Raymond Cusick

Raymond Cusick has rightly been hailed for his design of the Daleks for the original Doctor Who story in which they appeared in December 1963, only the second serial in its very first season. It was a design to which that much abused and overused term ‘iconic’ can for once be confidently and accurately applied. As ever with BBC productions of the time, there was a good deal of contingency involved, practical considerations of cost, time and utility playing a role in what was eventually produced. Terry Nation’s original intention, backed up by producer Sydney Newman’s determination to avoid ‘bug-eyed monsters’, was to create something which steered clear of the usual man in a rubber suit clichés of monstrous SF aliens (clichés which Dr Who would later wholeheartedly embrace, often to great effect, and on occasion not). Nation’ descriptions in his script were left vague; he described machine-like creatures moving on a cylindrical base with mechanical arms and a lens eye on a flexible stalk. Cusick took this basic scripted thumbnail sketch and set to creating a workable model. He originally thought of a straight cylinder, which really would have looked like the mobile dustbins which the Daleks were later to be characterised as. But he realised that this would be distinctly uncomfortable for actors who would have to stand stooped inside for considerable period of time. It would be far better for them to be seated, which would also make them easier to operate. The leg room thus required led to the forward flaring expanse of their ‘skirts’, which, with the inspired addition of the half-tennis ball bumps giving it a textured design, had the appearance of a thorax separate from the dome-capped ‘head’. This gave some sense of a body, which added to the terror they inspired: they were alien, but not wholly other. It’s a characteristic which Steven Moffat cleverly exploited in a recent story which played on the horror of being forcibly turned into one of them. The angular thrust of their skirt also added to the menace of the dalek glide, lending its leading edge the aspect of a plough, designed to cast aside all in its path.

Daleks vs. Mechanoids - The Chase

The grilled ‘neck’ beneath the shiny skull cap also played a practical part, allowing the encased actor to see out, whilst the flashing ‘ear’ lights (perhaps the Daleks’ only cute feature) were added so that it would be clearer which one was talking (or shouting, as tended to be the case with these irritable creatures). The lights would be flicked on and off by the actor inside in morse-like flashes corresponding to the lines being spoken. The actor could also operate the whisk-like gun, which Cusick added, and also gesticulate with the sucker. As director Richard Martin ruefully recollects, the plunger was a matter of contingency. They wanted some sort of mechanical arm, but the budget was already at full stretch, so they had to make do with what they could find lying around – a sink plunger (which no doubt still had to be accounted for). This served as an all-purpose if rather impractical hand. Ironically, this underwhelming facet of the Dalek design was the first we ever saw of them, as they menaced Barbara at the end of the first episode before being fully revealed at the beginning of the next. A magnet was attached beneath the black rubber sucker so that it could carry metal trays. In the first Dalek story, one of the creatures brings in some food on a tea tray to the Doctor and his imprisoned companions, thus proving for all time that this was an alien invented by an Englishman. Rob Shearman would later make effective play with years of mockery occasioned by the plunger in his Dalek story in the revamped Russell T Davies series. A soldier unwisely takes the piss and finds out exactly what the sucker is capable of in a horrific scene which ensures that the appendage will never be seen in the same jokey light again.

Dalek vs. Dracula - The Chase

The Daleks were an immediate success, in no small part due to their immediate visual impact, their classic profile so to speak. Cusick must have looked on with a certain amount of weary resignation as he saw his original work licensed out to become a phenomenal marketing success from the mid 60s through to the seventies. Die cast toys, board games and play costumes were mass produced to meet insatiable public demand. Whilst his design might have been distributed in a wide variety of forms throughout the households of Britain (and beyond), as a jobbing staff designer at the BBC he presumably saw not a bean of the considerable profits accrued over the years. Of course, if people wanted to replicate the actual Dalek, the mutated mess which lurked within the protective metal casing, they could have done so in a budget fashion following that taken by Cusick. The slimy claw briefly seen protruding from a tarpaulin covering the corpse Ian has scooped out of the decommissioned Dalek’s lid was the hand from a joke shop gorilla costume smeared in Vaseline.

The first monster - petrified Magneton

His contributions to Doctor Who went well beyond the fashioning of the Daleks, however. He worked as a designer on the programme for a little over 2 years, from December 1963 through to January 1966, when he bowed out in style no the epic 12 part Dalek story The Daleks’ Master Plan. With his work for The Mutants, the serial later to be known as The Daleks, he can lay claim to having created a number of Doctor Who firsts: its first alien, a rather charming chameleon-like creature with upright eye stalks called a Magneton, whose dead husk the Doctor and his companions chance upon (he would later design another alien with snail-like eyestalks for the Keys to Marinus, this time rising from that pulp SF classic, the squirming brain in a bell jar); its first alien environment, the petrified forest on Skaro, whose haunted strangeness is economically conveyed through some trails of white lattice-like growths; and the first alien city, the Daleks’ metropolis. This looks magnificent, and only a cynical curmudgeon or someone whose senses are oversaturated with digital dazzle, leaving them unwilling to expand upon the model in their own imagination, would point out that it was evidently just a collation of toothpaste tube lids, plastic screws and box corner reinforcers.

Dalek City - knick-knack dystopia

Its interiors also feature Doctor Who’s first corridors, walled with a semi-reflective material which gives it the look of some alien alloy. The running down corridors aspect of Doctor Who was later to become something of a cliché, but it was used so much because of its simple effectiveness (and, of course, because it was economical). The suspense is heightened when something might appear around the corner at any moment. Cusick cleverly pointed to the fact that this city had been constructed with non-human needs in mind by making the doorways oval and low-lying. He also created an alien symbology, with dials and controls covered with ‘pie-chart’ designs. Futurity was indicated, 60s style, by the use of a lot of Perspex, with blinking lights and diodes behind suggesting complex computational functions in constant operation. Cusick would also make impressive use of Perspex in The Keys to Marinus, with the giant machine brain which provides the calculating judicial Conscience of the planet represented by a large transparent platonic solid, an all-knowing, all-seeing dodecahedron.

Perspex mind - the conscience machine in Keys to Marinus

Cusick seemed to specialise in the more science fictional aspects of the first two series, mostly leaving the historical backdrops to others. His broken down spaceship in The Rescue had the kind of deglamourised shoddiness which would later be a feature of the Nostromo in Alien (and Ridley Scott was a BBC designer at the same time as Cusick). He created another spaceship as working environment for the Sensorites, a story for which he also imagined another convincingly alien city. The climax of The Rescue featured a particularly effective and atmospheric set – the Dido temple, with its columnar row of smoking braziers, draped tapestries and its round table and altar decorated with Aztec-style designs. In low light shone through drifting smoke, this looks very impressive indeed. Cusick also explored the domestic quarters of the Tardis in the third story, Inside the Spaceship (or The Edge of Destruction). Curved plastic beds descend from the walls, and there is an automatic food dispenser which synthesises whatever is programmed in. Shades of the Nutrimatic in The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, although no one asks for a cup of tea. He also designed the Tardis’ rather unwieldy ‘fault locator’, a bank of instrumentation which took so much effort to set up that it soon quietly disappeared.

Ian and Barbara inspect the drains in Planet of the Giants

One of his greatest triumphs can be found in the oversized sets he designed for the Planet of Giants, which outshone the rather dull story in which they featured. A miniaturised Doctor, Susan, Barbara and Ian make their way through rocky canyons which turn out to be the gaps between garden paving stones, and come across dead specimens of ants and earthworms. Later, Ian and Barbara unwisely climb into a the cavernous interior of a briefcase and are carried into a laboratory. Here, there is a great aluminium sink set, with very convincing plughole and adjacent plug with linked chain. There is also a king-sized spiral-bound notebook, a tangled slope of cloth-insulated phone wires and a mighty telephone handset, as well as a match on the scale of a caber, which Ian and Susan heave up like battering ram, taking a short run-up to strike it against the side of a shed-sized matchbox.

Viewing the Op Art caves - The Chase

Cusick did design the sets for one of the historical Whos, however: The Romans, which encompassed a rather impressive villa, a stretch of Roman road, a marketplace, various rooms of the Emperor Nero’s court, prison and a galley slaves’ rowing deck. All of this with a budget which was fiddling change in comparison with the money thrown at the Taylor/Burton Cleopatra a year or so earlier, and which would make Carry On Cleo look like a lavish epic. Perhaps his greatest challenge came with two series whose episodic nature required multiple sets, often of an elaborate nature. The Chase finds the Doctor, Barbara and Ian pursued by the Daleks across space and time, stopping off on a desert planet, Aridius (the vaulted, labyrinthine underworld of which is impressively Piraneisian); the top of the Empire State Building (where Peter Purves does a hilarious turn as a stereotypical Texan before turning up later as a completely different character, Steven, who would become one of the Doctor’s companions for the next year), the Marie Celeste (a well-realised ship’s deck set); a haunted house complete with gothic monsters and paraphernalia, which turns out to be an abandoned, robot-populated fun fair, Frankenstein’s House of Horrors (and it’s great fun seeing the Daleks confronting – and getting a pasting from – Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster and freaking out at a wailing female ghost); and finally, the planet Mechanus. Here, there are some entertaining giant ambulatory mushrooms which envelop any who linger too near with their umbrella-like caps; some great op-art caves; and a fantastic alien city which follows the fungoid theme by resembling something that has grown from rotting humus. It looks like something that Roger Dean might have drawn for a 70s Yes album cover (triple gatefold, of course). There's a miniature shot I particularly enjoy here of a model mechanoid travelling across the arcaded bridge between the cliffs and the main city. Cusick also gives us a mechanical adversary for the Daleks, the Mechanoids, which resemble trundling Faberge eggs. There’s a great climactic battle between the two, taking place on another excellent city interior set, which of necessity involves a lot of intersecting ramps along with white arching architecture which makes it all look like the bisected section of a seashell.

