Competition, by Asa Briggs

This mammoth, more-than-a-thousand-page account of broadcasting in the United Kingdom between 1955 and 1974 is the fifth and final volume in Asa Briggs’ definitive history largely focused on the BBC. ITV is included, but mostly in terms of its impact rather than in its own right. 

Very quickly after launching in September 1955, ITV offered more hours of entertainment than the BBC. Advertising revenue also quickly made ITV very profitable - a one-shilling share in 1955 was worth £11 by 1958 (p. 11). With more money on offer, there was a huge flow of talent from the BBC; 500 out of 200 staff members moved to ITV in the first six months of 1956. The result was a desperate need for new people and a sharp rise in fees, doubling the cost of making an hour’s television (p. 18). Audiences responded to the fun, less formal ITV. The low point for the BBC came in the last quarter of 1957, 

“when ITV, on the BBC’s own calculations, achieved a 72 per cent share of the viewing public wherever there was a choice.” (p. 20)

A lot of what follows is about the BBC’s concerted efforts to claw back that audience. But the book is as much about rivalry inside the BBC - the infighting of different departments, the effort to make the new BBC-2 different from and yet complementary to BBC-1, and the ascendance of TV over radio.

The latter happens gradually but with telling shifts. Since 1932, the monarch had addressed the nation each Christmas by radio; in 1957, Queen Elizabeth made the first such broadcast on TV (p. 144). That seems exactly on the cusp of the audience making the switch: in 1957 more radio-only licences were issued than radio-and-TV licences (7,558,843 to 6,966,256); in 1958 there were more TV-and-radio than radio-only licenses (8,090,003 to 6,556,347) (source: Appendix A, p. 1005). There’s a corresponding flip in the money spent on the two media: in 1957-8, expenditure on radio was more than on TV (£11,856,120 to £11,149,207); in 1958-9, more was spent on TV than radio (£13,988,812 to £11,441,818), and that gap only continued to widen (source: Appendix C, p. 1007). Yet aspects of BBC culture were slower to shift: Briggs notes that “The Governors … held most of their fortnightly meetings at Broadcasting House [home of radio] even after Television Centre was opened [in the summer of 1960]” (p. 32).

Television was expensive to buy into: the “cheapest Ferguson 17” television receiver” in an advertisement from 1957 “cost £72.9s, including purchase tax” (p. 5). Briggs compares the increased uptake of TV to the ownership of refrigerators and washing machines - 25% of households in 1955, 44% in 1960 - as well as cars (p. 6). So there was more going on that what’s often given as the reason TV caught on - ie the chance to watch the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953. The sense is of new prosperity, or at least an end to post-war austerity. Television was part of a wider cultural movement. The total number of licences issued (radio and TV) rose steadily through the period covered, from 13.98 million in 1956 to 17.32 million in 1974 (source: Appendix A, p. 1005). By 1974, the Report of the Committee on Broadcasting Coverage chaired by Sir Stewart Crawford felt, according to Briggs, that,

“People now expected television services to be provided like electricity and water; they were ‘a condition of normal life’.” (p. 998)

This increase in viewers and therefore in licence fee revenue, plus the competition from ITV, led to a change in attitude at the BBC about the sort of thing they were doing. Briggs notes that the experimentalism of the early TV service gave way to more and more people speaking of “professionalism” - skill, experience and pride in the work being done (p. 24). I’m struck by how those skills was shared and developed:

“The Home Services, sound and television, gain … from the fact that they are part of an organisation of worldwide scope [with staff] freely transferred … from any one part of the corporation to another [meaning that Radio and TV had] a wide field of talent and experience to draw upon in filling their key positions”. (pp. 314-15)

There are numerous examples of this kind of cross-pollination. Police drama Dixon of Dock Green was produced by the Light Entertainment department. Innes Lloyd became producer of Doctor Who at the end of 1965 after years in Outside Broadcasts, which I think fed in to the contemporary feel he brought to the series, full of stylish location filming. Crews would work on drama, then the news, then Sportsview, flitting between genre and form. Briggs cites a particular example of this in two programmes initiated in 1957 following the end of the “toddlers’ truce”.

For years, television was required to stop broadcasting between 6 and 7 pm so that young children could be put to bed and older children could do their homework. But that meant a loss in advertising revenue at prime time, so the ITV companies appealed to Postmaster General Charles Hill, who was eventually persuaded to abolish the truce from February 1957. But what to put into that new slot?

“Both sides [ie BBC and ITV] recognised clearly that if viewers tuned into one particular channel in the early evening, there was considerable likelihood that they would stay with it for a large part of the evening that follows.” (Briggs, p. 160)

The BBC filled the new gap with two innovative programmes aimed at grabbing (and therefore holding) a very broad audience. From Monday to Friday, the slot was filled by Tonight, a current affairs programme that basically still survives today as The One Show. The fact that it remains such a staple of the TV landscape can hide how revolutionary it was:

“Through its magazine mix, which included music, Tonight deliberately blurred traditional distinctions between entertainment, information, and even education; while through its informal styles of presentation, it broke sharply with old BBC traditions of ‘correctness’ and ‘dignity’. It also showed the viewing public that the BBC could be just as sprightly and irreverent as ITV. Not surprisingly, therefore, the programme influenced many other programmes, including party political broadcasts.” (p. 162)

Briggs argues that part of the creative freedom came because Tonight was initially made outside the usual BBC studios and system, as space had been fully allocated while the truce was still in place. The programme was made in what became known as “Studio M”, in St Mary Abbots Place, Kensington. But the key thing is that this informality, the blurring of genre, spread.

“This [1960] was a time when old distinctions between drama and entertainment were themselves becoming at least as blurred as old distinctions between news and current affairs and entertainment.” (p. 195)

Jon Pertwee, Adam Faith
Six-Five Special (1958)

On Saturdays, the same slot was filled by music show Six-Five Special. Briggs says that this and Grandstand (which began the following year in October 1958) were not the first programmes devoted to pop music or sport, but their under-rehearsed, spontaneous style was completely innovative (p. 200). Although Six-Five Special had a special appeal to teen viewers, it and Grandstand were, importantly, “not allowed to target one audience alone” (p. 199). With such broad, popular appeal,

“along with a number of other Saturday programmes, it [Six-Five Special] helped to reconstruct the British Saturday, which had, of course, begun to change in character long before the advent of competitive television [and was, with Grandstand, part of] a new leisure weekend.” (p. 199)

Elsewhere, Briggs notes the impact of TV - especially of ITV - on other forms of entertainment: attendance at football matches and cinemas dropped, with many cinemas closing (p. 185). Large audiences of varied ages were becoming glued to the box. I’d dare to suggest that this was not a “reconstruction” but the invention of Saturday, the later development of Juke Box Jury, Doctor Who, The Generation Game etc all part of a determined, conscious effort to compete with ITV with varied, engaging, good shows.

(On Sundays, the BBC continued to honour the truce, with no programming in the 6-7 slot that might compete with evening church services. From October 1961, the slot was taken by Songs of Praise.)

One key way of making good television was to write especially for the small screen. Briggs, of course, cites Nigel Kneale in this regard - though his The Quatermass Experiment and Nineteen Eight-Four are covered in Briggs’ previous volume. But Stuart Hood in A Survey of Television (1967) notes how sitcom grew out of the demands that TV placed on comedians:

"the medium is a voracious consumer of talent and turns. A comic who might in the [music or variety] halls hope to maintain himself with a polished routine changing little over the years, embellished a little, spiced with topicality, finds that his material is used up in the course of a couple of television appearances. The comic requires a team of writers to supply him with gags, and invention" (Hood, p. 152)

Briggs has more on this. For example, Eric Maschwitz, head of Light Entertainment at the BBC, remarked in 1960 that,

“We believe in comedy specially written for the television medium [and recognise] the great and essential value of writers, [employing] the best comedy writing teams [and] paying them, if necessary, as much as we pay the Stars they write for” (Briggs, p. 196-97)

Briggs makes the point on p. 210 that, “The fact that the scripts were written by named writers - and not by [anonymous] teams - distinguished British sitcom from that of the United States.” Some of these writers, such as Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, became household names. Frank Muir and Denis Norden appear, busy over scripts, in Richard Cawston’s documentary This is the BBC (1959, broadcast on TV in 1960): these are writers as film stars.

