The Doctor Who bar, which seems nice and liberal enough.
But here, in the former Nazi heartlands, they are ominously building a moon, wait, that’s no moon, it’s a space station.
I have no idea what this is or why.
And while they may be a bit rubbish when it comes to remembering the names of existentialist philosophers,
they are pretty impressive when it comes to statues celebrating equine micturition.
[Something written pseudonymously about John Hurt for a 50th anniversary feature on Doctor Who. I have no idea by who.]
He is the one who comes between. The one we did not know was there. The one who does not count (or, at least, was not counted). Even his costume, part-McGann/part-Eccleston and bridging between them both, is interstitial, not really his own. He is the not-Doctor who says ‘no more’. As Matt Smith’s Doctor explains: ‘I said he was me, I never said he was the Doctor. … The name I chose is the Doctor. The name you choose, … it’s like a promise you make. He’s the one who broke the promise’ – and what he did to end the Time War, destroying Gallifrey and billions of Time Lords, he did ‘not [do] in the name of the Doctor’.
It now seems inevitable that sooner or later John Hurt would play the Doctor, and that when he did it would be this particular Doctor – the War Doctor – or someone like him. The one who can bear it no longer. The one who must face a Kobayashi Maru moment that is no mere test or simulation, and which cannot, Kirk-like, be glibly cheated.[1] It is not just that Hurt, the oldest actor to play the role, has been around even longer than the series,[2] and thus can bring a sense of perspective to the more infantile, gurning, gesticulatory, timey-wimey shenanigans of the relaunched series, to its peacock displays of masculinity, its violence and all the snogging. Although, edging his sorrow with an impish despair at the younger men playing his older self, he does.
Nor is just that Hurt’s sf credentials are impeccable, although they are. In Contact (Zemeckis US 1997), he portrays the billionaire funding the first contact mission as an Arthur C. Clarke lookalike, and more recently he raised Hellboy (Ron Perlman) from a pup for Guillermo del Toro. Haggard and squalid in Michael Radford’s Nineteen Eighty-four (UK 1984), his is the definitive screen Winston Smith; but one can easily imagine him taking a role in Equals, the Kristen Stewart-starring ‘epic love story’ adaptation of Orwell’s novel with which we are currently threatened, just so he can suffer again and suffer some more. It would not be the first time Hurt returned for a further dose of agony and anguish, reprising tragedy as farce. After all, his is the chest from which the alien chestburster first burst, and then again in Spaceballs (Brooks US 1987).
And it this capacity for suffering, and for provoking our sympathy, that is the key to Hurt’s persona and to his casting as the Doctor, and as this particular Doctor; that, and his aura of jaded sexual dissidence – he is, do not forget, Caligula in I, Claudius (UK 1976) – that often also leads to suffering.
He is Max, the heroin addict stuck in a Turkish hellhole prison in Midnight Express (Parker UK/US 1978) but in Love and Death on Long Island (Kwietniowski UK/Canada 1997), he is Giles De’Ath – a reclusive, modernity-hating author who stumbles into a cinema hoping for an E.M. Forster adaptation and instead gets Hotpants College II and is smitten with its star, Ronnie Bostock (Jason Priestley). He is John Merrick in The Elephant Man (Lynch US 1980), disfigured, despised and turned into a sideshow freak. Yet he is also The Countess in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (Van Sant US 1993), sagely noting, ‘All of us are freaks in one way or another. Try being born a male Russian Countess into a white, middle class, Baptist family in Mississippi, and you’ll see what I mean’. In 10 Rillington Place (Fleischer UK 1971), he is the ill-educated Timothy Evans, framed and executed for murders committed by serial killer John Christie (Richard Attenborough). In Scandal (Caton-Jones UK 1989), he is Stephen Ward, the procurer at the heart of the Profumo affair, who is abandoned by his Establishment friends, scapegoated and driven to suicide (or possibly murdered by MI5). But he is also the fabulous flaming Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant (UK 1975), produced by Doctor Who’s very own Verity Lambert, and in An Englishman in New York (UK 2009).[3] He is the fearfully haunted Parkin in Whistle and I’ll Come to You (UK 2010) and the ailing vampire Christopher Marlowe in Only Lovers Left Alive (Jarmusch UK/Germany/France/Cyprus/US 2013), but he is also the world-weary assassin in The Hit (Frears UK 1984) and, in a neat reversal, Britain’s fascist dictator, the Big Brother to Evey’s (Natalie Portman) Winston Smith, in V for Vendetta (McTeigue US/UK/Germany 2005).
And in Frankenstein Unbound (Corman US 1990), he is Dr Joe Buchanan, the inventor of an ultimate weapon that tears holes in time and space. It casts him back to the very birth of sf, to the Villa Diodati in 1817, but in an alternative history in which Mary Shelley is writing up a factual account, not a novel, of the Frankenstein affair. And then he travels forward into a future in which his superweapon has destroyed humankind.
He has done all this before. No wonder the War Doctor’s weary mantra is ‘no more, no more’. You can hear his exhaustion ground deep in that gravelly voice.
‘I’ve been fighting this war for a long time, I’ve lost the right to be the Doctor’, he tells the sentient ultimate weapon as he prepares to use it, knowing that his punishment will be to survive genociding his own people. But Hurt has suffered – has hurt – for so long, who else had the right to be the War Doctor?
Notes
[1] Although, being a Steven Moffat episode, actually it can. The scenario can be gamed, and what was written in stone can be rewritten, while handy amnesia also leaves continuity pretty much intact.
[2] Already a stage actor, his first television appearance was in an episode of Probation Officer (UK 1959–62) broadcast two years before ‘An Unearthly Child’.
[3] Sadly, he is also Kerwin, the gay cop teamed with Ryan O’Neal in the alleged comedy Partners (Burrows US 1982).
To my surprise, Stockholm pre-empted Banksy.
The original Dismaland, now called Gröna Lund, has been dismal ever since that night on 4 September 1967 when Jimi Hendrix refused to stop playing so they unplugged him. To overcome this shame, the city has recently opened a new venue, which enraged locals have already dubbed Dismaland Redux:
Indeed, so grim and crime-infested has the city become, that officials have been forced to turn to vigilante justice. When the roaming gangs of thugs get too far out of hand the police commissioner has no choice but to call on Zack Snyder for help, projecting a sigil into the sky to summon his aid:
In his language, in any language, it means ‘hopeless’.
Long gone are the days of cheery social democracy, when the nearest thing to a threat faced by the city was the boundless energy of …
Clifford the Big Red Church.
What few people remember is that Doctor Who was originally a Swedish television show, although the streets of Stockholm and other cities are littered with reminders.
It was here that the Doctor faced such enemies as the newly hatched troll sheep,
the tiniest goat you have ever seen pooh,
and the dread advance of the robot giraffes of doom.
