Love and Liberty

Introducing Doctor Who – Ghost Light…

The Doctor takes Ace to her worst nightmare: a Victorian ghost story for Christmas. Lush BBC costume drama is only the start of one of the most bizarre, macabre and intelligently designed pieces of television you’ll ever see. At a stage in Doctor Who’s life-cycle when the series looked to be facing extinction, it evolves by taking risks and challenging the audience rather than ever playing it safe – though it’s got the vicar from Downton Abbey, here he’s at a much more satisfying posh dinner party, where everyone’s shockingly talking science and religion.

As part of not just a seasonal but I hope a year-long celebration, I’m still catching up. That is, I’m catching up even with my catching up from last year, but this is one of the last I’d previously published. Only a couple to go now, and I may perhaps be writing something else first that’s not a ‘Special Edition’ at all – wish me luck. But I’m at least slightly gladdened to have reached Ghost Light for Christmas Eve. It feels of the season (though if you watch carefully, it isn’t at all – the clocks suggest both Midsummer and October, which may not entirely help). And I’ve just watched the whole season it’s a part of, an ending that brought me to tears when of course it’s not an ending at all.

It’s hard to think of another Doctor Who story so exuberantly packed with brilliant ideas and witty lines, so I was tempted to suggest as one of my ten reasons to watch (like using your last wish to wish for more wishes) that you should explore it to discover how many more reasons than ten there really are.

Ten Reasons To Watch Ghost Light (warning: spoilers lower down the list)

1 – The Doctor and Ace.

By Ghost Light, the Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) and his friend Ace (Sophie Aldred) have been together for quite a while. Under lead writer Andrew Cartmel they’ve both become more complex than in the previous season, him less judgmental, her less the troubled teenager, but both still seem to delight in blowing things up – here the Doctor even worries that he’s lit the blue touch paper and left nowhere to retire to, but it’s really Ace’s fuse that he’s playing with.

I love Sylvester’s Doctor in this story, as much an initiative test for the viewer as it is for Ace. He’s powerful, inquisitive, caring, cruel, funny, melancholy and more, but he always leaves me with more questions than answers here: how much does he know what’s going on, and why does he come to Gabriel Chase in the first place? His thinking aloud that even he can’t play this many games at once and the not-a-reassurance that he always leaves things to the last minute suggest he may have seen all sorts of fascinating threads along the way and couldn’t help tugging at them, but that this is really all about his getting Ace to confront her demons before the house’s angels, and that saving Earth is just a by-product.

Is the Doctor Professor Higgins, forcing Ace / Eliza to evolve into his own idea of a Lady (Pygmalion)? Is he Merlin, pushing Ace / Wart through one form after another to learn from the inside out (The Sword In the Stone)? Or is he just prodding her to find out what she’ll turn into for herself? At least, whatever he’s doing to his companion without asking permission, he’s out to expand her mind rather than wiping it. Whether he learns a lesson in the end from seeing other people being treated as he treats Ace and just how badly that works out is open to question, but on the other hand it’s not just Ace who adapts herself to what’s happening in the house; the Doctor has always been able to rise to whatever situation he finds himself in. When Victorian vicar Reverend Matthews takes him for their host, the Doctor fits himself into the niche and responds to the immediate stimuli of “condescend” by how he acts up to him. Or he may just be having enormous fun. It takes Ace rather longer to enjoy it.

The climax of Part One – though Part Two has the more thrilling cliffhanger – comes in possibly their best scene together, when Ace realises that the Doctor’s taken her to her worst nightmare and demands he face her. Sophie Aldred is terrific confronting her mentor / tormentor, looking suddenly grown up in a dinner suit, grasping the trophy room table like a lectern to rain brimstone on the Doctor as he comes in behind her, dark, quiet, stealthy, prodding.

“Don’t you have things you hate?”
“I can’t stand burnt toast. I loathe bus stations. Terrible places, full of lost luggage and lost souls.”
“I told you I never wanted to come back here again.”
“Then there’s unrequited love, and tyranny, and cruelty.”
“Too right.”
“We all have a universe of our own terrors to face.”
“I face mine on my own terms!”

And her terms aren’t to do with what the Doctor prompts her to realise about what terrified her five years earlier for her, a century in the house’s future, much closer to home. When she starts to open up about the greatest horror in her past, the haunted house just a symptom, Doctor’s quietly supportive, it puts the hairs up on my neck. And you realise that this isn’t about strange upper-class manners in 1883 London at all, and that Doctor Who is now confronting other demons, real and terrible ones that are sickeningly on the rise again as 2016 comes to a close.




2 – That’s the Way to the Zoo.

Mark Ayres’ score is lush, sinister, sometimes intimate and probably his best for the show. He does wonders to produce an orchestral feel without an orchestra. I often listen to the soundtrack (itself released in three different versions). The captivating chords building as Ace confronts the Doctor and her past, the swirling frenzy as they break apart and the African pipes as Redvers stalks them through his own private world make an enormous contribution to Part One. But even here, he’s upstaged by the genuine and disturbingly appropriate Victorian parlour song he found for Katharine Schlesinger’s Gwendoline to sing.

For the climax of the first episode, the music has been rising and getting more claustrophobic as things come to a head; there’s a magnificent flurry as Ace runs up the stairs; it spellbindingly underscores Ace’s harrowing revelations; it spirals dizzyingly as she flees into the red darkness deep below. But hurled through the middle of Mark Ayres’ own magnificent compositions is a novelty song about zoos, monkeys and nuts that the daughter of the house sings with deranged fervour, counterpointing the terrible memories upstairs and the terrible deeds in the drawing room while foreshadowing worse to come, the camera swooping round the piano and Gwendoline’s unnaturally bright eyes with unforgettable passion. Sorry, Mark. She’s the bit that everyone remembers.

The story only gives one verse, but I’ve just discovered a more complete version by fan podcasters The Splendid Chaps, who tracked down the original music for their hellish cabaret. Click here: That’s the Way To the Zoo.




3 – Bringing the Haunted House story to life.

The whole story takes place within Gabriel Chase, a spooky old Victorian house. Except… It’s not haunted yet. It’s much weirder than that. It’s not an old house in 1883. And it’s teeming with life, more and more vividly as the story forges on. But terrible things have been happening, as a study of life corrupts into death after death, and the Doctor’s brought Ace here to find out what haunts her from a hundred years later – and it’s not just the house. While all the people caught inside try to work out how to cope with their environment – more an experience than a plot, and for some people life is more difficult to handle than what’s written in stone – the story’s major haunting is by the future, as Ace’s past comes to life around her as if the house knows what she’s going to do. And once the life of the house goes out, it remembers and broods for a hundred years…




4 – Sylvia Syms’ Mrs Pritchard.

Ghost Light has a terrific cast all round. Michael Cochrane steals a dozen scenes in an endearingly bewildered role far from the vicar at Downton Abbey; I remembered John Hallam as a hard soldier in Dragonslayer, and of course he drove his car over a cliff into a quarry (twice in one night? That is suspicious), but here his dangerously fey force of nature foreshadows Peter Capaldi’s Angel Islington in both performance and heralding that angels down below are rarely a good sign; John Nettleton is marvellous and seemed the biggest name to me because he’d been at the top of the tree in Yes Minister; Frank Windsor was far enough from Z Cars now that he could play another policeman; and Sharon Duce was a big deal too.

But out of all the bestiary, one actor always grabs your attention – because you don’t dare to look away from her. One of Britain’s major movie stars from the ’50s, playing demure but determined women in films such as Ice Cold In Alex and Victim, here Sylvia Syms plays terrifying housekeeper Mrs Pritchard in spidery black lace that goes beyond Queen Victoria and into half-Skeksis and with a face as hard as her tongue. Her scenes with awkward house guest Reverend Matthews are scarier than any of the aliens: she feels like a stalking cobra as she glides across the floor towards him, and she clearly struck author Marc Platt with the same force, if you read that passage in his novelisation. Who’s been shedding their skin? And her harsh reprimands to young Gwendoline are savage, horribly telling and hilarious all in one (I can never help joining in the whiplash of “Sitting there dressed like a music hall trollop!”). She seems to be a perfect fit for the household. But there’s other significance to dressing in Victoria’s widow’s weeds and another clue right there at hand from the story’s first few seconds, so Utopia’s not the only time a real self is hidden within a locket (the novel fills another character’s head with the sound of drums), and her final moment will freeze your heart…


5 – How Not to Bribe the Doctor.

Marc Platt’s fantastic script is packed to the brim with brilliant lines, many of them his own. You can’t count all the puns on light and change that reinforce the themes – from “Thank you, Nimrod. We would be delighted” to the butler right through to weaponised puns at the climax – and it completely changes your reaction to the word “Java” from something to wake you up. There’s a lot of it I join in on, appropriately for a gorgeously designed affair that at times looks just like Rocky Horror. But today, my favourite exchange is when self-made man – and if he isn’t, who made him? – Josiah Samuel Smith appraises the Doctor’s abilities if not his origins or morals and tries to employ him for a murder. “I’m afflicted with an enemy,” he claims, in a lovely turn of phrase evoking the man of property’s fear of the underclass despite them being the same underneath (depraved or deprived?), still satirically topical in 1989, and proffers a handful of such massive banknotes that the Doctor whistles.

“I’m not interested in money. How much?”
“Five thousand pounds to rid me of the evil brute.”
“Now that’s what I call Victorian value. But I’m still not interested in money.”

The novelisation adds an extra punchline from the Doctor:

“Five thousand pounds! he thought. A gentleman only ever pays in guineas!”

6 – The Victorian Age.

Ghost Light is the most deeply Victorian Doctor Who story of all. It doesn’t just glory in the literature and the stereotypes, but embodies the society, family, science, religion and philosophy too, and everything that comes crawling out when you scratch the veneer, everything the ’80s veneration of “Victorian Values” pretended to ignore. And the heart of what makes Ghost Light so much fun and so disturbing is that it revels in doing to the Victorians what they did to everyone else.

“You have no shred of decency.”

