The Classic British Telefantasy Guide

by Paul Cornell, Martin Day, Keith Topping

Genres: Science Fiction

Synopsis

The Classic British Telefantasy Guide is derived from the second edition of The Guinness Book of Classic British TV with various corrections and a revised introduction to bring it up to date. It was written when the Internet barely existed, and at a time when few books had been published on the subject. This is, however, by no means a new or completely revised version of the original material - too much time has passed, and if we were to start reworking and correcting the text now, it would probably never be finished! Instead, Classic British Telefantasy is an electronic reprint of some of the authors' earliest work, repacked for a new format and, perhaps, a new age.

Release date: July 30, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 192

Sample

1 ‘McLuhanism’: The philosophy contained in the writings of Canadian media-guru Marshall McLuhan (1911–80), author of The Medium is the Message, which states that the way in which people communicate with each other is, actually, far more important than what they communicate. The word first appeared in print in the 6 May 1967 edition of the Saturday Review, in an article concerning the humourist Joel Lieber’s book Humanizing the Image: ‘On a superficial level Lieber’s provocative novel bears out the basic precept of elementary McLuhanism: the medium is the message.’

2 The author Phil Tonge argues that Telefantasy is ‘a term originally coined by French writers who wanted to avoid long-winded sub-categories for programmes such as say The Avengers. It’s much handier to term it a “Telefantasy” show than forever listing it as “One Time Trenchcoat Gritty, Surreal, SF-tinged, Action-Adventure, Comedy, Secret Agent, Leather Sex-Cop Show.” Basically, if a programme contains elements of SF, horror, the supernatural, mythology and/or surrealism, then it can be deemed to be “Telefantasy.”’ Alison Peirse in A Broken Tradition: British Telefantasy and Children’s Television in the 1980s and 1990s (published in 2010) considers Telefantasy to be: ‘A term that encompasses fantasy, science fiction and horror on television.’ Both are more than decent descriptions of the genre itself and of the creative terms of reference which it contains. The actual word may well be of French origin though it appears to have first been used in a published work in Fantastic Television by Gerry Gerani and Paul M Schulman, which appeared in May 1977.

3 R.U.R. was first published in 1920. Capek himself wrote a letter in reference to the etymology of the word to the Oxford English Dictionary in which he suggested that his brother, the painter and writer Josef Capek, was its actual originator. In an article in the Czech journal Lidové Noviny in 1933, Capek explained that he had originally wanted to call the machine creatures in R.U.R. ‘workers’ using either the word ‘labori’ (from the Latin ‘labor’) or ‘delnasi’ (from the Czech word for workers, ‘delníci’). However, Capek didn’t believe either word fitted, and sought advice from Josef, who suggested ‘roboti.’ The word ‘robota’ means literally ‘corvée’ or ‘slave labour’ and, more figuratively, ‘drudgery’ or ‘hard work’ in Czech and also ‘work’ generally in several of the Slavic languages. Tragically, neither Capek brother lived to see their word become a standard element of science-fiction in the post-war years. Karel died on Christmas Day 1938 from pneumonia whilst Josef perished in Belsen in 1945.

4 Like Dennis Potter, Rudolph Cartier died on 7 June 1994. Although of different generations, in the same day were lost television’s greatest dramatist and the man who, in effect, created television serial drama as we know it. Characteristically modest, when interviewed in 1991 by BBC2’s The Late Show, Cartier summed up his life’s work thus: ‘The public wants to be lifted out of their drab, dreary life, to look at this cold screen of glass, and look at another world. That is what the public expected of me.’

5 John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris (1903–69) started writing for American pulp-fiction houses whilst working for the Civil Service in the 1930s. A writer of superb urbane and sophisticated dramas, his use of first-person narrative helped give his stories a strong sense of reality. His first SF novel, The Day of the Triffids was published in 1951 it was quickly picked up for a film adaptation, as was his fourth novel The Midwich Cuckoos, published in 1957 (and filmed in 1960 as The Village of the Damned). Now regarded as the father of modern British SF, Wyndham’s other novels include The Kraken Wakes, The Chrysalids and Trouble with Lichen. His finest work, the alternate-universe short story ‘Random Quest’ from the Consider Her Ways collection, has also been filmed (as Quest for Love).

6 To lay another popular myth to rest, Doctor Who is not, and has never been – at least in production terms – ‘a children’s show,’ albeit the age-group remains a vital part of the show’s audience. It was made by the BBC’s drama department until 1989 and was devised as a programme which would attract a wide, family-based, audience. The first public reference of the series was in an article in The Times in September 1963 highlighting forthcoming BBC productions. Doctor Who is described as: ‘A new family series [which] borders on science fiction.’ Almost 50 years later that’s still a decent summation of the format.

