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| "Psychedelic Spacial Dr. Who" by Doomguy1001 |
I don't want to add too much to the glut of celebratory discussion today, and there are people far more qualified to talk about the show than me (such as my friends and colleagues Phil Sandifer, Jack Graham or Andrew Hickey): I've really only ever considered myself a casual fan of Doctor Who: It was part of the larger tapestry of action and science fiction shows I remember growing up with and while I always thought it was fun, it was never something that had a profound effect on my life the way it has on the lives of most of my friends (as you can probably tell given what I said last time I mentioned Doctor Who, over at Vaka Rangi).
But a few years back I went through the Classic Series myself to reacquaint myself with it and developed a newfound appreciation for its history, which is seeped in alchemical mysticism and symbolic magick. I figured the one thing I could do to celebrate the show's 50th birthday is to provide a little primer for people who might like Doctor Who today but who are for whatever reason nervous about checking out the bits of it that came before 2005. Since Doctor Who
is split up into various creative periods (which were usually, but
not always, split up by Doctor), I've divided the list into
different categories organised by both actor who played The Doctor
and major creative personnel. I've tried to pick one or two serials
from each era I think are at once representative of the overall
creative and thematic vibe of the era and also show off the series'
radical and alchemical heritage the strongest.
Section 1:
Season 2 (1964-1965)
Producer: Verity Lambert
Script Editor: David Whitaker
Doctor: William Hartnell
Companions: Ian (William Russel), Barbara (Jacqueline Hill), Vicki
(Maureen O'Brien)
This
season shows the original format running on all cylinders. Lambert
and Whitaker had found a way to make Doctor Who a
show about strange and fantastic things, and it's biggest charm was
that it was impossible to predict where it would go and what it would
do next. The guiding philosophy was “whatever we did last time, do
something completely different this time”. This
was why the original companions were a pair of ordinary
schoolteachers: The point was they were recongisable people caught up
in strange and wonderful situations.
Thanks to Lambert's strong social justice conventions it was also a
show firmly allied with the youth and, thanks to Whitaker, dripping
with mercury.
One thing that's unique to the Hartnell era is the historical story:
Serials where the TARDIS crew would travel back to a period of
Earth's history and either play with the genre tropes or try to
survive, no alien meddling necessary. Whitaker puts a really clever twist on
the historical style here, expressly setting it as a Shakespearean
theatre version of the medieval crusades and having a lot of fun
mashing up the different genres. This was also the first story not to
open on the TARDIS crew, a move Whitaker cleverly uses to code them
as narrative intruders and something often taken for granted today.
The previous story, “The Web Planet”, similarly blended
theatrical stylings with sci-fi concepts and space art set design,
but it's arguably the most noticeable here. This is helped a great
deal by a guest cast explicitly playing their roles like
Shakespearean actors, including future star Julian Glover.
The TARDIS crew stumbles upon a museum that exists outside space and
time, somehow managing to arrive "before they were supposed to", and discover they are destined to become featured exhibits. Obviously, this is a problem, and now The Doctor, Ian, Barbera and Vicki have to find away to change their own future.
There are a lot of clever
twists, some surprisingly good action scenes,
William Hartnell gets to play The Doctor as mysterious, something he
over time got fewer opportunities to do, and Vicki gets to lead a Mod-themed
fascism-toppling armed
revolution in space. It's a brilliantly mental concept that never runs out of steam and is only partially let down by poor acting on the part of the guest cast.
Section 2
Season 4 (1966-1967)
Producer: Innes Lloyd
Script Editor: Gerry Davis, Peter Bryant
Doctor: William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton
Companions: Polly (Anneke Willis), Ben (Michael Craze), Jamie (Frazer
Hines), Victoria (Deborah Watling)
This
was a major season of chaotic transition with Innes Lloyd just taking
over from his predecessor John Wiles and Gerry Davis serving a brief
term as script editor before being replaced by Peter Bryant. There
were a good three companion changes and, of course, the landmark
switch from William Hartnell to Patrick Troughton. This change is
directly connected to Hartnell's last serial “The Tenth Planet”,
where the Cybermen are introduced as “star monks”: the horrific,
enlightened dark future of humanity. Whitaker, who is brought back to
oversee the transition, uses the regeneration to explore Kenneth
Grant's conception of enlightenment and how it might affect The
Doctor specifically. Behind the scenes, the switch happened because
Hartnell's health was declining to the point it was beginning to
affect his acting, but probably also because the production team
wanted him gone. Lloyd wanted to turn Doctor Who
into an action serial to compete with Batman
and needed a younger, more charismatic lead to
do that. But both Whitaker
and New Doctor Patrick Troughton were too smart to quite give him
that.
