NOSFERATUTU THE DANCYR

NOSFERATUTU THE DANCYR

So there you have it, after working for a long time as a graphic artist before suddenly finding myself with rather a lot of time on my hands in my mid-fifties, I've been pottering around writing stuff, drawing stuff, and recording stuff, for the past couple of years, mostly because I happen to be lucky enough to share my life with someone rather wonderful who has been very supportive of what I still think of as my silly creative nonsenses.

Just after New Year, having been inspired by a documentary I watched over Christmas, I Idly did a sketch - of what I thought was a slightly amusing idea - in my sketchbook and thought "Hang on..." as I realised that maybe, just maybe, this was a pretty good subject on which to hang a project that I'd been trying to get off the ground since around the time I got flung onto life's scrapheap a couple of Christmases earlier.

One long, bitter afternoon, back in November 2019, I'd had a thought that I might investigate what it took to put "A. Book." together, and went onto the self-publishing site Lulu to see if I could possibly work out how to do it.

Several hours later, and, despite having had a long career in the Graphic Arts, I walked away from their templates with my forehead bleeding from the frustration of having utterly failed to make any of it work properly and, as I've discovered in the intervening years, I was not alone in having this problem.

Two years passed, in which I continued making contributions to the ROUND THE ARCHIVES podcast, carried on working with ANDY PRIESTNER on the "AN A TO Z OF UK TV DRAMA" podcast and "SPACE SOLDIERS: A FLASH GORDON COMMENTARY PODCAST," as well as producing and presenting VISION ON SOUND for FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL (a digital radio station based in Manchester), and I continued scribbling in my sketchbooks and, more rarely, writing my poems, and this idea of creating "A. Book." of some sort had never really gone away.

So I sat down in front of my keyboard and wrote a 32 stanza poem which I thought might work quite well as the basis for this new project, and sat down with my pens and started scribbling and, after a few days, was able to put together a couple of pages and began to see that maybe, just maybe, I might be able to bring something together that, if I did it properly, might just be the master document I could use to return to that website and see whether I could finally figure out how to actually stagger across the finishing line and hit "publish" because, basically, it's a lot easier to figure out the details if you've actually got something tangible to upload to the site.

At this point I didn't ever expect to ever ACTUALLY publish it. The whole thing was just an exercise in teaching myself how to do something new.

This started to become known as the "not really a book" project, and I carried on working on the drawings, and I was generally finding that I was quite enjoying doing that, and, at one point, even felt brave enough to put out a "teaser" image that suggested (with all my key ingredients still kept very secret) that I might be working on something new to the kind and lovely crowd with whom I engage in the allegedly big bad online community.

Two months passed and, eventually, the artwork part was - I thought - finished, and a first draft had been put together and, after several frustrating attempts, I managed to chip away at the necessary tolerances, and found myself with an acceptably formatted file, an ISBN number, and the possibility of ordering up a test print, because I still had no idea just how well a fully illustrated book might actually print using their processes.

I hit "print" and figured that would be the end of it.

After all, the entire point of the exercise had been accomplished; I had created and prepared something resembling "A. Book."  and sent it to print.

Then, overnight, I had a thought. One of the design concepts I'd had whilst creating the first draft had been to make the whole story look like a "Family Album" with the kind of borders you might find in those old Victorian photograph albums but, having hit "print" I suddenly hated that idea (which had taken a whole day to add to every page after I'd found the previous "ragged edge" style looked far too messy) and went back to the computer "just to see" how it looked with clean white margins instead.

Dammit. I thought it looked far better without.

Anyway, with that little hiccup out of the way, the test print arrived and I thought that it looked okay, and I shared a picture of it with TwitWorld, and nobody was saying it looked awful, or that it was a truly dreadful idea. There were, however, a few minor issues that I decided I really ought to deal with because, well, wouldn't it be nice if I actually made use of that ISBN number and maybe, just maybe, I could actually make my silly bit of nonsense available on the Lulu Bookstore...?

And whilst I tinkered, and procrastinated, and worried about the fact that I'm not really a "real" writer, I was reminded with a hearty "Well, what's the worst that can happen?" (Answer - I'm so humiliated that I crawl back under my rock and vow never to approach a keyboard, or a sketchbook, ever again) that I might as well hit "publish" - and so I did.