To the otherworldly survey agent, the house is unexplored and primitive territory, so naturally it’s his to claim and he sticks a flag in it as his property, whatever that does to the natives. And he doesn’t quite understand the customs, applying his perfectly sensible theory in entirely the wrong context… So if you think Josiah’s plan doesn’t make sense, this proto-Thatcherite assuming Darwinism and Social Darwinism are just the same as each other might just be the point. The religious and scientific establishment’s sermons are satirised over dinner, in the horrible comeuppance of Homo Victorianus Ineptus, and eventually on a grand scale when we find out just how appalling it would be if God were a proper Victorian deity. Josiah, the coming man, has become both the Victorian Age’s biggest fan and its harshest critic (so often the way). Just as Thatcherites in 1989 complained that there’s no discipline these days and call for a return to the standards of a century earlier, he condemns the Empire as a mess with no discipline or direction. Every layer of the character is more complex: even as Josiah appears to have evolved into the ruthless, self-centred Victorian capitalist, the same survey observations that identified Victorian Man as the pinnacle of nature makes him a naturalist with a realisation that there’s no such thing, in an unconventional challenge to every established hierarchy. Where Josiah seems to wind up appalled fundamentalist Reverend Matthews even more than in his theories on evolution is in the application he gives them, criticising industrial pollution and arguing that Man is merely another part of nature and just as in danger of becoming extinct.

The opposite inversion to Josiah is Redvers Fenn-Cooper, the finest explorer in the Empire but who’s lost himself. The explorer brings the madness back with him in some of the most heart-poundingly weird scenes for the Doctor, Ace and the viewer (making it a much cleverer take on Kinda, and with far greater semiotic thickness to it to boot). Seemingly the biggest threat at first, he should be the most objectionable character in the whole thing – but his ‘heroic’ Victorian stereotype turns inside-out instead. Rather than espousing the Inspector’s casual racism he sees London and its inhabitants as no different to the jungle, from the strange totems of Gabriel Chase – brilliantly captured in the novelisation as he escapes among them by some unimaginable feat of cunning – to his determination to hunt the crowned Saxe-Coburg. For me, Redvers is the most endearing character in the whole story, marvellously played by Michael Cochrane and adorable even if he raves, screams and introduces himself by wresting a Zulu assegai from where it hung on a tree beside a barometer…

“Burning bright in the heart of the Interior. It burnt through my eyes, into my mind. It had blazing – radiant – wings!”

7 – The Video Age.

Talking about “video” now seems almost quaintly Victorian too, but since the moment it was broadcast, people have talked about this as a story for the videotape era – meaning just that you have to record it and watch it several times to pick up how all the details work and understand it. And enjoying it and unlocking its puzzles in all those ways is a good part of what makes Ghost Light marvellous. But you can take videotape as metaphor, too. The story’s Recording Angel is a video archivist, who thinks the point is to log all the master tapes and never watch them. Or, like the BBC, burn them to prevent anyone watching them – play the tapes, and things happen, time moves forward… Evolution. Like a videotape, you can play it backwards, but just as that used to knacker your tapes, keeping evolution on pause or winding it back are bad news in this story. Ace regresses to her thirteen-year-old traumas, Matthews to an ape, Josiah back under control, and others in their own terrible ways. Going forwards, change, is life, and the only way to see your story unfold.


8 – The Scientific Method.

“My theories appal you, my heresies outrage you, I never answer letters and you don’t like my tie.”

And of course this story is all about evolution, not just the science but the catastrophic shock it posed to an entire worldview. The story boasts a menagerie of scientists, naturalists and explorers, and only the open-minded can cope. And for all that it challenges fixed religious orthodoxy, there is a creator here, and he’s not happy. It’s not your ordinary Frankenstein pastiche, either. Here the ‘mad scientist’ and creature are one, as well as two, and he’s actually published his papers for scrutiny, with his workings-out left on show in the cellar and a proper control (and if she’s not proper to start with, she evolves). Not that the peer review is favourable, but for the viewer just as for Ace, finding your own truth here is more rewarding than being told all the answers.

Science and religion are threaded through each other in Ghost Light – it’s not as simple as saying that one should defeat the other. For several of the characters, the two are the same, and an absolute, fixed canon of either or of anything is going to end up breaking under the strain. The story is on the side of irrepressible, unpredictable life and – very Doctor Who – against domination, control and telling people where they fit. Do you label the two most intertwined characters the Control and the Survey in an experiment started by the ultimate naturalist, telling the scientific method by metaphor? Or as Innocence and Experience, presided over by a Blakean angel? So when Light finally emerges, it doesn’t matter what you call him. Except to him, which is the essence of the problem. Obsessive cataloguer or oppressive deity, if it’s not written in the book, it’s got no right to be real! But that’s life. And even travelling at the speed of thought isn’t much use if you lack an imagination.




9 – Soup of the Evening, Beautiful Soup!

“You got stuffed and it wasn’t even Christmas.”

In a house so teeming with life, there’s a lot of catering. The day staff and the Night Maid are kept busy – there’s a dinner party on both evenings, Ace eats a hearty breakfast (perhaps brupper) but still wants a curry, even the Doctor talks about hamburgers, and Control has a crunchy nibble, though it’s Inspector Mackenzie who provides the most work for the kitchens. Well, he did sleep through a meal or two. The dinner in Part One is satisfying, serving up witty lines and gathering tension, but it pales beside the feast the following night which forms the climax to Part Three and the story. Although it’s probably not Christmas, the banquet begins with appropriately seasonal elements: estranged siblings seething at each other; mother running out in distress; squabbling over whether to cut off the Queen’s speech. And it all ends up with a couple of big fights breaking out, the Doctor’s idiosyncratic version of grace and a bomb surprise for afters.

I think this is the only time the Doctor defeats both major and minor villains over dinner. Polishing off Josiah is the hors d’oeuvre for him, but the richest confection for the viewer, with everyone bringing something to the table. Josiah objects to Redvers’ dinner guest so it’s hardly surprisingly when she makes his plans go up in smoke, but it’s not all jollity round the fire – Ace has a last revelation about the police. And after the mounting sense that he’s bitten off more than he can chew, the Doctor’s after-dinner speech is an utter triumph. In between, the guest of honour finally turns up to tell everyone the party’s over. Light has already shown himself a dab hand at carving, but is at his finger-licking worst leering over the soup tureen. Ace realises why the Doctor told her not to touch it; the Doctor confirms it; Josiah revels in it. And that wasn’t the last revelation about the police after all.

“There’s only one solution to Earth. I was going to reduce it to this…”
[Light raises a ladle full of soup, the medallion of a Victorian police inspector dangling from it.]
“Oh, no…”
“So you started with Inspector Mackenzie.”
“The cream of Scotland Yard.”

Terrance Dicks’ characters often experienced “a thrill of horror” in the Target books. This was the first time I was consciously aware of one. The horribly macabre joke still does it for me.


10 – The Stone Spaceshippers.

The story ends – no, the story continues – with power used not for domination or destruction but to evolve into Doctor Who, showing how the series can still rush off into the sheer joy of new adventures. The pioneer-not-user gang that goes off to explore strange new worlds and be new life have been inspired by the Doctor and Ace, and I’m always surprised that with all the books and CDs since no-one’s ever brought them back to see their continuing travels, or even a spin-off. Someone should remind Steven Moffat of an idea he might like to pick up. Here’s the gang: in control, the Victorian ladylike who’s actually been around for millions of years. Her other half. Plus the dim but enthusiastic militarist and the one who looks a bit strange but gets away with it in his butler’s outfit. And a bit of sex. If you were to make them all a regular team, of course, you’d probably cut costs by amalgamating the last two into one comic relief character, then bring them back to Earth to explore the curious world of Victorian London through their outsiders’ eyes. Sounds like they could be popular!

What Else Should I Tell You About Ghost Light?

If you watch Ghost Light on DVD, it’s especially rewarding to look at the extended and deleted scenes for this one. There are a lot of them, and several of those add quite a bit (I particularly like the escape from Newgate). The off-cuts are unfortunately imprinted with time-codes and so couldn’t be assembled into a Special Edition, but Marc Platt’s rather marvellous novelisation is able to reintegrate them seamlessly. It also has possibly Alister Pearson’s most striking cover.

Ghost Light is at the heart of one of Doctor Who’s most mesmerising years, 1989’s Season Twenty-Six, and you can see in it many of the season’s running themes, from confronting gods and strange magic to survival of the fittest not meaning what the ’80s took it to mean. In a year that centres on Ace, many of the themes are hers in particular: fire; nuclear holocaust (they’re against it); female empowerment; lesbian subtexts; living your life in the wrong order; and the moral that you should always remember to send a Mother’s Day card, because you have no idea how much your life might get out of hand if you lose track of your Mum. This was the final story actually made for the original series. The last one shown was Survival, Ghost Light’s mirror-twin, which is also set around Ace’s old home of Perivale to show her facing her past, present and future, and this all-studio story even shares a location shoot with it (but it’s not Perivale). But more on those stories later.

I loved Ghost Light from its first night. My husband Richard loves it too, and the first thing I saw in his flat on my first visit, twenty-two years and two months and two days to go-ago, was a print of Alister Pearson painting for the book cover hanging opposite the door. It’s still hanging in our flat today. As it’s Christmas Eve, Richard also asks me to point out that the whole story grows out of a tale told around – or at least starting with – a cheery festive blazing fire. Although many other fans agree that this is one of the very best Doctor Who stories – and one of the few at the time to get enthusiastic press reviews – many others don’t. Some seem to have their masculinity threatened by Light being played by a usually very butch actor here wearing a pre-Raphaelite frock and a fey voice (though rarely seem to complain about the women wrestling in tuxedos). Others complain that the multi-layered script is incomprehensible to them. I don’t find myself threatened by a lack of macho, by making my brain work, or by daring to be different. But if you can’t quite see the scientific method in the madness together here, the Doctor and Ace sum up how it’s supposed to work a couple of minutes into Part Three.