Patrick Troughton's first story is quite simply one of the series
finest moments. He spends the majority of the serial playing The
Doctor very mysterious, unreadable, unpredictable and even scary.
It's not what his Doctor would eventually become famous for, but it
is a chillingly good bit of acting and fits the story perfectly, not
to mention becomes more than a little influential on the series'
future. A central tension is whether or not this strange man really
is The Doctor (remember the show had never done a story like this
before) and the key to resolving this is the Daleks. Although they
had been massively popular in the Hartnell era, this is the story
where they explicitly become The Doctor's alchemical mirror for they,
and only they, know who The Doctor really is.
Season 6 (1968-1969)
Producer: Peter Bryant
Script Editor: Derrick Sherwin, Terrance Dicks
Doctor: Patrick Troughton
Companions: Jamie (Frazer Hines), Zoe (Wendy Padbury)
Troughton's
tenure on the show, through no fault of his own (he
was nothing short of a genius),
became something of a wasted
opportunity. Most of the alchemical potential he and David Whitaker
tried to bring back to the show was squandered as Innes Lloyd, Peter
Bryant and Derrick Sherwin remained focused on targeting the action
demographics, rendering an entire season and a half of Doctor
Who a series of repetitive,
identical base-under-siege stories that
came dangerously close to tripping into outright xenophobia (and
arguably actually crossing the line once or twice. Even so, buried
within are still a handful of classics). Therefore Troughton's final
year became intensely self-critical as
the show geared up for yet another major reboot. This was
helped greatly by newcomers Terrance Dicks, Malcolm Hulke and
especially Robert Holmes, who understood the show's true roots and
would go on to be the major architects of the rest of the Classic
series.
Practically
a godsend as the show faltered, this is an absolute triumph. Although
the season finale “The War Games” gets a lot of credit for
introducing the Time Lords (we had no clues as to The Doctor's
background and history
before now), this is the real origin story for The Doctor. This one's
all about the nature of fiction and the
creative process, imagining
a realm outside the universe where stories and ideas can become real.
More
importantly, “The Mind
Robber” explains why Doctor
Who is special and what it
offers for storytelling that few other shows can. Watch
out in particular for the recurring motif of television and things
being monitored, and Patrick Troughton's tendency to peer out of TV
screens. It's not penned by
David Whitaker, one of the rare classics from this era that isn't,
but it's firmly within the intellectual tradition he worked in.
Section 3
Season 7 (1970)
Producer: Barry Letts
Script Editor: Terrance Dicks
Doctor: Jon Pertwee
Companions: Brigadier General Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart
(Nicholas Courtney), Sergeant Benton (John Levene), Dr. Liz Shaw
(Caroline John)
This
third (or really fifth, actually) version of Doctor
Who
is a highly unusual one. For Season 7, it was decided that the show
would get a bold re-tooling; As
punishment for interfering with the laws of time, the Time Lords
ground The Doctor on Earth and cause
him to lose the secret to the TARDIS and
be unable to travel in
time and space.
Partially, this was a reaction against the Lloyd/Bryant/Sherwin era's
losing touch with the concerns of regular people in its attempt to be
an exciting monster rumble action series and its uncomfortable
tendency to slip into outright xenophobia. Mostly though, to be
honest, this was due to costs becoming prohibitive and a need to do
away with alien
planets. This new Doctor
Who
would still try to be an action series, but a more socially conscious
one and draw its inspirations from tense spy-fi thrillers like The
Avengers,
The Quatermass
Experiment
and The Manchurian
Candidate.
A popular character from the latter Troughton era, Brigadier
General Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, was
brought back as a regular and The Doctor was sent to work for the
United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, a paramilitary organisation
tasked with investigating the unknown. Not everyone was on board with
this new direction, however, including, interestingly, most of the
creative team.
