"The Fry Chronicles" by Stephen Fry

Looking back at Fry’s first autobiographical delight I remember that I know it almost off by heart without actually having read it. The answer is not some weird mumbo jumbo in which people like Stephen Fry and I don’t believe (see how I got myself nuzzled up next to him in a convoluted sentence?) but rather the audio tapes that helped get me off to sleep every night for a couple of years. So, if I’m honest, I know the first half of each tape rather better than the second but the point still stands. I have a copy – a SIGNED~! copy – of Moab but I’ve not actually used it for the purpose it was intended. Fast forwarding about a century, his second book comes out and this time I’ve read it without having actually bought the book in any meaningful physical sense. Thanks to Audible I have the downloaded, unabridged reading (a treat I’m saving for a fifteen hour period of intense glumness and a full charged iThing) and thanks to Amazon I have the text on my Kindle. None of which is at all relevant to what is in the book but it gives a slight clue as to how I’m going to view this particular book. Someone who routinely buys two versions of his texts is – essentially – the sort of demographic this book will appeal to.

If the first book was a tragedy – ending as it does with Fry freshly released from prison after a long spiral into deception, theft and self-destruction – then this is what happens after the wayward child learns his lesson and is redeemed. We start with Fry arriving in Cambridge for three blissful years of acting, writing, fraternising, fornicating, punting, organising, drinking, smoking and meeting future Oscar winners by the tonne. If you don’t like Stephen Fry – and such people do occasionally exist despite the most thorough genetic vetting – you’ll hate this. You’ll see it as a smug, middle class upstart having a whale of a time (at the tax payer’s expense) and coasting through the bare minimum of academic chores as though they were a slight interruption to his day. Which, in essence, they were. In three years he barely did any of the set work. He admits to this because instead he learned a thousand times more than he would in the lecture theatres. Three years of performing, writing, reading and spending late nights with fellow thesps gives one a better understanding of English lit than some set texts and a marking system which grades you according to whether your opinions are "correct" or not.

He makes basically that same point – rather better than me I fear – in one of his tangents. Another tangent that stands out is his descriptions of the times he’s given up smoking. Fry being one of the luckiest men in the universe was able to quit – twice and there’s a story behind that apparent contradiction – using pills alone. No effort, no torment – just a daily dose and he gradually stopped with the puffing. It’s another example of something that will irritate the Fry-o-phobe because, like so much else in his life, he excelled through no apparent effort. He became a millionaire almost as soon as he left Cambridge thanks to writing the book of the revived musical "Me and My Girl". Footlights got him an agent, his agent knew a guy who knew a guy and the rest is zeros at the end of a cheque.

Not everything was that successful of course. His early television shows – Alfresco for Granada and the Crystal Cube for the BBC – went without comment. They weren’t slated like Morecambe and Wise’s debut, Running Wild, of which a witty reviewer once (and it turned out wrongly) said "Television is the box in which they buried Morecambe and wise" but they didn’t contribute anything to the impending Fry juggernaut of success. He got the job on Saturday Live – as the distinctly tweedy (his word) outsiders in the whole alternative comedy revolution that was going on at the time – and then to Blackadder the Second which was being rehearsed just as the book ends. Including an anecdote about Miriam Margolyes that defies explanation. So here it is verbatim.

"How do you do? I’m Mir..." she stopped and plucked at her tongue with her thumb and forefinger. "Miriam Margolyes. Sorry about that, I was licking my girlfriend out last night and I’ve still got some cunt hairs in my mouth"

It’s a happy book and I enjoyed it enormously. I fear his next one – and who knows when that will be since it’s nearly twice as long since his first volume as the second volume covers which means there is more of his life unrecorded now than there was in the aftermath of Moab – won’t be quite so happy. Yes, it will cover all the good stuff like a Bit of Fry and Laurie and Jeeves & Wooster (two of the ten best programmes ever made and I’ll fight anyone that disagrees) but it will also include the breakdown, the escape to Belgium and everything that followed. So enjoy the blandly named Fry Chronicles – (a) because it is very enjoyable but also (b) because it is a blissful English calm before a particularly violent storm.

"Confessions of a Conjuror" by Derren Brown

I liked Derren Brown’s last book – so much so that I bought it twice because I wanted to read it a second time and couldn’t find my first copy. It was a mix of magical history, performance secrets, spiritual debunking and a spot of practical self-help that might’ve seemed disjointed if it hadn’t all been good stuff and all so utterly part of the Derren Brown experience. His new book looks like an attempt to do something similar but achieves something else entirely.

The framing device is Derren’s past life as a restaurant magician. He would spend his evenings going from table to table doing tricks for the eating guests. The book opens with the nerves he’d suffer when he emerged from his dressing room (better known as the staff toilets – somewhere he admits he felt preposterous as he set up the wires, gizmos and secret pockets of his magic clothes eight times a night) and moves on to him selecting a suitable table to entertain and from there to the card trick that wowed two of the guests and irritated another so much that he faked a phone call and went outside to let his ego calm down. This lengthy and drawn out description of a simple (as in insanely complicated) card trick contains much of what is good about the book. He doesn’t tell us how he did it but he shows us some of the techniques he used to make the trick work. Magic is as much about psychology and misdirection as it is about secret cuts and cards that have had a fraction of a millimetre shaved off them to make them instantly recognisable to trained fingers.

Each facet of the trick sends Derren off on a tangent and here is where the book is meant to come alive. These tangents are mainly autobiographical (though some are historical) and don’t manage to be as charming as he appears to want us to find them. Except I don’t really believe Derren Brown could misfire like this. I came away from this book firmly believing that what he actually set out to achieve was to make us realise that Derren Brown is completely and utterly human. He is as flawed, foolish and disgusting as any other human being. He can be stupid, he can be clumsy, he can be forgetful, he can be anxious and he can be wrong. He goes into a lot of detail about visiting the toilet (chiefly what he reads in there but sticks around to tell us how long and how often as well), his fondness for removing bits of skin, mucus and other physical detritus and many other habits and foibles that most of us would try to pretend we don’t have.

I wouldn’t mind this self-debasement if any of it was enjoyable to read. But it isn’t – it’s stories about not being able to find a pen or having a list of books he likes to read while "using the bathroom" (my Sooty Show euphemism - he was rather more direct). Maybe it’s all part of a bigger trick that is supposed to become clear at the end. We feel bored by his indulgent tales about how much he likes picking his nose and while our brains turn off slightly he nips in and reprograms them so now we can all mend tyres or something. But I doubt it. I’m sticking with the theory that he’s dragging himself down to earth in the most base ways possible so everyone will stop treating him like he’s some sort of demonic angel with super powers and an evil beard.