From 4 October to 10 November 2013, London’s Somerset House, which stretches from the Strand to the Embankment, was home to Forgotten Spaces 2013, an exhibition showcasing the 26 shortlisted (of 147) entries in the Royal Institute of British Architects’ competition of the same name. Located in the Lightwells (the two meter wide subterranean passageway that runs between three of the House’s inner walls and the sides of the fountain court) and in the Deadhouse (the tunnels beneath the fountain court where gravestones were relocated during the Georgian rebuilding of the House), it is fairly minimalist: a pair of information boards per entry, including artists’ impressions and, perhaps, photographs of the location as it currently appears or as it used to be fifty or a hundred or more years ago; occasional architects’ models or dioramas; several small installations. It is as if William Gibson’s cool hunters raided the Bridge for ideas to commodify but ended up doing school projects instead.
Forgotten Spaces is a rather spectral affair. Ghosts of London’s multiple pasts appear in glimpses; histories that played out differently than expected flicker and flit among the Deadhouse stands; and each display conjures a possible future that, like the dirigible cheekily lofting in the blue evening sky above A Lost World, is never seriously intended to become reality. (Meanwhile, dancing just out of reach are reputation and the possibility of actual commissions.) The exhibition inserts possibility into deeply sedimented urban spacetime. Each entry refuses to accept that a city’s retrofitting must succumb to the dystopianism of Syd Mead’s Blade Runner Los Angeles. But utopian desire is everywhere haunted by the phantasm of corporate co-optation. Neoliberal capital frames every project. Few of them would have any chance without corporate sponsorship, and those that might get by without it—such as Urban Agri-Aqua Culture’s plan to convert an abandoned Kingston Upon Thames sewage works into a fish, fruit and vegetable farm—cannot hope to escape the inertia of property and the menace of land values.
The scale of the projects varies considerably. Bikebox wants to create a network of emergency cycle repair stations from the iconic K6 red telephone boxes falling into relative disuse across the city, while In the Canopy raises ladders up to treetop perches, opening up new vistas for adults reliving childhood tree-climbing antics. The Lepidopterium is an exotic butterfly house, situated on a patch of ground next to a railway line, itself already a haven to native species. Recalling some of London’s earliest streetlights, fuelled by methane from the sewers, Hidden Light imagines pipes that slowly telescope up into the air as they fill with sewer gas and, on reaching their full extension, burn it off in a spectacular flare before telescoping down to ground level once more.
Another piece of outmoded gas technology, the gasometer, fascinates entrants. The Gasworks retains the cylindrical lattice that used to frame the gasholder when it was above ground, and decorates it with panels off which light can be bounced, creating the effect of a giant lantern, while the cavernous space below, which held the retracted gasholder, becomes a gallery, with a long ramp sweeping down around the outer wall. A Lost World envisions several adjacent gasometers housing a zoo and aquarium, with their anaerobically digested waste sustaining a lake and wetlands. Reclaiming the Canalside has its eye on gasometers as the centerpiece of an urban park, while Sculpture & Sons seems happy merely to have a gasometer visible in the background of its five-storey reconfigurable sculpture park.
Every bit as iconic as a phone box or gasometer is the BT Tower, which (when it was the Post Office Tower and tallest building in London) housed the megalomaniacal WOTAN supercomputer (at least according to Doctor Who’s “The War Machines” (1966)). It once had a revolving restaurant and viewing galleries open to the public, but for more than thirty years public access to this monument to the 1960s’ optimism of Harold Wilson’s “white heat of technology” has been restricted. An Aerial View wishes to convert the Tower’s aerial platforms into a public space once more, with multi-storey curtains to be pulled back to reveal the city. (Sadly, there is no plan to turn its pinnacle into a mooring mast for A Lost World’s rogue airship.)
Plunging beneath the ground, Museum of Memories is an archive of artifacts situated in the terminus of the old London Necropolis Railway (which, I swear, is, or was, a real thing). With more than a hint of Passport to Pimlico (Cornelius UK 1949) about it, Aldwych Baths is a decommissioned tube station turned swimming baths; Aquadocks is a similar, if rather more up-market, scheme for the airy, columned space 
beneath the Royal Docks. In contrast, Fleeting Memories wants to bring water above ground, returning the River Fleet to the surface near St. Pancras where, according to the crafty artists’ impression, Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières (1884) will idle away London days; and The Centre for Forgotten Beer wants to recover London’s brewing history and bring long abandoned beers—their flavors and smells—back into circulation.
While some projects prioritize recycled and reusable materials, others seem mostly to harvest buzzwords (“responsive,” “innovative,” “permeable public realm”). Some are difficult to distinguish from the ongoing gentrification of Docklands and other rising boroughs. Many of those that want to recover river and canal banks seem little different—give or take a tree or two, some wetlands, or a strip of garden—to the soulless piazza behind the new Paddington Station development. A number of entries seem to belie their nature as hypermodern spaces by imagining themselves as, in Marc Augé’s terms, places. Guerrilla gardening and other urban insubordinations are pre-empted by the occasional bed devoted to urban agriculture, and innovation from below becomes draped in the discourse of increasing “food security” against a backdrop of rising global populations (as if produce from an urban fish farm might actually end up on regular folks’ dinner tables rather than the menu of a boutique restaurant).
Other, related dystopianisms lurk in equally plain view. Many entries talk about providing spaces for “the community,” but no one seems even to have consulted with actually existing communities in which these forgotten spaces exist. Has the ideological commitment to neoliberal regeneration reached the point where “the community” is always-already in the subjunctive tense? Are incoming hipsters always-already gathering, like Hitchcock’s birds? About halfway around the displays, I realized that in all the artists’ impressions there had not been a single person of color, and the only one I subsequently spotted in any of the exhibition’s images was in a “before,” rather than an “after,” picture. Is this the real future of London to be found in Forgotten Spaces 2013?
Artists’ impressions of the 26 shortlisted entries can be seen at the RIBA London website.
A version of this review appeared in Science Fiction Studies 123 (2014): 467–9.
Cue jingle: ♫ favourite flagstones of the week!!!! ♫
And this week’s winners are…
These flagstones are part of the workroom floor at the rear of William Herschel’s house in Bath, where he made his own lenses and other optical equipment. In August 1871, during one such procedure, the stones were shattered by a stream of molten metal that leaked through the bottom of the furnace.
The event is recorded in the journals of his sister, the renowned comet-hunter Caroline. She later accompanied the Doctor on a series of interstellar and transtemporal adventures in a stone TARDIS.