Doctor
Who
does “Space Oddity”, David Whitaker's sadly final
contribution to the show (though helped via an uncredited rewrite by
Pertwee-era architect Malcolm Hulke) is at once the story in the
Letts/Dicks/Pertwee era that most readily embraces the trappings of
spy-fi
thrillers, but at the same time most clearly problematizes them as a
blueprint for Doctor
Who.
Whitaker is of course brilliant at using The Doctor to deform the
narrative and had previously done a genius James Bond send-up in the
Troughton era with “The Enemy of the World”. It's
also really the second and last time Doctor
Who
addressed 1960s space fever, becoming oddly prescient in its
scepticism that the space race would ever lead to anything.
Aside from that, it's an incredibly gripping little thriller with a
great,
fitting twist. This is also pretty much exactly what I thought Doctor Who was before I learned more about it, so this era, and this story in particular, remains a personal favourite of mine.
Season 10 (1972-1973)
Producer: Barry Letts
Script Editor: Terrance Dicks
Doctor:
Jon Pertwee (sort
of)
Companions:
Jo
Grant (Katy Manning), Brigadier
General Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart (Nicholas Courtney),
Sergeant Benton (John Levene), Captain
Mike Yates (Richard Franklin)
As
the Pertwee era went on, eventually the creative team on the whole
could no longer support the more militaristic, action-oriented
aspects of the show, feeling it was tipping Doctor
Who
dangerously close to empire-glorifying
Tory
politics
and hegemony. This was not helped by Jon Pertwee, who unabashedly
played The Doctor as a virile leading man (which
neither William Hartnell nor Patrick Troughton had
ever done)
and an upper-class
aesthete to boot,
seemingly completely missing the mercurial, anarchic
core of the character introduced in the show's earliest years. The
solution, dreamed up over the course of Seasons 8 and 9 by savvy
writers like Robert Holmes, Bob
Baker
and Malcolm Hulke, directors like David Maloney and cast members like
Nicholas Courtney and Katy Manning, was to turn to things like Monty
Python and Glam Rock visual logic to turn Doctor
Who
into a giddy roller coaster of campy Glam performativity. Thus The
Doctor became a Drag leading man (probably completely unbeknownst to
Pertwee) and the mercury shifted other places (pay close attention to
Katy Manning's Jo Grant in particular here) and
Season
10 sees this approach at it's apex. The 10th Anniversary year also
saw the first multi-Doctor team up as William Hartnell and Patrick
Troughton returned in the reunion special “The Three Doctors”,
which also restored The Doctor's ability to use the TARDIS.
Robert
Holmes, in one of his finest scripts, delivers both the peak of the
Glam version of Doctor
Who
and strong
evidence it can't last forever and a new model is needed. “Carnival
of Monsters” is a delight, running through Holmes' favourite
subjects like the marginalization
of the working classes, the banal evils of bureaucracy and a toothy
critique of those who think Doctor
Who
is all about monsters and scary things. Notice also the metaphorical
television motifs: A return to a theme that Troughton in particular
reveled in and a reminder that The Doctor is in some sense connected
to TV. Here,
Holmes uses it as an exploration of spectacle, and questions whether
or not this is irreducible from television and if it's truly an
admirable goal in and of itself.
Section 4
Season
13 (1975-1976)
Producer: Phillip Hinchcliffe
Script Editor: Robert Holmes
Doctor: Tom Baker
Companion: Sarah Jane Smith (Lis Sladen)
The
Letts/Dicks/Pertwee era had been the most popular incarnation of
Doctor Who
thus far, cementing the show as a Saturday teatime staple. However,
that success was nothing compared to Phillip Hinchcliffe and Robert
Holmes' time
running
the programme. Backpedaling hard away from the Pertwee era's
restrictive format and all-too-often facile politics, Hinchcliffe and
Holmes catapulted Doctor
Who
back into the realm of ideas by pitting The Doctor against the
Lovecraftian horrors that lurk in our collective consciousness by
crashing him into a series of nightmare-scapes inspired by Hammer
Horror. The Hinchcliffe era got instant marquee value by casting the
unbelievably charming and charismatic theatre actor Tom Baker as
The Doctor and winning over a sceptical audience almost immediately.
Baker would go on to become the longest serving actor ever to play
The Doctor on television to this day (a record seven consecutive years) and become
so iconic he would remain synonymous with Doctor
Who
until David Tennant finally surpassed him as most beloved Doctor in
2006-7.