Let’s look at an example – ear plugs. He bangs on for ages about ear plugs. Making sure to tell us that he uses them for too long so they get soft from the waxy fluids secreted by his ears during the night. He likes one particular brand of ear plugs, he spends time checking packets of them in Boots to make sure they’re exactly right, he’s even started using them when not attempting to sleep in noisy old London. And? Nope – that’s it. He likes one particular type of ear plugs, he is slack when it comes to replacing them and his ears produce minute quantities of fluid. Many, many pages are wasted on ear plug related non-stories.

One bit that threatened to get interesting was his life of teenage crime. Young Derren was a bit of a shoplifter in his youth. It started out with little bits and bobs and had reached CDs and electrical items when a near-miss in Harrods set him on the straight and narrow. From his brief descriptions of the methods he used to snaffle his booty it sounded as if his burgeoning interest in magic was of great help when it came to misdirecting the shop keepers and secreting the pilfered items using slight of hand. But he didn’t develop this point. He stole, he stole more, he nearly got caught, he stopped. Again, what might’ve been a good story became little more than a self-incriminating chapter that was only there to point out that he used to be a rather grotty little thief.

I like Derren Brown and have never succumbed to the cynicism he seems to attract in some quarters. He’s "just" doing this or he’s "obviously" doing that they decry. It’s just trickery made to look like something more impressive, they scoff. His lottery balls illusion brought out the worst in some of his detractors because it gave them chance to belittle everything because they "knew" how it was done and it was "only" a trick. Of course it was - just as Elvis "only" moved air across his throat – but done so well it was entertaining. He’s an incredibly talented showman and there are few more genuinely impressive people in any branch of show business. He should be writing books that are just as impressive as his TV shows. He’s a very good writer and has a way with words that is almost (but not quite) on a par with Sir Stephen Fry himself. All of which makes me so disappointed that Derren chose to waste weeks of his life on such a terrible book. I really don’t want to know the boring details of Derren’s all too human existence. I want him to entertain me, to amaze me, to improve me and to impress me. Not to make me imagine him on the toilet, reading a well-thumbed book of swear words, worrying about his worn out ear plugs, wondering where his pen is and deciding if enough time has elapsed since he last stuck a finger up his nose for a crusty mucus layer to have formed.

"The War Games" by Malcolm Hulke

I’ve read the War Games several times over the years but this is the first time since I’ve become so familiar with the serial itself. Which actually means I’ve not read it for at least 17 years and that fact depresses me slightly. I chose the War Games as the first book I’d read in its entirety on my Kindle because I wanted something familiar, something cosy, something jolly but also something that had made me curious ever since I saw the 10 part original – just how did they compress 10 episodes of television into a novel that was no longer than your average 4 parter?

Having read it I’m still not entirely sure. There are bits that are removed entirely – mainly cliffhangers and the hoops they had to jump through to get to those cliffhanging moments – but it doesn’t feel abridged. It doesn’t feel like a novelisation of episodes 1 and 2, then 9 and 10 with lines to cover the main points of episodes 3 to 8. Instead it tells the story at a pretty rapid pace. Where things need to be slowed down to make sure the audience realises what’s going on, it slows down. But where it is action and gun fire and driving through war zones it rushes along to get from immediate point A to required point B.

The story of the War Games is of course excellent. For a story born of turmoil and – in the opinion of the writer – stretched well beyond its natural form (an opinion I strongly disagree with) it is a masterpiece. Could it have been done in a 4 or 6 episode format? Of course it could. But I don’t think the 10 part format hurts it at all. They set up the intrigue early on, show us the scale of the problem, unfold both the answers the Doctor seeks and the short term solution to the problem, put the plan into operation and you have your grand finale. It’s a story that keeps adding new stuff every chapter and that stops it ever becoming boring or repetitive.

The novel doesn’t have much time for fleshing things out. It gives names to a few minor characters that don’t have names on screen and takes a few lines to establish the Romans as more than just men who walk up a hill with a pole but it clearly sees its main job as translating what’s on screen into words. It shuffles a few bits and pieces around – the revelation of the Time Lords is no longer uttered by the scientist for example – and makes Carstairs’ and Jennifer’s reason for believing the Doctor’s tale of futuristic technology more credible but on the whole it is faithful.

One thing I’ll always remember the book for is the word sidrat which appears dozens of times and is only ever mentioned once or twice on screen. And pronounced differently. I’d always thought of it as sid-rat but then they had to spoil it by saying side-rat.

It’s a fun little book and one which kept the e-pages turning at a satisfying rate. It doesn’t seek to make the original story sound bigger and better than it really was. I don’t remember having that Target curse of finally seeing a story after reading the novel and being disappointed at how pokey and small it looked. Hulke took on a huge task to cut the War Games down to 140 pages and had no time to waste on embellishments. He produces a fast, faithful and highly enjoyable story which never feels like War Games Lite. So now I know how a 10 part story can be shrunk to the size of a 4 part story – Malcolm Hulke was just a really good writer.

"So Long and Thanks for All the Fish" by Douglas Adams

Ah ha. So THIS is where the H2G2 series falls so unutterably off a cliff. Not, as had previously been thought, "Life, the Universe and Everything". While that book came as a pleasant surprise, this one is everything I feared it would be. This one is dull. This one is so completely not a Hitch Hiker’s novel that I see now why Douglas Adams decided never to write one again. He was done with the idea and the result was an Earth-based love story with little bits of comic sci fi bolted on to please the hardcores. The irony of course is that this book is about Fenchurch and by the time "Mostly Harmless" came along, Adams realised he couldn’t do anything with her and had her vanish in a puff of logic during a hyperspacial crossing.

It’s not that I’ve got anything against Fenchurch. In some ways I really fancy her because she’s brooding and a bit weird. Her and Arthur are clearly meant to be together and the universe bends over backwards to ensure they keep meeting often enough for Englishness to be put to one side and sex to begin. Fenchurch is, of course, the girl from the café in the introduction to Hitch Hiker’s who realised what the meaning of life was seconds before the Vogons destroyed the planet. Oh yes – the Vogons destroying the planet. That didn’t really happen. There is an explanation that involves dolphins but in all the times I’ve read this book I’ve never actually taken it in. I’ve just read it now on Wikipedia. That’s the sort of book this is – by the time you get to the important bit, the bit that actually matters, you’re too bogged down in how little this book is trying to be interesting that it passes you by. I just assumed that the trip to California to see Wonko the Sane was just more pointless wandering round and meeting people who are a bit kerazy but who purport to know more than they’re letting on about Life, the Universe et Cetera.

