Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Doctor Who – Invasion of the Dinosaurs: Another Totally Convincing Triceratops at Moorgate
Saturday, May 12, 2012
The Avengers – The Morning After
No, this isn’t another post about the Coalition. It’s a strange and sinister 1969 tale of waking up in an English town to find it deserted… But why? With a script full of tension, twists and betrayal, eerie direction, terrific music and impressive guest-star turns from Peter Barkworth, Joss Ackland and Brian Blessed, The Morning After is one of The Avengers’ strongest and most gripping episodes. Steed is landed with an unexpected (and unwilling) ally and faces unexpected (and all too unflinching) enemies in this stylish mid-point between Seven Days To Noon and Doctor Who – Invasion of the Dinosaurs…
First broadcast in the Midlands 43 years ago last night (oh, all right, they showed it in London several months earlier, but it’s difficult to celebrate proper Avengers anniversaries when ITV regions all used to do their own thing), you can now find The Morning After on Disc 6 of The Avengers – The Complete Series 6 DVD Box Set, or Disc 35 in The Avengers Complete 50th Anniversary Collection. I’ve previously offered tips on which The Avengers DVDs to buy. You may be surprised, though, at how little Tara King appears in this episode from her season of the show; with Series 6 half as long again as any of the others, both Linda Thorson and Patrick Macnee had to have a couple of ‘holiday’ episodes each. I’m a huge admirer of Tara, as I’ve gone into before in The Avengers – Game and My Wildest Dream, but Steed’s new best enemy in The Morning After more than makes up for her absence, a help and hindrance who’s surely the best of the one-off Avengers.
Having written about Seven Days To Noon a week ago, it’s appropriate to recognise the debt this story owes to that film while still being very much its own show. For me, of all the closest variations on that central idea (the original, this, Doctor Who – Invasion of the Dinosaurs and The New Avengers – Sleeper) this is arguably the best, with a clear identity of its own and told with more economy, great visual style and an outstanding musical score. It turns the film’s central threat on its head, an idea which goes on to be swallowed whole by Invasion of the Dinosaurs; it’s probably a coincidence, but a satisfying one, that it deploys a minor young actor from the film, Joss Ackland, as a major guest star two decades later; and it may well be deliberate that it hires stock film shot for Seven Days To Noon to depict its own evacuation scenes, though intriguingly often off-cuts from the film rather than those used in the final version, such as a different edit of men hammering up an evacuation sign (Tat Wood put me onto this in his Doctor Who guidebook About Time 3, though take its thumbnail plot summary of this with a pinch and, for Homicide and Old Lace, a lorryload of salt). Its focus, punch and production values are way ahead of the Doctor Who, although that shares with Seven Days To Noon a greater political depth, while I’ve said before that Sleeper, while mostly enjoyable and looking impressive, is by far the least interesting of these, having no twists, nothing to say and, for all its attempt at ‘urban realism’, pulling almost all its punches (it even takes the near-comic relief gas from this episode and makes it the main plot). True, the others have over The Morning After the ambition and unsettling impact of a deserted London, though this story’s less iconic ‘everytown’ has its own claustrophobic effect. On which note…
The Avengers doesn’t do ‘continuity’ – but could a man in a clown mask raiding the Ministry of Technology and Scientific Innovation suggest an old enemy? No. It’s just yet another of those sort of openings, here at least done more briskly and impishly than in previous episodes, then jumping straight to a busy, noisy town somewhere in England, where Steed and Tara lie in wait for him (no spending half the episode working out how he got in or what he’s stolen). I told you this started with a fast-moving Bond mini-adventure, didn’t I? And already, it’s unsettling; Steed never carries a gun. But against quadruple agent Jimmy Merlin, an adversary as playful, as charming and as dangerous as he is, Steed jarringly arms himself. Our heroes get the jump on Merlin; he jumps back to fling down the new sleeping gas capsule he’s stolen; but Steed’s locked the door, so as the little rendezvous fills with gas, all three go down. There’s a thrilling freeze-frame for the title as the phone starts to ring and suddenly music crashes in, fast, bombastic and threatening.
The most gripping part of the story for me is on the morning after; Steed wakes first, the busy town suddenly silent save for a dog howling miserably. Only emphasising the silence, eerie music drifts into the scene, like the wind. Steed tries the phone – no connection. The same with the red callbox outside – from where he can see a car crashed into bins and abandoned. All around, things smashed and left, and not a soul. With Tara still deeply unconscious, Steed testily wakes a protesting Merlin and drags him down to the yellow Rolls, eager to hand him over now he’s captured. I love the banter between the two fabulous characters as everything the camera shows us makes us – and them – more worried, right from Steed cheerily telling Merlin to enjoy the view while he can: usually, in The Avengers, glorious countryside; here, the garage door. And Steed has to enjoy the drive while he can, too, as soon he runs into an empty truck used as a roadblock and has no choice but to handcuff the two of them together and start walking…
It helps enormously that all of this is out on location, on a sunny day, so you can see right down long, narrow, slightly claustrophobic streets. This was The Avengers’ most ambitious location shoot to date (later beaten in that, I think, by Sleeper), and for this eerie ‘everytown’ director John Hough carefully slices together non-contiguous parts of Watford, Old Hatfield and, particularly, St Albans, most blatantly when the streets suddenly give way to the Cathedral, zooming on the little pram and dollies left behind in its grounds. That always gives me a bit of a turn, as I remember the place vaguely from a single childhood visit with my Nana and Grandad (who lived in the other end of Watford), though the cathedral also offers some mirth if you watch carefully; as Steed and Merlin walk and talk, you keep seeing it poking up in the background in different shots, but never in the same place. You could say that it shows they’re going round in circles; you might just shrug that they’re cutting together lots of different locations; but it keeps looking like the cathedral is tiptoeing from side to side, stalking them.
Brian Clemens’ script is merciless, telling you nothing more of what’s going on than Steed and Merlin can see, and even as Act One draws to a close with eerie exploration shifting to sudden threat, there are no answers – just Merlin starting to ask some of the same questions as the audience. Where has everybody gone? And why? Was it an emergency? A mass kidnapping? War, plague, radiation…? Your mind races through all of Terry Nation’s favourite plot devices, not least because he’s script editor here (is this why he and Clemens fell out over who had the idea for Survivors? All so much more absorbing than Sleeper, which tells you what’s going in the pre-titles sequence). Even the bank’s deserted, notes fluttering everywhere, and no-one comes running when Steed sounds the alarm. Or do they? Now there’s a black, silent VW camper van gliding through the streets – robots? Remote control? Hypnotism? Then, just as Merlin and Steed explode into action, there’s that shockingly loud, thundering fanfare again, not a march but a dash, soldiers running through the streets to shoot a little man down as a “LOOTER!” And if you think the capital-lettered sign they toss onto him is shouting, the man giving the order to fire (camera appropriately zooming on his mouth in close-up) is Sergeant Brian Blessed!
Peter Barkworth, Merlin the spy before John le Carré, is a simply sublime guest star and, while I’d put My Wildest Dream just a touch ahead in the terrific episode stakes, Merlin makes a far better anti-Steed than the villain there. Charming and dangerous, tricky and devious, even more playful – sometimes gleeful – but far more cowardly than our hero, he doesn’t look as flamboyant (a straighter hat, a more buttoned-up look, a dark overcoat, as if he wants to stay unnoticed in the shadows) but has his own showiness, not least his conjuror’s-trick habit of producing whatever he needs from his sleeve. It’s a marvellous performance, easily the best and biggest of Barkworth’s four Avengers roles (one lost, a frosty businessperson in The Medicine Men, a well-mannered warrior in The Correct Way To Kill), dragged along, always complaining, never trustworthy – until Steed catches him out and leads him into the jaws of death. They make a very entertaining team. Look out for a particularly priceless exchange where each gives the other three reasons for investigating, or for running away, and just why Steed eventually uncuffs him…
With Linda Thorson recharging her own batteries for the week, Tara gets a couple of good moments – praised at the start, an impressive knockout punch later – but is largely asleep with a teddy (not Chilcott) and in a red and white trouser suit, which isn’t bad but makes her seem a bit young. For anyone missing an Avengers woman for a week, half-way through we meet Jenny Firston, played by Penelope Horner. She’s not bad, if a little flat, and after a rather undignified entrance has little to do save act as the exposition and then hide; if you’ve seen Doctor Who – Invasion of the Dinosaurs, you may just expect to find a plucky female journalist sneaking in for the scoop, and she even has a man called Yates teamed with her who isn’t much help. Her exposition is rather stylishly by television, though it slightly clumsily underlines that they’ve not given the ‘everytown’ a name: “This town has become a ghost area” seems very laboured, when anyone would naturally say ‘This has become a ghost town’.
But why has this ghost town been evacuated, and the fifty square miles surrounding it? Spoilers follow shortly…
Late ’60s Avengers episodes look gorgeous on DVD, shot on film and in colour, and with the current full-season (or complete series) box sets they’ve not only been cleaned up beautifully but have been given a few extra features – though, while the look of the episodes mostly beats Doctor Who hands down, the value added material is still some way behind. While almost every Doctor Who DVD release has a full set of commentaries, they’re rare for The Avengers, so it’s cheering that on this (one of my favourites) director John Hough is there to give his recollections, ably questioned by Jaz Wiseman. Hough’s direction is particularly impressive here; not quite as exuberantly inventive as Robert Fuest but still with a great deal of style, equally able in building atmosphere for the unsettlingly empty streets and then in giving it lots of pace and energy as the soldiers crash into the story.
John Hough has some intriguing insights into this story in particular – how to match Peter against Patrick as the two leads so that both could let their own charisma flow and battle each other’s characters without overshadowing each other, or how though it took more hard work than usual to create so much of the empty town, it was only one step up from the way The Avengers always eschewed extras to create its own world – but, with few commentaries about for the series, it’s mostly more of an extended interview than a bantering, story-led traditional commentary. It ranges over his four episodes as full director (he returned for one especially good New Avengers) and how he started off as second unit director, having got that post on The Avengers following The Saint after he and Ray Austin managed to swap jobs. He explains how the series doing it differently led to such high quality, with good words to say about the likes of Linda Thorson, Patrick Macnee, and most of all producers Albert Fennell and Brian Clemens. Though not about the Movie. And, like me, he admired Patrick Macnee’s special velvet collars, though unlike me he went to Patrick’s tailor and got one (it looks like you can see it in the Photo Gallery for Super Secret Cypher Snatch)!
So, now, are you ready for the spoilers on what was going on?
Much of The Avengers takes place in a highly stylised fantasy of Britain, sometimes called ‘AvengerLand’, with highly stylised characters within it. Here, the threat is more grim and real-world than usual, though it’s still informed by Avengers themes and, in the extensive location shooting, brings ‘AvengerLand’ further than it’s ever been before in transforming the real world. Rather than outlandish sets, rolling countryside or picturesque villages called Little Storping-in-the-Swuff, this ambitiously turns a whole town inside-out and into Avengers country, closer to most viewers’ experiences but more unsettlingly different at the same time. And it’s unsettlingly different for Steed, too, as rather than be sent in to investigate the mystery, here he simply wakes up in the midst of it and becomes a hunted fugitive, the full force of the authorities seemingly out to kill him, a reversal that gives him new oomph.
Army nuclear expert Brigadier Hansing has detected an atomic bomb secreted by one of the unfriendly governments who backed the old Eastern Hemisphere Trade Commission in town, and enforces martial law while he’s staying in the evacuated area to dismantle the bomb. Or is he? The conspiracy goes right to the top, with Joss Ackland as Hansing moving deftly from sternly efficient, to snarling brutal orders, to just a few notches below his full Hollywood-villain-boggler of later years. Hansing’s due to be pensioned off in favour of a computer and, as with so many Avengers villains motived by either amity or animosity towards technology, turns. His good old British nuclear shock troop platoons are lying drugged in their trucks while merciless mercenaries led by the excellent Donald Douglas and the even more outstanding Brian Blessed shoot anyone on the streets and Hansing supervises not the dismantling of an imaginary bomb but the installation of a real one, ready to blackmail the government with no time for evacuation once the town’s population returns (though while he’s in it for money and pride, it’s never made entirely clear just what his “Eastern Hemisphere” backers are aiming for. It might have been interesting to hear they intended to double-cross him in turn, and blow up the bomb anyway).
I should mention the final moment designed to defuse the tension, the traditional light-hearted ‘tag scene’; in Steed’s flat, it’s immediately rather jarring, as it’s the only scene since the pre-titles where we’ve not been trapped in that unfamiliar town. Unusually, there is a link to the main plot – something else Merlin’s stolen – but it’s not a particularly good gag and, for once, not particularly well done (dialogue or lighting). And though Tara’s back, in rather a shimmery frock, Steed’s tux is a bit much. If it ends on a slight disappointment, though, The Morning After’s still been one of The Avengers’ strongest episodes, and showing great confidence in doing something so different in tone so late in the series. That confidence even shows through in what might be the best moment of that tag scene: Steed, enjoying the TV, hears one hand clapping and sighs, “Sock it to me,” the catchphrase of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, which was right then causing problems for the series when scheduled against it on US TV. It was very interesting to show even Steed fondly watching their opposition… But it was also stupid. Though I think it was more interesting than stupid…
First broadcast in the Midlands 43 years ago last night (oh, all right, they showed it in London several months earlier, but it’s difficult to celebrate proper Avengers anniversaries when ITV regions all used to do their own thing), you can now find The Morning After on Disc 6 of The Avengers – The Complete Series 6 DVD Box Set, or Disc 35 in The Avengers Complete 50th Anniversary Collection. I’ve previously offered tips on which The Avengers DVDs to buy. You may be surprised, though, at how little Tara King appears in this episode from her season of the show; with Series 6 half as long again as any of the others, both Linda Thorson and Patrick Macnee had to have a couple of ‘holiday’ episodes each. I’m a huge admirer of Tara, as I’ve gone into before in The Avengers – Game and My Wildest Dream, but Steed’s new best enemy in The Morning After more than makes up for her absence, a help and hindrance who’s surely the best of the one-off Avengers.
Having written about Seven Days To Noon a week ago, it’s appropriate to recognise the debt this story owes to that film while still being very much its own show. For me, of all the closest variations on that central idea (the original, this, Doctor Who – Invasion of the Dinosaurs and The New Avengers – Sleeper) this is arguably the best, with a clear identity of its own and told with more economy, great visual style and an outstanding musical score. It turns the film’s central threat on its head, an idea which goes on to be swallowed whole by Invasion of the Dinosaurs; it’s probably a coincidence, but a satisfying one, that it deploys a minor young actor from the film, Joss Ackland, as a major guest star two decades later; and it may well be deliberate that it hires stock film shot for Seven Days To Noon to depict its own evacuation scenes, though intriguingly often off-cuts from the film rather than those used in the final version, such as a different edit of men hammering up an evacuation sign (Tat Wood put me onto this in his Doctor Who guidebook About Time 3, though take its thumbnail plot summary of this with a pinch and, for Homicide and Old Lace, a lorryload of salt). Its focus, punch and production values are way ahead of the Doctor Who, although that shares with Seven Days To Noon a greater political depth, while I’ve said before that Sleeper, while mostly enjoyable and looking impressive, is by far the least interesting of these, having no twists, nothing to say and, for all its attempt at ‘urban realism’, pulling almost all its punches (it even takes the near-comic relief gas from this episode and makes it the main plot). True, the others have over The Morning After the ambition and unsettling impact of a deserted London, though this story’s less iconic ‘everytown’ has its own claustrophobic effect. On which note…
That Golden Moment
“Do you think the world’s ended, and they forgot to tell us?”The Avengers doesn’t do multi-part stories with cliffhangers – except that, made for an hour ITV slot in the ’60s, each fifty-minute Avengers episode usually splits into four ‘Acts’, each designed to come to a climax, then fade to black for the ad break. And the first Act of The Morning After is an outstanding example of the style, eighteen minutes opening with an exciting James Bond-style mini-adventure preview, then plunging into Steed’s forced exploration of a mystery in which he’s on his own – no briefing, no Mother to send him in, and no Tara to watch his back. And it’s as gripping for the audience as it is disturbing for our hero, building steadily until a sudden burst of action and the first death, inevitably, to keep you breathless through the adverts that aren’t there.