Although it didn't always completely work, the Hinchcliffe era was
incredibly bold, confidant and forward-thinking and remains the most
popular of the Classic Series eras.
Sadly,
it was not to last: Phillip
Hinchcliffe's steadfast refusal to shy away from the more overtly
adult horror aspects of the genre he was playing with a roused the
ire of media watchdog, moral guardian and professional
buzzkill
Mary Whitehouse, who claimed Hinchliffe's version of Doctor
Who
was "poisoning the youth", dubbing it “teatime brutality for tots”.
Rather than stand up for its staff and
ideals,
the BBC, in one of its more reprehensible moves, turned Hinchcliffe
into a sacrificial lamb and fired him after
three years
to appease Whitehouse.
“The Brain of Morbius”***
An
incredibly singular retelling of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein,
drawing heavy inspiration from the Hammer series of film adaptations
beginning with 1957's The
Curse of Frankenstein.
Robert
Holmes simply packs this script full of tantalizing concepts and
symbols as a mad scientist tries to revive the greatest war criminal
in the universe, we are exposed to the Time Lords' dark subconscious
and The Doctor is forced to negotiate with a monastic order of
priestesses who guard the secret to eternal life. “Morbius” also
boasts some really clever usage of BBC production techniques and an
absolutely phenomenal cast that brings the script to life, so to
speak. It's
Holmes' deliberate attempt to place Doctor
Who
into a tradition of alchemical and mythical British literature and,
just for good measure,
he
throws us a whopping great retcon that challenges everything we
thought we knew about Doctor
Who
up 'till now.
Season
17 (1979-1980)
Producer: Graham Williams
Script Editor: Douglas Adams
Doctor: Tom Baker (sort of)
Companions:
Romanadvoratrelundar,
A.K.A. “Romana” (Lalla Ward), K-9 (David Brierley)
After
the firing of Phillip Hinchcliffe, incoming
producer Graham Williams was told to tone down the horror and focus
on comedy, while at the same time being told Doctor
Who
was too comedic (neither the first nor the last time a producer would
be given unworkably contradictory marching orders). It took Williams
several years, but with his third script editor, Douglas Adams, he
finally found a model that
worked: Adams
had submitted several scripts to Phillip Hinchcliffe and Robert
Holmes in Season 12, but was told that his scripts, while very good,
did not mesh with the classic horror metafiction themes
they were interested in exploring. These rejected scripts would
eventually
become, with some revisions and rewrites, The
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in
1978.
Adams finally got his chance to write for Doctor
Who
under Graham Williams and used much the same approach to it that he
had on Hitchhiker's.
Unfortunately, given the chaos the production team was in, this meant
Adams' vision didn't always come through as strongly as he, and we,
would have liked, although it works best in this season. Another
problem Williams and Adams had was Tom Baker: Baker had something of an
ego and had
a tendency
to steal scenes and walk all over his co-stars, and by
this point was firmly convinced the show revolved around him (irritatingly, he wasn't exactly wrong either).
This
wasn't the first time the actors and the producers were at odds (and
sadly won't be the last), but it is the most explosive and several
times threatened to outright destroy
the show.
Thankfully,
Adams, along with Robert Holmes, came up with a solution: Returning
to and updating a strategy Holmes had used last time a single actor
dominated the show, the character of Romanadvoratrelundar, or Romana
for short was created as the show's first Time Lord co-star. By
introducing her in “The Ribos Operation”, a story consciously
built around themes of “as above, so below” duplication and
redundancy and eventually casting the abjectly brilliant Lalla Ward
once Romana's original actress Mary Tamm walked off the set,
Williams, Adams and Holmes were able to subtly restore the show's mercurial balance. Furthermore, Baker and Ward turned into one of Doctor Who's greatest double acts, and Season 17 saw the show displaying possibly the most self-aware and forward-thinking attitude towards its structure and ethos in its history.
Rightly
regarded as a high-water mark of the Classic Series, one's opinions
on the larger Graham Williams era notwithstanding, “City of Death”
is a sublime romp that cleverly disguises just how intelligent it's
actually being. In many ways it's the closest the Classic Series gets
to the pacing of the New Series as it flips back and forth between
three different time periods, involves cracks in time and features a
great deal of running to and from places. The premise is wonderfully insane, involving a massive conspiracy hatched by an extraterrestrial
war hero to paint six identical Mona Lisas so he can travel back to
the dawn of life on Earth and undo his species' extinction. It's
little wonder a basic writing prompt for Doctor
Who
after this is “do what 'City of Death' did”. The cast is once
again brilliant, highlights being watching Tom Baker and Julian
Glover (back from “The Crusade”!) screaming at each other and
Lalla Ward being delightfully subversive in
between bouts of snarking at Tom Chadbon's Detective Inspector
Duggan.
