William Hartnell – Blood and Porridge

April 30, 2026April 30, 2026

Films I’d like to see remade (Part 1)

From imdb.com / © Rank Organisation

I still find it disconcerting when films I enjoyed in my youth are remade in the 21^st century: for example, 1980’s The Fog (remade in 2005), 1981’s The Evil Dead (remade in 2013) and Clash of the Titans (remade in 2010), 1986’s The Hitcher (remade in 2007), 1987’s Robocop (remade in 2014) and 1988’s Hairspray (remade in 2007). My immediate and automatic response to such remakes is, “What, they’re remaking that movie already? Have you no shame, Hollywood?”

This is followed by a feeling of horror as I realise just how long ago it was when those original movies were released. The first Evil Dead movie was 32 years old – 32 years! – when its remake surfaced, though in my mind it was only yesterday when Sam Raimi’s Deadites made their first-ever appearance and started making life difficult for Bruce Campbell. And actually, three of the films I remember most fondly from my youth, Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) and Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983) were remakes themselves. Body Snatchers appeared just 22 years after the 1956 original and The Thing appeared 32 years after its 1950 one. Scarface was an outlier, since the first Scarface came out in 1932, more than a half-century earlier.

Maybe I shouldn’t be so concerned about how soon after the original movie that a remake appears. I should be concerned about the quality of it – for remakes tend to be shite. I haven’t seen all those mentioned at the beginning of this entry, but the ones I have seen have been nowhere near as good as the originals. (The Evil Dead remake probably comes closest, but I still much prefer the ramshackle and low-budget, but resourceful, charm of Raimi’s 1981 film.) That said, remakes don’t have to be bad all the time – the aforementioned ones by Kaufman, Carpenter and De Palma testify to that.

So, without further ado, here are some films – and one series of films – I wouldn’t mind seeing remade in the 21^st century, with bigger budgets and better special effects. But remade decently.

From wikipedia.org / © Rank Organisation

Hell Drivers (1957)

Blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1951, American director Cy Endfield moved to Britain where, half-a-dozen years later, he made Hell Drivers. Given the persecution Endfield had suffered, it unsurprisingly takes a dim view of American-style, cut-throat capitalism. It has that underrated but magnificent actor Stanley Baker as an ex-con who finds a job as a truck driver with a dodgy haulage company, which threatens its drivers with the sack if they don’t deliver loads of gravel across treacherous roads at breakneck speeds. The reason there aren’t more drivers employed to relieve the pressure, and reduce the danger, is because of a scam involving the local depot manager and its off-his-head Irish foreman (played by Patrick McGoohan like a brawnier version of Shane MacGowan). The latter soon becomes Baker’s nemesis.

As well as a political message, Endfield injects Hell Drivers with an American-style grittiness rarely seen in British films of the period. But what really makes the film a joy to watch nowadays is the cast. As Kim Newman has written of it in Empire Magazine, “how many other movies have an ensemble which includes the original Dr Who (Hartnell), the first James Bond (Sean Connery), the Prisoner (McGoohan), a Man From UNCLE (David McCallum), a Professional (Gordon Jackson), Clouseau’s boss (Herbert Lom), plus Alfie Bass, the excellent Peggy Cummins (of the cult items Gun Crazy and Night of the Demon), the inimitably boozy Wilfrid Lawson, Jill Ireland and Sid James?”

In 2026, with capitalism more cut-throat than ever, a remake of Hell Drivers would be timely. I don’t think, though, setting it in the wilds of Middlesex, West Sussex and Buckinghamshire, where the original was filmed, would work now, so it’d have to have its hard-pressed truck drivers pounding the roads of a less hospitable locale – the Alaskan tundra, say, or somewhere that retains some near-impenetrable tropical rainforest.

And to pay proper homage to the original, you’d definitely need a cast made up of actors who’ve played iconic roles in iconic TV shows or movie series. You could have one of the grittier Bonds (Daniel Craig or Timothy Dalton), one of the grittier Doctors Who (Christopher Eccleston or Peter Capaldi), plus a Sherlock Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch, maybe), a Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), perhaps someone from the Breaking Bad universe (Bryan Cranston, say, or Bob Odenkirk)… The possibilities are endless.

From wikipedia.org

The Margaret Rutherford Miss Marple movies (1961-64)

This is a little different. I’d like to see the four movies made about Agatha Christie’s genteel sleuth of a certain age, Miss Marple, which had the delightful Margaret Rutherford in the leading role – Murder She Said (1961), Murder at the Gallop (1963), Murder Most Foul (1964) and Murder Ahoy! (1964) – rebooted as a TV show. Not just another show about Miss Marple per se – there have been ones with Joan Hickson, Geraldine McEwan and Julia McKenzie – but one set in the universe of the four Rutherford movies.