The Avengers doesn’t do ‘continuity’ – but could a man in a clown mask raiding the Ministry of Technology and Scientific Innovation suggest an old enemy? No. It’s just yet another of those sort of openings, here at least done more briskly and impishly than in previous episodes, then jumping straight to a busy, noisy town somewhere in England, where Steed and Tara lie in wait for him (no spending half the episode working out how he got in or what he’s stolen). I told you this started with a fast-moving Bond mini-adventure, didn’t I? And already, it’s unsettling; Steed never carries a gun. But against quadruple agent Jimmy Merlin, an adversary as playful, as charming and as dangerous as he is, Steed jarringly arms himself. Our heroes get the jump on Merlin; he jumps back to fling down the new sleeping gas capsule he’s stolen; but Steed’s locked the door, so as the little rendezvous fills with gas, all three go down. There’s a thrilling freeze-frame for the title as the phone starts to ring and suddenly music crashes in, fast, bombastic and threatening.
The most gripping part of the story for me is on the morning after; Steed wakes first, the busy town suddenly silent save for a dog howling miserably. Only emphasising the silence, eerie music drifts into the scene, like the wind. Steed tries the phone – no connection. The same with the red callbox outside – from where he can see a car crashed into bins and abandoned. All around, things smashed and left, and not a soul. With Tara still deeply unconscious, Steed testily wakes a protesting Merlin and drags him down to the yellow Rolls, eager to hand him over now he’s captured. I love the banter between the two fabulous characters as everything the camera shows us makes us – and them – more worried, right from Steed cheerily telling Merlin to enjoy the view while he can: usually, in The Avengers, glorious countryside; here, the garage door. And Steed has to enjoy the drive while he can, too, as soon he runs into an empty truck used as a roadblock and has no choice but to handcuff the two of them together and start walking…
“Any chance of making a deal?”And of course, in this strange setting, suddenly neither can get what they want. It’s a terrific sequence with superb cinematography as the two stroll through the deserted town, nothing but keening music to keep them company. And it’s a brilliant idea to use all the humour to build tension, every line played like a gag between them but juxtaposed with the emptiness yawning around them: the policeman’s helmet on the ground and in the foreground as we see them, tiny and lost, far beyond it; the high, old-fashioned buildings looming above them; the sack of spilled coal, the milk bottles, surely to Steed most disturbingly the abandoned pub with drinks left unfinished. And while both actors keep their tone light, their faces are at odds with their voices. Patrick Macnee’s Steed is determined but disturbed, keenly observing; Peter Barkworth’s Merlin jittery and increasingly desperate. Watch Steed knowing that “It’s lonely up there” merely reflects ‘here’; watch Merlin’s little face fall as Steed keeps raising and dashing his hopes.
“I shouldn’t have thought so, but keep talking.”
“Twenty thousand? In a Swiss bank? No names, no strings?”
“Pounds?”
“Yes!”
“Very sorry, old chap. Only deal in guineas.”
“Well, I could throw in a yacht.”
“I’ve had one.”
“My private plane?”
“It’s lonely up there.”
“String of Arab ponies?”
“Prefer palominos.”
“Well, how about… A villa? France?”
“Whereabouts?”
“St Tropez.”
“Prefer Provence.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Steed – isn’t there anything you want?”
“Yes. There’s one thing I want very much. You – behind bars.”
It helps enormously that all of this is out on location, on a sunny day, so you can see right down long, narrow, slightly claustrophobic streets. This was The Avengers’ most ambitious location shoot to date (later beaten in that, I think, by Sleeper), and for this eerie ‘everytown’ director John Hough carefully slices together non-contiguous parts of Watford, Old Hatfield and, particularly, St Albans, most blatantly when the streets suddenly give way to the Cathedral, zooming on the little pram and dollies left behind in its grounds. That always gives me a bit of a turn, as I remember the place vaguely from a single childhood visit with my Nana and Grandad (who lived in the other end of Watford), though the cathedral also offers some mirth if you watch carefully; as Steed and Merlin walk and talk, you keep seeing it poking up in the background in different shots, but never in the same place. You could say that it shows they’re going round in circles; you might just shrug that they’re cutting together lots of different locations; but it keeps looking like the cathedral is tiptoeing from side to side, stalking them.
Brian Clemens’ script is merciless, telling you nothing more of what’s going on than Steed and Merlin can see, and even as Act One draws to a close with eerie exploration shifting to sudden threat, there are no answers – just Merlin starting to ask some of the same questions as the audience. Where has everybody gone? And why? Was it an emergency? A mass kidnapping? War, plague, radiation…? Your mind races through all of Terry Nation’s favourite plot devices, not least because he’s script editor here (is this why he and Clemens fell out over who had the idea for Survivors? All so much more absorbing than Sleeper, which tells you what’s going in the pre-titles sequence). Even the bank’s deserted, notes fluttering everywhere, and no-one comes running when Steed sounds the alarm. Or do they? Now there’s a black, silent VW camper van gliding through the streets – robots? Remote control? Hypnotism? Then, just as Merlin and Steed explode into action, there’s that shockingly loud, thundering fanfare again, not a march but a dash, soldiers running through the streets to shoot a little man down as a “LOOTER!” And if you think the capital-lettered sign they toss onto him is shouting, the man giving the order to fire (camera appropriately zooming on his mouth in close-up) is Sergeant Brian Blessed!
Steed and Merlin
“Your friend wasn’t very brave.”The Morning After is a great episode for Steed, as he carries most of it and almost has to carry unwilling burden Merlin – a much more sober than usual performance, though still with plenty of Patrick Macnee’s charm. Against the usual flamboyant parade of outfits, this time he’s in the same suit from the teaser right up until the last couple of minutes; this isn’t London, and there’s no friendly flat to pop back to for a change of clothes and a glass of champagne. Fortunately, the brown with that trademark velvet collar suits him, and he stays immaculate throughout, of course (even if it seems strangely improbable that, confronting Merlin at the start, he has a touch of uncharacteristic five o’clock shadow, but is as beautifully clean-shaven as always on waking a day later).
“He’s a big disappointment to me.”
Peter Barkworth, Merlin the spy before John le Carré, is a simply sublime guest star and, while I’d put My Wildest Dream just a touch ahead in the terrific episode stakes, Merlin makes a far better anti-Steed than the villain there. Charming and dangerous, tricky and devious, even more playful – sometimes gleeful – but far more cowardly than our hero, he doesn’t look as flamboyant (a straighter hat, a more buttoned-up look, a dark overcoat, as if he wants to stay unnoticed in the shadows) but has his own showiness, not least his conjuror’s-trick habit of producing whatever he needs from his sleeve. It’s a marvellous performance, easily the best and biggest of Barkworth’s four Avengers roles (one lost, a frosty businessperson in The Medicine Men, a well-mannered warrior in The Correct Way To Kill), dragged along, always complaining, never trustworthy – until Steed catches him out and leads him into the jaws of death. They make a very entertaining team. Look out for a particularly priceless exchange where each gives the other three reasons for investigating, or for running away, and just why Steed eventually uncuffs him…
“I’m too young to die!”Not a new man on the team but so fresh he sounds like it, composer Laurie Johnson adds to the feel of ‘The Avengers, but suddenly harder-edged’ with one of his very best original scores. After providing all the music for the Diana Rigg episodes, often reusing and reworking themes into old friends, Laurie Johnson had taken some time off while working on a musical, handing over several of the Tara King scores to Howard Blake. And that clearly recharged his batteries, as the soundtrack here is not just one of his best but strikingly different to his usual.
“You’re over 21.”
“If I were eighty, I’d still feel the same!”
With Linda Thorson recharging her own batteries for the week, Tara gets a couple of good moments – praised at the start, an impressive knockout punch later – but is largely asleep with a teddy (not Chilcott) and in a red and white trouser suit, which isn’t bad but makes her seem a bit young. For anyone missing an Avengers woman for a week, half-way through we meet Jenny Firston, played by Penelope Horner. She’s not bad, if a little flat, and after a rather undignified entrance has little to do save act as the exposition and then hide; if you’ve seen Doctor Who – Invasion of the Dinosaurs, you may just expect to find a plucky female journalist sneaking in for the scoop, and she even has a man called Yates teamed with her who isn’t much help. Her exposition is rather stylishly by television, though it slightly clumsily underlines that they’ve not given the ‘everytown’ a name: “This town has become a ghost area” seems very laboured, when anyone would naturally say ‘This has become a ghost town’.
But why has this ghost town been evacuated, and the fifty square miles surrounding it? Spoilers follow shortly…
Commentary and Conspiracy (Or – Spoilers – What’s It All About, Ackland?)
Late ’60s Avengers episodes look gorgeous on DVD, shot on film and in colour, and with the current full-season (or complete series) box sets they’ve not only been cleaned up beautifully but have been given a few extra features – though, while the look of the episodes mostly beats Doctor Who hands down, the value added material is still some way behind. While almost every Doctor Who DVD release has a full set of commentaries, they’re rare for The Avengers, so it’s cheering that on this (one of my favourites) director John Hough is there to give his recollections, ably questioned by Jaz Wiseman. Hough’s direction is particularly impressive here; not quite as exuberantly inventive as Robert Fuest but still with a great deal of style, equally able in building atmosphere for the unsettlingly empty streets and then in giving it lots of pace and energy as the soldiers crash into the story.
John Hough has some intriguing insights into this story in particular – how to match Peter against Patrick as the two leads so that both could let their own charisma flow and battle each other’s characters without overshadowing each other, or how though it took more hard work than usual to create so much of the empty town, it was only one step up from the way The Avengers always eschewed extras to create its own world – but, with few commentaries about for the series, it’s mostly more of an extended interview than a bantering, story-led traditional commentary. It ranges over his four episodes as full director (he returned for one especially good New Avengers) and how he started off as second unit director, having got that post on The Avengers following The Saint after he and Ray Austin managed to swap jobs. He explains how the series doing it differently led to such high quality, with good words to say about the likes of Linda Thorson, Patrick Macnee, and most of all producers Albert Fennell and Brian Clemens. Though not about the Movie. And, like me, he admired Patrick Macnee’s special velvet collars, though unlike me he went to Patrick’s tailor and got one (it looks like you can see it in the Photo Gallery for Super Secret Cypher Snatch)!
So, now, are you ready for the spoilers on what was going on?
Much of The Avengers takes place in a highly stylised fantasy of Britain, sometimes called ‘AvengerLand’, with highly stylised characters within it. Here, the threat is more grim and real-world than usual, though it’s still informed by Avengers themes and, in the extensive location shooting, brings ‘AvengerLand’ further than it’s ever been before in transforming the real world. Rather than outlandish sets, rolling countryside or picturesque villages called Little Storping-in-the-Swuff, this ambitiously turns a whole town inside-out and into Avengers country, closer to most viewers’ experiences but more unsettlingly different at the same time. And it’s unsettlingly different for Steed, too, as rather than be sent in to investigate the mystery, here he simply wakes up in the midst of it and becomes a hunted fugitive, the full force of the authorities seemingly out to kill him, a reversal that gives him new oomph.
Army nuclear expert Brigadier Hansing has detected an atomic bomb secreted by one of the unfriendly governments who backed the old Eastern Hemisphere Trade Commission in town, and enforces martial law while he’s staying in the evacuated area to dismantle the bomb. Or is he? The conspiracy goes right to the top, with Joss Ackland as Hansing moving deftly from sternly efficient, to snarling brutal orders, to just a few notches below his full Hollywood-villain-boggler of later years. Hansing’s due to be pensioned off in favour of a computer and, as with so many Avengers villains motived by either amity or animosity towards technology, turns. His good old British nuclear shock troop platoons are lying drugged in their trucks while merciless mercenaries led by the excellent Donald Douglas and the even more outstanding Brian Blessed shoot anyone on the streets and Hansing supervises not the dismantling of an imaginary bomb but the installation of a real one, ready to blackmail the government with no time for evacuation once the town’s population returns (though while he’s in it for money and pride, it’s never made entirely clear just what his “Eastern Hemisphere” backers are aiming for. It might have been interesting to hear they intended to double-cross him in turn, and blow up the bomb anyway).
“You have been found guilty of looting!”A shoot-to-kill policy is, of course, just not British – except when it is – and you can see the effect it has on Steed; not concerned for himself, but neatly underplayed doubt that they’re genuine and fear that they might be. It’s a conspiracy thriller quite unlike any other Avengers, full of twists and betrayal, and as well as cleverly subverting the motivations of Seven Days To Noon, when we see soldiers running along house-to-house searches they become far more sinister, the film’s subtext become the text. And, in villainous ’tache, it’s Brian Blessed who barks their orders, on the cusp of serious stardom, already known for Z Cars, still in a working class role, some great asides as he tells Steed he’s not a regular (he gets the drink; Steed doesn’t; he doesn’t drink like Steed does, though), but in an early example of SHOUTING!
I should mention the final moment designed to defuse the tension, the traditional light-hearted ‘tag scene’; in Steed’s flat, it’s immediately rather jarring, as it’s the only scene since the pre-titles where we’ve not been trapped in that unfamiliar town. Unusually, there is a link to the main plot – something else Merlin’s stolen – but it’s not a particularly good gag and, for once, not particularly well done (dialogue or lighting). And though Tara’s back, in rather a shimmery frock, Steed’s tux is a bit much. If it ends on a slight disappointment, though, The Morning After’s still been one of The Avengers’ strongest episodes, and showing great confidence in doing something so different in tone so late in the series. That confidence even shows through in what might be the best moment of that tag scene: Steed, enjoying the TV, hears one hand clapping and sighs, “Sock it to me,” the catchphrase of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, which was right then causing problems for the series when scheduled against it on US TV. It was very interesting to show even Steed fondly watching their opposition… But it was also stupid. Though I think it was more interesting than stupid…
Labels: Brian Blessed, DVD, Film, Jon Pertwee, Music, Reviews, The Avengers, The Avengers Season 6, The New Avengers
Friday, May 11, 2012
Happy Birthday to the Libera-Tory Coalition?
With no party winning a majority of seats (much less votes), two years ago today the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats did the responsible thing and reached an initial agreement on Coalition. Since then, some Tories have been wailing that they can’t do everything they want because the Lib Dems won’t let them (and because the voters didn’t let them), many Lib Dems have been suffering and most voters have been wanting to have their cake and make cuts to everyone else’s. Soon, I’ll be looking at some of the effects and just what the Lib Dems stand for in detail. Today, I’m looking back to what I and others said then, how that worked out, and whether we were right to say it in the first place.
Forming the Coalition was easier for the Tories. First, because they’re not used to being out of power and would do anything to get it back; the Lib Dems, having been out of power for ninety years, were a bit more concerned with what to achieve with it. And second, because once the negotiations reached an agreement between the two parties, they could make an instant yes / no decision, as the Tory Leader’s word is law right up to the point they decide to cut his head off (luckily for Mr Cameron, his main threat at the moment only appears to be Nadine Dorries, a headless chicken herself).
The Liberal Democrats who negotiated The Coalition: Our Programme For Government had, instead, to convince the rest of the party to agree in advance (which turned out not to be so hard after all, and strengthens Nick Clegg in adversity where Tories who get cold feet can pretend it’s all David Cameron’s fault). And once Parliamentarians and Party Committees had been convinced, the rest of us were given our opportunity in that rare beast, the Special Conference, held on Sunday 16 May 2010 in an unfriendly aircraft hangar at the Birmingham NEC. Now, what I should be doing, of course, is re-reading our 2010 Manifesto, the initial Coalition Agreement and the long Coalition Agreement, cross-referencing them against each other and against the Government’s record. Sorry. I haven’t (though I did notice that during the negotiations I said it should be all four of our front-page Manifesto priorities, or no deal, and our negotiators got three and a half, which was better than I was expecting). But what I have done recently is come across the scrappy bit of paper on which I jotted down my speech to that Special Conference and, bonus! It was only a minute long…
If you want to make a speech at a Lib Dem Conference, you have a think about why and then put that down on a card. The Chair of the debate balances what you want to say against what everyone else does, so the debate’s neither too repetitious or two one-sided (a speech against often helps you get called, with the speakers against Coalition at the Special Conference also being virtually all of the tiny “No” vote so as to make the debate sound more balanced). And the likelihood of your being selected also rises or falls depending on how popular the topic and how early the hour. If you say just what everyone else is going to on your card, but less coherently, and you put in to speak in the packed debate on the Manifesto immediately before the Leader’s speech, you’ve got no chance, while if you want to be called at 9am on the third day of Conference to speak against the Milk Marketing motion, even if what you’ve written is gibberish, the Chair will be as pathetically grateful you’ve got out of bed as if you were the cavalry charging over the hill.
It turned out that, for this debate, arguably the most important the party’s ever held and all essentially on the same topic, nearly two hundred people wanted to make the fewer than forty speeches there would be time for at five minutes apiece. Worse, MPs, Peers and all the rest of the Party Great and Good were all lining up impatiently for their own chance at the lottery, making the likelihood of your being called if you were an ordinary member slimmer still. My beloved Richard Flowers wrote an excellent speech about making the Liberal difference, but didn’t get the chance to make it.
