Terror of the Suburbs, with Matthew Sweet

The Blu-ray set Doctor Who: The Collection Season 7 has been out for a few weeks. It includes the documentary I co-produced, Terror of the Suburbs, a clip from which has just been posted on the official Doctor Who YouTube channel:

Now that people have had a chance to see Terror of the Suburbs in full, I have permission to share some photos from the shoot.

Terror of the Suburbs was directed by Jon Clarke and edited by Robin Andrews at Eklectics. Presenter Matthew Sweet spoke to Alex Moore (assistant location manager on Doctor Who 2022-24), Dr Adam Scovell (writer and historian), Subhadra Das (also a writer and historian) and Dr Rupa Huq, MP. It's produced by me and Thomas Guerrier for executive producer Russell Minton at BBC Studios.

Director Jon Clarke and camera op Lewis Hobson on Ealing High Street
where Autons once invaded

,

Presenter Matthew Sweet on the corner of Ealing Broadway and Ealing High Street,
outside the Autons' favourite branch of M&S

Jon and Lewis line up a shot with Matthew

Lewis, Jon, expert guest Alex Moore, Matthew Sweet and me
(Photo by Kitty Dunning)

Me looming in the foreground while the team interview Dr Adam Scovell
outside Ealing Film Studios

Dr Adam Scovell and Matthew Sweet at Ealing Film Studios

Nice Vibez, Lime Grove

Jon records Subhadra Das and Matthew Sweet in Chiswick

Subhadra and Matthew in Chiswick

Jon records Matthew's reaction shot in front of a brick wall

Matthew and Jon in front of the Palace of Westminster,
the south side of the river popular with alien invasions 

Matthew and Dr Rupa Huq, MP at Portcullis House

Jon and Matthew in front of Elizabeth Tower

An Independent Woman, The Autobiography of Edith Guerrier

An archivist pal asked if I was any relation of Edith Guerrier (1870-1958), the subject of Tirzah Frank’s fascinating “The ‘Boston Marriage’ of Edith Guerrier and Edith Brown”.

I’d not heard of her before but, looking up details, Edith’s great-grandfather was George Guerrier (1771-1824), my direct ancestor — my grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather. My grandfather’s grandfather, William George Guerrier (1827-1920) was the cousin of Edith’s father, George.

Edith wrote an autobiography under the title A Little Woman of New England, which was published as An Independent Woman in 1992. It’s about how, from modest beginnings, she set up  a series of clubs for girls, largely from Italian and Jewish immigrant families. That leads to a long career with Boston Library, included a nine-year campaign to get a Bill passed into law. She meets various famous people such as Louisa May Alcott (hence the original title of this autobiography) and some US politicians who would later be president. It’s an evocative story and full of great historical detail. 

There’s not a lot of detail about her 40-year relationship with Edith Brown, though a couple of things, I think, are telling.

The first meeting with Edith Brown and their setting up home together are described in a chapter titled “A Single Woman”. They’re clearly a close partnership from the off, a duo. In that sense, at least, Edith Guerrier isn’t single. The title is consciously ironic.

Then there’s the following comment towards the end of the book, where Edith Guerrier speaks of her retirement from Boston City Library, mandated when she turns 70:

“In looking ahead, all my plans had been made with regard to the things my dearly beloved comrade and I would do together, but before time came Edith had passed into the next life. After nearly forty years of closest companionship I was left to face retirement alone, never doubting, however, that she still lived vitally and radiantly beyond this bourne of Time and Place.” (p. 127)

Otherwise, there’s not much on the Ediths’ relationship. We hear of their holidays — to Italy, to Amsterdam and Switzerland, an evocative trip to post-war Ypres in 1922 and then England. We learn how these trips inspired their work back in the US, such as in setting up a pottery. But Edith Brown, who went on these trips and led some of the work that followed, is an almost ghostly presence in the text. 

Edith Guerrier names lots of different people: her various relatives, the famous people she encountered, a range of people she worked with or who supported her work. But she is discreet about Edith Brown. And she also, notably I think, doesn’t name the female school friends she went to stay with in her teens, or the cowgirl she once ran away with on a “marauding expedition”.

“I had practically no companions and I longed to become acquainted with a girl about my own age who bought our milk from her father’s ranch several miles out on the high prairie … I had made up my mind that it would be a good thing to see the cowgirl’s ranch and I wished nothing to interfere with the plan.” (p. 45)

It is all, I think, suggestive.

Edith Guerrier is much more interested in demonstrating the impact of a little time and investment on those who don’t have much. We see the impact on her of earning six dollars a week rather than three, and of the $300 she is somehow awarded as compensation for the loss of her great-great grandfather’s ship in the War of 1812 (p. 75). Inheritance, patronage and government grants have a transformative impact on her and her community. 

There’s something, too, about the indirect impact of this kind of initiative. They hoped, for example, that the pottery would make some money. However,

“We learned many useful facts about pottery making and became convinced that the leisurely product of a studio demands rather than provides a steady income.” (p. 96)

But that doesn’t mean it failed.

Annoyingly for my purposes, editor Mary Matson says in her preface,

“I have made excisions. I have omitted her discursively genealogical ‘Part 1’ on the history of her forbears, while making liberal use of the material in my own introduction.” (p. xx)

According to a written account by Edith’s father, the Guerriers are "of Huguenot descent, one of a body settling on the banks of the Thames about 1685.” (p. xxviii). That matches what I’d learned elsewhere, with the first Guerrier, Jean, arriving at the Huguenot church on Threadneedle Street in London on 6 December 1677.

Again according to Edith’s father, her great-grandfather George (my direct ancestor).

 “was a farmer on the Isle of Dogs, and when he died he left considerable property, but [his son, Edith’s grandfather] Samuel Guerrier’s portion of the inheritance was swallowed up in an unsuccessful book publishing enterprise. He pursued clerical occupations, having but a precarious subsistence through many years and finally died in the care of my half-brother Will Guerrier at an advanced age.” (Ibid).

This Will Guerrier (1795-1850) is another of my direct ancestors.

Samuel’s son George (1837-1911), had been a freight clerk when he visited a panorama (presumably in London) showing a rather fanciful view of Mississippi, complete with monkeys. This inspired him to emigrate to the US at the age of 19, in 1856 (pp. 33-35). During the Civil War, he was Second Lieutenant of Coloured Infantry, and fought at Yorktown and the siege of Fort Wagner, and was,

“wounded at Gaines Mill and captured. For six weeks he had lain in Libby Prison, an experience he refused to talk about.” (p. 81)

Edith is sure that this, and other aspects of his war service, ruined his health. Even so, on 2 September 1867, he married Emma Ricketson, the daughter of an abolitionist, who died of tuberculosis when their daughter Edith was three.

Edith says her father was keen that she learn French (but that she never had much success). 

“It may have been because of our French ancestry, and because our name, which according to the family legend was given by a French king to a distant ancestor for prowess on the battlefield.” (p. 59)

I’d like to read more about Edith and her father’s accounts of their — and my — family history. And I wonder if, when the two Ediths were in London in 1922, they looked up some of her relatives there. Her father’s cousin, William George Guerrier, died in 1920, but his son and nine year-old grandson were there. 

That grandson was my grandfather. And I wonder if, just possibly, that man I knew once met Edith.

How they Broke Britain, by James O’Brien

This is a righteously angry account of the past 15 years of politics in the UK, under Conservative (mis)rule. O’Brien ends with the disastrous mini-budget announced on 23 September 2022 by Kwasi Kwarteng, Chancellor the Exchequer to Prime Minister Liz Truss. The book is about the cascade of errors and bad-faith actions that, over more than a decade, got us to that point.

It’s divided into chapters covering, in turn, Rupert Murdoch, Paul Dacre, Andrew Neil, Matthew Elliott, Nigel Farage, David Cameron, Jeremy Corbyn, Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss (with an afterword in my paperback edition written in February 2024 about Rishi Sunak). It is necessarily wide-ranging to cover the myriad interconnections between politicians, think-tanks and allies in the media, and between politicians in the UK with movements and cabals abroad. It is densely packed with evidence. The result is engrossing (due to the author) and intensely infuriating (due to what he describes).