One of the things ‘Some Lapse of Time’ gets right (and would have probably got right even if it had been a 75-minute episode as originally intended) is selecting to adapt a source of appropriate length – John Brunner’s novella of the same name, originally published in Science Fantasy (February 1963) and reprinted in Brunner’s collection Now Then just a couple of months before the episode aired. A novella has more than sufficient complication for an hour-long drama without any need for additional elaboration (or padding), while also not requiring the compression that adapting a novel might entail, such as season two’s Level Seven, season three’s Immortality, Inc and The Naked Sun or season four’s Deathday.
Dr Max Harrow – whose young son recently died of a rare disease, heterochylia, the product of a genetic mutation caused by radiation – is plagued by a nightmare of the distant past, of immiserated primitives dominated by a shaman figure. In the small hours of the morning, after the nightmare has woken him once more, a policeman arrives at the door, having found an unconscious tramp outside Harrow’s house. To the doctor’s astonishment, the tramp seems to have survived into his thirties or forties despite suffering from heterochylia, which is every bit as impossible as him even having the disease since he was born long before there were any nuclear weapons. And he somehow found his way to the doorstep of one of the handful of doctors in the country capable of recognising the symptoms…
These are not the only odd thing about the vagrant.
He carries a finger bone with a distinctive curve, he speaks no known language and is, it turns out, radioactive. He is not from the past at all, but from the future. From after the nuclear war. His language is an evolved or, rather devolved, version of English (like in Threads (1985) or Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980)).
And when Harrow loses the top of one finger – accidentally slammed in a car door during an argument with his wife – and it goes missing, he realises it is the shaman/tramp’s fetish bone, used to focus his journey back in time. (Nigel Kneale’s The Road (1964) relied on a similar reversal of temporal perspective.)
Also being treated at hospital is Wilfred Fitz-Prior, the Minister of War – precisely the kind of person Harrow holds responsible for causing his son’s death. (What choice does Harrow have but to steal the Fitz-Prior’s’s amputated leg and hide it so that it’s bones, too, can become a fetish object for some post-apocalyptic shaman to use to come back and haunt the Minister?) On a rather less macabre note, when Harrow wants to carbon-date the finger bone, he consults with Gerry Anderson (presumably taking a break from filming Supercar or Fireball XL5).
Brunner’s novella is structurally a little clunky, and bows some under the weight of a compositional principle that seems to consist of cramming in everything he could think of, but this does help to generate a sense of inescapable nightmare. (A nightmare that ties in closely with Brunner’s work with the National Council for the Abolition of Nuclear Tests and with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.)
The script by Leon Griffiths – who also wrote John Gillings’ Burke and Hare movie The Flesh and the Fiends (1960), and adapted Raymond F. Jones’s ‘Divided We Fall’ (1950) and Rog Phillips’ ‘The Yellow Pill’ (1958) for Out of this World (25 August and 30 June 1962, respectively, the latter also reworked for Out of the Unknown (25 March 1969)) – cuts away a lot of the clutter. This reduces the nightmarish quality somewhat, even as the pace of the episode teeters on the brink of hysteria.
The production design is by some chap called Ridley Scott, and includes some impressively moderne hospital spaces, especially an angular corridor. The brief exteriors – filmed at the Technical College and the School of Art in (appropriately enough) Harrow – further convey this sense of the very near future; and one shot, in which the camera hurriedly tracks alongside one side of a fence while Dr Harrow races down the other, is especially effective.
Other things to look out for:
– the copper who finds the tramp is played by a young Peter Bowles, delightfully struggling to do the accent of a rural plod
– one of the medical students lurking in the background is played by Victor Pemberton, who wrote the Doctor Who serial ‘Fury from the Deep’ (1968), as well as episodes of Timeslip (1971) and Ace of Wands (1972)
Previous episode, ‘Andover and the Android’
Sources
John Brunner, ‘Some Lapse of Time’, Now and Then (London: Mayflower-Dell, 1965)
Mark Ward, Out of the Unknown: A Guide to the Legendary Series (Bristol: Kaleidoscope, 2004)
Out of the Unknown DVD boxset. BFI, 2014.
The second original script for the series has, like ‘Stranger in the Family’, a contemporary setting (but is rather less adventurous in its use of location shooting – just the exterior of an old suburban home and the Putney street outside). The writer, Mike Watts, had primarily worked for various ITV companies, although in 1965 he also scripted a couple of episodes of the BBC’s The Troubleshooters (1965–72); in addition to writing original dramas and episodes, he wrote or co-wrote several British crime movies, all of them comedies, The Pot Carriers (1962), The Cracksman (1963), Crooks in Cloisters (1964), which I remember fondly but haven’t seen in about a million years, and Joey Boy (1965). The director was Paddy Russell, one of the first two women directors at the BBC. Originally an actress, she appeared in a 1950 adaptation of Karel Capek’s The Insect Play for BBC Sunday-Night Theatre (1950–59) and in two different and uncredited roles in a couple of episodes of Nigel Kneale/Rudolph Cartier’s The Quatermass Experiment (1953); she quit acting to become Cartier’s floor manager and then a director. Despite a long and varied career that lasted until around 1980, and included everything from 55 episodes of Z Cars (1962–78) to 15 instalments of the gameshow 3-2-1 (1978–87), she is probably best remembered as the director of Doctor Who’s The Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve (1966), Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974), The Pyramids of Mars (1975) and The Horror of Fang Rock (1997). Here, she does an excellent job of never letting the potentially ridiculous aspects of the story teeter over into the comical.
‘Come Buttercup, Come Daisy, Come…’ tells the story of Henry Wilkes (Milo O’Shea), a fishmonger and an obsessive gardener who, thanks to his weekly, year-long correspondence with the mysterious Mr Pringle, has managed to grow a number of exotic species which should not even survive in the UK. He has, in fact, grown them to monstrous size, feeding them experimental foodstuffs as well as diced rabbit and cockles. There is something odd about them, though. Birds stay away from the garden. Wilkes, who has given the plants names, also talks to them, and they respond, although we do not hear their voices or what they say; their sentience, however, is confirmed for viewers by their physical responses to his proximity and touch, and the way they extend feelers to grasp at the food he scatters on the soil. Wilkes goes as far as to steal hextellenium, a dangerous chemical, from the pharmacy next to his shop to use in an experimental formula to make Nobby, his favourite among the plants, grow even bigger and stronger.
Indeed, Wilkes is so obsessed with plants as living beings that he berates his new shop assistant, Anne Lovejoy (Patsy Rowlands), for dressing the displays of fish with parsley – he refuses to stock the herb in an effort to discourage his customers from making parsley sauce – and for putting tomato and lettuce in her cheese sandwiches. She is extremely devoted to her new boss, ever so slightly a-quiver when he is around.
Monica Wilkes (Christine Hargreaves) is a nervous mess, concerned her husband no longer loves her and driven to distraction by the weirdness the garden exudes. Although she has witnessed nothing in particular to distress her so, she senses it is somehow unnatural. She suffers from headaches and depression, and her only comfort is her pet dog, Mina, an obvious child surrogate whom she obsessively sketches and paints. (If the story was told from Monica’s point of view, it might be rather like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892).)
