London Falling, by Paul Cornell

Opening London Falling reminded me of how out of practice I am at reading fiction; it took a while to reaccustom myself to looking for indications of character and absorbing detail. Befitting a police procedural, there is a lot to take in and a lot which is unfamiliar to the uninitiated. The same is true of the fantasy-horror genre to which London Falling also belongs. Its protagonists - DI Jimmy Quill, intelligence analyst Lisa Ross and undercover constables Sefton and Costain - are also on a learning curve, and most of their first investigation consists of them finding their depth in the sea of magic which underpins the novel's London. Paul Cornell's worldbuilding is as dependent upon London mythology - specifically that of West Ham United Football Club - as it is on the culture of the Metropolitan Police, and it's an author's right and perhaps also obligation to refashion and add to both as necessary. If footballers start exploding, be afraid.

London Falling features concerns familiar from Paul's earlier work, but demonstrates a more mature understanding. There's a stronger grasp of how the historical process shapes mythology; the reader is (gently and then pointedly) asked to consider what this does to the identity of a person who lives for a very long time, feeding from an ever-changing society from the margins. Concepts less than half a century old, such as the Hammersmith and City Line and a Greater London of thirty-three boroughs, are ritually invoked in the name of tradition. His police protagonists ask questions about their own understanding of themselves as well as the organised crime case which brings the Sight (second and more) to them, but they are rationalists throughout, two characters in particular laying emphasis in different ways on the application of the scientific method to the supposedly irrational. There are preoccupations about intimidation, particularly school bullying and 'discipline' among criminals, but also how accent expresses not only locality and social class but also tribalism and individual or collective self-respect and self-loathing.

This is self-consciously the first novel in a series. Several important threads belong to a wider arc. The conclusion to the main plot, though satisfying, horrific but true to the characters concerned, reveals a larger mystery; and the epilogue opens a long barrow of backstory. The origins of what the back cover blurb calls the Shadow Police novels are traced in the author's afterword to a television series proposal put together under the auspices of Steven Moffat and Sue and Beryl Vertue, and there are times when one really wants to see what actors would make of the protagonists. There's a viscerality to this magical underworld which leaves the mind's camera foaming with blood and dollying precariously over bridges of soil. Watch out, also, for a very personable cat.

London Falling is a confident book, one of those adventure stories with some thought. There's a conjuring trick underway for most of the book hidden in plain sight which is achieved with some force. Only occasionally is there anxiety that characterisation has been compromised by the need to make authorial preoccupations too concrete. Resolution is achieved, but not closure; there are boxes still to open, darknesses to be charted, and diminutive entities to be punched against the wall of the Rotherhithe Tunnel. Quill, Ross, Sefton and Costain deserve their chance.

London Falling by Paul Cornell is published in the UK by Tor at a RRP of £12.99.

Children of the Stones

I missed Children of the Stones when it was first broadcast, and only caught up with it about twelve years ago. That occasion was enabled by a domestic television in a medium-sized university lecture room, the province of a cult television society who cheered at every appearance of the HTV West animation. This one was served by a projection screen in the back room of a terraced house, which made the viewing much more immersive and played to the serial's claustrophobic nature.

As most British television enthusiasts of a certain vintage could recount, whether or not they had actually seen Children of the Stones, the serial recognises the stipulation that ITV franchise holders had to make programmes which reflected or represented their region. Executive producer Peter Graham Scott and producer-director Patrick Dromgoole pursued it to limits probably undreamed of by the Independent Broadcasting Authority. For seven weeks at the start of 1977, viewers of ITV children's television were given a fictionalised tour of the Wiltshire village of Avebury - here reinvented as Milbury - its stone circle and the mythology surrounding them. Woven in with the factual material, including several historical instances relating to the stones and authentic archaeological detail, were a plot inspired by contemporary speculations about astral science known to prehistoric humanity and lost to recorded history, and drawing on astronomy and astrophysics.

The plot advances slowly, but inevitably, as if a wheel is being turned tightening a snare. Young Matthew (Matt) Brake (played by Peter Demin) accompanies his father, Professor Adam Brake (Gareth Thomas, a year before Blake's 7), to Milbury, where Professor Brake intends to complete his research into magnetic fields associated with Milbury's stone circle. Almost immediately apparent is the division of the population into recent arrivals and longer-established 'Happy Ones', who hail each other with the words 'Happy Day'. As described in dialogue, it's more like a password than a greeting. Adam Brake, who is widowed, is attracted to another recent arrival, Margaret Smythe (Veronica Strong), who runs the archaeological museum. Matt finds a near soulmate in her daughter Sandra (Katharine Levy). A looming and ambivalent presence is the lord of the manor, retired astrophysicist Raphael Hendrick (Ian Cuthbertson); his counterpart, skulking on the fringe of the village, is Welsh poacher Dai (Freddie Jones).