Hancock’s Half Hour (written by Galton and Simpson) and Whack-o (written by Muir and Norden) were, Briggs says, among the most popular TV programmes of the period, but he also explains how a technological innovation gave Hancock lasting power. 

In August 1958, the BBC bought its first Ampex videotape recording machine. At £100 per tape, and with cut (ie edited) tapes not being reusable, this was an expensive system and most British television continued to be broadcast live and not saved for posterity. (Briggs explains, p. 836n, that Ampex was of more practical benefit in the US, where different time zones between the west and east coasts presented challenges for broadcast.)

From July 1959, Ampex was used to prerecord Hancock’s Half Hour, taking some of the pressure of live performance off its anxious star (p. 212). Producer Duncan Wood, who’d also overseen Six-Five Special, then made full use of Ampex to record Hancock’s Half-Hour out of chronological order, 

“allowing for changes of scene and costume … Wood used great skill also in employing the camera in close-ups to register (and cut off at the right point) Hancock’s remarkable range of fascinating facial expressions … Galton and Simpson regarded the close-up as the ‘basis of television.’” (p. 213)

Prerecording allowed editing, which allowed better, more polished programmes. What’s more, prerecording meant Hancock’s Half-Hour could be - and was often - repeated, even after his death. The result was to score particular episodes and jokes - “That’s very nearly an armful” in The Blood Donor - into the cultural consciousness. Another, later comedy series, Dad’s Army, got higher viewing figures when it was repeated (p. 954).

Clive Dunn, Michael Bentine
It's a Square World (1963)

Yet not all prerecorded shows survive or, even if they do, retain such cultural impact. I was fascinated to read Briggs on Michael Bentine’s It’s a Square World (1960-64), which he wrote with John Law (most famous now for co-writing the “Class Sketch” with Marty Feldman). Some 46 of the 57 episodes of this pioneering series still exist, but there’s no DVD release and I don't think it's been repeated. A clip included on the DVD of Doctor Who: The Aztecs gives a sense of the anarchic, richly inventive fun: Clive Dunn, dressed as Dr. Who, accidentally launches Television Centre into space, with commentary from Patrick Moore just like he’d give on The Sky at Night. How I’d love to see the episode referred to by Briggs, where the Houses of Parliament are attacked by pirates and sink into the Thames, which caused trouble at the time of the 1964 general election...

Briggs says of the appeal of the later Monty Python’s Flying Circus (which he insists on referring to as “the Circus” rather than the more common “Python”) that,

“It took basic premises and reversed them. It’s humour, which was visual as much as verbal, again often succeeded in fusing both.” (p. 950)

More than that, it was comedy that spoofed and subverted the structures and furniture of television itself. In this, it surely owed a big debt to Bentine.

He’s not the only one to have been rather overlooked in histories of broadcasting. I’ve seen it said in many different places that Verity Lambert, first producer of Doctor Who, was also at the time, 

“the BBC’s youngest, and only female, drama producer” (Archives Hub listing for the Verity Lambert papers)

Yet Briggs cites Dorothea Brooking and Joy Harington as producers of “memorable programmes” for the children’s department, referring to several dramas adapted from books. Harington had also produced adult drama - for example, she oversaw A Choice of Partners in June 1957, the first TV work by David Whitaker (whose career I am researching). In early 1963, “drama and light entertainment productions for children were removed from the Children’s Department,” says Briggs on page 179, with this responsibility going to the newly reorganised Drama and Light Entertainment departments respectively. Lambert may have been the only female producer in the Drama Department at the time she joined the BBC in June 1963. Except that Brooking produced an adaptation of Julius Caesar broadcast in November 1963, and Harington was still around; she produced drama-documentary Fothergale Co. Ltd, which began broadcast on 5 January 1965. 

(Paddy Russell’s first credit as a producer was on The Massingham Affair, which began broadcast on 12 September 1964. Speaking of female producers, Briggs mentions Isa Benzie and Betty Rowley, the first two producers of the long-running Today programme on what’s now Radio 4 (p. 223). My sense is that there are many more women in key roles than this history implies.)

Stripped of responsibility for drama and light entertainment, the children’s department was incorporated into a new Family Programming group, headed by Doreen Stephens. According to Verity Lambert, this group was envious of Doctor Who - a programme they felt that they should be making. When, on 8 February 1964, an episode of Doctor Who showed teenage Susan Foreman attack a chair with some scissors, it was felt to break the BBC’s own code on acts of imitable violence. As Lambert told Doctor Who Magazine #235,

“The children’s department [ie Family Programming], who had been waiting patiently for something like this to happen, came down on us like a ton of bricks! We didn’t make the same mistake again.”

Lambert had to write Doreen Stephens an apology, so it’s interesting to read in Briggs that Stephens didn’t think violence on screen was necessarily bad. In a lecture of 19 October 1966, she spoke of “overcoming timidity” in making programmes, and believed that,

“violence and tension [don’t] necessarily harm a child in normal circumstances [while] in middle-class homes of the twenties and thirties, too many children were brought up in cushioned innocence … protected as much as possible from all harsh realities.” (Briggs, p. 347).

"Compulsive nonsense"
Doctor Who (1965)

Briggs devotes a whole subsection to “New Programmes: Dr Who and Z Cars” (pp. 416-434), the complexities of creating and running Doctor Who a good case study for understanding television more broadly. I'm acutely conscious in my work that the fact Doctor Who is so long-running makes it an especially rich source text for social and cultural history, but Briggs is really concerned with explaining its early appeal.

“The university lecturer Edward Blishen called Doctor Who ‘compulsive nonsense’ [footnote: Daily Sketch, 3 July 1964, quoting a Report published by the Advisory Centre for Education], but there was often shrewd sense there as well. At its best it was capable of fascinating highly intelligent adults.” (p. 424)

Beyond the specific subsection, there are other insights into early Doctor Who, too. For example, Briggs tells us that,

“nearly 13 million BBC viewers had seen Colonel Glenn entering his capsule at Cape Canaveral before beginning his great orbital flight [as the first American in space, 20 February 1962]. An earlier report on the flight in Tonight had attracted the biggest audience hat the programme had ever achieved, nearly a third higher than the usual Thursday figure [footnote: BBC Record, 7 (March 1962): ‘Watching the Space Flight’’]” (p. 844)

Could this have inspired head of light entertainment (note - not drama) Eric Maschwitz to commission - via Donald Wilson of the Script Department - Alice Frick and Donald Bull to look into the potential for science-fiction on TV. Their report, delivered on 25 April that year, is the first document in the paper trail that leads to Doctor Who.

Then there is the impact of the programme once it was on air. On 16 September 1965, Prime Minister Harold Wilson addressed a dinner held at London’s Guildhall to mark ten years of the ITA - and of independent television. Part of Wilson’s speech mentioned programmes that he felt had made their mark. As well as Maigret, starring Wilson’s “old friend Rupert Davies”,

“It is a fact that Ena Sharples or Dr Finlay, Steptoe or Dr Who … have been seen by far more people than all the theatre audiences who ever saw all the actors that strode the stage in all the centuries between the first and second Elizabethan age.” (Copy of speech in R31/101/6, cited in Briggs, p. 497).