One example will give the flavour:

“In August 2019, Thiemo Fetzer, a professor in economics at the University of Warwick, went further:

‘I gathered data from all electoral contests that took place in the UK since 2000, and assembled a detailed individual-led panel data set covering almost 40,000 households since 2009. Through these data, I studied to what extent an individual’s or region’s exposure to welfare cuts since 2010 was associated with increased political support for UKIP in the run up to the Brexit referendum in 2016. The analysis suggests that this association was so strong that the 2016 EU referendum would have resulted in a clear victory for Remain (or the referendum might never have happened) had it not been for austerity measures such as extensive cuts to public spending.’ [Quotation from Thiemo Fetzer, ‘Did Austerity in the UK Lead to the Brexit Crisis?’, Harvard Business Review, 23 August 2019]

In other words, David Cameron and George Osborne created the dissatisfaction and distress that would prompt many people to vote for Brexit. Into this space sashayed the deliberate and deceitful demonisation of workers from other EU countries, perpetrated by Nigel Farage and co., and the unkeepable promises about prosperity punted by the likes of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, drawing on erroneous economic modelling.” (p. 242)

O’Brien is good at making these connections: the way one misguided policy or deliberately cynical action has had far-reaching negative effects. The incidents he describes are usually well known — they were often leading stories on the news — but he shows how they are symptoms of a wider culture of privilege and personal connection. He shows how each headline is an incremental steps towards that mini-budget.

In some ways, I think this book picks up the baton from The Blunders of Our Governments (2013), by Anthony King & Ivor Crewe, but whereas that largely describes a bunch of well-meaning professionals whose fault is unconscious bias, O’Brien digs into something much more pernicious: a protection racket, effectively, to line the pockets of the haves by preying on the have-nots. 

But it is also about the fantasies of those involved: their actions, their supporters, driven by beliefs that fly in the face of reality. The perceived threat of immigration or of public spending, the perceived bias of the media if it is not wholly supportive, a whole pack of straw dogs. Worst of all is the lofty disdain when it all goes wrong, the certainty — despite all evidence — that they will yet be vindicated.

Not delusions of grandeur but delusions of the grand. 

David Whitaker wrote 32 episodes of Crossroads

I’ve just received my copy of Doctor Who Chronicles — 1970, from the makers of Doctor Who Magazine. It features, on pp. 28-31 “Cross purposes”, my article on the back and forth of personnel between the production teams of Doctor Who and the ATV soap opera Crossroads, me arguing that the 1970 reboot of Doctor Who owes as much to the soap as it does to the oft-cited Quatermass. 

Several writers worked on both Doctor Who and Crossroads at different times, including Barbara Clegg, Terrance Dicks, David Ellis, Paul Erickson, Brian Hayles, Don Houghton, Malcolm Hulke, Peter Ling, Derrick Sherwin and my bae David Whitaker. I trace who did what when, and the direction of travel back and forth between the two series.

But this new article originates in me being wrong. Here is the full story, with a wealth of new information about David Whitaker.

On page 332 of my biography David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television, I quote a Sunday Times story by ‘Atticus’ (Michael Bateman) from 8 March 1970, criticising actions by David Whitaker ‘who used to write for Crossroads.’ I respond to this: ‘David had written episodes of the soap opera Compact, not Crossroads.’ In fact, I now know David wrote for both.

A number of things led me to the wrong conclusion in my book. First, I had access to various CVs and potted biographies of David from over the years, which tend to emphasise the great variety of film and TV he worked on. None of them mention Crossroads yet they include many things that didn’t make it to the screen or for which he didn't receive on-screen credit. 

For example, a report in the Australian TV Week from 18 May 1974, which interviewed David, claimed he’d written ‘a number of episodes of The Saint, The Avengers and Danger Man’. He’d had a meeting about potential work on The Saint and may have pitched an episode of Danger Man… But he doesn't have a credit on any of these shows and there's no evidence that he was ever commissioned to write full scripts for them. It seems that David, not uniquely in the industry, exaggerated a little to bulk out his CV. I thought if he had worked on Crossroads, or even gone for a meeting with the production team, he would have included it on a CV. 

I was able to verify that David is not credited as writer on any surviving episodes of Crossroads. When researching at Birmingham Central Library, I leafed through old copies of listings magazine TV Times but the random selection of Crossroads episodes I found did not credit the writer (or director or producer). This was, as we'll see, an oversight on my part.

IMDB, as yet, does not credit David for any episodes of Crossroads but I already knew it was missing many screen credits I could trace from other sources. I ran David's name through The Kaleidoscope British Independent Television Drama Research Guide 1955-2010 edited by Simon Coward, Richard Down and Christopher Perry (2010) and various online archives but his name didn’t come up in relation to Crossroads. 

In addition, one of the people I interviewed for my book told me that they didn’t think David wrote for Crossroads as it was a programme they watched and they would have spotted his name. In all, it seemed fair to surmise that ‘Atticus’ in the Sunday Times had muddled things up: David Whitaker worked with writers Hazel Adair and Peter Ling on developing their BBC soap opera Compact and is credited as writer on seven episodes of that; but he didn’t then work on their ATV soap Crossroads.

Then, late last year, Doctor Who Magazine #610 boasted an extended interview with former producer Philip Hinchcliffe, in which writer Benjamin Cook noted that Hinchcliffe had written for Crossroads. In a footnote on page 26, Ben said that “David Whittaker” — two Ts — had also written for the soap. 

I ran some online searches to see if I could corroborate this and ended up finding a photograph of the cast and crew of Crossroads (image 12588028vh) that has been added to Shutterstock since I wrote my book. Second from the left in the bottom row is David Whitaker. Which, flipping heck, is pretty conclusive evidence that he worked on the series.

The caption with the photograph tells us who some of the other people are: 

“Crossroads: Behind the scenes cast and crew picture circa early 1970s - featuring, including Rollo Gamble (TV Director, 1st R, back row), Jack Barton (TV Director and Producer, 3rd L back row), Tish Hope, as played by Joy Andrews (5th L, middle row), Noele Gordon as Meg Richardson, Ann George, as Amy Turtle, Susan Hanson, as Diane (2nd R middle row), David Whitaker (TV Script Writer - former BBC TV series Doctor Who writer, 2nd L btm row), Reg Watson (Producer, seated centre on chair), and others”

I think Hazel Adair and Peter Ling are in the front row, Ling in glasses and moustache at Reg Watson’s knee. Second left on the back row, stood between Rollo Gamble and Jack Barton, may be fellow director Alan Coleman. (Three of the people in this photograph figured in Russell T Davies' 2023 drama Nolly, namely Noele Gordon played by Helena Bonham Carter, Susan Hanson played by Chloe Harris and director Jack Barton played by Con O'Neill.)

I was especially taken by the sight of Rollo Gamble in the top-right corner, as he played Squire Winstanley in 1971 Doctor Who story The Daemons. It was this that inspired my new article for DWM.

The photograph seems to show cast and crew on the roof of Bradford House, on Bradford Street in Digbeth, which ATV rented for rehearsals. As my friend David Jennings astutely notes, the skyline matches the view in pictures taken in 2007, and the view would have been very different from the original ATV Centre in Aston or the new complex on Broad Street, which opened in 1970. Since Cleo Sylvestre, who joined the cast in an episode first broadcast on 27 January 1970,  doesn’t feature among the cast in this photograph, I think it must have been taken in 1969.

Having found this photograph, I got in touch with Benjamin Cook to ask what sources he’d drawn from. He pointed me back towards the Kaleidoscope guide, which lists 24 episodes of Crossroads written by David Whittaker — two Ts — between 22 July 1969 and 27 February 1970. But there were also numerous gaps where no writer was credited at all, leaving the tantalising prospect that Whitaker had written more.

The Kaleidoscope guide lists episodes of Crossroads on the basis of their first transmission on the ATV network (as some other ITV regions showed Crossroads days or even months behind). I double-checked against copies of TV Times for the Midlands region (the one served by ATV) at Birmingham Central Library and found David credited for eight episodes covering that same period, 22 July 1969 to 27 February 1970.

But the reason for the discrepancy swiftly became clear. At the time, Crossroads was broadcast four times a week, Tuesday to Friday, and the listings in TV Times usually credits writer, director and producer only on the Tuesday. The implication is that the same writer and director were assigned blocks of four episodes at a time — a week’s worth. David was therefore credited on eight blocks of four episodes, or 32 in total. It was consistent work, one block per calendar month between July and February. And nothing either side.

The TV Times listings usually include a line of dialogue from the episode in question, instead of precis or recap (which might spoil the plot). This gives some flavour of the drama. What's more, the lines of dialogue seem to be from the opening moments of each episode. That meant I could relatively easily match the listings printed in TV Times with the soundtrack of an otherwise missing episode - part of a cache of 1960s episodes of Crossroads on the Internet Archive - and show it was one written by David.

David Whitaker's 32 episodes of Crossroads are as follows, with quotations, cast and crew details as per the ATV region TV Times:

1. 
   Episode 1116, 6.35 pm, Tuesday, 22 July 1969 (the day after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left the surface of the Moon)


   
   “Amy: Any more surprises and I’ll jump out of my skin.”