The serial's imagery establishes early on that Milbury is a trap. Matt first meets Dai while riding a bicycle which is actually Hendrick's property; he crashes and damages the bicycle's front wheel. Later, Matt rescues a rabbit from Dai's snare (itself positioned by a stone) and replaces it with a drawing of the broken bike, both a message and a symbol of the predicament Matt is only beginning to recognise. Once Matt has established the correspondences between the network of ley lines converging on the village through the stones, his father's magnetic fields and the astronomical feature at which the stones appear to be pointing, then characters and viewer feel bound within a psychically electrified net.

In their different ways both Adam and Matthew are sensitive to the powers concentrated in the stones. On touching the stones, both experience visions before being rendered unconscious, but Matt also manifests telepathic powers associated with items of clothing, adding useful insight into what happens when newcomers to the village are invited to dinner at Hendrick's house. Neither of the Brakes succumb to irrationality. Even when captured through apparently paranormal means in episode six, Adam Brake calmly lays before Hendrick his hypotheses about having missed a "time turning" which would return Adam and Matt to "our present" before Hendrick as a fellow man of science. He leaves Hendrick to condemn himself by admitting that he exercises powers which he does not fully understand. Adam and Matt both strive to comprehend their situation before they act.

Like most other television fiction of the day, exterior scenes were shot on location, on film, while interiors were recorded in studio on videotape. Children of the Stones's location filming took place in the hot summer of 1976, and in some scenes the grass on the fields of Avebury is noticeably yellow. This is turned to advantage by the cinematography, especially in the scene at the end of episode three where Jimmo Browning, classmate of Matt and Sandra, unexpectedly takes a prominent role in a morris dance. There is something barren about the rural rituals upon which Hendrick smiles with appropriated patriarchal feeling. Though the integration of sound and image is of a high standard throughout, it's particularly powerful during the filmed sequences, which include those of the villagers standing in a circle singing the tonal hymn (the pervasively characteristic element of Sidney Sager's precise and haunting score) which provides incidental music even when it seems not to be part of the linear narrative. The line between diegesis and extradiegetic commentary is pointedly blurred.

Several important scenes early in the serial are set in the village school, a one-classroom affair of wood-panelled walls where children of all ages are taught advanced mathematics by tweed-skirted Miss Clegg (sometime Forsyte Saga heroine June Barrie). Those who perform the calculations with ease sit together on the High Table, implicitly working as a collective. Those who do not sit as individuals, like dunces, struggling to understand the equations Miss Clegg chalks out on her blackboard. At this viewing, the mathematician in the room described one equation, which served to show the transformation of Jimmo from slow learner to mathematical genius, as gibberish; but as this equation was inscribed by the actor playing Jimmo, one hopes that scientific adviser Peter Williams provided astrophysical in-jokes at least for the others.

Theme and execution have brought comments over the years that Children of the Stones is too disturbing for children's viewing. This was supposedly the view of an executive at HTV when the serial's concept was first pitched. However, its central premise is one familiar to many children, the unease which new children feel at school when facing a different set of cultural norms to those which they are accustomed. Making friends with other recent arrivals is an obvious strategy, but as they are assimilated one by one, picking up the incomprehensible local mannerisms and jargon, what happens when only you are left? The pressure to conform to the rules of the herd manifests itself as the beam of light which the viewers see burn negativity and autonomy away from Margaret and Sandra, just as a schoolchild might feel their attitudes and personality changed by interactions with new people in a new setting. Though Matt feels his psychic connection with Sandra broken as she becomes a 'Happy One', Sandra and Margaret do not become strangers to the viewers, who see them discussing the effects of the change on their mood and abilities, Sandra thereafter finding the calculations performed at school easy. In an unnerving exchange Katharine Levy's performance becomes much more mature and self-possessed, Sandra appearing preternaturally knowing in front of the now isolated Matt. Seeing Sandra and Margaret bask in their transformations is more chilling than making their changed personalities unknowable: one can believe, as Sandra says to Matt, that the villagers "will see you soon" and that there will be no escape.

