Mordecai Roshwald – Mark Bould

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.

This is the second episode not to have survived (apart from its final credits and filmed inserts of newspaper headlines). This is particularly annoying since it is the only episode out of 49 based on a story by a woman. Kate Wilhelm’s ‘Andover and the Android’ was one of several original stories among the reprints in her The Mile-Long Spaceship (1963). When the collection was published in the UK in 1966, it was retitled Andover and the Android, presumably because the adaptation had given it recognition value. Curiously, although the story order was shuffled, ‘Andover’ did not become the lead story. (Out of this World also only had one episode based on a story by a woman, Katherine Maclean’s 1951 ‘Picture Don’t Lie’ (11 August 1962).)

Wilhelm’s story begins with Roger Andover facing a choice between the death sentence or narco-analysis, which will wipe his memory and personality. (Or something like that – it is not the clearest of opening exchanges or penal systems.) While deciding on his course of action, he recalls what brought him to this juncture. A confirmed bachelor, he was urged to marry in order to be deemed suitable for promotion to a corporate vice-presidency.

Not normal? Just because he liked an orderly life? Just because he loved his music and his books? Because he had never met a woman who could share his interests and not be cluttering his life with a lot of nonsense about changing the apartment and having a horde of messy children underfoot? Because he couldn’t abide women who had to run things, had to interfere constantly, had to manage me the same way they managed money, children, vacations, everything else he could think of? Damn it! He liked living alone. … The fact that he considered marriage slightly irregular seemed not at all odd to him, but explicable in light of the nature of women; and his own celibate life he privately concluded was a result of the happy circumstances that had seen fit to place him higher on the scale of rationality than his fellow man, to give him a keener insight concerning the machinations of the female mind. (116)

Andover seems to fall halfway between a queer stereotype – he is gourmand; he visits Roman ruins, Parisian galleries, German cathedrals, Venetian concerts – and the kind of sophisticated, consumerist playboy figure Hugh Heffner introduced into fifties culture (played so well by Rock Hudson), without quite being either. So as the pressure mounts, he uses blackmail to have a ‘perfect wife’ made for him, even though it is illegal to own personal androids. Lydia is a groundbreaking prototype, utterly convincing. And of course – yet to his complete surprise – he grows accustomed to her ways. He falls in love with her.

When Lydia begins to malfunction, the executive Andover has been blackmailing sees his chance: instead of repairing her, he destroys her, embezzles half a million dollars and flees the country. That is when the police become suspicious about the disappearance of Andover’s wife…

Like the last episode’s source story, ‘Andover and the Android’ is rather slender for an hour-long drama. Adapter Bruce Stewart – who would also adapt Colin Kapp’s 1962 ‘Lambda 1’ (20 October 1966) and write 19 of the 26 episodes of the underrated children’s sf series Timeslip (1970-71) – opted to expand the story by transforming it into a comedy. While a number of earlier episodes, regardless of where they are set, languish somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, with English actors trying on often infelicitous American accents, ‘Andover’ is firmly relocated from a rather vague future US to the England of West End farces (and of an sf film such as The Perfect Woman (Knowles 1949)). The comic action described by Mark Ward in quite painstaking detail sounds laboriously unfunny, but apparently audiences responded well to it.

Andover’s scheme is altered slightly – he needs a wife so as to inherit a fortune, but he intends all along to dispose of her once he is wealthy.

And the conclusion is altered significantly. Rather than Andover declaring that he murdered his wife (presumably so he will be executed without it being revealed that he fell in love with a machine), the adaptation’s protagonist is himself mistaken for a faulty android and destroyed, while the faulty Lydia lives on. This blackly comic conclusion – which seems at odds tonally with the earlier farce – was also apparently well-received, according to audience surveys and newspaper reviews. Indeed, the episode was selected for a repeat (under its own title, rather than the series’) a month later as part of BBC1’s A Taste of Two season intended to promote the junior channel.

The episode was directed by Alan Cooke, who would also direct Frederik Pohl’s ‘Tunnel Under the World’ (1 December 1966). He had directed DH Lawrence’s own stage adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (the cast included Tom Criddle, who plays Andover and also appears in the series’ adaptation of Mordecai Roshwald’s 1959 Level 7 (27 October 1966), scripted by JB Priestley). Cooke was also a classmate at Cambridge with Tony Richardson and John Schlesinger (apparently Andover at one point orders a ‘simple auberge a la John Schlesinger’; Cooke’s brother Malcolm edited Schlesinger’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1967)).

It would have been nice to see it. And not just because Fulton Mackay was in it.

Last episode, ‘The Fox and the Forest’
Next episode, ‘Some Lapse Time’

References
Mark Ward, Out of the Unknown: A Guide to the Legendary Series (Bristol: Kaleidoscope, 2004)
Kate Wilhelm, ‘Andover and the Android’, The Mile-Long Spaceship (New York: Berkeley Medallion, 1963), 115-127.

Tag: Mordecai Roshwald

Out of the Unknown: ‘Some Lapse of Time’, BBC2 8 December 1965

Out of the Unknown: ‘Andover and the Android’, BBC2 29 November 1965