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.

KILLING YOUR DARLINGS

Authors are always burbling on about "killing your darlings" because sometimes, when a meisterwerk is in progress, it becomes obvious that the plotline involving a particular Tom, Dick or Harriet is actually diminishing the overall story and has to be excised in order to improve the whole.

"Bye, bye, Aunt Agatha, but really, nobody's going to miss you...!"

And so a better story emerges, or doesn't because, like with most things, "Nobody knows anything..."

I do get mildly irritated, however, when iconic characters get the chop for no very good reason, or to try and create a bit of a "buzz" around something, or, more cynically, just to increase the circulation or the ratings or the box office, depending upon the medium in which you are working.

When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle shoved Sherlock Holmes off the Reichenbach Falls, it was because he wanted an end to him, but, partially because of the outcry (but, I suspect, also because of the pay cheques and the fact that nothing else he was writing was ever quite THAT successful - which is also, incidentally, why I believe Harry Potter WILL be back one day...) he brought him back and he went on to have a further career up until and beyond his life as a Sussex Bee-Keeper, and that particular Great Detective was able to fade away so that we can still believe, if we want to, that he's out there somewhere, solving his crimes and doing his bit for King and Country.

I'd rather believe that than find him coming to a pitiful end on his deathbed with all his faculties fading. Sherlock Holmes should never be seen in his dotage, or losing his marbles, in my humble opinion, because he's meant to be there, in his prime, combatting the worst villainy that the Empire could produce.

When Agatha Christie did finally bump off Poirot (You didn't know that? Sorry, perhaps I ought to have put up a spoiler warning there...?) it was probably a fitting end to a long and distinguished literary career, but I really didn't like it all that much, to be honest with you, and I notice that in contrast, Jane Marple is still out there in literary limbo with her fate unknown, which is somehow far more comforting, unless you're a villain, that is...

You see, I really don't like it when they bump off iconic figures in books and television and films, especially if it's done as a cheap bit of opportunism, but also when you know that it's bringing along with it a bit of false jeopardy.

Science Fiction is particularly poor at doing this because the audience simply know that with a bit of jiggery-pokery and mumbo-jumbo our hero or heroine is going to be alive and kicking by episode two of next year's run, given that their character's name is in the title, unless the contract negotiations really break down and then, like Marley, doornail resemblance awaits them and a "mysterious, never-before-mentioned-or-seen relative who just happens to share their name might turn up at just the right moment instead.

Captain Kirk has now become such a massive and iconic part of popular culture that I always thought that it was a mistake to have him bumped off in that "Next Generation" film in which he appeared. Given the number of follow-up books featuring the character resurrected, it seems that quite a few people agreed with me on this, but then, in the original ten films, it's hard to think of one where something or someone important to the mix didn't get obliterated (usually the Starship Enterprise itself) in an effort to make each film "different" or "more iconic" than the last.

Interestingly, when it was done best, it was because the character of Mister Spock was supposed to be killed off forever, only for the producers to build the next two films around bringing him back from the dead, but it proves the point that when it's done poorly, it can look very poor indeed, like the "homage" to that scene played out in the new film which somehow manages to play far worse than in the original, convinces no-one, and somehow just serves to show how well it was done the first time around.

Superman, Batman, Kirk... In many ways these characters ought to be the immortals of popular fiction in American culture, and yet they're forever being announced as being killed off, only to be resurrected in another form like "New Coca Cola" or any other "new, improved" nonsense which turns out to just be more of the same, but just a little bit worse.

I still haven't really recovered from the fictional death of Inspector Morse and I, for one, still think that it was a bit of a mistake for the author to actually go through with it. Somehow, to me, it's now very difficult to watch all of the other Morse episodes without thinking of his ultimate fate and wondering whether he should be bothering, and that he should go off and enjoy himself instead, and maybe have a pint or three, because it's really not going to end well for him.

Sometimes, it's simply better not to know.

It does, of course, all come down to how much investment that you personally have in the character as to whether you care very much. After all, they are only creatures of the imagination, and some people take a positive pleasure in knowing that their favourite soap opera characters are going to come to a sticky end sometime soon, whilst I can't understand why anyone would want to watch anything new if they know exactly how it's going to unfold before it even begins.

Some people, of course, just revel in witnessing the misfortunes of others, in life as well as in fiction, but for me, especially when it comes to the great detectives, I'd rather that they didn't go out in a blaze of glory, but remain quietly doing what they do best, out there somewhere, putting away the villains and keeping the rest of us safe.

A WAGON TRAIN TO THE FUTURE

There was an article or two which came out last week announcing that scientists had had some success in creating a “tractor beam” which, incidentally, isn’t a large piece of steel that you attach to a piece of farm machinery, but a abbreviation of “attractor beam” which is the kind of electronic super-gizmo Captain Kirk used to use to drag bits of space debris, random shuttlecraft and long-lost super-criminals towards his spaceship at the click of a big switch or twelve.