Richard got our current car four years ago. With the number plate beginning “RV”, we inevitably named it for the stylish, slightly old-fashioned but inspiring explorer from one of our favourite stories. I met Michael Cochrane a few months later and, while he signed our Ghost Light DVD, I confided that we’d named our car after his character. “Oh, really? …What sort of car is it?” he asked, evidently fearing an old banger. “It’s a Jaguar.” “That’ll do!” he exclaimed delightedly.

And, if you need one, my score:

9/10

If You Like Ghost Light, Why Not Try…

Well, goodness. This isn’t just probably the Doctor Who story with the most ideas packed into it, but the greatest density of references too. So what isn’t there to try? Obviously it goes down the rabbit hole into so much Victorian literature that it makes Dickensian look like a lightweight, so I’ll pick just out a favourite Victorian short story which supplies a detail turned inside-out and into both a gag and a plot thread and recommend you read The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual. Ghost Light also references the two earlier outstandingly brilliant Doctor Who stories set in the Victorian era, The Talons of Weng-Chiang (explicitly) and The Evil of the Daleks (esoterically). The Night Maid always make me think of an evil Bagpuss, the end makes me want to listen to Talking Heads, and I rarely need an excuse to revisit The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, another cautionary tale of religion and evolution (with a moment in the TV version of the Earth made anew which never fails to make me tear up). And as today is the thirty-second anniversary of the finale of The Box of Delights, which really is gloriously seasonal, you might find more joy in an innocuous little box opening and blazing out light than poor Mr Fenn-Cooper does.

But back to Doctor Who. Today is also the anniversary of not the broadcast of but most of the events of three more Victorian Doctor Who stories, The Unquiet Dead, The Next Doctor, and The Snowmen. Marc Platt has written many other (Merry Otherstide!) fabulous stories through novels and audio dramas, and as Ghost Light helped inspire so much of the New Adventures, from Ace to owls, today I might recommend you pick up some of the best of those with a yuletide flavour – Paul Cornell’s Timewyrm: Revelation, Mark Gatiss’ Nightshade, Lawrence Miles’ Christmas on a Rational Planet – or of course Marc’s own Lungbarrow, the Seventh Doctor’s finale and itself a multiple reflection of Ghost Light (complete with its own Victorian evolution debate in-joke, with Omphalos metamorphosed into a mystery about the Doctor’s creation or, for his family, a rude nick-name). To continue the festive theme, Big Finish published several Christmas collections in their Short Trips anthologies. I’d particularly recommend The History of Christmas (edited by Simon Guerrier, of whom more later) and A Christmas Treasury (edited by Paul Cornell, similarly), which brims with stocking-filler games and recipes, where Terrance Dicks offers us a grumpy Doctor and shows you can’t trust a beard, even at Christmas, and Marc himself gives us a Christmas Special with Eric and Ernie and a scary ’80s monster. Or, on DVD…

Ghost Light is the first Doctor Who from a brilliant new author working with one of the show’s most brilliant script editors, shown in one of its most brilliant seasons, and excoriates ossified religion while doing remarkable things with evolution. The same is true for both of these.

The Face of Evil. The Doctor (Tom Baker) finds himself in a strange if not entirely convincing jungle and finds that the locals’ myths have an uncomfortable amount of truth to them amid the superstitions. And are they locals after all? He leaves with a new companion, a free-thinker who’s challenged all the local orthodoxies. The Doctor doesn’t really want her on board at first, but she becomes a great favourite with the viewers.
[Watch it and revel in the festive knowledge that it was nearly called “The Day God Went Mad”, but the producer decided Mary Whitehouse was up to quota on pronouncing fatwas already.]

Full Circle. The Doctor (Tom Baker) finds himself in a strange and vividly convincing jungle and finds that the locals’ myths have an uncomfortable amount of truth to them amid the superstitions. And are they locals after all? He leaves with a new companion, a free-thinker who’s challenged all the local orthodoxies. The Doctor doesn’t really want him on board at first, but he becomes… Well, some people liked him.

Next Time…

The next tale I have planned is a heart-warming nativity story… And there’s still no such thing as a final evolutionary form, but who’s going to tell them that?

“Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!”

Or I might decide that the next few may have to involve some travelling back and forth in time, because Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without actual Christmas. But which?

Labels: Christmas, Doctor Who, Doctor Who 52, Food, Ghost Light, New Adventures, Repeats Er I Mean Special Editions, Sylvester McCoy, The Paternoster Gang

Introducing Doctor Who – Ghost Light…

The Doctor takes Ace to her worst nightmare: a Victorian ghost story for Christmas. Lush BBC costume drama is only the start of one of the most bizarre, macabre and intelligently designed pieces of television you’ll ever see. At a stage in Doctor Who’s life-cycle when the series looked to be facing extinction, it evolves by taking risks and challenging the audience rather than ever playing it safe – though it’s got the vicar from Downton Abbey, here he’s at a much more satisfying posh dinner party, where everyone’s shockingly talking science and religion.

I’m celebrating Doctor Who’s fifty-second anniversary with one story every week (so my catalogue says) for a year – and my husband Richard is joining in with his own eclectic choices if you want different recommendations. You can read more of what this Doctor Who 52 is all about here. But if I were you I’d just read on, then press Play on the DVD.

It’s hard to think of another Doctor Who story so exuberantly packed with brilliant ideas and witty lines, so I was tempted to suggest as one of my ten reasons to watch (like using your last wish to wish for more wishes) that you should explore it to discover how many more reasons than ten there really are.

Ten Reasons To Watch Ghost Light (warning: spoilers lower down the list)

1 – The Doctor and Ace. By Ghost Light, the Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) and his friend Ace (Sophie Aldred) have been together for quite a while. Under lead writer Andrew Cartmel they’ve both become more complex than in the previous season, him less judgmental, her less the troubled teenager, but both still seem to delight in blowing things up – here the Doctor even worries that he’s lit the blue touch paper and left nowhere to retire to, but it’s really Ace’s fuse that he’s playing with.

I love Sylvester’s Doctor in this story, as much an initiative test for the viewer as it is for Ace. He’s powerful, inquisitive, caring, cruel, funny, melancholy and more, but he always leaves me with more questions than answers here: how much does he know what’s going on, and why does he come to Gabriel Chase in the first place? His thinking aloud that even he can’t play this many games at once and the not-a-reassurance that he always leaves things to the last minute suggest he may have seen all sorts of fascinating threads along the way and couldn’t help tugging at them, but that this is really all about his getting Ace to confront her demons before the house’s angels, and that saving Earth is just a by-product.

Is the Doctor Professor Higgins, forcing Ace / Eliza to evolve into his own idea of a Lady (Pygmalion)? Is he Merlin, pushing Ace / Wart through one form after another to learn from the inside out (The Sword In the Stone)? Or is he just prodding her to find out what she’ll turn into for herself? At least, whatever he’s doing to his companion without asking permission, he’s out to expand her mind rather than wiping it. Whether he learns a lesson in the end from seeing other people being treated as he treats Ace and just how badly that works out is open to question, but at least it’s not just Ace who adapts herself to what’s happening in the house; the Doctor has always been able to rise to whatever situation he finds himself in. When Victorian vicar Reverend Matthews takes him for their host, the Doctor fits himself into the niche and responds to the immediate stimuli of “condescend” by how he acts up to him. Or he may just be having enormous fun. It takes Ace rather longer to enjoy it.

The climax of Part One – though Part Two has the more thrilling cliffhanger – comes in possibly their best scene together, when Ace realises that the Doctor’s taken her to her worst nightmare and demands he face her. Sophie Aldred is terrific confronting her mentor / tormentor, looking suddenly grown up in a dinner suit, grasping the trophy room table like a lectern to rain brimstone on the Doctor as he comes in behind her, dark, quiet, stealthy, prodding.

“Don’t you have things you hate?”
“I can’t stand burnt toast. I loathe bus stations. Terrible places, full of lost luggage and lost souls.”
“I told you I never wanted to come back here again.”
“Then there’s unrequited love, and tyranny, and cruelty.”
“Too right.”
“We all have a universe of our own terrors to face.”
“I face mine on my own terms!”

And her terms aren’t to do with what the Doctor prompts her to realise about what terrified her five years earlier for her, a century in the house’s future, much closer to home. When she starts to open up about the greatest horror in her past, the haunted house just a symptom, Doctor’s quietly supportive, it puts the hairs up on my neck. And you realise that this isn’t about strange upper-class manners in 1883 London at all, and that Doctor Who is now confronting other demons.




2 – That’s the Way to the Zoo. Mark Ayres’ score is lush, sinister, sometimes intimate and probably his best for the show. He does wonders to produce an orchestral feel without an orchestra. I often listen to the soundtrack (itself released in three different versions). The captivating chords building as Ace confronts the Doctor and her past, the swirling frenzy as they break apart and the African pipes as Redvers stalks them through his own private world make an enormous contribution to Part One. But even here, he’s upstaged by the genuine and disturbingly appropriate Victorian parlour song he found for Katharine Schlesinger’s Gwendoline to sing.

For the climax of the first episode, the music has been rising and getting more claustrophobic as things come to a head; there’s a magnificent flurry as Ace runs up the stairs; it spellbindingly underscores Ace’s harrowing revelations; it spirals dizzyingly as she flees into the red darkness deep below. But hurled through the middle of Mark Ayres’ own magnificent compositions is a novelty song about zoos, monkeys and nuts that the daughter of the house sings with deranged fervour, counterpointing the terrible memories upstairs and the terrible deeds in the drawing room while foreshadowing worse to come, the camera swooping round the piano and Gwendoline’s unnaturally bright eyes with unforgettable passion. Sorry, Mark. She’s the bit that everyone remembers.

The story only gives one verse, but I’ve just discovered a more complete version by fan podcasters The Splendid Chaps, who tracked down the original music for their hellish cabaret. Click here: That’s the Way To the Zoo.