This potential middle-class love triangle comes to the fore when Dr Chambers (Desmond Jordan) is brought in to consult on Monica’s ‘nerves’. (He is a private specialist, rather than an NHS doctor, which is significant to the class politics of the story: there are clear social hierarchies, including ones around education, the amateur and the professional.) Chambers bluntly asks Wilkes whether the source of Monica’s anxiety could be that he is having an affair with another woman.
But something else entirely is going on. Something rather queer.
There is a tradition of sf/horror stories about sentient plants, from HG Wells’s ‘The Flowering of the Strange Orchid’ (1894) to John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951) to The Thing (from another World) (Nyby 1951) to Scott Smith’s The Ruins (2006). Many of these stories are obsessed with reproduction, especially Don Siegel’s version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), in which the peculiarities of human sexual reproduction are mapped onto a post-war world world being transformed by commodity production. In ‘Come Buttercup, Come Daisy, Come…’, though, the plants are partly about masturbation and all about homosexual desire.
Wilkes comforts Monica with transparent – to us – lies. He is oblivious to Anne, even as he seeks her collusion in his secretive schemes; in a quite agonising scene, his efforts to make up for snapping at her lead to an intimate conversation, during which he is completely unaware of quite how likely she might be to misinterpret his sudden attention (Rowlands excels, as always, at combining self-deprecation, class aspiration, timidity and repressed desire). He has been engaged in a secretive correspondence with Pringle, a man whom no one has met and who regularly sends him odd packages. Wilkes takes special pleasure in the plant he calls Nobby. He thrusts his hands deep into Nobby’s leaves to administer a ‘morning tickle’, during which he calls the plant what sounds like ‘a little old plonker’ and then unquestionably a ‘great big silly old faggot’. And when he plunges a syringe full of his special formula into Nobby’s roots to make his favourite even bigger, the framing of the shot makes it look as if Wilkes is fumbling with his penis. Elsewhere, he describes himself to Anne as ‘the biggest cockle-eater in the business’.
And Nobby is a jealous lover. He devours Mina, and then barks like the dog so as to lure Monica to her death; and then when Anne turns up, laden with cockles for Wilkes…
The script was originally commissioned as a seventy-five minute drama; cutting it down to sixty-minutes (even then, it overruns by a minute), might be why the end seems a little rushed, fizzles a little. On the one hand, there is no revelation that Pringle is really an intelligent plant, which is probably a good thing; but there is certainly left open the unexplored possibility that Nobby or the other plants are telepathically controlling Wilkes and others…
Other things to watch out for
— Patsy Rowland’s reverse acting when the plant wraps its tendrils around her neck
— The quite astonishing line after Wilkes tears a plastic flower off one his customer’s bosoms: You can’t go out for a pair of kippers nowadays without getting raped.
— The expression on Patsy Rowland’s face when she walks out of the shop just in time to hear that line being delivered.
— And Norman. Watch out for Norman. He is the pharmacist. He is also Eric Thompson, Emma’s dad and, far more significantly for world culture, the narrator of the English-language dub of The Magic Roundabout (1965–77).
Previous episode, ‘Time in Advance’
Next episode, ‘Sucker Bait‘
Sources
Out of the Unknown DVD boxset. BFI, 2014.
A giant figure in immaculate evening dress looms over night-time Paris. Stepping over familiar landmarks, he gazes out at us from behind a domino mask. And in his outstretched hand is a bloodied dagger. The image, by Gino Starace, is iconic. It is Fantômas. The Lord of Terror. The Genius of Evil. But despite his costume, he is not a gentleman.
Created in 1911 by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre for a series of 32 monthly novels, the enormously popular Fantômas soon crossed over to the movies. In 1913 and 1914, Louis Feuillade directed five films about the endless quest of Inspector Juve and journalist Jerôme Fandor to capture the criminal mastermind. However, although Starace’s picture was used to promote Feuillade’s Fantômas, he only once appears costumed like this – and then as a figment of the defeated Juve’s imagination.
The head of a vast criminal organisation and a master of disguise, Fantômas has less in common with the gentleman thief than with the villains of Fritz Lang’s Die Spinnen (1919-20), Spione (1928) and Dr Mabuse films (1922, 1933, 1960), in whom the terrors of disempowerment and anonymity that accompany capitalist-industrial, urban modernity coalesce. Brutally instrumentalist and utterly impersonal, there is no true identity to be discovered behind his series of disguises.
Starace’s dapper but knife-wielding gentleman is – in the face of the globalising forces of empire and capital squaring off on the eve of World War I – at once reassuring, anachronistic, transgressive and fantastical. Perhaps this is why Fantômas, the product of arch-conservatives, so appealed to such radical avant-gardists as Guillaume Apollinaire, Antonin Artaud, Blaise Cendrars, René Magritte and Kurt Weill. He embodies the contradictions of his age.
The probable source of Starace’s gentleman-thief image is AJ Raffles, perhaps channelled through Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin. Created by EW Hornung in the 1890s, Raffles is the finest slow bowler of his generation. Penniless, he is nonetheless proud to be a Gentleman rather than a Player, and likewise insists on his amateur status as a thief. Selecting only the most challenging jobs and most exquisite loot to support his bachelor lifestyle, he robs from the rich and is not averse to others helping the poor.
He appeared in a dozen films between 1905 and 1939. Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman (1917) stars John Barrymore in a breakneck mash-up of Hornung’s stories that only ever pauses to display The Great Profile’s great profile. This Raffles appears to be not so much a gentleman as someone who knows a gentleman’s tailor (Barrymore, his looks and his star both fading, is a more compelling gentleman thief in Arsène Lupin and Grand Hotel, both 1932). In Raffles (1925), House Peters, known as ‘The Star of a Thousand Emotions’, can muster only a handful of them, including ‘stolid refusal to be charismatic’ and ‘discomfort in ill-fitting evening dress’. In contrast, 
Ronald Colman in the first talkie Raffles (1930) gives one of his most effortless-seeming performances – as if acting were too vulgar even to contemplate – and the warm timbre of his Surrey burr modulates plummy received pronunciation into something quite sensuous. But the narrative material had already been filleted of its fundamental queerness. Hornung’s stories, focused on the close bond between Raffles and his accomplice Bunny, are full of innuendo and double entendre, with occasional allusions to amyl nitrate and Oscar Wilde.