This, I realised, would no doubt go some way towards creating a whole slew of tiresome articles (not unlike this one), claiming that the world is becoming more like “Star Trek” every day and what “visionary genii” were involved in creating that show fifty years ago, and perhaps quietly forgetting that the narrative needs of a TV show which was set-up to be basically a “Western set in Space” (or “A ‘Wagon Train’ to the Stars”) required the characters to talk to each other over huge distances, land on planets, and zap things with space guns ,and so they would probably have had to have such things anyway.

The cleverness of the designers of that show was that they came up with relatively practical (if a little chunky) designs which generally stand up to closer scrutiny today than one or two of the other props of the time, although I still recall Mr Scott effectively talking into a silver toaster festooned with Christmas lights in one early episode, so they didn’t get everything right.

The “chunkiness” can be forgiven because props needed to be practical and had to fit the quite frankly enormous batteries of the time in or around them somewhere, and, to be honest, most of the “designers of the future” back then failed completely to predict the miniaturisation of such things and the coming of wireless technology.

Of course when people claim that the ascendance of the mobile phone into our everyday lives was predicted by “Star Trek”, albeit in a world 200 years beyond our own, it’s a very easy analogy for them to make but, as ever, things are seldom that simple.

After all, if there had never been a single episode of “Star Trek” ever made, wouldn’t we still have had mobile phones anyway…?

I do suspect, however, that they might have looked slightly different. I have this sneaking suspicion that a lot of the people working in scientific R&D and in design studios across the globe are the sorts of people who might also be “Star Trek” fans, and that more than a few of them are rather keen to shape the world into its image so that they can fulfil their fantasy of growing up to actually live in a “Star Trek” universe.

Perhaps that is why they called that discovery a “tractor beam” in the first place...?

Okay, Warp Drive and Matter Transporters might still be some way off, but today you can have your Communicators, Tricorders and “Phaser Beam” generators if you choose to.

So, perhaps designers are Trekkies in disguise all wanting to turn the world into “Star Trek” but many of the aspects of the world we live in fail to live up to its standards, and our willingness to reach to the stars seems ever more diminished by modern financial limits, so that houses that could be built with all the modern environmental concerns (like built-in solar panels) are prohibitively expensive, and the short term economic thinking is that houses need to be cheap and affordable and such add-ons are unnecessary…

But this is always a problem when it comes to real people and their own personal needs and ambitions. We might all accept that it is in the long-term good for the economy that we don’t get a pay rise again this year, but our own very personal short-term thinking about pay is that we don’t like that idea all that much when we struggle to buy the season ticket or the petrol that actually gets us to work.

It’s a very hard sell to tell us that we’re going to have to start paying now for a High-Speed train which we might not be able to use until twenty years from now, by which time we might just have invested the first teleporters anyway.

Although I doubt it…

The E.U. seeing the wisdom of investing billions of Euros into research into the fabulous new discovery of the material we currently call Graphine might well mean that those vast spaceships might one day be able to leap off the drawing boards and head out towards the stars, but it’s hard to persuade people of what a miraculous material it might turn out to be until they start seeing some practical uses for the stuff.

Unless they’re “Star Trek” fans, of course…

SCI-FI SIXTIES STYLE

Well, after a few months of fitting them in and around the crinkly bits around the edges of my life, I finally ran out of original “Outer Limits” episodes to watch this weekend, having worked my way through all forty-nine of them, which puts me in a bit of a dilemma. What, precisely, should I work my way through next?

“The Outer Limits” had a two series (or perhaps one and a half series) run on American television in from 1964-1965 and has been, in all honesty, a bit of a slog to get through. I picked up the box set in an online “bargain bin” (or perhaps bucket) after rediscovering “The Twilight Zone” and working my way through the first three years of that.

“The Outer Limits” was kind of the bastard offspring of “The Twilight Zone” anyway and they live in a kind of  “matter/antimatter” relationship with each other in the sense that they almost balance each other out perfectly and you kind of get the feeling that you couldn’t have one without the other. Some people do tend to mix the shows up in their memories anyway, swearing blind that episodes from one show were actually from the other, which probably doesn’t matter all that much.

That said, on the whole I found “The Outer Limits” much more hard going than “Twilight Zone” has ever been. I thought it might be due to the longer episodes (usually about fifty minutes) slowing down the stories, but I popped a few of the longer “Twilight Zone” episodes into the player, the ones from the “aberration” fourth year when they were also stretched to the fifty minute format, and they fairly rattled along, so I can only put it down to the style of the show itself.

Ultimately it suffers slightly from having that feeling of being a bit of a hangover from the 1950s American “Sci-Fi” boom which brought us a slew of irradiated giant monsters being battled by worthy “scientist” types and assorted military men with the kinds of jutting jaws which you could cut bathroom tiles with. This generally means that it takes itself far too seriously and can come across as being rather “po-faced” as it tries very hard to be a serious drama with monsters made out of rubber and silver jumpsuits.

Usually, I would quite like that sort of thing, of course, but I will admit that more than once I’ve missed the middle of an episode because I was checking my phone or heading into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, and rarely did I feel that I was missing something. Ah, well, it’s gone now and there’s a bit of a disc-viewing void which needs filling, otherwise I might have to return to one or two of the other projects that I’ve been procrastinating over.