Of course I got something the wrong way around, and I still had to order myself that proof copy that Lulu insist upon for approval before allowing "World Distribution" (Yikes!) but, over the course of that terrifying Sunday, several very kind people decided to order it "sight unseen" as it were, because they were being supportive of me and my efforts, and so a tricky week followed in which I hadn't seen the finished product, and I still fully expected the ones which arrived at those people's homes to be greeted with hoots of derision of the "How dare he think that THIS was book-worthy?!" kind.

Anyway, on Friday the 25th of February, 2022, as the world was unravelling around us, that proof copy arrived, as did the dozen or so copies which had been ordered by those various households.

And they were all very kind and told me that they liked my work, which is always something of a relief. It’s difficult to explain how much it means when, as somebody who doesn’t think of themselves as a “real” writer, I put something (a poem I wrote and illustrated) “out there” for public scrutiny, and (so far anyway), people have not poured scorn or found it truly awful.

To be honest, the purpose of the exercise has been fulfilled. I have, as the saying goes, achieved all of the goals that I set myself. I never expected that there'd be any demand for many more than the twenty or so copies that I thought it might run to, and, to be honest, at least a dozen of those have been bought by the very same people I would probably have gifted them to if I'd had an actual income to afford to print that many for myself.

But NOSFERATUTU THE DANCYR, my silly bittersweet little story about loneliness and dancing, has made it out from the confines of my imagination into the real world, and I hope, at least, that some people enjoy it.

Martin A W Holmes, February 26th, 2022

NOSFERATUTU THE DANCYR is available via the Lulu Bookstore

ISBN 978-1-6780-3662-1

https://www.lulu.com/en/gb/shop/martin-holmes-and-martin-holmes/nosferatutu-the-dancyr/paperback/product-882nz7.html

SOME DOCTOR WHO TARGET BOOK MEMORIES

 I think I've stated before - in this long-neglected blog - the fact that I don't really remember all that much before the age of twelve. The odd flash of memory of primary school, the occasional ghastly family gathering, but nothing substantial apart from some key moments that spring to mind when the universe shifts that way.

But it's taken the death of Terrance Dicks, prolific children's author, and writer of many of the Target Books DOCTOR WHO range in the 1970s and 1980s (amongst other credits too numerous to mention) to remind me of just how many vivid, if vague, memories in my life involve the purchase and acquisition of those very books as I collected them, pretty much from the start of the range in 1973, to when it petered out in the early 1990s for lack of new material.

The very first I was given - I don't remember who by, but my mum did work in the Children's Book department at W H Smiths for a time around then - was DOCTOR WHO IN AN EXCITING ADVENTURE WITH THE DALEKS written by David Whitaker and first published in the 1960s alongside two other titles, before being acquired by Tandem Publishing to be re-released in exciting new covers under the Target branding nearly a decade later. 

Three books were never going to be enough for this exciting new range, and, with a huge back-catalogue of television stories already accrued, new authors were sought to continue the range, and up popped Terrance Dicks to write DOCTOR WHO AND THE AUTON INVASION which I think I was bought by my mother again, and I was hooked, and a lifetime interest in the programme was seeded by those books, and my own inept attempts to duplicate the exciting covers usually done in those days by Chris Achilleos inspired by the graphic stylings of another hero of mine, Frank Bellamy.

DOCTOR WHO AND THE CRUSADERS came to me next, via (I think) the 50p piece that Auntie Bea used to tape inside my birthday card (although it may have come from one of her rare visits now I come to think about it) - another 1960s re-issue from the pen of David Whitaker and one which, for some reason, I got into my head that I dare not finish because the world would end, or something. I never got around to reading it fully, but the audiobook release - decades later - would finally plug that gap and set aside that ridiculous superstition.

Next up was DOCTOR WHO AND THE GIANT ROBOT, another Terrance Dicks classic, which I remember taking as my book to read on that school trip to Switzerland when I was ten, and it must have been around then, with my DOCTOR WHO scrapbooks already started to be glued together, that I started keeping my rudimentary records of the order I got the books in and, eventually, the date on which I got them.

And what memories are in that list when I think about it now. The astonishing illustrations in those first dozen or so books that somehow surpassed the actual TV images years later that I couldn't have hoped to ever see when the books were coming out so regularly. The awesome story of THE DAY OF THE DALEKS (Dicks again), those mysterious "other" Doctors in fascinating tales like DOCTOR WHO AND THE CYBERMEN (Gerry Davis), my sister nicking my brand new copy of THE THREE DOCTORS to read in the bath before I could read it, being presented with a copy of DOCTOR WHO AND THE ZARBI (Bill Strutton) out of nowhere by my father, and the total surprise - and I remember it astounding me that it seemed to come from nowhere - of finding REVENGE OF THE CYBERMEN for sale in our local Smiths when I hadn't expected it at all.