Once the Production Code was enforced, the gentleman thief became not merely straight but almost completely desexualised. In the 1940 Raffles, David Niven is too young, his Raffles too boyish, and the casting of classical Hollywood’s very best good girl, Olivia de Havilland, as his love interest compounds an error that would not be corrected until Yorkshire Television’s 1977 Raffles series, 
starring Anthony Valentine. Perfectly cast, Valentine’s precise delivery and slightly faded looks – the contrast between his crow’s feet and seemingly plasticised cheekbones suggests more than merely a youth misspent – unleash the homoerotic appeal of the gentleman thief: the tastefully furnished, comfortable quarters, devoid of women; the endless flirtations, but avoidance of romance or entanglement; the gentlemen’s clubs; the secret nocturnal identity; the dressing-up to break into other men’s houses; the crossing of class barriers; the mixing with rough trade…
But, queer or otherwise, this sexual undercurrent is not the only source of the gentleman thief’s appeal. The flipside of Fantômas, that anonymously devastating force of modernity, the gentleman thief negotiates modernity’s transformations of economic and social structures. This is beautifully captured by the prominence afforded a bust of WG Grace in the apartment of Valentine’s Raffles. As the finest cricketer of his generation, Grace is worthy of Raffles’s respect. But despite being a Gentleman, he was only nominally an amateur, making more money from the sport than any professional Player. A similar whiff of disrepute surrounds Raffles.
As old hierarchies crumbled, signifiers of social class were disrupted by wider access to certain varieties of commodity. Appearances begin to deceive. In Ernst Lubitsch’s racy, pre-Code Trouble in Paradise (1932), a Baron (Herbert Marshall) and a Countess (Miriam Hopkins) only fall in love when each discovers the other is a fake and a thief. Self-made and simulacral, they can play any social role – given the right costume – but the only place they really belong is with each other, conning, stealing or on the lam. However, such semiotic manipulations rarely succeed. In Pépé le moko (1938), Jean Gabin’s proletarian thief is unutterably stylish, but he cannot escape his class or fate.
In the post-war period, values shifted. Consider the contrast in The Pink Panther (1963) between the aristocratic Phantom and his nephew: David Niven is too old, Robert Wagner too American, too glib. A new consumerist masculinity was taking over, and gentleman thieves were no longer gentlemen. And they were as likely to solve crimes as commit them.
The character-type saw a popular resurgence in 1966, the year in which Cary Grant, Hollywood’s master of sartorial transformation (and a gentleman thief in To Catch a Thief, 1955), retired from films. The charm of Gambit’s Harry Dean (Michael Caine) is located in the gulf between his East London vowels and his dubious received pronunciation when posing as Sir Harold Dean. That of Kaleidoscope’s Barney Lincoln (Warren Beatty) depends entirely on his transparent reliance on a broad smile to buy time when he is out of his social depth. This league of ‘gentlemen’, which also includes Oliver Reed in The Jokers (1967) and Stanley Baker in Perfect Friday (1970), consists of working- (or middle-) class boys made good, and valorised for doing so. The very best of them is to be found in How to Steal a Million (1966), less a film than an opportunity to ponder whether Audrey Hepburn – as elegant when disguised as a cleaning lady as when dressed by Givenchy – or a young Peter O’Toole is the more beautiful (although it is probably a draw, O’Toole does showcase some of the most remarkable cigarette-handling you will ever see).
Costume, commodities and consumption are also at the heart of Mario Bava’s Diabolik (1968). The eponymous Jaguar-driving criminal mastermind (played by John Phillip Law, who looks like the offspring of Alain Delon and a Vulcan mod) dresses in full-enclosure leather and rubber body suits to commit his crimes, only his eyes visible through a domino-shaped cutaway. Based on a 1960s Italian comic book character, Diabolik is an intriguing inversion of Fantômas. His ‘terrorism’ is restricted to destroying the taxation system because the government have wasted so much public money pursuing him, and his subterranean base is a fantasy of modish, high-tech apartment living – a love-nest shared with Eva (Marisa Mell), his beautiful blonde accomplice with a taste for mini-
dresses, hotpants, hipsters, peekaboo tops and kinky boots. Crime, for them, is passionate foreplay and, in contrast to poor Raffles and Bunny, it need never go unconsummated.
This dynamic between class and consumption was repeatedly played out on British television in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Adam Adamant (Gerald Harper), a Victorian secret agent revived in swinging London, was a gentleman (and misogynistic prig) but not a thief. Peter Wyngarde’s deliciously-voiced Jason King was no 
gentleman, although he was certainly a player. Tony Curtis’s brash self-made millionaire Danny Wilde partners up with Roger Moore’s Lord Brett Sinclair to fight crime in expensive locations in The Persuaders!, although Moore always seemed less an aristocrat than a bemused estate agent. However, the pattern was most decisively set when, in the fifth season of The Avengers, Patrick Macnee’s John Steed, formerly so well-dressed that you forgot he was a government functionary, let himself be costumed by Pierre Cardin. Bringing modern touches to classic Savile Row designs might have sounded innocuous, but from there it was only a short step to working with Gareth Hunt…
Perhaps it was the backlash against the ‘excesses’ of the 1960s and 1970s, or perhaps it was neo-liberalism’s success in persuading otherwise sensible people that there are no such things as society or social and economic classes, that finally did for the gentleman thief. Where is he now?
In Entrapment (1999), Sean Connery – whose James Bond negotiated so intriguingly between working-class physique and access to style, articulating social mobility as a semiotic possibility – is just some rich guy, no more convincing as a gentleman than he was as a Soviet submarine commander. There is too much of the catalogue model about Pierce Brosnan in The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), and George Clooney’s Danny Ocean merely gentrifies the rat pack. Remorselessly heterosexualised, they reek of new money. And then there is The Gentleman Thief (2001), which only exists because the BBC realised – far too late – that they should lazily cast Nigel Havers as Raffles before it was too late. Or former Eastender Michelle Ryan as Doctor Who’s ‘aristocratic’ thief/Emma-Peel-wannabe, Lady Christina de Souza…
Frankly, I’d rather work with Gareth Hunt.
[A version of this piece first appeared in Electric Sheep back when it was hard copy; but issue 12 (winter 2009), is now out of print.]
This episode is based on ‘Time in Advance’ (Galaxy 1956) by William Tenn, the pseudonym of Philip Klass, UK-born but US-resident since childhood. He published only one novel, Of Men and Monsters (magazine version 1963; book version 1968), but around fifty short stories in the second half of the 1940s and the 1950s. ‘Time in Advance’ was reprinted as the title story of a 1958 collection of his work by Bantam in the US and in the UK by Gollancz in 1963 and the Science Fiction Book Club in 1964; Brian Aldiss also included it in Introducing SF: A Science Fiction Anthology for Faber and Faber in 1964. It has been anthologised a handful of times since then, though the reasons for its early prominence rather elude me.