Amidst all this fun, though is some serious commentary on the nature of
mechanization and artistic expression. Adams has an agenda here, and makes a
fundamental claim to what Doctor
Who
should be and should stand for in a time it seemed like few were
willing to.
Section 5
Season
21 (1984)
Producer: John Nathan-Turner
Script Editor: Eric Saward
Doctor: Peter Davison
Companions:
Tegan (Janet Fielding), Vislor
Turlough
(Mark
Strickson)
Graham
Williams and Douglas Adams abandoned Doctor
Who
at the end of Season 17, finally fed up with the impossible
conditions they were being asked to work under. With the production
staff all but completely gone, the only one willing to take the top
seat was former production assistant John Nathan-Turner. Undeniably
the show's most controversial producer, Nathan-Turner introduced a series of
sweeping aesthetic and production changes in an attempt to modernize
the show. Although his tenure lasted a frankly unprecedented decade
and he oversaw no fewer than four Doctors, three script editors and
near
a dozen companions, Nathan-Turner was far less of a creative
influence than his predecessors had been-He was a CEO and an ad man,
not a showrunner. More than any other producer, Nathan-Turner was
dependent on his script editor to provide a concrete vision for
Doctor Who.
Sadly, for half of that decade he was paired with Eric Saward, a
completely untrained and untested rookie whose biggest credentials
were being a hardcore Doctor
Who
fan. The result can be called nothing short of a complete disaster:
Nathan-Turner and Saward accentuated each others faults and together
made a series of crushingly poor decisions that culminated in driving
almost their entire audience away in 1984-1986 and getting Doctor
Who
canceled in every way except officially. Ironic,
as Nathan-Turner had helped save it just a few years earlier.
Despite that, there are still quite a few good ideas here; they just
came far more intermittently than in the past and require a lot of
rehabilitation and patience.
“Frontios”
Penned
by one-time script editor and veteran science fiction writer
Christopher Bidmead, this is one of the Sward era's rare gems.
Bidmead had previously sent off the Tom Baker era with “Warrior's
Gate”, “The Keeper of Traken” and “Logopolis”: A masterful trilogy of
stories in Season 18 that dealt heavily with the concept of social
entropy and decay that have been aptly described as "science poetry". Bidmead returns to this theme with “Frontios”, imagining
a place both at the edge of the universe and the end of history
itself; a place where even the TARDIS is not meant to go. Putrefication
and decay are not only major themes, but major elements of the set
design and visual logic. Peter Davison, an incredibly talented
veteran actor who, like Patrick Troughton was insultingly wasted on
this part, gets one of his rare opportunities to play The Doctor the
way he wanted (instead
of the ineffectual, emotionally stunted soap opera lead he was often
written as)
and is a delight to watch here.
Section 6
Season 26 (1989)
Producer: John Nathan-Turner
Script Editor: Andrew Cartmel
Doctor: Sylvester McCoy
Companion:
Ace (Sophie
Aldred)
The
fact Doctor Who
managed to survive an extra three years after the Saward era is at
once something of a miracle and also a technicality. The wasted
potential of Peter Davison's tenure and the catastrophic train wreck
of his
successor
Colin Baker's**** meant that the vast majority of the show's intended
audience had long since abandoned it and Doctor
Who
was now seen as an embarrassing relic by the BBC. As a result of
demands placed on him by the BBC as well as his own desperate attempt
at both salvaging the series and being able to retire comfortably,
Nathan-Turner purged the entire Doctor
Who
production staff in
1987
and took a chance on a bunch of brash young upstarts led by new
script editor Andrew Cartmel: A person who, when asked what he
thought the purpose of Doctor
Who
was, gave the absolutely delightful answer “to bring down the
government”.