My first "recorded" issue is GENESIS OF THE DALEKS which was given to me by Mrs Fitton as I was recovering at home from having my tonsils out and missing the end of the school year, and I also remember being ludicrously excited by the spiderweb cover of THE WEB OF FEAR, and remembering that one time that Mr Sellars in the Post Office had a brand new DOCTOR WHO book on his racks (PLANET OF THE DALEKS) transports me back into that shop as if it were yesterday like nothing else can.

A less happy memory was discovering that keeping your precious collection on a windowsill meant that it could be damaged by condensation. THE HORROR OF FANG ROCK suffered the worst for that.

Years passed, and I would make my monthly pilgrimage to get my next book in the series - often helped by regular mailshots that I somehow started to get from Target Books  - and devour it in a sitting usually.

Boys wanting to read... That's a neat trick, isn't it...?

Later on, I would receive new copies via a monthly mail order system set up by the DOCTOR WHO APPRECIATION SOCIETY, and later still, I was happy to find a bookshop in the town I went away to get my degree in that stocked the new ones as they came in, so I was able to continue collecting, however furtively, despite my mind supposedly being on "higher" things.

And so, around a hundred and seventy books later, the range finally petered out, not long after the series itself, and I would find other things to collect for a while, but those original DOCTOR WHO Target Books have stayed with me through thick and thin, finally making it onto bookshelves earlier this year after several years in boxes, and for several years before that, high up and inaccessible at the back of a "double banked" bookshelf, all wrapped in plastic in case the bathroom sprang a leak.

I look at them now, some of them slightly battered from reading after reading, all still neatly stacked in purchase order, and I'm so glad I clung on to them. In many ways, these were the books that shaped me, and kindled an interest in me that has led in later years to new friendships and a desire - however unprofessionally - to keep on writing.

So, to whoever decided to go ahead and reprint those three originals, and who saw the potential in bringing out more of them, I can only salute you. And, of course, those incredible authors; David Whitaker, Malcolm Hulke, Gerry Davis, and the incredibly wonderful Terrance Dicks, who were a very special part of my young life.

Martin A W Holmes, September 3, 2019

LIFE AMONGST THE NOT-WE

LIFE AMONGST THE NOT-WE

You’ll never

Understand

The simple joy

These new

Target Books bring

To the inner boy

Who travelled

The universe

Through those pages

Long ago

With his best friend

To the ends of time

They never

Understood

The simple joy

Those old

Target Books brought

To the lonely boy

Who sat alone

Imagining

Such new worlds

Far away

With such endless

Possibilities

They’ll never

Understand

The happy glow

Having new

Target Books brings

To those in the know

MAWH, April 2018

TWELVE BY TEN

Because I'm never, ever likely to do anything else with the 70,000 words of that first draft novel I splurged out during November, I then got bored enough to start working up several rough cover ideas for that thing I'm not doing.

Still, it's sometimes kind of fun to mess around with things when there's no actual significance to them whatsoever, don't you think?

No...? 

Just me then.

Well, why not, eh...?

A philosophical curmudgeon watching his half century disappear rapidly in the rear-view mirror of the second-hand rust-bucket of life, whilst living constantly on the brink of Derbyshire with a very tolerant Beloved.

The day job involves colouring in pictures to earn an honest crust, and the evenings, weekends, and early mornings are often spent writing plays nobody performs, poetry (or something resembling it) that nobody cares all that much about, and blog posts that seep out unnoticed into the uncaring universe. Dabbling in this return long-form prose in the form of writing a novel is yet another experiment to find out whether I have the stamina or mental capacity to create something more substantial.

As has been pointed out on several occasions, I'm always finding new ways to find another complete waste of time to fritter a few more precious heartbeats away.

Old enough to know better, stupid enough to care about it, daft enough to keep on doing it anyway...

NOW IT CAN BE TOLD!

NOW IT CAN BE TOLD!

Okay, now that the stench of potential failure and the embarrassment of even suggesting that I might be capable of such a thing has passed, I feel confident enough to make a small confession.

This year, and with the kind of unofficial and unaided approach that tends to see me through these things, I was foolish enough to attempt the NaNoWriMo 2016 Challenge to write a "novel" (or at least 50,000 words of something that might turn into a novel) within the month of November.