The serial's atmosphere is reinforced by its reluctance to provide anything except a working hypothesis as an answer to its questions, underlined by the viewer being left with more information than its rationalist protagonists. The Roadline lorry which disappears as it turns a corner to enter the village in episode one is never seen again, perhaps the clearest indication - but only an indication - that there is a 'linear time' Milbury which luckier travellers might enter. The most enigmatic character is not Raphael Hendrick, but John Woodnutt as Link. He only appears in the final three episodes and to the Brakes appears only to be Hendrick's butler; but while a subordinate in the household, he is at least a partner in Hendrick's scheme, and possibly even the puppetmaster, disappearing into a control cubicle to operate astronomical technology while Hendrick plays the part of High Priest as part of his recruitment ritual. At the conclusion, as the time cycle restarts and Sir Joshua Lytton arrives to take possession of the house that had and had not been Hendrick's, Link appears again, but with dark hair and a moustache and in the character of an estate or land agent.

Children of the Stones advertises its sources. Entirely fictional finds are combined in Milbury's museum with those drawn from the archaeological digs of Alexander Keiller and others at Avebury. Though the production team added many of their own polystyrene 'stones' to the circle, the title sequence advertises in word and image that Milbury-Avebury is a real and dramatic part of the Wiltshire landscape. Some details are conflated - the Sanctuary of Children of the Stones is (as far as its exterior is concerned) West Kennett Long Barrow, not the real Sanctuary of the Avebury complex, south of the village by the A4 - but this does not compromise the story's imaginative response to a landscape of lost ritual. It also draws from the countercultural currents of the period, when speculation that the 'lost' knowledge of ancient civilizations might be rediscovered was rife, when extrasensory perception was a well-publicised subject of scientific study, and the ancient stone circles of the British Isles were adopted as places of worship by the emerging New Age movement. The association of the stone circle with cyclical time united both interest in the possibility that stone circles were observatories or astronomical timepieces (one drawn on explicitly by the script) and western fascination with the Buddhist bhavacakra.

The row of books in the Brakes' cottage includes at least one contemporary magical text, Elizabeth St George's The Casebook of a Working Occultist (Rigel Press, London, 1973). St George - otherwise Sandra West - was an active magical practitioner in the late twentieth century who died in 2007. Her semi-fictionalised, quasi-Sherlockian account of past projects includes an overlap with the world of fantasy television when she summons the 'thought-form' of Star Trek's Mr Spock to aid the rescue of Apollo 13 in 1970, having earlier rejected Doctor Who - 'an old man in a frock coat' - as inappropriate. If the book has any more significance than someone's idea of witty set-dressing, it's the last chapter which has relevance for Children of the Stones. There, the narrator confronts the guardian spirit of a long barrow. It's possible that this figure provided some inspiration for Dai in his role as guardian of the Sanctuary against Hendrick and the Happy Ones and against the time cycle, though ultimately it is the barrow itself, rather than Dai, which offers protection.

The conflation of archaeology, magic and knowledge of ancient or non-western civilizations marks Children of the Stones out as a late-postwar British work. Hendrick's wish to bring together the fifty-three villagers as one happy family, with himself as patriarch, can be read in terms of both imperialist and social democratic ideals, if one is so minded. Stewart Lee, in BBC Radio 4's Happy Days: Children of the Stones, has commented that revisiting the series as an adult makes him much more sympathetic to Hendrick's world view in that Hendrick wishes to take away the suffering of others by making a sacrifice of himself. However, the society which results is one where there is only one imagination left and only its posessor has any real capacity to learn. The era of the Happy Ones might seem to be that of the ultimate welfare state - the extraction of 'negative energy' has removed even ill health, as the unprocessed Dr Lyle comments - but this social security rests on disempowerment rather than democracy. To be a little more tendentious, it's tempting to imagine that for the career freelancers who wrote Children of the Stones, actor-writers Jeremy Burnham and Trevor Ray, the overthrow of Hendrick by the Brakes might have symbolised a rebellion against corporate culture in government and business with which they identified. The Brakes' inability to save Margaret and Sandra from being turned to stone demonstrates both the limits of the gesture and attempts at a less general reading.