Prog rock cities - The Chase

This was all tremendously demanding, with much being expected in a short space of time. The scriptwriter, Terry Nation, had also put Cusick through his paces on an earlier story, The Keys of Marinus. Here, the plot coupon structure requires the gathering of various segments of a key to gain control of the powerful conscience machine before the Doctor, Barbara, Ian and Susan can leave the planet. This meant that Cusick had to develop and build a completely new environment for each episode. There was the initial island of glass surrounded by an acid sea (another fantastic model alien environment), with a pyramid atop a mountain containing the all-powerful machine; a beach spiked with shards of black glass (and with some rather nifty one man submarines beached upon its shores – Perspex, of course); a lavish palace and banqueting hall; a trap laden laboratory in a tropical region which is besieged by carnivorous plants; ice caverns, economically achieved by using cellophane shot in low reflective light; and a museum, courtroom and city interiors. Considering the time strictures, with the erection of sets, run throughs and filming of each episode required to be completed in one day, this was asking an incredible amount.

Isle of glass in an acid sea - Keys of Marinus

Cusick outlined his approach as being a matter of ‘beg, borrow and steal’. This is put to great effect in the palace scene, in which he has evidently raided the historical props department to create a motley scene of decadent excess. He also enjoys wrecking it, showing the tawdry and dilapidated reality which lies behind the hypnotic illusion implanted in the minds of the questing travellers. A comment on extensive use of illusion which he had to resort to achieve what was required of him, perhaps. Cusick noted that Nation tended to be a bit vague when it came to specific description in his scripts. He would, he said, write something along the lines of ‘they enter a white featureless room’. When he asked Nation about this, he told him that it was up to him to supply the detail. There is indeed a scene in Keys of Marinus in which Ian and the Doctor walk into a blank, featureless room, its only prop a battered table and a rusty tin cup. Under the hypnotic spell of the aliens who run the place (those brains with protruding eye stalks mentioned earlier), they see what we don’t – a fantastically well-equipped (cyclotrons and all) phantom laboratory. Maybe Nation was having a little self-effacing dig at his own shortcomings here.

Far from armless - Ian fails to approach idol with due caution in Keys to Marinus

Cusick also designed a marvellously fierce-looking idol for the tropical episode, which grabs the curious who approach too closely and swivels round to deposit them in a secret room beyond. Cusick had wanted mechanical arms, but had to make do with real ones thrust through convenient holes. There’s never any doubt that they’re real, and that they will obviously come to life, but the whole thing still looks pretty good. Cusick, ever his own harshest critic, and recollecting things with unsentimentally acerbity, observed that it ‘didn’t quite work, but it was cheap’. His assessment of his work on Keys of Marinus, an experience which he evidently felt was absurdly overdemanding, was particularly damning. Asked whether he was proud of anything he’d done on the story, he replied, with the air of a true perfectionist, ‘I can really say no’. I’d say he was wrong, and that he had much to be proud of there and elsewhere.

Michael Chabon and Scream Queens on the Radio

There have been some interesting things on the radio over the past few days. On the BBC Radio 3 programme Night Waves on Monday Michael Chabon joined presenter Matthew Sweet to discuss his new novel Telegraph Avenue (it’s about seven minutes in). A reading from the book focussed on the character of Mr Nostalgia, a peddler of collectible ephemera, bubblegum cards in particular, selling people encapsulated fragments of their past. This led to a discussion about nostalgia and retromania, and the power of certain artefacts or pieces of popular art (songs or movies) to briefly bring about a sense of completely inhabiting a recollected past. As Mr Nostalgia reflects, the reverently preserved relics of throwaway culture, the bubble gum cards, model kits and spin-off boardgames he casts his slightly worldweary eye over, whilst they have no intrinsic value other than what people are prepared to pay for them, offer the possibility that what has been lost (a past which has acquired an Edenic aura in the mind) can be restored, if only for a briefly ignited moment. Chabon likens the powerful talismanic artefacts and mantric sounds which Mr Nostalgia and his Telegraph Avenue record shop proprietors seek out and sell to drugs, allowing the individual to access a layer of consciousness beyond the day to day awareness of the temporal instant, to defy the conveyor belt of linear time. As with any drug, it can prove addictive, its effects dangerously alluring. Sweet points out that nostalgia used to be classified as a medical condition up until the 1870s or 80s, the ‘algia’ part having its Greek roots in the word ‘algos’, or pain.

Chabon confesses that his own perspective on collecting and pop cultural obsessiveness is one of ‘helpless approval’, not to mention active participation. He goes on to discuss Doctor Who with Sweet, and the two immediately hit it off, sharing their in-depth knowledge of the series in the very manner which Chabon celebrates in his essay The Amateur Family, included in his recent collection Manhood For Amateurs. The word geek is avoided, as Chabon notes its negative connotations and contemptuous usage in his essay, and he’s not comfortable with the way ‘fan’ suggests an indiscriminate and narrowly uncritical focus, so he settles instead on the notion of enthusiastic amateurs. The essay also charts his Doctor Who obsession, which sprang from his love of the new series and his inherent need to then go on and discover the entire history of its fictional universe, watching stories all the way back to William Hartnell’s first appearance in 1963. He shares his extensive explorations of this expansive world with his children, who are soon sporting Dalek and Cybermen t-shirts, and they all enthusiastically engage in a conversation with a fellow fan in a museum, cued by his question ‘is that a Dalek?’ Reflecting on the way that fandom allows this intense and detailed enjoyment of a popular artwork (as he refers to it) to be shared with others, he comes to see the link between it and family life. Both are the domain of the passionate amateur, in which a shared world is explored and discussed, its limits tested and its familiarity alternately cherished and challenged. They provide a model through which the wider world can be better understood.

Holmesian Who - Tom Baker in The Talons of Weng-Chiang

Sweet asks Chabon who is his favourite Who from the past, and he opts for Tom Baker, apologising for the obviousness of the choice. Baker was the actor who most notably impinged on the American consciousness, and appeared with the greatest regularity on their screens, so he is partly drawing on youthful recollection. Harlan Ellison provides a good American perspective on the series in his 1979 introduction to the US editions of the paperback novelisations, noting that ‘we’re only now being treated to the wonderful universes of Who here in the States’. He remembers being introduced to it in 1975 by Michael Moorcock, the first year in which Baker took on the role, so he could even have begun with the classic Genesis of the Daleks story (than which he could have had no finer introduction). He testifies to his wholehearted conversion, calling the show ‘the apex, the pinnacle, the tops, the Louvre Museum, the tops, the Coliseum, and other etcetera’, and praising it as being ‘sunk to the hips in humanism, decency, solid adventure and simple good reading’. The Doctor, he suggests, has the same universal appeal as Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan and Superman. Chabon holds up the Baker era as the one in which the greatest balance between between whimsy and pleasurable terror was struck. He specifically expresses his enjoyment of a Sherlock Holmesian adventure set in Victorian London, which Matthew Sweet immediately and enthusiastically identifies as The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Sweet too has come out as a Who fan, and provided a witty and well-informed documentary for the Invasion of the Dinosaurs dvd, a 1974 Jon Pertwee adventure which he puts into its wider political and cultural context (the birth of modern environmentalism and the fear of right-wing coups by private armies). ‘We’re on the same wavelength, Matthew’, Chabon remarks, ‘a nightwave’.

