthy and hard work — yet also bland, safe and easy. As well as the criticisms of the form made by Jonathan Miller, Screening the Novel cites Hanif Kureishi:

“It’s as if the real passion of the writers … gets lost in the peripherals which are to do with the look of the thing, and with the kind of softening out and flattening out that you get … it’s as if the stories are pulled out, whereas the ideas are left behind.” (p. 100)

A footnote on page 119 says Kureishi made these comments about the Classic Serial on an edition of The Media Show, shown on Channel 4 in May 1987. IMDB suggests this was actually episode S1E7 of The Media Show, broadcast 10 June 1987 — and that Terrance Dicks was on the same programme. I’d love to know more about this.

Screening the Novel also addresses the look or house style of the Classic Serial, dictated by studio and outside broadcast recording on videotape. Again, there is the sense of this being an outmoded form, with film productions becoming synonymous with “quality”. Given all this, we could understand the Classic Serial being cancelled on aesthetic grounds, a relic of an old way of making TV and simply no longer relevant.

Except that Terrance Dicks later gave very different reasons for the end of the Classic Serial. In 1992 — four years after leaving his staff role as producer and so off the BBC leash — he was asked at a Doctor Who convention about the cancellation and potential resurrection of Doctor Who. His answer put that in the context of the wider BBC. Science-fiction, he said, was much like costume drama.

“The two things are expensive. I’ve always working in the wrong areas, you know! And the classic serial, which I used to produce, eventually the BBC stopped making, not because it wasn’t popular, not because it didn’t sell overseas, not because they weren’t good shows. Everybody thought they were wonderful, and the jewel in the crown of the BBC. They just did not have the money.”

This was because, he said,

“No politician wanted to up the licence fee because it was unpopular, and so the BBC found that its income was shrinking and that its output wasn’t. Ultimately, you try and do cheaper and simpler programmes, but at the end of the day, the only way you really save money is by not making the programmes.” (Michael Procter, ‘Terrance Dicks interview’ (26 September 1992), published in Celestial Toyroom #191 (vol. 18, no. 1), January 1993, p. 8.)

I’m watching Vanity Fair at the moment. Four episodes in, it’s a confident, bold production, textured and nuanced and rich. It’s also very relevant to its late ‘80s audience, being all about money. Given the plot, it’s ironic that the BBC couldn’t afford to make programmes of this sort any more. And then there’s this, amid the praise cited in Screening the Novel:

“The Listener for 17-24 December [1987] informed its readers that Vanity Fair was chosen by the Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, as his ‘programme of the year’, and the Daily Mirror on 9 January 1988, that the Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher, had asked the BBC to send her video cassettes of all 16 episodes for her Christmas viewing.” (p. 167)

Enjoying but not paying for lavish entertainment is exactly what happens in Vanity Fair, such as when a young, unscrupulous gentlemen encourages his friends to join him for an evening at Vauxhall Gardens, then contrives to have someone else pay. From today’s perspective, that link couldn’t be more on the nail, as the rogue’s name is George Osborne.

For more of this sort of thing, see Billy Smart’s interview with Terrance Dicks about the Classic Serial from 2015.

For more from me on the history of TV, see my book David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television, and these old blog posts:

• Writing for Television by Sir Basil Bartlett (1955)
• A Survey of Television by Stuart Hood (1967)
• The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, vol. V: Competition by Asa Briggs (1995) 
• The Intimate Screen by Jason Jacobs (2000)