3 – Bringing the Haunted House story to life. The whole story takes place within Gabriel Chase, a spooky old Victorian house. Except… It’s not haunted yet. It’s much weirder than that. It’s not an old house in 1883. And it’s teeming with life, more and more vividly as the story forges on. But terrible things have been happening, as a study of life corrupts into death after death, and the Doctor’s brought Ace here to find out what haunts her from a hundred years later – and it’s not just the house. While all the people caught inside try to work out how to cope with their environment – more an experience than a plot, and for some people life is more difficult to handle than what’s written in stone – the story’s major haunting is by the future, as Ace’s past comes to life around her as if the house knows what she’s going to do. And once the life of the house goes out, it remembers and broods for a hundred years…




4 – Sylvia Syms’ Mrs Pritchard. Ghost Light has a terrific cast all round. Michael Cochrane steals a dozen scenes in an endearingly bewildered role far from the vicar at Downton Abbey; I remembered John Hallam as a hard soldier in Dragonslayer, and of course he drove his car over a cliff into a quarry (twice in one night? That is suspicious), but here his dangerously fey force of nature foreshadows Peter Capaldi’s Angel Islington in both performance and heralding that angels down below are rarely a good sign; John Nettleton is marvellous and seemed the biggest name to me because he’d been at the top of the tree in Yes Minister; Frank Windsor was far enough from Z Cars now that he could play another policeman; and Sharon Duce was a big deal too.

But out of all the bestiary, one actor always grabs your attention – because you don’t dare to look away from her. One of Britain’s major movie stars from the ’50s, playing demure but determined women in films such as Ice Cold In Alex and Victim, here Sylvia Syms plays terrifying housekeeper Mrs Pritchard in spidery black lace that goes beyond Queen Victoria and into half-Skeksis and with a face as hard as her tongue. Her scenes with awkward house guest Reverend Matthews are scarier than any of the aliens: she feels like a stalking cobra as she glides across the floor towards him, and she clearly struck author Marc Platt with the same force, if you read that passage in his novelisation. Who’s been shedding their skin? And her harsh reprimands to young Gwendoline are savage, horribly telling and hilarious all in one (I can never help joining in the whiplash of “Sitting there dressed like a music hall trollop!”). She seems to be a perfect fit for the household. But there’s other significance to dressing in Victoria’s widow’s weeds, and Utopia’s not the only time a real self is hidden within a locket (the novel fills another character’s head with the sound of drums), and her final moment will freeze your heart…


5 – How Not to Bribe the Doctor. Marc Platt’s fantastic script is packed to the brim with brilliant lines, many of them his own. You can’t count all the puns on light and change that reinforce the themes – from “Thank you, Nimrod. We would be delighted” to the butler right through to weaponised puns at the climax – and it completely changes your reaction to the word “Java” from something to wake you up. There’s a lot of it I join in on, appropriately for a gorgeously designed affair that at times looks just like Rocky Horror. But today, my favourite exchange is when self-made man – and if he isn’t, who made him? – Josiah Samuel Smith appraises the Doctor’s abilities if not his origins or morals and tries to employ him for a murder. “I’m afflicted with an enemy,” he claims, in a lovely turn of phrase evoking the man of property’s fear of the underclass despite them being the same underneath (depraved or deprived?), still satirically topical in 1989, and proffers a handful of such massive banknotes that the Doctor whistles.

“I’m not interested in money. How much?”
“Five thousand pounds to rid me of the evil brute.”
“Now that’s what I call Victorian value. But I’m still not interested in money.”

The novelisation adds an extra punchline from the Doctor:

“Five thousand pounds! he thought. A gentleman only ever pays in guineas!”

6 – The Victorian Age. Ghost Light is the most deeply Victorian Doctor Who story of all. It doesn’t just glory in the literature and the stereotypes, but embodies the society, family, science, religion and philosophy too, and everything that comes crawling out when you scratch the veneer, everything the ’80s veneration of “Victorian Values” pretended to ignore. And the heart of what makes Ghost Light so much fun and so disturbing is that it revels in doing to the Victorians what they did to everyone else.

“You have no shred of decency.”

To the otherworldly survey agent, the house is unexplored and primitive territory, so naturally it’s his to claim and he sticks a flag in it as his property, whatever that does to the natives. And he doesn’t quite understand the customs, applying his perfectly sensible theory in entirely the wrong context… So if you think Josiah’s plan doesn’t make sense, this proto-Thatcherite assuming Darwinism and Social Darwinism are just the same as each other might just be the point. The religious and scientific establishment’s sermons are satirised over dinner, in the horrible comeuppance of Homo Victorianus Ineptus, and eventually on a grand scale when we find out just how appalling it would be if God were a proper Victorian deity. Josiah, the coming man, has become both the Victorian Age’s biggest fan and its harshest critic (so often the way). Just as Thatcherites in 1989 complained that there’s no discipline these days and call for a return to the standards of a century earlier, he condemns the Empire as a mess with no discipline or direction. Every layer of the character is more complex: even as Josiah appears to have evolved into the ruthless, self-centred Victorian capitalist, the same survey observations that identified Victorian Man as the pinnacle of nature makes him a naturalist with a realisation that there’s no such thing, in an unconventional challenge to every established hierarchy. Where Josiah seems to wind up appalled fundamentalist Reverend Matthews even more than in his theories on evolution is in the application he gives them, criticising industrial pollution and arguing that Man is merely another part of nature and just as in danger of becoming extinct.

The opposite inversion to Josiah is Redvers Fenn-Cooper, the finest explorer in the Empire but who’s lost himself. The explorer brings the madness back with him in some of the most heart-poundingly weird scenes for the Doctor, Ace and the viewer (making it a much cleverer take on Kinda, and with far greater semiotic thickness to it to boot). Seemingly the biggest threat at first, he should be the most objectionable character in the whole thing – but his ‘heroic’ Victorian stereotype turns inside-out instead. Rather than espousing the Inspector’s casual racism he sees London and its inhabitants as no different to the jungle, from the strange totems of Gabriel Chase – brilliantly captured in the novelisation as he escapes among them by some unimaginable feat of cunning – to his determination to hunt the crowned Saxe-Coburg. For me, Redvers is the most endearing character in the whole story, marvellously played by Michael Cochrane and adorable even if he raves, screams and introduces himself by wresting a Zulu assegai from where it hung on a tree beside a barometer…

“Burning bright in the heart of the Interior. It burnt through my eyes, into my mind. It had blazing – radiant – wings!”

7 – The Video Age. Talking about video now seems almost Victorian too, but since the moment it was broadcast, people have talked about this as a story for the videotape era – meaning just that you have to record it and watch it several times to pick up how all the details work and understand it. And enjoying it and unlocking its puzzles in all those ways is a good part of what makes Ghost Light marvellous. But you can take videotape as metaphor, too. The story’s Recording Angel is a video archivist, who thinks the point is to log all the master tapes and never watch them. Or, like the BBC, burn them to prevent anyone watching them – play the tapes, and things happen, time moves forward… Evolution. Like a videotape, you can play it backwards, but just as that used to knacker your tapes, keeping evolution on pause or winding it back are bad news in this story. Ace regresses to her thirteen-year-old traumas, Matthews to an ape, Josiah back under control, and others in their own terrible ways. Going forwards, change, is life, and the only way to see your story unfold.


8 – The Scientific Method.

“My theories appal you, my heresies outrage you, I never answer letters and you don’t like my tie.”

And of course this story is all about evolution, not just the science but the catastrophic shock it posed to an entire worldview. The story boasts a menagerie of scientists, naturalists and explorers, and only the open-minded can cope. And for all that it challenges fixed religious orthodoxy, there is a creator here, and he’s not happy. It’s not your ordinary Frankenstein pastiche, either. Here the ‘mad scientist’ and creature are one, as well as two, and he’s actually published his papers for scrutiny, with his workings-out left on show in the cellar and a proper control (and if she’s not proper to start with, she evolves). Not that the peer review is favourable, but for the viewer just as for Ace, finding your own truth here is more rewarding than being told all the answers.

Science and religion are threaded through each other in Ghost Light – it’s not as simple as saying that one should defeat the other. For several of the characters, the two are the same, and an absolute, fixed canon of either or of anything is going to end up breaking under the strain. The story is on the side of irrepressible, unpredictable life and – very Doctor Who – against domination, control and telling people where they fit. Do you label the two most intertwined characters the Control and the Survey in an experiment started by the ultimate naturalist, telling the scientific method by metaphor? Or as Innocence and Experience, presided over by a Blakean angel? So when Light finally emerges, it doesn’t matter what you call him. Except to him, which is the essence of the problem. Obsessive cataloguer or oppressive deity, if it’s not written in the book, it’s got no right to be real! But that’s life. And even travelling at the speed of thought isn’t much use if you lack an imagination.




9 – Soup of the Evening, Beautiful Soup!

“You got stuffed and it wasn’t even Christmas.”

In a house so teeming with life, there’s a lot of catering. The day staff and the Night Maid are kept busy – there’s a dinner party on both evenings, Ace eats a hearty breakfast (perhaps brupper) but still wants a curry, even the Doctor talks about hamburgers, and Control has a crunchy nibble, though it’s Inspector Mackenzie who provides the most work for the kitchens. Well, he did sleep through a meal or two. The dinner in Part One is satisfying, serving up witty lines and gathering tension, but it pales beside the feast the following night which forms the climax to Part Three and the story. Although it’s probably not Christmas, the banquet begins with appropriately seasonal elements: estranged siblings seething at each other; mother running out in distress; squabbling over whether to cut off the Queen’s speech. And it all ends up with a couple of big fights breaking out, the Doctor’s idiosyncratic version of grace and a bomb surprise for afters.

I think this is the only time the Doctor defeats both major and minor villains over dinner. Polishing off Josiah is the hors d’oeuvre for him, but the richest confection for the viewer, with everyone bringing something to the table. Josiah objects to Redvers’ dinner guest so it’s hardly surprisingly when she makes his plans go up in smoke, but it’s not all jollity round the fire – Ace has a last revelation about the police. And after the mounting sense that he’s bitten off more than he can chew, the Doctor’s after-dinner speech is an utter triumph. In between, the guest of honour finally turns up to tell everyone the party’s over. Light has already shown himself a dab hand at carving, but is at his finger-licking worst leering over the soup tureen. Ace realises why the Doctor told her not to touch it; the Doctor confirms it; Josiah revels in it. And that wasn’t the last revelation about the police after all.