However, for massive debates like this – well, there are no others like this, and haven’t been since the Lib Dems were formed, but for major debates with wide-ranging policies – there’s also the opportunity of making an ‘intervention’. This means you don’t go up to the stage to speak, resoundingly, from the lectern, but have to clutch your notes in your hand at a smaller mike somewhere in the middle of the seating; that you’re chosen at random; and you only get one minute, one second after which you will usually have the power to your mike switched off, which is ignominious and unhelpful to your point if you’re in the middle of a sentence. In this case there were a mere hundred or so people chasing just over thirty mini-speeches but, luckily, my name was called for a slot – and here’s roughly what I said in it:
Why did I want to speak? To make my point; to be part of history; to ‘dip my hand in the blood’. Take your pick. I wanted to make a mark on the main issue – astoundingly, no-one else seemed to say what I said – I knew what I wanted to say, and I found myself ever more strongly hoping that I’d get the chance to say it as the debate went on, with most of the ‘interventions’ basically shopping lists of ‘I want you to renegotiate the entire Coalition Agreement because you’ve not included my pet project’ or, even more aggravatingly, delusional members moaning that they wanted a “progressive coalition” with Labour and wasn’t it unfair that the voters hadn’t given either party enough seats to do it.
So I know that my first line was made up on the spot to answer back. I have no illusions about either of the other parties. Progressive? Labour? Thirteen years of appalling Labour Government, and one week for some idiots to forget what they were like, apparently. Two years later, I can still think of plenty of things to remember about Labour. Anyway, knowing the mike-choppers are brutal on one-minute interventions, as I found myself starting that way instead I automatically skipped over my original opening line: ‘Of course it’s scary. Coalition might make us unpopular – power can do that. So can permanent irrelevance.’ Of course, it’s a good job I did, as we’re today so universally beloved and soaring at 57% in the polls that, had I suggested out loud that Coalition might make us unpopular, I’d look a right nana now.
[Tumbleweeds]
I had the added fun of having been horribly ill – much more than usual – throughout the previous month, and varied from bounding about with nervous excitement to being half-carried on the day. Luckily for their own nerves, the speakers waiting in line for the mike with me didn’t know that I didn’t know if I was going to speak or to projectile-vomit. Luckily, I spoke, and under the various stresses of the moment, with some passion: what one activist called later “A frisson of ‘fuck off’!” Being on form, I got a lot of applause and quite a few cheers (which are pretty damn rare).
But it’s not just ego that makes me regret there were no cameras there. For only the second time I can remember at a Lib Dem Conference, the press were excluded: party managers were worried there’d be a storm of opposition to the Coalition, I think. Instead, Nick Clegg afterwards slightly ruefully called the 98% vote in favour a bit North Korean, and posterity – and the day’s news broadcasts – were denied quite a few telling speeches.
Although I didn’t think much of most of my fellow interventionists, some of the principal speeches were very impressive, and if there was one advantage to denying the cameras access, it’s that some ‘big guns’ felt they could speak more personally, just to a hall full of Lib Dem members, rather than have to beam a message to the country as a whole. I remember other people raving about several of them: Simon Hughes touching activists’ g-spots; Chris Huhne grandly combative; David Rendel sad and dignified speaking against. But the two speeches that stuck in my heart were each from senior Lib Dems I’ve never been a huge fan of, despite one of them being then at the crest of quite amazing popularity. One spoke to my hopes, and said he would look after them, the other to my fears, and said they were worth facing.
So when things get bad in the Coalition, I still hold firm to what I said then, and hold close the speeches from Tom McNally and Vince Cable, both newly-appointed ministers. Tom, in the Justice Ministry, knew that of all the ministers speaking, he was the one right on a major faultline between Liberals and Conservatives, and he took his responsibility seriously in promoting freedom rather than just letting yet another hideously authoritarian Government take over: he was, he said, “Minister with Responsibility for this party’s soul.” And Vince was the platform speaker who didn’t seem starry-eyed, or triumphant, or combative, but in tune with my feeling that I wished it wasn’t the worst possible time to take power, but that if we said, ‘No, it’s too difficult and it’ll hurt’, what would have been the point of all those years in the wilderness? We had a responsibility to do what we could. And one line of his should be written on every Lib Dem’s heart:
It has, obviously, been bloody awful. Again obviously, we’d be far higher in the opinion polls now (though the new Lib Dem minister in May 2010 who said we’d be down to 5% within a year is still looking on the bright side) if we’d refused to enter the Coalition, not that the voters who back us in mid-term (or even mid-campaign) opinion polls ever have the guts to actually vote for us, and those polls and the lovely pure voting record of our forty or so MPs against the Conservative Government elected in Autumn 2010 would give Lib Dems the warming glow we need to sustain us against the unfortunate let-down that we were slashed down to forty or so MPs when the Conservative Government was elected in Autumn 2010. And we’d have voted against the unlimited rises in tuition fees that the Tories wanted and that Labour’s Browne Report decided, and we’d have patted ourselves on the back when we were a useless minority of forty or so MPs with both the other parties voting it all through, because at least people would still see us as the fluffy, nice, ineffectual party, and they still wouldn’t vote for us.
When I feel cowardly, I wish, in secret, that the Labour Party had managed to creep back into office in 2010 with a majority of 6 seats, rather than dodging the bullet and going into Opposition, where they could say they never did any of the things they did in Government, and vote against all the things they did in Government, and not face a single one of the consequences of the things they did in Government.
I wish, when I feel cowardly, that I wasn’t just writing about things to remember about Labour, but watching Labour MPs scream and turn on each other as their party writhes around with nowhere else to go but face up to their trashing the economy. Watching the Labour Party destroy itself as it either stuck to the cuts they announced before the election and prayed someone else would have to carry out – the cuts “worse than Thatcher” that Labour’s Chancellor promised, mañana – or that they’d bottle them, crash the economy completely and have no-one willing to lend to them, like many other countries in the same position.
I wish the Labour Party who laughed that “There is no money left” to the Coalition that had to pick up their shattered pieces had to find some. That the Labour Party who dicked about in negotiations because the last thing they wanted was to be back in power and then said how terrible a betrayal it was to have a Coalition, because they always thought they could smash our teeth in and then drag us into bed with them like their battered wife, were instead dumped with just enough power on their own to destroy themselves. That when Mervyn King said that whoever won the 2010 election and had to deal with Labour’s disastrous legacy would be “out of power for a generation”, it would mean the Labour Party.
But no.
If we Liberal Democrats were cowards, we’d have joined either Labour or the Tories years ago, never mind what power is for, it’s easier just to sit back and enjoy it. And we Liberals used to dream of being out of power for just a generation.
I’d love watching the Labour Party be destroyed by staying in Government. But that would mean destroying more of the country, too, from their sinking the economy to enforcing their ID cards, and that wouldn’t just be cowardly, it would be evil.
I don’t like the Tories. I never have, and never will. But they’re just like the Labour Party, except that they were serious about compromising on a programme for Coalition Government because they wanted it, and Labour weren’t because they didn’t. Because Labour are cowards.
As for the other lot… There was a brief period where the Tories were trying to be nice, and to their credit I did think their slogan “Together in the National Interest” was a lot better than our slightly forced “In Government – On Your Side”. I remember interviewing Oliver Letwin in Autumn 2010 (written up by Prateek Buch and Mary Reid), and he was trying his hardest to show that we were all the same, while I and others tried our hardest to prize out some differences. He called himself both a soggy liberal and a Gladstonian Liberal (tip for anyone else trying to put one over: you can’t be both). I managed to prize out some differences that convinced me he was really a Tory, but, fine, one we could do business with. Interestingly, one issue the Lib Dems were pressing for and the Tories were still against at the time was same-sex marriage, and the more I threw at him Conservative reasons for it from every direction, the more he looked like he wanted to run away. So, to be fair to them, the Tories in Government have still let themselves be moved further since. But within a month, there came the Browne Report on tuition fees; within six, the AV referendum campaign, and never glad confident morning again. At which most Tories and most Lib Dems breathed a secret sigh of relief and thought, well, we may still have to work with each other but we no longer have to pretend we don’t hate each other’s guts.
Too many Tories still believe that they have a divine right to rule. Well, tough. Labour drones love to squeak ‘No-one voted for this government!’ despite the two parties having had the support of well over 50% of the voters, massively more than any other government during my lifetime (and, still, even in last week’s ‘terrible’ elections). To be fair to the Tories, even on their own they got a lot more votes than Labour did when their last Government ‘won’ absolute power in 2005, though both of them only got a little over a third of the vote. Funny how Labour drones never got round to saying ‘No-one voted for that government!’ isn’t it?
But Liberal Democrats are old-fashioned in that we think Governments need a majority of votes to count, and if they don’t get them, they’re not legitimate. The Tories, of course, are used to being bastards, but they’re not bastards with a majority, so every time they scream that we’re stopping them doing every nasty thing they want – and we are – what they’re really furious about is not ‘the Lib Dems won’t let us govern like Tories’ but ‘the voters didn’t let us govern like Tories, and how very dare they?’
Last year, my subtle and judicious (and award-winning) article “Tory Boy Throws Toys Out of Pram: Not Exactly ‘Man Bites Dog’” explained the whining Tories’ sense of entitlement, their inability to do basic maths, and how far right they want the Government to be – but Lib Dems have stopped them being – on a massive range of issues they were crying bitterly about. I’d like to say the Tory Party’s grown up since, but the latest cry-baby who thinks he’s born to rule is David Cameron, so that’ll be a no.
There’s a lot more to say about the Coalition Government. It’s not a happy birthday. But so what? We knew what we were getting into. We never said we were going to be happy. We said it was going to be bloody awful. And it is.
But we also said it would be less awful because we’re there. And it is. And not just because we’ve put the brakes on much of what the Tories wanted, and fixed much of what Labour did – last week, proudly, with The Protection of Freedoms Act (going right back to my Special Conference speech) becoming law and making Britain a bit more Liberal, a bit less Labour’s bully state.
Those four priorities written on the front of the Liberal Democrat Manifesto are being put into positive action – well, three and a half of them, at least. In Coalition Government, even with Labour blowing the economy to bits and leaving an incredible debt to repay, and even having to compromise with the Tories over what they want to do, the Liberal Democrats have still put our own distinctive stamp on good things from government, not just lessening the bad. Look at that front cover: the only party that ever proposed raising the income tax threshold and cutting taxes for 23 million ordinary working people; the Pupil Premium to help out poorer schoolkids; a fairer economy, tackling the banks, record numbers of apprenticeships, green jobs and the new Green Investment Bank open for business; more open politics, even as Labour and the Tories both try to dick about with democratic reforms they both stood on, too.
When things are bloody awful, it’s easy to be cowardly. It’s easy to let someone else take the responsibility. It’s easy just to take it easy.
The Liberal Democrats have never been a ‘take it easy’ party – or we’d all have joined one of the others and coasted, long ago.
It’s not a happy birthday for the Coalition. It’s a determined birthday. Just as it was a determined birth.
I’ll return to look at what the Lib Dems stand for – and what might make people listen to us again. I’ll look at some more of the Coalition’s greatest mistakes. But today, of all days, I’m determined that we should carry on doing the right thing, because while that may be worse for us, it’s a lot better for the country.
Mark Valladares asked last month, “Can we stop apologising for being in government yet?” Let me agree with him and say, with a lot of determination and, for cowards, a frisson of ‘fuck off’, that the only apology due would have been if we’d been given the opportunity of making a more Liberal Government and let people down instead.
And thanks to everyone who’s linked to this, particularly Caron’s lovely post.
Forming the Coalition was easier for the Tories. First, because they’re not used to being out of power and would do anything to get it back; the Lib Dems, having been out of power for ninety years, were a bit more concerned with what to achieve with it. And second, because once the negotiations reached an agreement between the two parties, they could make an instant yes / no decision, as the Tory Leader’s word is law right up to the point they decide to cut his head off (luckily for Mr Cameron, his main threat at the moment only appears to be Nadine Dorries, a headless chicken herself).
The Liberal Democrats who negotiated The Coalition: Our Programme For Government had, instead, to convince the rest of the party to agree in advance (which turned out not to be so hard after all, and strengthens Nick Clegg in adversity where Tories who get cold feet can pretend it’s all David Cameron’s fault). And once Parliamentarians and Party Committees had been convinced, the rest of us were given our opportunity in that rare beast, the Special Conference, held on Sunday 16 May 2010 in an unfriendly aircraft hangar at the Birmingham NEC. Now, what I should be doing, of course, is re-reading our 2010 Manifesto, the initial Coalition Agreement and the long Coalition Agreement, cross-referencing them against each other and against the Government’s record. Sorry. I haven’t (though I did notice that during the negotiations I said it should be all four of our front-page Manifesto priorities, or no deal, and our negotiators got three and a half, which was better than I was expecting). But what I have done recently is come across the scrappy bit of paper on which I jotted down my speech to that Special Conference and, bonus! It was only a minute long…
Coalition Special Conference Speech: “The Worst Possible Time”
If you want to make a speech at a Lib Dem Conference, you have a think about why and then put that down on a card. The Chair of the debate balances what you want to say against what everyone else does, so the debate’s neither too repetitious or two one-sided (a speech against often helps you get called, with the speakers against Coalition at the Special Conference also being virtually all of the tiny “No” vote so as to make the debate sound more balanced). And the likelihood of your being selected also rises or falls depending on how popular the topic and how early the hour. If you say just what everyone else is going to on your card, but less coherently, and you put in to speak in the packed debate on the Manifesto immediately before the Leader’s speech, you’ve got no chance, while if you want to be called at 9am on the third day of Conference to speak against the Milk Marketing motion, even if what you’ve written is gibberish, the Chair will be as pathetically grateful you’ve got out of bed as if you were the cavalry charging over the hill.
It turned out that, for this debate, arguably the most important the party’s ever held and all essentially on the same topic, nearly two hundred people wanted to make the fewer than forty speeches there would be time for at five minutes apiece. Worse, MPs, Peers and all the rest of the Party Great and Good were all lining up impatiently for their own chance at the lottery, making the likelihood of your being called if you were an ordinary member slimmer still. My beloved Richard Flowers wrote an excellent speech about making the Liberal difference, but didn’t get the chance to make it.
However, for massive debates like this – well, there are no others like this, and haven’t been since the Lib Dems were formed, but for major debates with wide-ranging policies – there’s also the opportunity of making an ‘intervention’. This means you don’t go up to the stage to speak, resoundingly, from the lectern, but have to clutch your notes in your hand at a smaller mike somewhere in the middle of the seating; that you’re chosen at random; and you only get one minute, one second after which you will usually have the power to your mike switched off, which is ignominious and unhelpful to your point if you’re in the middle of a sentence. In this case there were a mere hundred or so people chasing just over thirty mini-speeches but, luckily, my name was called for a slot – and here’s roughly what I said in it:
“I wanted a progressive coalition too, but 57 Lib Dems plus one Alliance Party’s still only 58, so we had to talk to both nasty authoritarian parties instead.
“When I read that Coalition Agreement, some of it was inspiring.
“OK, some of it was dispiriting.
“But at last we can implement Liberal Democrat policies. Liberalism.
“We can hold back the worst of the Tories – when the alternative was the DUP making the Tories that much worse.
“And we can scrap some of the worst of that appalling Labour Government in the Freedom Bill – which I hope will include the Digital Economy Act. No wonder Labour didn’t want to talk.
“This is our first real national power since 40 years before I was born.
“Maybe it is the worst possible time to take power.
“But I don’t want us to wait until I’m wheeled into Conference aged 78, in another 40 years, to say, ‘Well, the economy’s crashed again and at last we’ve got another hung Parliament. Maybe we should try it this time’.”
Why did I want to speak? To make my point; to be part of history; to ‘dip my hand in the blood’. Take your pick. I wanted to make a mark on the main issue – astoundingly, no-one else seemed to say what I said – I knew what I wanted to say, and I found myself ever more strongly hoping that I’d get the chance to say it as the debate went on, with most of the ‘interventions’ basically shopping lists of ‘I want you to renegotiate the entire Coalition Agreement because you’ve not included my pet project’ or, even more aggravatingly, delusional members moaning that they wanted a “progressive coalition” with Labour and wasn’t it unfair that the voters hadn’t given either party enough seats to do it.
So I know that my first line was made up on the spot to answer back. I have no illusions about either of the other parties. Progressive? Labour? Thirteen years of appalling Labour Government, and one week for some idiots to forget what they were like, apparently. Two years later, I can still think of plenty of things to remember about Labour. Anyway, knowing the mike-choppers are brutal on one-minute interventions, as I found myself starting that way instead I automatically skipped over my original opening line: ‘Of course it’s scary. Coalition might make us unpopular – power can do that. So can permanent irrelevance.’ Of course, it’s a good job I did, as we’re today so universally beloved and soaring at 57% in the polls that, had I suggested out loud that Coalition might make us unpopular, I’d look a right nana now.