Two things about this seem extraordinary. One, Wilson - who was no fan of the BBC, as Briggs details at some length - quotes four BBC shows to one by ITV. And at the time, Doctor Who was not the institution it is now, a “heritage brand” of such recognised value that its next episode will be a major feature in the BBC's centenary celebrations this October. When Wilson spoke, this compulsive nonsense of a series was not quite two years-old. 

But such is the power of television...

More by me on old telly:

• Nigel Kneale: a centenary celebration
• The influence of The Inheritors by William Golding on the first Doctor Who story
• A Survey of Television by Stuart Hood
• Mary Whitehouse vs Doctor Who
• Starlight Days, by Cecil Madden
• Writing for Television, by Sir Basil Bartlett
• The Intimate Screen, by Jason Jacobs
• I’m Just the Guy Who Says Action, by Alvin Rakoff

Rosewater, by Tade Thompson

Kaaro can find things. He can read people's minds and switch into a sort of psychic internet thing - so long as he's not lathered himself in anti-fungal cream. He's one of a number of "sensitives" working for the Nigerian government, trying to puzzle out - among other things - why America has gone silent, and what the aliens in London might want...

This is a gripping, intelligent thriller, full of big, mad ideas and images. The world Thompson has created is rich enough for multiple stories - this is the first of a trilogy, and in the closing pages we discover someone close to Kaaro does not think of herself as a supporting character but is the heroine of her own tale.

Bayo Gbadamosi's reading of the audiobook is especially good, giving voice to an array of different characters. It's suspenseful, it's weird and visceral, and has that brilliant science-fiction thing of being at once utterly extraordinary and also tangibly real. 

Rosewater won the Clarke Award in 2019. Other books on the shortlist were Semiosis by Sue Burke, Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi, and The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley.

Doctor Who Magazine #578

There's a lot by me in the new issue of Doctor Who Magazine. I've written the main cover feature, "Who is Ncuti Gatwa", a profile of the actor announced earlier this month as the new Doctor.

Had it not been for this exciting announcement, the cover would probably have gone to Peter Cushing, star of the 1960s Dalek movies that are being re-released this summer. There is lots about the films this issue, including two things by me. 

In "Sets and the City", Rhys Williams and Gav Rymill recreate the sets from the 1965 film Dr Who and the Daleks, with commentary by me and Rhys. This month's "Sufficient Data" infographic by me and Ben Morris charts actors from the first Dalek movie who were also in TV Doctor Who.

(By nice coincidence, almost exactly 20 years ago, my first ever work for DWM was a feature on that first Dalek movie and big-screen Doctor Who generally. That was a cover feature, too.)

Plus, in "Hebe Monsters", I speak to Ruth Madeley about playing Hebe Harrison, new companion to the Sixth Doctor in his latest audio adventures.

Given all this, they've also put a photo of niceish me on page 3, taken by the Dr.

Amongst Our Weapons, by Ben Aaronovitch

I loved this latest entry in the Rivers of London series, with Detective Constable Peter Grant on the trail of a vengeful angel linked to the Spanish Inquisition (hence the title). The case involves a trip to Manchester and Glossop, and lots of good twists and turns, with Ben - as ever - keeping the magic stuff grounded in the real. Police work is, it seems, based on knowing the nearest location of "refs" (ie coffee and snacks).

What I especially like is how this standalone adventure still moves the series on, with Peter's imminent fatherhood creating ripples for the whole series, and then a quiet word from another character at the end promising more radical shake-ups to come. I also really like the sense of Peter trying to make connections between different magical communities, breaking down the idea so common to fantasy of wizarding as an elite.

The Waterstones edition includes a bonus story, "Miroslav's Fabulous Hand", narrated by Peter's mentor Nightingale and set just before and then during the Second World War. It's thrilling in itself - like an old-school James Bond adventure - but also exciting to see some of Nightingale's early life in more detail. This sort of thing could support a whole novel of its own. (See also what I said about the recent novella, What Abigail Did That Summer.)

By coincidence, I finished this while the Dr is on holiday in Thessaloniki, which is where I was in 2011 when I read the first Rivers of London book. By coincidence, the Dr now works at one of the places featured in this new book. By coincidence, as I was making my way to the Nigel Kneale centenary event last week, I got to the reference on page 218 to "the original Quatermass".

Doctor Who Magazine #577

There's another "Sufficient Data" infographic at the back of the new Doctor Who Magazine, written by me and illustrated by Ben Morris. This one is based on episodes of Doctor Who first broadcast at Easter.

A lot of attention has been given to Doctor Who Christmas specials, but to date 14 episodes have first been broadcast on Christmas Day, while 20 have premiered on Holy Saturday (the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday):

1. 28 March 1964 - Mighty Kublai Khan
2. 17 April 1965 - The Warlords
3. 9 April 1966 - The Hall of Dolls
4. 25 March 1967 - The Macra Terror Episode 3
5. 13 April 1968 - Fury from the Deep Episode 5
6. 5 April 1969 - "The Space Pirates" Episode 5
7. 28 March 1970 - Doctor Who and the Silurians Episode 2
8. 10 April 1971 - Colony in Space Episode One
9. 1 April 1972 - The Sea Devils Episode Six
10. 21 April 1973 - Planet of the Daleks Episode Three
11. 13 April 1974 - The Monster of Peladon Part Four
12. 29 March 1975 - Genesis of the Daleks Part Four
13. 26 March 2005 - Rose*
14. 15 April 2006 - New Earth*
15. 7 April 2007 - The Shakespeare Code
16. 11 April 2009 - Planet of the Dead
17. 3 April 2010 - The Eleventh Hour*
18. 23 April 2011 - The Impossible Astronaut*
19. 30 March 2013 - The Bells of Saint John*
20. 15 April 2017 - The Pilot*

Six of those (marked with an asterisk) were the first of a new series, using Easter as part of the launch. Planet of the Dead (2009) and this year's Legend of the Sea Devils were special, one-off episodes for the Easter weekend. 

Legend of the Sea Devils is the first episode of Doctor Who to debut on Easter Sunday itself. And the 1993 repeat on BBC Two of Revelation of the Daleks Part Four is the only episode of Doctor Who broadcast on terrestrial TV on Good Friday.

Skyward Inn, by Aliya Whiteley

This was the perfect accompaniment to my journey to London and back for the Nigel Kneale centenary, and not only because it fitted the drive time almost exactly.

A long time ago, Jem escaped her home in Devon and young son to cross through the Kissing Gate and journey into space. There she met and bonded with an alien called Isley, then brought him home to run a pub, the Skyward Inn, and reconnect with her own people. But the "brew" that Isley supplies has unusual properties, forging connections across time and memory, even giving visions of the future. As a disease takes hold of the Earth, the community starts to break down, people together and yet somehow utterly alone...

As strange and haunting as Whiteley's previous books, Skyward Inn is full of threat just under the surface, a pervasive wrongness that we can't always quite touch. The last section plays out as a nightmare, as unsettling as any Kneale. It's horrible yet beautiful, too - the prose full of feeling and pathos. We're made to understand why people make the awful choice to surrender entirely to the thing that's happening. The ending hangs on our belief in the strength of a connection between two individuals on separate planets and in different periods of time; it's brilliant.

The book owes something to Jamaica Inn, and is about the cross-pollination cultures. At its heart is the colonisation of another, populated world, its native people not resisting human invasion. As with previous Whiteley, that passivity is deeply unsettling. But this is all mirrored with an incursion by humans from across the boundary wall round Devon (now known as the "Western Protectorate"). There's lots on "good" immigrants bringing needed skills and expertise, deemed more worthy of acceptance than other individuals. There's lots on dysfunctional families and how we choose our connections. There's lots about how we interact and are shaped by interaction. We are our connections.