Meanwhile, Ford Prefect has occasional interludes where he dicks about. There is absolutely no purpose behind these interludes except to introduce some sci fi into this sci fi novel. That said, the bit where he turns up at Arthur’s house is the best bit of the book. Which isn’t saying much.

Having had their little courtship and confessed to each other what their big secrets are – Fenchurch’s revelation about life (now forgotten) and Arthur’s interstellar travels (now concluded) – they sneak aboard a space ship that has just landed in London and made a botched attempt at first contact (this should’ve been funny but really wasn’t) they go in search of God’s Final Message as introduced in a clumsy post-script to "Life..." This turns out to be the very revelation Fenchurch had in Rickmansworth and is a rather disappointing "We apologise for the inconvenience".

Adams reportedly found this a very hard book to write and it shows. It’s basically a sweet romance for Arthur Dent that would’ve worked really well as one of those inconsequential mid-season episodes in a long running TV series (think "Amy’s Choice" or "Love and Monsters") but as a standalone book is too thin and unsatisfying. He tries to have two stories running together and dove-tailing at the end but one of them turns out not to be a story as much as a series of unfunny sketches and so it doesn’t really work. Without the customary Douglas Adams energy and swipes at contemporary society (he’s even decided that he now likes computers and they’re not actually the bastards he always said they were) we’re left with a feel-good tale about Arthur Dent actually getting to be happy which he keeps trying, rather half-heartedly, to turn into H2G2 IV. As a "whatever happened to Arthur Dent?" type story it would be pretty good. But for what it is supposed to be, it isn’t.

"Mostly Harmless" by Douglas Adams

Now here’s a strange little book. I first remember starting it while waiting on a runway for an absolute eternity (but in business class as a result of my one and only upgrade) and never finishing it. Then I tried to read it again and don’t remember finishing it. And so on until I listened to the Radio 4 adaptation on CD and... never finished it. There may not be a book I’ve failed to finish as often as Mostly Harmless. And this time was a pretty close thing.

About two hours into the audio book – still read by the blessed Douglas – I was very close to tapping out. It was a terrible book. Far too much about Tricia McMillan – a parallel version of Trillian who never went into space with Zaphod and instead stayed behind on an Earth that wasn’t destroyed by Vogons and became a TV presenter – and not enough that felt like anything worth reading. There was a bit of Ford Prefect running round the Guide offices and discovering they’ve been taken over and that the good times are over, and a bit of Arthur Dent having a miserable time once Fenchurch disappeared during a hyperspace jump. The key thing in all of this was that they were three depressing strands running through three lives and none of it felt in the least bit important. Or indeed felt like it was going anywhere at all.

Then it suddenly perks up considerably. Arthur Dent finding happiness as the Sandwich Maker on a backwards little planet that just gets on with its business and doesn’t bother anyone is nice. It’s peppered with the ever changing wisdom of Old Thrashbarg – the local priest-cum-scribe who interprets the wisdom of Bob. Into this life comes Random – Arthur’s daughter via Trillian after he sold sperm to pay for an upgrade, she bought the only human sperm in the bank and hey presto, one sulky teenage daughter. I can see now why Adams decided to get rid of Fenchurch – four female characters (including Trillian and Tricia) who don’t have much in the way of entertaining personalities and whose sexual relationships with Arthur and Ford are so clearly and ineffably defined that there is no dramatic possibilities what so ever would be too many. Random wants to belong somewhere and – unfortunately – doesn’t want it to be Arthur’s quiet little backwards planet.

Everything chugs along – Adams takes pops at religion and astrology, pays tribute to Elvis Presley, subtly (and possibly unintentionally) evolves his language when describing future tech to bring it into line with a super-charged version of early 90s computing instead of early 80s computing - and reaches a final climax which is more akin to Blake’s 7 than anything Adams had hinted at before.

It was this conclusion that confused me when I read "And Another Thing" – the recently published H2G2 continuation – because it picks up from the moment Mostly Harmless ends. Never having reached the end I was rather confused for quite a long time. Long enough to get far enough into the book not to give up when I realised how terrible it was anyway.

Now that I’ve finally reached the end of Mostly Harmless I have to say I liked it. Though it was undoubtedly downbeat, it brought the whole H2G2 story full circle and to a definite conclusion. Everything made a weird sort of sense, loose ends were tied up, ticks were put in boxes and there was no punch line.

Now for the bit I didn’t like. The Guide Mark 2 was a wonderful creation once it was explained. The enormity of the idea of this thing that can see every possibility and in every direction of time. It can change things and manipulate people over such a long period of time and in such apparently irrelevant ways that it makes whatever its ultimate outcome is a certainty. It’s just a shame that this incredible idea had to be shoe horned in as the Guide Mark 2. It’s nothing of the sort. Not even slightly. Had it been anything else – even something that was never really described as anything (Ford found it in a lab after all – it could’ve been a random prototype of something he didn’t know the purpose of) – it would’ve been a triumph. But making it the Guide Mark 2 is another of those things that spoils itself by being too cute. And by being too far removed from the thing it’s meant to be (computers had moved on and something like the original Guide was increasingly plausible so Guide II should’ve been another giant leap from early 90s tech like an eye-ball implant or an iPhone) it is impossible to imagine as you’re reading. You can imagine a bird, you can imagine a computerised book but you can’t imagine a computerised book that looks and acts like a bird. Not easily anyway.

In the end it is a book I’m glad I finally got to the end of but which I entirely understand my former selves not being able to do so. After the almost completely mellow and irrelevant "So Long..." it really felt as if we were going to get a pointless book about what would’ve happened if Tricia McMillan had never left Earth in the first place (with jokes about New York, hotels in New York, media people in New York and was I the only one who suspected Douglas had had a bad time recently either living or working in New York?) Thankfully it got better and by the end it was a fun final chapter of the H2G2 trilogy.

For no particular reason I’d now like to rank the trilogy’s five volumes in the aftermath of my first proper and focused run through them.

The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is undoubtedly the best.

Life the Universe and Everything is a surprising second because – although it is too cute in three almost-crippling ways – it is a much better story than I thought.