[Tumbleweeds]
I had the added fun of having been horribly ill – much more than usual – throughout the previous month, and varied from bounding about with nervous excitement to being half-carried on the day. Luckily for their own nerves, the speakers waiting in line for the mike with me didn’t know that I didn’t know if I was going to speak or to projectile-vomit. Luckily, I spoke, and under the various stresses of the moment, with some passion: what one activist called later “A frisson of ‘fuck off’!” Being on form, I got a lot of applause and quite a few cheers (which are pretty damn rare).
“It’s Going To Be Bloody Awful…”
But it’s not just ego that makes me regret there were no cameras there. For only the second time I can remember at a Lib Dem Conference, the press were excluded: party managers were worried there’d be a storm of opposition to the Coalition, I think. Instead, Nick Clegg afterwards slightly ruefully called the 98% vote in favour a bit North Korean, and posterity – and the day’s news broadcasts – were denied quite a few telling speeches.
Although I didn’t think much of most of my fellow interventionists, some of the principal speeches were very impressive, and if there was one advantage to denying the cameras access, it’s that some ‘big guns’ felt they could speak more personally, just to a hall full of Lib Dem members, rather than have to beam a message to the country as a whole. I remember other people raving about several of them: Simon Hughes touching activists’ g-spots; Chris Huhne grandly combative; David Rendel sad and dignified speaking against. But the two speeches that stuck in my heart were each from senior Lib Dems I’ve never been a huge fan of, despite one of them being then at the crest of quite amazing popularity. One spoke to my hopes, and said he would look after them, the other to my fears, and said they were worth facing.
So when things get bad in the Coalition, I still hold firm to what I said then, and hold close the speeches from Tom McNally and Vince Cable, both newly-appointed ministers. Tom, in the Justice Ministry, knew that of all the ministers speaking, he was the one right on a major faultline between Liberals and Conservatives, and he took his responsibility seriously in promoting freedom rather than just letting yet another hideously authoritarian Government take over: he was, he said, “Minister with Responsibility for this party’s soul.” And Vince was the platform speaker who didn’t seem starry-eyed, or triumphant, or combative, but in tune with my feeling that I wished it wasn’t the worst possible time to take power, but that if we said, ‘No, it’s too difficult and it’ll hurt’, what would have been the point of all those years in the wilderness? We had a responsibility to do what we could. And one line of his should be written on every Lib Dem’s heart:
“It’s going to be bloody awful. But it’ll be less awful because we’re there.”I remembered the lovely Andy Strange having written an excellent piece about the Special Conference, so I’ve looked up what he had had to say at the time in case there was something important I’d forgotten. For me, he sums up the tone of the debate perfectly as a “pattern of a clear head and a troubled heart”, and has a far better overview than I can remember of it two years later. But I’m also slightly embarrassed, as I’m sure there were other people who wrote about the debate, and it’s just possible Andy’s may have stuck in my head because his was the one I agreed with! He, too, says “Vince Cable gave the best speech I heard” and “The speech that moved me most was the one by Tom McNally.” And also, erm…
“The best speaker in the two intervention slots was Alex Wilcock who managed to make several telling points in a short space of time.”
When I Feel Cowardly
It has, obviously, been bloody awful. Again obviously, we’d be far higher in the opinion polls now (though the new Lib Dem minister in May 2010 who said we’d be down to 5% within a year is still looking on the bright side) if we’d refused to enter the Coalition, not that the voters who back us in mid-term (or even mid-campaign) opinion polls ever have the guts to actually vote for us, and those polls and the lovely pure voting record of our forty or so MPs against the Conservative Government elected in Autumn 2010 would give Lib Dems the warming glow we need to sustain us against the unfortunate let-down that we were slashed down to forty or so MPs when the Conservative Government was elected in Autumn 2010. And we’d have voted against the unlimited rises in tuition fees that the Tories wanted and that Labour’s Browne Report decided, and we’d have patted ourselves on the back when we were a useless minority of forty or so MPs with both the other parties voting it all through, because at least people would still see us as the fluffy, nice, ineffectual party, and they still wouldn’t vote for us.
When I feel cowardly, I wish, in secret, that the Labour Party had managed to creep back into office in 2010 with a majority of 6 seats, rather than dodging the bullet and going into Opposition, where they could say they never did any of the things they did in Government, and vote against all the things they did in Government, and not face a single one of the consequences of the things they did in Government.
I wish, when I feel cowardly, that I wasn’t just writing about things to remember about Labour, but watching Labour MPs scream and turn on each other as their party writhes around with nowhere else to go but face up to their trashing the economy. Watching the Labour Party destroy itself as it either stuck to the cuts they announced before the election and prayed someone else would have to carry out – the cuts “worse than Thatcher” that Labour’s Chancellor promised, mañana – or that they’d bottle them, crash the economy completely and have no-one willing to lend to them, like many other countries in the same position.
I wish the Labour Party who laughed that “There is no money left” to the Coalition that had to pick up their shattered pieces had to find some. That the Labour Party who dicked about in negotiations because the last thing they wanted was to be back in power and then said how terrible a betrayal it was to have a Coalition, because they always thought they could smash our teeth in and then drag us into bed with them like their battered wife, were instead dumped with just enough power on their own to destroy themselves. That when Mervyn King said that whoever won the 2010 election and had to deal with Labour’s disastrous legacy would be “out of power for a generation”, it would mean the Labour Party.
But no.
If we Liberal Democrats were cowards, we’d have joined either Labour or the Tories years ago, never mind what power is for, it’s easier just to sit back and enjoy it. And we Liberals used to dream of being out of power for just a generation.
Holding Back the Cry-Babies Who Think They’re Born To Rule
I’d love watching the Labour Party be destroyed by staying in Government. But that would mean destroying more of the country, too, from their sinking the economy to enforcing their ID cards, and that wouldn’t just be cowardly, it would be evil.
I don’t like the Tories. I never have, and never will. But they’re just like the Labour Party, except that they were serious about compromising on a programme for Coalition Government because they wanted it, and Labour weren’t because they didn’t. Because Labour are cowards.
As for the other lot… There was a brief period where the Tories were trying to be nice, and to their credit I did think their slogan “Together in the National Interest” was a lot better than our slightly forced “In Government – On Your Side”. I remember interviewing Oliver Letwin in Autumn 2010 (written up by Prateek Buch and Mary Reid), and he was trying his hardest to show that we were all the same, while I and others tried our hardest to prize out some differences. He called himself both a soggy liberal and a Gladstonian Liberal (tip for anyone else trying to put one over: you can’t be both). I managed to prize out some differences that convinced me he was really a Tory, but, fine, one we could do business with. Interestingly, one issue the Lib Dems were pressing for and the Tories were still against at the time was same-sex marriage, and the more I threw at him Conservative reasons for it from every direction, the more he looked like he wanted to run away. So, to be fair to them, the Tories in Government have still let themselves be moved further since. But within a month, there came the Browne Report on tuition fees; within six, the AV referendum campaign, and never glad confident morning again. At which most Tories and most Lib Dems breathed a secret sigh of relief and thought, well, we may still have to work with each other but we no longer have to pretend we don’t hate each other’s guts.
Too many Tories still believe that they have a divine right to rule. Well, tough. Labour drones love to squeak ‘No-one voted for this government!’ despite the two parties having had the support of well over 50% of the voters, massively more than any other government during my lifetime (and, still, even in last week’s ‘terrible’ elections). To be fair to the Tories, even on their own they got a lot more votes than Labour did when their last Government ‘won’ absolute power in 2005, though both of them only got a little over a third of the vote. Funny how Labour drones never got round to saying ‘No-one voted for that government!’ isn’t it?
But Liberal Democrats are old-fashioned in that we think Governments need a majority of votes to count, and if they don’t get them, they’re not legitimate. The Tories, of course, are used to being bastards, but they’re not bastards with a majority, so every time they scream that we’re stopping them doing every nasty thing they want – and we are – what they’re really furious about is not ‘the Lib Dems won’t let us govern like Tories’ but ‘the voters didn’t let us govern like Tories, and how very dare they?’
Last year, my subtle and judicious (and award-winning) article “Tory Boy Throws Toys Out of Pram: Not Exactly ‘Man Bites Dog’” explained the whining Tories’ sense of entitlement, their inability to do basic maths, and how far right they want the Government to be – but Lib Dems have stopped them being – on a massive range of issues they were crying bitterly about. I’d like to say the Tory Party’s grown up since, but the latest cry-baby who thinks he’s born to rule is David Cameron, so that’ll be a no.
A Determined Birthday
There’s a lot more to say about the Coalition Government. It’s not a happy birthday. But so what? We knew what we were getting into. We never said we were going to be happy. We said it was going to be bloody awful. And it is.
But we also said it would be less awful because we’re there. And it is. And not just because we’ve put the brakes on much of what the Tories wanted, and fixed much of what Labour did – last week, proudly, with The Protection of Freedoms Act (going right back to my Special Conference speech) becoming law and making Britain a bit more Liberal, a bit less Labour’s bully state.
Those four priorities written on the front of the Liberal Democrat Manifesto are being put into positive action – well, three and a half of them, at least. In Coalition Government, even with Labour blowing the economy to bits and leaving an incredible debt to repay, and even having to compromise with the Tories over what they want to do, the Liberal Democrats have still put our own distinctive stamp on good things from government, not just lessening the bad. Look at that front cover: the only party that ever proposed raising the income tax threshold and cutting taxes for 23 million ordinary working people; the Pupil Premium to help out poorer schoolkids; a fairer economy, tackling the banks, record numbers of apprenticeships, green jobs and the new Green Investment Bank open for business; more open politics, even as Labour and the Tories both try to dick about with democratic reforms they both stood on, too.
When things are bloody awful, it’s easy to be cowardly. It’s easy to let someone else take the responsibility. It’s easy just to take it easy.
The Liberal Democrats have never been a ‘take it easy’ party – or we’d all have joined one of the others and coasted, long ago.
It’s not a happy birthday for the Coalition. It’s a determined birthday. Just as it was a determined birth.
I’ll return to look at what the Lib Dems stand for – and what might make people listen to us again. I’ll look at some more of the Coalition’s greatest mistakes. But today, of all days, I’m determined that we should carry on doing the right thing, because while that may be worse for us, it’s a lot better for the country.
Mark Valladares asked last month, “Can we stop apologising for being in government yet?” Let me agree with him and say, with a lot of determination and, for cowards, a frisson of ‘fuck off’, that the only apology due would have been if we’d been given the opportunity of making a more Liberal Government and let people down instead.
And thanks to everyone who’s linked to this, particularly Caron’s lovely post.
Labels: British Politics, Coalition, Conservatives, Education, Environment, Health, History, Labour, Liberal Democrat Conferences, Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, Personal, Richard, Speeches, Tax, The Golden Dozen
Thursday, May 10, 2012
Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons
Happy birthday, today, to Doctor Who novelist supreme Terrance Dicks. BBC Books are celebrating with the release of new editions of another six Target Doctor Who novels (after last year’s successful relaunch). I’ve turned to one of Terrance Dicks’ earliest and best-loved books, possibly the first of his that I read, Doctor Who and the Terrance of the Autons: in which the Doctor discovers that the most everyday objects can be the source of a murderous attack; faces a more unearthly attacker that’s part crab, part spider, part octopus; and, for the first time, his rival Time Lord, the Master. And daffodils. What could be better for a wet Spring day?
Like many others, I learned to read – was inspired to learn – on Target Doctor Who books. While the very first I read wasn’t one of Terrance’s, the first Doctor Who I saw on television was (its own novelisation broadcast again on Radio 4Extra just yesterday), and the next three books I can dimly remember saving up my 5p tokens to buy from the three little racks that made up the St Simon’s School Bookshop all were: The Abominable Snowmen, The Web of Fear and, of course, Terror of the Autons. All may have been my second Doctor Who book, and certainly the three together were read and re-read so much that I knew that was the way I’d carry on. So it’s fair to say that Terrance Dicks had a huge impact on literacy as well as on Doctor Who, where he went from lead writer during Jon Pertwee’s time as the Doctor to then write many more Who novels than anyone else, sometimes – perhaps ironically, particularly for those Pertwee stories – making them far more exciting than they were on screen.
Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons is one of those so packed with ideas (and script fixes that he may have missed at the time but thought of later) that it’s been hugely influential on later Doctor Who in its own right, as well as becoming a prime example of the notorious ‘Pertwee Gap’ between the fabulous novels I grew up reading and the patchier TV versions I only saw much later. Like many of Terrance’s best books, it’s based on an original screenplay by Robert Holmes, who Terrance himself says made him rise to his best because Bob’s were simply the best scripts. Pyramids of Mars; Carnival of Monsters; The Auton Invasion; its first sequel, here; all these books showcased that ideal relationship between a scriptwriter with a flair for brilliant dialogue, strong stories and a dab of horror, and a novelist with a tautly readable style, a sense for structure and an understated, laconic wit. Like many of Terrance’s earlier novels, too, not just his enthusiasm but the time he had to write it gives a novel with much more inventive detail and nearly half as many words again (crammed into the same page count!) as when he later became the sole author on the production line.
Unusually for a 1975 Target Doctor Who book, the cover isn’t by Chris Achilleos but Peter Brookes, later to become a top political cartoonist, and it’s by far my favourite of his handful of Who paintings, with its fabulous pop-art spark and the huge, tentacled Nestene monster looming above a tiny radio telescope. It’s one of the covers that’s most startlingly appropriate to the novelisation range – while most took images from the TV serials as their starting points, Brookes read the book and let his imagination soar into a Cthulhoid horror fit for Terrance’s prose, rather than the rather disappointing smudge of light that appears in the climax of the TV serial (and it’s not the only way in which the novel improves that climax; spoilers below at the end of “The Master Takes Over”). Peter Brookes isn’t the only artist for the book, either, with some pretty good internal illustrations from Alan Willow, the most memorable of which are, again, those never shown on TV: the Master haunting Goodge from a skylight (though the artist has plainly paid no attention at all to Goodge’s description); the Master, again, creating an Auton from a coffin of seething plastic (well, never seen on TV until it was borrowed for The Sontaran Stratagem); and Willow’s own take on the giant Nestene, no competition for Brookes’ comic-book fabulousness but again showing that Terrance’s vivid description of the ultimate monster inspired artists as much as it did readers, and that even for such an incredibly cartoony and colourful story as this is on TV, the most memorable mental images remain the ones you imagine. A third artist arrived for a new edition in 1979, and Alun Hood, too, choose to feature that hideous creature only brought to life in the book, building on Brookes’ design to create the most horribly photo-realistic cover painting of the whole Target range, disturbing readers with its glaring eye, writhing tentacle and, above all, its ickily teeth-like suckers [above, clockwise: the original edition; shiny CD audiobook; Alun Hood’s hideous Nestene; back cover of the original, and my oldest battered original copy].
Here’s the passage in the book that most gripped me as a child. It’s the horror of Bob Holmes’ original scene, turned by Terrance Dicks into a crucial establishing moment for the Master, with most of the jokes taken out but one, intriguingly, put in. You can find it on page 45, or in track 4 of the second CD…
Yes; the Master is behind penis enlargement spam.
Perversely, of course, this made me long for a blow-up plastic chair. My parents were less impressed, so I had to be content just with pulling the slabs* of our black leather sofa on top of myself and uttering choked cries. It also made me adore the Master as a villain all the more, having been introduced to him in a later incarnation on telly months before I started reading. Still today, some of the Master’s most memorable moments for me aren’t to be found on the telly, but where in the novels he makes a nasty joke at some patsy’s expense and begins to laugh (“Polynestene” here, “Enemy agents” in The Sea Devils). It’s more appropriate, too, for it to be McDermot and not the Doctor who’s given the word “jackanapes” against the Master, with the book’s engineer more plausibly seeing him as an upstart than the TV’s rival Time Lord thinking of him as a naughty monkey.