Thus, its episodes would be set against the tableau of early-1960s England, with Miss Marple depicted as an obstinate, feisty old lady who refuses to know her place and keeps barging into and solving mysteries. There’d be as much as humour as tension and the show would have the films’ supporting characters, like the timid librarian Mr Stringer (Rutherford’s real-life husband Stringer Davis), who reluctantly helps Miss Marple out, and the exasperated copper Inspector Craddock (Charles Tingwell), who begins each instalment telling her to mind her own business but ends it taking orders from her. Meanwhile, Ron Goodwin’s jaunty Miss Marple Theme would burble in the background.

I suspect in a 2026 version Mark Gatiss would make a lovely Mr Stringer, while Daniel Mays would nicely fill the shoes of the long-suffering Inspector Craddock. But who would play Miss Marple – or more precisely, play Margaret Rutherford playing Miss Marple? Perhaps Dawn French, though she’d have to spend a long time in the make-up chair to recreate Rutherford’s famously jowly, hangdog features.

In the original movies, each murder that Rutherford / Marple investigated involved a British institution – a country manor, horse riding, the theatre and the Navy. She’d duly rattle establishment cages by sticking her nose in where it wasn’t welcome. So perhaps each episode of this hypothetical series would have her ruffling the feathers of other British institutions of the time – the Army, the House of Lords, Savile Row, Crufts, the country’s nascent rock ‘n’ roll industry… Miss Marple meets the young Rolling Stones? I’d pay good money to see that.

From wikipedia.org / © 20^th Century Fox

Von Ryan’s Express (1965)

I never had much time for Frank Sinatra, neither as an entertainer nor as a person, but he left an impression on my 10-year-old self the first time I saw the ripping World War II yarn Von Ryan’s Express. It’s the story of an American airman, Ryan (Sinatra), downed in Italy, who joins forces with some Allied prisoners of war, led by Trevor Howard. They attempt an audacious escape into neutral Switzerland by seizing control of a train and steering it up a railway line into the Alps. Much derring-do is involved as German troops and aircraft go all-out to stop them reaching their destination.

It’s great, crowd-pleasing stuff until the ending – spoilers are coming! – which is depicted on the movie poster, painted by the great Frank McCarthy. The train has almost made it to safety. Having fought a rearguard action against the Germans, Sinatra is running after the train and has almost caught up with it. But then…. What happened next put a dampener on things. But it also lodged the film in my mind forever.

With 2009’s Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino showed his love for rip-roaring if cheesily improbable World War II adventures, so perhaps he could helm a remake of Von Ryan’s Express? To stick to the innocent, uncomplicated spirit of the original, though, he’d have to forgo his use of the F-word and N-word, and his fetish for close-ups of ladies’ feet, and his nerdish references to ‘film-study criticism of the work of German director G.W. Pabst’.

© Hammer Film Productions / Seven Arts Productions

Quatermass and the Pit (1967)

Hammer Films’ sci-fi horror film Quatermass and the Pit was based on the 1958 BBC TV serial of the same name. Both film and serial were written by Nigel Kneale. It begins with workers on a London Underground extension project digging up an alien spacecraft full of dead, horned, insect-like creatures that are identified by scientist-hero Professor Bernard Quatermass (Andrew Keir) as inhabitants of the now-lifeless planet Mars. It transpired that millions of years ago, these sneaky Martians arrived on earth and did some evolutionary tinkering on the apes who were the ancestors of modern humanity. This tinkering included implanting in the apes an urge to conduct occasional culls whereby those with pure Martian programming exterminated those who’d developed mutations and lost that programming.

When some TV news crews descend on the scene, a power surge from their camera-cables reactivates the spacecraft and it triggers a new cull. London becomes an apocalyptic hellscape where the human inhabitants who retain their Martian conditioning roam around, zombie-like, and use newly awoken telekinetic powers to kill everyone who’s lost it.

I still find Quatermass and the Pit impressive today, and scary, though inevitably there are special effects that reflect the limitations of Hammer’s budget. I’d relish the prospect of a modern, big-budget retelling of the story.

One thing that makes the film effective, and affecting, is Kneale’s portrayal of the scientists. Unlike usual movie-scientists, they aren’t cold-blooded, delusional, self-serving or plain weird. Instead, Quatermass and his colleagues, Dr Roney (James Donald) and Barbara Judd (Barbara Shelley), are portrayed as decent human beings, working with an eager curiosity, a sense of duty and a sense of humour. Keir and Donald were both Scots, so maybe a modern movie could cast Brian Cox as Quatermass and James McAvoy as Dr Roney. Actually, I think a third Scottish actor, Karen Gillan, would be excellent as Barbara Judd.

To be continued…

© Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

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.