Spark Sunderland - radio comedy

Quick plug - my mate Paul Dunn has a comedy hour on Spark FM in Sunderland (107 FM) on Tuesday afternoons, 15:00 - 16:00 as of today.

You can listen on the internet if you're not local to Sunderland (as I'm not) and details are here:

http://www.sparksunderland.com/

But the big thing for me is that the shows will feature some comedy sketches by me - hooray!

More details about Paul's production company Cranked Anvil can be found here:

http://crankedanvil.co.uk/

Watch out puny humans, Murgala and the Graspatrons are planning to invade and enslave us all - at some point...

Views from the Basement..?

I started this Blog a few years ago when I was living in a second floor flat in Beckenham, Kent. Not long after that we moved to a ground / basement flat in beautiful Catford. I kept the Blog name the same, even though my views now were coming from what looked like the basement from the front of the property and the ground floor from the rear (thanks to us having a garden!)

As life has changed in so many ways over the past three years it's now time to move on again. But this time we're off to Exeter in Devon. And a house at last instead of a flat. Bit of a change, yes. The reasons to move are plenty, and the reasons to stay in London are also plenty - but the bottom line is we, as a family, have made the decision to start an almost new life in a part of the Country that we love, that's near the coastline that we love. We have some links over that side of the Country already too, which helps.

Also the new place has a converted loft space, so there's a chance that my ramblings may once again become views from the second floor!

See you all on the other side!

The Terrible Zodin Issue 17 - available now to download for free!

Hello all,

Just a quick plug (don't know why I've never done this before to be honest!) for the new issue of the Doctor Who fanzine The Terrible Zodin, issue #17 of which is now available to download for free here: http://doctorwhottz.blogspot.co.uk/

It's a thing of beauty, with lots of reviews, articles and artwork by dedicated and capable fans, and it even features a couple of book reviews by yours truly.

While you're there the earlier issues are also available to download, also for free, and selfishly I'd recommend issues 12 onwards as those are the ones which contain pieces by me!

It would be terribly rude of me at this point not to send out a massive shout for the editor Leslie McMurtry PhD, ably supported by Jamie Beckwith Wilches and Steven Sautter. They all put a lot of time into creating this beast while real life carries on unabated and I think it's a real credit to them that all of the Terrible Zodin issues are so professionally presented.

Thanks guys!

And the rest of you out there - get downloading and reading!

Cheers,
Tim

A Target triple: Ian Marter’s Fourth Doctor Target novelisations

I’ve been on something of an unconscious Ian Marter roll of late it seems. Having recently read Harry Sullivan’s War for the first time for an article in CSO Issue 3 – coming soon (http://csofanzine.blogspot.co.uk/), I then found myself reading The Ark In Space (1977) as a ‘quick win’ after a difficult read (see my previous Blog post for more about quick wins!); I enjoyed the book so much I immediately reached for The Sontaran Experiment (1978) to find out what happened next (as if I didn’t already know, ha!), and then I thought ‘I’m enjoying these Ian Marter books, why not pick up The Ribos Operation (1979) as well since it’s overdue another re-read’, so I did. Then I looked up Ian Marter’s bibliography and realised I’d done a fortunate thing – a thing possibly worth blogging about, so here I am.

These three books were the first three novelisations undertaken by Ian Marter for the Target Doctor Who range, and the only Fourth Doctor stories he adapted. They are quite extraordinary entries into a range that, with the best will in the world, didn’t serve the Fourth Doctor that well. Gone are the heady early days of The Auton Invasion or The Doomsday Weapon (both 1974), where page count seemed unrestricted and stories were adapted with a passion and originality that would become difficult to sustain as the output increased and rested largely on Terrance Dicks’ shoulders alone. Many of the Fourth Doctor Target stories are, alas, perfunctory script-to-page efforts, ever briefer, often racing to the finish line so the author could move on to the next one. They are still good, fun reads, and Dicks usually puts a little more effort in on those stories he wrote himself, but on the whole they lack something special.

It’s only really at the end of the run of Fourth Doctor stories that the situation starts to change in any real sense, where the original TV authors start to take more of an interest in adapting their own work for the page and the books become a little more colourful and flavoursome. The Leisure Hive, Full Circle and Warrior’s Gate (all 1982) from the final season of Fourth Doctor adventures are refreshing and engaging in particular.

But, swimming amongst the earlier efforts we find three titles by Ian Marter.