“There’s only one solution to Earth. I was going to reduce it to this…”
[Light raises a ladle full of soup, the medallion of a Victorian police inspector dangling from it.]
“Oh, no…”
“So you started with Inspector Mackenzie.”
“The cream of Scotland Yard.”

Terrance Dicks’ characters often experienced “a thrill of horror” in the Target books. This was the first time I was consciously aware of one. The horribly macabre joke still does it for me.


10 – The Stone Spaceshippers. The story ends – no, the story continues – with power used not for domination or destruction but to evolve into Doctor Who, showing show the series can still rush off into the sheer joy of new adventures. The pioneer-not-user gang that goes off to explore strange new worlds and be new life have been inspired by the Doctor and Ace, and I’m always surprised that with all the books and CDs since no-one’s ever brought them back to see their continuing travels, or even a spin-off. Someone should remind Steven Moffat of an idea he might like to pick up. Here’s the gang: in control, the Victorian ladylike who’s actually been around for millions of years. Her other half. Plus the dim but enthusiastic militarist and the one who looks a bit strange but gets away with it in his butler’s outfit. And a bit of sex. If you were to make them all a regular team, of course, you’d probably cut costs by amalgamating the last two into one comic relief character, then bring them back to Earth to explore the curious world of Victorian London through their outsiders’ eyes. Sounds like they could be popular!

What Else Should I Tell You About Ghost Light?

If you watch Ghost Light on DVD, it’s especially rewarding to look at the extended and deleted scenes for this one. There are a lot of them, and several of those add quite a bit (I particularly like the escape from Newgate). The off-cuts are unfortunately imprinted with time-codes and so couldn’t be assembled into a Special Edition, but Marc Platt’s rather marvellous novelisation is able to reintegrate them seamlessly. It also has possibly Alister Pearson’s most striking cover.

Ghost Light is at the heart of one of Doctor Who’s most mesmerising years, 1989’s Season Twenty-six, and you can see in it many of the season’s running themes, from confronting gods and strange magic to survival of the fittest not meaning what the ’80s took it to mean. In a year that centres on Ace, many of the themes are hers in particular: fire; female empowerment; lesbian subtexts; living your life in the wrong order; and the moral that you should always remember to send a Mother’s Day card, because you have no idea how much your life might get out of hand if you lose track of your Mum. This was the final story actually made for the original series. The last one shown was Survival, Ghost Light’s mirror-twin, which is also set around Ace’s old home of Perivale to show her facing her past, present and future, and this all-studio story even shares a location shoot with it (but it’s not Perivale). But more on those stories later.

I loved Ghost Light from its first night. My husband Richard loves it too, and the first thing I saw in his flat on my first visit, twenty-one years ago, was a print of Alister Pearson painting for the book cover hanging opposite the door. It’s still hanging in our flat today. Although many other fans agree that this is one of the very best Doctor Who stories – and one of the few at the time to get enthusiastic press reviews – many others don’t. Some seem to have their masculinity threatened by Light being played by a usually very butch actor here wearing a pre-Raphaelite frock and a fey voice (though rarely seem to complain about the women wrestling in tuxedos). Others complain that the multi-layered script is incomprehensible to them. I don’t find myself threatened by a lack of macho, by making my brain work, or by daring to be different. But if you can’t quite see the scientific method in the madness together here, the Doctor and Ace sum up how it’s supposed to work a couple of minutes into Part Three.

Richard got our current car three years ago. With the number plate beginning “RV”, we inevitably named it for the stylish, slightly old-fashioned but inspiring explorer from one of our favourite stories. I met Michael Cochrane a few months later and, while he signed our Ghost Light DVD, I confided that we’d named our car after his character. “Oh, really? …What sort of car is it?” he asked, evidently fearing an old banger. “It’s a Jaguar.” “That’ll do!” he exclaimed delightedly.

And, if you need one, my score:
9/10

If You Like Ghost Light, Why Not Try…

Well, goodness. This isn’t just probably the Doctor Who story with the most ideas packed into it, but the greatest density of references too. So what isn’t there to try? Obviously it goes down the rabbit hole into so much Victorian literature that it makes Dickensian look like a lightweight, so I’ll pick just out a favourite Victorian short story which supplies a detail turned inside-out and into both a gag and a plot thread and recommend you read The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual. It references the two other outstandingly brilliant Doctor Who stories set in the Victorian era, The Talons of Weng-Chiang (explicitly) and The Evil of the Daleks (esoterically). The Night Maid always make me think of an evil Bagpuss, the end makes me want to listen to Talking Heads, and I rarely need an excuse to revisit The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, another cautionary tale of religion and evolution (with a moment in the TV version of the Earth made anew which never fails to make me tear up).

But back to Doctor Who. Marc Platt has written many other (Merry Otherstide!) fabulous stories through novels and audio dramas, and as Ghost Light helped inspire so much of the New Adventures, from Ace to owls, today I might recommend you pick up some of the best of those with a yuletide flavour – Paul Cornell’s Timewyrm: Revelation, Mark Gatiss’ Nightshade, Lawrence Miles’ Christmas on a Rational Planet – or of course Marc’s own Lungbarrow, the Seventh Doctor’s finale and itself a multiple reflection of Ghost Light (complete with its own Victorian evolution debate in-joke, with Omphalos metamorphosed into a mystery about the Doctor’s creation or, for his family, a rude nick-name). To continue the festive theme, Big Finish published several Christmas collections in their Short Trips anthologies. I’d particularly recommend The History of Christmas (edited by Simon Guerrier, of whom more later) and A Christmas Treasury (edited by Paul Cornell, similarly), which brims with stocking-filler games and recipes, where Terrance Dicks offers us a grumpy Doctor and shows you can’t trust a beard, even at Christmas, and Marc himself gives us a Christmas Special with Eric and Ernie and a scary ’80s monster. Or, on DVD…

Ghost Light is the first Doctor Who from a brilliant new author working with one of the show’s most brilliant script editors, shown in one of its most brilliant seasons, and excoriates ossified religion while doing remarkable things with evolution. The same is true for both of these.

The Face of Evil. The Doctor (Tom Baker) finds himself in a strange if not entirely convincing jungle and finds that the locals’ myths have an uncomfortable amount of truth to them amid the superstitions. And are they locals after all? He leaves with a new companion, a free-thinker who’s challenged all the local orthodoxies. The Doctor doesn’t really want her on board at first, but she becomes a great favourite with the viewers.

The Face of Evil is the only story from my favourite season of Doctor Who which isn’t shown on the Horror Channel. Boo. But it’s being repeated on BBC4 this very evening and tomorrow night. Hurrah! Watch it and revel in the festive knowledge that it was nearly called The Day God Went Mad (but the producer decided Mary Whitehouse was up to quota on pronouncing fatwas already).

Full Circle. The Doctor (Tom Baker) finds himself in a strange and vividly convincing jungle and finds that the locals’ myths have an uncomfortable amount of truth to them amid the superstitions. And are they locals after all? He leaves with a new companion, a free-thinker who’s challenged all the local orthodoxies. The Doctor doesn’t really want him on board at first, but he becomes… Well, some people liked him.

Meanwhile, On the Other Side…

Richard is watching… Blink. A creepy old house, a life in the wrong order, and angels still as statues.

Next Time…

“Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!”

The next tale I have planned is a heart-warming nativity story… Though as I’m rather behind, to do the next few may involve some travelling back in time. And there’s still no such thing as a final evolutionary form, but who’s going to tell them that?

Labels: Doctor Who, Doctor Who 52, Ghost Light, New Adventures, Sylvester McCoy

It’s the end of Summer – traditionally, as Doctor Who’s back – so how was your holiday? Did you go anywhere nice? We went to North Yorkshire for a week, which is relatively usual, then I spent all of mine in hospital, which isn’t. When I’ve not blogged for a while it’s often due to some of my many long-term health problems, so I’ll try to make light of it by saying afterwards that “my health has been worse than usual – as usual”. That week and all the last seven weeks have made this weak gag rather less funny.

I’ve been so ill – and still not quite back even to my normal levels – that I’ve not really known what to write to explain it when I eventually got back to the point when I could. At one point I determined to let absolutely everything out, and drafted a long blog post going into all the gruesome details, including the things that are always wrong with me and how they all fed into each other… But in the end I bottled it. I felt too exposed, and as an excuse told myself that no-one would enjoy reading it. But I’m aware some people have been worrying, and probably more since Richard outed my hospitalisation this time last week, so here’s the very long but hopefully more entertaining and definitely less soul-and-body-baringly invasive version. Are you sitting uncomfortably? I am…

This Is the Important Paragraph – You Should Probably Skip the Rest

The first thing I should say is that while this was intensely awful at its worst, like all my other miserable long-term conditions (and the bonus ones that frequently pop up to join them), its effect was low quality of life rather than life-threatening. So that’s one awkward question you don’t have to ask. The worst effect of it was that my lovely Richard, who has more than enough to cope with anyway, had to work seven hours a day visiting me and more in his ‘time off’ answering all the questions from family and friends that I wasn’t able to cope with. So he deserves a medal and really, really needs an actual holiday. If you happen to be in touch with Richard, please be especially nice to him, as he’s been having a particularly knackering time and, unlike me, can’t spend days in bed after swallowing fourteen pills (my apogee combination of antibiotics, painkillers, especially good hospital painkillers and ordinary prescriptions – I’m down to a smaller number now).