   
   Cast: Noele Gordon (Meg Richardson); David Davenport (Malcolm Ryder); Michael McStay (Steve Mitchell); Pamela Duncan (Mrs Cordelia Fitts); Ann George (Amy Turtle); Joy Andrews (Mrs Hope); William Avenall (Mr Lovejoy); Gillian Betts (Josefina Rafael); Susan Travers (Elena Brandt); Eva Wishaw (Tessa Wyvern); Jane Rossington (Jill Richardson); Ralph Lawton (Sgt Yorke); Peter Boyes (Nick Van Doren); Jack Haig (Archie Gibbs).
   
   WRITER DAVID WHITAKER: DIRECTOR ROLLO GAMBLE PRODUCER REG WATSON
   
   Full listing for this episode in the Anglia-region version of TV Times (because I couldn't get a very legible picture from the bound edition of the Midlands version!):
   

   
   
   
2. Episode 1117, 6.35 pm, Wednesday 23 July 1969
   
   Jill: “I know. You’re so innocent and misunderstood. But can’t you see how much trouble you’re causing?”
   
   Cast: Noele Gordon (Meg Richardson); David Davenport (Malcolm Ryder); Jane Rossington (Jill Richardson); Eva Wishaw (Tessa Wyvern); Ann George (Amy Turtle); Joy Andrews (Mrs Hope); Susan Travers (Elena Brandt); Pamela Duncan (Mrs Cordelia Fitts); Peter Boyes (Nick Van Doren); Michael McStay (Steve Mitchell); Bay White (Mrs Arden); Gillian Betts (Josefina Rafael); Neville Hughes (Peter Hope); John Bradbury (Musician).
   
   DIRECTOR JACK BARTON

   
   
3. Episode 1118, 6.35 pm, Thursday, 24 July 1969
   
   Malcolm: “Burn the dinner! Chuck it in the dustbin!”
   
   Cast: Noele Gordon (Meg Richardson); David Davenport (Malcolm Ryder); Michael McStay (Steve Mitchell); Eva Wishaw (Tessa Wyvern); Gillian Betts (Josefina Rafael); Ann George (Amy Turtle); Joy Andrews (Mrs Hope); Pamela Duncan (Mrs Cordelia Fitts); Jack Haig (Archie Gibbs); Neville Hughes (Peter Hope); Peter Boyes (Nick Van Doren); Jane Rossington (Jill Richardson); Ralph Lawton (Sgt Yorke).
   
   
4. Episode 1119, 6.35 pm, Friday 25 July 1969
   
   Same quotation and listing given as for Thursday.

   
   
5. 
   Episode 1132, 6.35 pm Tuesday 19 August 1969
   
   Diane: “Hey! What do you think you’re doing?”
   
   Cast: Noele Gordon (Meg Richardson); Susan Hanson (Diane Lawton); Peter Brookes (Vince Parker); Doris Wellings (Mrs Grimble); Ted Morris (Willie Mayne); Jane Rossington (Jill Richardson); Colin Spaull (Jacko Gregg); David Davenport (Malcolm Ryder); Philip Garston-Jones (Commercial traveller); Ann George (Amy Turtle).
   
   SCRIPT BY DAVID WHITAKER: SCRIPT EDITOR MALCOLM HULKE: DIRECTOR JACK BARTON: PRODUCER REG WATON

   
   
6. Episode 1133, 6.35 pm, Wednesday 20 August 1969
   
   Mr Lovejoy: “Am I such a tyrant?”
   
   Cast: Peter Brookes (Vince Parker); Susan Hanson (Diana [sic] Lawton); Doris Wellings (Mrs Grimble); Ted Morris (Willie Mayne); Ralph Lawton (Sgt Yorke); Joy Andrews (Mrs Hope); Ann George (Amy Turtle); Gillian Betts (Josefina Rafael); William Avenell (Mr Lovejoy); Peter Boyes (Nick Van Doren); Philip Garston-Jones (Commercial traveller); Eve Whishaw (Tessa Wyvern).
NB no credit for Noele Gordon.

   
   
7. Episode 1134, 6.35pm, Thursday 21 August 1969
   
   Joesfina: “Now, now, Mrs Hope—you’re match-making.”
   
   No cast given.

   
   
8. Episode 1135, 6.35 pm, Friday 22 August 1969
   
   Diane: “Wouldn’t it be better to tell Mrs Richardson about the gambling?”

   
   No cast given.

   
   
9. Episode 1148, 6.35 pm, Tuesday 16 September 1969
   
   Booth: “I have strict rules.”
   
   Cast: Noele Gordon (Meg); Hilary Wontner (Sir Geoffrey); Ann George (Amy Turtle); David Lawton (Mr Booth); Susan Hanson (Diane Lawton); Gillian Betts (Josefina Rafael); Jon Kelly (Frank Adam); Joy Andrews (Mrs Hope); William Avenell (Mr Lovejoy); Paul Large (Paul Tatum); Jane Rossington (Jill).
   
   WRITER DAVID WHITAKER: DIRECTOR ALAN COLEMAN: PRODUCER REG WATSON.

   
   
10. Episode 1149, 6.35 pm, Wednesday 17 September 1969
    
    Amy: “It gives you confidence to have a revolver in the palm of your hand.”
    
    No cast given.

    
    
11. Episode 1150, 6.35 pm, Thursday, 18 September 1969
    
    Meg: “Why didn’t Malcolm confide in me?”

    Sir Geoffrey: “I’m offering you a lifeline. You must take it.”
    
    No cast given.

    
    
12. Episode 1151, 6.35pm, Friday 19 September 1969
    
    Meg: “Are you certain he doesn’t need any stitches?”
    
    No cast given.
The audio of this episode survives.
    
    
13. Episode 1172, 6.35 pm, Tuesday 28 October 1969
    
    Mrs Grey: “That’s why I’m here.”
    Malcolm: “Because of me.”
    
    Cast: Noele Gordon (Meg Richardson); David Davenport (Malcolm Ryder); Patricia Greene (Mrs Grey); Susan Hanson (Diane Lawton); Ann George (Amy Turtle); Peter Boyes (Nick Van Doren); Michael Anthony (Col. St Clair); Joy Andrews (Mrs Hope); Jane Rossington (Jill Richardson); Denis Gilmore (Terry Lawton).

    
    SCRIPT DAVID WHITAKER: DIRECTOR ALAN COLEMAN: PRODUCER REG WATSON
    
    
    
    
    
14. Episode 1173, 6.35pm, Wednesday 29 October 1969
    
    Jill: “Thick quickly, Uncle Dick, because I mean what I say.”

    
    No cast given.

    
    
15. Episode 1174, 6.35pm, Thursday 30 October 1969
    
    Diane: “Why don’t you order champagne?”
    Terry: “A beer’s not going to break us is it?”
    
    Cast: Elisabeth Croft (Miss Tatum); Peter Brookes (Vince Parker); John Henderson (Mr Meddows); Joy Andrews (Mrs Hope); Ann George (Amy Turtle); Susan Hanson (Diane Lawton); Beatrice Shaw (Mrs Seymour); Peter Boyes (Nick Van Doren); Jane Rossington (Jill Richardson); Brian Kent (Dick Jarvis); Denis Gilmore (Terry Lawton); Brian Hankins (Derek Maynard); David Davenport (Malcolm Ryder).
    
    
16. Episode 1175, 6.35pm, Friday 31 October 1969
    
    Gypsy: “Shall I read what the cards say for you, Lady?”
    
    Cast: Noele Gordon (Meg Richardson); David Davenport (Malcolm Ryder); Brian Hankins (Derek Maynard); Ann George (Amy Turtle); Peter Boyes (Nick Van Doren); Peter Brookes (Vince Parker); Susan Hanson (Diane Lawton); Patricia Greene (Mrs Grey); Malja Woolf (Gypsy); Beatrice Shaw (Mrs Seymour); Denis Gilmore (Terry Lawton); Joy Andrews (Mrs Hope); John Henderson (Mr Meddows); Elisabeth Croft (Miss Tatum).
    
    
17. Episode 1188, 6.35 pm Tuesday 25 November 1969
(Crossroads now in colour)
    
    No quotation
    
    Cast: Joy Andrews (Mrs Hope); John Gatrell (Commander Boone); Denis Gilmore (Terry Lawton); Sally-Jane Spencer (Caroline Boone); David Davenport (Malcolm Ryder); Peter Boyes (Nick Van Doren); William Avenell (Mr Lovejoy); Elisabeth Croft (Miss Tatum); Peter Brookes (Vince Parker); Eva Wishaw (Tessa Wyvern); David Sherwood (Danny Conroy); Jane Rossington (Jill Richardson).
    