• On The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley

Nigel Kneale: A Centenary Celebration

What a thrill to be at the Picturehouse Cinema in Crouch End yesterday, in the shadow of Alexandra Palace, for the centenary celebration of writer Thomas Nigel Kneale, born 28 April 1922 - and not 18 April as some parts of the internet insist. This point was made by MC Toby Hadoke in his opening introduction to the day's festivities. And that, I think, was the theme of the day: to get this right. All credit to everyone involved.

The first panel, "Nigel Kneale, Quatermass and the BBC", was chaired by Kneale biographer Andy Murray and featured Dick Fiddy from the BFI, Toby Hadoke and comedian Johnny Mains - the latter daring to admit that he doesn't much like Doctor Who. Kneale famously hated that series, but many of us got into Kneale's work via Doctor Who. I've been trying to puzzle out why, and think a lot of fandom - of anything - is trying to recapture the strong feelings of our past. For those thrilled and terrified by Doctor Who as kids, Kneale offers a grown-up version of those feelings, and - since he was so often borrowed from - an understanding of how they were kindled.

The panel was a good, breezy introduction to Kneale and the impact of his work on television in the 1950s, though a lot of the ground here was familiar to me from Toby's recent Radio 4 Extra programme, Remembering Nigel Kneale, and Cambridge Festival's "Televising the future: Nineteen Eighty-Four and the imagination of Nigel Kneale". I'd also just read Andrew Pixley's 1986 interview with Kneale.

Next up, we watched the extraordinary opening episode of The Quatermass Experiment from 1953 (available on the Quatermass Collection DVD set). It's a while since I'd last seen this, and I'd forgotten how blurry, clunky and techbnobabble-heavy its early scenes are as we watch serious, posh scientists at their desks in a tracking control room. But that soon gives way to the extraordinary sight of a house half-demolished by the world's first crewed space rocket. We see before the characters on screen that there's an old woman trapped in the exposed upstairs; she's played by Katie Johnson who two years later was the similarly dotty Mrs Wilberforce in The Ladykillers, only without her scene-stealing cat. It's just one of a number of well-observed comic characters enlivening the serious horror plot, adding a touch of realism - and fun - to the fantasy.

Having read The Intimate Screen by Jason Jacobs, I can understand why The Quatermass Experiment made such an impact: an original drama for television, rather than an adaptation of a stage play or book, that makes full use of the strengths of the medium to conjure an intimately creepy atmosphere. It's so busy, so populous, so nakedly ambitious - and all broadcast live. All these years later, it is thrilling. No wonder it stuck so powerfully with those who saw it at the time. As several panelists said, Quatermass was a thing that terrified our parents, that we first heard about from them decades afterwards - a folk memory of horror. (My mum says the girls at her school would make a lot of noise at the start of each episode, so the grown-ups in charge would not hear the warning of it not being suitable...)

Next up was Tom Baker in a bookish office to narrate Kneale's short story "The Photograph", in a 1978  episode of Late Night Story - a sort of grown-up Jackanory. It's an unsettling story about a sick child, but I was mostly struck by how little Baker blinked throughout what seemed to be a single take (and presumably involved him reading the story off an autocue). 

Then Douglas Weir discussed the the new restoration of Nineteen Eighty Four (1954). The audience gasped at a particular example showing Peter Cushing's Winston Smith walking through Hampstead. The version screened by BBC Four a few years ago had Cushing moving through what looked like silver fog; the restored version shows him moving between trees, individual leaves crisp and clear. (I'm on the new Blu-ray release, by the way, just about audible asking Toby Hadoke and Andy Murray the question about Kneale's never-made scripts.)

Next was the panel "From Taskerlands to Ringstone Round – Nigel Kneale in the 70s", chaired by Howard David Ingham with panelists William Fowler, Una McCormack and Andrew Screen. I've been guilty of overlooking Kneale's 1970s output - The Stone Tape (1972), which I'd at least seen, and the anthology series Beasts (1976), which I haven't yet. That led into a screening of Murrain, Kneale's contribution to a 1975 anthology, Against the Crowd (included on the DVD release of Beasts).

David Simeon - who sadly couldn't be at yesterday's event - plays a vet called to a small village by a farmer played by Bernard Lee from the James Bond films. The farmer has some sick pigs and his water supply has dried up, plus a young boy in the village has had something like flu for a month. The farmer and the villagers think this all the work of a local woman, played by Una Brandon-Jones (who I recognised at once as Mrs Parkin in Withnail & I). The villagers want the vet's help in dealing with her; he's determined to champion science over superstition, insisting that "We can't go back" to the old ways. It's a compelling piece: real, sometimes funny and increasingly sinister. With a start, I recognised some of the scenery: the Curious British Telly site says Murrain was recorded in Wildboarclough, not far from where I now live. A local film for this local person, indeed.

Then Matthew Sweet chaired a panel on "Kneale on Film" with panelists Jon Dear, Kim Newman and Vic Pratt. This covered a lot of stuff I didn't know about: Kneale's work on the movie version of stage plays Look Back in Anger (1959) and The Entertainer (1960), and the mutiny-at-sea story HMS Defiant (1962) - all a long way from the weird-thriller stuff. Because of that, I'd not been much interested; the panel made me want to look them out and understand the weird stuff in context. I want, too, to see his last work, a 1997 episode of legal drama Kavanagh QC.

A clip from the movie version of The Quatermass Xperiment ((1955) showed infected astronaut Victor Carroon (Richard Wordsworth) stalk a Little Girl (Jane Asher), who offers it imaginary cake. Asher then joined us to discuss this early role and her later, more prominent part in The Stone Tape (1972) - which was then shown in full. I'd seen this before, but it was fascinating to see beside Nimbos, who didn't know what was coming, and in the context of the day's other offering. Again what struck me was how funny it was, especially the visual gag of Reginald Marsh's hands being outlandish colours as he experiments with dyes. Toby Hadoke pointed out that Neil Wilson appears as a salt-of-the-earth security guard having been seen as a salt-of-the-earth policeman in The Quatermass Experiment, so I wonder how much Kneale consciously used the same actors over the years.

This was followed by a live reading of Kneale's 1952 radio play, You Must Listen. Mark Gatiss played the lawyer who has a new telephone installed in his office, only to find he can hear a young woman talking sauce to an unheard lover. Again, it's very funny, the lawyer embarrassed and outraged but the telephone staff all keen to listen in on this rude stuff. And then, as before, it becomes ever more sinister as we realise this saucy woman is an echo from the past. In that sense, it dovetails with The Stone Tape from 20 years later, and with elements of the other stuff we'd seen. How well chosen all these examples were; we could see we were engaged in an experiment ourselves, to trace the resonant echoes of Kneale.

By this time Nimbos and I were flagging as the short breaks between screenings had not been long enough for us to eat any food, and I was getting a bit wobbly. So we sadly missed the panel on “'The inventor of modern television': Kneale’s influences and Legacy" chaired by Jennifer Wallis with panelists Stephen Gallagher, Mark Gatiss, Andy Murray and Adam Scovell. The day ended with a screening of the movie Quatermass & The Pit (1967), and then much natter in the bar.

It was all a bit overwhelming. There was the sheer amount of stuff covered and shown, but also the way the selection encouraged us to tease out shared themes, techniques, stylistics. Then there was the visceral thrill of being in company, catching up with so many friends. I had a long drive home today, passing close to Wildboarclough and its Murrain, brain abuzz from things learned and spotted and argued. That's the thing about Kneale, who died in 2006, and the stuff he wrote that was largely screened long before I was born... 