Restaurant at the End of the Universe narrowly squeaks into third place because it doesn’t do anything wrong and the stories it’s telling are all good but they’re clearly in the wrong order.

Mostly Harmless is fourth – it would be an easy third if the Tricia stuff had been edited down, pepped up or otherwise made to be less of an off-putting swamp to wade through.

So Long and Thanks for all the Fish is last – it’s mostly harmless (see what I did there?) and I would very much like to meet my own Fenchurch but it is far too ordinary to be a Hitch Hiker’s book and when it tries to not be ordinary it all falls to pieces.

"Life, the Universe and Everything" by Douglas Adams

I’ve known for 18 years that Life, the Universe and Everything isn’t very good. I’ve known for 18 years that the plot is too thick for H2G2 and it loses all the original’s spontaneity and freedom. I’ve known for 18 years that Life was Douglas Adams trying to write a proper story within the H2G2 universe and it failed miserably. I’ve known for about 3 days that I was wrong about all that.

There are only three things wrong with Life and none is fatal.

Firstly, the whole Krikkit thing is way too cute. It would be fine to have a race of robots whose appearance and manner of execution is a bit like cricket. But to have them called Krikkit robots and to be from Krikkit and for everything to be exactly like cricket (up to but not including the wholesale slaughter of the galaxy) is too silly. It’s the satirical equivalent of a single entendre where a double entendre would’ve been better.

Secondly, the bistromathic ship was also too cute. Again, if it was a subtle allusion to restaurant bills and how groups behave when it comes to organised dining that would be fun. But it goes too far – it’s another single entendre – and it lacks the pseudo-cleverness of the infinite improbability drive in the earlier books.

Thirdly, why did they use Slartibartfast? He was a coastline designer on the planet Magrathea. Now he’s a time travelling anti-meddler. There was no need for it to be him. It could’ve been anyone else in the entire galaxy.

All three problems draw your attention to how wrong they are and it’s all too easy (I spent 18 years doing it after all) to assume that everything about them is wrong instead of the surface layer of cuteness that spoils an otherwise sound set of ideas.

Looking at it for what it is – a rejected Doctor Who story – you can see that Slartibartfast is playing the Doctor and I like to imagine Trillian’s sudden prominence at the end would’ve been Romana had it been accepted by Graham Williams. Ford has almost nothing to do – there not being a comparable character in season 17 Doctor Who – and Arthur only does Arthur Dent things that have nothing to do with the plot and are probably the only genuinely original bit of Hitch Hiking in the book.

All of that said, it is a much more enjoyable book than I thought it was. The plot doesn’t overwhelm everything we would normally want from a H2G2 book. The plot with the white robots gets introduced, there is some background information spread in amongst the tangents and side-ideas, and then we have the ending. It’s one of those plots that lets the main cast go from place to place, encountering H2G2 ideas like the endless party, without it being constantly about galactic destruction and yet more references to cricket. It even gives him chance to give Zaphod a cameo without him having much to do with anything else. In other words, it was a loose frame on which to hang a further Hitch Hiker’s novel without just having them wander round for no reason.

It even has a good ending. I’d never realised it had a good ending before. There actually is a reason why the people of Krikkit did what they did and it makes sense. At least in the context of a 70s Doctor Who plot it does. It makes the whole thing even more satisfying when you realise it all happened for a reason. It didn’t just happen, cue a race against time, they save the day. End of. No, it takes one of the ideas mentioned in passing earlier in the book and uses it to explain everything.

I’m really glad I revisited Life, the Universe and Everything. I’ve laid an old ghost to rest. It’s not the weakest link in the H2G2 chain at all. Indeed, had he not been just that bit too cute in three places it may well have been the best book in the series. But then if he hadn’t been too cute in his original BBC pitch it might’ve made it to the small screen and the third chapter of the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy would’ve been something else entirely.

"Dished! the Rise and Fall of British Satellite Broadcasting" by Peter Chippindale and Suzanne Franks

BSB lives on today in a way most people don’t really notice. British Sky Broadcasting – BSkyB – is all that remains following a 50-50 merger in November 1990 which may well have used mathematics otherwise unknown on Earth to define those two 50s. But for a while it was a strange beacon of hope. I can remember the commercials for quality television, squarials and sophistication. I particularly remember one where Dawn French and Lenny Henry came round to someone’s house to watch BSB. Like most people who remember BSB – and we’re pretty much at a stage now where a whole generation has known nothing but Sky – I know it was a failure. It wasn’t until reading this book that I learned why.

The book starts with a grim warning from Harold Wilson in the 1970s that "the satellite" was going to beam rubbish into British homes and there was nothing anyone could do about it. This eventually lead to the government deciding that a British satellite broadcaster was needed to stave off foreign garbage and American drivel. This is where it all started to go wrong because it was done so very strangely. The winning consortium would have the exclusive IBA licence to transmit up to 5 channels via satellite into British homes. But there were three small problems.

(1) They had to build the satellites and get them into space at a cost of hundreds of millions of pounds.

(2) They had to use a new broadcasting standard called D-MAC which was better than the existing PAL system but for which the technology didn’t yet exist.

(3) We’ll come to problem three shortly.

So it was no small undertaking to be British Satellite Broadcasting. Never mind trying to fill five channels (initially three but expanded to five during the planning process) with revolutionary television, they had to invent new technology and build and launch two satellites. All before they could even come close to launching. But that wasn’t a problem – time was on their side. After all, they had the exclusive licence. It wasn’t as if anyone else was going to come along and compete with them, was it?

Rupert Murdoch launched Sky Television – a four channel expansion of his Sky Channel – in early 1989. He got round the licensing issue by renting space on a European satellite so even though it was based in Britain, produced its programming in Britain, transmitted them up to the satellite from Britain, beamed them back down to Britain, sold subscriptions to British customers and installed their dishes on British walls, they didn’t need a licence to broadcast because they weren’t British. They were European. That was BSB’s third small problem – their exclusive licence was utterly worthless in practice. BSB could've beaten Murdoch to the punch, rented five channels on the Astra satellite and been on air in the late 80s if they hadn’t be saddled with the devastating terms of the licence which in practice gave them nothing in return.

In a different world that is what would’ve happened. BSB and Sky would both have been on the rapidly expanding Astra platform and would’ve competed for customers without any of that tedious two-incompatible-systems malarkey. Competition is always healthier for all concerned if the dedicated and eager customer ultimately has the choice to buy both products if she really wants to. Planning regulations (resolved much too late to be of any benefit) meant it wasn’t possible to have two dishes even if you really wanted to spend upwards of £400 for the privilege.