Night Terrors - Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad

They also discover a shared interest in the ghost stories of MR James (who is also mentioned in the previous article, about the worrying plight of the ash tree). Chabon has written an essay on James, included in his collection Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands, and taking into account his enthusiasm for Sherlock Holmes (who is the subject of another essay in the collection), there appears to be a definite Anglophone tendency to his literary tastes. Sweet suggests that Chabon’s record collectors and dealers in ephemera are like James’ antiquaries, with a similarly single-minded absorption in their quest, which leaves them vulnerable to attendant dangers, whether psychological or supernatural. Chabon insists upon the blamelessness of James’ scholarly protagonists, suggesting that part of the horror of the stories lies in their moral arbitrariness. These harmless dabblers (more enthusiastic amateurs) do nothing to deserve the terrible fates which befall them. Sweet mischievously points out that Professor Parkins, the amateur archaeologist of Chabon’s favourite James story, ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, does earn the terrifying visitation of the spectre which forms itself from his bedclothes, since he mistranslates the Latin inscription on the bronze whistle which he unearths from an old Templar site on the bleak East Anglian shore. Or rather, it is an omission of scholarly thorougness. As ST Joshi points out in his annotated Penguin Classics edition of James, the inscription Quis Est Iste Qui Venit is adapted from Biblical verse (Isaiah 63:1 to be precise) and is correctly interpreted by Professor Parkin as meaning ‘who is this who is coming’. But he neglects to decipher the further marks etched into the ancient metal, Fur Fla Bis Fle, before impulsively blowing the whistle, producing a sound with ‘a quality of infinite distance in it’. Joshi alludes to the varying interpretations of the word fragments by literary scholars before opting for the Latin phrase ‘Fur, flabis, flebis’ as the most apposite. Translated, it means ‘Thief, you will blow, you will weep’. Undue haste and overeager carelessness in drawing conclusions are certainly academic sins, but the mind-cracking supernatural encounter which Parking suffers as a result certainly seems incommensurate with the original infraction.

Sweet and Chabon also discuss the notion of crossover characters, fictional creations who migrate from one story world into another. Science fiction and fantasy seem particularly adept at such wholesale import and export of established figures. Chabon continues to use Doctor Who as an exemplar, citing Captain Jack’s appearances in the new series, after having been established in Torchwood, and the Doctor’s in the Sarah Jane Adventures. He also proposes that Barack Obama is essentially a fictional character in the manner he and others have constructed his persona and presented itself to the American public, and that his appearance in Telegraph Avenue is therefore in the nature of a crossover. The grey parrot who crops up in Telegraph Avenue has also crossed over from Chabon’s short novel The Final Solution. This is a subtly devastating story which (as the title cryptically hints) conflates a portrait of an elderly Sherlock Holmes (never actually named, but readily identifiable to anyone who knows the Holmesian oeuvre) coping with physical and mental decline and the terrible, bureaucratic logic of the European death camps, whose spectre places him in a very different world from the Victorian and Edwardian environs he once surveyed with an all-encompassing eye. The new Moriarties have come aboveground, developed a political philosophy and taken control. The grey parrot, chattering out seemingly random sequences of numbers, holds the key to the mystery, one last case for the great detective to solve – a solution which will swallow up the last vestiges of his old world in a dark moral abyss. Sweet points to the fact that Chabon’s literary universe now contains both Sherlock Holmes and Barack Obama. Chabon makes the intriguing observation that the two have some affinity, a reference perhaps to the president’s perceived cool intellectual aloofness which has not proved popular with the portion of America which expects a more bullish assertiveness from its leaders. Who knows where this interest in crossover characters within his fictional worlds will take him. It’s started with a parrot, maybe it will develop into the kind of vast, teeming multiverse of Michael Moorcock’s fictional worlds, with their increasing retrospective ordering of an initially chaotic profligacy of genre-migrating characters, and the occasional appearance of ‘real’ people. Chabon can also be heard talking to Alex Fitch down a slightly distorted phone line on the Resonance FM Book List programme, the conversation starting about 40 minutes in.

Delphine Seyrig - Daughter of Darkness

On Tuesday, Reece Shearsmith presented the Radio 4 programme Scream Queens, looking at the role of women in horror films over the decades, but particularly in the golden age of British horror from the 50s through to the early 70s. The League of Gentlemen writer and performer isn’t the only one to have paid homage to his love of classic horror. Mark Gatiss made an excellent, very personal three part history of British horror films for BBC4 a couple of years age, and is soon to present its follow up, which will focus on the European horror film tradition. This single 90 minute film, called Horror Europa, is being previewed at the bfi on 28th October, with Gatiss present for a Q&A session afterwards. The bfi programme summary promises that the documentary will range from ‘the nightmare visions of German Expressionism to the black-gloved killers of Italian Giallo movies, from Belgian lesbian vampires to the ghosts of the Spanish Civil War’. So it sounds like we can expect a lineage tracing Murnau and Dreyer (Nosferatu and Vampyr) to Mario Bavo and Dario Argento, Harry Kumel’s deliciously decadent Daughters of Darkness (and possibly also his wonderfully surreal and dreamlike Malpertuis) to Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth. Shearsmith’s approach is a little more flippant than Gatiss’, the latter managing to combine an evident affection for the films with an essentially serious approach to the material (which doesn’t preclude him having a bit of fun with some of the film’s more preposterous elements).

Barbara Shelley - Dracula Prince of Darkness

Shearsmith’s documentary, light and a little frivolous though it may be, does offer the pleasure of gathering together several actresses from British horror films of the 60s and 70s, Hammer and otherwise. It was particularly good to hear from Barbara Shelley, who recalls that her unpretentious desire upon becoming an actress was to entertain and amuse. She was initially wary of the horror roles she was offered, before coming to realise that these films achieved precisely that aim. She seems proud of her status as a Hammer icon, and claims that horror roles were in many ways more demanding than ‘normal’ ones. She recalls doing more research (in this case being into Greek mythology) for her role as Carla/Megaera in the Gorgon (one of her finest performances and a rare leading part) than for any other. Questioned about her dual role in Dracula Prince of Darkness, in which she is transformed by the Count’s infectious kiss from a primly repressed Victorian lady into a sensual vampiric temptress, she admits that she actually preferred the more ‘starchy’ parts, since they required a more restrained form of acting. But it’s this very restraint, the subtly conveyed air of a character holding some part of herself in, which makes her transitions into wild abandonment so compelling. Her wailing levitation under the influence of the pulsating force of the awakening Martian pod in Quatermass and the Pit is absolutely electrifying. These transitions can be equally powerful in reverse, too. She cites her death scene in Dracula Prince of Darkness as the moment in her film career of which she is most proud, her wild, hissing, animalistic ferocity instantly receding into peaceful repose as the stake is forcefully hammered in (an uncomfortable scene which has often been likened to a sexual assault).

Innocence and Experience - Madeleine Smith and Ingrid Pitt

Shearsmith also talks to Madeleine Smith, who came to Hammer quite late and featured in such films as Taste the Blood of Dracula, The Vampire Lovers and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell. She talks, with the amused tolerance of someone remembering water which has passed under and well beyond the bridge, about the indignities she was obliged to put up with in an era in which Hammer was beginning to expose more flesh, and to make a sexuality which had been left largely implicit emphatically explicit (although not as emphatically as some of its seedier rivals, it has to be said). She puts this new emphasis on sex down to co-financing of The Vampire Lovers by AIP (American International Pictures) and the arrival of producers Michael Style and Harry Fine, who she says followed her around everywhere in order to ensure that they were getting the kind of film they envisaged. The BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) head John Trevelyan was sufficiently bothered about the script’s lesbian content that he contacted Sir James Carreras, the well-connected father figure of the Hammer ‘family’, asking him if he could try to temper the excesses of these upstart newcomers and ‘keep this film within reasonable grounds’. Carreras played the literary adaptation card, pointing out that the lesbianism was present in Le Fanu’s source story Carmilla (who lent the central character her name, if nothing else), which Trevelyan seemed to accept. A reading from Le Fanu’s story in the programme reveals that it does indeed possess a heady, narcotised atmosphere of decadent eroticism, remarkably so for the time of its writing (1872). Madeleine Smith professes to have been completely naive at the time the film was made, which helped to see her through, and her obliviousness to what was going on, and the nature of the parts she was required to play, gives her characters an authentic and affecting appearance of innocence. There was no such reticence or naivety about Ingrid Pitt, whose rich Eastern European accent is heard in an archive interview (hearing it makes you wonder why on earth her lines were overdubbed in Countess Dracula). She had no problem with nudity since, as she proudly proclaimed, ‘I had a wonderful body’.

The cult of Linda - Blood On Satan's Claw

Linda Hayden, who had to do a nude scene in Blood on Satan’s Claw in which she attempts to seduce the village vicar (as played by Anthony Ainley, later to exchange the cloth for the villain’s black of The Master in Doctor Who) in his church, also professes to have been unabashed at such a requirement, partly due to her respect for director Piers Haggard, whose work on the film she unreservedly praises. Despite its lurid title, Blood On Satan’s Claw is a haunting, beautifully shot evocation of a pastoral England infected with a malign spirit which seems to distil the cruel and vicious elements of the natural world. Hayden is chillingly effective as the leader of a rural cult in an isolated woodland village, her possession by a devil churned up piecemeal from the ploughed over earth signified by a wolfish thickening of her dark eyebrows Hayden is also very good in the 1969 Hammer film Taste The Blood Of Dracula as the daughter of one of a trio of Victorian ‘gentlemen’, seduced to the dark side by Christopher Lee’s Count in a story which exposes the hollow hypocrisy of their moral authority. Hayden embraces her vampiric nature with wholehearted abandon, fully conveying the sense of liberation from Victorian strictures which it brings.

