Matt Smith – Blood and Porridge

February 11, 2024February 13, 2024

Daphne’s up the creek

© Penguin Books

Daphne du Maurier’s 1941 novel Frenchman’s Creek comes nowhere near the standard of her best work. It lacks the growing unease, troubling ambiguity and general intensity of, say, Rebecca (1938) or My Cousin Rachel (1951). Even as a historical potboiler, it falls far short of Jamaica Inn (1936) because it doesn’t have a main character as monstrously memorable as Jamaica Inn’s villain, Joss Merlyn.

That said, with its twists and turns and skin-of-the-teeth escapes and rescues (predictable though they were), I found the book enjoyable as an undemanding romp. Also, its cultural politics seem amusingly ironic when viewed through the prism of 2024 Britain, insecure at home and diminished abroad after the fiasco of Brexit.

Frenchman’s Creek starts with its heroine Dona St Columb, basically a 17^th-century desperate housewife, fleeing London for the wilds of Cornwall. Dona has been living it up in the capital with her doltish and drunken husband Harry and his circle of friends, but now she finds their company monotonous and shallow. Among them, only the smooth and confident Rockingham has much personality, but as he flirts aggressively with Dona behind her husband’s back and even enlists her help in perpetrating a cruel joke against an elderly Countess – they terrify the old dear one night by disguising themselves as highwaymen, stopping her coach and pretending to rob her – he’s obviously a bad ’un.

Thus, bored and disgusted, Dona leaves Harry behind and travels to his country estate on the Cornish coast, hoping to lead a quiet life. This doesn’t happen, of course. One of her landowner neighbours, Godolphin – who’s as oafish as her husband and suffers the additional disadvantages of having ‘bulbous eyes’ and a ‘growth on the end of his nose’ – informs her that the local countryside is in uproar, thanks to raids being carried out by a French pirate-ship, captained by a figure known only as ‘the Frenchman’. Meanwhile, Dona is puzzled to find the estate emptied of its servants, save for one enigmatic character called William, ‘with a button mouth and a curiously white face’, speaking with ‘a curious accent, at least she supposed it was Cornish’.

It soon transpires that William is in the employ of the Frenchman, and his ship La Mouette – The Seagull – is anchored within Harry’s estate, in a hidden creek off the side of an estuary. The pirates have been sneakily hiding there between their assaults on the neighbouring coastline. Dona falls into their clutches, but discovers that – quelle surprise! – the Frenchman, one Jean-Benoit Aubéry, is actually a dashing fellow. As well as having the requisite amounts of tallness, darkness and handsomeness, he wears ‘his own hair, as men used to do, instead of the ridiculous curled wigs that had become the fashion…’ (Needless to say, all the pompous Englishmen Dona knows wear wigs.) Even better, he has an artistic temperament – he loves drawing pictures – and he’s at one with nature – his pictures are of herons, sanderlings, herring-gulls and other birdlife.

Trusting Dona to keep her mouth shut, Jean-Benoit releases her from captivity. And before you know it, romance blossoms between the two of them. Not only is she inviting him up for dinner at her husband’s manor house, and he taking her on fishing expeditions, but she becomes a member of his crew. She’s on board La Mouette when it sallies forth from the creek, in search of booty. She even takes part in the raids on her neighbours’ coffers. Meanwhile, as one of the local gentry, Dona gets to hear all the plans Godolphin and his fellow landowners are hatching to trap and catch the Frenchman. The Englishmen never imagine that one of the supposedly silly, frivolous women in their company is secretly channeling this information to their enemy.

For a while, Dona lives the dream. She enjoys the charms of a hunky, creative and sensitive man and gets to participate in swashbuckling adventures. Then, however, Harry arrives from London to aid his neighbours in their efforts to apprehend the Frenchman – never suspecting that the naughty pirate is holed up in the nearby creek, right under his nose. Also, he brings Rockingham with him, and it’s his shrewd, caddish friend who begins to smell a rat…

From wikipedia.org / © The Chichester Partnership

It’s fun to speculate on the audience de Maurier had in mind for this tosh. Frustrated 1940s English ladies, fantasizing about a hot-blooded continental man whisking them away from their humdrum middle-class lives? Especially, whisking them away from their repressed, pipe-smoking, cardigan-and-slipper-wearing husbands, chaps who probably found David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) a bit too raunchy?