Cartmel and his team were flagrantly leftist and
radical, a sharp change from Nathan-Turner's attempts during the
Saward era to make Doctor
Who
safe and apolitical. In
addition, the Cartmel era saw an attempt to restore a sense of
mystery to the character of The Doctor, and, under Sylvester McCoy he
became increasingly dark, unpredictable and manipulative. This era
also saw magic and the power of myths and symbols examined
with
the most complexity and power they'd ever been. What
this all
meant though
was the show finally had something to prove again, and with an
absolutely killer main cast comprising of Sylvester McCoy, Bonnie
Langford and Sophie Aldred, Doctor
Who
became, in my opinion at least, the most intelligent, tight and
exciting it had ever been. A shame nobody watched it: The Cartmel/McCoy era
ended after only three years when the Classic Series was finally
officially canceled in 1989.
“Ghost Light”*****
This
is, in my view, the series' crowning triumph. “Ghost Light” is a
strange, intriguing work that dives headfirst into the world of
dreams and symbols. It's not made to be passively watched; it's meant
to be carefully examined and engaged with. One of the serial's core
themes seems to be studying oppositions, and it gets a lot of mileage
displaying the contrast between things like light and dark and
masculine and feminine and then blurring the boundaries and
reappropriating the logic they work by. Another major theme is
Darwinian evolution, or at least the pop perception of it and the
effect it had on society's perception of nature. This is a fantastic
story for both The Doctor, who staunchly rejects the trappings of
Victoriana even as he's a product of it (he is, at heart, a Victorian
inventor) and Ace, the series' first canonically bisexual lead. Ace
is undeniably the main character here (as she is throughout the last
two years of the Cartmel era) and, in yet another of “Ghost
Light”'s genius twists, the story eventually becomes about her
dealing with her personal demons and finding ways to channel and
stoke her rebellious, anarchic fire.
*Like a great many TV episodes from this period, much of "The Crusade" is missing, dating as it does from a period of time where television was seen as disposable entertainment and
therefore the concept of archiving not even being a thing anyone
would have thought of. Thankfully, the soundtracks for all the
serials still exist, as do more than a few on-set photos and
screenshots, so it's possible to watch animated reconstructions of
these missing stories. If you're uncomfortable watching a reconstruction, swap out this serial for either "The Web Planet" or "The Rescue" also from this season, both of which exist in their complete forms.
**"Power of the Daleks", despite being possibly the most important story in the show's history, is also missing. Again, if sitting down with a reconstruction is a problem for you, check out "The Krotons" from Season 6 instead. It's not as good, but still a great romp that bucks the more distasteful trends of the Lloyd/Bryant/Sherwin/Troughton era. Alternatively, you could go with the newly discovered "The Enemy of the World" from Season 5, a terrific Whitaker outing that gleefully plays around with tossing The Doctor and company into a James Bond movie and lets Troughton show off his formidable acting chops.
***Want more Tom Baker? I almost included "The Face of Evil" from Season 14 as it's an underrated highlight of the late Hinchcliffe/Holmes era and introduces Leela, played by Louise Jameson, who is one of my favourite companions (and apparently Matt Groening's too, as he named a character after her). It's the Baker/Jameson duo that I most associate with this era of the show, and their first outing is also arguably their best: It's a tight little story featuring a great central time travel mystery with a lot of fun twists and turns, some wonderfully witty dialog, outstanding acting all around and fantastic chemistry between the two leads. To me, this is quintessential, iconic 1970s Doctor Who the way I remember it and can't recommend it highly enough.
****Why no Colin Baker? Frankly, I suggest newcomers avoid his tenure entirely. I simply can't find a single thing to recommend in it unless you're a serious fan and willing to forgive quite a lot. If you really want an example of what mid-80s Doctor Who might have looked like had it worked, I suggest the Big Finish audio plays "...ish", "Jubilee", "Doctor Who and the Pirates" or "Peri and the Piscan Paradox".
*****While "Ghost Light" remains the best in my opinion, pretty much everything in the Sylvester McCoy era is a triumph, and I'd also draw your attention to his first season, which operated slightly differently than the Ace stories of his latter two years (though no less effectively, I hasten to add). Of those I very much also recommend "Paradise Towers", which does J.G. Ballard as a children's pantomime or "Delta and the Bannermen", which concerns an interstellar war between carnivorous flagmen and insect women set against the backdrop of the 1950s as seen through a British holiday camp. It's also named after Echo and the Bunnymen, so really, where can you go wrong?