It is potent. It is alive.

The Far Country, by Nevil Shute

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Me on Requiem for a Wren, by Nevil Shute

What Abigail Did That Summer, by Ben Aaronovitch

Oh what joy, a Rivers of London adventure we could share with the ten year-old as we drove down to my mum's for the Easter weekend. We thought we'd try it and see how he got on - and how suitable the content might be - and very quickly he was hooked.

Abigail Kamara is Peter Grant's 12 year-old cousin, as featured in several of the books about Grant, a London copper who investigates weird bollocks. This novella is what happens while Peter is away in Hereford (during the events of Foxglove Summer), looking into the disappearance of a bunch of kids her own age from Hampstead Heath. There's some suggestion this is going to riff on Pied Piper of Hamelin but it goes more The Stone Tape, but full of the usual smart, funny observation that makes the main series so compelling. There's a posh boy called Simon who prefers climbing trees to school work which particularly struck a chord.

Shvorne Marks is an excellent reader, with dour footnotes provided by Kobna Holbrook-Smith (who usually narrate's Peter's audiobook adventures). What strikes me is how easily Abigail could lead further adventures - as could many of the other rich and well-drawn characters in the series. Ben has created a whole world, one that could survive the death or retirement of its lead character. I'm all too aware off that as I begin Amongst Our Weapons...

On other titles in the series:

• Lies Sleeping
• The October Man
• False Value

Sci-fi Bulletin interview re Mary Whitehouse

Samira and I were interviewed by Paul Simpson at Sci-fi Bulletin about our recent Radio 4 documentary, Disgusted, Mary Whitehouse. 

• Archive on Four: Interview: Samira Ahmed and Simon Guerrier
• Our documentary: Disgusted, Mary Whitehouse

This week, BBC Four has also broadcast a very good two-part TV documentary on the same subject, Banned! The Mary Whitehouse Story. Having spent weeks going through the archives looking for good material, it's interesting to see which bits of old footage they've used - and the different choices / potential afforded by telling a story visually.

Doctor Who Magazine #576

The new issue of Doctor Who Magazine is devoted to forthcoming Easter TV special Legend of the Sea Devils, but there are a couple of bits from me.

First, there's a tribute to the actor Henry Soskin who, as Henry Lincoln, co-wrote The Abominable Snowman and The Web of Fear, and - under another pseudonym - The Dominators. Lincoln then want on to investigate the Knights Templar, and co-wrote the best-selling The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. It was a fun challenge to dig through the various things said about - and by - him to piece together the true story was; how very fitting for him, I thought.

Then the latest instalment of Sufficient Data is on the different cat badges worn by the Sixth Doctor, as always illustrated by the amazing Ben Morris.

17 years of new Doctor Who

17 years ago today, on 26 March 2005, Doctor Who returned to TV after an absence of almost as long. That first new episode Rose is still fresh and exhilarating, and readily available on iPlayer. It's easy to imagine someone starting with it now and quickly getting hooked. 

But I wonder how Rose would look to someone coming to it only familiar with Doctor Who from Jodie Whittaker's Doctor. Would it seem so very different? In the intervening years, there have been new lead actors, the move to high definition TV, and there's a lot more CGI - but in its pace and feel and imagination, and in the character and motivations of the Doctor, it's still recognisably the same programme.

How that contrasts with the first time Doctor Who turned 17, on 23 November 1980. The night before that birthday, State of Decay Part One saw the Fourth Doctor and his companions - two aliens and a robot - meeting vampires in a bubble universe, in a clash of old mythology and cutting edge physics. A few weeks before, on 4 November, is was announced that Peter Davison would be taking over the title role in the series, a markedly younger actor than the previous incumbents, promising new life for the then-venerable series. And a little before that, on 25 October, the first episode of Full Circle made a big impression on me; it's the earliest thing I remember.

For a long time, to me Doctor Who before then was essentially myth. My elder siblings shared tantalising memories of Doctor Who stories from just a few years before that I thought I'd never see. Old Doctor Who had been better, scarier, stranger - and theirs. Then came fleeting glimpses of what had been. At the end of 1981, BBC Two repeated some old stories, including ones older than my siblings. I vividly remember the awe with which we met Doctor Who's very first four episodes, relics of another age. 

For one thing, they were so strikingly different from the Doctor Who of 17 or 18 years later. They were black and white, but also dark and spooky and shot in a completely different way: long scenes with lots of close-ups, and little in the way of effects. There was also the character of the Doctor, this grumpy, cowardly, selfish figure - literally a different person, not just played by a different actor.

This extraordinary difference was evident to the people who worked on the programme. Jacqueline Hill, who played Barbara Wright in the first 18 months of Doctor Who, returned to the series in 1980 to play Lexa, an alien priestess. If Billie Piper, who played Rose, were to return to Doctor Who now, I wonder how much she'd share these sentiments:

"We did Meglos in different studios, and of course television had moved on in leaps and bounds so that the technique was completely different. The special effects were a lot more dominant. It was recorded entirely out of order and there was nobody working on the story who could remember as far back as me – which was something of a humbling experience. I did enjoy it very much, though, mainly because the part I played was so very different to the calm and unflappable Barbara. It was a happy reunion with a show that was really only the same show by name alone." (Jaqueline Hill in Doctor Who Magazine #105 (1985)

As it happens, this week I was in London to research more about the early days of Doctor Who and the people who made it - stuff now on the cusp of living memory. Since I was passing that way, I called in at a particular tree.

The Inheritors, by William Golding

Two years ago, Backlisted devoted an episode to The Inheritors, the second novel by William Golding, author of The Lord of the Flies. Ever since, I've been meaning to reread it, not least because panelist Dr Una McCormack asked me about the book's influence on the first Doctor Who.

In The Inheritors, a small group of primitive people face what Iain Banks referred to as an "outside context problem", a threat so far beyond the limits of their understanding that they don't stand a chance. In this case, we recognise - as the primitive people do not - that the strange "other" people who have settled nearby possess weapons and transport, and the intent to kill. As the book goes on, we realise that the people whose perspective we share are Neanderthals; the cruel, drunk and good-at-killing "others" are humans, the inheritors of the world.

It's a strange, heady book that builds on stuff in The Lord of the Flies: the idea of humans as essentially violent and primal; a reversal at the end where we see everything from someone else's perspective that changes our sense of what we have witnessed. The Lord of the Flies is a staple of the secondary school curriculum - I studied it for GCSE - but The Inheritors is a harder read, the action not always clear, and there's plenty of nakedness and sex.

Golding seems to root modern gender politics in the ancient past. His Neanderthals have clearly designated roles:

"A man for pictures [ie thinking]. A woman for Oa [ie having children.] (p. 117)

Except, as we see, the truth is more complicated and the male who says this often gives way to more gifted, able women who see pictures more clearly. Golding's not exactly a feminist here - he rarely gets through a page without mentioning breasts, though the Neanderthals would surely be used to seeing each other naked. The women might have better ideas and understanding, but its all told from the perspective of (heterosexual) men. 

I think there's something similar with racial or colonial politics. The Neanderthals and the humans are distinct groups, physically and culturally, and there's a sense of innate separateness - or apartheid. And yet there's a scene in which Liku can speak the same language as the humans, and begin to form a bond, while the humans effectively adopt one of the Neanderthals as their own. The suggestion is that whatever inequalities exist, it wasn't always thus and there is still a chance to change. (We now know, of course, that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred, that many people alive today have a direct genetic inheritance from Homo neanderthalis; my understanding is that this wasn't understood at the time Golding wrote this.)