Maybe she was trying to exploit an inferiority complex that lurks in the British psyche regarding the French. Well, in the English psyche – mention ‘France’ to Scottish people and many will simply enthuse about ‘The Auld Alliance’. There’s always been a feeling that compared to the average English bloke, the average French bloke is more suave, elegant, cultured and aware of what it takes to sweep les dames off their feet. (Mind you, the recent publicity surrounding the 20-stone horribleness that is Gerard Depardieu suggests that French male superiority in the charm stakes is just a myth.)

As a recent example of this Anglo-insecurity, when faced with Gallic masculinity, look at the anger with which Britain’s stupidest right-wing newspapers reacted to French president Emmanuel Macron turning up in London for Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral in 2022. Macron – of whom, I should say, I’m not usually a fan – wore sunglasses, a blue blazer and blue trainers and came accompanied by a phalanx of bodyguards who strutted with nonchalant Jean Reno-style coolness. He was accused of being disrespectful with his ‘casual’ attire, but come on… The real issue was cringing English jealousy. Compare Macron’s chicness with the appearance of former British prime minister Boris Johnson, who shambled to the funeral looking like a cross between an ambulatory compost heap and an electrocuted yeti.

No doubt this inferiority complex towards the French (and all things continental) has been compounded by the Brexit vote, which has left England / Britain on the fringes of Europe, looking rather daft and deluded.

Frenchman’s Creek was filmed in 1944, in a now-forgotten production whose one point of interest is that it was the only time Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce appeared together in a film that wasn’t a Sherlock Holmes adventure. It’d be interesting, though, to have the book filmed again in the 2020s. You could have some hot young French actor like Pio Marmaï or François Civil in the role of the Frenchman. Matt Lucas, channeling Boris Johnson, could be cast as Harry, Dona’s hapless husband; and Matt Smith – in psycho mode, rather than Doctor mode – cast as the alluring but nasty Rockingham. A range of bumbling and grotesque character-actors like Eddie Marson, Tom Hollander, Nick Frost and Reece Shearsmith could play Godolphin and the other English landowners.

I suspect desperate housewives all over Middle England would flock to see a new Frenchman’s Creek movie; even while ridiculous newspapers like the Daily Mail, Daily Express and Daily Telegraph fulminated at how it cast aspersions on the manliness of Dear Old Blighty.

Before I finish, I should mention that the pleasure you get from Frenchman’s Creek possibly depends on how much you can tolerate the character of Dona. I didn’t mind her, spoilt and self-centred though she obviously was, and just got on with enjoying the book’s narrative drive and historical colour. However, my partner – Mrs Blood and Porridge – also read the novel and detested it. This was due to Dona, whom she described as “insipid and childish… she’d marry a prisoner on death row because she’s rebelling against her oh-so-boring life… Meanwhile, people are starving and the bitch is f**king a murderer because it’s fun as long as she can luxuriate in her white upper-class ‘lady’ privileges. She’s an abomination. I hate her… her lack of a moral compass and her inability to imagine anything more for herself than a man.”

So, that’s me told, then.

© Paramount Pictures

December 11, 2023December 25, 2023

How Terrance left a stamp on me

From downthetubes.net

If you were to draw up a list of great children’s authors of the 20^th century, you’d no doubt end up with names such as Roald Dahl, Alan Garner, Tove Jansson, Clive King, C.S. Lewis, Astrid Lindgren, A.A. Milne, Philip Pullman and Rosemary Sutcliffe. But you probably wouldn’t think of including Terrance Dicks, who passed away in 2019 at the age of 84.