I wouldn’t dare deny Terrance Dicks the honour of novelising his own story Robot to open the Fourth Doctor’s term in office (Doctor Who and The Giant Robot, 1975), but personally speaking if Ian Marter had started running with The Ark In Space and proceeded to novelise all the other Harry Sullivan stories or even all the other Fourth Doctor stories, I’d be far from disappointed. These books capture a last vestige of that pioneering spirit which originally gripped Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke. They tell the story, but they’re not afraid to go above and beyond, to challenge the reader, to stretch the imagination and paint wonderfully embellished pictures that raise the material way beyond what was or could be achieved on television, BUT – and this is key – without losing the feel that this was also televised Doctor Who, still the programme we watched and loved. Certainly The Ark In Space and The Ribos Operation books are much longer than had become the norm by that time, and as a consequence they don’t feel rushed or compromised. But they also don’t feel overlong – they feel like a good value read; they’re as long as they need to be, that’s all.

Ian Marter’s supreme skill is in creating atmosphere through strong and vibrant images. The Ark In Space is Ridley Scott’s Alien manqué, with the space station setting and the Wirrrn lurking in the shadows. Noah’s transformation is truly monstrous as he describes the Wirrrn flesh seeping out through his uniform. The Earth of The Sontaran Experiment is scarred by the solar flares and becomes a much less forgiving backdrop. The cloying nature of the Sontaran’s oily breath lingers over much of the action, like a small steam engine chugging and powering his way around the terrain and polluting the cleansed air. In The Ribos Operation the wintery setting, with its full-bodied culture and characters, is enriched by the monstrous Shrivenzales’ stentorian breathing in the frozen shadows and their claws sparking off the stone floor, adding a purely natural threat to proceedings - a fact of life that the locals have come to live with and not a situation engineered for the story. He writes confidently, with pace and flare, and a real eye for the reader picturing the action in all it’s often gory or grotesque splendour.

The way The Seeker fulfils her own prophecy and commits suicide at the end of The Ribos Operation is horrific, and there’s a feeling in all these books that Marter enjoyed pushing the envelope in terms of taste. These aren’t children’s books, in my view; they’re fine for the oft quoted ‘intelligent twelve year old’ (I was one once). And the stories benefit from baring their guts from time to time and not being too sanitised. Super space-age weapons never hit their victims in these novels without some sort of grim description of the damage caused. No one is ever blasted and forgotten, there’s always searing damage, a charred aroma, thick smoke or whatever – it comes alive so much more in the description.

Marter isn’t afraid to change little things as well as embellishing them – generally names. Space station Nerva in The Ark In Space becomes Terra Nova is his adaptation (and repeated in The Sontaran Experiment), the Wirrn gain an extra ‘r’ to become Wirrrn – perhaps a more insectoid name, perhaps a suggestion that they have West Country roots, perhaps even a simple yet consistent typo? Styre becomes Styr, maintaining the trend for snappy four-letter Sontaran names (Linx, Stor, Varl etc.) The pronunciation could be the same, it’s up to the reader whether he’s ‘Stire’ or ‘Stir’. The TARDIS takes our heroes to Earth at the end of The Ark In Space, instead of the three transmat booths (which don’t appear in Marter’s version) and it delivers them at the beginning of The Sontaran Experiment, although it disappears again afterwards thanks to the faulty receptors, allowing for the transmat beam to be intercepted as broadcast at the beginning of Genesis of The Daleks, so all is well in the end with this minor diversion and continuity is maintained. On Ribos the Graff Vynda-K becomes The Graff Vynda Ka. Maybe he thought an altered spelling would guide the reader to an easier pronunciation (questionable), or maybe he liked to change subtle things as part of his ‘mark’?

The Ark In Space and The Ribos Operation were both scripted by Robert Holmes, often lauded as the finest of the Classic Series writers and definitely at the height of his brilliance in the mid-70s period from which these stories hail. They have an inherent richness of story and character, a clear wit and charm - but that's not to say that it makes adapting them for the page any easier; there is still plenty for the author to do to turn a decent story into a great novelisation. And he does just that. What may perhaps be more evident in these two books, though, is an affection and a respect for the source material.