So, what about Doctor Who? The first ever Doctor Who serial is a four-part story generally known as An Unearthly Child (the title of its first episode) but also as 100,000 BC or The Tribe of Gum (titles used by the production team for the serial as a whole).

When he began working on Doctor Who, writer Anthony Coburn was on the full-time staff of the BBC's Script Department, where his job included looking for books to adapt for the screen. Golding had been lauded since the publication of Lord of the Flies in 1954, and the BBC had adapted that and several other of his novels for radio. Surely then, Coburn at least knew of The Inheritors. But there's some suggestion that he drew on it directly.

In 2003, Alan Barnes listed for Doctor Who Magazine some of the connections between that first Doctor Who serial and what he referred to as "the most renowned prehistoric novel at the time", singling out the sense in the novel that Golding's Neanderthals do not "make" fire from scratch but carry burning embers with them (each fire inherited from the last).

"Clearly, the secret of fire-making has been lost, and so the fire must be transported as a constant. Likewise, in The Cave of Skulls, Hur tips ash ("the dead fire") over Za's kindling. Both Golding's and Coburn's Neanderthals have something like a religion - the first devoted to "Oa", a kind of "Earth-Mother", the other to "Orb", a sun-god. But perhaps the best reason for believing that Coburn was acquainted with The Inheritors lies in the similarities between Golding's Neanderthal names and Coburn's: the names of 'Ha', the leader, and the woman 'Fa', are echoed by Coburn's 'Za', for instance, with the male names 'Lok' and 'Mal' resembling ancestors of 'Kal'."(Alan Barnes, "Fact of Fiction: 100,000 BC", DWM #337 (2003))

I think there are more direct links than that. Both feature an unnamed "old woman" where all other speaking characters have names. In Doctor Who, she's credited as "Old Mother", but in the dialogue is only ever "Old Woman" - capitalised in the script. Both these old women mutter from the sidelines about what the leader ought to do. 

"'Mal! Mal! We have meat!' 

Mal opened his eyes and got himself on one elbow. He looked across the fire at the swinging stomach [of a doe they had scavenged] and panted a grin at Lok. Then he turned to the old woman. She smiled at him and began to beat the free hand on her thigh. 

'That is good, Mal. That is strength.'" (p. 58)

Both old women are murdered at key dramatic moments. When the novel's old woman dies, we discover she is the mother of one of the other characters; the Doctor Who story never tells us who Old Mother is the mother of, but that seems to have been part of an early draft.

Then there is the way these primitive people understand the world around them - and describe their own understanding. Throughout The Inheritors, the Neanderthals speak of the "pictures" in their minds that they endeavour to share with one another. Compare that to the following from Doctor Who's third episode (the red bits as per the camera script but not the broadcast version):

KAL: My eyes tell me what has happened... as they do when I sleep and I see things. Za and Hur came here to free them, and find out the a way to make fire. The old woman saw them and Za killed old woman. Za has gone with them... taking them to their tree [ie the TARDIS]. Za is taking away fire.

HORG: The old woman is dead. It must have been as your eyes said it was. (Doctor Who episode 3: The Forest of Fear]

There's something, too, in the way control of some "technology" (in the broadest sense) defines who has power - weapons and boats in the book, but also clearer thinking; fire in Doctor Who. As Alan suggests in DWM, the second Doctor Who story then builds on that idea - the Daleks threatening to obliterate all other life on their planet with a neutron bomb. I wonder if something of that second story was also inspired by The Inheritors, or at least the review by Arthur Koestler in the Sunday Times of 25 December 1955, which was then quoted on later editions:

"An earthquake in the petrified forests of the English novel." 

As I said in response to the Backlisted episode, The Inheritors surely influenced the 1970 story Doctor Who and the Silurians - in which a prehistoric people wake up to discover "their" Earth has been conquered by humans - and then the novelisation of that story, which begins with a chapter all told from a Silurian's point of view. There are other Doctor Who stories too, directly or indirectly. But then, if The Inheritors influenced the very first Doctor Who story, all of Doctor Who draws a line back to that book.

Backlisted suggested Golding's influence on Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker (1980), which I want to reread soon. But I now wonder if the racial aspects especially of The Inheritors fed into Nigel Kneale's Quatermass and the Pit (TV version broadcast 1958-59), and into Pierre Boulle's novel La Planète des Singes (1963) - the source of the Planet of the Apes film series. There's the "Dawn of Man" sequence that opens 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), with two groups of primate clashing, one inspired to use weapons. I can see the interest in humanity's primitive urges, and also the reversals of perspective, in the work of Iain Banks - the "outside context problem" referenced above is a feature of Banks's Excession (1996).

There's more, I'm sure - all inheritors.

Putin's People, by Catherine Belton

This extraordinary, meticulously researched book is an essential read just now. Belton charts the rise and rise of Vladimir Putin from his early days in the KGB to the present day (or 2020, when the book was published), to show where everything going on at the moment came from. There's a lot to take in: the scale of the kleptocracy, the astonishing sums of cash involved, the huge number of people caught up in it.

There's a lot on Russian links to Donald Trump, going back many decades, and lots on Putin's long-standing interest in Ukraine. There's lots on Russian support for Brexit and the corrosive effect of "black money" in London. What a lot of damage has been done; the horror of it all is exhausting.

Pincher Martin, by William Golding

It took a while to get into this 1956 novel by William Golding, and after the first few pages of a man struggling in water mixed up with bits of other stuff - conversations, images of life - I turned to the back cover hoping the blurb might provide a steer on what was going on. What's there contains a whopping spoiler for the end of the novel, and so does what follows here...

The back of this Faber paperback offers no teaser or summary of plot: instead, there are two quotations from reviews praising the "technical wizardry" (Kenneth Tynan in the Observer) and "sustained imaginative intensity" (unknown in the TLS). Tynan's particular praise is for, "the shock ending, which throws a new and doubly alarming retrospective light on the whole book". Rather than illuminate what's happening in the book, the message is to persevere. Which is a little ironic.

Pressing on through page after page, things became more clear. Christopher Hadley "Pincher" Martin has been shipwrecked, his ship torpedoed in what seems to be the Second World War. Martin kicks off his seaboots and struggles through the water to a rough, sheer bit of rock, stunned and exhausted, while bits of his former life flash before his eyes. There's then the promise of a harder, grittier Robinson Crusoe: the rock offering little comfort or useful materials, and Martin already half-mad.  

The glimpses of his life don't make us like him very much: a not very good actor, whose management were going to let go anyway before his call-up; a wannabe writer who has not written anything; a philanderer who once assaulted a woman who spurned him (an event, I gather, based on something Golding really did). Then there's the suggestion that the shipwreck was all his fault for giving the wrong order. There's a sense these privations - exposure, starvation, constipation, hideous sickness - are a punishment. Towards the end, there's a figure on the rock with Martin, suggesting this is some kind of purgatory.

And then the twist, as Martin's body is found on the shore and - in the killer final line - can't have suffered much because,

"He didn't even have time to kick off his seaboots." (p. 208)

Everything that precedes this is the last desperate vision of a drowning, dying man. Those boots, which surely killed him, are even on the cover of my edition, the only part of Martin visible, in a deceptively simple design by Paul Hogarth. Even on the last page I thought I must be missing something, and yet in that final line, what had been unfixed and uncertain all locks into place. 

Disgusted, Mary Whitehouse: Pick of the Week

Our documentary, Disgusted, Mary Whitehouse, has made tonight's Pick of the Week on Radio 4, presented by Geoff Lloyd. Hooray!

It's the second of the five radio documentaries made by me and my brother Thomas, and presented by Samira Ahmed, to have made Pick of the Week - the last was John Ruskin's Eurythmic Girls in 2017.