One of the things that stands out for me in the book is how the two companies fought a hugely expensive war over movie rights. They believed strongly in those days that movies would be the premium product that drove the satellite revolution. Looking back it is amusing how wrong they were. Don’t get me wrong, films are important but it was sport – specifically and almost exclusively Premier League football – which turned Sky from a rather plebby niche to something that was desirable and acceptable for viewers in all socio-economic brackets. Sky and BSB paid hundreds of millions for film rights from the major studios – in the end those rights were one of BSB’s few assets Sky took on board. Very little is mentioned about sport – save a late reference to a cricket series that was an early success for Sky and a reminder that they didn’t have their own sports channel until the BSB merger (they were partners in the pan-European Eurosport which had no interest in cricket thus the games were shown on Sky Channel instead).

I came away from the book with a sense of regret that BSB never made it. Sky’s programming at the time sounded dreadful. I of course wanted Sky because they showed WWF programmes. Had I known that BSB showed the rival NWA I might’ve been pestering Pops for that instead. By the time we got Sky – which was Christmas 1990, a month after the merger – I remember their programmes being ok. There was some dross on there but it wasn’t the complete wall-to-wall excrement this book suggests. Equally, it wasn’t on the same level as BSB’s product. UK Gold only came about because the BBC’s appetite for satellite repeats had been whetted by BSB and their only option once Sky took over was to set up their own channel for it.

Before we get too sad and/or angry at the cruel hand fate dealt BSB we must turn to their wild and utterly unsustainable spending and perhaps not-quite-competent-enough management. Their luxury offices at Marco Polo House (later the home of the equally unsuccessful ITV Digital) cost a fortune and were in sharp contrast to Sky’s dingy HQ. Everywhere there was waste, everywhere there were huge budgets just begging to be spent. There were stories about BSB managing to drive up the price for rights by bidding against itself. For a company that was already committed to spending hundreds of millions on equipment and still needed to fill five channels, the overspending on day to day existence was appalling. Not that being run properly would’ve saved them.

BSB was destroyed by the constant delays in launching their service which, in turn, was caused by the technical problems involved in being lumbered with a totally new broadcasting system. Advocates said D-MAC was better than PAL. I’ve never seen D-MAC so I’ll have to take their word for that. But it was never going to be the selling point they hoped it would. It was a bit better than PAL. That’s all. It wasn’t HD vs SD (and I’m still unconvinced by HD as anything more than SD with the bitrate it should always have had) or VHS vs DVD. I don’t even know if it was NTSC vs PAL – they’re rather hazy on exactly how and why D-MAC was better. The reality was that it wasn’t enough of a selling point to (a) make people wait a year for a BSB dish rather than buying a Sky dish immediately and (b) make people buy a BSB dish once they eventually became available.

Once the inevitable became obvious – that both companies needed to merge or both would be in danger of collapsing – the deal was hammered out in secret. Murdoch had massive debts across his empire that was teetering on the brink and BSB’s shareholders were getting antsy about when exactly this company they’d pumped almost a billion pounds into was going to get anywhere near to being healthy enough that they might one day do anything other than haemorrhage money. The 50-50 merger gave Sky 80% of the profits (if there would be any) for the next few years, made the Sky name the brand they sold to the public, closed all but BSB’s Movie Channel, sacked almost all of BSB’s staff, closed BSB’s production base, cancelled all BSB’s contracts and programming and had Sky bosses running every area of the business. Even at the end, BSB was let down by the people at the top being not quite good enough to save the day.

I wish BSB had just been a five channel family on someone else’s satellite and could’ve survived. If they’d competed with Sky on their quality of product they would’ve been fine, even with the Murdoch press filling their pages with plugs masquerading as news. Imagine if they’d spent those hundreds of millions on content rather than unnecessary technology. British TV would be very different today. You might have two big players – and America shows that cable television can be home to more than one megalithic media company – instead of one which can bully and squash anyone that gets in their way.

Dished is a book that is sometimes quite dry, sometimes quite complicated with its plethora of undistinguishable executives and a too bit long for the story it is telling but as a near contemporary account of one of British television’s most amazing periods it is everything I hoped it would be. When they wrote it in 1991 the authors couldn’t have had any idea what the trashy, near bankrupt, down market and still struggling BSkyB were about to achieve.

"The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams

H2G2 (as I shall call it) is one of those books I’ve read an awful lot but probably haven’t. I first saw the TV series and liked it enough to get a 1-4 omnibus and work my way through that. Including a distant memory of reading "So Long and Thanks for all the Fish" in North Wales during a geography field trip that has just come back to me after many years of suppression. Then came the radio series, the hoopla around the CGI illustrated edition which had the second hottest Trillian ever, and finally the movie. Leaving aside, for the moment, all the other versions I’ve forgotten about. So I’m fairly steeped in H2 lore. I know who cooks the Vogons’ food, where Zarniwoop was hiding and why fairy cake is an integral part of burning out some unlucky peoples’ brains. And yet it is too long since I’d gone back to basics and actually experienced the purest form of H2. The radio serials were unpolished, the TV series was edited, the movie was... well it was... Zooey was rather dishy wasn’t she? The books are where true H2G2 lies (excluding "And Another Thing" for reasons of shite) and what could possibly be purer than Douglas himself reading them out loud? So that’s what I’ve been doing.

The first novel doesn’t, as many people think, cover the first series. Oh no. Legend has it that it ought to have done – that was everyone’s intention – but Douglas was a bit behind schedule and was told to finish the page he was on, send the manuscript to WHSmith and let the peeps figure it out for themselves. That probably explains why there is a thread running through the first book that is absent from the produced versions and which doesn’t get paid off until the second book – "Restaurant at the End of the Universe".

The flow of the book is mostly familiar to anyone with a passing understand of how Arthur gets from his bathroom to Magrathea. The major deviation is in how he then gets from Magrathea to Milliways. Adams wisely gets rid of the terribly coincidental exploding-computer-time-travel-machine device and replaces it (in the second book as it turns out) with an entirely different exploding-computer-time-travel-machine device. Albeit one which it is possibly to squint at and sort of semi-believe happened deliberately.