    SCRIPT BY DAVID WHITAKER: DIRECTOR ROLLO GAMBLE: PRODUCER REG WATSON.

    
    
18. Episode 1189, 6.35 pm, Wednesday, 26 November 1969
    
    Terry: “The Commander? He didn’t land me this one?”
    
    Cast: Noele Gordon (Meg Richardson); Eva Whishaw (Tessa Wyvern); Susan Hanson (Diane Lawton); Jane Rossington (Jill Richardson); Ann George (Amy Turtle); Peter Boyes (Nick Van Doren); Gillian Betts (Josefina Rafael); Joy Andrews (Mrs Hope); Denis Gilmore (Terry Lawton); William Avenell (Mr Lovejoy); David Sherwood (Danny Conroy); David Davenport (Malcolm Ryder); Patricia Greene (Mrs Grey); Jack Haig (Archie Gibbs).
    
    WRITER DAVID WHITAKER: DIRECTOR ROLLO GAMBLE: PRODUCER REG WATSON
    

19. Episode 1190, 6.35 pm, Thursday, 27 November 1969
    
    Archie: “Do you want to make £100?”
    
    Cast: Noele Gordon (Meg Richardson); Susan Hanson (Diane Lawton); Jack Haig (Archie Gibbs); David Sherwood (Danny Conroy); Eva Whishaw (Tessa Wyvern); Peter Boyes (Nick Van Doren); David Davenport (Malcolm Ryder); Peter Brookes (Vince Parker); Joy Andrews (Mrs Hope); Brian Hankins (Derek Maynard); Jean Aubrey (Kathy Knight); Jane Rossington (Jill Richardson); Neville Hughes (Peter Hope); William Avenell (Mr Lovejoy); Patricia Greene (Mrs Grey).

    
    
20. Episode 1191, 6.35 pm, Friday, 28 November 1969
    
    Amy: “Oh yes… here, he’s not leading you astray is he?”
    
    Cast: Noele Gordon (Meg Richardson); Peter Boyes (Nick Van Doren); William Avenell (Mr Lovejoy); Susan Hanson (Diane Lawton); Jack Haig (Archie Gibbs); Ann George (Amy Turtle); Joy Andrews (Mrs Hope); Gillian Betts (Josefina Rafael); David Davenport (Malcolm Ryder); Elisabeth Croft (Miss Tatum); Peter Brookes (Vince Parker); Neville Hughes (Peter Hope); Brian Hankins (Derek Maynard); Jean Aubrey (Kathy Knight); Jane Rossington (Jill Richardson); Eva Whishaw (Tessa Wyvern); Patricia Greene (Mrs Grey).

    
    
21. Episode 1209, 6.35 pm, Tuesday, 30 December 1969
    
    Mr Lovejoy: “Your way is not the only way.”
    Mr Booth: “Your way is certainly not the right way.”
    
    Cast: Noele Gordon (Meg Richardson); Jacqueline Stanbury (Joanne Peterson); Roger Tonge (Sandy Richardson); David Lawton (Mr Booth); William Avenell (Mr Lovejoy); Susan Hanson (Diane Lawton); David Sherwood (Danny Conroy); Peter Boyes (Nick Van Doren); Joy Andrews (Mrs Hope); Neville Hughes (Peter Hope); Nadine Hanwell (Marilyn Hope); Nicola Davies (Angela Davy); Beatrice Kane (Miss Davey).


    
    WRITER DAVID WHITAKER: DIRECTOR ALAN COLEMAN: PRODUCER REG WATSON

    
    
22. Episode 1210, 6.35 pm, Wednesday, 31 December 1969
    
    Eve: “Do you remember I told you Michael was out of the country?”

    Mrs Hope: “Yes.”

    Eve: “Diane met him at the El Dorado.”
    
    Cast: Roger Tonge (Sandy Richardson); Jacqueline Stanbury (Joanne Peterson); William Avenell (Mr Lovejoy); Susan Hanson (Diane Lawton); Nadine Hanwell (Marilyn Hope); Neville Hughes (Peter Hope); Joy Andrews (Mrs Hope); Toni Sinclair (Eve Baker); David Sherwood (Danny Conroy); Ann George (Amy Turtle); Peter Boyes (Nick Van Doren); Jane Rossington (Jill Richardson); Nicola Davies (Angela Davy).

    
    
23. Episode 1211, 6.35 pm, Thursday, 1 January 1970
    
    Mr Booth: “Mr Lovejoy’s quite an elderly gentleman, isn’t he?”
    
    Cast: Noele Gordon (Meg Richardson); Claire Davenport (Miss Worbeck); Jacqueline Stanbury (Joanne Peterson); David Lawton (Mr Booth); Peter Boyes (Nick Van Doren); William Avenell (Mr Lovejoy); Roger Tonge (Sandy Richardson); Susan Hanson (Diane Lawton); Toni Sinclair (Eve Baker); Joy Andrews (Mrs Hope); Neville Hughes (Peter Hope); Nadine Hanwell (Marilyn Hope); Nicola Davies (Angela Davy); Peter Brookes (Vince Parker).

    
    
24. Episode 1212, 6.35 pm, Friday 2 January 1970
    
    Michael: “Take a look in the mirror sweetheart, and give yourself a shock.”
    
    Cast: Noele Gordon (Meg Richardson); Peter Brookes (Vince Parker); Joy Andrews (Mrs Hope); Toni Sinclair (Eve Baker); Paul Greaves (Michael Phillips); Roger Tonge (Sandy Richardson); Jacqueline Stanbury (Joanne Peterson); Claire Davenport (Miss Worbeck); Nadine Hanwell (Marilyn Hope); Neville Hughes (Peter Hope).

    
    
25. Episode 1225, 6.35 pm, Tuesday 27 January 1970
    
    Eve: “How much will you pay me to tell my story to your paper?”
    
    Cast: Toni Sinclair (Eve Baker); Joy Andrews (Mrs Hope); Michael Mundell (Marcus Allison); Susan Hanson (Diane Lawton); Nadine Hanwell (Marilyn Hope); Neville Hughes (Peter Hope); Peter Brookes (Vince Parker); Peter Boyes (Nick Van Doren); Ann George (Amy Turtle); Doreen Keogh (Mrs Candour); Cleo Sylvestre (Melanie Harper).
    
    WRITER DAVID WHITAKER: DIRECTOR ROLLO GAMBLE: PRODUCER REG WATSON.

    
    This was a notable episode, featuring the introduction of new regular character Melanie Harper, played by Cleo Sylvestre (who had also had a role in David’s 1965 Doctor Who story The Crusade). Sylvestre later recalled:
    
    “Enoch Powell had been making those terrible ‘Rivers of Blood’ speeches, which resulted in a lot of racial tension up and down the country, especially in cities like Birmingham. Reg [Watson, producer of Crossroads] must have picked up on this, and decided to create one of the first regular black characters in a British soap… Melanie Harper was Meg’s adopted daughter who, until then, had never been mentioned. Melanie arrived from France, where she had been studying, and viewers just accepted her. It was great. It was wonderful.
    
     “At the very end of an episode, I walked into the motel with a suitcase and rung the reception desk bell. The receptionist came out and I said 'Can I speak to Mrs Richardson, please?’ and she said ‘Yes. Who shall I say is asking for her?’ I replied, ‘Tell her it’s her daughter.’ And then the music came up. What a cliffhanger! This was the first time Meg’s other daughter had been mentioned.” - Cleo Sylvestre, interviewed by Stephen Bourne as part of ‘Soap Queens’ at the NFT, 2001
     

26. Episode 1226, 6.35 pm, Wednesday, 28 January 1970
    
    Peter: “The Bishop wants to see me as soon as possible.”
    
    Cast: Noele Gordon (Meg Richardson); Cleo Sylvestre (Melanie Harper); Peter Brookes (Vince Parker); Susan Hanson (Diane Lawton); Ann George (Amy Turtle); Toni Sinclair (Eve Baker); Doreen Keogh (Mrs Candour); David Sherwood (Danny Conroy); Joy Andrews (Mrs Hope); Michael Mundell (Marcus Allison); Neville Hughes (Peter Hope); Nadine Hanwell (Marilyn Hope).
    

27. Episode 1227, 6.35 pm Thursday, 29 January 1970
    
    Meg: “I’ve had some news about Malcolm, Mrs Grey—you’re the only one I can talk to.”