There's been a fair amount of press coverage of the documentary, too. We were mentioned on the cover of Radio Times, which also described the doc as "exceptional" (see below), and there were write-ups in BBC History Magazine, the Daily Express, Guardian, Herald, Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, Daily Telegraph, Times, Sunday Times, and Total TV Guide.

As well as her blog post, Samira wrote a piece for the BBC website:

• BBC: Was moral campaigner Mary Whitehouse ahead of her time?

Generally, responses have been positive. Mary Whitehouse remains a controversial figure and there are those appalled we made the programme at all and refuse to listen (which is ironic, given what we cover in the documentary). There are those who did listen and still think we're wrong - some because we were too lenient, some because we were too harsh. 

Roger Moore as James Bond

"The frank, uncensored story of what really happens in the making of a super-film," promises the back-cover blurb on Roger Moore as James Bond (aka Roger Moore's James Bond Diary). The star takes us through his 84 shooting days on his first Bond film, Live and Let Die, from Sunday 8 October 1972 when he leaves England for New Orleans to being told, if the rushes turn out okay, that he is done. 

On 14 October - Day 2 of shooting - Moore turned 45, the age I am now. There's a lot here about his aches and pains, his need of dental work, the various therapies employed and it's odd to think of myself, old and broken as I am, in better fettle than  Bond. There's also his anxieties and homesickness, and all the business that goes alongside making the movie itself.

"Daily more of the mechanics behind the mystique that is Bond become clear. The actual shooting, the rapport between my countenance and the camera, forms only a fraction of a field of operations which is a constant source of surprise." (Day 10, p. 27.)

The extra-curricular work includes endless press interviews, Moore is increasingly impatient when asked the same question each time: how will his Bond be different from Sean Connery's? There are endless photoshoots, appearances, charity galas, bits and pieces. Then there's the pop concert he goes to, where its announced to the audience that the new Bond is in their midst - and no one seems to care. He's self-effacing about this, and often very funny.

Yet Moore's wife Luisa is annoyed by how much this all encroaches into time he could spend with his children. Then there's the awkwardness of his various love scenes: how Luisa treats him on the days he's got sex on the schedule, the etiquette of what you say to the other actor during and after this stuff. It's Moore's diary, his version of events, but I often found myself wondering how it was for them. 

There's lots, too, that is amazing to see in an official, licensed release. In that sense, the book reminds me of Alan Arnold's absolutely extraordinary Once Upon a Galaxy: A Journal of the Making of The Empire Strikes Back which I now want to read again. Moore is candid about other actors fluffing their lines, mucking up shots or weeping. He cites various mistakes made by producer Harry Saltzman (such as, on page 32, making the wrong call on what the weather would be like, and so losing a day's shooting). There's stuff about Moore's children, such as his son needing an enema for trapped wind, that is personal, embarrassing and hardly relevant to the making of the film. But Moore seems to delight in this kind of thing: the gulf between movie fantasy and prosaic reality.

I wonder how much the cast and crew really enjoyed his constant pranking, which sometimes seems a bit cruel. I'm surprised, too, how little the other producer, Cubby Broccoli, features. Is that because he wasn't on set, or because he kept out of Moore's way, or because Moore had nothing funny or scathing to say about him, or because he knew better than to do so? Again, that's what make this so intriguing: Moore is sometimes brutally candid but we're not getting the whole story.

As early as day 5 we're told of plans afoot for the next Bond film, The Man With the Golden Gun, to begin shooting 18 months later in August 1974, and we really feel the weight and power of the Bond machine. But there's little on how much of a risk this all was, Moore the second attempt to keep the franchise going with a new leading man after George Lazenby had not turned out as hoped.

"The build-up of publicity and advertising for the film is fascinating. I was asking Harry [Saltzman] about the sort of money the Bonds have made in the past and he told me the biggest grosser was Thunderball which has done 64 million dollars to date. Diamonds are Forever, the last before Live and Let Die, had already grossed 48 million and it is only on its first time round [the cinemas]. OHMSS was the lowest and even that grossed 25 million dollars. I just hope ours will be as successful." (Day 52, p. 132.)

There's little sense he felt under pressure, I think because he could see the script and production were all good. But I wonder how Saltzman and Broccoli were feeling, especially given other tensions in the air. This is a film tapping into something of its moment. For example, early on, Moore was horrified to hear Saltzman shouting the N-word on set.

"He was not trying to start a race riot but simply calling to our English props man [by the] nickname he has answered to since the days of silent cinema. I pointed out that it might be better to to find him another name here in the racial hotbed of Louisiana so we have settled on 'Chalky'. As Bond, I make love to Rose Carver, played by beautiful black actress, Gloria Hendry, and Luisa has learned from certain Louisiana ladies that if there is a scene like that they won't go to see the picture. I personally don't give a damn and it makes me all the more determined to  play the scene." (Day 11, p. 31.)

There was more on this the following day: 

"Paul [Rabiger, supervising make-up] agrees with Guy [Hamilton, director], Tom Mankiewicz [writer] and myself that it would have been more interesting if Solitaire, our present leading lady, had been black as she was in Tom's original screen play, but United Artists would not stand for it." (Day 12, p. 33.)

A few days later, Moore reports on an argument on set, the black stunt team having objected to scenes being shot with white stunt performers blacked up (Day 17, p. 44). Two days after this, yet another photocall was the cause of further disagreement when Yaphet Kotto - the actor playing the villainous Mr Big - raised his fist in a black power salute.

"Whether he was serious or not I don't know but the sequel was a scorching row. [Publicity director] Derek Coyte pointed out that the pictures would rouse resentment from the rabid whites and could be seen as an endorsement of black power by militant blacks. We are making anything but a political picture but Derek said the photographs syndicated far and wide would involve us in a controversy which could do nothing but harm. Yaphet was incensed. At midday he and the black stunt men lunched together and during the afternoon Derek Coyte was ostracised by blacks who had previously been pally." (Day 19, p. 50.)

The next day, the black stuntmen were airing their grievances on local TV (p. 51). And these tensions were not confined to Louisiana. Returning to the UK, Moore shares a letter sent to him by a woman from North Wales, outraged by the sight of him pictured with Gloria Hendry as seen in the Daily Express (Day 54, p. 136).

Moore is unapologetic. It strikes me that George Lazenby had seen Bond as reactionary, but there's something here of Bond as progressive, just as they've tried to push things in the recent Daniel Craig films. Hardly perfect, but attempting to steer the juggernaut. 

I think there's something in that, too, when Moore first hears the theme tune for the film. In Goldfinger, Bond mocks the Beatles. Now a Beatle has written his title song, and Moore's response is telling:

"It is a tremendous piece of music and I will stick my neck out and say that three weeks from its release it will be number one in the charts. It's not last year's music, it's not even this year's music, it's next year's." (Day 66, p. 154.)

Doctor Who Magazine #575

The new issue of Doctor Who Magazine features "Silver Screen", in which Rhys Williams and I explore the writing and production design for the first episode of The Wheel in Space (1968) - a story by David Whitaker, designed by Derek Dodd. Rhys and Gav Rymill recreate the sets in CG, and Rhys has done the lion's share on this one - but it was very nice to coast in his wake.

There's also another "Sufficient Data" by me and Ben Morris, this time on the subject of antimatter to mark 40 years since it killed poor Adric.