Although, to be perfectly fair, I've not really approached it their way. I'm not in any groups, haven't got any "buddies" (Lord help us), and I've ignored their continued requests for donations (A-hah...!). I merely arbitrarily picked their target and start date, and off I jolly well went, prattling along and churning out my nonsense simply as an exercise to discover or not I have the stamina or the mental capacity to one day try to go the full "nov..."

So, you might have noticed - you probably didn't - that I'd been rather less "active" on the "stringing a few inept words together" front over the past few weeks, but that wasn't because I'd become all antisocial, or decided that you weren't worthy, it was simply that producing a wodge of deathless prose in those quantities takes an extraordinary amount of your free time - especially when your free time is evenings, weekends, and the occasional early morning if you can be faffed getting up that early in the week.

Nevertheless... By Jove, I think that I may have actually been and gone and done it...!

Despite the fact that prose hasn't really been the strongest of my writing "things" in recent times, I seem to have managed to start thinking in that way again and created a string of several thousand words that, to me at least, aren't completely terrible to read.

Now, because it's me, I doubt that anything else is going to happen to those words other than the fact that they'll sit on a hard drive forever, but the fact is that they exist and I have, for whatever reasons, achieved whatever pointless goal it was that I set myself.

Huzzah!

This is a story that's been rattling around in my head for several years now, so I'm glad of the opportunity to finally make a proper start to it and prove to myself that, with a certain amount of focus, I can actually belt out a significant slab of prose after all those years of play-writing and (more recently) poems. 

I fully expect to fail, by the way, but will be happy enough if I even get half way.
Meanwhile, the story itself is a small, multi-stranded, web of deceit in which several lives and fates cross in (hopefully) unexpected ways. In the end I'm aiming for a more psychological torment than action-packed thriller, so don't expect helicopter gunships or massive explosions... 

Well, not unless I get weirdly sidetracked and end up including helicopter gunships and massive explosions after all...

I did have this rather bizarre notion, you see, that I could cheat a little and write a full-length novel by writing around a dozen short stories that happened to be linked in some tenuous way, not unlike that Christmas story I once knocked out in 25 parts on the blog one year. It was only whilst I was doing this that I realised that that's what chapters tend to be anyway; short stories that are part of a larger whole. The only difference I was trying was compartmentalising each segment and playing around with the notion of narrative time, neither of which are that innovative as ideas, but they did make climbing the word mountain at least plausible rather than seemingly impossible.

On a summer morning, a woman does the washing up at her kitchen window. 

On an autumn weekend, a man heads out with a camera before dawn. 

Overnight in a lonely office, a Detective contemplates his enforced retirement.

In an otherwise deserted factory, a Senior Executive tries to cover up her crimes. 

The paths of these disparate lives will cross at terrible junctions, and murder, betrayal, fraud, and the events of a chequered past, will come back to haunt all of these people in one way or another, long after some of them might think that they had got away with it.

Because bitter people have long memories, and can carry grudges for a very, very long time.

To be fair, I did approach this little project as a type of bonkers literary therapy, and the subject matter was, in part at least, rather too personal to ever be considered for publication, but I have found the process extraordinarily cathartic and, in the process, have managed to deal with a few "issues" which have been bubbling under in my subconscious for far too long now.

My top tip from this month (actually half a month) of pointless madness?

If you have demons in your past that sometimes pop back into your mind, write them down and find ways to slaughter them - in a purely fanciful and literary manner of course. Even if those dark demons are still out there in the real world, somehow I have found that addressing them on the page, and finding ways of destroying them in fiction, just makes you feel a hell of a lot better about life.

I tell you, it works wonders.

Of course, whenever I do start to even consider that I might one day actually be able or allowed to publish some of my wordmongery, I find someone with my name (or something very similar to it) is already out there as a playwright or novelist, and I start to wonder whether I might have to come up with a nom-de-plume.

Because, believe me, writing a poem or a play or, Lord help us, a novel is an absolute breeze in comparison to having to try and come up with one of those...

STATS:

November 15th, 2016 - Of the twelve planned "chapters" or "short stories", seven chapters "complete" to "first draft". The earliest incomplete chapter is five, and the latest "complete" first draft is chapter nine.

Ch 1 - 6021 Words; Ch 2 - 5828 Words; Ch 3 - 5783 Words; Ch 4 - 5470 Words; Ch 5 - 2264 Words; Ch 6 - 5462 Words; Ch 7 - 4961 Words; Ch 8 - 7066 Words; Ch 9 - 6479 Words; Ch 10 - 1112 Words; Ch 11 - 233 Words; Ch 12 - 162 Words.