Children of the Stones is carved from stratum upon stratum of apprehension, a psychogeology of fears. So much of the drama takes place in blazing sunshine or under the open sky of a summer night, or in well-lit sets which stress mundanity over mystery, but this only emphasises how in Milbury the strange permeates every person, every stone (almost a tautology). The story is told deliberately between visual images which haunt and arrest, sometimes marrying film and video techniques in a fashion which is a reminder of how common a union this was in the 1970s. The viewer is left considerably less sanguine about the naturalism of television storytelling. Just as Adam and Matt Brake leave Milbury desperate for the tangible reality of the sandwich after their experiences with the uncanny, Children of the Stones itself encourages doubts about its reliability as a witness. The production's voice is closer to Hendrick's than to that of the Brakes, because it feigns not to understand itself and leaves the viewer to answer questions. Children of the Stones continues to preoccupy viewers long after most of the fare which surrounded it has been forgotten, as demonstrated by its internet following, the recent radio documentary, and the series' continued presence on Network DVD's catalogue and its role as a gateway (through a bonus disc) into HTV's other ventures into the fantastic from the period.

Recent activities

Long time, no post; so here is a summary of my recent activities.

Throughout this year I've been undertaking freelance editing work proofchecking the translations of print works to annotated online texts for Oxford Scholarly Editions Online, published by Oxford University Press. The site was launched in September and is a powerful addition to OUP's arsenal of online educational publications. To quote the site itself, "The launch content (as at September 2012) includes the complete text of more than 170 scholarly editions of material written between 1485 and 1660, including all of Shakespeare’s plays and the poetry of John Donne." More is to follow in 2013, including authors such as John Milton and John Locke.

Work on The History of Oxford University Press, volume one, to 1780, is well advanced, and that should be seeing print next year, including three chapters by me. My old ODNB colleague Professor Ian Gadd of Bath Spa University is the volume editor and he has spent much of the last few years shepherding the words of different contributors into one work, which should do much for understanding of the early history of scholarly publishing in England as well as the book trade as a whole.

The first Doctor Who DVD to which I have contributed production information subtitles, Planet of Giants, was released in August. I'm glad that the work everyone involved has done to make this 1964 story a release of such high technical, informational and dramatic quality has been so well received, particularly given the marginal nature of the story to most histories of the programme and its defiance of the historical/science fiction dichotomy traditionally imposed upon the series' first three years. I set out with my notes to build on what was already known about the debt Louis Marks's script owed to Rachel Carson's book warning of imminent ecological catastrophe, Silent Spring, relating it to other ecological stories, as well as highlight the achievements of the production team in designing a story in two scales, with our miniaturised heroes clambering over giant telephone handsets and threatened by giant flies and a cat whose curiosity would have been fatal were it not for ruthless editing to curtail the story's length.

The Best of Men

My review of The Best of Men by Lucy Gannon (BBC Two, 16 August 2012) has just gone live at Reviews in Time and Space. The one scene which I really liked, which set off a lot of the ideas in the review, and which I somehow neglected to mention is the VE Day party, where Wyn Bowen (Rob Brydon) appears as Britannia, but after the joke is over removes his Union Jack outfit and the fake breasts under it and contemplates a self he regards (like the obnoxious Cowan) as disenpatriated, disgendered. Furthermore, the scheduling of this piece on BBC Two rather than BBC One might suggest that the acceptance of the disabled as part of society has a little way yet to travel.

Split Screen: Poetry Inspired by Film and Television

Edited by Andy Jackson. Stannington: Red Squirrel Press, 2012. £6.99

As the new accessions shelf (where I found this volume) at the Newcastle Lit and Phil made clear, poetry is the realm of the small publisher; and from Northumberland, Red Squirrel Press bids to reign. Though it defines itself largely as a fiction publisher, its drey includes a flourishing nest of poets.

It has been a long time since I was any sort of poetry reader, but I was drawn in by the subject matter of this anthology. Split Screen: Poetry Inspired by Film and Television reflects the experiences of the viewing generations of recent decades, when professional promotion and performance were brought into the domestic environment on a scale never before possible.

The emphasis in this collection is on the specific and personal rather than the general, albeit appealing to an expectation of shared individual experience. Ian McMillan's musings on the influence exerted on a developing sexuality by Diana Rigg's Emma Peel (in The Avengers) doesn't break new ground ('There'll be a cloudburst soon...'), but relies (as one former television writer-producer once said) on cliches being cliches because they work. Less sure-footed is Alan Buckley's 'Walmington-on-Sea', which in its interpretation of Dad's Army as 'the old England, where each man / must know his place' obscures Jimmy Perry and David Croft's deft observations about interwar social mobility and the limits of hierarchy.