Some of the jokes that Terrance removes for the book are just bad to start with – a whole sequence of the Doctor bullying a civil servant by being a Tory on TV is one I don’t miss, and is part of making the Doctor less childish and arrogant on the page (most notably by no longer having the Doctor, at the start, singing how a world destroyed was a laugh, nor, at the end, saying how several hundred deaths and nearly half a million more was a big laugh), just as his Master seems more dangerous – while other lost jokes are funnier ones that he clearly thought were in too bad taste for children, sadly. Ironically, without the bad taste jokes and with some lines reinterpreted as anger and given added brutality, he makes the book a far grimmer work than the TV serial, which others might suggest is just as unsuitable for kids (not bowdlerisation but swapping one approach to death for another). I loved it, of course, and while I also now love the outrageous punchline to the version of that scene above found in Episode Two on TV, I think Terrance was probably right to have Rex shocked by the violence in his book, even as the Master (and the reader, and for all his protestations plainly the writer) revels in it. What most shocked me when I at last saw this on screen wasn’t the camp comeback, which is funny, nor the special effect – which, unlike many, is almost as convincing as in the book – but that the Master’s joke plastic name was only in the book. I don’t know why that had always tickled me, yet for some reason it had. Perhaps it’s that it makes the Master laugh, and so has to be funny, but on top of Terrance writing a Master here whose sudden lashing anger scares us and whose outrageous, ludicrously inventive deathtrapamuses appals us, he also gives him a joke that’s funnier than Bob Holmes’. Now, that’s an achievement.
Death by armchair wasn’t even one of the most controversial scenes in a story attacked by anti-TV busybodies, the police and even Labour Lords when it was broadcast. A scene with police officers is one of the few that has even more punch on TV; a killer ‘devil doll’ is far more striking when the book’s special effects beam straight into your head; and while penitent, responsible BBC Script Editor Terrance Dicks always says in public that perhaps Bob went a bit far and shouldn’t do it again, children’s novelist Terrance Dicks (no relation) simply wasn’t going to retitle this story ‘Doctor Who and the Slight Goosebumps of the Autons’, so in making the book much better-done he also makes it more frightening from the start.
Though not to the same degree as Malcolm Hulke’s novels, Terrance fleshes out characters and settings with flashes of backstory and internal dialogue here, opening with bullying circus owner Luigi Rossini (née Lew Ross from Hoxton), a greedy, crooked, vain hard man with a shabby circus full of deadbeats, incompetents and “Some, like Tony the strong man, were on the run from the police” (notably, we don’t get ‘illegal immigrants’, so thank you, Terrance for not reading the Daily Mail, and I’ll try to gloss over the doll’s “slitted eyes”), all of whom he exploits in a way that prefigures the story’s wider critique of mass-market consumerism, whose luck seems on the turn thanks to ’flu in a big circus but is actually turning a different way when a gleaming new horse box suddenly appears by the one holding Madame Mariella’s Prancing ponies (“three worn out old nags who could hardly manage a gallop, let alone a prance”)…
New companion Jo Grant, too, gets a good page of introduction, though it’s a shame that, along with softening the Doctor’s character for this story (on screen, as much a git as in The Dæmons), Terrance drops the Brigadier’s put-downs of him. Terrance’s characterisation of Jo is a mix, having more initiative but also made even dimmer (at one unfortunate point internally agreeing with someone who hideously patronises her then still going off against orders after accepting it’s wrong), though at least he greatly expands both the general search of the plastics factories by UNIT agents when it looks like the Nestenes – who can animate any form of plastic – are back, and Jo’s own search of the factories allotted to her, right down to her “tiny, nagging feeling of unease” about the too-helpful Rex Farrel. The Doctor, on the other hand, rubs his chin a lot, thoughtfully, a barbed in-joke for Pertwee’s mannerism when looking about for his lines. And says an awful lot of things “grimly”, giving the feeling Terrance is sternly telling gleeful Bob that, all right, he’ll put in all his grisly deaths, but he draws the line at laughing at them:
Another impressively improved sequence is at the circus (despite only a fleeting mention of elephants); on TV, the Doctor’s trip there meanders a little and it becomes easy to spot that he’s pretty much only gone there because Bob wanted to do a circus with paper-thin relevance to the plot. In the book, there’s more compelling characterisation and a more palpable sense of threat. I enjoy the Doctor smugly thinking that if the Master had materialised as something shabby to fit in with the rest of the circus, he’d have taken much longer to find his ‘horse box’, while displaying a glorious lack of self-awareness that it’s his own flamboyant outfit that means he’s easily spotted and followed as he goes around asking frightened circus people if they’ve seen the unfortunate Phillips, who’s since gone missing. Phillips himself is doing the following, as part of if anything a more queasily undignified fate than Goodge – he’s now the sinister clown that’s so shockingly lacking from the TV version. After the Doctor, taken prisoner, manages both to out-butch the strongman and name-drop even in the narration (gee, thanks, Terrance), the Master famously orders Phillips to blow him up with a “Sontaran fragmentation grenade” – bringing them into the series before their first appearance, as well as the TARDIS’ “chameleon circuits” long before they were called that on TV – which Terrance turns into a vividly exciting action sequence with a turn of phrase that’s much-copied, not least by Terrance himself. Among the book’s few flaws, though, is while that a lot of time seems to have been spent on rewriting the script (largely to its benefit), it might have been read through with a fresh eye itself: often, the same word or phrase recurs in very close proximity, as if stuck in Terrance’s head. The most memorable, a sort of Goodge’s revenge, is in this particular murder attempt:
Your personal Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons drinking game (remember to steal your wine from a prominent politician, sneering at him for having it while you neck it down) might also include each instant re-use of the words “tremendous” or “grotesque”, or when every explosive device in the galaxy, whatever its provenance, blasts its target into “white ash”. You should probably restrain yourself from tippling to “exultant”, which occurs so often you’ll rapidly find yourself as exultant as a Sea Devil.
Terror of the Autons, both on TV and even more on the page, is so packed with little character moments, japes and flashes of fury for the Master that this story does far more to establish him than you’d expect even from it being his first appearance. There’s even a narrator, in the form of a Time Lord in civil service drag, to tell the Doctor and the audience that he’s a bad ’un and dangerous with it; the book’s narrative voice is at pains to stress the difference between the two renegades, the Doctor’s interference always “on the side of good” and the Master enjoying “death, chaos and destruction for its own sake”.
On screen, Roger Delgado grabs the role and establishes it very effectively, but Terrance makes much more of the book point directly to the Master. He sets up Luigi Rossini as a tough guy to be reckoned with on the very first page, telling us he enjoys being “the Boss”. The repeated self-identification as “the Boss” is entirely to set up what a real Boss or synonym would be. Someone who likes snapping his fingers, once, like a pistol shot, and who Rossini “With a sudden flash of superstitious fear” thinks “looked like the Devil.” After that, when the much weaker Rex Farrel gets his own introduction, trying to carve out his own identity at his father’s plastics factory once his father’s at last retired, you already know he’s not going to be up to it before his internal monologue, too, rings your alarm bells: “At last… he was the boss.” The Master, like the Doctor, doesn’t have such a simple internal monologue that we can be privy to it, and rather than hiding his ego inside his head, introduces himself outright with “I am usually referred to as the Master”, smiling “as if at a private joke”. The joke being that, like you and me as we look at the page, he can read the others’ internal monologues.
Right from the Master’s first scene, when his eyes blaze with anger at Rossini – “You insolent primitive!” – he’s much less playful than on screen, or rather, on a much shorter fuse when his playfulness isn’t instantly humoured or his little attempts on the Doctor fail. On screen, he lightly dismisses these little bungles as small gallantries, but while the book doesn’t take us directly inside his thoughts, it often observes what they must be, usually when he’s covering up. “He was unable to resist boasting, even to such a pitiful audience” (as Rex), and “having twice failed to kill the Doctor, the Master was salving his enormous vanity by pretending he’d planned things that way all along.” Given more bad news, the Master is initially as light as on screen but then, in “bitter anger,” “slammed his fist onto the desk, cracking the heavy mahogany top.” It’s both the playfulness and the savage temper that I remember, and that makes him seem more dangerous on the page (there’s a single moment in Episode Four of the TV serial when his urbanity deserts him and he suddenly, savagely kills someone in his way, which has always been the more powerful for illustrating exactly how I’ve always read him to be). That gives him space to be more urbane when planning the flower tour with a cringing, and flattering Rex, which turns into a rather marvellous travelogue that gives him much more to do in the book’s equivalent of ‘Episode Three’ than the TV’s couple of cameos on a poky set and on bluescreen that week. In the book, it feels like he’s still driving the plot (even if he gets Rex to chauffeur the coach).
Each time the Master’s been reintroduced to the TV series – The Deadly Assassin, Logopolis, Last of the Time Lords – Terror of the Autons has been the source text that the writers have looked to for inspiration. Bob Holmes, to strip him down to his essentials and bring back his meanest and most distinctive weapon; Chris Bidmead, to make him murderously dangerous again, and make use of a radio telescope; Russell T Davies, to add many little references (including to the last two) but crucially, for me, to capture with John Simm’s Master better than any other the same viciously playful streak of that original concept, going from “Ooh, you public menace” to deadly threat. I realise it’s shocking to see Simm’s first appearance as probably the Master’s greatest flowering, compounded by the way that for me Last of the Time Lords is a much stronger script, though I love both writers, with Terror of the Autons seeming weirdly much more in Russell’s style than Bob’s: a selection of vivid pop-culture set-pieces rather than much of a story, and that’s something Russell does better than Bob. This book, especially, is one Russell has certainly read, with elements specific to the novelisation informing the TV series more than thirty years later: Farrel, dismissed and overlooked, attacking the Master and crashing the coach is echoed in Chan’tho; he subverts, of course, the Doctor’s confidence that “He knew the Master would be unable to resist the opportunity to explain his own cleverness”; the Cabinet nearly die en masse because there’s a bowl of the Master’s deadly daffodils on their table; replacing the TV’s “Don’t be trivial” in reply to wondering how the Master gets into UNIT HQ, the book has him proclaim:
Perhaps it’s the climax above all else that makes me see this as perhaps the story Terrance rewrote most significantly for the novel, and that makes me think of its second half as where it really gets going, despite so many memorable moments early on (the chair, the circus, Goodge…). He shifts the structure around rather more, changing one ‘cliffhanger’ to what he clearly thought was a more effective scene to close a chapter on, and makes two big fight sequences exciting – not always easy on paper – with the last one particularly strong in both its telling and its aftermath.
Terrance always writes a good thriller – the crispness of his action scenes is exciting, complete with those Auton guns that fall away at the wrist rather than near the knuckle (as it were). The start of Chapter 7 / Episode Three is vibrant, the UNIT jeep (not a nasty blue saloon) driving up to precipitate a far more exciting battle in the forest than on TV, with both UNIT and Auton casualties, albeit lacking one superb stunt fall. And poor Katy running into a tree, or a rock, or whatever it was. Similarly, the desperate final battle seems for much higher stakes and with far higher casualties. And while the Autons here have a much smaller role in the plot than in The Auton Invasion, much less being made of them as shop window dummies come to life and making them consequently less sinister, the explosion of deadly plastic consumergoods bads that Bob gleefully thinks up mostly make up for them, with Terrance deftly sketching in a much bigger promotional campaign than we could ever see on TV.
The more tautly directed book also makes it amusingly clear that this is not a road safety lesson – never mind giving a bad example with the police, it features the Doctor and Jo leaping from moving vehicles in two ‘episodes’ running. The best is their escape from the coach, depicted far more excitingly and in far greater detail than some rather confused and limited scenes on screen.
One of the less fêted elements of this novel is that the victims, too, get a quiet look-in. Rex’s bullying father is easier to empathise with here thanks to Terrance softening the news (albeit deliciously broken on screen by the Master) of McDermot’s death into just a cover story about a sudden business trip. You’d think it would be the death of his friend that would make him more sympathetic, but on screen all that means is that Rex, seemingly in shock and cracking up, is just the target of his father having a go at him without the empathy to see it; in the book, Mr Farrel Snr worries that his son’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Mrs Farrel, too, is more successful on the page (rather than in front of her fitted kitchen). Terrance is both straight to the point and understated in deftly sketching in her feelings after bereavement, a rare moment in one of his books that I can instantly feel for, while the Doctor solemnly telling her that her husband was one of the first victims of a kind of war resonates with the return of the Autons three decades later.
You thought the picture of me grown up and retouched was scary? Here’s a very early model me, aged 7: “Alexander” still shortened to “Sandy” rather than “Alex”; pre-glasses; hair in mid-shift between curly blond and straight brown; but already a Doctor Who fan, and when everyone else in my class at St Simon’s R.C. Primary School, Hazel Grove, was just getting on with drawing the daffodil, I was wondering if it was going to kill me. And who could blame it, in that outfit?
Doctor Who had obviously made all too great an impact on me very early in life. But, fortunately, pretty much all of that impact was marvellous. Except for the bow tie (no, Matt, I hate to break it to you…). From reading to Richard, life is just better. And unlike my love for Richard, I did eventually learn to love not just daffodils but Doctor Who with a critical eye. So, yes, as I give Terrance his birthday bouquet, he has some reason to be wary, too…
While mostly Terrance’s novel beats TV’s Terror of the Autons hands down, one element that’s definitely inferior in the book is that the Master switches from having a Mark Two dematerialisation circuit to the suggestion that the Time Lords have only had two marginally different TARDISes in their millions of years watching all of time and space. Terrance is clearly making it about the TARDISes themselves as a character point, so that the Doctor in effect sides with the ‘vintage roadster’ against the ‘flashy new model’, but what it gains in ‘moment of charm’ it loses in ‘moment of brain’:
Terrance’s tendency in his Pertwee books most of all is to smooth out any character development, so that the reader can comfortably drop in at any point in the book range and have, say, the Doctor always feeling the same about his exile, always wearing a velvet jacket and always patrician but kind. This occasionally leads to slip-ups such as that on page 79, where Terrance is so familiar with the set-up that he forgets to make it new when it needs to be – Jo has only just met the Doctor and has yet even to see inside the TARDIS, much less believe it works, but when the Doctor plans to slope off:
Terrance’s – and the sub-editor’s – biggest cropper comes on page 104, after a deadly daffodil attacks Jo and a whole chapter after the doll has, empirically observed to have been activated by heat, as the Doctor exclaims on page 92…
Although Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons isn’t yet one of the new reprints, an unabridged reading by Geoffrey Beevers was released on CD in 2010, and as with his Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon, this later Master has rather a fabulous voice. Though he has a fair range for the characters, he’s usually most effective as the engaging and very slightly creepy narrator – except, of course, that it’s again marvellous to hear more of his silky Master, who at last gets to say “Polynestene”.
There’s more than the reading to these CDs, though. As ever, the audiobook misses the Doctor Who Theme, despite a jolly little tune at the end which, charmingly if inappropriately, segues into the TARDIS dematerialisation noise, a BBC sound that they can afford. There’s considerable development from the early audiobooks, now with far more of their own added music, mostly quite effective though occasionally overwhelming the lines, and sound effects that vary in effectiveness from an echo on the Master’s hypnotism to some rather overdone paper-shuffling and over-literal “pistol shots”.
Another happy development is that they’ve added a ‘third page’ to this one’s folded booklet, thankfully, which means its reproductions of Alan Willow’s interior illustrations (while not large) are no longer postage-stamp-sized as they were in earlier releases. It makes it all the more of a shame that their picture of Alun Hood’s horrific Nestene second edition is still tiny, and hidden within the jewel case.
Most novelisations of stories from this Doctor Who season (the Eighth, in 1971) are highly praised, and I’m solidly with that – most, too, are for me some way ahead of their TV versions. In both the books – where both The Doomsday Weapon and The Dæmons are among the best they ever did – and the TV series – where I’d plump for The Dæmons and The Mind of Evil – I sometimes overlook Terror of the Autons slightly now, yet each time I come to it, in either version, I tend to enjoy it enormously, if not faultlessly. And when I first started reading Doctor Who books, aged five, the crisp pace, inventive plot and the fantastic Master throughout were all exactly that. It was a long time before I starting thinking maybe other writers gave more character than Terrance, or that the plot of this one goes all over the shop, or that the Master was mightily overused that year – the last, certainly, fair in criticism of some stories but never for this, still the benchmark for his character. This story was still brilliant when, a few years later, Doctor Who Magazine started up and showed those fabulous photos of the Pertwee era, still for me unbeatable for, ah, stills, and the best of the lot surely the four main characters posing dramatically with the TARDIS out at the circus. I loved the picture of one of them so much that I drew them myself from it, several times. I bet you can guess which.
When I was a boy, Terror of the Autons was without a doubt the best story of Season 8 and one of my favourites of my early books. And sometimes it’s just a pleasure to revisit this story, and that feeling. Thank you, Terrance.
*Apparently the proper term for the big soft square bits that you put over the frame of your sofa or armchair and form the back or seat that you sit on is just “cushion”. But that sounds like the smaller ‘throw’ or ‘scatter’ cushion that’s more of a decoration or a back support. Yes, it took me a lot more online work to try and find the word for a ‘boxed cushion’ than it did to check any of the Doctor Who bits, both because I’m far more of an expert on Who than upholstery, and because it turns out that the vocabulary of upholstery sites is a bit cruddy. They needed to read more Terrance Dicks as children.