    
    Cast: Noele Gordon (Meg Richardson); Neville Hughes (Peter Hope); Nadine Hanwell (Marilyn Hope); Joy Andrews (Mrs Hope); Toni Sinclair (Eve Baker); Susan Hanson (Diane Lawton); Peter Brookes (Vince Parker); Peter Boyes (Nick Van Doren); Doreen Keogh (Mrs Candour); Cleo Sylvestre (Melanie Harper); Ann George (Amy Turtle); David Sherwood (Danny Conroy); William Sherwood (The Bishop); Patricia Greene (Mrs Grey).
    
    
28. Episode 1228, 6.35 pm, Friday, 30 January 1970
    
    Mrs Hope: “Angela, either you do come, or I’ll say what I have to say to your aunt… and to the police.”

    
    Cast: Noele Gordon (Meg Richardson); Toni Sinclair (Eve Baker); Joy Andrews (Mrs Hope); Peter Boyes (Nick Van Doren); ; Cleo Sylvestre (Melanie Harper); David Sherwood (Danny Conroy); Michael Mundell (Marcus Allison); Nicola Davies (Angela Davy); Patricia Greene (Mrs Grey); Doreen Keogh (Mrs Candour); Neville Hughes (Peter Hope); Nadine Hanwell (Marilyn Hope); Beatrice Kane (Miss Davy).

    
    
29. Episode 1241, 6.35 pm Tuesday, 24 February 1970
    
    Eve: “He’s still critically ill. I could have helped him you know. He begged me—and I refused.”
    
    Cast: Noele Gordon (Meg Richardson); Kevin Frazer (Rex Drayton); Susan Hanson (Diane Lawton); Cleo Sylvestre (Melanie Harper); Peter Boyes (Nick Van Doren); Jon Kelley (Frank Adam); Toni Sinclair (Eve Baker).
    
    WRITER DAVID WHITAKER: DIRECTOR JACK BARTON: PRODUCER REG WATSON

    
    
30. Episode 1242, 6.35 pm, Wednesday, 25 February 1970
    
    Meg: “There’s only one way to get some sanity into this motel and that is to set fire to everyone and start all over again.”
    
    Cast: Noele Gordon (Meg Richardson); Susan Hanson (Diane Lawton); Cleo Sylvestre (Melanie Harper); Joy Andrews (Mrs Hope); David Sherwood (Danny Conroy); William Avenell (Mr Lovejoy); Jon Kelley (Frank Adam); Peter Boyes (Nick Van Doren); Toni Sinclair (Eve Baker); David Lawton (Mr Booth); Kevin Frazer (Rex Drayton).

    
    
31. Episode 1243, 6.35 pm, Thursday 26 February 1970
    
    Nurse: “You really shouldn’t have come back, Miss Baker. I did say we’d get in touch with you if there was any change.”
    
    Cast: Joy Andrews (Mrs Hope); Toni Sinclair (Eve Baker); Peter Boyes (Nick Van Doren); William Avenell (Mr Lovejoy); David Sherwood (Danny Conroy); Ann George (Amy Turtle); Lee Clark (Delivery boy);  Kevin Frazer (Rex Drayton); Cleo Sylvestre (Melanie Harper); Susan Hanson (Diane Lawton); Sarah Child (Nurse).
    

32. Episode 1244, 6.35 pm, Friday 27 February 1970
    
    Melanie: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    Diane: “When I woke up in the middle of the night you were missing.”


    
    Cast: Cleo Sylvestre (Melanie Harper); Susan Hanson (Diane Lawton); Peter Brookes (Vince Parker); David Sherwood (Danny Conroy); Jon Kelley (Frank Adam); Toni Sinclair (Eve Baker); Joy Andrews (Mrs Hope); Ann George (Amy Turtle); David Lawton (Mr Booth); Deidre Costello (Rita Mayne); Peter Boyes (Nick Van Doren).

When Atticus wrote the Sunday Times piece published on 8 March, David Whitaker had stopped working for Crossroads only very recently. We don't know the circumstances under which he left the programme but around this time other people who employed David received poison-pen letters about him. Did such letters reach ATV and hasten his departure? If so, is there something knowing, even crowing, about the Sunday Times saying that he “used to write for Crossroads”? 

Whatever the case, David Whitaker left just before the arrival of a new writer on Crossroads. Philip Hinchcliffe's first episode aired on ATV on 21 April 1970.

Holiday Sketches exhibition at Senate House

Exciting news! The clever Dr has curated an exhibition which opens this Saturday, 1 February, and runs until 14 March, at Senate House in London.

Holiday Sketches: Two Female Artists and an Archaeologist Husband go on Holiday, 1863, is about the trip made to Rhodes (as well as Athens, Ephesos and Istanbul) by artist Ann Mary Severn Newton and the teenaged Gertrude Jekyll, in the company of Mary's husband Charles. He was an archaeologist, the trip related to his work for the British Museum. 

You can find the exhibition on the 3rd floor of Senate House, University of London - just as you come out of the lifts, by the library of the Institute of Classical Studies. If you can't make it (and even if you can), the Dr has also produced an accompanying fanzine. 

For more of this sort of thing, she previously wrote the book, From the Harpy Tomb to the Wonders of Ephesus - British Archaeologists in the Ottoman Empire 1840-1880 (Bloomsbury, 2008) and continues to dig into all this, especially the life of Mary. You can keep up with her researches on her blog.

Someone from the Past, by Margot Bennett

Nancy Graham, 26 year-old magazine writer and the narrator of this novel, is out for dinner with her fiancee Donald when they bump into Susan Lampson. Nancy used to share a flat and work with Susan but they’ve not seen each other in a while. To complicate matters, Donald used to go out with Susan and when she left him tried to shoot himself.

Now Susan is marrying someone else — but, she tells Nancy, she’s received a threatening note from an ex. Susan wants Nancy, who kept notes in shorthand on Susan’s love-life when they lived together, to seek out her exes and find out who is making trouble. It might be the convicted thief Peter or the poet Laurence or the vain actor Mike… Nancy is sure it can’t be Donald.

When Susan is murdered, Nancy’s first thought is to ensure that the police don’t suspect her fiancee. But in tidying up the crime scene to protect Donald, she incriminates herself…

This is a fantastic return to form by Margot Bennett after the disappointment of Farewell Crown and Good-bye King. It’s at least as good as The Widow of Bath and probably better, my favourite of her books that I have read so far. I can see why it won the Crime Writers’ Association ‘Crossed Red Herrings’ award — since renamed the Gold Dagger (and presented to Bennett by JB Priestley) — and why Bennett was, in 1959, elected to the Detection Club. Fast-moving, twisty and suspenseful, this keeps us guessing to the end. Even the very last paragraph takes an unexpected turn.

In his introduction, Martin Edwards quotes Bennett herself on what made this and The Man Who Didn’t Fly “my best books”. The latter,

“had an unusual plot and a set of people I believed in. In the same way, Someone from the Past had five characters I might have met anywhere. The best of all my people was the girl Nancy. She was kind and cruel, and loyal and bitchy. She was a ready liar, with a sharp tongue, but she was brave and real. All through my books, the best I have done is to make the people real.” (pp. 9-10, citing John M Reilly (ed.), Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers)

Nancy is a compelling protagonist. We never know what she might do next. She is observant and reckless, intelligent and yet capable of extraordinary folly. Sometimes she tries to fix things in ways we can see (and want to shout) will only make things worse. But we are with her all the way as she faces multiple dangers.

As so often with Margot Bennett, characters attracted to one another bicker and fight, but here the stakes are raised because any one of these men Nancy is winding up could be the murderer. Whether or not they did for Susan, they can be violent with Nancy, or treat her appallingly in other ways. In fact, she is not the only woman here who puts up with variously crap men.

This British Library Crime Classic edition, first published in 2023, is subtitled “a London mystery” and it boasts a few good descriptions of places such as Soho. More than that, it offers an extraordinary snapshot of the mores of 1958, the year the novel was originally published. As well as a lot of smoking and drinking, there’s a surprising nonchalance about drugs. Tired and wound-up after a row with Donald, Nancy tells us:

“I knew I should take a couple of strong sleeping-pills. They would give me four hours’ sleep, and a heavily-doped morning that would make work impossible, unless I took a stimulant. After that, a couple of tranquilizing tablets would level me up for the day.” (p. 37)

She has all of these to hand as, a few pages later, she offers them and “a confidence drug” to her fiancee, who tells her he’s already taken “knockout pills” (p. 45). These, we learn, are “blue things, sodium amytal” (p. 47). Elsewhere, Nancy seems familiar with benzedrine. The drug-taking is part of the plot (one suspect was apparently doped and unconscious at the time of the murder) but also part of everyday life. 

I’m intrigued by elements of the novel that Bennett may have drawn from her own (fascinating) life, such as her years as a writer for the magazine Lilliput (while her husband Richard Bennett was editor).