A Survey of Television, by Stuart Hood

I mentioned Stuart Hood in my last post because I recently saw him in an episode of the BBC's Talkback from 7 November 1967, with six members of the public - including Mary Whitehouse - responding to this passage from his then recently published book:

"If one works in television one most reconcile oneself to the fact that the bulk of audience reaction is from cranks, from the unstable, the hysterical and sick." (p. 38)

For all the caustic tone, Hood's point was that those making television for a mass popular audience really need a sense of that audience's responses, but the means of gauging a reaction are limited. Viewing figures, audience surveys and correspondence can rarely explain the success or otherwise of a programme, let alone offer practical advice on how to improve. Programme makers are more often led by instinct. Committees of public opinion only resulted in bland television no one wanted to watch.

"Committees are uncreative." (p. 49)

Hood was Controller of BBC Television between 1961 and 1964, then moved to the ITV franchise Rediffusion. His survey of the medium is full of fascinating detail and more of that caustic wit. 

"Scottish Television serves the 4 million people of the Scottish industrial belt, which contains - to judge by the programmes they watch - the most uncritical body of viewers in the British Isles." (p. 25).

On the facts, it's interesting to read that there were, he thought in 1967, 

"some one hundred and ten countries with television service (p. 4),

up from four in 1946. He details how these were, at the time of writing, organised in groups: the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) with associate members from the American networks, Australia and South Africa plus new nations such as Malawi, Chad and Congo; its mirror opposite International Radio and Television Organisation (OIRT) comprising East European countries, Cuba, the Republic of Mali, the Korean People's Republic, China, the United Arab Emirates and the People's Democratic Republic of Vietnam; the Asian Broadcasting Union (ABU); the African Radio and Television Organisation (URNTA). Seeing the members helped me understand why, for example, Doctor Who sold to particular countries and not to others.

Sales could also be affected by cultural differences.

"Maigret was judged unacceptable by the [American] networks not because of the English accents (although they are a stumbling block) nor because of the foreign setting, but because of little incidents which betrayed a different set of television mores. Thus when Maigret had occasion to cross-examine a girl in a maison de passe it was found surprising that no moral attitude was taken towards the little tart. Nymphomania, lesbianism, drug addiction were touched on and accepted as facts of life, neither swept under the carpet nor magnified out of proportion in the context of the plot. Added to all these was the incident in which Maigret and Lucas stood in a courtyard, saw a light come on in a window, watched and waited to be rewarded by hearing the cistern of a lavatory flush." (p. 139)

Hood is even more withering of programmes that do sell to the US: he thought The Saint and The Avengers "anodyne" mid-Atlantic fare, the "triumph" of selling to the American networks,

“only slightly tarnished by the fact that these series have usually been used as cheap summer replacements.” (p. 140)

He's even less impressed by programmes coming the other way: Batman is "subliterate" (p. 160).

For all he is withering about shows he clearly doesn't like, he's good on the way that the structure, tone and content of programmes is set by the structures imposed on television by technology, politics and other forces. He begins with the physics of television itself and the varying methods of producing a moving picture at a distance, and how that dictated form. During the General Strike of 1926, the Government wished to "commandeer the BBC as an instrument of propaganda", which John Reith fiercely opposed.

"His victory was one of the crucial moments in the history of British broadcasting. Both BBC and ITV benefit from his stand to this day." (p. 168)

Then, of Hood's own time at the BBC, there's the way subtle differences between the Royal Charter and the Television Act 1954 dictated the output of the BBC and ITV respectively. Under the Act, the Independent Television Authority - overseeing ITV - had to ensure that,

"nothing is included in the programmes [of an ITV franchise] which offends against good taste or decency (a question-begging phrase) or is likely to encourage or incite crime or lead to disorder or to be offensive to public feeling or which contains any offensive representation of or reference to a living person." (p. 20)

The last part effectively meant that ITV could not engage in the satire craze of the early 1960s: the BBC could screen That Was The Week That Was; on ITV, "it would have been a breach of the Act."

Hood mentions TW3 eight times in the book, suggesting his own reckoning of its significance. There are multiple entries for police series Maigret and business drama The Plane Makers, and for sitcoms Steptoe and Son and Till Death Us Do Part. Surprisingly, there is no mention of other innovative and successful programmes created in Hood's time as Controller: Doctor Who, Top of the Pops and Play School. Perhaps he didn't think much of them; perhaps their significance only became clear when they'd been running for decades.

Hood has plenty to say about sitcoms. In his view, 

"the medium [of television] is a voracious consumer of talent and turns. A comic who might in the [music or variety] halls hope to maintain himself with a polished routine changing little over the years, embellished a little, spiced with topicality, finds that his material is used up in the course of a couple of television appearances. The comic requires a team of writers to supply him with gags, and invention" (p. 152)

The sitcom is a vehicle to enable this: effectively providing the comic performer with a structure for new material based on a familiar form. But whereas drama is innovative, sometimes uncomfortable or shocking, sitcom is part of a type of television altogether more safe. 

"Light entertainment is the most conservative department of television.” (p. 151)

He defines light entertainment as, 

“comedy, quiz games, light musical productions, pop programmes, outside broadcasts from night clubs and variety theatres. Its traditions are mainly drawn from the halls or from radio. They have been adopted television presentation but fundamentally the sequence of song, dance, spot comedian is unchanged.” (ibid)

Perhaps that's why he doesn't think Top of the Pops worthy of a mention. But I also think it's to do with his politics. He had been a member of the Communist Party and was later a member of the Workers Revolutionary Party, and Hood reviewed Asa Briggs' history of the BBC of this period for International Socialism. At the beginning of his Survey of Television, he suggests why a country such as apartheid South Africa may have been slow to embrace TV:

“Television is a great educator. Besides who knows what remarks the coloured citizens of the Republic might feel free to make in the privacy of their homes about the white people on the screen?”  (p. 5)

He's interested, then, in television as progressives, a medium of necessary change. And light entertainment,

“is a non-political tradition. Political satire has been traditionally avoided… It is more likely to be dictated by a determined political neutrality. Much of TV variety is of this inoffensive, traditional nature. It is popular and professionally presented and fundamentally unintellectual.” (p. 152)

This, I think, is why Hood devotes a lot to the advances in news and educational programming - the role of television in explaining politics and shaping the world. It's not that light entertainment couldn't be technically sophisticated - even groundbreaking. I've always heard The Black and White Minstrel Show spoken of in terms of embarrassment, a show that should have been cancelled long before 1978. It's odd to think of it as having been innovative and exciting.

"When The Black and White Minstrel Show won the Golden Rose of Montreux in 1959 there were some European representatives who doubted whether their audiences could follow the speedy cutting and rhythm of the camera work. Such sophistication is now general." (p. 169)

Compare that to the reactionary culture of the news:

"On one point only it seems unlikely that the BBC or ITN will take a step forward - by employing a woman to read the news. For one short period the BBC did employ a woman announcer who was at once intelligent and good looking; but the weight of masculine prejudice among her colleagues was too powerful and the experiment had to be discontinued. So too was ITN's experiment in the use of newscasters in the sense of men who write their own copy and then read it in front of the camera." (p. 108)

This all makes it sound like Hood's survey is of where television has been, but much of this is about where it is going next. He's concerned about TV schedules programmed not by humans but by "crystal clock and computer" (p. 84). There's stuff about the practicalities of 625-line television, brought in by the BBC the year Hood was writing, and the impact of more channels, of colour TV, of satellite broadcasting. The striking thing, in retrospect, and the irony given Hood's politics and predilections, is how conservative he was about the future we've seen come to pass.

Think of the BBC's new promo to mark its centenary this year, #ThisIsOurBBC: the rich variety of programming showcased, the social contract with the audience and nation, news and light entertainment mixed in with the drama, the whole thing posited as direct engagement with the audience, a two-way conversation. I think, from working on our documentary about Mary Whitehouse, that she had a media savvy understanding of the power of television. Ironically, Stuart Hood lacked the same faith.