Running total: 50841 words (+/- variations in word counting software) between 01 and 15 November - although most of the actual words themselves are probably quite dreadful it's been an interesting experiment. 

NB - To not appear to be a proper swot, and not discourage any scribes still in the doldrums, I've been understating my word count on the "official" website - They still think I'm wallowing in the low 40,000s - the fools...! 

FIRST, FIND YOUR IDIOT

I'm often being informed that lots of the things that lie scattered about my little house are "worth" quite a lot. Various old magazines with pictures of particular movie or television stars on the cover will go for quite a few more quid than marked as the cover price apparently, if you know where to look and can be bothered to go looking for the keenest sort of buyer.

However, when you look into it, most of the contents of the various stacks of old magazines the are lying about the place and threatening to engulf me if they should ever collapse are already for sale on certain e-selling sites and often either fail to sell at all, or disappear at a price that is usually just a few pence.

Bloody so-called "Collector's Editions…" or "Exclusive Covers…" or things printed with several covers to tempt the gullible.

Occasionally one lucky seller will find that there is a bidding war for that old edition of something that they just happened to hang on to, but it does rather depend upon two keen and eager buyers happening to come across your offer to sell at precisely the same moment.

In other words, first, find your idiot… then hope that you'll find another idiot at about the same time.

After all, if someone is stupid or desperate enough to want that old Radio Times with "Harry Potter" on the cover that they'll pay three figures for it, who am I to stop them…? It can be quite easy for the unscrupulous dealer to manipulate the obsessions of others so that they are persuaded that some old pieces of tat are actually worth a week's salary to them.

Of course, in the real world, most things are only really "worth" what someone is prepared to pay for them…

You can walk around your house looking at stuff and thinking "Well, I paid XX for that so it must be worth at least YY" or you might be lucky enough to notice that somebody once paid hundreds for something that you also happen to have a copy of, but that doesn't mean that anyone's going to give you a similar price for one, and it might still end up going for seven pence on eBay, only to be sold on by your far more savvy purchaser for those mythical hundreds once they've got their grubby little mitts upon it…

Let the seller beware...

I may well have spent twenty quid or more on that shiny new book when I first bought it, but other copies still turn up in the remainder outlets for less than a quarter of that, or even in the charity shop for a couple of quid if only I'd been more patient, or selling on Amazon for £0.01 (plus postage) if I really want to feel fed up about it.

There, unfortunately, is the reality of it...

Once upon a time, I think that I genuinely believed that I might be creating an archive, or maybe I might need reference material for some topics I was becoming a minor league "expert" in and might be able to give talks about, if I was ever so inclined.

However, these days I'm very aware that it's far more likely that it will all end up just being thrown into a skip once I've carked it.

Still, it's much the same with anything. Houses, cars, jewellery, fine art. Things that are "precious" to you are only so much landfill to almost everyone else… unless they think that they can sniff out a bargain…

Because that's the other side of the coin, isn't it. You're out to get as much as you can for your tat, whereas everyone else is looking to get it as cheaply as they can and maybe make a tidy profit.

There's also the tiny problem that any collector has. How do you get rid of a collection what you've built up without grieving for its loss…?

There are now hundreds of editions of "Empire" Magazine stacked up in my house that I can't see anyone ever wanting, but if I sold them en masse they'd probably struggle to make me a tenner, but individual copies with certain actors on the cover might be able to be sold at many times that on their own to a "Star Trek" or "James Bond" fan, if you know where to look for one...

LAZY DAYS AND EVEN MORE SUNDAYS

We have, I fear (and even if it was even possible), become even more lazy when it comes to weekends than even I had thought possible. To be honest, before a very late breakfast, I did spend some time reading, and reading an actual book (with paper and everything), which is kind of an unusual occurrence for me nowadays, but that was about as productive as it got.

Oh, we talked about doing a lot of things. We talked about attacking the clutter that’s still claiming more than it’s fair share of the floor-space in the living room, but by Monday morning it remained strangely unmoved. We talked about going through the stacks of accumulated Estate paperwork just to see what we no longer needed, but it remains untouched and gathering that tell-tale film of dust. I glanced out of the window upon a bright, shiny day and thought to myself that the garden might be in need of some attention, but that was all of the attention it got. There was even a vintage fair which we considered heading out to visit, but somehow we never actually made it out of the house.