7 Described by BBC continuity as ‘a serial for older children,’ the series was freely adapted by Anna Home from a trilogy of novels by Dickinson. The series took most of its material from the first book The Weathermonger which, together with Heartsease and The Devil’s Children have since been reissued in a single volume. In the original books, the character of Nicky appears only in The Devil’s Children – the other books have entirely separate characters. Also, the time span of The Changes is considerably reduced from that in the original trilogy which take place over several years.

1 We’re happy to state that Lou’s sister-in-law eventually allowed his nephews to watch the show, and the whole family became fans for a time.

The television medium is uniquely suited to expanding viewers’ imaginations: suspend your disbelief and the universe is at your fingertips. Thus from almost the dawn of the television era producers have turned to styles like horror, science fiction, the supernatural and surrealism for inspiration. The BBC’s early interest in fantasy was perhaps inevitable given that most of the definitive written works in this field were British: the gothic novelists of the 1820s, the Victorian penny dreadfuls, the ghost stories of M. R. James, and the scientific romances of H.G. Wells. As early as 1937 the BBC produced a live performance of Arnold Ridley’s The Ghost Train, though the real birth of telefantasy as a genre occurred on 11 February 1938 with a live 25-minute performance from Alexandra Palace of Czech writer Karel Capek’s R.U.R., which had introduced the word ‘robot’ to the English language. The birth of TV horror followed soon afterwards, in 1939, with a production of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart.

The immediate post-war years brought literary adaptations of Wells’s The Time Machine and J.B. Priestley’s Summer Day’s Dream in 1949, and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and A Christmas Carol in 1950. A 1952 version of Wells’s The Wonderful Visit starred a young Kenneth Williams, while 1954 saw a powerful adaptation of The Monkey’s Paw. The same era also saw the first experiments in episodic science-fiction sagas. 1951’s Stranger from Space was an 11-episode fortnightly insert into the children’s programme Whirligig. Written by Hazel Adair and Ronald Marriott, the series concerned a Martian (Michael Newell) who crashes his ‘space boat’ and is found by a young boy (Brian Smith). Telefantasy legend Peter Hawkins had a role, as did Valentine Dyall in 1952’s sequel. Similar serials from the period include 1954’s The Lost Planet and 1956’s Space School, all produced by Kevin Sheldon.

An August 1952 production of Stanley Young’s Mystery Story saw the telefantasy debut of a writer who was to shape the genre for the next two decades – Nigel Kneale. Kneale was also involved in the adaptation of Charles Irving’s paranoid nuclear chiller Number Three, but it was with his own The Quatermass Experiment (1953) that he changed the face of TV drama. Kneale’s development of the art through the three Quatermass serials and ground-breaking productions of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and his own The Creature would continue throughout the next decade, when plays like The Road, The Year of the Sex Olympics, Bam! Pow! Zap! and The Stone Tape would pull telefantasy into areas never dreamed of in the 50s. Compared to the revisionist work of the Kneale/Rudolph Cartier stable, contemporary plays like Charles Main’s TimeSlip (1953) or The Offshore Island (a 1958 post-nuclear tale) seem dull, if worthy, by comparison. The era was also notable for George Kerr’s alien-invasion classic The Voices (1955), Evelyn Fraser’s cryogenic murder mystery The Critical Point starring Leo McKern (1957), and Hands Across the Sky, a 1960 opera concerning aliens and featuring the memorable libretto ‘I chased him through the uranium deposit/ Now he’s locked himself in the heavy water closet!’

The cause of serious science fiction received a boost in 1961 with A for Andromeda. Written by John Elliot, from a story by controversial astronomer Fred Hoyle, this starred Esmond Knight, Mary Morris, Peter Halliday and Julie Christie as the eponymous heroine. A combination of boardroom politics (a predecessor of Elliot’s The Troubleshooters) and science-fiction speculation, A for Andromeda was highly popular and led to a sequel, The Andromeda Breakthrough, the following year, with Susan Hampshire in the title role. The BBC tried to repeat the Andromeda formula with Tom Clarke’s intelligent serial The Escape of RD7 and plays like The Test and The Big Pull. 1964’s series R3 starring Jon Rollason falls into the same category.

The Monsters, a four-part 1962 series about a Loch Ness-type Monster, may have failed to excite the viewers but, with an eye on the success of the ABC Pathfinder family science-fiction serials, the BBC confirmed its commitment to the genre in 1963 with Sydney Newman’s creation of British telefantasy’s flagship, Doctor Who.

During 1962 the BBC provincial anthology series Suspense began and featured plays with telefantasy content. These included Virus X, Project Survival, the eerie The Tourelle Skull, and the space-mission drama The Edge of Discovery. The success of such experiments and of another one-off production, The Caves of Steel, in BBC2’s Story Parade, as well as the popularity of ATV’s Out of this World, encouraged the BBC to use time on the new minority channel to attempt an anthology series of its own. Out of the Unknown began in 1965; during its first two seasons it largely concentrated on adapting classic science-fiction sto. . .