Like many others, I learned to read – was inspired to learn – on Target Doctor Who books. While the very first I read wasn’t one of Terrance’s, the first Doctor Who I saw on television was (its own novelisation broadcast again on Radio 4Extra just yesterday), and the next three books I can dimly remember saving up my 5p tokens to buy from the three little racks that made up the St Simon’s School Bookshop all were: The Abominable Snowmen, The Web of Fear and, of course, Terror of the Autons. All may have been my second Doctor Who book, and certainly the three together were read and re-read so much that I knew that was the way I’d carry on. So it’s fair to say that Terrance Dicks had a huge impact on literacy as well as on Doctor Who, where he went from lead writer during Jon Pertwee’s time as the Doctor to then write many more Who novels than anyone else, sometimes – perhaps ironically, particularly for those Pertwee stories – making them far more exciting than they were on screen.
Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons is one of those so packed with ideas (and script fixes that he may have missed at the time but thought of later) that it’s been hugely influential on later Doctor Who in its own right, as well as becoming a prime example of the notorious ‘Pertwee Gap’ between the fabulous novels I grew up reading and the patchier TV versions I only saw much later. Like many of Terrance’s best books, it’s based on an original screenplay by Robert Holmes, who Terrance himself says made him rise to his best because Bob’s were simply the best scripts. Pyramids of Mars; Carnival of Monsters; The Auton Invasion; its first sequel, here; all these books showcased that ideal relationship between a scriptwriter with a flair for brilliant dialogue, strong stories and a dab of horror, and a novelist with a tautly readable style, a sense for structure and an understated, laconic wit. Like many of Terrance’s earlier novels, too, not just his enthusiasm but the time he had to write it gives a novel with much more inventive detail and nearly half as many words again (crammed into the same page count!) as when he later became the sole author on the production line.
Unusually for a 1975 Target Doctor Who book, the cover isn’t by Chris Achilleos but Peter Brookes, later to become a top political cartoonist, and it’s by far my favourite of his handful of Who paintings, with its fabulous pop-art spark and the huge, tentacled Nestene monster looming above a tiny radio telescope. It’s one of the covers that’s most startlingly appropriate to the novelisation range – while most took images from the TV serials as their starting points, Brookes read the book and let his imagination soar into a Cthulhoid horror fit for Terrance’s prose, rather than the rather disappointing smudge of light that appears in the climax of the TV serial (and it’s not the only way in which the novel improves that climax; spoilers below at the end of “The Master Takes Over”). Peter Brookes isn’t the only artist for the book, either, with some pretty good internal illustrations from Alan Willow, the most memorable of which are, again, those never shown on TV: the Master haunting Goodge from a skylight (though the artist has plainly paid no attention at all to Goodge’s description); the Master, again, creating an Auton from a coffin of seething plastic (well, never seen on TV until it was borrowed for The Sontaran Stratagem); and Willow’s own take on the giant Nestene, no competition for Brookes’ comic-book fabulousness but again showing that Terrance’s vivid description of the ultimate monster inspired artists as much as it did readers, and that even for such an incredibly cartoony and colourful story as this is on TV, the most memorable mental images remain the ones you imagine. A third artist arrived for a new edition in 1979, and Alun Hood, too, choose to feature that hideous creature only brought to life in the book, building on Brookes’ design to create the most horribly photo-realistic cover painting of the whole Target range, disturbing readers with its glaring eye, writhing tentacle and, above all, its ickily teeth-like suckers [above, clockwise: the original edition; shiny CD audiobook; Alun Hood’s hideous Nestene; back cover of the original, and my oldest battered original copy].
Death at the Plastics Factory
Here’s the passage in the book that most gripped me as a child. It’s the horror of Bob Holmes’ original scene, turned by Terrance Dicks into a crucial establishing moment for the Master, with most of the jokes taken out but one, intriguingly, put in. You can find it on page 45, or in track 4 of the second CD…
“McDermot, a tough, stocky Northcountryman in his fifties, was on the phone in Rex Farrel’s office. A brief tour of the factory had convinced him that Rex’s father should be informed at once. He was talking to him now in a low, urgent voice. ‘It’s true I tell you… aye, that’s right. All the staff’s been dismissed. Regular customers told we can’t supply them. New machinery brought in, a secret research lab. I’m sorry, Mr. Farrel, but I think young Rex has gone right round the bend. Keeps on about this fellow, Colonel Masters. Right, sir, I’ll tell them to hold everything, and that you’re on your way. I’ll wait for you here.’
Rex entered with the Master who was carrying a black plastic bundle.
McDermot slammed down the phone and swung round angrily. ‘You’ll be Rex’s precious Colonel Masters, I take it? Just the man I wanted to see!’
The Master smiled. ‘You are seeing me, Mr. McDermot.’ The angry engineer wasn’t listening. ‘Just what right do you think you’ve got to come marching in here and ruin a decent little family business? Me and Rex’s dad built this place up from nothing. I’ll not stand by and see it all thrown away by a daft kid and some foreign jackanapes with big ideas.’
The Master’s eyes blazed with sudden anger, but he kept his voice quiet and pleasant. ‘You’re being less than fair, Mr. McDermot. The new processes and products I have introduced are truly revolutionary.’ The Master held out the bundle of plastic sheeting over his arm.
McDermot snatched it from him and snorted in disgust. ‘That—revolutionary? It’s the wrong colour, the wrong texture. It’s got a cold, clammy feel...’
He threw the plastic bundle back at the Master in disgust.
The Master caught it. ‘I assure you, you don’t realise its full potential... Allow me to demonstrate.’ He threw the bundle of plastic into a corner, then snapped his fingers. The plastic sheeting began to move and swell, as if alive. McDermot looked on, shaken, as the plastic writhed and grew. Slowly but surely it was taking on the shape of a chair. A squashy, bulgy, black armchair, made of plastic. McDermot snorted. ‘You think you’ll sell that? It’s one of the ugliest things I’ve seen in my life.’
‘It’s very comfortable,’ said the Master smoothly. ‘Try it.’
Somehow McDermot didn’t fancy the idea. There was something very sinister about that squat black shape. ‘No thanks,’ he said, backing away.
With a sudden fierce authority the Master snapped, ‘Sit down, man!’
Without quite knowing why, McDermot lowered himself uneasily into the chair. Its arms felt cold and slithery to the touch. ‘Disgusting stuff, this,’ he muttered. ‘What do you call it?’
The Master smiled coldly. ‘Polynestene!’ he said, and began to laugh. The armchair billowed and surged, and McDermot felt himself sinking lower and lower. He struggled to get up but the plastic seemed to cling to him. His arms and legs were trapped. A tide of cold clammy black plastic rose over his head and swallowed him up, choking off his attempt to scream... The last thing McDermot heard was the Master’s mocking laughter.
Rex looked on appalled as the heaving black shape in the corner swallowed McDermot, completely. He made an instinctive move as if to help the doomed engineer, but the Master held him back. ‘No! I will not tolerate the insolence of primitives.’
The Master snapped his fingers. An Auton appeared in the doorway, gathered up the shapeless black bundle and carried it from the room.
Regretfully, the Master watched the armchair disappear. ‘An amusing little conceit—but rather laborious!’
White and shaking, Rex sank into his chair. ‘It seemed very effective,’ he said.
The Master smiled. ‘But so extravagant, my dear Rex. All very well for my little joke—but for the mass attack, we have better means. Why use yards and yards of precious plastic for a task that can be accomplished by a mere few inches?’
Rex stared at him uncomprehendingly. ‘Inches?’
‘The human body has one central weakness,’ said the Master savagely. ‘One which I shall exploit to bring about the destruction of mankind.’”
Yes; the Master is behind penis enlargement spam.
Perversely, of course, this made me long for a blow-up plastic chair. My parents were less impressed, so I had to be content just with pulling the slabs* of our black leather sofa on top of myself and uttering choked cries. It also made me adore the Master as a villain all the more, having been introduced to him in a later incarnation on telly months before I started reading. Still today, some of the Master’s most memorable moments for me aren’t to be found on the telly, but where in the novels he makes a nasty joke at some patsy’s expense and begins to laugh (“Polynestene” here, “Enemy agents” in The Sea Devils). It’s more appropriate, too, for it to be McDermot and not the Doctor who’s given the word “jackanapes” against the Master, with the book’s engineer more plausibly seeing him as an upstart than the TV’s rival Time Lord thinking of him as a naughty monkey.
Some of the jokes that Terrance removes for the book are just bad to start with – a whole sequence of the Doctor bullying a civil servant by being a Tory on TV is one I don’t miss, and is part of making the Doctor less childish and arrogant on the page (most notably by no longer having the Doctor, at the start, singing how a world destroyed was a laugh, nor, at the end, saying how several hundred deaths and nearly half a million more was a big laugh), just as his Master seems more dangerous – while other lost jokes are funnier ones that he clearly thought were in too bad taste for children, sadly. Ironically, without the bad taste jokes and with some lines reinterpreted as anger and given added brutality, he makes the book a far grimmer work than the TV serial, which others might suggest is just as unsuitable for kids (not bowdlerisation but swapping one approach to death for another). I loved it, of course, and while I also now love the outrageous punchline to the version of that scene above found in Episode Two on TV, I think Terrance was probably right to have Rex shocked by the violence in his book, even as the Master (and the reader, and for all his protestations plainly the writer) revels in it. What most shocked me when I at last saw this on screen wasn’t the camp comeback, which is funny, nor the special effect – which, unlike many, is almost as convincing as in the book – but that the Master’s joke plastic name was only in the book. I don’t know why that had always tickled me, yet for some reason it had. Perhaps it’s that it makes the Master laugh, and so has to be funny, but on top of Terrance writing a Master here whose sudden lashing anger scares us and whose outrageous, ludicrously inventive deathtrap
The Terror Begins
Death by armchair wasn’t even one of the most controversial scenes in a story attacked by anti-TV busybodies, the police and even Labour Lords when it was broadcast. A scene with police officers is one of the few that has even more punch on TV; a killer ‘devil doll’ is far more striking when the book’s special effects beam straight into your head; and while penitent, responsible BBC Script Editor Terrance Dicks always says in public that perhaps Bob went a bit far and shouldn’t do it again, children’s novelist Terrance Dicks (no relation) simply wasn’t going to retitle this story ‘Doctor Who and the Slight Goosebumps of the Autons’, so in making the book much better-done he also makes it more frightening from the start.
Though not to the same degree as Malcolm Hulke’s novels, Terrance fleshes out characters and settings with flashes of backstory and internal dialogue here, opening with bullying circus owner Luigi Rossini (née Lew Ross from Hoxton), a greedy, crooked, vain hard man with a shabby circus full of deadbeats, incompetents and “Some, like Tony the strong man, were on the run from the police” (notably, we don’t get ‘illegal immigrants’, so thank you, Terrance for not reading the Daily Mail, and I’ll try to gloss over the doll’s “slitted eyes”), all of whom he exploits in a way that prefigures the story’s wider critique of mass-market consumerism, whose luck seems on the turn thanks to ’flu in a big circus but is actually turning a different way when a gleaming new horse box suddenly appears by the one holding Madame Mariella’s Prancing ponies (“three worn out old nags who could hardly manage a gallop, let alone a prance”)…
New companion Jo Grant, too, gets a good page of introduction, though it’s a shame that, along with softening the Doctor’s character for this story (on screen, as much a git as in The Dæmons), Terrance drops the Brigadier’s put-downs of him. Terrance’s characterisation of Jo is a mix, having more initiative but also made even dimmer (at one unfortunate point internally agreeing with someone who hideously patronises her then still going off against orders after accepting it’s wrong), though at least he greatly expands both the general search of the plastics factories by UNIT agents when it looks like the Nestenes – who can animate any form of plastic – are back, and Jo’s own search of the factories allotted to her, right down to her “tiny, nagging feeling of unease” about the too-helpful Rex Farrel. The Doctor, on the other hand, rubs his chin a lot, thoughtfully, a barbed in-joke for Pertwee’s mannerism when looking about for his lines. And says an awful lot of things “grimly”, giving the feeling Terrance is sternly telling gleeful Bob that, all right, he’ll put in all his grisly deaths, but he draws the line at laughing at them:
“‘You’ve just got to be joking.’Despite his cuts and his occasionally disapproving tone, though, Terrance does put in some of his own black humour; something that’s much more understated, and which I didn’t find funny as a child but now can’t help smiling at, is the start of Chapter 2, Terrance’s extended shaggy egg story:
The Doctor said grimly, ‘There’s precious little to joke about, I assure you. That thing’s appallingly dangerous.’”
“‘I think it was someone’s idea of a joke,’ said the Doctor. But there was no amusement in his voice.”
“Albert Goodge, a melancholy, balding, bespectacled scientist, drove slowly and cautiously as always along the narrow country lane, plunged in his usual gloom and lost to the beauty of the scene around him. It was a fine day in early summer. Fields and hedges lay bathed in sunshine, birds sang, lambs gambolled; and Albert Goodge worried about the quality of his packed lunch.”The list of bucolic bliss cracks me up. And it’s actually all a harbinger of death. Goodge, with an egg-like head of his own, is gloomy about everything except the threat that’s going to kill him…
“Goodge sighed and opened his lunch box. His worst fears were confirmed. Eggs again!”And, again, the bathos is brilliant – he’s in a horror story, and his worst fears are eggs.
“‘I told her only last night,’ he said indignantly. Phillips went on taking readings. ‘Mmm?’And at this stage you realise that Phillips is going to be doomed in exactly the same way – what’s he going to criticise Goodge for in a moment? Yet he’s in a listening station, and he’s stopped listening. He loves people bringing it on themselves, does Terrance.
‘“Cut out the boiled eggs, Elsie,” I said. “Quite apart from the effect on my digestion they’re boring to look at.”’
‘Aha!’ said Professor Phillips, who hadn’t heard a word of all this. Goodge was always grumbling about something, and most of his colleagues had stopped listening long ago.”
“Philips paused by the door and looked back at his colleague. All around them instruments whirred and clicked. Radio pulses and emissions from the depths of deep space were being monitored and recorded by the giant radio telescope, checked on the computer in an attempt to detect a pattern, a meaning, some clue to the biggest question of all. Was there, somewhere in the galaxy, an intelligence other than man? Here in this tiny cabin they were listening to the voices of the stars. And old Goodge was grumbling about boiled eggs! Phillips shook his head and left the cabin. Closing the door behind him, he started clattering down the metal steps on his way to the main control area.And that blood-curdling last line, all foreshadowed by the jokes of him never looking up, always just looking into his lunch box and never to the stars. So the stars stick him there (but you’ll have to read the book or watch the DVD to find out how bad taste Bob Holmes does it).
Albert Goodge, still obsessed with boiled eggs, continued the routine duties that marked the beginning of his shift on the scanner. Above his head, a sort of skylight was set into the roof of the cabin. Had Goodge looked up, he might have caught a glimpse of a dark shape peering down at him. He might even have been able to sound the alarm in time to save his own life. But he didn’t look up.”
Another impressively improved sequence is at the circus (despite only a fleeting mention of elephants); on TV, the Doctor’s trip there meanders a little and it becomes easy to spot that he’s pretty much only gone there because Bob wanted to do a circus with paper-thin relevance to the plot. In the book, there’s more compelling characterisation and a more palpable sense of threat. I enjoy the Doctor smugly thinking that if the Master had materialised as something shabby to fit in with the rest of the circus, he’d have taken much longer to find his ‘horse box’, while displaying a glorious lack of self-awareness that it’s his own flamboyant outfit that means he’s easily spotted and followed as he goes around asking frightened circus people if they’ve seen the unfortunate Phillips, who’s since gone missing. Phillips himself is doing the following, as part of if anything a more queasily undignified fate than Goodge – he’s now the sinister clown that’s so shockingly lacking from the TV version. After the Doctor, taken prisoner, manages both to out-butch the strongman and name-drop even in the narration (gee, thanks, Terrance), the Master famously orders Phillips to blow him up with a “Sontaran fragmentation grenade” – bringing them into the series before their first appearance, as well as the TARDIS’ “chameleon circuits” long before they were called that on TV – which Terrance turns into a vividly exciting action sequence with a turn of phrase that’s much-copied, not least by Terrance himself. Among the book’s few flaws, though, is while that a lot of time seems to have been spent on rewriting the script (largely to its benefit), it might have been read through with a fresh eye itself: often, the same word or phrase recurs in very close proximity, as if stuck in Terrance’s head. The most memorable, a sort of Goodge’s revenge, is in this particular murder attempt:
“‘Listen carefully. In a locker just beside you is a small egg-shaped sphere, with a contact button inset into the top. Here is what you must do...’”At least not until you’ve become a Professor of Spherology and learnt the greatest secret of all spheres – that eggs are a different shape!