One could argue that this is less the case with The Sontaran Experiment, where Ian Marter’s skills and creativity are particularly tested. There’s not a lot to Bob Baker & Dave Martin’s two-parter, really; it's got some engaging ideas but it's largely superficial, side-lining its challenging aspects for a more basic impact. It was only the third two part story the programme had done at that point (the previous two being First Doctor stories from 1964 and 1965), and there's a real sense with all of them that they are filler material, furthering the overall grander storyline but not of particular brilliance themselves in isolation. Two-parters wouldn't be revisited again until the Fifth Doctor's reign in 1982. This particular two-parter came about through a production experiment planned by outgoing producer Barry Letts to split a six part story into two productions, one four-parter completely studio bound and the other two episodes totally external filming / OB. It’s unlikely that this was a cost-saving measure and more a way to vary the prevalent trend for six part stories and maintain pace and interest (six-part stories tended to drag at times as the story thinned out). The unfortunate result is that Baker & Martin’s story feels like it's just something to bridge the gap between The Ark In Space and Genesis of The Daleks - two of the best stories the programme had made up to that point.

The author clearly knows that he’s got some pretty thin material to work with, and there’s a real danger this book could come in at half the length of a standard Target novelisation – essentially a pamphlet more than a book – in lesser hands.

The fact that it becomes a very rich, visual and engaging read that naturally fills out to a good length is testament indeed to his skill and creativity, to his eye for embellishment without a sense of padding, and his firm understanding of the characters. The focus really is on the Sontaran, Styr, and his experiments. Episode one runs on the page pretty much as it does on TV, but the episode two material is expanded in line with his focus on the title. There’s less of the Marshall awaiting Styr’s report in order to green-light the invasion, which is most noticeable at the end of the story. Marter knows how lacklustre the dénouement was on TV so he does his best to work around it. Styr instead becomes an obsessive sadist, a psychotic hell-bent on dishing out torture to show his own supremacy, regardless of its value to military intelligence. When he is finally overcome and the Doctor cuts the link with the Sontaran fleet one gets the feeling that Styr’s senior officers have already dismissed him as a rogue element and that’s why they don’t invade, rather than the TV version with its twee ‘we have your invasion plans, so go away!’

The Sontaran Experiment was never going to become a classic Doctor Who story, even with Ian Marter’s best efforts, but it’s way above the mediocrity of mere 'filler' as a book and that’s more than can be claimed by the TV story it was based on.

It’s worth noting that if The Ark In Space and The Sontaran Experiment had  gone out as one umbrella six-parter (in the way that The Invasion of Time did in 1978, essentially a four-parter with an associated two-parter tacked on at the end) we would have got one book covering both stories. Splitting them like this means we get two cracking novelisations, which added together come in at pretty much double the length of a standard six-part story novelisation like The Invasion of Time. Result!

There’s a lovely internal consistency to all three of these books. The author nails the character of the Fourth Doctor completely, as well as his companions. Sarah Jane’s irritable affection for Harry’s bumbling old school ways is played up a little more on the page but this just adds verisimilitude to her as a progressive, independent role model. Surgeon Lieutenant Harry Sullivan is never written better than by Ian Marter – there’s clearly an affinity there between character, actor and writer. The TARDIS scenes between The Doctor, Romana and K9 towards the beginning of The Ribos Operation are still frosty and juvenile, but they seem a little less cringe-worthy on the page than they do on screen and there is a consistency to Romana throughout her first adventure that was perhaps lacking on screen as Mary Tamm worked her way into the character. But the Doctor is still the same Doctor as the one from those earlier stories, just lacking a ‘best friend’ to banter with until Romana gets more settled into her ‘assignment’.

The ear trumpet makes regular appearances in all three stories, and it’s rewarding to the reader to spot that the collection of items removed from the Doctor’s pockets in The Ribos Operation are the same as those removed from his pockets in the earlier books, and that his bags of jelly babies are always slightly melted – which is unimportant to the story but is the kind of charming addition to detail that helps raise these books above the quotidian.

If I had to pick a favourite from these three stories then it would have to be The Ark In Space (both as a book and as a TV story actually). Ian Marter lays his cards firmly on the table with his first book and it really is brilliant from start to finish.

The only aspect of these novelisations that doesn’t sit well with me is that the author has the Doctor regularly addressing his female companions as ‘my dear’. That’s a very Third Doctor thing to say and it jars every time it comes up, because it doesn’t fit with the way the Fourth Doctor speaks. He can get away with calling the TARDIS ‘my dear old thing’ in The Deadly Assassin, but it’s difficult to conjure the sound of Tom Baker’s voice delivering a line that includes ‘my dear’ in a heartfelt way to an actual female.