The mountain of washing up did get done, but mostly because we ran out of clean bowls, and the recycling made the great leap for freedom from the draining board to the outside dustbin which might not appear to be much, but in context it feels like a great achievement.

We did also venture out on Sunday and buy some paint, fully intending to restart the decorating which was interrupted by events last October and which we’ve struggled to resume, but, apart from adding to the growing pile of paint purchases which seldom make it from the can to the wall, and calling in at the supermarket to get the weekly food supplies with which to stuff our couch-potato faces, little else was achieved in the way of actual progress.

On the plus side, last Saturday "Columbo" put away six, count 'em, six murderers during the course of our day, as played by Jackie Cooper, Ray Milland, Rip Torn, Oscar Werner, and a pair of Martin Landaus, so fictional justice from way back in the televisual past was, at the very least, served.

Meanwhile, and because absolutely nobody is asking, I thought I would tell you how the year's rewatch of "The Six Million Dollar Man" is going, not least because I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was going to work my way through at least some of it this year, and, as far as achievements are going, actually doing something that I say I will, even if its as utterly pointless as this, is turning out to feel like a victory of sorts.

Anyway, my viewing marathon staggers along at a couple of episodes a week crammed into the moments alone when it fills the time as a pastime which is far too excruciating to share, but I don't think that I'll get much further than season three (even though I fully expect my "completist" gene to kick in once I reach the end of the season) because, to be perfectly honest, I had started to find it all rather monotonous and predictable at about the halfway point of season two and only staggered through that because of the prospect of getting to the “Bionic Woman” episodes.

Incidentally, those episodes turned out to be far, far duller than I remembered from childhood and, horror of horrors, also turned out to involve Lee Majors actually singing. Well, sort of. God alone knows what the Bionic Woman actually saw in him, but if I were Steve Austin, I’d’ve been asking whether I could have some bionic replacement vocal chords installed if I was going to get up to that sort of caterwauling…

Meanwhile, Richard Anderson's mournful silences as he stared off towards the horizon each week in the cough and a spit role of OSI Boss Oscar Goldman, presumably wondering where his credibility and his career went were bad enough, but his plaintive cries of "Steve... Steve!!!" whenever his favourite celebrity agent (who occasionally nobody recognised if the plot demanded it) disobeyed an order, started to make him sound more like a spurned lover than the head of a “Top Secret” organisation about which everyone seemed to know.

Also getting tedious were the many and varied excuses to bring in blonde female characters who were invariably played by Farrah Fawcett-Majors (as was...). These seemed to occur quite regularly, with nobody pointing out the similarity in appearance of the plucky female astronaut to the plucky female TV journalist, but that’s telly for you.

After all if Bionic Doctor Rudy Wells can change his head on a regular basis without anybody commenting upon it, sometimes in the blink of an eye, then you start to get the impression that the makers of the programme thought even less of the viewers that the viewers did themselves.

Mind you, in those “pre-internet” “Pre-VHS” days, people just didn’t watch this kind of telly in the same way that we do now, and weren’t able to nit-pick and dissect every episode as it was actually airing, so maybe nobody noticed. Funnily enough, I appear to have reached the point where I started watching them when I was a kid, because I had very distinct memories of the episode “The Blue Flash” when I got to it, and (although he isn’t in that particular edition) I remember very clear memories of thinking at about that time that Dr Wells had been a different person a few weeks earlier, but, in those “Pre-Google” (other search engines, etc…) days, I had no way of proving it…

And so the rewatch reluctantly plods along more out of obligation than from any pleasure it now is giving. The "light comedy" episodes can be a little bit cringeworthy, but remain slightly interesting when you can spot within them the roots of other "much-loved" seventies shows like "The Dukes of Hazzard" but, in general, those editions are better than the sub-James Bond antics of the cold-war spy tales, or anything involving villainy in the vicinity of car racing, horse racing or boxing.

Actually most series seem to touch upon those particularly tedious areas as plot ideas from time to time, and they're always so dreadful that I've learned by now to switch over immediately a racetrack or gym appears...

Still, Lee Majors seems to be quite good with kids, and experimenting with his facial hair options, and, in terms of mid-seventies adventure hokum, it's passable enough, and as a bit of nostalgia about a hilarious looking era of huge cars, cheap petrol, and villains in loud sports jackets, kipper ties, and greasy combovers, or wearing housecoats to match the décor of their motel room, it really couldn't be beaten.