It hasn’t been terribly pleasant for me, either. The week in hospital – for all my terrible health, the first actual hospitalisation of my adult life, though I spent months there as a kid – was of course the worst, involving amongst other things very, very much more pain than I’m used to coping with, almost complete physical incapacitation, humiliation and discovering that I do have some physical vanity after all on getting an unexpected and upsetting blow to it – which like several other things is still not mended. But in some ways the most difficult thing to deal with wasn’t the most intense part but the very slow recovery.

One of my ways of coping with the way ill health usually knocks me out at random is, after the Ray Milland alcoholism film The Lost Weekend, to tell myself my incapacitated time was a Lost Morning, or a Lost Day, or a Lost Week, so that by naming it I can mentally file it away and not dwell on it. I can’t just dismiss a ‘Lost Month And A Half’, especially when both Richard and I are getting rather stressed now that our preparation time for our wedding, which had been going all right, has been cut in half. I suspect this may make me still more wary in future of booking anything; other than my income being technically zero (sorry, Richard, again), I am forced to miss so many things that I’ve paid out for even with my ordinary health problems that I sometimes get to the point where I rarely leave the flat – or get too stressed that I might not be able to when needed (yes, I am listening to the complete works of Kate Bush and feeling jealous as I type). So if you’ve ever wondered why I don’t seem to be about at a Lib Dem Conference, say, then tell me I’m looking well when you eventually see me, there’s a strong chance that I may have been mostly knocked out in a hotel room for the previous forty-eight hours and, on getting out for an evening or an afternoon, be what’s technically termed ‘faking it’. That’s when I don’t just turn entirely inward as a way of coping, a strategy that did at least get me through a week in hospital without going berserk.

I said there’d be entertaining bits, so I’ll tell you that I’ve learned two ‘Be careful what you wish for’ lessons that many a man would grip a monkey’s paw for: one of them isn’t printable in this less TMI version, but the other is ‘I wish it would seem like time on holiday went more slowly’. Well, it certainly did that.

So, Back in Mid-July… The Prologue and the Hotel From Hell

OK, preliminary rambling over, here’s the abridged version of what’s been going on. Back on Sunday July 13th, I started feeling ill, painful and swollen, recognised the symptoms as a nasty infection I’d had once before (though as it turned out to a tiny fraction of the severity), and rather than putting it off as usual because I tend to hope anything new will just go away, decided to deal with it if it hadn’t passed by after I’d slept on it. So on the Monday, with it all much worse, I got a taxi – with a non-stop-gabbling taxi driver so loudly and horribly a Kipper that I wondered if he was a method-actor testing out a stereotype – to seek medical advice, seeing a very nervous doctor who gave me what turned out to be seriously feeble antibiotics. Still, I spent the week mainly trying to rest in order that we’d be able to go on our holiday. I didn’t go out; I missed a pre-booked book evening in town with Neil the Husband In Space and Jenny Colgan; the swelling got worse, but with the (duff) antibiotics, constant paracetamol and not moving the heavy flu-like symptoms seemed to be retreating slightly. What could possibly go wrong? Having fooled myself things were improving, Richard drove us up to Stockport in a nightmare journey of traffic jams in order to see my parents, for whom I looked much better (see ‘faking it’).

The next twenty-four hours were when everything that could went rather wrong at once. As well as getting increasingly feverish as a side-effect during the journey up, the main infection was getting more and more painful while swollen and constricted in a car seat, and I wasn’t able to get any sleep. So that night I was pretty much exhausted – which was unfortunate, as we’d chosen a hotel at random and turned out to have booked into the worst hotel in Stockport. It seemed almost funny at the time. It looked astoundingly like the hotel from Doctor Who – The God Complex, complete with the same cream doors and red paisley carpet, except that even they’d not been able to find a hotel so stuck in the 1950s that it still had a lift with hand-pulled outer shutters and inner cage. It must be thirty years since I was last in one of those (probably not since they pulled the old Hazel Grove Co-op down). It was absolutely sweltering that night, and the place had no air-conditioning, so I did what any rather odd person running a fever and feeling rather out of it would do: reeled around the place after midnight Tweeting that I was trapped in a Sapphire and Steel story. You can read this improbable timeline here: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine and ten (three, five and eight are my favourites).




It got a lot less funny when we tried to sleep. However loud the storm outside, even with the window propped open the crack it would allow, the temperature in the tiny room was soaring and so was mine, so despite my pain and tiredness I was only able to get a few short stretches of sleep. Now, I ordinarily tend to sleep badly, but most days keel over for a couple of hours in the afternoon to deal with it; when I’m short of sleep even in relatively normal health I tend towards testy, headachey, incoherent, unsteady and vomiting (and all without touching a drop). This will all be a bonus later in the day.

The Day It All Went Down

And so we crawled out of bed on the morning of Saturday July 19th, me in a much worse state but Richard also deprived of sleep both by the heat and a feverish fiancé, and more worryingly the one who had to do all the driving. We planned to take some stops along the way from Stockport to Sutton-Under-Whitestonecliffe; as it turned out, the traffic again did that for us, with more massive tailbacks, another long trip taking twice as long as it should, and my trying not to say anything about the effect it was having on me when there was nothing either of us could do about it. One thing I should have done was taken off my shoes and towelled my feet; we’d been out in heavy rain for a couple of minutes in the morning, and I was very soggy. But even bending was by this point excruciating, so I suspect I also caught a chill which may not have helped later.

At long last we arrived at our destination. I got out of the car and went into the office to say hello and get the keys to our self-catering cottage. I was aware at the back of my mind that I was feeling very unwell indeed, but kept standing, bantered – faked it – and it was fine. I was fine. I’d just get my clothes off, dry off and have a sit-down without being jammed into a car seat, have some water and a couple of paracetamol and I’d be fine. We’d got there. We could relax.

I literally collapsed within two minutes of opening the cottage door.

Now, I’m frequently tired and ill and in pain and have to lie down for a couple of hours. Most afternoons, probably. And I label this ‘collapsing’. I think I need to find a new word. Because having held off the worst while doing the bits I absolutely needed to, like travelling, seeing my side of the family and being in public, something suddenly snapped. I fell onto the bed and couldn’t get up.

For two hours I couldn’t move except to weakly reel about when being in one position was too much. I was in suddenly unbearable pain of several types (one of the worst of my usuals, stomach like a bag of knives, coming in just when I didn’t need it). For the first half-hour I couldn’t get my teeth to stop chattering enough to speak. I was shaking, sweating and running a high fever. I threw up the painkillers within minutes of taking them, babbled incoherent guilt to Richard when I could get words out through my shudders, and kept telling myself that I was just too exhausted and if I could only get to sleep, I would get better.

That didn’t happen.

After two hours of this, I gave in and rang 111, because I didn’t want to trouble them with something that wasn’t very serious. I could still barely speak and hardly move at all, and they sent an ambulance immediately. It turns out they thought I was very ill indeed, and it turned out they were right. I’ve only once before been taken off in an ambulance as an adult, when quite a few years earlier I was having several hours of chest pains (which fortunately were just a combination of asthma and muscle spasms). I was given gas and air that time, which relieved the pain and was very jolly (for me, at least. They didn’t give Richard any to relax him, so he was dreadfully worried). So I was a bit disappointed when the gas and air this time made the pain only slightly less intolerable, and that only in the moments I was actually breathing it in. They offered me morphine, which I’ll admit I was wary of but was fantastic (kids: don’t listen). Or at least let me slowly start to cope. I was rushed to the hospital in Northallerton, with Richard – who fortunately knows the area – following in the car (not a great time for him after two days of horrible drives). He stayed with me through all the initial hours of pokes and proddings until I was consigned to a ward about 1am.

I didn’t take any photos that evening, or for the next few days, which is just as well.

Hospital #1

I was given rather a lot of drugs through two different drip-feeds and as a consequence got more sleep that night. In fact I can’t tell you a great deal about the Sunday, as I was constantly dipping in and out of consciousness, and couldn’t actually move without a lot of help – still less make much sense – until the Monday. I do remember using the counter on the electronic box that combined my twin feeds to calculate the time and then counting slowly for the half an hour until three o’clock when I was sure Richard would come. He was stuck in the car park and got in about two minutes past; he was the first to arrive at visiting hours (and the last to leave, but I won’t talk about an excessively rude nurse noting that as the others were very much nicer), but I was not at that point coping well and nearly cried when he didn’t appear on the dot, as I wasn’t up to devising any other coping strategy, then nearly cried again when he appeared to look after me. It’s startling how much hope you can build up on one tiny thing when you’re in an awful state.

The Saturday night and through the Sunday was pretty much all a blur, often a distressing one, certainly an uncomfortable one, but above all a relief. Asked by the ambulance crew to rate my pain level out of ten, I’d given a nine because, you know, nothing’s perfect and you always have to assume something better can come along. My gratitude at it settling to between a five and a seven – and I often get a five at home – was inexpressible. Even when I found myself turning my list of all the things usually wrong with me and all my prescription medication into a sort of ritual chant I could repeat while semi-conscious as what seemed an endless file of doctors and nurses would ask the same questions and be taken aback at the length of the litany detailing my long-term health issues from literally head to toe…

…Even when – throughout the week – they’d always wait impatiently to the end and then say, “Are you diabetic?” (the politer ones) or “Aren’t you diabetic?” (the more supercilious ones), because, y’know, that’s one that’s really easy to forget, isn’t it? Well, no, I’m not, and as I have so many things wrong with me I have regular blood tests – and still many more in the hospitals – I’m regularly aware that I’m still not. And as the various consultants ruled out more and more potential causes of what was wrong with me, despite diabetes actually having no possible bearing on my infections, over and over they kept asking, “Are you diabetic?” and I kept hearing, ‘We are frustrated and feel we lack control of the situation because we should know what’s causing this and don’t, but you are very fat and we wish to reassert our control of the situation by blaming you for it.’ And over and over I kept saying, “No, I’m not diabetic,” and I kept meaning, ‘I am in hospital and very ill and feeling that I have very little control over my life at the moment, but I assert control over at least being adjusted to being very fat, and up yours.’