Ingrid as Le Fanu's Carmilla - The Vampire Lovers

Madeleine Smith and Pauline Moran, who played the Woman in Black in Nigel Kneale’s 1989 TV adaptation of Susan Hill’s short novel, both decry the lack of leading roles for women both in horror and in the acting profession in general. Moran works for the actor’s union Equity, who have recently been working to redress this imbalance. Horror, whilst it frequently reduces women to the role of sacrificial victim or predatory vamp, has also provided some excellent opportunities for female actors. The Vampire Lovers and Countess Dracula may have been born out of Hammer’s attempt to compete with the exploitation market, but Ingrid Pitt puts in towering performances in both, bringing a touch of pathos and longing to her monstrous characters which earns them a degree of sympathy. She reflects that she was probably best suited to horror films, and that if she somehow strayed into a romantic comedy ‘I would probably kill him’. Leading female characters such as Irena in Val Lewton’s Cat People (played by Simone Simon) and Miss Giddens, the governess in The Innocents (played by Deborah Kerr), trailers or excerpts from both of which are heard in the programme, are richly ambiguous and psychologically complex, offering challenging and demanding roles for the actor (and both Simon and Kerr give fine performances).

Gloria Holden - Dracula's Daughter

Gloria Holden in Dracula’s Daughter (a neglected minor gem in the Universal canon) and Elsa Lanchester in Bride of Frankenstein are also held up as exemplars of women who have created memorable female characters in horror films. Lanchester’s bride may be onscreen for only a few moments, and she doesn’t so much scream as hiss and spit, but her impact is unforgettable. Holden brings an unworldly, deeply melancholic quality to her cursed character, bringing a tragic dimension to the story. It’s interesting that both she and Irena in Cat People are subject to the interrogations of a psychiatrist looking to find the true subconscious origins of their afflictions – the underlying metaphor of their monstrous natures laid bare for a few moments. Irena ends up killing her psychiatrist in leopard form, however, which clears up that case. As a more modern example of a complex female protagonist, neither victim nor one-dimensionally feisty and all-competent heroine, Shearsmith mentions The Awakening, in which Rebecca Hall plays Florence, a sceptical ghost hunter. Shearsmith offers the intriguing insight that an early draft of Stephen Volk’s script revealed this character to be Flora, the little girl from The Innocents, all grown up but still working through the trauma of her experiences.

The Woman In Black - Pauline Moran

Pauline Moran’s performance as the hateful spirit of The Woman In Black, a revenant bent on revenge, was extremely effective. As she points out, she is only seen five times in the course of the film, but each appearance makes an indelible impression. She recalls the scene, which Shearsmith remembers as being possibly the most terrifying he has seen on any television programme, in which the woman in black descends on the hapless solicitor, marooned on his sick bed. She floats impossibly through his window and approaches him in a glide which seems to bring her looming endlessly forward without ever quite arriving. Moran reveals the mechanics of the filming of this spectral visitation, and the effect her appearance had on the normally fairly hardbitten crew; they all instinctively leaned away from her as she was pulled towards them on the dolly tracks, the wind machine blowing her hair and black cloak back behind her. She produced her bloodcurdling scream not as a full-throated bellow, but as a long-drawn out ‘eeeeeeee’ from the front of her mouth, held in a rigid rictus; a terrifying sound which seemed to draw on ancestral Celtic memories of banshee death wails in the dead of night. It was still utterly hair-raising even just coming out of the radio. Moran, Madeleine Smith and Barbara Shelley were united in their dislike for modern developments in the genre, which they see as having becoming coarser and more explicitly violent. Moran sees no reason why classic period horror shouldn’t find a place in the modern cinema landscape, however. The recent success of the revived Hammer’s version of The Woman In Black, for all its flaws (and they are, to my mind, manifold) shows that there is an appetite for such fare. And perhaps Hammer is the studio to provide it once more.

Scream Queens is part of the Gothic Imagination series of programmes on Radio 4. This week also saw the start of a new adaptation of Bram Stoker’s hugely influential novel Dracula. There is an immediate sense of redundancy to such an undertaking. The story has been told so many times before, and by now there’s a definite sense of strain in the search for a new way in which it can be approached. This is actually a fairly straight ‘classic’ interpretation, acted with period drama correctness, and offering little that is new. A degree of familiarity is almost assumed here, and the narrative appears at times to be unfolding with a retrospective air. The limitations of radio are exposed at times, or rather are not sufficiently overcome. Parts of the action are awkwardly conveyed by characters pointing them out: Lucy commenting on the Demeter’s dramatic storm-tossed beaching n Whitby Harbour (‘look, there’s a man on deck – he’s lashed to the wheel’, etc.) and Dr Seward’s ‘Ah, you’ve cut me’ in reaction to a knife attack from Renfield. Dracula is obviously a difficult role to take on, with the temptation to fall into the mannerisms of renowned Counts from the past hard to resist. He is presented here as an old man with a long white moustache, a welcoming, slightly creaky East European who seems disarmingly ordinary. The sexual nature of his predation on Lucy, which is brought out by lines such as ‘you must ask me to enter you’, and by the breathy moans which accompany his supping of blood, is rather undermined by this initial image of an ageing, slightly avuncular figure, full of mild complaint. It makes this Dracula seem more of a dirty old man than a dark seducer of the Christopher Lee variety (or even a stage mesmerist in the Lugosi mould). The sound design for the scenes of blood drinking is also decidedly odd, with an exaggerated ripping sound followed by a loud, stickily fluid bubbling. Perhaps it is intended as an expressionistic effect, but it verges on the inadvertently ridiculous, Dracula sounding like a loud and messy eater. Similarly, Renfield’s lapping up of blood from the floor is done with such an emphatic slurp that it sounds like he has produced a handy straw from about his person to hoover it all up. The action so far has reached Lucy’s death. Again, overfamiliarity has rendered the repeated attempts at reviving her through blood transfusions a little tedious. We know she’s not going to survive, so the whole process seems a little drawn out. Don’t let me put you off entirely though. There are also things to enjoy here. The performances are solid and the script a clear and faithful rendering of Stoker’s story (Christopher Lee would approve). The interjection of moments of interior monologue give depth to characters who can appear a little one-dimensional on the page, and make them more sympathetic. Dracula will be followed by an adaptation of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. Given that her novel is far less familiar to the modern reader, this may prove more fruitful material for adaptation. Perhaps, for now, it’s time to put the Count to bed. He’s earned a long, long sleep.

Mary Tamm

It’s been a year or so of terrible mortality for actors playing Doctor Who companions. First Elisabeth Sladen, then Caroline John and now Mary Tamm. Tamm played Romana alongside Tom Baker’s Doctor in the 1978-9 season. She followed on from Louise Jamieson’s hugely popular Leela, a hard act to follow. Leela had been written out in a disappointingly underwhelming fashion. The noble, fearless savage deciding to settle down and marry a man she had only just met! The producers wanted Elisabeth Sladen to return as Sarah Jane Smith, but she was firm in keeping her distance from the character (for the time being). The choice of Tamm came once the decision had been made to make the Doctor’s new companion a fellow time traveller. She was initially suspicious of the whole idea of the female companion, believing that it would too easily devolve into the standard passive role assigned women in adventure stories, the woman in peril or the admiring observer of heroic male deeds. Having been assured that this would not be the case, she accepted the part. Romana was indeed a character of great intelligence and cool assurance, the polar opposite of Leela’s hot-headed primitive. She was imposed on the Doctor at the beginning of his quest to find the Key To Time, a clumsy contrivance which grafted a story arc onto stories which would otherwise have stood as individual adventures. The Time Lords assigned a reluctant Doctor to search for the fragments of this grail-like relic which maintained the balance between the opposing forces of the Black and White Guardians. They are the equivalent to the forces of Law and Chaos in Michael Moorcock’s multiverse, although here rather crudely envisaged as pantomime figures of good and evil. Tamm’s Romana is given the job of assisting him in this quest. She introduces herself as Romanadvoratrelunda, which the Doctor immediately shortens to Romana. ‘I don’t like Romana’, she complains. ‘It’s either Romana or Fred’, he retorts, a line which has the hallmarks of a Baker ad lib. ‘All right, call me Fred’, she coolly replies.