The joy of H2 is that even someone like me that can speak along to great swathes of the prose can enjoy it and find new bits amidst the old favourites. Adams takes the chance to flesh out certain characters and situations in a way that would feel like padding if it wasn’t so well done. Mr Prosser’s Hun background is, I think, unique to the book and is a nicely silly way to bridge the gaps between revs of the bulldozer’s engines.

Then there’s the Zaphod storyline – the reason (or rather the space where we realise a reason should be) why he wanted to become galactic president and steal the Heart of Gold. Elsewhere it is just One of Those Things. Zaphod is this amazingly crazy guy and stealing the Heart of Gold is an amazingly crazy thing to do so he does it. Given free reign and no time constraints, Adams plants the seeds of a mystery and in doing so gives Zaphod just that bit more depth.

Overall, the book feels like a book rather than an adaptation of a radio series (which is what it was – no one knew at the time that it would become a phenomenon). It has a sense of fun combined with a sharpness of wit that later books had lost. This was a book Adams wrote because he wanted to rather than because he had to. It was also a book that had nothing (bar the radio series it was adapting) to reference and so had to make jokes at the rest of the universe’s expense instead of constantly rehashing its own legacy.

There’s no point my recommending this to you – you’ve already read it. But I would recommend you read it again, especially if you’ve not read it for a good few years. Better still, get Douglas to read it to you. The only downside is that the rest of the series fails to be this good. Douglas foolishly let himself get mixed up in plots rather than ideas, mythology rather than originality and wrote for a franchise rather than an audience. Mind you, I was pleasantly surprised by The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy so maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised by the rest. Heck, if Mostly Harmless isn’t shit I’m ahead.

"The Restaurant at the End of the Universe" by Douglas Adams

And so to book two of what was already inaccurately named a trilogy. As mentioned in the first book’s review, it’s a long time since I’d read these. Obviously a very long time because I’ve spent years labouring under the twin misapprehensions that (a) none of the second radio serial made it into print because (b) the second book is just episodes 5 and 6 of the first radio serial. All that stuff that people don’t generally remember because it isn’t important – shoes, birds, lemon scented paper napkins – it’s in there. It’s proper. It’s canon (duck).

In the produced version of H2G2 the team are sent crashing forwards in time from Magrathea – as woken by the mice to build Earth 2 – to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe when a computer blows up. In this second volume of words, Adams goes the long way round. The first book ended with the gang safely and successfully leaving Magrathea in the Heart of Gold. They are then attacked by Vogons and the whole destruction-of-the-Earth angle from book one is explained as a plan by the galaxy’s psychiatrists to keep themselves in work. If the secret of Life, the Universe et cetera is ever known, analysts like Gag Halfront are out of a job. So they hired the Vogons to blow up the computer and now they want to finish the job by eliminating the last two printouts of that computer, Arthur and Trillian. Zaphod saves the day by holding a séance and asking his great grandfather to help them out. This builds on the seeds sewn in the first book that there is more to Zaphod’s ascendancy to the premiership of the galaxy than thinking it was a pretty neat idea at the time.

Not quite knowing how to get Zaphod from point A to point B to continue this story, he’s zapped across time and space to the Guide’s offices where he is kidnapped by Frog Star Fighters and taken to the total perspective vortex. And so on. Hearing this – I’m on the Adams’ read audio books remember – was a weird surprise. I wasn’t expecting Roosta and co to appear and for a heavily abridged version of fits seven to twelve to unfold. I think they get the best out of them. The second radio series always felt a bit of a let-down. There were some nice ideas in there and some amusing scenes but it felt like it wasn’t going anywhere and we weren’t really enjoying the ride. And I’m still not entirely sure how much of John Le Mesurier’s performance was acting and how much was illness. All the stuff with the birds was shifted to the Frog Star (as was the location of Milliways in the distant future) and the result is a tighter and more efficient recounting of patently pointless events.

Having met Zarniwoop and discovered how to get back to the Heart of Gold, the newly reassembled crew (the others did nothing while Zaphod was off having his adventure in this universe and the other one) now go to the Restaurant and we’re back on very familiar territory. The Restaurant is one of those really good comic ideas. It plays well on radio and TV and, although most certainly impossible, has a believability if you’re so minded. On the page it just feels a bit limp. After half a book of new material, going back to something so familiar is likely to have one of two effects – either relief because you didn’t like the new material and this conditions the brain to dislike anything not from the cosy warmth of fits one to six, or disappointment because the book has taken a big backwards step into Old Stuff just as you were getting into the new stuff which conditions the brain not to enjoy the second half of the book because you’ve seen it all before. I can’t think of any particular reason why the restaurant, the stunt ship and the emergency teleport couldn’t have happened at the start of the book and left the new stuff to take place afterwards. Zaphod could quite easily have teleported to Ursa Minor Beta from the Disaster Area stunt ship, had the Zarniwoop adventure, got the H of G back by some equally improbably means, encountered the Vogons and thence to the shack and the man in the shack (or the man who believes, for the moment, that someone lives in a shack and it might well be him).

It ends as it should end – with Arthur, Ford and the B Ark on a planet that will be familiar to all who have ever lived on it. Restaurant gives us a glimpse of what life will be like in the H2G2 universe now that all the familiar material has been used up and the author will have to start inventing new stuff. It’s an awkward blend because the running order is so strange. It’s still an entertaining book and one that pays off Zaphod’s quest/conspiracy/journey/real mission storyline in an unexpected but worryingly satisfying way (the man in the shack is a strangely good solution to the problem if you look at it from the right angle). Good jokes, good ideas but the return of the Vogons and the early attempts to turn this into a Saga rather than just The Goodies in space are already pointing to the series’ decline.

"Fatherland" by Robert Harris

What if Germany had won the Second World War? It’s a question that’s been asked many times in speculative fiction – not least in Terrance Dicks’s early New Adventure whose name momentarily escapes me but which I assure you I’ve read at least two and a half times. Robert Harris – whose earlier book, "Enigma", got me interested in the code breaking work of Bletchley Park – has written this apparent murder mystery set in a victorious Germany, about to celebrate Hitler’s 75^th birthday in the mid-1960s. It promises thrills, spills, shocks and surprises.

For the most part this book was a bit of a chore to get through. The central character is Xavier March, a slightly unorthodox and slightly anti-establishment police officer with an absurdly over the top German rank (Sturmbannführer in case you were wondering) who stumbles across something the Gestapo would rather was left un-stumbled-across. It’s his bad luck to become mixed up in the murder of a high ranking Party official which quickly turns into the murders of several high ranking party officials and then... et cetera.