“‘The sky appears to be reflective,’ Holmes replied, more hesitantly than usual. ‘Perhaps, like Dante’s inner circle of Hell, we have ice above us. If you look closely, you will see a reflected glow from something over the horizon. The nearest Earthly equivalent would be the lights of a town or city.’ He coughed. ‘I am merely speculating, of course. It could be an incandescent chicken the size of the North Riding for all I know.’”

That’s a line from Andy Lane’s very entertaining Doctor Who: The New Adventures – All-Consuming Fire that would go through my head each time, stranded in the North Riding with far less mental faculty than me, let alone Sherlock Holmes, and feeling the same overwhelming fish-out-of-water helplessness, with a certain degree of satisfaction that the doctor was similarly stumped. The spontaneous combustion plot was rather less comforting to think of, with the fever I was running (but you can’t have everything, and oh look, I was prefiguring another Victorian spontaneous combustion Doctor Who story just last weekend).

Another sudden collapse of self-image: usually I eat to cope. A lot. The doctors may have deduced this. Richard brought grapes, chocolate, goodies of various kinds (and two very lovely cards), and I just had to ask him to take most of them away again. Not because I was ordered not to eat them (except for the points when I was), but because I realised that I had absolutely no appetite whatsoever and it was too distressing to be reminded of it. I have a massive amount of stomach problems, but this was the only week I can remember when my appetite just went utterly flat. I was aware that with every hospital meal I had to force myself with every forkful, and still left bits (I do not leave food), simply because I was aware I had to eat and willed myself sternly to do it. Not even a giant incandescent chicken could tempt me. The week’s single happiest moment when Richard wasn’t there was being woken at 6am on the Thursday and realising that I’d been in a vivid dream of food, which meant that there was a chance I was becoming me again.

One thing that I held onto – other than Richard – was my befuddled brain playing Doctor Who. One story above (literally, it occurs to me) all: another from the same range as All-Consuming Fire, this time Russell T Davies’ brilliant first official Doctor Who, 1996’s novel Doctor Who: The New Adventures – Damaged Goods. There will be spoilers if you’ve not read it. Because I was surrounded my curtains and full of drugs and exhausted, and until Richard brought in my phone I had no distractions or diversions, all I could do was fall asleep, or lie awake looking up. Looking up at the large panels of the ceiling, like a big noughts and crosses board. And vividly remember how noughts and crosses keep featuring through the book with what eventually turns out to be exactly the same hallucinatory importance I was experiencing. Although it was published the same year my most bedevilling health problem started, at least as a long-term health issue it’s a better one to have than young Steven Jericho’s: in a story of terrible bargains, happy blow jobs, families, death and war, the most haunting aspect is the endless visions of noughts and crosses that Gabriel Tyler receives without rest from his separated, unknown, hospitalised twin who can do nothing every day but stare up at his own noughts and crosses board. Uncannily, not only is the bulk of the book set during the same week of the year that I was in hospital, but it was during that very week this year that Big Finish announced they’re adapting it as an audio play. But like Gabriel’s, my visions of noughts and crosses came first, and knowledge of their significance afterwards.




By the Monday, my brain and body were starting to function. Though I preferred being on average more conscious than unconscious, this wasn’t all good. The worst moment… Worse than when I was admitted – because that was a relief from pain. Worse than grumpy nurses trying to take my two gowns and telling me off for not bringing my own pyjamas – because I don’t have pyjamas, doubly not when on holiday, because I was too swollen to get anything over my legs, and I needed two backless, impossible-to-fasten-yourself gowns for courtesy’s sake, as I’m a naturist but am aware non-nudists didn’t want me flashing or mooning them as I tottered to the loo. Worse even than Tuesday when I hit ‘peak swelling’ at a huge, painful and absurd size – because I’d been inured to this being what I was ill with. The worst moment of all when I was in hospital came because I was able to clean myself. I’d been drenched in fever-sweat and unable to move for two days; when, in not a great twist, the cannula on the back of my hand ripped free while I was dozing, it at least meant there was a point when they had to disconnect my drip-feeds and I seized the moment to ask if I could have a shower. I was terribly weak but just determined enough to stagger to a bathroom, pull off my gown, and… Though I’d been conceptually aware of it, this was when I got the real blow to my vanity: there is just one part of my body that I like, and I’d never realised just how much of my limited self-esteem balances on it until I suddenly saw what a wreck the hospital had made of it. It’s still not right, but that initial shock in the mirror nearly stopped me coping. It’s the bits you’re not prepared for that tip you off the deep end. Partly as a way of mentally striking back with a physical change under my own control, and partly just because I didn’t have the energy and co-ordination to use a razor for several days, I decided then to grow a beard until I’d recovered. I have, of course, still got it. Sorry, Richard.

Monday was also the day I changed hospitals. The one in Northallerton had mostly very friendly nurses and a cheerier ward, but it did turn out to have one serious disadvantage: a great many specialists all coming to see me and none, apparently, talking to each other (several of them even to me in my enfeebled state worryingly but plainly not having a clue). So let’s say that I wasn’t very happy when one decided seemingly at random that they should operate and told me, as if that wasn’t enough, that I couldn’t be sewn up but would just have to have a nurse pack the wound daily for a fortnight until it healed of its own accord. And let’s also say that I wasn’t very confident when another sent me for an ultrasound scan (on top of the x-rays, direct physical examinations of every kind and everything else I’d had) and those scan results said that there was absolutely no need to have an operation, because the assumption on which they’d based that decision was entirely wrong. And I wasn’t very happy at all when I was told I’d still be having the operation, pointed out the contrary information from later in the day, and was told that the doctors knew what they were doing.

It turns out it was rather lucky that they didn’t have a theatre available and sent me to a larger sister hospital.

Hospital #2

Almost everything about the second hospital in Middlesbrough was less good. Twenty-five miles further north, in a town neither of us knew, so that rather than Richard being able to drive there in ten minutes it would take an hour, making a full seven-hour day for him to visit me for my five hours of blessed company. The hospital itself bigger and grimmer and the ward much more – disrupted, I’ll call it, and not say anything of the distressed or distressing other patients. The bed… I’ll come back to the bed. The hour’s ambulance ride there, which was excessively painful just as I was levelling out (though the paramedics were lovely).

None of that matters. Because the best thing about the second hospital is that there was one consultant who saw me each time. One consultant, rather than half a dozen who only saw me once or twice each and made on-the-spot contradictory decisions. One consultant, who took the time to explain what was going on at every stage. One consultant, and this is less important but reassuring, who looked rather like Roy Marsden’s before he was eaten by vampires. One consultant, who most importantly of all had a f*****g clue and who on taking the notes from the hospital that had referred me for what I’d already weakly suggested and which his actually reading and cross-referencing them confirmed was a wholly unnecessary and dangerous operation, came remarkably close to expressing his professional opinion of some of the previous hospital’s personnel’s judgement and told me that I would definitely not be going into theatre that night, and detailed precisely why not.

So the second hospital was able to tell me that I had two infections, named, interrelated and both very bad and with pretty horrible direct effects and heavily flu-like side-effects, but that I didn’t in fact also have the other one that a random consultant had just guessed at. Reassuring to know precisely and definitely what was wrong. Slightly less reassuring that, after they also ran all the possible tests all over again to see what caused it, I predictably came up zero on the forty-six or so most common possibilities, which at least means they were able to confirm I’m not at all infectious to anyone else but also means I don’t know what esoteric cause to avoid and so that it might just strike again at random.

By contrast, perhaps the least appealing thing about the second hospital was the bed. Every bed in the ward had a whiteboard with the patient’s name above it. Every bed was a modern grey plastic creation with a wide frame and remote control elevation the patient could operate to get out of bed more easily or raise their pillows. You can see where this is going, can’t you? I was put in Bed 13, which unlike all the others in the ward never had my name put above it, and again uniquely was a narrow old iron frame which I had to clamber out of before they lowered it to change the bedclothes because the crank was too violent. Not that that occurred to the student nurse who, bored with listening in on rounds, idly kicked at it until the constant jolts of pain across my face prompted the senior nurse to stop her.

My slightly thoughtless way of coping was to tell Richard this was because in 1958 the last person whose name had been put on the board over Bed 13 had died before the night was out, and they’d never changed it again. He didn’t think this was very funny. The number, the nameless horror and the ancient frame did give me the sense that I was incarcerated in a half-finished Christmas script by Mark Gatiss, though.




The bed’s plastic mattress and pillows were no doubt practical for cleaning, but when I tend to get quite sweaty just as a matter of course and was mostly feverish while incarcerated, it meant the plastic would heat up against my skin like a furnace and I’d simply pour. One night I woke and was so sopping wet with sweat I had to plead with a nurse to change the sheets at 3am, which was one of my more mortifying moments and made rather worse when it transpired there were no spare pillowcases. I said I couldn’t sleep with a sodden rag under my head, so… They took it and left just the bare plastic pillow. That didn’t help. Should you ever find yourself in a similarly untenable position, here is my tip: ask for a large towel. Pillowcases they may not have had, but an intrepid nursing assistant found me a proper bath towel rather than the tea-towels they give you to dry with in the bathroom and I wrapped it snugly round both plastic pillows. Being considerably thicker than the cases, it was much more comfortable too, and psychologically it was a small victory.

Things I Learned From Hospitalisation

Gosh, I’m going on a bit, aren’t I? It’s therapy.

Much like discovering that Carry On Doctor is still a documentary.

It was a small, private act of protest. Both hospitals were festooned with signs saying that mobile phones were not to be used. Stern admonitions were given on admission. And I couldn’t get a signal in the first one, anyway. But after Richard tried to ring me on the ward phone number he was given and was told off because he should have rung my mobile – seriously – I relaxed a bit about occasional surfing to relieve the stupefaction, though I’m afraid I didn’t look at any messages because I just didn’t feel I could cope. And part of this was finding a rogue copy of Carry On Doctor online and slowly buffering it through the night as cheer in my most miserable moments.