Coolness and a certain haughty froideur were the hallmarks of Tamm’s Romana. She provided an excellent foil for Baker, who by this time was showing an increasing tendency to clown around and introduce his own amendments to the scripts in order to keep himself amused. She is a top grade graduate from the Academy on Gallifrey, an intellectual with an encyclopaedic knowledge and academic understanding of the nature of the universe which is the match of the Doctor’s. Indeed, it is revealed, much to his huffy chagrin, that the Doctor only just scraped through his own examinations. Her knowledge has not been tempered with the wisdom of experience, however, and in this respect she still functions as the Doctor’s junior, and as the questioning figure of identification for the audience. The testy nature of her relationship with the Doctor perhaps reflects Baker’s reluctance to have a companion at all. His ego was, by this stage, large enough to lead him to feel he could carry the show on its own, and he was reluctant to share the spotlight. There’s little real interaction between him and Tamm, and at times he might as well be talking to himself. Some of the Doctor’s dismissive lines could almost be seen as little satirical digs on the part of the scriptwriters. The Doctor rudely rebuffs her initial overtures in which she asks how she can be of assistance, telling her ‘I’d like you to stay out of my way as much as possible and try and keep out of trouble’. ‘I don’t suppose you can make tea?’ he adds, summoning up another one of the elements of the traditional female character which Tamm was keen to avoid. She was also lumbered with the lumbering K-9, who returned for this and further seasons to act as the occasional plot deus ex machina and obligatory cute post-Star Wars robot. The producers were assured that his internal mechanisms would be improved for this series, but he still experienced difficulties in navigating the slightest ruck in a carpet.

It has to be said that this was not a great period for Doctor Who. The Key to Time structure was clumsy and unnecessary, and was for the most part an incidental aspect of each story. It never really led to any great conclusion, either. The Doctor was best left as a bohemian wanderer, without the need for any extraneous quest to spur him on. There were a few good stories, along with several dull ones, but nothing attained the level of the classic gothic tales of the Philip Hinchliffe era, or the domestic SF and political allegory of Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks’ Jon Pertwee stories. Tamm looks regal in long white dress and cape trimmed with feathery fur in her first story, The Ribos Operation. But the story itself, written by Robert Holmes, one of the finest Doctor Who scriptwriters, is merely competent, and fails to rise to his previous heights. It’s probably best to gloss over his later story in the series, The Power of Kroll, which conforms to Margaret Atwood’s expectations of science fiction by featuring giant squid-like creatures who menace the Doctor and Romana with wholly unconvincing rubbery tentacles. The Pirate Planet, Douglas Adams’ debut script for the show, is enjoyable in a broad, comic way (it was written at the same time as The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), with a memorably over the top villain, deadly robotic parrot perching on his shoulder. The Stones of Blood reaches back to early 70s preoccupations with its mixture of stone circles and pagan beliefs given a space operatic rationale. The image of a mobile megalithic standing stone draining the blood from a hapless camper is definitely one of my early ‘behind the sofa’ moments. The Androids of Tara adapts the form and look of a Ruritanian adventure story in the Prisoner of Zenda or Man in the Iron Mask mould, and whilst the story is rather flat and uninspiring, this does allow for some splendid and colourful costumes and set dressing. Tamm plays multiple roles in this one, as Romana and as her double on the planet Tara, Princess Strella, as well as their android doubles (a return of the companion revealed to be a robotic replica plotline used in the Sarah Jane story The Android Invasion some years earlier). Tamm wears a vaguely Edwardian purple and green ensemble as Romana, whilst her princess is decked out in spangly disco queen finery.

Mary Tamm and Peter Jeffrey in The Androids of Tara

Tamm got to act alongside some fine co-stars during the series: John Woodvine, Iain Cuthbertson, Peter Jeffrey, the towering, craggy-faced Neil McCarthy and the recently deceased Who regular Philip Madoc (best known for his role as mad scientist Solon in The Brain of Morbius) all delivering distinctive performances. Disappointingly for Tamm, however, her character remained underdeveloped and scriptwriters swiftly reverted to using her primarily as a passive focus for cliffhanging peril, her worst fears realised. She was menaced by the embarrassing ‘man in a suit’ dragon the Shrivensale in the Ribos Operation, falls off a cliff and is transported as a captive to an orbiting spaceship in The Stones of Blood, is almost immediately taken prisoner in The Androids of Tara and replaced by a killer android replica, is captured once more in the Power of Kroll and offered up as a sacrifice by a primitive tribe to their cephalopod gods, and is threatened with torture by the Black Guardian in the Armageddon Factor. In the light of this, it’s perhaps not surprising that she decided not to return for another series. The producers and scriptwriters may have taken heed of her dissatisfaction, however. When Romana returned in regenerated form, portrayed by Lalla Ward, she took a much more active role, whilst retaining her function as a foil to Baker’s Doctor. Tamm’s Romana remains as a bridging character, possessed of great intelligence (and beauty) and a cool, sardonic wit which the writers didn’t quite know how to incorporate into the more traditional stories which predominated in this period. She pointed the way towards the more active heroines of the future, however, and Tamm always maintained an elegant poise and displayed effortless style. They are qualities which make her six episodes worth revisiting.

Caroline John

Dr Elizabeth Shaw - the scientist at work

Caroline John, who died last Thursday, was always something of a Doctor Who companion that time forgot, present only for the transitional first series of Jon Pertwee’s tenure in 1970. She played Dr Liz Shaw, and she always emphasised the Doctor when she introduced herself and her character on dvd commentaries, as if she wanted to underline the intellectual substance of her companion. That ‘doctor’ earned her a sort of equality with the Doctor, her qualifications and readily apparent knowledge immediately gaining his respect and the right to share in his empirical attempts to provide a scientific solution to whatever crisis they were confronted with. We meet Liz in the first Pertwee story Spearhead From Space (which also introduces the Autons, animated plastic dummies controlled by an alien intelligence), when she is recruited by UNIT, driven into a shadowy underground complex beneath Kings Cross station and ushered into an interview with the Brigadier. She is clearly unimpressed, making it evident that she is not there through any choice of her own, and that she has ‘an important research project at Cambridge’ in which she is engaged. The Brig tells her that he is well aware of this, and of the fact that she is ‘an expert in meteorites’ with ‘degrees in medicine, physics and a dozen other subjects’, thus informing us of her intellectual qualities. Her scepticism and indeed ridicule of the Brigadier’s claims that the Earth has been subject to alien visitation and attack sets up the new series’ Earth-based format. It also positions her as an audience identification figure for the revamped show, introducing viewers to the UNIT ‘family’ into which she is being invited, and of course to Jon Pertwee’s new Doctor. Liz is in fact being established as the ideal female counterpart of the Doctor’s intellectual probity, defiant individualism and staunch advocacy of reason over force. She even adopts, right from the start, something of the fractious relationship with the brigadier and the military establishment which in general which will become characteristic of Pertwee’s Doctor. During their initial meetings, she is extremely short with the Brig, treating him as if her were a fool, and even laughs in his face. ‘No need to get tetchy’, he remarks at one point. When the Brig announces the arrival of General Scobie, UNIT’s army liaison chief, she tartly retorts ‘you don’t expect me to salute him, I hope’. When she finally does get to meet The Doctor, having been introduced by the Brigadier with a dismissively offhand ‘by the way, this is Miss Shaw’, they immediately set to examining the unearthly plastic fragment of an Auton ‘shell’. Framed by a skeletal sculpture of retorts, test tubes and vials, they discover a common language of thermo plastics and polymer chains, falling into an animated discussion which leaves the Brig looking baffled and a bit miffed in the background.

The excitement of science - Spearhead From Space

Liz is later a bit put out when the Doctor declares the ‘lasers, spectrographs and micron probes’ at their disposal to be too primitive for his purposes. She is a creature of the white heat, technocratic sixties, excited by the possibilities of science and its potential for creating a brighter, more rationalised future. When we first see her, she wears a coat with plastic panels of geometric relief pattern, a sixties fashion statement of belief in such a science-driven, space-age future. A belief in which the Doctor Who series itself partook, of course. The new, all-colour Pertwee era ushered Who into the 70s (the first episode of Spearhead from Space was broadcast on the 3rd January 1970). But Liz remained a 60s figure. She was in fact the creation of producers Derrick Sherwin and Paul Bryant, both of whom had been centrally involved with the production of Who in the preceding Patrick Troughton era. They had already shown their interest in having female characters partaking in the scientific excitement of the period by making Wendy Padbury’s Zoe a mathematical genius. Having established this trait, however, not a great deal was done with it, and her character did tend to fall into the more traditional role requirements of the female companion: screaming and finding themselves in positions of peril from which they had to be rescued. Liz was a more grown-up version of Wendy, and her scientific knowledge and curiosity was central to her character. But Sherwin and Brady were diverted to other projects at the start of the production of the series, and only got to supervise the making of Spearhead from Space. Their place was taken by Barry Letts (who took over as producer) and script editor Terrance Dicks. This duo was to become absolutely central to the creation of the character and feel of the Pertwee era, and they would bring a great deal of their own progressive social and political ideals to various stories. These did not extend to a belief in female equality and the greater participation of women in roles previously closed off to them, however. On dvd commentaries and extras, Dicks always talks about feminism as if it’s a dirty word, and is quite plain about his adherence to old adventure and thriller conventions of the woman as passive victim awaiting rescue by the hero. On the commentary track of The Silurians, Caroline John’s second Doctor Who story, Dicks talks of being ‘stuck with several decisions left to us’. He cites the seven-part story structure and the Earthbound nature of the series, but given the presence of Caroline John beside him in the studio, tactfully omits adding that this list included the character of Liz Shaw. Neither he nor Letts was comfortable with having a female character who was the equal of the Doctor, and Letts immediately set about ‘softening’ her initial appearance and manner. Her practical and businesslike bun, serving to keep her hair out of the potassium nitrate solution and away from the Bunsen flame, was gradually loosened, reaching full-flowing length in The Ambassadors of Death (John’s third story), and achieving salon-styled shape and colour in Inferno. In the opening scenes of The Silurians (the first story on which Letts was producer) we see her in red mini-dress and boots, looking down as the Doctor tinkers beneath Bessie. Her collaboration here is clearly not required, and neither is she dressed for it if it were. John talks in the extras of Inferno about Letts’ requirement that when Liz insisted on going down into the caves with the Doctor to communicate with the Silurians, she should do so in her miniskirt. She argued with him that this was simply absurd, and that practicality dictated that if she were going potholing, Liz would at least wear a pair of trousers. Jon Pertwee lent his support to her point of view, at which point Letts relented and both of them appeared in suitable overalls. John gently reminds Letts of this incident during the Silurians commentary, but he effects to forget, and during the episode including the scene, she is absent from the commentary team, so it isn’t brought up again. But it does serve to illustrate the new production team’s lack of interest in developing a strong female character.

