The Man Who Invented the Daleks, The Strange Worlds of Terry Nation by Alwyn W. Turner
Terry Nation casts a long shadow over British television, although only in very particular corners. His main claim to fame (and riches due to canny licensing deals) is that he wrote the first Dalek story for the then new Doctor Who but his career stretches over many decades. Starting out as a comedy writer, he eventually made the switch to drama in the early 60s and never looked back. The list of shows he wrote for reads like a perfect rainy Saturday afternoon’s viewing: The Saint, The Avengers, Doctor Who, and Blake’s Seven, plus all sorts of other thick slices of cheese on toast. One of the last things he did was Macgyver, back when it was good.
This biography is a bit of a strange beast. It is incredibly detailed in some respects, going over each show (and sometimes individual episodes) with the kind of meticulous scrupulousness that only the British can muster.
On the other hand, Nation was a man who entered his chosen profession early, worked hard, made some contacts, and found success pretty early on. An admirable way to live your life perhaps, but not much to hang a great biography on. His childhood is covered in a few pages, somewhere along the way he acquires a wife. His first born child gets a brief mention, but only because Nation wrote a popular children’s book for her. His other child only appears for a sentence or two. There are no serious setbacks along the way, no lost loves, no professional rivals. Just page after page of Nation churning out stories.
And churn them out he could. Almost all his colleagues were in awe at the speed at which he wrote (his secret was never doing second drafts) and the consistent quality of his scripts (his secret was to have a lot of stock scenes that he could “recycle”).
In fact, this biography is a testament the Nation’s approach; like his serials each episode in the book is entertaining but the whole thing is a bit same-y if you consume the whole thing in one go. You don’t even get a chase through dimly lit corridors or a bomb to liven up the plot.
Only recommended if you really like this sort of thing.
A while ago I read The Bounty by Caroline Alexander, a modern account of Captain Bligh’s famous-for-all-the-wrong-reasons expedition to Tahiti aboard The Bounty. It focused mainly on what happened after everyone got home again. This book is the tale told by the man himself, compiled by Bligh from his logs kept during the voyage and it is a fascinating read. Even if there wasn’t a (spoiler alert!) mutiny, it would make for a cracking story as Bligh has an eye for both nautical detail during the voyage and a keen interest in how Tahitian society (very different to the English system) worked after The Bounty arrives.
This early novel in the form of a diary purports to be a day-to-day account of the life of a young London man during the 1665 outbreak of the black plague as people were dying in their thousands. Defoe did actually live through the plague but he was only 5 at the time, so the story is fictionalized but obviously carefully researched. Defoe uses the experiences of the narrator to highlight how various aspects of society (the rich, the poor, etc) reacted to the plague, maintaining a detached tone while horrible things are occurring on all sides. The thing that struck me the most was the general atmosphere of resigned bewilderment that permeates the book – nobody in pre-germ theory London really understands what is going on but society continues on as best as it can while people are dropping dead and whole streets worth of houses are empty or contain only corpses.
I, Claudius by Robert Graves is an historical novel that proports to be the secret autobiography of Claudius from his childhood up until his surprising assumption of power. Grave’s Claudius states up front that he is writing a true history for the ages that will not be found for hundreds of years so he can include information that is damaging to either his family or the political body of the empire. Claudius was apparently a keen student of history, and this is reflected in the clear, dispassionate narrative that Claudius/Grave weaves around what must have been stressful times for the protagonist.