Dicks made his name on television as a scriptwriter and script editor. He was involved in TV shows like The Avengers (1961-69), Moonbase 3 (1973), Space 1999 (1975-77) and much-maligned ITV soap opera Crossroads (1964-88), and also in a raft of TV adaptations of classic literary works that the BBC broadcast on Sunday evenings and included Great Expectations (1981), Beau Geste (1982), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1982), Oliver Twist (1985), David Copperfield (1986-87) and Vanity Fair (1987). But his most famous TV work was with the BBC’s long-running science fiction / fantasy show Doctor Who, which kicked off in 1963 and has recently celebrated its 60^th birthday with a series of TV specials featuring Scottish actor David Tennant, returning to the role of the Doctor after 13 years, and Rwandan-but-also-Scottish actor Ncuti Gatwa making his debut in the role too.

Yet I suspect it was as a writer of books, not TV shows, that Dicks left his greatest legacy. For he had a huge but unsung influence on the reading habits of British kids during the 1970s and 1980s.

Dicks served as script editor on Doctor Who from 1970 to 1975, when the title character was played by Jon Pertwee as an imperious, cape-and-bowtie-wearing, vintage car-driving, karate-chopping man of action. He also contributed the occasional script to the show during the tenures of Pertwee’s immediate predecessor (Patrick Troughton) and successors (Tom Baker and Peter Davison). However, it’s for his role as novelist-in-chief for Target Books’ Doctor Who series that I believe Dicks is most important. The Target series turned most of the Doctor Who TV adventures from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s into neat, collectible paperbacks, with attractive and colourful covers that were often courtesy of fantasy-artist Chris Achilleos.

Back then, the BBC seemed disinterested in repeating past episodes of Doctor Who. And if you were a fan of the show, as I was, there were no such things as whole-season box sets, Internet streaming or BBC iplayers, or indeed, DVDs or even video cassette tapes, to allow you to catch up with missed episodes. And you often missed them, because the show was broadcast early on Saturday evenings, and Saturday was a school-free day when you’d be out of the house doing stuff. Plus, there were many episodes you hadn’t seen because they’d been broadcast before you were even born…

It didn’t help that the BBC wiped many of the early episodes featuring the first two Doctors, William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton, assuming that the tapes served no financial or cultural function and only took up unnecessary space in their storerooms. Considering how the BBC has made millions since then selling the show and its memorabilia to worldwide audiences, they must be really kicking themselves about destroying those episodes now.

So, in those days, if you were a ten-year-old wanting to experience past adventures with past Doctors, your only option was to buy the Target novelisations, the majority of which were penned by Dicks in his simple, no-nonsense, fast-moving prose. Admittedly, I think their quality tailed off a bit in later years as demand for them increased, and the backlog of un-novelised adventures grew greater, forcing Dicks to churn them out at a faster rate, but some of the ones he wrote in the 1970s were great and, even without the TV show behind them, would have stood up as excellent children’s books in their own right: for example, The Auton Invasion (1974), The Abominable Snowmen (1974), The Terror of the Autons (1975), The Three Doctors (1975), The Genesis of the Daleks (1976) and The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977).

The only problem with Dicks’ books was that they tended to make the stories seem much more spectacular on the page than how they’d appeared on the screen. One of Dicks’ paragraphs, coupled with a child’s imagination, could conjure up incredible settings – teeming utopian cities, vast gladiatorial arenas and huge bustling spaceports. Whereas on TV these were really poky little BBC studio-sets, bare and shaky and obviously low-budget. Meanwhile, the immense alien deserts, wastelands and battlefields evoked by Dicks’ prose were invariably, on TV, a big quarry outside London where the show seemed to do 80% of its outdoor filming. Years later, when you finally got to see those old TV episodes that you’d previously only known through reading the novelisations, they disappointingly looked a bit rubbish.