I say "quickly" but that’s a lie. It moves very slowly for the first nine tenths. With hindsight it is weaving a deliberately obscure web which you think is about murder and then about stolen art treasures and then possibly corruption in high places and when you finally discover what it’s all about, then (and only then) does it become worth all the effort. It would be a very easy book to give up on half way through – none of the characters is likeable, none of the set pieces is exciting and none of the locations is anything other than grim. Once you’ve got over the novelty of the victorious, glorious Third Reich as it approaches middle age, there is nothing to keep you there.

The Germany – and the wider world – it describes is definitely the book’s main strength. It is an all too frighteningly realistic Nazi Europe with puppet governments in Britain and Spain (under Edward VIII and Franco respectively), an on-going war on the Russian front with America sending arms and supplies to what remains of Stalin’s army, the rest of Europe huddled together in a toothless and German controlled "European Community" and a cold war between Germany and America that could go nuclear at any time. For ordinary Germans, life is comfortable if unspectacular, there is a personality cult around Hitler and his iconography, surveillance is everywhere and people disappear if they say or do the wrong thing, and there is no spirit of enterprise or drive to succeed – only to conform and survive. Victorious Germany appears much closer to the Soviet bloc than it does to post-War Germany in our reality. The fires of German efficiency and industry were wasted on pointless architectural follies, reciting party slogans, spying on your neighbours and fighting Russian rebels.

Because this is a story centred on one man, we don’t get to see much beyond the Berlin he knows. Only later, when the American journalist Charlotte "Charlie" McGuire joins the story do we get a sense of outside perspective. Americans view the Germans in the same way they viewed the Soviets in our version of history. They don’t quite know why they hate them but they do. They’re the enemy. But at the same time they pity them for living in a bubble that hides the rest of the world from them. She knows more about his country than he does and, with this simple device, she tells us about it. There is an awful lot of historical exposition in this book and it never feels forced or artificial. We get thirty years of history – a curious mix of fact and fiction if Wikipedia (pause for cheap joke about Wikipedia being a curious mix of fact and fiction itself) can be believed – without it getting in the way of the story. Maybe that’s just because I was more interested in the history than the story and so welcomed a bit of "factual" relief.

As with any really good idea for a setting, it’s useless without a story to tell in it. 1984 came as close as you can to not having a story – the story was the world itself and one man’s struggle against it, I’m sure many alternative history post-WWII stories do likewise with one man against Nazism – while Fatherland gives every impression of having a story that could’ve been set anywhere. It’s a murder mystery which starts getting higher and higher up the ranks as more clues and bodies are uncovered. It seemed like a bit of a waste really. Why construct this plausible world with its carefully assembled fake history and use it to tell a fairly routine story about greedy old men who fell out over some paintings?

And then Harris slowly but surely lets us know what it is really all about. Oh, the greedy old men wanted us to think it was about paintings but it was actually a desperate attempt to cover up the greatest crime in human history.

By the last fifty or so pages I was desperate to know what happened next. The downbeat tone of the novel showed me that it might end in tragedy. They might fail and evil might triumph. Or they might escape and tell the world what they know. The ending was good, the middle was ok and the beginning was laboured except when the story was put to one side and the world was built around us. In the end, that world did matter. It wasn’t something that could’ve happened anywhere. It had to be there, it had to be then and it had to be that. Robert Harris is a much better story teller than I gave him credit for half way through. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend you start Fatherland but if you do, stick with it to the end.

"Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell

I always seem to fall for Gladwell books. They sound good, they get good reviews, I buy them, read them and feel let down by them. It’s not that they promise a lot and don’t deliver so much as they promise vague things and half way through I realise those vague things aren’t actually that interesting to begin with. Outliers is his study of what makes successful people successful and for its first half it is a very depressing book.

The moral of the first half is that you can’t do anything about it. If you’re not successful then forget about it. If you’re old enough to read a book like Outliers, you’re too old to become a success. Success is determined when you’re a child or by factors over which you have no control. Canadian ice hockey players’ destinies are decided by what month they are born in (because the kids’ leagues have an age cut-off date and if you’re born in January you’re going to be almost a year more developed than a child born in December playing in the same team), the giants of computing were almost all born within 2 years of each other and were exactly the right age to take advantage of the birth of home computing. Jewish lawyers in New York actually benefited from the prejudice they endured in the 40s and 50s because they got into areas of law that exploded in the 70s and made them all rich. It’s all luck. Apart from the hard work bit of course.

The hard work takes the form of 10,000 of practice – roughly 10 years at 3 hours per day – which you have to start when you’re young. That means being born into a family that can and will let you do that. If you’re not, or if you don’t get hooked on something at an early age, then forget it. Again, if you’re old enough to read about it, it’s already too late to do it.

An exception would be the Beatles who got their 10,000 hours in playing in Hamburg. This is what you have to do to become a really great band, says Gladwell. Funny, I don’t remember the Rolling Stones, Metallica or the Spice Girls putting in 8 hour days in seedy German clubs before becoming huge successes. It feels too much like Gladwell has this theory and looked around for a musical act that fitted it. Of course the rule that practice makes perfect is a valid one, and the more training and experience you have the better. But there isn’t really a magic number – just a few examples that can be made to appear like a magic number.

Amongst the depressing tales of "they did it but you can’t" are a few interesting nuggets. Like the European ban on Jews owning land for most of modern history leading to Jewish migrants to America being the only ones who brought with them city skills like clothes making rather than country skills like agriculture. But mostly it was stories of people who were in the right place at the right time and had the good fortune to get lots of practice in before it became the right time.

The second half is much more interesting. It starts with the story of Korean first officers who would rather let their planes crash than contradict the captain. Korean air went from having one of the world’s worst safety records to one of the best by abandoning Korea’s cultural respect for authority and introducing a bit of old fashioned American everyone’s-equal-and-call-me-Bob informality. He broadens it to make it a trend – those cultures that aren’t equal and forthright are less safe in the air than those where a captain who was about to crash into a mountain would be told "you’re about to crash into a mountain" rather than "you don’t often see snow on the ground at this time of year". It’s not really about outliers or stories of success but I’m all for ditching a losing hypothesis if it means a book gets about a dozen times more interesting.