Of course, I do miss that sort of villain on TV. Nowadays they all look like those shaven-headed, tattooed, leather-jacketed loons that you hope won’t catch your eye in the pub, and, quite frankly, a bit of variety wouldn’t go amiss in the world of villain fashions.

Where are the fluffy white cats and the Nehru jackets…?

Meanwhile, back on “Sixie”, more amusement can be had in spotting the more obvious stuntmen, especially when filmed in “super slo-mo” just in case you hadn’t noticed that they weren’t actually Lee Majors himself, although he presumably got on quite well with “Unknown Stuntmen” given that for his career "The Fall Guy" beckons...

Oh, before I forget… That book that I mentioned I was reading...? (Still… because unfortunately I’m reading far less than I used to…)

That’s "Screen Burn" by Charlie Brooker.

Charlie's a very talented wordsmith. In fact, perhaps he’s rather too talented. His writing is impressive enough to make my own feel so utterly inadequate that I might just feel like stopping doing it altogether for at least six months and trying to teach myself how to write this sort of nonsense properly. Meanwhile, if I continue to read his words, I might just learn how to be far more cutting about the TV shows I'm watching...

THE SLIDE

Another week, and another audiobook gets picked from the shelf and put into the CD player in the car to keep me entertained on my journeys to and from work.

Having decided that continual spending on new stuff is generally a bad idea, I have recently been "revisiting" some of the things which have been gathering dust since the first time I played them and, in certain cases, even longer than that.

Such it was with "The Slide" a seven-part "science-fiction serial for radio" written by Victor Pemberton and first broadcast on BBC Radio in 1965. I'd bought the audio CDs relatively cheaply in a sale a couple of years ago, but never successfully made it past episode two, so this time I was determined to stick with it and see how it all unfolded.

The difficulty of getting past part two was not, incidentally, the serial's fault. When I first got it, I was working full-time from home and, whilst I rarely found the need for audio stimulation, when I did, I quite often found that audiobooks didn't really work for me under such circumstances. I would start to concentrate upon some knotty little problem or other and, perhaps an hour later, I would realise that the CD had stopped and I'd barely heard a word. This doesn't help when it comes to comprehending a plot, so I used to just put music on instead, if the mood of loneliness was overwhelming me that day.

This, incidentally, is why "Test Match Special" was always such a Godsend for me, as it would burble away all day giving me a sense of companionship without me necessarily having to concentrate fully on every word.

Interestingly, audiobooks in the car I seem to be able to follow quite easily, which might explain something of significance about my driving...

Anyway, as a piece of 1960s science-fiction written for the radio, how did "The Slide" hold up nearly fifty years on?

Well, it was all right, I suppose... I mean, it wasn't great, but it wasn't awful either. The seven half-hour segments rattled along at a fair old pace, and it told its story clearly enough in a brisk and entertaining manner, and, to modern ears, gave the tiniest of insights into how attitudes have changed over half a century, as well as how performing styles have moved on. For some of the time it really felt as if I was listening to "The Archers" with added monsters, and yet, with a few changes to the pacing and relatively few tweaks to the script, I actually think that you could remake it today and it would still make a rather gripping radio serial.

The acting style is very much of its era, because everyone talks V-E-R-Y C-L-E-A-R-L-Y and with proper cut glass accents, or with the generic "rough types" accent that presumably used to be taught at RADA…

The stars are the rather marvellous Maurice Denham playing a very complicated role as an MP whose entire world starts to literally crumble around him, and Roger Delgado, the original "Master" from "Doctor Who" playing a more heroic role as a Chilean earthquake "expert" with a rather tragic past, and there's also a small but significant role for a presumably very young Miriam Margolyes... as well as plummy intros courtesy of a young Brian Perkins...

Strangely, this tale of intelligent killer mud was apparently first pitched to the "Doctor Who" production office way back when young Billy Hartnell was holding the keys to the TARDIS, but was deemed "unsuitable" for their needs.

Instead it was reworked as a radio serial with another kind of doctor playing a very key role, and, a couple of years later, the writer would end up working on "Doctor Who" itself, so it must have made one heck of a calling card.

Sadly, some of the "science" being talked about seems pretty "hinky" now. Some of the firmly held opinions about geology seems pretty strange especially because this serial was broadcast at about the time when theories about plate tectonics were first being accepted in the wider scientific community, and the solution to the problem, which I'm not going to explain here, seems to counter-intuitively rely upon the mysteries of the infra-red part of the spectrum which now seems a little implausible.