For me, Carry On Doctor’s one of the best of the series, and definitely the best of the non-historicals – though the ending is in some ways more disturbing than chopping the villains’ heads off. It makes a brilliant use of a brilliant ensemble cast, and you can really see it as a big relaunch for the series at a new studio but doing what they’d been most famous for. You can see it this Sunday morning on Film4 (and no doubt every other week on some channel).




What I didn’t realise until I watched it illicitly in hospital was how half a century later it’s still uncannily Cinéma Vérité. Though the thermometers are smaller these days, even the wards still look the same, only split into half-length and with Sky Sports screens dangling above you that I would regularly switch off and that orderlies would be commanded to switch on to try and get me to pay for them. I even had one of the original beds. The only thing that let down the documentary realism was Frankie Howerd being woken at 6am. No, not that part – I was woken every night at at least 2 and 6 (or 12 ½ p in new money) as part of having my blood pressure checked every four hours, which they’d always be surprised to see going sharply up or down but which I could reliably chart by how close they measured it to my last having had fabulous morphine derivatives and whether my pain score was a manageable four or a pump-popping seven. What I found incredible was Mr Francis Bigger wanting to get back to sleep (“Sleep’s good for you!”) only to be interrupted immediately by more crashing about from the guy doing the washes, and the vacuuming and the tea. It’s nothing like real life! They always gave you at least twenty minutes to start to nod off again before the next noisy interruption. Though our tea ladies were always very kindly, and I was always very apologetic when I couldn’t force myself through a full meal. Oh, and that sadly the only seriously hot nurse I saw was only in my ward for a couple of minutes while he was helping transfer a patient, and at a point where I was physically about as far from a Sid James reaction as I’ve ever felt. So no lovely pair there.

On a related note, day staff seem to have no idea what night staff do, as the question “Did you have a good sleep?” is one you can’t answer politely when you’re not only deliberately woken through the night on hospital policy but also constantly woken by patients being trollied in, patients being ferried out or patients being distressing in any number of ways (especially one night, where the suffering of one man was too near the knuckle and I had to go and sit in a loo down the corridor for half an hour because otherwise I couldn’t have dealt with my own). At no point did I ever have anything approaching a good sleep, though in the first night and day there was a long stretch of intermittently blessed unconsciousness and really excellently hazy painkillers.

In hospitals there is also a different meaning of “comfortable”: you are never remotely comfortable, but what they want to know if your pain level is copeable or if they have to hit you on the head with a mallet to stop you screaming the place down (see ‘distressing patients’).

If you have many prescriptions, you must remember to bring all the right drugs in in the right combinations on admission even if you’re passing out with pain.

The nearest I had to a proper row was with the pharmacist in the first hospital. I’d just grabbed one of everything to illustrate what I take, not expecting to be kept in for a week. This meant that the drug that I use in an unusually small dose because I’m prescribed it for something completely different to most people confused her. And then, as I take 2.5-3mg (depending on how badly I’m doing) in a combination of 1mg from one bottle and 0.5mg from another, she only let me take 0.5mg as I’d not actually picked up both bottles. As I need a small but not that small esoteric dose for an esoteric condition, that was no bloody use at all. I preferred the pharmacist in the second hospital, who I first saw scurrying about bent over in an amazingly disreputable manner before he eventually introduced himself. I remain suspicious, not least because he was the only staff member there in the sort of white with green flashes uniform seen in the likes of Doctor Who – The Ark In Space or The Invisible Enemy, and looked uncannily like a cross between Ewen Solon and Charles Kay, who acted in just that sort of TV in just that sort of period. So perhaps he didn’t actually work there, and was just a ’70s method actor pretending to be on set. Or, as he claimed to be a pharmacist, on drugs.

Richard – My Lifeline and Escape Line

I have always known that Richard is the most marvellous person and the most perfect partner in the entire world, but now I have objective factual evidence.

He gave up his holiday to spend every minute (and more) of the five hours allowed each day to come and comfort me – even when I really wasn’t in a good state for company, hospitalised 250 miles from home, and an hour’s drive each way for him. I am still pathetically grateful, to say nothing of what a lifeline he was at the time. He was always the first to arrive and the last to leave, and every day the only visitor who stayed right through. He is, objectively, better than everyone else and the most attentive visitor by a mile. Subjectively, he talked when I wanted him to, he was silently supportive when I needed him to be, and he was adorably affectionate. And from what I could hear of everyone else, he had far, far better conversation. Though I probably can’t go into detail on the parents I wanted to scream at to shut up, or the elderly sister who got bored of an old man just out of surgery not being a performing seal and told her husband to prod him to wake him up. Luckily for her, I was too feeble to prod her by hurling the bedside cabinet I had to hand.

And on one night I was greeted by an older gay man who’d had no visitors and was in a lot of pain talking on the phone to a friend about how the only thing that helped him cope was the gay couple in the opposite berth who were being lovely in holding each other and talking all evening and generally being the most couply couple possible.

Perhaps the thing I should be most grateful to my beloved for is the bit I didn’t see. I absolutely couldn’t cope with anyone else when I was in hospital, however much I love them – though it has been nice to see some of my family since, along with two lovely men who’ve visited me in my lonely flat – and he stopped me having to do so. He stopped well-meaning but just too much people contacting me in hospital, only brought in the messages he knew I’d want, and spent most of the remaining hours of his precious ‘rest’ time when back at the cottage on the phone or on Facebook updating people, reassuring people and answering endless questions from people, all so that I never had to. I love him so much.

I think of him standing at the ward doors him wielding his iPhone and roaring,

“You shall not pass!”

Absolute proof that Richard is the best. Please be lovely to him.

I take back what I said about pharmacists and the worst part in hospital, though.

On the Friday morning, the helpful and competent specialist told me they were going to discharge me. He told me that they’d have kept me in had I lived locally, but that he knew we were on holiday (ho ho) and that we were only booked in where we were staying until Saturday morning. On balance, he thought it would be better for me to get home on Saturday rather than Richard have to find somewhere else to stay, get time off work and them not really be able to do much more for me in hospital except pump me full of drugs and rest. So I was warned not even to think of doing anything for a fortnight (and my usual recovery time is twice medical estimates, because I have so many things wrong with me ordinarily, which has of course been proven again since) and that I was being discharged not for being better but for being on balance manageable. At the time, I was much less feverish than when I was admitted, but actually much more swollen (that having got much worse before starting to improve) and still just as weak.

Where the hitch came was with the ‘pumping me full of drugs’ part. I was told I’d need three different sorts of painkillers and antibiotics to take away with me, and that the hospital pharmacy would send them up. This was about 9am. I was told to expect them between 12pm and 2pm, and a kind nurse said Richard could come in early. This was fortunate, as he ended up staying longer than any of the other days as the time dragged on, and on. They stripped my bed and remade it, as I’d be out straight away… Which became a problem as it got later into the afternoon, when I got weaker and shakier but had nowhere to sleep, caught in a no man’s land where I was neither discharged nor not discharged. Or, as Richard described me, as I changed from patient to impatient. It was the promise being broken: I’d coped with being there all week, the first time I’d been hospitalised for about thirty years as opposed to all the many times going in for tests and consultants, and it was immensely draining but I could shut off enough bits of my mind to get through. But so close to escape, and just finding that always out of reach, that drove me up the wall.

When 4.45pm and the pills eventually came and I tottered weakly out of the hospital to see it for the first time – and disappointingly find that what looked like a scrap-metal sculpture of Gonzo from the window was just an interestingly-but-less-interestingly-shaped tree from more accurate angles – I was more than slightly frustrated. Tip for unblocking hospital beds: don’t let hospital pharmacies delay patients from being discharged by eight hours for no reason at all.

Still, you wouldn’t believe the sense of escape when Richard drove me away from there, despite all the pain. Just seeing anywhere else. Now there was an adrenalin rush.

Aftermath Still-during-math

I had hoped we might get one tiny smidgeon of holiday on the Saturday morning by visiting York – lovely town, our favourite chippie, the Fudge Kitchen – but I was very evidently in no fit state, and still in way too much pain, quite apart from still having a severely suppressed appetite. On the bright side, by leaving early, we seemed to miss most of the traffic and to our great relief had a far less hellish journey going back to London.

That, of course, was only the end of week two of my double-infection. It’s now nearly the end of week seven. I’m looking a little more me, and feeling a lot more me. I’m back to eating far too much food – but still not really up to much of the walking I’d been doing to try and keep my weight in check. It’s been pretty rough in between, though.

Week three I went out just once that wasn’t to the doctor, and of course overdid it with catastrophic results. Much the same happened in week four, but the swelling was a lot less as I moved onto my fourth course of antibiotics (same as the third course I got from the hospital pharmacy, far more effective than the utterly rubbish first week’s variety, and I never knew what the serious second stuff they pumped in intravenously was), so I was quite confident I could be getting out more. Obviously, in week five I moved from merely still weak and feverish to the full-on flu-type attack and was far more ill than I’d been at any time since about the third day in hospital. So that was… Bloody terrible, actually. Week six I was still very knocked out but got a few things done, and at last the multiple massive cannula bruises all along my left hand and arm have vanished.

Now late on in week seven, the former massive cannula bruise on my left hand has even stopped hurting. The swelling hasn’t, though. Both types of swelling are much better, but they’re still ‘tender’ (or just plain sore, depending), and while about a twentieth the absurd / horrific volume at peak, still noticeably inflamed. I finished the fourth course of antibiotics last week; I saw the doctor again this week; I’m on the fifth course of antibiotics. He’ll see how I’m doing in a fortnight.

On the bright side, I’ve managed to get some things done this week though still very far from catching up any of The Lost Month And A Half, and most of the ill hours I’ve had to write off as ‘Lost Time’ this week have been my standard, familiar illnesses and not the one that slaughtered me a month and a half ago, so that’s encouraging, isn’t it?




Whatever the doctor says, maybe this’ll work: the beard’s coming off tomorrow.

Labels: Carry On, Doctor Who, Food, Health, Matt Smith, Naturism, New Adventures, NHS, Personal, Pictures, Richard, Sherlock Holmes, Sylvester McCoy, Twitter