“From the moment that I got the job on the Diagonal Press and scrawled out my first paid illiteracies I saw myself as a great writer, one who kept notebooks and would soon be guest of honour at literary luncheons.” (p. 27)

Again, the notebooks are part of the plot but I wonder how much this attitude — to her earlier work and to her career — matched Bennett’s own. When the murder case bears down on Nancy, the publisher she works for offers her a chance to get away with a job in Spain (p. 248). Is that a nod to Bennett’s own history, as she served as a nurse (and publicist) in Spain during the civil war?

Then there is what the novel says about Television, which in those days still had a capital T. Bennett had already made her debut as a TV writer: her one-off drama The Sun Divorce (dir. Philip Savile) was shown as part of London Playhouse on the ITV network Associated-Redifussion on Thursday 26 January 1956, just four months after the launch of ITV. Writing of Someone from the Past must have overlapped with the agreement of rights for a TV adaptation one of her earlier novels: The Man Who Didn’t Fly, starring William Shatner and Jonathan Harris, was adapted by Jerome Coopersmith and broadcast by NBC in Canada on 16 July 1958.

Since it was made and broadcast in Canada, Bennett probably had little involvement in this and she may never have seen it. But, excitingly, we can watch that production of The Man Who Didn’t Fly on YouTube. It even enjoys a bit of a following because it stars both William Shatner and Jonathan Harris, later stars of Star Trek and Lost in Space respectively. 

Margot Bennett was soon writing for TV herself, with work on ATV soap opera Emergency-Ward 10, perhaps making use of her own nursing experience. IMDB credits her on 15 episodes of the soap, broadcast between Tuesday 23 September 1958 and Friday 22 May 1959. The implication is that she moved into soap opera soon after completing work on this novel.

By the time she finished on Emergency-ward 10, Bennett had made the switch to BBC — and more prestigious drama — with her six-part adaption of her novel The Widow of Bath, which began transmission on 1 June 1959. But Someone from the Past suggests she was already familiar with the mechanics of BBC television more than a year before that.

In the novel, actor Mike Fenby, presumably used to late nights on stage followed by late mornings (as described in Exit Through the Fireplace), complains of the “brutal creatures” of “Terrivision” who have him up at “ten o’clock” in the morning for rehearsals in Shepherds Bush — which is where the BBC was based. 

“And you should see, I really wish you could see, the producer. Temperament! He thinks out the sets with a kind of telescope, and when he wants to concentrate, he blows bubbles. … He has a tin. He shakes the bubbles off with a bit of wire. They help him to relax. When they burst, they cover the floor with slime, like invisible banana skins. There’s practically no one in the cast who hasn’t a sprained ankle or a broken neck. You ought to see us, skidding about the place.” (pp. 39-40). 

That “telescope” was a director’s viewfinder, enabling the director to see how much of the actors and set would be visible through different diameter lenses, and to plan and block their shots ahead of studio recording. Viewfinders had been in use since at least 1938: the Tech Ops site boasts a clipping from Radio Times that year, a photo of one in use and some other details. But this is not the sort of thing people outside the world of TV were likely to know about,.

Actor Mike can escape from rehearsals for lunch with Nancy at one o’clock, suggesting “a pub called the Blue Unicorn”, which is surely a play on the real-life White Horse at 31 Uxbridge Road, where I’ve also sometimes met up with actors. (For those with an interest in the drinking habits of old TV people, the late Alvin Rakoff says in his memoir of working for the BBC in the 1950s that after recording at Lime Grove he’d take the crew for a pint at the end of the road, in the British Prince at 77 Goldhawk Road.)

Later, Mike can’t believe Nancy didn’t see his TV performance go out.

“‘I thought you might have been interested enough to watch me on the new medium.’

‘It’s a fairly old medium by now, isn’t it?’

‘But Nancy, this was terrific. I’m a brain surgeon, you see, who takes to drink, and just when I’m having a terrible fit of the stagers, my former loved one is wheeled in with her brains dashed out. I’m supposed to shake so much, the forceps clash together like a steel band as I approach the operating table. The trouble was that I really was shaking so much I dropped the whole kit of instruments on her face. It was Sylvia, you know, she’s got a shocking temper, I cracked the porcelain jacket on one of her front teeth, she’s going to sue me. If I hadn’t got between her and the cameras and ad-libbed, the viewers would have heard every word she said. You certainly missed something. It will be in all the papers tomorrow.” (p. 95)

There’s a lot of interest here (to me): Television no longer a novelty, favouring melodramatic productions in which the viewer might enjoy the emotional crisis of characters in close-up, all within the lively, stressy chaos of live broadcast. The depiction is a bit pointed, even satirical — as is Mike buying up all the papers to bask in the contradictory reviews — but the details are all right, and so surely based on direct observation.

Did Margot Bennett have first-hand experience of BBC drama production when she wrote Someone from the Past, more than a year before her first writing credits at the BBC? Her husband had worked in BBC radio since the war and also sometimes wrote for listings magazine Radio Times, such as his interview with Jimmy Wheeler ahead of a TV comedy show in May 1956. Yet it seems unlikely that Margot tours of TV rehearsals through that connection. 

More probable, I think, is this came through her own efforts. Was she meeting with BBC people about writing for TV, and getting tours of production, long before her first screen credit there? Or perhaps, like Nancy, Margot Bennett simply met an actor friend for lunch while they were in rehearsals…

Whatever the case, and for all Bennett might have mocked TV drama, something extraordinary happened after the publication of Someone from the Past. Despite the accolades it won, she never published another crime novel. According to her family (and detailed in the introduction to the British Library edition of The Man Who Didn’t Fly), she didn’t earn enough from novels to continue; crime didn’t pay. Instead, she spent the next decade writing prolifically for TV.

More investigation to follow...

Novels by Margot Bennett:

• Time to Change Hats (1945); Away Went the Little Fish (1946); The Golden Pebble (1948); The Widow of Bath (1952); Farewell Crown and Good-bye King (1953); The Long Way Back (1954); The Man Who Didn’t Fly (1955); Someone from the Past (1958); That Summer’s Earthquake (1964); The Furious Masters (1968)

Non-fiction by Margot Bennett:

• The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Atomic Radiation (1964) 

Truth & Dare, by So Mayer

“The funny thing is that getting the morning-after pill the first day of a zombie apocalypse is really no easier or harder than on a previously average day. No bigger a deal, the obstacles are just… different. More slow-moving, brain-eating hordes, sure, but fewer overtly religiose or obstructive pharmacists. The baseball bat I brought to use in case of the former was also effective on the triple-lock cabinets erected by the latter.” (p. 224)

This is a rich, intoxicating anthology of 19 short stories and musings. Several of the stories are set in the near future, such as the one in which the invention of new kinds of artificial dick leads, through one thing and another, to the collapse of capitalism. Other stories spiral backward — to the pogrom in York in 1190, to The Black Cap gay pub, to the narrator’s own history. There are ghost stories and ghostly stories, and a lot of it is strange and unsettling.

The last story, Dune Elegies, is one of several set in a bleak near-future, a world just beyond our current grasp. The narrator, “terfed off” their own radio show, takes up residence in a lighthouse near the stone mirrors at Denge and continues to transmit a podcast, but with a pervasive sense of lost connection. The narrator is unable to recall the names of Conrad Veidt and Derek Jarman while detailing their importance in queer history — we fill in the blanks as readers. Then there’s a response from listeners to the podcast, transmission of which triggers something in stones taken from the area, wherever they might be now. It’s such an odd, beguiling idea, the sort of story that sits with you long afterwards.

As well as what’s happening, there’s the way these stories are told, dense with allusion and word play, poetry and punning. There are references to films and TV shows, novels and academic texts — I’d have quite liked a bibliography and/or end notes for further reading. It’s not just that stuff is referenced; it is toyed with and spun. For example, one passage about the lives of particular pirates includes the phrase “our flag means life” (p. 229) reversing the title of the 2022-23 TV series while at the same time making a connection to its own exploration of sexuality and identity.

We frequently explore derivation and etymology, how meaning is constructed, generating history and identity. With that in mind, I think the cut-up technique of quotations and references may be a way of shaking things up to create new meanings and ideas. That took me back into my own past when, as a university student some three decades ago, I got hooked on linguistic relativity and the so-called “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” that language shapes or even determines our thoughts and perceptions.

(In fact, it’s an axiom, not a hypothesis, and not one put forward by the linguists Sapir and Whorf as such, who never wrote together. But perhaps that makes it more fitting as a label, evidence that we need a name, any name, to be able to remonstrate with an idea.)