The premise of the story is neatly ironic. In the future, in order to reduce crime and also to provide labour for the arduous colonisation of other worlds, murder is made legal – sort of. If you announce your intention to kill, you can serve a halved sentence breaking alien rocks in perilous circumstances, and if you survive, you return to Earth and receive a license permitting you to commit the murder (or equivalent crimes, the sentences of which equal that which you have already served; and you do not have to identify your intended victim). Often, just a short stint 
off-world is enough to dissuade people from murder, and they return home chastened; those determined to see it through rarely survive. (Philip K. Dick’s ‘The Minority Report’ introduced a rather different notion of pre-crime earlier the same year, in the January 1956 Fantastic Universe.)
The story opens with Nicholas Crandall and Otto Henck, who have kept each other alive through countless dangers, returning aboard the convict ship Jean Valjean, their sentences completed, their desire to kill unchanged. And then, in rather a schematic manner, Nick encounters an array of people who either assume they are his intended victim or wish him to use his immunity from prosecution to other ends. He learns that everyone is kind of shitty and that he does not have the will to kill even his worst enemy, while Otto is denied the possibility of revenge upon his unfaithful wife.
It is entertaining enough in its jadedness, but rather poorly constructed. Nick tends to meet other characters just once, with each exchange being wrapped up and effectively forgotten before the next commences, and a number of passages – such as Nick’s explanation of his grievance – seem very first draft, not so much in the quality of their prose as in their off the cuff rationalisation. According to Tenn, the story was written in one night, after a friend, Calder Willingham was mugged on his way over to visit. The seed of the story was Willingham’s sense that he would never again feel safe in Greenwich Village:
‘That’s the worst thing about these rotten criminals – not what they do to you at the moment, but what they do to you in the future, when they’re not even around’. (370)
Tenn took the completed story to Horace Gold the next morning, who promptly bought it without requiring any changes.
The episode is the first of three directed by Peter Sasdy, the others being ‘The Midas Plague’ (20 December 1965) and ‘The Eye’ (24 November 1966). A prolific director of serial and standalone television drama since 1959, he had previously directed the Terry Nation-scripted, Peter Cushing-starring, Irene Shubik-script-edited adaptation of Asimov’s ‘The Caves of Steel’ (5 June 1964) for Story Parade (1964). He graduated to films with Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970), Countess Dracula (1971), written by Jeremy Paul, author of ‘The Dead Past’, and Hands of the Ripper (1971), all made for Hammer, and the 1972 Doomwatch spin-off movie, written by Cybermen creators Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis, made for Tigon. He directed a few more films, including the horror movies Nothing but the Night (1973) and I Don’t Want to Be Born (1975) and the Canadian sf-western Welcome to Blood City (1977). But the remainder of his career was spent primarily in television, directing Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape (1972), as well as episodes of Arthur of the Britons (1972-73), Great Mysteries (1973-74), Supernatural (1977), 1990 (1977-78), Return of the Saint (1978-79), Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson (1979-80), Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense (1984-85) and Imaginary Friends (1987). Which means I saw an awful lot of his work while growing up, albeit without knowing it.
The script by Peter Erickson, who would next year co-write Doctor Who’s ‘The Ark’ four-parter, does the best it can to make the story less schematic. It also, thankfully, omits the wealthy and strikingly beautiful woman who tries to persuade Tenn’s Crandall not to commit murder but instead to rape her in as brutal and degrading a manner as possible – since it carries the same sentence, he couldn’t be prosecuted for it. And Erickson changes the conclusion of the story – while Tenn cannot quite maintain his misanthropy to the end, Erickson introduces one more betrayal:
I was his best friend. It was my turn to make a profit out of him.
Erickson works hard to create a more distinctive future world than the one Tenn sketches in, albeit from familiar enough building blocks. Scarcity has been banished, and most people live lives of leisure. Redevelopment projects turn massive apartment blocks into nature parks (!), and automation is widespread (in a nice touch, which plays a little clunkily now, it is implied that revolutionary power source behind Crandall’s desire for revenge has lead to sufficient changes in his and Otto’s seven year absence that they have to figure out and explain to each other – i.e., the audience – how things work). The existence of voluntary euthanasia suggests a certain ambivalence about this future, as does the fact that pretty much the entire cast sport similar white-blond/e wigs. On the one hand, this merely suggests alterity, a kind of Thal-like premature glam-rock; on the other, some kind of Aryan uniformity. The skin make-up on some characters anticipates the gold-skinned cast of Kneale’s The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968), and it remains unclear whether the excessive eyeliner worn by some of the male characters signifies, along with the psychedelic wall displays, the perpetuation of a youthful culture or queasiness about so much leisure and its potential for 
decadence. Certainly, as Crandall, Edward Judd’s trademark ability – exercised so well in the Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), First Men in the Moon (1964), Invasion (1966), Island of Terror (1966) and The Vengeance of She (1968) – to play sympathetic but unlikeable characters allows a kind of manly robustness to be let loose in this queer future.
Other things to look out for:
— Judy Parfitt as Marie, and Mike Pratt (y’know Randall, from Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) (1969-71)) as Otto
–Numerous reflections of the microphone boom and sometimes the entire crew in the metallic walls – one of the real problems when shininess signifies futurity.
Last episode, ‘The Dead Past’
Next episode, ‘Come Buttercup, Come Daisy, Come…‘
Sources
William Tenn, ‘Time in Advance’, Immodest Proposals: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn, volume 1. Framingham: NESFA, 2000. 349–70.
Out of the Unknown DVD boxset. BFI, 2014.
This is the first of the series’ six episodes based on the fiction of Isaac Asimov, its most adapted author. The others are ‘Sucker Bait’ (1954; 15 November 1965), ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed’ (1951; 29 December 1966), ‘Reason’ (1941; 1 January 1967 as ‘The Prophet’), ‘Liar!’ (1941; 14 January 1969) and ‘The Naked Sun’ (1956; 18 February 1969). Only the first two episodes survive.1
‘The Dead Past’ was directed by John Gorrie, who had previously worked on Doctor Who, directing ‘The Keys of Marinus’ (1964) and possibly one episode of ‘The Reign of Terror’ (1964), though this seems to be disputed, not least by Gorrie himself.
The adaptation of Asimov’s 1956 Astounding story was by Jeremy Paul, probably best known in sf circles for a pair of original Play for Today (1970-84) teleplays, The Flipside of Dominick Hide (9 Decemeber 1980) and Another Flip for Dominick (14 December 1982). Paul also adapted John Brunner’s ‘The Last Lonely Man’ (1964; 21 January 1969) for Out of the Unknown, and scripted ‘Poor Butterfly’ (9 January 1969), an original Journey to the Unknown (1968-69) teleplay, and Hammer’s Countess Dracula (Sasdy 1971).