At ten years old, and as a budding writer, I decided to follow Dicks’ example and write my own Target Books Doctor Who novelisation. I made up my own TV adventure in my head and then wrote it as a book, by hand, in a hundred-page jotter. I even added my own black-and-white illustrations every dozen pages or so. The cover (again drawn by me) showed a giant, gauntleted fist grabbing hold of planet Earth. The book was called Bloodlust of the Sontarans. The Sontarans were war-like, potato-headed aliens who at that point had appeared on the show a couple of times to menace Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker’s Doctors. When it was relaunched in 2005, the Sontarans were reintroduced during the Doctor-ship of David Tennant and one of them, played by Dan Starkey, even became a semi-regular character while Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi occupied the lead role.

Two years later, I decided to produce my second Doctor Who novelisation, and for this one I became positively hi-tech. My parents had given me a typewriter for Christmas, so with that I banged out about 130 paperback-sized pages and then taped them together. There were no illustrations in this volume, but I drew a colourful, hopefully Chris Achilleos-style cover showing Tom Baker getting his head fried by a futuristic brain-washing machine. This I titled Destruction of the Daleks and, yes, it featured the show’s number-one villains, the demented, eye-stalked, kitchen-plunger-waving, Nazi pepperpots, the Daleks. The premise of this novel was that the Daleks had started to be killed off by a newly evolved virus and were going to extreme lengths to locate a cure for it. I was peeved when, several years later, the BBC seemed to nick my idea and used it as the basis for an official Doctor Who TV adventure, Resurrection of the Daleks, which starred Peter Davison as the fifth Doctor. I should have sued.

As I said, I’m positive Dicks’ books got a lot of kids (who otherwise would have been glued to their TV sets all the time) reading, even if it was the TV connection that got them to open the books in the first place. And as I’ve suggested in the previous two paragraphs, he was also a big influence on kids who wanted to become writers themselves. Decades later I still write stuff, and get the occasional thing published, and when I use certain words I find myself reminded of Dicks, who originally showed me how to use those words in certain ways. For example, ‘croak’ instead of ‘said’, to describe a raspy voice – that came from Dicks using it in reference to the Daleks, who regularly ‘croaked’ the word “Exterminate!” Or ‘wheezing’ or ‘groaning’ to describe a particular type of sound, like the one made by the Doctor’s space / time-ship, the Tardis, when it was materialising or dematerialising.

I ended up with a row of colourful Target / Doctor Who novels on my bookshelf. I assumed it was just me who was geeky enough to possess such a collection, but then one day in the late 1980s I happened to be in the Edinburgh flat of one Dougie Watt, whom I knew fairly well back then and who is now a novelist and historian. I noticed a similar row of Target books on his bookshelves too. However, as Doctor Who was definitely not considered cool in those days, and labelling yourself a Doctor Who fan was about as damaging to your street credibility as announcing that you took a shower once a month or your all-time favourite musical act was Rick Astley, I tactfully pretended I hadn’t noticed them and avoided Who-shaming my friend.

After being relaunched in the 21^st century, Doctor Who has had many established writers of books, comics, television and films falling over themselves to write either TV-show episodes or spin-off novels for it: for instance, Dan Abnett, David Bishop, Eoin Colfer, Jenny Colgan, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Paul Cornell, Neil Cross, Richard Curtis, Neil Gaiman, Mark Gatiss, A.L. Kennedy, Jamie Mathieson, Michael Moorcock, Patrick Ness, Kim Newman, Simon Nye, Robert Shearman and Toby Whitehouse. In addition, the three ‘showrunners’ who’ve helmed ‘Nu-Who’ so far, Russell T. Davies, Stephen Moffat and Chris Chibnall – Davies is currently back in charge – all made their names as writers originally. So it’s a writers’ show through and through. And I suspect that reading Terrance Dicks’ books back in their childhood helped a good number of those people find their calling as writers.

Meanwhile, Russell T. Davies, if you’re reading this and fancy commissioning a script for the next season of Doctor Who with the title Bloodlust of the Sontarans, give me a call.