Still, it passed two or three days of commuting quite adequately, and despite being part of the "aliens in an english domestic setting" subgenre of science-fiction, it wasn't really too silly and did, of course, allow me to experience the various "terrifying" sound effects courtesy of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which is always a good thing.

And really, I couldn't have asked any more of it than that.

DYLAN

The "Audio CD of the Commute" last week was "The Essential Dylan Thomas", a four CD collection bought for me one Christmas a few years ago after we'd spent a damp autumnal evening watching A.N. Actor performing some of the great Welsh poet's works during his tour with a one-man show.

I'd listened to one or two of my favourite pieces at the time and then put the box on a shelf to gather dust, as these things do, and, having never played it through in its entirely, decided that it wasn't a bad starting point in my search to fill the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle shaped hole in my journeys to work.

Coincidentally, when I finally put the first disc into the machine and pressed "play", it was a little over sixty years and three weeks since the main work recorded on these discs, the now rather legendary play for voices that is called "Under Milk Wood" was first performed by Richard Burton and the rest of the cast, way back in January 1954.

It's a bit of a smutty old piece really, at least it is on the quiet and if you listen between the lines. I don't know whether some of the expressions being used have become ruder since it was first broadcast, or whether Thomas was just trying to slip a few things past the censors because that's just the way he was, but it's definitely chock-full of innuendo for the modern listener. Although, seeing as most generations think that they were the ones who first discovered sex, perhaps it comes as some surprise to discover how much it remained on the minds of those living in those impoverished communities way back before even our parents were twinkles in somebody's roving eye.

The words Thomas uses are mostly very bleak and cynical, born as they were in the pitiable poverty of South Wales between the two World Wars. This seems especially true on the first two CDs which seem to be made up of the more melancholy works and end with a collection of poems which include the famous titles "And Death Shall Have No Dominion" and "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night", phrases which both sent something over a shiver down my spine as I drove homewards across the bleak hill tops on that recent midwinter evening.

The language really is very doom-laden on the whole, maybe because of being born from the fire and brimstone of regular attendance at Chapel, and brewed in the crucible of war, but given that Thomas died at the age of thirty-nine back in 1953, it's just plausible that his own mortality was very much on his mind as he went about his work, perhaps most noticeably in pieces like "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog" and the exceptional "Return Journey to Swansea".

Things brighten up when the subject of his stories turn to Thomas's childhood in Wales, although often still laced with a melancholy streak, although my favourite piece, the one which stuck with me long after that evening watching and listening to that lone actor, was "The Outing" a hilarious take upon Welsh Life involving a boozy day out in a charabanc…

Dylan Marlais Thomas was born almost a hundred years ago in Swansea on the 27th of October, 1914 (So I suppose there'll be some sort of centenary celebrations later on this year), and he died the death of a "Roistering, drunken and doomed poet" in New York, just over thirty-nine years later, having become a popular writer, performer and broadcaster during his tragically brief and somewhat turbulent life.

Since his death he has been acknowledged as being one of the most important Welsh poets of the last century, despite his work being originally written in English, and his works are much studied in schools across the world and yet, despite this air of respectability and association with the more formal end of the educational spectrum, aspects of which might have surprised the old Welsh Dog himself, he remains one of the more popular and well-known of the modern poets.

I had a friend who claimed a, perhaps illegitimate, connection to this great modern Welsh poet and, given that she came from the Mumbles, an area much name-checked in his works, and shared a surname which played a large part in his personal history, who am I to doubt it…?

To be honest, I've always struggled a little in appreciating written poetry, but I do rather like the sound of Thomas's works, both for  the rhythm and the original imagery, and I do love the sound of voices reading it. Perhaps this is also because the sound of these readings, especially when being read in those dour Welsh tones, have triggered something very evocative, something that is perhaps a little nostalgic, and reminded me of something very personal which is buried deep within me. Perhaps a sense of "home" (if that's not too pretentious), but certainly not least, I imagine, because they remind me in some ways of how my own father, the lay preacher, used to speak, although he was born ten years later than Thomas, in a different part of South Wales, and lived a very different, and possibly far more God-fearing, life.

I'm sure that Thomas's writings are not for everyone. The emphasis on the fleeting nature of happiness and the impermanence of life are probably not the most uplifting of themes, and, despite the fact that aspects of such thinking can still be seen in the people and towns he was describing, nor is the abject poverty being talked about in much of his work likely to resonate as much as it once did with our modern materialistic, narcissistic and hedonistic culture.

But I bloody love it…