Something nasty in the hay loft - The Silurians

But Liz remained a breed apart from other Who companions, before or since. Perhaps Lalla Ward's Romana is the one with whom she shares most affinity. In The Silurians commentary, during a scene in which one of the reptilian monsters creeps up on her character in a hay loft in which it has been hiding out, John remarks ‘here come my one scream’. It is indeed the only time that she was required to display and vocalise terror. Her brief reactive yelp was also made distant by the fact that we were viewing the incident through the prismatic point-of-view perspective of the wounded Silurian, whose heavy, rasping breathing was foregrounded on the soundtrack, muting all other noise. Liz soon recovers from her encounter, having been dealt a glancing blow by lizard claw, and is able to give a calm and rational description of the creature: ‘like a repetile, but it walked upright like a man’. This scene apart, she is rarely isolated in situations of peril or threat. There is a long chase sequence in the hybrid of SF and spy thriller The Ambassadors of Death (due for release on dvd later this year, with a commentary already recorded featuring both John and Nicholas Courtney), in which she is pursued by two thuggish goons. She gives them a good run for their money (and the HAVOC stunt men were apparently impressed by her efforts) before it all ends in a run across the narrow wooden boards of a walkway above a weir, from the handrail of which she was required to hang before being pulled up by her pursuers. As John points out in the UNIT Family documentary extra on the Inferno dvd, this wasn’t bad for someone who was three months pregnant at the time. She manages to keep her broad-brimmed felt hat on all the while too. This stylish piece of headwear, combined with her white mini-skirt and white boots, makes her look like she should be fronting some psych-pop or folk band in the Pentangle mould. It’s an association enhanced by the jazzy flute piece (presumably a bit of library music) used on the soundtrack of this serial, which diverges from the customary Radiophonics or the blend of orchestral and electronic sounds used by regular composer Dudley Simpson. Indeed, the feeling that Liz and the first series as a whole are still somehow rooted in the 60s is furthered by the use of Fleetwood Mac’s Oh Well in the plastic factory scenes in Spearhead from Space.

'Evil' Liz - Inferno

In John’s last story, Inferno, she was able to enjoy playing variations on her character by portraying Liz’s shadow self in the parallel Earth into which the Doctor stumbles and from which he must escape in order to save the world in which the Liz that we know exists. Here, she is a security officer in a Britain which has fallen under the rule of a fascist dictatorship at some point in the 30s or 40s. ‘Evil’ Liz is under the command of the Brigadier’s mirror-world counterpart, a bellowing bully with brigandish eye-patch. John plays this other Liz as a tight-lipped, unquestioning servant of the regime. But something of the Liz the Doctor knows is still present, an essential core which allows him to appeal to her. He tells her that in his world she is a scientist, and asks whether she had ever longed to become one herself. This has a definite effect on her, the element of scientific curiosity being such an ineradicable element of her nature. The alternate Brigadier, interestingly enough, turns into a whimpering coward prepared to sacrifice an entire world (or an even greater swathe of the continuum of existence) in order to save his own skin. The spark of selfless nobility in Liz which has remained alight beneath the hardened carapace built up through years of compliance to power (according to the needs of personal survival), and which the Doctor has re-ignited, causes her to act. She enables the Doctor to escape by shooting the Brigadier in the back, a brutal and extreme expression of her counterpart’s intuitive anti-militarism.

Stroll with the family UNIT - The Ambassadors of Death

As soon as Letts and Dicks were in charge, the writing was on the wall for Liz. She was effectively caught between the shifting of old and new guards, who happened to intersect for a brief moment at the beginning of this new era for Doctor Who. John remembers in the UNIT Family documentary on the Inferno dvd that it was during the party following the completion of that story and the series which it concluded that Letts came up to her and told her that they would be looking for a new companion, and that her contract would not be renewed. She reflected that she could have responded by telling him that she was by this stage four months pregnant, and it been increasingly difficult for her to hide it. The decision was thus, in some ways, convenient for her. She displays a certain amount of hurt at the rejection implicit in the decision, but had the good grace over the years not to make a big deal out of it. Letts, for his part, has always explained his choice to get rid of Liz by pointing to the need for a companion for the Doctor who would need to have things explained to them. This would provide a convenient way in which younger (or slower) viewers could also have such explanations fed to them. It’s effectively an admission that the more adult direction which Sherwin and Bryant had envisaged for the show’s new format would not be pursued, and is also a little condescending towards the audience (be they young or mature). It’s certainly an outlook which current producer Stephen Moffat wouldn’t endorse. John allows a little of her disappointment to show through when she recalls later reading a comment from Letts in a Doctor Who magazine suggesting that Liz Shaw had to go because she was too clever by half. Having said which, it should be added that Letts and Dicks formed an excellent creative partnership, and presided over what is probably my favourite Doctor Who era. Nobody’s perfect, and the shortcomings alluded to were part of the prevalent and ingrained attitudes of the period. The duo, with their otherwise liberal outlook, were fairly representative of the major disparity between radical 60s ideals of creating a new social order and those same radicals’ expectations that women would essentially fulfil the same supportive roles as they had done before.

The last laugh - Inferno

Liz’s replacement was introduced in another story featuring the menace of the plastic animating Nestene Consciousness, The Auton Invasion. Katy Manning’s Jo Grant also meets the Doctor in the laboratory which he has, by now, made his own. The parallels are indeed quite marked. There’s none of the sense of fellow feeling, of a meeting of minds with this meeting however. Jo distracts the Doctor, causes his experiment to catch fire, and destroys it utterly by putting it out with a fire extinguisher. A sensible move, you would have thought, but the Doctor’s having none of it. ‘Dealt with it? You’ve ruined it’, he splutters, and proceeds to decry her as a ‘ham-fisted bun vendor’. When she tells him, with eager to please enthusiasm, ‘I’m your new assistant’, he responds with a rudely dismissive ‘oh no’. He demands someone with qualifications equivalent to Liz’s, before the Brigadier puts him firmly in his place, telling him ‘what you need, Doctor, as Miss Shaw herself so often remarked, is someone to pass you your test tubes and to tell you how brilliant you are. Miss Grant will fulfil that function admirably’. In other words, she’s a secretary, not a fellow scientist. Of course, Jo would develop considerably beyond such parameters, and display great resourcefulness, bravery and moral strength. But, initially at least, she was a step backwards in terms of creating strong, intelligent female characters. Caroline John had her own ideas of what Liz would have done next. ‘She’d have gone back to her work’, she says, without hesitation or doubt, resuming that important research she was whisked away from at Cambridge, and glad to be away from the idiocies of the military mind. She would appear very briefly in the 20th anniversary special The Five Doctors, albeit in rather desultory fashion (alongside other former companions) as a siren phantom. Her husband, Geoffrey Beevers, also had a brief moment of Doctor Who glory, playing the Master in The Keeper of Traken, although he was largely unrecognisable beneath the make-up representing the disfigured flesh of his failed regeneration. John herself played many further roles, both on stage and on TV. I’ve recently seen her in the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes story The Dying Detective, in which she plays the weary, irritable wife of a loud and gluttonous boor; and in Nigel Kneale’s 1989 adaptation of Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black, in which she sympathetically plays the supportive mother in law of the fated solicitor. In her early career she also appeared down this way (in Exeter) on the stage of the Northcott Theatre in a 1967 production of Ann Jellicoe’s play The Knack, presumably in the role played in Richard Lester’s 1965 film adaptation by Rita Tushingham. John is always marvellous on the dvd commentaries of the Doctor Who episodes she appeared in (she’s not present on Inferno, sadly). She makes a particularly entertaining double act with Nicholas Courtney, with whom she shares the commentary on Spearhead From Space. They obviously got on very well, Courtney affectionately referring to her as Carrie, and they engage in much amusing and unaffected banter. John is generous in allowing others the space to speak, and at times almost seems to be acting as a moderator. She’s all but interviewing Courtney at times, prompting anecdotes and asking him about aspects of his character. The final shot we see of Liz is also the shot on which Inferno fades out. The Brigadier and the Doctor have walked off, engaged in bickering interplay, the Doctor attempting to withdraw a remark made in the belief that he was about to depart in his newly fixed Tardis, and the Brig intent on reminding him of its precise wording (‘pompous, self-opinionated idiot’ I believe you said). Liz looks on with indulgent humour, shaking with hearty, unaffected laughter. It’s a lovely, warm image with which to bid her, and Caroline John, farewell.