It’s not just about words in the stories here: in dreams of being Joan of Arc and her insistence on wearing trousers, or in detailing why Artemis wore a short skirt, we’re exploring the construction of gendered and non-gendered identities.

By chance, I was reading this as I saw the new documentary From Roger Moore With Love, which details how movie-star “Roger Moore” was an invented persona; Moore learned to play this persona and then, from The Spy Who Loved Me, applied that to his role as James Bond. At one point, Moore’s friend Christopher Walken says this shouldn’t be a surprise because we’re all self-invented people — there’s a point in our lives, perhaps more than one, where we choose who we are. How fascinating to see archive interviews with Moore uncomfortable with the violence and misogyny of Bond or — in an episode of Hardtalk which so yielded something new from its subjects — voicing concern about the “heroic” image of his Bond wielding a gun. I’m not sure I’d have picked up on that if I’d not been reading this book…

Like the world of James Bond, the stories in this book are frequently lusty, even graphic. But Bond is about gratified desire, sex just part of the mix with exotic locations, stylish clothes, fancy food and gadgets. In the book, desire is, I think, less external but bubbling up from within. There’s a lot here on the bloody, visceral heft of bodies — of ourselves not just as contracted identities but as physical things.

“What it means to be in a body, differently, is what the Crusades take aim against,” (p. 61).

So much of this book is exploring that haunting idea, the half of the sentence before “is” and the sentence as a whole.

You can buy Truth & Dare by So Mayer direct from Cipher Press.

Farewell Crown and Good-bye King, by Margot Bennett

After so enjoying Margot Bennett’s 1952 crime novel The Widow of Bath, I plunged into her next novel, a thriller first published in 1953. It’s not nearly as good, yet full of things of interest.

The plot is quite involved so I’ll endeavour to explain the set-up. In the first chapter, we meet wealthy Barry and Vanessa Bone as they return home late from a posh party, arguing about the cheque for £2,000 that Barry has just given Roger Maple. The money, insists Barry, is as an investment in a new railway in an eastern European country called Ardania, where copper has been found; Maple is a friend of the local king.

A young woman called Kate Browning returns home from the same party and admits to her sober, level-headed sister Julia that she overheard Maple and the Bones, got mixed up in their conversation after she claimed to know the king as a friend of a friend, and has herself invested £100 in the scheme. Yet Kate believes that the money is an investment in a deal to distribute Ardanian oil.

Vincent and Frances Roydon were also at the party. Vincent is features editor of the Vigilant newspaper, which is ironic as he, too, has been hoodwinked by Maple, investing £250 that he can ill-afford in what he thinks is a paper-making scheme to exploit Ardania’s plentiful soft woodlands.

In the second chapter, we meet Maple himself, calling in on his old friend Duncan Stewart, an impoverished documentary film-maker who finds £250 to invest in what Maple describes as a scheme to dam Ardania’s Lixaman Falls and supply hydroelectric power across the border. 

By now the reader is sure of what Duncan only suspects: that all of this is a scam. Maple conspicuously leaves the remains of a letter from a mystery woman, Elvira, in Duncan’s wastepaper bin and then heads off to meet his wife, Jenny Maple, so they can leave the country.

He promptly disappears. Jenny tells Duncan that her husband stood her up but she refuses to go to the police, even as days turn to weeks without word from him. Duncan instead meets the other hoodwinked investors and together they investigate what has been going on. Their first move is to try and meet up with Ardania’s former king, now living in London under the name Mr Forster and busy trying to agree the sale of his unrivalled collection of paintings by Vermeer…

That is just the start. This is all fiendishly complicated and yet the mystery at the heart of it I very quickly guessed, not least because the fictional, mittel-European country of Ardania put me in mind of The Prisoner of Zenda. As with The Widow of Bath (and the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of Silver Blaze), the behaviour of a dog is an important clue — in this case, the telling feature is that the dog does bark. But I think the whole thing might have been more effective if the dead body found in water late on in the novel happened much earlier on, with these people then all involved in solving a murder, not just trying to retrieve their investments.

Even so, the novel is full of brilliant details and Bennett shows her usual sharply observational eye. Roger Maple, before he disappears, is a beguiling rogue with a neat line in tradecraft. For example, he advises Duncan Stewart not to buy beer on credit from his local shop:

“It gives you a reputation of being hard up, and in your own street, too.” (p. 22)

It doesn’t matter that Duncan is hard up; the important thing is appearance. Maple instead recommends being bold and try cashing a cheque for £100 in the same establishment to give a contrary impression. Then there’s the artful way Maple gives the names of his other investors — Bone, Browning and Roydon — to sufficiently impress Duncan that he wants to put in money himself, while thinking this is his own idea (p. 28). In doing so, the author also provides Duncan with leads to follow when Maple disappears, bringing the different investors together to compare stories and so form a bond. That is elegantly, effectively done.

Speaking of bonds, I wondered at first why Duncan was so easily taken in by Maple, given he’s such an evident rogue. How did these two so very different men ever become friends? Just as I wondered this, the answer came: on p. 34 we’re told that they were in the army together. The implication is that this formed an unshakeable bond between two people otherwise from completely different worlds. Now I wonder how relatable that would have been to readers of the time, so soon after the end of the war and with National Service ongoing. I’m aware that the services threw together people from different backgrounds and classes who might never otherwise have met. But I’d never thought of the lasting relationships so created, akin to friends made on holiday that you can’t then shake, but with a stronger, faced-death-together connection.

Another contemporary insight is Duncan’s own frustrations. As a filmmaker, he’s keen to find truth, avoid cliche and to document ordinary, real life. There's a sequence late on where he’s being briefed on an advert for serial. When he offers his view on how to lift this above cliche, he is told “This is meant to be an advertising, not an art film” (p. 166) — though the implication is that his suggestions will be taken on and will prove effective.

This and the sequence where Roydon is faced with the sack, apparently on the whim of the publisher, may reveal something of the real-life experience of the author, or her husband who was editor of Lilliput between 1943 and 1950, when Margot wrote regularly for it. How much could the Bennetts do what Roydon does here, his threat to take a scoop to a rival publication earnings him promotion and a raise? My guess is that this was wish fulfilment, even revenge for real life.

On another occasion, Duncan rails against the nannying welfare state, in much the way as might the protagonist of novels from the same year such as Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale or Nevil Shute’s time-travelling In the Wet.

“‘I can’t leave the country, drive a car, open a shop, buy a pound of butter, not without permission. There are places where I can’t cross the road until a policeman lets me. I know I’m a man and not a unit,’ he said satirically, ‘because I’m allowed to register a vote for Holborn Borough Councillors. I’d like to do something more. I’d like to find Roger and not just run bleating to the police. I’d like to be a man on my own.” (pp. 62-63)

But Duncan isn’t alone; the whole wheeze of the book is that it’s an investigation by a group of amateur detectives, all from different backgrounds but linked by common cause. Though Duncan crave adventure of a John Buchan/Richard Hannay sort, it is Roydon who enjoys racy antics abroad.

There are lots of fun supporting characters, best of all Derek Vaughn, the burglar battling with his own conscience. Here’s a typical monologue from him, all sex and violence and comedy:

“When I was a lad, I was one of the roughest types on God’s earth. I’ve done five years for rapping a harmless old woman on the head. But I used my time to educate myself, and before the end I was the prison librarian. Some of the least educated men used to be great readers They’d get me to mark off the dirty bits for them, and even if it was just the lights going out or a description of a woman’s brassiere they’d read it till the page dropped off. That way, sir, I gradually got a lot of them interest in literature for its own sake.” (pp. 73-74)

Something of this echoes in a later sex scene just kindling as a chapter ends:

“She drew his hard, reluctant body closer to her and held his head against her soft, generous breasts. She soothed him with her loving, expressive hands until he was utterly relaxed in the ambience of her kindness. He was weak, and knew for the first time the peace that comes from abandoning the painful disguise of strength.” (p. 217)

How different, I thought, to the gruff, masculine perspective of bonking in Fleming or Shute, sex as surrender rather than attack. And yet, this sex is also victory, an accomplishment and something got away with for the lover who is married to someone else. 

That is more interesting than the way the novel ends for Duncan, rejected by one woman so he immediately proposes to another. We leave him and his fiancee on an ostensibly happy note, but the cold exchange of one woman for another simply doesn’t sit right. The Widow of Bath neatly tied up all the threads of its plot and added an unsettling coda to haunt us after the close of the book. The ending here is is unsettling because it is unsatisfactory, not quite tying things up. The basic trick behind this novel isn’t as clever or as satisfying as her last book, and it’s not quite so well done.