There are still a couple of series of “Twilight Zone” but, because so far we’ve been watching those together, it does seem a trifle unfair to consider popping those into the player in the wee small hours when nothing is stirring not even a mouse, except for the great big spiders and one obsessive insomniac.

I might just return to series two of “The Invaders”, picking it up from where I stopped just over a year ago, when I had a sudden rush towards a couple of reduced price seasons of  “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” which kept me distracted for a while. I have, however, been fancying revisiting a selection of old original “Star Trek” episodes in recent weeks, perhaps not least because of the various “Outer Limits” links that there are with that series which reminded me of various plots and storylines which were done far better on the starship Enterprise back in the days when it had red domes on the front of its engines and all of its equipment was impressively chunky.

The more astute (or sad) amongst you will have realised that all of these shows have one thing in common, that they’re all American Sci-Fi shows made in the 1960s post-communist witch-hunt cold war era. Actually, that’s far more than just one thing that they have in common (I counted at least three) but I’m never one to let a bit of accuracy get in the way of a nicely honed sentence.

Suffice it to say that this was precisely the kind of stuff that was used to fill our early evening TV schedules when I was still a new potato, and I got exposed to an awful lot of it in the days before I learned to shave and, to be honest, I love every minute of it.

Even if, on occasions, it drives me back towards the kettle of freedom for just a few moments.

CLARKE’S THIRD LAW IN ACTION

The novelist Arthur C Clarke formulated three “laws” governing prediction which basically stated:

1: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The third is, perhaps, the best known of the three as it is often cited, by those who quote such things, as being a prime example of something or other.

Yes, I know that it looks like I’m being flippant there, but bear with me…

Sometimes, as a culture, we try to give importance to certain ideas formed inside fictional worlds to try and give them greater status in the real world. Science fiction is a prime example of this. Whilst it is an undoubtedly popular genre in the movie theatres, quite often certain people will resist reading the books because they like to suggest that they “prefer to read about real things…” and find SF “All a bit silly…”

The mildly affronted SF fan will then try and dredge up examples like Clarke’s Third Law or Asimov’s Laws of Robotics to justify the general brilliance of a genre at being subversive about teaching us more about humanity by putting those humans in an obviously unreal context, so that the barriers and prejudices which might prove resistant to the general reader can be bypassed and their message can get through unhindered by those trappings.

There are and always have been, after all, some great minds and thinkers who have written in the SF genre, and just because their philosophies are being written about tin men or colonists in space suits doesn’t make them any less relevant to actual human life.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”

But, of course, I’ve allowed myself once again to let myself get sidetracked from what I thought that I was going to write about today.

It’s far too easy to forget that many of the devices that we have in our pockets right now would be indistinguishable from magic if we were able to wave them in front of the noses of people living even as recently as fifty years ago. Of course, being able to do that would be pretty magical in itself, but I digress. I’m always digressing these days – or perhaps that ought to be d-iGress-ing…? – instead of staying focussed upon the point, almost as if I need to keep interrupting myself as the thoughts tumble out with more and more reckless abandonment…

Perhaps it’s because I myself have now got to an age where I’m actually seeing human-made magic in action. I look at those 3-D printers which can produce objects drawn on a screen and produce them out of a number of materials but basically out of thin air, and I realise that I am actually seeing what once might have been considered to be “magic” happening “before my very eyes” and then I also realise that I have lived so long that those “replicators” talked about in those old “Star Trek” episodes are pretty much with us already.

Nevertheless, if you were able to tell those young whippersnappers of the 1950s that they might grow up to experience such things as energy coming out of thin air with no wires, and devices so tiny and with no moving parts which could contain all of their “grooviest new sounds” they’d probably burn you at the stake… Well, no, obviously… But they might laugh you out of the room, asking you where they are supposed to fit the batteries or the thick cabling that would make the thing actually work.

Even the most optimistic designers of “what the future might look like” back in the 1950s seemed not to think about wireless technology or miniaturisation as genuine options. Even the most forward-thinking of the props builders are still thinking in a very “chunky” way and many of those actors prancing around in the tinfoil jumpsuits are waving preposterously huge boxes in the general direction of whatever probing tentacle has turned up to menace them this week.

But then again, we can look at the many photographs and newsreel film sequences taken of that world which still remains within the bounds of living memory for some people and find it laughable. Looking at the world from our viewpoint of being here, fifty or sixty years on with all of those hats and cigarettes and huge telephones… How “hilarious” it can all seem, even though those were the very foundations upon which our own multimedia super-communications based technological society is built upon, and I do often wonder how “hilarious” pictures of our world are going to look to the people looking at them in fifty years time.

Will they find our iPhones and iPads amusing little trinkets…? Or might they react in horror at the way we’re all blatantly and openly sharing our information or cooking our brains…? And what if you threw your iPhone into a swamp and it turned into a fossil? What would the archaeologists of the far future make of it if they dug it up? Would they perhaps interpret it as an over-elaborate pebble created for the worship of some long-forgotten cult…? Or would they merely think that it might be an imitation of their own advanced technology and wonder what it was we thought we were creating with it…?

Whatever they’re likely to think, I’m sure that, to us, living here in our primitive times, it might seem indistinguishable from magic…