Other voices ring more sure: Liane Strauss's 'The Dark Days are Done' weighs audience expectations of Italy alongside those which shaped The Godfather's Corleone family, and sees Sonny Corleone's death as that of an Icarus born from the Medici. It's twinned with Luke Wright's mordantly concise study of Michael Corleone's character development, 'Godfather'. Where these poems about cinema engage with their films as texts, it's those on television personalities which make the case for the box in the corner as maker of the most enduring myths: Paul McGrane's 'And the doctor says' adopts Tommy Cooper's sense of rhythm to turn the story of his televised death on stage into a routine, though the reader is left to imagine what conjurer's props would be most appropriate. Angela Topping's 'Doctor Love' claims Jon Pertwee's Doctor Who as a sex symbol for adolescent girls and as a model for teenage rebels, even as the poet's maturation causes her to leave the Doctor behind. There was, as Naomi Woddis's 'Always Ours' argues through the career of Diana Dors, always a pragmatic end to British postwar fantasies.

This is a collection about time and place and personhood, and in closing with 'The White Dot' by Andrew Philip, it suggests that the age of the LCD and plasma screen and multiple channels is a death of sorts. When television closed down, when the device itself had to be switched off, it died and was brought back to life the next day. In an age of perpetual standby and twenty-four hour broadcasting, it is still not simply a machine, but instead undead, drawing greater and greater masses into communication with it. The old order mourned in much of this volume is lost in a depersonalisation as sure as that felt by the last survivor in some televised conflict. The contemporary hero of these poems is perhaps Jude Marr's Meerkat - but the choice between that of 'blood and sand realities' or the comforting comic figure advertising insurance is for the reader.

The night editor

It's in the nature of freelance work that it doesn't necessarily respond well to being penned into the working day. This editor has been kept awake by the knowledge that he is tantalisingly close to completing a range of bibliographic data for a forthcoming online project. The work can be time-consuming and sometimes involves buttressing the foundations of scholarly publications compiled in eras which allowed a more relaxed attitude to referencing than is now acceptable. It's at this point that the remote researcher falls back on online catalogues and has cause to thank the unsung heroes behind them. Such a resource is the agglomerated catalogue of seventy major libraries in Britain and Ireland, Copac. Its interface has recently been redesigned with a softer colourscheme and a more user-friendly layout which provides more information than was previously available on the old search results screen. The links to the holdings of individual libraries are an especially welcome feature of a redesign which probably reduces the number of clicks most visitors need to make on their mouse or touchpad.

Eric Sykes 1923-2012

A few years ago, I heard of a successful young stand-up comedian who had become baffled when conversation turned to great figures in the British comedic tradition. Who, they asked, was Eric Sykes? For someone who grew up with the television of the 1970s, this response revealed how time and changes in fashion had pushed Sykes to the margins of public consciousness during the 1980s and after. The confused early press reports of his death refer to his deafness of 'later life' - in reality, most of his life was spent profoundly deaf - and emphasise his role in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, as if this is all a readership would be able to remember. Indeed, in later years Sykes was known for materialising in unexpected places, whether as one of the mysterious new servants in The Others, or as a solicitor in an episode of Agatha Christie's Poirot. Part of his power in his later career was talismanic, a figure from an earlier and perhaps more straightforward time whose appearances authenticated the works of a later entertainment age. The combination of evident strength of character and physical frailty was startling, as if performance alone kept Eric Sykes alive.

This wasn't the case. A BBC television documentary several years ago depicted Eric Sykes on the golf course and poring over documents with the help of magnification and computer screens, guarding his business interests carefully but avuncularly with the help of the formidable Norma Farnes, in what was still then 'The Office of Spike Milligan and Eric Sykes' in Orme Place on the borders of Bayswater and Notting Hill in west London. This was one of the fragments of the old Associated London Scripts, and with Eric Sykes's death another link to the heyday of that creative collective and agency has gone.

I'm too young to have seen Sykes and a..., but I watched its successor Sykes as a child, and recognised something funny in it even if I couldn't quite say what it was at the time. I've seen very little of it since, but in my mind the humour of Sykes had an openness of possibility to it, the consequences of Eric's ideas could be imagined playing out in wider society even if we didn't see them do so. There's also a determined ordinariness to the setting of Sykes; aspiration tends to be personal and while not without material objectives, these are often couched in terms which have more to do with inner personal obession and self-assurance of identity than wealth. There's a recognition that most people make their way through common frustrations. Eric and sister Hattie dwell in a sort of claustrophobic contentment, where everyday privations are reassurance that one still exists. Sykes is idiosyncratic, but it's for that reason it has something to say about a post-war suburban Britain of moderate incomes and ill-articulated expectations.