Dartington Ways With Words Festival

At the Ways With Words literary festival at Dartington Hall last week, all three of Mervyn Peake’s children, Clare, Fabian and Sebastian, appeared together to talk about their memories of their father and feelings about his work in this his centenary year. As the mediator of the talk observed, the large medieval hall with its faded tapestried banners and hefty oak roof beams was the ideal setting in which to talk about the creator of Gormenghast’s stone labyrinth. He was remembered with evident warmth as a man for whom family was paramount, and in no way an obstacle to work. Fabian pointed out that his studio or work room was always open, and they were free to wander in and look at whatever he might be engaged upon at the time. He recalled seeing his father working on the illustrations for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Treasure Island, and noted how he would erase unwanted lines by physically scraping away the surface of the paper with a razor blade. The final illustration would thus be a rough and chaotically textured thing, but this wouldn’t come through in the reproduction. Sebastian remembered posing on the table of their house in Sark for the figure of Jim in Treasure Island. The house had no heating save for a meagre portable affair, and he remembers grimly steeling himself against the winter cold as his father pleaded for him to just hold on for one more sketch. To this day, he has no great affection for the character, but can now gain a certain pride from looking back at his young self immortalised as the innocent boy caught up in a world of piratical devilry.

Asked about how their father was able to separate the intense and frequently dark worlds of the imagination peopled with striking grotesques in which he immersed himself from the everyday demands of family life, they said it was just something he was intuitively able to manage. He seemed to find the ordinary world a place of magic and delight anyway, as numerous anecdotes attested. Perhaps his fantastic turn of mind (and the fantastic imagination always finds delight in the grotesque and macabre) was not such a bad attribute when it came to raising inquisitive children who delighted in their own imaginations. The recently published Sunday Books memorialise the stories Peake would tell his children on Sark, accompanying them with spontaneous sketches and drawings. The stories were never written down, but the illustrations remain, and Michael Moorcock, a friend of Mervyn and his wife Maeve’s, has added his own accompanying tales. These Sunday stories show how integral his art was to his family life, and vice versa, something also evident from his innumerable sketches of Sebastian, Fabian and Maeve. As a result, all three children have grown up to be creative in their own particular way. Sebastian edged around the question of the influence of the family on the creation of the Gormenghast books by emphasising the primary importance of his childhood experiences in China on its imaginative construction. Fabian added that, like all artists, he drew from every element of his life, from the deeply felt to the casually observed. They conceded that there was a lot of Maeve in both Fuschia and Gertrude, and Sebastian was the model for the infant Titus (sketches of him adorn the manuscript of Titus Groan). Maeve was remembered by her children as a warmly generous woman who somehow managed to combine the bohemian lifestyle with classic glamour. Other children on Sark would shout out as she was approaching in her Givenchy or Dior-style ‘new look’ dresses, and Sebastian and Fabian would hide behind a hedge. In his memoir A Child of Bliss, Sebastian recalls that she liked to dance to flamenco music on top of the table at the end of her parties, and would always encourage other people to dance.

Mervyn was full of life and vitality, always goofing about and indulging in practical jokes, and his dark, romantic good looks (deriving from his Welsh ancestry, no doubt) and easy charm made him very popular with women. Sebastian recalled his persistent pursuit of a music student at the Royal College of Music whom he sat opposite on the train and wanted to sketch. She demurred and got off at the next stop, but he was not to be deterred. He would turn up at her rehearsals at the College and draw her from the stalls. When she mentioned this to her husband later in life, he commented ‘well, he always did have an eye for the grotesque’. Asked how Maeve felt about such dalliances and his eye for the female form, they said it was accepted with equanimity. Sebastian told the above anecdote with the command of someone who has become expert at public speaking. He above all has been the one who has tirelessly promoted his father’s work over the years. He talks of a moment which defined his father in his eyes. Again, it returns us to Sark, the spiritual centre of the family’s life. Mervyn got the young Sebastian to close his eyes and placed a piece of topaz in his palm. He knew that his father would have had to have climbed down the dangerous cliff-face descending to the sea on the sheer sides of the Coupee, the narrow arête joining the two halves of the island, where deposits of the mineral were to be found. He was also prone to performing daredevil stunts on his bicycle as he raced along the narrow Coupee path. This was what made his father a hero to him, Sebastian said.

All three Peakes gave brief readings. Clare read a passage from her recent memoir Under A Canvas Sky, in which she recalled her father taking her for walks down the Kings Road, near their Chelsea studio flat. He would buy her a Chelsea bun from the baker’s (the Kings Road still had such things in those days), commenting that they were in Chelsea, so they might as well have one; a throwaway remark which would become a running joke between them. They would look in art shops and pick up the tubes of paint, but not the canvasses, which her father couldn’t afford. The evocative names of the paints, the cobalt blues, rose madders, burnt umbers and yellow ochres cast a magical spell, and the studio in which Mervyn worked was a place of warmth and comfort for her. So much so that the smell of turps still has an odd emotional resonance for her.

Fabian, himself a poet and artist, read one of his father’s poems, Love, I Had Thought It Rocklike, written around 1946 and included in the recent Collected Poems volume. It depicts love become evanescent and fragile where once it had seemed so solid and firmly rooted. ‘I had thought it founded like a city of stone’, Peake wrote, ‘but it was thistledown/Or the touch of a wand’. This was one of several poems written at the time (Love’s House, Swans Die and a Tower Falls and Forever Through Love’s Weather Wandering being others) in which Peake seems to articulate a dissociation from his feelings for Maeve. This was perhaps caused by the shock of war and in particular his observation of the horrors of the camp at Belsen. These poems seem to express an inner loneliness, a crisis over the purpose and value of his art. This despair was kept in check to a great extent. It’s certainly not a quality his children remember in him. Sebastian (the oldest of the three children) remembers in his memoir A Child of Bliss that there was a change in his father coming back from the war. He attributes this directly to his experiences in Belsen, asking ‘how can his experience of the camp not have created an eternal helplessness of the soul?’ Indeed, Sebastian became obsessed with the camps himself for a period of time, trying to gain an understanding of just what it was that had wrought such a change in his father.

Mervyn was able to rediscover his love for Maeve (perhaps after a spiritually restorative return to Sark) as the 1948 poem Out of the Chaos of My Doubt makes plain: ‘Out of the chaos of my doubt/And the chaos of my art/I turn to you inevitably/As the needle to the pole’. Fabian interpreted the poem he read in a far less personal way, viewing it as a declaration that the small and fragile can be, in its own way, as strong and vital as the solid and monumental. Drawing an artistic analogy, he said that the thin pencil line can be as forcefully expressive as the thick brush stroke. He sees his father’s approach to poetry as being primarily emotional and instinctive, with technique and structure being applied to subsequently shape such rawly felt material.

Sebastian ended the session with a reading from Titus Awakes, the recently published manuscript of Maeve’s discovered in an old box in his attic. It was her attempt to draw from the skeletal notes made by Mervyn in his declining years outlining ideas for the development of the Titus books and bring his story to a conclusion. But it was also her personal search for the husband who had been taken away from her by the cruel fate of degenerative illness leading to early death. Sebastian reads the final pages, in which Sark once more becomes the magnetic island, drawing Titus to his final place of rest, the endpoint of his quest. As he draws near to the shore, he sees the artist for whom he’s been searching, two boys by his side and a young girl hoisted onto his shoulders. It’s a deeply moving conclusion, both to the book and to the talk, for the artist is clearly Mervyn Peake, and the children Sebastian, Fabian and Clare. Titus is Maeve, returning to Sark one final time, a personal Avalon and blessed isle.