“They both stopped talking as the rear doors of the horse-box opened. Still wearing his clown costume, Professor Phillips came down the steps and started walking towards them. His eyes were blank and glassy, and there was an egg-shaped silvery sphere in his right hand. He raised the hand above his head in a throwing gesture. The Doctor put every ounce of authority and power he could into his voice. ‘Professor Phillips! Don’t!’”
Your personal Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons drinking game (remember to steal your wine from a prominent politician, sneering at him for having it while you neck it down) might also include each instant re-use of the words “tremendous” or “grotesque”, or when every explosive device in the galaxy, whatever its provenance, blasts its target into “white ash”. You should probably restrain yourself from tippling to “exultant”, which occurs so often you’ll rapidly find yourself as exultant as a Sea Devil.
The Master Takes Over
Terror of the Autons, both on TV and even more on the page, is so packed with little character moments, japes and flashes of fury for the Master that this story does far more to establish him than you’d expect even from it being his first appearance. There’s even a narrator, in the form of a Time Lord in civil service drag, to tell the Doctor and the audience that he’s a bad ’un and dangerous with it; the book’s narrative voice is at pains to stress the difference between the two renegades, the Doctor’s interference always “on the side of good” and the Master enjoying “death, chaos and destruction for its own sake”.
On screen, Roger Delgado grabs the role and establishes it very effectively, but Terrance makes much more of the book point directly to the Master. He sets up Luigi Rossini as a tough guy to be reckoned with on the very first page, telling us he enjoys being “the Boss”. The repeated self-identification as “the Boss” is entirely to set up what a real Boss or synonym would be. Someone who likes snapping his fingers, once, like a pistol shot, and who Rossini “With a sudden flash of superstitious fear” thinks “looked like the Devil.” After that, when the much weaker Rex Farrel gets his own introduction, trying to carve out his own identity at his father’s plastics factory once his father’s at last retired, you already know he’s not going to be up to it before his internal monologue, too, rings your alarm bells: “At last… he was the boss.” The Master, like the Doctor, doesn’t have such a simple internal monologue that we can be privy to it, and rather than hiding his ego inside his head, introduces himself outright with “I am usually referred to as the Master”, smiling “as if at a private joke”. The joke being that, like you and me as we look at the page, he can read the others’ internal monologues.
Right from the Master’s first scene, when his eyes blaze with anger at Rossini – “You insolent primitive!” – he’s much less playful than on screen, or rather, on a much shorter fuse when his playfulness isn’t instantly humoured or his little attempts on the Doctor fail. On screen, he lightly dismisses these little bungles as small gallantries, but while the book doesn’t take us directly inside his thoughts, it often observes what they must be, usually when he’s covering up. “He was unable to resist boasting, even to such a pitiful audience” (as Rex), and “having twice failed to kill the Doctor, the Master was salving his enormous vanity by pretending he’d planned things that way all along.” Given more bad news, the Master is initially as light as on screen but then, in “bitter anger,” “slammed his fist onto the desk, cracking the heavy mahogany top.” It’s both the playfulness and the savage temper that I remember, and that makes him seem more dangerous on the page (there’s a single moment in Episode Four of the TV serial when his urbanity deserts him and he suddenly, savagely kills someone in his way, which has always been the more powerful for illustrating exactly how I’ve always read him to be). That gives him space to be more urbane when planning the flower tour with a cringing, and flattering Rex, which turns into a rather marvellous travelogue that gives him much more to do in the book’s equivalent of ‘Episode Three’ than the TV’s couple of cameos on a poky set and on bluescreen that week. In the book, it feels like he’s still driving the plot (even if he gets Rex to chauffeur the coach).
Each time the Master’s been reintroduced to the TV series – The Deadly Assassin, Logopolis, Last of the Time Lords – Terror of the Autons has been the source text that the writers have looked to for inspiration. Bob Holmes, to strip him down to his essentials and bring back his meanest and most distinctive weapon; Chris Bidmead, to make him murderously dangerous again, and make use of a radio telescope; Russell T Davies, to add many little references (including to the last two) but crucially, for me, to capture with John Simm’s Master better than any other the same viciously playful streak of that original concept, going from “Ooh, you public menace” to deadly threat. I realise it’s shocking to see Simm’s first appearance as probably the Master’s greatest flowering, compounded by the way that for me Last of the Time Lords is a much stronger script, though I love both writers, with Terror of the Autons seeming weirdly much more in Russell’s style than Bob’s: a selection of vivid pop-culture set-pieces rather than much of a story, and that’s something Russell does better than Bob. This book, especially, is one Russell has certainly read, with elements specific to the novelisation informing the TV series more than thirty years later: Farrel, dismissed and overlooked, attacking the Master and crashing the coach is echoed in Chan’tho; he subverts, of course, the Doctor’s confidence that “He knew the Master would be unable to resist the opportunity to explain his own cleverness”; the Cabinet nearly die en masse because there’s a bowl of the Master’s deadly daffodils on their table; replacing the TV’s “Don’t be trivial” in reply to wondering how the Master gets into UNIT HQ, the book has him proclaim:
“A number of UNIT sentries firmly believe that they have just admitted the Prime Minister!”Perhaps the most influential idea in the novel, however, through many off-TV stories in between and now to the Mister Moffster, is Terrance’s brilliant time-travel interpretation of the Roman concept of damnatio memoriae. It’s announced by the unhelpful Time Lord at the start’s promise that, were they ever to catch the Master, he would face the severest punishment:
“The Master’s life-stream would be thrown into reverse. Not only would he no longer exist, he would never have existed.”It’s a more mundane but still striking existential threat that Terrance uses – and here is that spoiler – to greatly improve the story’s climax. Obviously, all three artists for the novel have jumped on one crucial way that Terrance improves that, the creature I mentioned above which is impossible to avoid; but he also significantly rewrites the Master. Ready? Having judiciously prefigured the key moment with a peppering of early scenes in which the Nestene High Command (how do you have that in a group intelligence? Moving swiftly on) start to mistrust and threaten their ally for wasting time and failing in doing it, causing the Master “A spurt of ungovernable rage”, once he goes to open a channel for the full Nestene energy to come through, first they nearly electrocute him to add to his doubts, then the Doctor comes in and warns him that they’ll only turn on him once they’ve won and he’s of no more use to them, and then the Brigadier calmly orders him to go along with the Doctor in shutting down the Nestene gateway or he’ll pump bullets into both his hearts. On TV, the only part of that we get is the Doctor’s warning, which makes the Master seem both a chump and a bit flighty when, after four episodes, it’s enough to make him switch sides on the spot. It’s a shame that Terrance has Jo run and hide here, as otherwise the book wins hands down, right through to the twin codas of the Master’s chilling last encounter with Rex (followed by Terrance’s sardonic eulogy) and the Doctor then expressing only a grudging feeling for his rival before going back to brooding on his exile.
In the Hands of the Autons
Perhaps it’s the climax above all else that makes me see this as perhaps the story Terrance rewrote most significantly for the novel, and that makes me think of its second half as where it really gets going, despite so many memorable moments early on (the chair, the circus, Goodge…). He shifts the structure around rather more, changing one ‘cliffhanger’ to what he clearly thought was a more effective scene to close a chapter on, and makes two big fight sequences exciting – not always easy on paper – with the last one particularly strong in both its telling and its aftermath.
Terrance always writes a good thriller – the crispness of his action scenes is exciting, complete with those Auton guns that fall away at the wrist rather than near the knuckle (as it were). The start of Chapter 7 / Episode Three is vibrant, the UNIT jeep (not a nasty blue saloon) driving up to precipitate a far more exciting battle in the forest than on TV, with both UNIT and Auton casualties, albeit lacking one superb stunt fall. And poor Katy running into a tree, or a rock, or whatever it was. Similarly, the desperate final battle seems for much higher stakes and with far higher casualties. And while the Autons here have a much smaller role in the plot than in The Auton Invasion, much less being made of them as shop window dummies come to life and making them consequently less sinister, the explosion of deadly plastic consumer
“Only the Master, and the Autons, knew that this particular something-for-nothing was the deadly prelude to the second Auton invasion.”Perhaps the most striking Auton appearance here, though, is only part of one, in a scene that builds terrifically on just a moment from the TV version. Searching the Farrel Factory for clues as to where the Master and the Autons might have gone, the Doctor shows off by opening the safe… Only for the Auton inside it to open fire. The Brigadier chucks in a grenade, the Doctor slams the door closed again… And its severed arm starts thrashing like a snake, “spitting out energy bolts” at them, a shock borrowed since by both Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat for the screen, though not yet bettered.
The more tautly directed book also makes it amusingly clear that this is not a road safety lesson – never mind giving a bad example with the police, it features the Doctor and Jo leaping from moving vehicles in two ‘episodes’ running. The best is their escape from the coach, depicted far more excitingly and in far greater detail than some rather confused and limited scenes on screen.
One of the less fêted elements of this novel is that the victims, too, get a quiet look-in. Rex’s bullying father is easier to empathise with here thanks to Terrance softening the news (albeit deliciously broken on screen by the Master) of McDermot’s death into just a cover story about a sudden business trip. You’d think it would be the death of his friend that would make him more sympathetic, but on screen all that means is that Rex, seemingly in shock and cracking up, is just the target of his father having a go at him without the empathy to see it; in the book, Mr Farrel Snr worries that his son’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Mrs Farrel, too, is more successful on the page (rather than in front of her fitted kitchen). Terrance is both straight to the point and understated in deftly sketching in her feelings after bereavement, a rare moment in one of his books that I can instantly feel for, while the Doctor solemnly telling her that her husband was one of the first victims of a kind of war resonates with the return of the Autons three decades later.
The Deadly Daffodils
You thought the picture of me grown up and retouched was scary? Here’s a very early model me, aged 7: “Alexander” still shortened to “Sandy” rather than “Alex”; pre-glasses; hair in mid-shift between curly blond and straight brown; but already a Doctor Who fan, and when everyone else in my class at St Simon’s R.C. Primary School, Hazel Grove, was just getting on with drawing the daffodil, I was wondering if it was going to kill me. And who could blame it, in that outfit?
Doctor Who had obviously made all too great an impact on me very early in life. But, fortunately, pretty much all of that impact was marvellous. Except for the bow tie (no, Matt, I hate to break it to you…). From reading to Richard, life is just better. And unlike my love for Richard, I did eventually learn to love not just daffodils but Doctor Who with a critical eye. So, yes, as I give Terrance his birthday bouquet, he has some reason to be wary, too…
While mostly Terrance’s novel beats TV’s Terror of the Autons hands down, one element that’s definitely inferior in the book is that the Master switches from having a Mark Two dematerialisation circuit to the suggestion that the Time Lords have only had two marginally different TARDISes in their millions of years watching all of time and space. Terrance is clearly making it about the TARDISes themselves as a character point, so that the Doctor in effect sides with the ‘vintage roadster’ against the ‘flashy new model’, but what it gains in ‘moment of charm’ it loses in ‘moment of brain’:
“‘You see my TARDIS is one of the original Mark One’s. Splendid old machine, mind you. Don’t build ’em like that any more. But the Master’s is one of these flashy Mark Two jobs. The two circuits just aren’t interchangeable.’”Shame about the uncharacteristic Grocer’s Apostrophe, too, but it didn’t harm me as a boy. Terrance’s other books taught me well.
Terrance’s tendency in his Pertwee books most of all is to smooth out any character development, so that the reader can comfortably drop in at any point in the book range and have, say, the Doctor always feeling the same about his exile, always wearing a velvet jacket and always patrician but kind. This occasionally leads to slip-ups such as that on page 79, where Terrance is so familiar with the set-up that he forgets to make it new when it needs to be – Jo has only just met the Doctor and has yet even to see inside the TARDIS, much less believe it works, but when the Doctor plans to slope off:
“She was always a little hurt when the Doctor talked about going away again.”Both the “always” and “again” being for the first time, as far as she’s concerned.
Terrance’s – and the sub-editor’s – biggest cropper comes on page 104, after a deadly daffodil attacks Jo and a whole chapter after the doll has, empirically observed to have been activated by heat, as the Doctor exclaims on page 92…
“‘What about that poor Mr. Farrel?’ asked Jo.A page which might continue:
“‘The doll probably works in the same way as the flowers. I expect he was murdered because he was threatening to cause trouble.’”
‘“But, surely, Doctor, you’ve already told me that the doll works in a completely different way to the flowers?”The book as originally pressed occasionally looks a little cramped in its layout to fit 34,000 words into space for 25,000, crashing in new chapters on the same pages as others end and often lacking even a blank line between scenes, though that does add to the feel of breathless excitement. Even the novel’s closing lines get an ad for other books stuffed in underneath them, which is a bit much! And yet who cares, when the words are so much fun and they have those pictures wrapped round them?
‘The Doctor rubbed his chin thoughtfully and looked around for his prompt card.’
Prisoners of the Master
Although Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons isn’t yet one of the new reprints, an unabridged reading by Geoffrey Beevers was released on CD in 2010, and as with his Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon, this later Master has rather a fabulous voice. Though he has a fair range for the characters, he’s usually most effective as the engaging and very slightly creepy narrator – except, of course, that it’s again marvellous to hear more of his silky Master, who at last gets to say “Polynestene”.
There’s more than the reading to these CDs, though. As ever, the audiobook misses the Doctor Who Theme, despite a jolly little tune at the end which, charmingly if inappropriately, segues into the TARDIS dematerialisation noise, a BBC sound that they can afford. There’s considerable development from the early audiobooks, now with far more of their own added music, mostly quite effective though occasionally overwhelming the lines, and sound effects that vary in effectiveness from an echo on the Master’s hypnotism to some rather overdone paper-shuffling and over-literal “pistol shots”.
Another happy development is that they’ve added a ‘third page’ to this one’s folded booklet, thankfully, which means its reproductions of Alan Willow’s interior illustrations (while not large) are no longer postage-stamp-sized as they were in earlier releases. It makes it all the more of a shame that their picture of Alun Hood’s horrific Nestene second edition is still tiny, and hidden within the jewel case.
The End of Round One
Most novelisations of stories from this Doctor Who season (the Eighth, in 1971) are highly praised, and I’m solidly with that – most, too, are for me some way ahead of their TV versions. In both the books – where both The Doomsday Weapon and The Dæmons are among the best they ever did – and the TV series – where I’d plump for The Dæmons and The Mind of Evil – I sometimes overlook Terror of the Autons slightly now, yet each time I come to it, in either version, I tend to enjoy it enormously, if not faultlessly. And when I first started reading Doctor Who books, aged five, the crisp pace, inventive plot and the fantastic Master throughout were all exactly that. It was a long time before I starting thinking maybe other writers gave more character than Terrance, or that the plot of this one goes all over the shop, or that the Master was mightily overused that year – the last, certainly, fair in criticism of some stories but never for this, still the benchmark for his character. This story was still brilliant when, a few years later, Doctor Who Magazine started up and showed those fabulous photos of the Pertwee era, still for me unbeatable for, ah, stills, and the best of the lot surely the four main characters posing dramatically with the TARDIS out at the circus. I loved the picture of one of them so much that I drew them myself from it, several times. I bet you can guess which.
When I was a boy, Terror of the Autons was without a doubt the best story of Season 8 and one of my favourites of my early books. And sometimes it’s just a pleasure to revisit this story, and that feeling. Thank you, Terrance.
*Apparently the proper term for the big soft square bits that you put over the frame of your sofa or armchair and form the back or seat that you sit on is just “cushion”. But that sounds like the smaller ‘throw’ or ‘scatter’ cushion that’s more of a decoration or a back support. Yes, it took me a lot more online work to try and find the word for a ‘boxed cushion’ than it did to check any of the Doctor Who bits, both because I’m far more of an expert on Who than upholstery, and because it turns out that the vocabulary of upholstery sites is a bit cruddy. They needed to read more Terrance Dicks as children.
Labels: Books, David Tennant, Doctor Who, Jon Pertwee, Matt Smith, Obscure Doctor Who Jokes, Personal, Pictures, Reviews, Terror of the Autons, The Brigadier, The Master
Thursday, May 03, 2012
Seven Days To Noon
OK, any Londoners reading; before you sit down with a cup of tea and this cheering tale of your city facing nuclear destruction, have you voted yet? No? Then get out and do so (and here’s why)!
Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll try to put a stop to that with this cosy catastrophe. It’s a thoughtful, understated but tense 1950 political thriller, so it may threaten London’s complete annihilation but, on the plus side, doesn’t have Boris or Ken in it. And though not science fiction, it was hugely influential, not least on Quatermass, The Avengers and Doctor Who, as well as films as late as, well, 28 Days Later.
BBC4 is at this moment cheering us all up at the end of election day with The End of the World? A Horizon Guide To Armageddon, so Seven Days To Noon sprang to mind; a film full of ‘firsts’ in the Armageddon genre, from the spectre of nuclear doom to an eerily deserted London, I’d been thinking about reviewing it for a little while, having recently caught it again on one of its frequent outings on Film4 (keep an eye out, if you don’t own a copy). While Advise and Consent and The Best Man, the early 1960s political thrillers I wrote about last week, were utterly American, this is incredibly British – though it mixes a queasy satire of World War II evacuations and Blitz Spirit with a looming dread of American, Russian and our own new nuclear capability. And while they had plotlines about intellectuals, this not only makes a scientist and thinker its central character, but forces the audience to consider the issues he raises. Though the conspiracy thriller rather than the lone actor comes later, and on the surface this is all stiff upper lip with a government that sternly protects the people, too, there is the subversive undercurrent that asks, like its main character, whether that government in fact wants to make us all complicit in mass murder and then see us blown to bits more comprehensively, just further down the line, which is a less reassuring subtext. While I won’t spoil the end, the way that the authorities simply abandon the plucky everywoman while the military rush about doing their thing is surely telling.
Seven Days To Noon was produced by the Boulting Brothers, perhaps best-known for their terrific version of Brighton Rock, with the story by Paul Dehn (Goldfinger, Beneath the Planet of the Apes and more) and, perhaps surprisingly, his partner, top Hammer composer-to-be James Bernard (another Quatermass connection). The film opens, quietly, with a letter posted to the Prime Minister from top British nuclear scientist Professor Willingdon (Barry Jones) – and if you thought the storyline of a terrorist walking around a big city with a nuclear bomb in their suitcase was new to the Twenty-First Century, think again. He’s come to the conclusion that the work he does is profoundly wrong, and gives the Government an ultimatum: give up nuclear weapons in one week, or have one explode at Westminster. Hence the title. And the film is all about the fallout from that ‘simple’ demand: why did he do it? How can he be stopped? And what will the effect be on everyone else, physically and philosophically?
Joining Jones’ excellent, tortured Willingdon among the stars are André Morell, at the end of the 1950s the definitive Professor Quatermass with a remarkably similar moral quandary, but here playing stern, serious and exceptionally well-spoken Superintendent Folland, who’s put in charge of the manhunt; and the other standout character is Olive Sloane’s Goldie Phillips, there as the spirit of London, a good-time girl a little past her best, sympathetic to those in need but distinctly stroppy at the thought of being blown to bits. She’s hugely endearing in an old-fashioned way, but also has some striking undercurrents to her for a film made in 1950: not only is the ‘everyman’ character a woman, but we’re meant to identify not with the genteel young lady but one for whom every implication is used to get past the censor that she’s been around a bit, and good for her. Though I’m not convinced by Goldie picking up Willingdon in the first place – she doesn’t know how vital he is until he’s much later and more threatening, so he doesn’t seem much of a catch for her. Don’t fancy hers much.
The crucial scene for me is one that in most films would be a flashback, but instead is a previous conversation with Willingdon related by a friend when Superintendent Folland comes calling in search of information. And the friend betraying a confidence happens to be the Professor’s local vicar, who’s caught doing some manual work and so for a moment presumed not posh enough to be among the clergy (ho ho. Look, most of the humour in the film’s better than this).
Also dated is the convention that the Professor has a pretty daughter with no noticeable character of her own but a boyfriend who’s a leading character, though at least here he’s only a younger scientist there to provide exposition, rather than a square-jawed hero in a ripped shirt (I’m not certain he even loosens his tie).
From this point on, the film is in essence a race against time to find a lone man in London, with first an attempt to keep it all quiet, then the city eventually put through total evacuation – save for Superintendent Folland, and the army – as it becomes clear that he means it, and won’t be easy to find. The stark black and white and frequent night filming all around London, some of it still bomb-damaged by much less ferocious ordinance in the last War, gives it all a tense atmosphere, but some of the film is also surprisingly witty.
There aren’t a lot of jokes in the script, with Goldie too plucky to be just a ‘comedy character’, though two characters do stand out – a man with a “The End Is Nigh” sign who keeps trying to get on his evacuation bus with it and being told to leave it behind, and who to add to the incongruity looks far too like Ronnie Corbett for an actor in 1950, and Joan Hickson’s Mrs Peckett, Willingdon’s temporary landlady. One of the few people less posh in this film than you’d expect – a gossipy Londoner with a fag surgically attached to her lip, a far cry from Miss Marple – she’s the most overtly comedic character, snooty, intrusive and paranoid, a caricature landlady. Suspicious when “Mr Richardson” (or is it “Mr Richards”?) doesn’t want to hand over his ration book, she manages to miss all the “Missing Scientist” posters, but runs to the police after “Moon Maniac” “LANDLADY KILLER AT LARGE” headlines in the Express!
To add to Joan Hickson, who was never young, there are many young faces in early roles – look out for Joss Ackland as an eager junior copper, or John Stratton (another to get a major role in Quatermass and the Pit at the other end of the decade) as a not eager at all young soldier, and at the end Victor Maddern as another young soldier at the end of his tether. And then there’s Geoffrey Keen, the thuggish, flag-waving, bomb-cheering ‘man in the street’ (or the pub) who decades later is the perishing Minister in the James Bond films that not even a change of government can get rid of, and Willingdon puts him (and the audience, who he’s almost speaking to direct when he angrily tells the man that he should be made to think about the things he says) down flat:
As I noted above, Seven Days To Noon had a remarkably wide influence on British cinema and television – most obviously in a host of nuclear blackmail stories, but several more particular and noticeable scripts, especially those more science fiction than just setting topical concern two years ahead. Here are a few of the most striking ones, and two which I hope to review quite shortly (but which?)…
The Quatermass Experiment (1953, and 1955 film): in itself massively influential, but also borrowing a scientist chased through bomb-site London, a scientist lead and moral grappling, a finale in a big church, an apocalyptic threat and, at one remove, André Morell.
The Avengers – November Five (1963): another nuclear bomb threat to London from within the establishment.
Doctor Who – The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964): similar scenes of pursuit through a deserted London, though this is more of a Nazi than a nuclear parable (but Terry Nation always likes his countdowns and his radiation threats).
The Avengers – The Morning After (1969): a small town rather than London is evacuated under nuclear threat by a figure of trust, though the manhunt isn’t for the ‘villain’. This one (as Tat Wood pointed me to in his revised Doctor Who guide About Time 3) even uses footage shot for Seven Days To Noon as part of its own evacuation scenes. And Joss Ackland.
Doctor Who – Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974): though very much by way of The Morning After for its conspiracy elements, this still recognisably borrows from the original source, as well, with London evacuated under a different sort of terror threat, and once again has people in positions of trust claiming to do good, by their lights, by means of mass murder.
The New Avengers – Sleeper (1976): London asleep rather than evacuated, though less interestingly than the very similar two immediately previous variations.
And films continue to use both the imagery and the moral complexity, from 28 Days Later to Watchmen…
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Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll try to put a stop to that with this cosy catastrophe. It’s a thoughtful, understated but tense 1950 political thriller, so it may threaten London’s complete annihilation but, on the plus side, doesn’t have Boris or Ken in it. And though not science fiction, it was hugely influential, not least on Quatermass, The Avengers and Doctor Who, as well as films as late as, well, 28 Days Later.
BBC4 is at this moment cheering us all up at the end of election day with The End of the World? A Horizon Guide To Armageddon, so Seven Days To Noon sprang to mind; a film full of ‘firsts’ in the Armageddon genre, from the spectre of nuclear doom to an eerily deserted London, I’d been thinking about reviewing it for a little while, having recently caught it again on one of its frequent outings on Film4 (keep an eye out, if you don’t own a copy). While Advise and Consent and The Best Man, the early 1960s political thrillers I wrote about last week, were utterly American, this is incredibly British – though it mixes a queasy satire of World War II evacuations and Blitz Spirit with a looming dread of American, Russian and our own new nuclear capability. And while they had plotlines about intellectuals, this not only makes a scientist and thinker its central character, but forces the audience to consider the issues he raises. Though the conspiracy thriller rather than the lone actor comes later, and on the surface this is all stiff upper lip with a government that sternly protects the people, too, there is the subversive undercurrent that asks, like its main character, whether that government in fact wants to make us all complicit in mass murder and then see us blown to bits more comprehensively, just further down the line, which is a less reassuring subtext. While I won’t spoil the end, the way that the authorities simply abandon the plucky everywoman while the military rush about doing their thing is surely telling.
Seven Days To Noon was produced by the Boulting Brothers, perhaps best-known for their terrific version of Brighton Rock, with the story by Paul Dehn (Goldfinger, Beneath the Planet of the Apes and more) and, perhaps surprisingly, his partner, top Hammer composer-to-be James Bernard (another Quatermass connection). The film opens, quietly, with a letter posted to the Prime Minister from top British nuclear scientist Professor Willingdon (Barry Jones) – and if you thought the storyline of a terrorist walking around a big city with a nuclear bomb in their suitcase was new to the Twenty-First Century, think again. He’s come to the conclusion that the work he does is profoundly wrong, and gives the Government an ultimatum: give up nuclear weapons in one week, or have one explode at Westminster. Hence the title. And the film is all about the fallout from that ‘simple’ demand: why did he do it? How can he be stopped? And what will the effect be on everyone else, physically and philosophically?
Joining Jones’ excellent, tortured Willingdon among the stars are André Morell, at the end of the 1950s the definitive Professor Quatermass with a remarkably similar moral quandary, but here playing stern, serious and exceptionally well-spoken Superintendent Folland, who’s put in charge of the manhunt; and the other standout character is Olive Sloane’s Goldie Phillips, there as the spirit of London, a good-time girl a little past her best, sympathetic to those in need but distinctly stroppy at the thought of being blown to bits. She’s hugely endearing in an old-fashioned way, but also has some striking undercurrents to her for a film made in 1950: not only is the ‘everyman’ character a woman, but we’re meant to identify not with the genteel young lady but one for whom every implication is used to get past the censor that she’s been around a bit, and good for her. Though I’m not convinced by Goldie picking up Willingdon in the first place – she doesn’t know how vital he is until he’s much later and more threatening, so he doesn’t seem much of a catch for her. Don’t fancy hers much.
More Betrayal, Vicar?
The crucial scene for me is one that in most films would be a flashback, but instead is a previous conversation with Willingdon related by a friend when Superintendent Folland comes calling in search of information. And the friend betraying a confidence happens to be the Professor’s local vicar, who’s caught doing some manual work and so for a moment presumed not posh enough to be among the clergy (ho ho. Look, most of the humour in the film’s better than this).
“And I’m going to be quite frank. His disappearance endangers – the national safety.”It sets out clearly the moral argument without having to have Willingdon himself confronted by Folland early on, and is a powerful moment, though one of the film’s more dated. It also makes me curl my lip rather at the Church of England; I was brought up Catholic. A Catholic priest wouldn’t let a little thing like nuclear Armageddon pry a confession out of him, still less when only hinted at by a police officer. It’s notable that Barry Jones’ portrayal of a mild, gentle man driven to extremes carries almost all the different notes of religion in the film, with the vicar’s established religion coming across far more as ‘establishment’ than ‘belief’; there’s an element of the more modern depiction of any passionately religious person as slightly mad (or at least of the caricature British view that you should be wary of anyone who believes in anything too much), but he also confronts you – if you were involved in a threat to kill millions of people, what should you do? And is it any more wrong to mount that threat on your own behalf rather than the government’s? Willingdon’s overwhelming guilt, at least, is very recognisable to a Catholic (though his despair is a sin). The film does pull its punches slightly in suggesting that Willingdon may just be mad – everyone’s first conclusion – rather than making a coldly sane decision; is he having a breakdown from the start, or is it only the pressure of his having to sustain his crushingly heavy decision for a week, alone, that causes him to start pacing all night, whispering Bible verses as a trailer for the film’s ultimate climax in a church?
“What is it you want to know?”
“…What would you do if you were convinced the results of your life’s work were being put to an evil purpose?”
Also dated is the convention that the Professor has a pretty daughter with no noticeable character of her own but a boyfriend who’s a leading character, though at least here he’s only a younger scientist there to provide exposition, rather than a square-jawed hero in a ripped shirt (I’m not certain he even loosens his tie).
From this point on, the film is in essence a race against time to find a lone man in London, with first an attempt to keep it all quiet, then the city eventually put through total evacuation – save for Superintendent Folland, and the army – as it becomes clear that he means it, and won’t be easy to find. The stark black and white and frequent night filming all around London, some of it still bomb-damaged by much less ferocious ordinance in the last War, gives it all a tense atmosphere, but some of the film is also surprisingly witty.
There aren’t a lot of jokes in the script, with Goldie too plucky to be just a ‘comedy character’, though two characters do stand out – a man with a “The End Is Nigh” sign who keeps trying to get on his evacuation bus with it and being told to leave it behind, and who to add to the incongruity looks far too like Ronnie Corbett for an actor in 1950, and Joan Hickson’s Mrs Peckett, Willingdon’s temporary landlady. One of the few people less posh in this film than you’d expect – a gossipy Londoner with a fag surgically attached to her lip, a far cry from Miss Marple – she’s the most overtly comedic character, snooty, intrusive and paranoid, a caricature landlady. Suspicious when “Mr Richardson” (or is it “Mr Richards”?) doesn’t want to hand over his ration book, she manages to miss all the “Missing Scientist” posters, but runs to the police after “Moon Maniac” “LANDLADY KILLER AT LARGE” headlines in the Express!
“I thought you might be an actor, and of course I won’t have theatricals in the house.”Most of the wit is in the cinematography; just as the camerawork prowls the shadows and shows us tormented faces, it can also brush past a petty crook or an inappropriate Atomic Racer game, or juxtapose The Garter and Slipper club with God Is Love, then listen to the Prime Minister’s broadcast under a dinosaur skeleton – before, along with “The End Is Nigh” signs, whole piles of items there’s no room to bring on the evacuation transport, from pets to sporting equipment.
To add to Joan Hickson, who was never young, there are many young faces in early roles – look out for Joss Ackland as an eager junior copper, or John Stratton (another to get a major role in Quatermass and the Pit at the other end of the decade) as a not eager at all young soldier, and at the end Victor Maddern as another young soldier at the end of his tether. And then there’s Geoffrey Keen, the thuggish, flag-waving, bomb-cheering ‘man in the street’ (or the pub) who decades later is the perishing Minister in the James Bond films that not even a change of government can get rid of, and Willingdon puts him (and the audience, who he’s almost speaking to direct when he angrily tells the man that he should be made to think about the things he says) down flat:
“You don’t understand what you’re saying… What you’re suggesting would mean the total destruction of mankind.”
After Noon – An Influential Film
As I noted above, Seven Days To Noon had a remarkably wide influence on British cinema and television – most obviously in a host of nuclear blackmail stories, but several more particular and noticeable scripts, especially those more science fiction than just setting topical concern two years ahead. Here are a few of the most striking ones, and two which I hope to review quite shortly (but which?)…
The Quatermass Experiment (1953, and 1955 film): in itself massively influential, but also borrowing a scientist chased through bomb-site London, a scientist lead and moral grappling, a finale in a big church, an apocalyptic threat and, at one remove, André Morell.
The Avengers – November Five (1963): another nuclear bomb threat to London from within the establishment.
Doctor Who – The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964): similar scenes of pursuit through a deserted London, though this is more of a Nazi than a nuclear parable (but Terry Nation always likes his countdowns and his radiation threats).
The Avengers – The Morning After (1969): a small town rather than London is evacuated under nuclear threat by a figure of trust, though the manhunt isn’t for the ‘villain’. This one (as Tat Wood pointed me to in his revised Doctor Who guide About Time 3) even uses footage shot for Seven Days To Noon as part of its own evacuation scenes. And Joss Ackland.
Doctor Who – Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974): though very much by way of The Morning After for its conspiracy elements, this still recognisably borrows from the original source, as well, with London evacuated under a different sort of terror threat, and once again has people in positions of trust claiming to do good, by their lights, by means of mass murder.
The New Avengers – Sleeper (1976): London asleep rather than evacuated, though less interestingly than the very similar two immediately previous variations.
And films continue to use both the imagery and the moral complexity, from 28 Days Later to Watchmen…
Labels: Doctor Who, Film, Ideas, London, Quatermass, Religion, Reviews, The Avengers, The New Avengers