However, if that’s the only negative (and truthfully I feel that it is) then it really is clutching at straws. Ian Marter’s Fourth Doctor novelisations breeze in like a breath of fresh air. They have energy, depth, gore, atmosphere, and at no point do they ever talk down to a juvenile audience or offer any comment at all on the quality of the story they are telling. They are three jewels in the crown of the Target range, and of these jewels The Ark In Space is clearly the lump of jethryk.

Quick wins and comfort reads

‘Quick win’ books and ‘comfort reads’ are similar concepts with differing agendas, but which share a common raison d’etre in my view: you are fond of reading but don't like lingering too long with one book. Here's a few thoughts from me on the subject.

We’re all voracious readers in my little family. My son is only two and a half and he’s been read to daily pretty much since birth. He’s already started to ‘read’ books to us for himself, and to be honest the stories he’s telling from these books – whilst following the general lines of the established story – sound much more exciting and lively the way he tells them!

My wife adores a broad spectrum of novels, with a particular fondness for Agatha Christie, Narnia, some of the classic Nineteenth Century ‘chick lit’ and also Harry Potter.

I tend to read Doctor Who and related books at the moment, because I’m still catching up on published fiction I should have been reading regularly between 1991 and 2005 but was too busy reading English Literature classics at the time for my A-Level, undergraduate and Postgraduate studies! But the perceived quality of the reading material makes little difference to my point.

My son has a lot of books. A lot. We try to read new and different books to him, and during the day he can be very receptive to this. However, at bedtime he has his favourites, his ‘comfort reads’. So Room On The Broom, Whatever Next, Peace At Last, and Alfie Gets In First get read over and over again on an almost nightly basis, occasionally punctuated with The Very Hungry Caterpillar, A Squash and A Squeeze, The Snail and The Whale, The Gruffalo’s Child,  Monkey Puzzle and a few others. He knows what he likes and what he’s comfortable with.

Similarly I see my wife returning time and time again to read the Harry Potter books, or The Chronicles of Narnia, mixed in with the mass of Agatha Christies – of which she also has her repeat favourites. These are her comfort reads; reading these isn’t necessarily about discovering something new, it’s about popping in to see an old friend who isn’t going to suddenly surprise or upset you. You know what’s going to happen over the page but you like the safety and security of knowing that and you can just enjoy being with the characters as they journey through the story, fully aware of how it will all end up. And if not everyone in the book is going to make it through to the end you can cherish the times you do spend with them. Your relationship to the text still changes each time you return to it, but the comfort comes from you as reader feeling that you are in control.

It’s because reading is an immersive pastime; it’s a relationship between the writer, the reader and the words on the page. Sometimes that relationship can be about surprise, or threat, or laughs, or sorrow; sometimes those reactions are totally dependent on this being the first time you’ve read that particular book, and sometimes as a result people may think ‘been there, done that, move on’. But there are times in everyone’s lives where there is a lot going on, and the resultant stress and strain can mean that you don’t necessarily want to read a new book right now (or discover a new album or watch a new film – the same applies). You want predictable escapism, you want the comfort of knowing that no matter what else is going on that may or may not be under your control in ‘real life’, that there on the page during your cramped commute or half an hour’s down time with a cuppa is what you know and love, somewhere familiar that you can lose yourself.

With comfort reads it’s not necessarily important how long the book is, or how long it will take you to finish it. However, because you are comfortable with the text you will tend to finish a comfort read more quickly when you re-visit it.

But purely on length alone, enter the ‘quick win’.

Quick win reads fall into two distinct categories:

• short books
• books you’ve read before and know won’t take you long to get through.

I know that these aren’t hard and fast rules – I made the mistake years ago of choosing Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a supposed quick win during a Nineteenth Century Culture module at University. Ay caramba! A pleasant afternoon’s read, I thought, over a coffee or two. Several days, plenty of coffee cups and ninety five difficult pages of stodgy Modernity later I finished it. Ho hum. But knowing what I’d be letting myself in for could I now pick it up and treat it as a comfort read? No, let’s not go there!

You have to love your comfort reads. You don't have to love your repeat-read quick wins, and you don't necessarily choose them for comfort.