The next day we went to see the wonderful Rabbi Lionel Blue, whose open, liberal approach to religion emphasising kindness and compassion as the values which create a preview of heaven on earth is a welcome corrective to the more judgemental forms which seem prevalent in the modern world. The Rabbi is a little shake and slow on his feet these days after the onset of Parkinson’s disease (and the simple effect of age) but as soon as he sat down he settled into an effortless flow of autobiographical reminiscence, wry observation, modestly offered wisdom and, most of all, jokes. Jewish culture is blessed with one of the richest veins of humour in the world, as documented in Leo Rosten’s excellent dictionary/cultural guide/philosophical treatise and jokebook The Joys of Yiddish. Blue noted how his family and those who lived around them in the Whitechapel area of the East End coped with hardship through humour. He likened this to religion in providing a perspective which allowed people to turn a situation inside out, to view it from a completely different angle. He’s candid about his own struggles with faith, politics and sexuality, an openness which makes him all the better able to empathise with and help those who come to him for advice and spiritual guidance. His view of religion is simple and practical; asked why he is religious and became a Rabbi, he says ‘because it worked for me’. He recalls how horrified his mother was when he announced that he intended to become a Rabbi. She felt that he was turning around and heading straight back into the ghetto from which they’d escaped. It was only when he declared that he was going to seek out a holy man in the Himalayas that she stopped threatening to kill herself and gave him her blessing (the monastic retreat gambit had failed to make the necessary impact). He doesn’t give any easy answers to the complex questions which people bring to him, refusing to supply the magical solutions which some people require of religion. His radical uncertainty (perhaps a healthy development from the radical over-certainty of his youth), his willingness to admit to cluelessness, is refreshing and a sign of unforced wisdom. He says he has no idea what the afterlife will be like, since death involves a cessation of both time and space, the measures by which experience is quantified, but that we can create a preview of heaven through acts of kindness to our fellow creatures.

Along with the jokes, Rabbi Blue also gives us a few lines from some of his favourite songs, in response to a question about what his desert island discs would be (it turns out that he has actually taken part in the programme – twice). He sings a couple of verses of that sentimental old weepie My Yiddishe Momme, guaranteed to have any good Jewish boy weeping within seconds. He also essayed Falling In Love Again, revealing his love of Marlene Dietrich, who, he remarked with a certain amount of fellow feeling, just kept on going, even if they had to glue her elbow to the bar table before the curtains rose. He commented that he tended to listen more these days, in particular to the new female Rabbis (he would have had an opportunity at this festival, as Rabbi Julia Neuberger was also speaking) and was less inclined to immediately leap in with his own opinions. This was presumably an observation of his own division of life into three stages: taking, giving and giving up. He admitted to finding the latter particularly hard to accept. Let’s hope that he continues to resist for a good time yet. The world really needs a gay, ex-Marxist (with remaining tendencies) East End liberal Rabbi right now.

On the Saturday, we went to see Dominic Sandbrook, whose histories of the Macmillan and (first) Wilson eras, Never Had It So Good and White Heat, I enjoyed immensely. These have now been followed up by State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain 1970-74, and it was these years which he talked about. He is always keen to separate the myths which accumulate around particular periods with the actuality, and to differentiate the world as seen from a political perspective from actual lived experience. He includes a couple of ‘stealth quotes’ which highlight the complexity of the era, its irreducibility to simplistic divisions. He follows a mention of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch in the context of the rise of a new wave of feminism at the time with a quote which turns out not to be from the book, although its rhetoric makes us believe that it could be. It is in fact taken from a speech by Margaret Thatcher. Similarly, a piece of firebrand revolutionary rhetoric, firmly demarcating the divisions of the class struggle, is made by one Robert Kilroy-Silk. The government of Heath was a hapless and ill-starred enterprise, stumbling from one crisis to the next, but Sandbrook makes it clear that for almost everybody in the country, the material standards of living were higher than at any time before. He begins by setting the scene for the royal wedding of Princess Anne and Mark Phillips in 1973, and imagines what a time traveller from the previous royal wedding (of the Queen) in 1953 would make of the world they found. He concluded that they would be amazed by how well off everyone was, and by the sheer modernity of the period. An interesting observation given the perception of the early 70s as being somehow backward and technologically primitive. For the time traveller looking back from the present (and Sandbrook makes reference to Life on Mars in this context) inequalities were still very much in place in terms of race, gender and sexuality, although feminist and gay rights movements were beginning to make a real impact. Much popular culture still revelled in contemptuous stereotypes which reflected (or partly created) general and largely unchallenged prejudices. Enoch Powell was repeatedly voted the public’s favourite politician at this time.

Sandbrook has a particularly ready and wide-ranging grasp of popular culture, which is what makes his books such excellent evocations of era as experienced by ordinary folk. I suspected from his previous books that he was something of a Doctor Who fan, as he used several quotes, identified as coming from particular episodes, which were perfectly matched to the social and political themes he was addressing. I was able to ask him about this afterwards, and he confirmed that he was indeed a big enthusiast. This would have been pretty self-evident had I had the most cursory browse through State of Emergency, which I bought later from the independent Totnes Bookshop. His chapter on the development of the sixties counterculture and the emergence of the environmental movement, and general turning away from Wilson’s white heat technological optimism, is entitled The Green Death, for a start. He talks of this story’s opposition by the hippyish Wholewheel scientific commune, who join forces with the Doctor, Jo, the Brigadier and Captain Yates, to the sinister Global Chemicals corporation which is directed by the BOSS supercomputer, an artificial intelligence. He quotes James Chapman’s interesting observation that the Earthbound monsters of the Pertwee era tend to be more ‘organic’ in appearance (Silurians, Sea Devils, Axons, Ogrons and, indeed, giant maggots) than the more shiny, metallic and technological creatures of the 60s, and that scientists tend to be villains and destroyers. The Invasion of the Dinosaurs is also mentioned in an ecological context, with its Operation Golden Age, a scientific conspiracy in which the idealistic Mike Yates becomes involved, representing an extreme version of the dream of a return to a pre-technological age. The Doctor defeats its fanatical scheme to return a select section of humanity to a distant past from which it can start again, but is not unsympathetic to its motivating philosophy. Sandbrook also refers to Doomwatch, The Changes, The Survivors and John Christopher’s post-apocalyptic pastoral trilogy The Prince In Waiting, Beyond the Burning Lands and The Sword of the Spirits in this chapter, all of which seem to return to the vision of a reversion to a medieval England imagined by William Morris in News from Nowhere.

Elsewhere, Sandbrook’s introductory example in his chapter on feminism refers to Elizabeth Sladen’s Sarah Jane taking over from Jo Grant as the Doctor’s companion, with a much more assertive manner and a refusal to be reduced to a tea-making role. Liz Shaw was the real equal companion in the Pertwee era, however, a scientist fully capable of keeping up with even the wildest of the Doctor’s theories and offering suggestions herself. Sandbrook also notes how the programme addressed the issues of joining the Common Market in The Curse of Peladon (1972) and the divisions of the miners’ strike in The Monster of Peladon (1974). In both cases, the Doctor opts for the progressive, more radical solution. Sandbrook also points out that Heath’s policy review unit known as The Think Tank was parodied in Tom Baker’s 1974 Who debut story Robot, in which the National Institute for Advanced Scientific Research (inevitably a front for a semi-fascistic scientific conspiracy) is also nicknamed the think tank. Noting the preponderance of rats in 70s popular culture (he must surely be the only prominent historian who would make reference to James Herbert’s novel The Rats, and also notes their appearance in Doomwatch and The New Avengers) he refers to the giant specimen encountered in the sewers in The Talons of Weng Chiang, and makes the reasonable observation that it is ‘one of the worst-realized monsters not merely in the show’s history, but in the history of human entertainment’. Fair enough, although, as is the contradictory way with Doctor Who, it is also one of the series’ finest stories.

Sandbrook makes further reference to fantastic literature and film throughout, suggesting both that he is an enthusiast for the genre, and that this was a particularly fertile period. Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffmann and The Passion of New Eve are discussed, and Brian Aldiss’ The Malacia Tapestry and JG Ballard’s High Rise mentioned. SF writer Edmund Cooper is cited for his wildly sexist views, broadcast not only in his novels (one of which, Who Needs Men? lends its title to the chapter on feminism and reactionary responses to) but in a 1975 Science Fiction Monthly interview from which Sandbrook quotes. Bagpuss is aptly summed up as being ‘gloriously melancholy’. I would take issue with his dismissal of the late 60s and early 70s output of Hammer, however. Some of its was indeed shoddy, exploitation fare (and not even very full-blooded exploitation at that). But there are some fascinating films amongst the studio’s latterday efforts, some of which genuinely attempt to play new variations on the old formulae, and a very few of which really succeed. And Dracula AD 1972 is hugely enjoyable to watch now, as I noted here. But Sandbrook is generally spot on, and his histories are both insightful and hugely enjoyable, as indeed was his talk. You can see a video of another such on his website and blog, over here, where you can also find extracts of his comments from the extras on the dvd release of the Hartnell Who story The Ark.