Asimov’s story presents a particular set of problems for the adapter in that it typifies both the strengths and weaknesses of his fiction as fiction. Take, for example, the opening scene, around 800 words long, in which Arnold Potterley, a Professor of Ancient History, has an appointment with Thaddeus Araman, head of the Chronoscopy Division, to plead once more for access to a chronoscope so that he can further pursue research into ancient Carthage (primarily to prove that the ancient civilization was not a brutal regime, given to sacrificing its children by fire to appease Moloch in times of adversity, and that this idea is merely a lie spread by the Greeks and Romans). There is a brief description of Potterley’s appearance, but no clues at all as to what Araman looks like or where the scene is set – presumably Araman’s office, since he looks through a folder of papers and has a buzzer (on his desk?) with which to summon his secretary; there is also some sitting down and standing up, implying there are chairs. But overall, there are few visual cues of any kind, and no other appeal to senses whatsoever, just two talking heads expositioning at each other. (Yes, I know it’s not a verb, but at times like this it needs to be.) Readers are left to themselves to fill in as much or as little of this detail as they want.2
Yet somehow it works, probably because Asimov is such an effective writer of exposition – it is why he was drawn to the kind of logic-problem stories typical of both his sf and crime fiction, and it is why he is better as a science populariser (or vulgariser, as I seem to recall him insisting) than a fiction writer. It is also part of his role in the hegemony of Campbellian sf. Asimov’s fiction so very effectively denies human material embodiment, it could not help but appeal to readers of a genre constantly and anxiously constructing its self-image (in opposition to fantasy, horror, the weird, romance, science fantasy) as one of reason and rationality. Presumably, this denial of embodiment, emotionality, irrationality, etc, also appealed to many adolescents and to the core lower-middle-class genre readership of the period, precariously positioned just that little bit higher up the class system than their parents and aspiring to at least remain there.
Of course, television drama – and particular the tradition of single plays – urgently wants to be more than just an interchange of talking heads, and this becomes difficult when depicting a future world on a budget.3 The episodes has just six speaking parts (and three extras), and nine sets, all of them interiors. The only external views are a couple of glimpses of the past on chronoscope screens and the city vista outside of Araman’s office window. Futurity is conveyed through fashion (suit jackets without lapels, collars or pockets; matching waistcoats and trousers revealed in medium and long shot to be one-piece outfits; shirts that fasten up one side rather than centrally; invisible fastenings, and especially no buttons, which seem to have become every bit as disinvented as seatbelts in the Star Trek universe) and some minor technological innovations, such as a small desktop videophone and the chronoscopes’ giant wallscreens. Dialogue can bear some of the weight, but exposition has to be briefer, tighter, sketchier when spoken than when on the page (at least within the magazine sf norms of Asimov’s time).
***
Part of the dilemma faced by Arnold Potterley is that he lives in a society in which the boundaries between – and indeed within – disciplines are heavily policed. As he expositions at a junior faculty member Jonas Foster, a physicist who has yet to make his first grant application, which will fix his specialism for his entire career,
Scholars … could be free only if they could freely follow their own free-swinging curiosity. Research … forced into a predesigned pattern by the powers that held the purse strings became slavish and had to stagnate. (15-16)
Actually, Asimov does not even try to stage this as a conversation between people. Foster’s thoughts soon slip into authorial exposition:
No one would advocate running a factory by allowing each individual worker to do whatever pleased him at the moment, or of running a ship according to the casual and conflicting notions or each individual crewman. It could be taken for granted that some sort of centralized supervisory agency must exist in each case. Why should direction and order benefit a factory and a ship but not scientific research?
People might say that the human mind was somehow qualitatively different from a ship or factory but the history of intellectual endeavor proved the opposite. … as knowledge grew, more and more data had to be absorbed before worthwhile journeys into ignorance could be organized. … More and more, the individual researcher gave way to the research team and the research institution. … By 1940, only the government, large industries and large universities or research institutions could properly subsidize basic research.
By 1960, even the largest universities depended entirely upon government grants, while research institutions could not exist without tax concessions and public subscriptions. By 2000, the industrial combines had become a branch of world government and, thereafter, the financing of research and therefore its direction naturally became centralized under a department of the government.
It all worked out naturally and well. Every branch of science was fitted neatly to the needs of the public, and the various branches of science were co-ordinated decently. (15-16)
This resonates with concerns voiced by JBS Haldane and Bertrand Russell in the 1920s, JD Bernal in the 1930s, Robert K. Merton in the 1930s and 1940s, among others, that the industrialization of science by states, especially for military purposes, and by corporations leads not only to secrecy but also distorts the practice of science for purposes of profit and social control. For the contemporary reader, especially if an academic in a UK university, such passages reek of the disastrous consequences – well, some of them – of the RAEs and REFs, and of the reorganization of research councils so as to channel research funding to the already-wealthiest universities and to promote top-down agendas of questionable merit.
Potterley goes so far as to claim that the government is actively preventing research using the chronoscopes – time windows, which enable one to see and hear the past – and into neutrinics, the science underpinning the technology. Against his better judgment, Foster is drawn in, and recruits the assistance of his uncle, Ralph Nimmo, a science writer whose job seems to combine science journalism, ghost-writing grant applications and ghost-writing refereed journal articles (I am not sure such a career actually quite exists yet, but again this seems prescient of the significance now given to ‘impact’ in the funding of UK research).
And, of course, once Foster is able to develop a low-cost easy-to-build version of the chronoscope, it turns out that Potterley’s suspicions are well-grounded. In a pretty well-orchestrated escalation, Asimov reveals that chronoscopes can only view the past up until about a century and a quarter previously, after which the noise to signal ration becomes impenetrably high. After some moral-panicking about new media – that people will spend all their time watching this new channel, close themselves off from the world and become obsessed with trying to relive the past – a far more significant point is made. The ‘past’ actually begins a split second ago, which makes the chronoscope a highly effective surveillance device – and one that, thanks to Foster and Nimmo, anyone can now build. It is the end of privacy, the beginning of an utterly new world.
Asimov’s conclusion also includes the suggestion that what Potterley saw as state tyranny was actually the state acting in the best interests of all. This tension runs through a lot of his work – partly a typical American obsession, partly a Wellsian desire for rational management by a benevolent elite, and partly the Technocracy and Michelism, perhaps tinged with debates about radical democracy versus centralised control (Trotsky vs Lenin vs Stalin), picked up in his Futurian days. The story’s abrupt conclusion, its refusal to try to imagine the world that might be created by the widespread use of chronoscopes, is among other things a reiterated terror of the supposedly irrational (and embodied) masses.
The episode does a pretty good job of capturing the various arguments and counter-arguments driving Asimov’s story forward, but sometimes struggles to enliven them, despite a strong cast of character actors and competent direction. The latter sadly fails to transform the sense of confinement produced by the limited sets into the oppressive claustrophobia that would lend more urgency and conviction.. A small but key change to the story comes at the end of the first scene – rather than completely forgetting about Potterley, Araman sets in motion a game of cat and mouse, once more channeling into television sf Orwell’s and Kneale/Cartier’s Nineteen Eight-fours. But even when Araman visits the Potterleys’ house while Foster is working in the basement there is little real sense of tension or suspense.