I don’t think I have any comfort reads myself. There are books I’ve read over and over again but I don’t necessarily pick them up in times of stress or concern, I just decide that it’s about time I visited them again. So I find I’ve read Gulliver’s Travels or The Hound of The Baskervilles, or The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy 1-5 far more than most of the other novels I own. But I also have some all time favourite texts that I haven’t read that often but hold in very high esteem – Ulysses, Trainspotting, Dracula, Don Quixote, The Lord of The Rings amongst them. I guess I’m a predictable ‘canonist’ in that these are generally era or genre-defining texts but by the same token they are what they are for good reasons.

But whereas I don’t seek comfort in the predictable contents of a book I do have issues with how long it takes me to read some books – which is a difficult one because it’s not always the book’s fault!

‘I just couldn’t get into it’ must be one of the most common criticisms aimed at books in general. I recall at University we spent the first half of one semester studying George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I read about two hundred pages in that first six week period for that very reason - because I just couldn’t get into it, I couldn’t come to terms with the style of Eliot’s prose or engage with any of the characters. But I wasn’t able to cast it aside because it was a set text and essays beckoned. Then something happened, something between myself and the book clicked, and I raced through the remaining eight hundred or so pages in about a week. Madness! But I couldn’t put my finger on what it was, it just… was.

Generally these days when I pick up a new book I pick it up because I want to read it for whatever reason and I will finish it whether I like it or not (and be damned!) Recent reads that I haven’t enjoyed and I’ve struggled with include Ben Aaronovitch’s Genius Loci (from the Big Finish Bernice Summerfield range) and Simon A. Forward’s BBC ‘Past Doctor Adventure’ Doctor Who: Drift, featuring the Fourth Doctor and Leela. Now before people think I’m mad or suffering from some obsessive compulsive disorder I will point out these are part of a series of books and they’re not very long – Drift was 280 pages I think – so I’m not wasting great swathes of my life on some pointless endeavour. What tends to happen is these less enjoyable books take me a lot longer to get through than I’d like, so I get frustrated and restless. As a consequence I will pick up a ‘quick win’ afterwards, a shorter book that I know I can easily read in one or two days’ of commuting, that gets me back in the swing and buoyant for my next longer novel.

I tend to set myself unrealistic demands on the number of books I should read each week - but no one’s judging me except myself, so writing this down does make me think that perhaps I may be slightly mad after all…

It must be the legacy from my English Literature degrees, because I embraced the reading lists so fully.

Anyway my main source of quick wins is the old Target range of Doctor Who novelisations. I’ve been reading them since I was a boy – so that would suggest to observers that they are comfort reads. But I tend to avoid the ones I favoured years ago (mainly Fourth Doctor stories novelised by Terrance Dicks) and aim instead for something I either haven’t read before or haven’t read for decades – and there’s plenty of them. So in that respect they’re not necessarily comfort reads (even though I know the stories by now through watching the TV episodes repeatedly or listening to the off-air soundtrack CDs), but they are quick wins, and they usually leave me in a positive frame of mind for my next read.

After finishing Drift late last week I was supposed to pick up another Fourth Doctor book, Evolution by John Peel, from Virgin’s ‘Missing Adventures’ range so I could review it for a forthcoming issue of The Terrible Zodin fanzine (http://doctorwhottz.blogspot.co.uk/). But having taken the best part of two weeks to trawl through Forward’s treacly prose, regularly losing track of who was who and where and why (and ending up thinking ‘what the hell, I’ll just see what happens when I get to the end’) I didn’t want to dive into another 250-odd page novel straight away; I wanted something snack size, around 150 pages that I knew I could read in a couple of days – I wanted a ‘quick win’. My quick win of choice was Ian Marter’s The Ark In Space, because it was maintaining the Fourth Doctor theme and I recalled it being a great book from my teenage years. It was indeed, but there’ll be more about that in a separate post.

I suppose where the lines cross for me with quick wins and comfort reads is that, because I set myself demanding targets in terms of how many books I should be reading (and reading properly, not skim-reading), the quick wins give me satisfaction that I am meeting my own expectations. And although the words are new the stories in these quick wins are familiar, comfortable. But then with a book it’s the words that count as much as the story and if the words aren’t familiar how can it be comfortable..?

I don’t know. But one thing is clear to me from all this: both 'comfort reads' and 'quick win' books provide a much needed psychological boost and support to us all, no matter how old we are and how much we choose to read.