Bennett followed Farewell Crown and Good-bye King with two novels both published in 1955 which I’ve already read: unconventional mystery The Man Who Didn’t Fly and the science-fictional The Long Way Back; my friend Matthew Sweet calls the latter her masterpiece. I’ll be back to read what’s considered the best as well as the last of her detective novels, Someone From the Past (1958).

Missing Believed Wiped 2024

I had a lovely day out on Saturday at the BFI’s Missing Believed Wiped event(s), where we got to see an assortment of old telly that had been thought lost. These events are always a thrillingly eclectic mix, some items really good and some plain boggling. Usually, it’s made up of stuff that has been returned to the archives over the preceding year but here that rule had been a little extended to include some special items.

Session 1, which was dedicated to the memory of Rory Clark, began with Jo Griffin telling us about the restoration work done on LWT comedy series The Complete and Utter History of Britain (1969). Two episodes of this were previously known to exist, then last year the whole lot was suddenly up on Britbox, to the amazement of my archive telly pals. It turns out that the other episodes had been misfiled, all as “episode 2”.

We watched episode 6 of 8, originally transmitted on 16 February 1969. Colin Gordon is the straightman, a sort of news anchor bridging comic skits based on historical moments, all in chronological order. In this case, we covered from Guy Fawkes (here lighting a fireworks display of Catherine Wheels) to Oliver Cromwell (being interviewed on a chat show, insisting he is popular while the audience throws things).

It was often very funny, such as the expert historian describing the execution of Charles I who ends up killing a member of the audience, or Michael Palin’s impression of David Frost as he interviews Terry Jones as Cromwell... as Edward Heath. Best of all, the episode ended with a sort of trailer for the next one, with a load of quick-fire visual gags. It was also often very well staged and shot, notably in the fun sequence of a witch (Jones) getting her spells wrong.

(ETA: I misunderstood some of what we were told. Seven episodes were made of the series but the first two episodes were then edited together, making a broadcast series of six. We saw the final, sixth episode, the closing sequence therefore trailing an unmade second series to come. The six broadcast episodes survive, as do the first two episodes in their original form before they were cut down, making a total of eight surviving episodes.)

Afterwards, Michael Palin and producer Humphrey Barclay were interviewed on stage. Palin seemed gratified by the response — not least because, on broadcast, John Cleese rang him up to say the series wasn’t very good. Instead, Cleese invited Palin and Jones to collaborate on something else, which of course ended up being Monty Python. Palin was funny about this and the context in which the programme was made, and classy in acknowledging the excellent job done on restoration by Jo Griffin and her team.

Next up was a compilation provided by my mate Ed Stradling from TV Ark of some otherwise missing telly he’s found by looking through old VHS tapes. This included Andrew Sachs as Manuel from Fawlty Towers chaotically cooking paella on Pebble Mill At One, and a bit of a New Year’s Eve programme from the late 1970s, with two comedians dragged up as Scottish policewomen trading bawdy jokes in front of a police box that then dematerialises.

(ETA: The comedians were apparently Jack Milroy and Rikki Fulton, at the time known for playing teddy-boys Francie and Josie; the policewomen in the sketch were Nancy and Rosie. This all went over my head.)

This was followed by an episode of trendy magazine programme A Whole Scene Going from 16 February 1966, in which a documentary crew visited three contrasting parties — one very posh and staid, another more down at heel — followed by a studio interview with the hosts, one of them a young Annie Nightingale. They discussed what made a good atmosphere and how to cope with people being drunk and sick. It was a fascinating snapshot of the time, loaded with assumptions about class and status, and all achingly awkward. 

So was an interview with Dudley Moore and Shirley Anne Field, who answered “Agony Aunt” style questions about dating, such as whether it was all right to kiss at the end of a first date. Marianne Faithful was filmed at home and then live in the studio, responding to fans’ repeated displeasure that she’d got married and had a baby. Presenters, guests and audience were all so oddly nervy, none of them knowing quite how to be in front of a camera, the way people now take for granted. The sense was of precocious, well-spoken children, squirming in their seats while nervously seeking approval.

We finished the first session with an episode of Six More Faces of Jim, in this case The Face of Fatherhood from 15 November 1962. The wheeze of the series (and the preceding Six Faces of Jim) was that each episode featured Jimmy Edwards as a different role and situation — effectively a series of sitcom pilots. This episode was a bit different: a TV version of the radio skit The Glums from the 1950s, with Mr Glum (Edwards) seeking to thwart the engagement of his son Ron (Ronnie Barker) to Eth (June Whitfield). It was fun, though I felt that it maybe under-served Edwards by having him play so closely to type.

Eth is a spirited character, laying down the law to Ron and snapping back at selfish Mr Glum. That, I think, was particularly notable after the lack of speaking women’s roles in The Complete and Utter History and the rather demure women in Scene (at one point, an audience member complained that Marianne Faithful’s marriage meant he could no longer consider her angelic, and she nodded along rather than punching him).

With barely enough time to wolf down a burrito, we hurried back in for Session 2, this time comprised of material recovered by Film is Fabulous. I’ve long been in awe of this project, which is really focused on ensuring that film collectors leave provision so that their collections don’t end up as landfill. But that has in turn led to a scheme to catalogue the contents of a number of collections, which has led to the discoveries of some otherwise missing telly. 

John Franklin and Simon Nicholls from Film is Fabulous gave us some background and announced some new finds: a Jackanory-style programme called Storyteller from September 1956 presented by Elizabeth Beresford years before she created the Wombles and illustrated by Tony Hart; and three episodes of Douglas Fair Banks Junior Presents, also from the late 1950s.

We were then treated to something called Disc Jockey from 1960 or 1961: a series of filmed performances of pop songs, all in very good quality. Jimmy Lloyd performed “I Double Dare You” on a set that looked like a New York apartment, with well dressed young people smouldering at one another, including a black man and white woman. Another song saw Frank Ifield getting very close to a young woman in a coffee bar. Later, a young woman at the window of her house in America sang about liking the young man loitering outside though her parents wouldn’t approve. For all the lightness of the pop song, behind her there was a rifle on the wall suggesting the risk posed to the would-be amore. The whole lot felt potent and rich, and I’d love to know more about this programme.

This was followed by a series of clips from found programmes, including a thrilling sequence from Mogul: Is That Tiger, Man? (30 April 1966) in which Tiger (Michael Coles) dons scuba gear to fix an oil-pipe in shark-infested waters while being taunted by gruff bully Peter Thornton (Ray Barrett) and cooed over by Steve Thornton (Justine Lord). When the sharks come close, Tiger surfaces too quickly and gets the bends; Thornton coldly insists he be thrown back into the water to recover. This and the scene of Alec Stewart (Robert Hardy) was all of the cross business-tycoon type that I remember once being so much part of TV drama until it was basically killed off by parody in A Bit of Fry and Laurie’s John and Peter (“Dammit John!”) — but what we saw here looked great.

We then got an episode of Tom Jones! (with exclamation mark) from 3 April 1967, comprising songs sharing a given theme, in this case Work. This ranged from a daft sequence of professional dancers fooling about in a kitchen to Jones as a miner, or working on a chain gang, or driving a truck while singing “Hard Day’s Night”. Yet when guest Maxine Brown sang about a woman’s (domestic) work, the gag was that Jones was doing the dishes, coming on with a tea towel which Brown handed back to him at the end of their flirty duet.

Finally, there was an episode of The Basil Brush Show from 20 November 1970, the CSO effects evidence that it was originally made in colour, for all it survives in black and white. The oddest thing about this, I thought, was how poorly it was pitched to the live audience of children (in their school and cub scout uniforms, all dressed up to be on TV). As Mr Derek (Fowlds) struggled not to corpse, Basil rattled off quips at the expense of women, trades union and foreigners. For example, when told he talks too much, he says it’s an inherited trait because his father was an auctioneer, his mother a woman. “Fucking hell,” responded the bloke just in front of me.

Some of the jokes earned a laugh, from the audience on screen and at the BFI, but it was notable how much less a response it got than The Complete and Utter History earlier that same afternoon. Discussing this afterwards in the bar, I wondered how much it was following the conventions of stand-up, taking as read How Jokes Are Done. So often, what makes old telly so extraordinary is the way it reveals these kinds of now-lost convention, things once taken for granted, perhaps not even thought of, that now seem so peculiar. Puzzling over these things is what makes an event like this so compelling. Television is such an intimate, immediate form, we have a particularly vivid means of travelling back in time.

Thanks to Robert Dick and Ian Farrington for catching some of what I missed, and to Dick Fiddy and the team at the BFI.

See also:

• Me on Missing Believed Wiped 2007
• Me on Missing Believed Wiped 2010
• My current work-in-progress: an episode guide to mostly missing BBC adventure series Garry Halliday (1959-62)