Solid production design does visually elaborate on the generational gulf between the Potterleys and Foster quite effectively, though, through the contrast between their Victorian house and his one room apartment, and the set-dressing of these spaces, including rather different artworks on the walls. (Foster’s apartment includes an alcove that can be separated from the main room by one of those sliding/concertinaing plastic doors. In the early 1970s we moved to a house with one of those separating the lounge space from the dining space, and even then it seemed so modern and swish. How wrong we were! My dad, being an omnicompetent sort of chap but not an open-plan kind of guy, had by the mid-seventies ripped it out and built a partition wall, and suddenly we had a living room and a dining room. Woo-hoo!)
Oddly, the aspect of the story the episode does not capture particularly well is Asimov’s cod-Freudian attempt to create psychological depth for Potterley. His strong, seemingly irrational, aversion to cigarettes is gradually revealed as a symptom of his guilt over this three-year-old daughter Laurel’s death in a house fire twenty years earlier, for which he may or may not have been responsible. He becomes terrified that his wife, already more or less obsessed with their long deceased child, will use the technology not only to spend all her time watching the infant Laurel but also discover whether or not he caused the fire. There is also the implication – made more explicit in the episode – that this underlies Potterley’s obsession, which he thinks of as a rational cerebral pursuit, with Carthage’s fiery infant sacrifices. It is all rather clunkily schematic and unsophisticated, and the episode has the unenviable task of compressing it while also playing it down.
It is unclear quite how aware Asimov was of the Freudian imagery in his story. A cigarette is not always just a cigarette and the Carthaginian Moloch took
the form of a hollow, brazen idol with a furnace in its belly. (19)
Although the story seems to imply Laurel’s death was the origin of Potterley’s symptom, this imagery points to a more deeply rooted Oedipal trauma, an unresolved castration anxiety and a terror of the archaic mother that includes terror of engulfment, of a lack of separation from others and, once more, of embodiment. This underscored by the final images of Caroline Potterley.
One real strength of the episode is its transformation of the story into a commentary on television as a medium. When it is highlighted that the past is not some fixed distant object but a constantly unfolding present-moment-just-gone, there is a moment of hesitation between archive and stream and a resonance with the transformations of television drama in the post-war period from live broadcast to recorded/edited more or less as-if-live to recorded and edited post-production. Furthermore, in a nice final touch, the episode also considers the role of audivisual media in the constitution of memory, affect and identity. Footage of a younger Potterley playing with Laurel ends with her running into the foreground and freeze-framing – a nod to the final shot of François Truffaut’s Les quatre cent coups (1959), already paid homage by Tony Richardson’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962). But unlike these precursors, the episode then shows this fragment, which recalls home movie footage, several times, revealing Caroline Potterley as its obsessive viewer. It is a complex moment. On the one hand it emphasizes the construction of her character by both Asimov and Paul as consisting entirely of maternal neurosis – a fate shared by both Ripley and Sarah Connor – while repeating a masculine terror of the archaic mother. But it does also suggest how ungrounded that might be since she would rather take joy in seeing her daughter again than pin down her husband’s guilt and punish him.
I have no idea whether or not Bob Shaw was familiar with ‘The Dead Past’, but his Other Days, Other Eyes (1972) reworks an awful lot of this material rather effectively. The first of the stories in his fix-up novel was published in Analog (August 1966) less than a year after the episode was broadcast.
Other things to watch out for
— It is not quite clear where ultimate responsibility lies, but either Dudley Simpson, credited with incidental music, or Brian Hodgson, credited with radiophonics, or their guvnor really needs to lay off the theremin. Don’t get me wrong. I love the theremin. It so brilliantly evokes weird alien otherness, conveys a sense of futurity and even, now, of pastness (this is how the future used to sound). But it is overused in this episode – at least it now sounds overused – and without adequate attention to its connotations. The most hilarious sequence comes when Foster is slaving away, secretly constructing a chronosocope, in the basement of the Potterleys’ home. There is a montage of one or other or both Potterleys rising anxiously as if to go down and see what he is doing. But it now comes across as a couple of dissatisfied parents, whose son has returned from college without a job and is now living in the basement, trying to get up the nerve to go and complain that he is playing his theremin too loud.
— The curious maintenance of Asimov’s US framework, particularly of Foster’s education at MIT, presented as the absolute imprimatur of a properly scientific education. Even though he and everyone else in the story sounds impeccably English, and it perhaps being set in London (is the ancient dome visible among the futuristic skyscrapers from Araman’s window St Paul’s Cathedral?). Does this betray a sense of the future as being American? Of an eye being cast to export markets? Or an inattentive adaptation?
Previous episode, ‘Stranger in the Family’
Next episode, ‘Time in Advance‘
Notes
1
Irene Shubik had previously script-edited a 75-minute adaptation of The Caves of Steel (1953; BBC2 5 June 1964), written by Terry Nation, directed by Peter Sasdy and starring Peter Cushing and John Carson, for Story Parade (1964-65), and a 60-minute adaptation of ‘Little Lost Robot’ (1947; ITV 7 July 1962) for the Boris Karloff-hosted Out of the This World (1962), starring Maxine Audley as Susan Calvin and directed by Guy Verney, whose many other television credits include Sydney Newman’s early sf serials for ITV Pathfinders in Space (1950), Pathfinders to Mars (1960-61) and Pathfinders to Venus (1961). Only a few fragments of The Caves of Steel survive, while ‘Little Lost Robot’ is the only episode of Out of the World to survive and is available on a BFI DVD (which includes audio recordings of the series’ adaptations of Tom Godwin’s ‘The Cold Equations’ (1954; 14 July 1962), starring Peter Wyngarde (!) and Jane Asher, and of Terry Nation’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s ‘Imposter’ (1953; 21 July 1962), and the script for the series opener, an adaptation of John Wyndham’s ‘Dumb Martian’ (1952; 24 June 1962).)
2
This makes me really curious to see ‘Little Lost Robot’, and perhaps even more curious to see the script, since Terry Nation has a reputation for not including details of character or setting, arguing that that sort of things was the job of casting, wardrobe and production design. I’m guessing the director had very little to work with.
3
Asimov’s 2050s seem to have become the 2030s in the television episode, but at one point Asimov’s wording implies a much later date than the story logic demands, and the episode is rather vague about when it is set (an observation, not a complaint).
Sources
Isaac Asimov, ‘The Dead Past’, Earth is Room Enough. London: Panther 1960. 9-50.
Out of the Unknown DVD boxset. BFI, 2014.
Mark Bould 