He also looks at schools and education and comes up with some interesting conclusions. It’s easy to dismiss them as "the more you work, the better you do" but stick with it because he eventually asks a staggering question – one that had never occurred to me and probably hasn’t occurred to you. Why do schools have such long holidays? Really? We take it for granted – and grumble in our youths that the Americans have longer hols – that six weeks in the summer is the bare minimum we require to hang around and watch television. But isn’t it just a really effective way of ensuring children forget almost everything they’ve learned in the preceding months? School hols are meant to be there to give the children a break and (because they’ve got a better union) the teachers a rest from the little bastards but is six weeks really necessary? Not in the far east it isn’t – they spend far more of their year actually in school and, not so coincidentally, achieve better results. University is even more illogical. I had three 10 week terms per year. That’s 30 out of 52 weeks (or 27 out of 52 if you discount "reading weeks") actually spent in lectures and seminars. There has to be scope for a rethink of education in this country with so much time wasted. It would also help parents out if they didn’t have six weeks in the summer to fill with child care and grandparents. The days when mummy was at home to look after us are long gone.

Then there’s maths – why are Asians better at maths than the rest of us? Gladwell thinks it’s because their numbers are shorter (taking 1/3 of a second to say – ours take much longer and so we can’t store as many in our short term memory as they can) and linguistically more logical. We say "thirteen", which is a corruption of "three" and "ten" but even if you know that, you don’t know they go the other way round – "ten" and "three" to make 13. This irrational system means it takes Western children up to a year longer to understand numbers and convert them for use in their brains than it does Chinese children who grow up saying ten-three and two-ten-five instead of "thirteen" and "twenty five".

Even if you don’t buy any of the conclusions he comes to in the second half of the book, they are at least food for thought. They’re enjoyable to ponder in a way that the life story of Bill Gates or Jewish hostile takeover lawyers’ isn’t.

It ends with Gladwell’s own family background and the series of lucky chances which eventually lead to him being here. If his great (many times over) grandmother hadn't caught his great (ditto) grandfather’s eye at a slave auction, if his great (fewer times over) grandmother had been born in an odd year rather than an even year (or vice versa) and thus hadn’t qualified for a particular scholarship which alternates gender each year, if the Jamaican skin-tone driven society hadn’t valued his maternal antecedents precise colour ahead of the colours of those around them, and so on. It’s an interesting story – again – but it doesn’t really fit with the rest of the book. This time it’s nothing to do with outliers or exceptional people, it’s just the lucky chances that everyone one of us has in our histories. Everyone person in the world is the result of thousands of chance encounters and bits of good fortune. If even one thing had been different we wouldn’t be here.

This book isn't worth the effort of reading it. It's almost all hindsight and almost all boils down to luck. It's a good idea to get your child(ren) doing something productive at a young age, it's a good idea to time conception so they are the oldest in their year, it's a good idea to make them read a lot over the summer hols but that's hardly worth reading a pseudo-academic book for. A few interesting "did you know that" tales and a bit of common sense childrearing can't make up for the depressing message that "It's too late" for any of us.

"An Utterly Impartial History of Britain" by John O’Farrell

I’m nothing if not a sucker for histories of Britain. Possibly because they’re easy – I know the basics and each one just hangs nuggets of interest on the bones of Normans-Plantagenets-Wars of the Roses-Tudors-Stuarts-Cromwell-Stuarts et cetera. It’s a good way to get some new bits of interesting stuff to toss lightly into conversation. The thing that sets O’Farrell’s book apart from "This Sceptred Isle" and the like is that he’s a comedy writer and he’s written a funny history of Britain. Indeed, the title gives it away – an utterly impartial history which, because we’re British and hardly ever use irony (see what I did there?) means he’s going to be very partial indeed.

This partiality is a bit irritating at times. Because mainly it involves comparing some of Britain’s evil monarchs and scheming barons with Mrs Thatcher. This was all fine and large thirty years ago when Ben Elton was doing it in a sparkly suit but this book came out in 2007 and the "Thatch" jokes have an awful lot of dust on them now.

His other comic devices are –

(1) And so we sent an army off to the middle east to wage war against Islam for political and economic reasons. Thank goodness we’d never do something like that today. Chuckle. The sarcastic parallel between history and modern Britain crops up roughly every hundred years or so. It’s a shame he blows them off with clumsy sarcasm as one of the interesting things about history is to see the same mistakes being made again and again. To dismiss such depressing examples with a "Thank goodness that could never happen now... ha ha" is to waste an opportunity to actually make a point. The book’s subtitle is "2000 years of upper class idiots in charge" and maybe he just can’t bring himself to admit that democracy and diversity haven’t made any difference at all – today’s elected leaders from (theoretically) ordinary backgrounds are just as greedy, ignorant, incompetent and blood thirsty as the aristocratic elite of the middle ages. Why even bother letting plebs vote when it doesn’t really change anything?

(2) And so the hundred years war began. "What did he say this war was called?" / "The hundred years war." / "So it’s going to last for a hundred years?" / "I suppose so." / "Shit." The little comic skit between a couple of contemporary characters that pretends that the people living in historical times were aware that they were part of history. Much as characters in fiction can be made to appear aware that they are fictional characters. It has a point to it – that books like this telling history as a story don’t – and shouldn’t – be assumed to tell us what life was actually like for people in those days. Every single thing that has ever happened has happened in the present and involved people that didn’t know where that particular day would fit into the jigsaw that would one day be called history. Sadly, though, these skits are rarely all that funny. A comedy writer writing about history should be better at the comedy than the history. Should be. "Oh I’m going to write a funny history book." / "Well, make sure you make it a better history book than it is a funny book." / "I will."

On the plus side it is a good read. It starts with Julius Caesar landing in Britain and ends with the Second World War. Which, as he points out, is exactly 2000 years. From the Romans we travel through the Kings and occasional Queens until the Georges arrive from Germany and their disinterest and lack of English means the politicians take centre stage for the first time. There is no denying that it is a pretty grim history. Basically, nothing good ever happened. For the first thousand years people sailed to Britain, slaughtered the inhabitants, settled down and were slaughtered by the next lot of invaders. Then, for the next five hundred years, the barons jostled for position, England fought the French, brothers killed each other to become King and the black death wiped out millions of people. The final five hundred years saw Catholics and Protestants at each other’s throats to out-do each other in the persecution stakes, Parliament slowly and opportunistically grab more and more power, and warfare change from the killing of thousands to the killing of millions. It’s a story that is easy to do badly and O’Farrell’s tone and pace are pretty much spot on. He saves his subjective remarks for situations that warrant them on the whole. With hindsight we could say pretty much every monarch and prime minister got pretty much everything wrong. But to spend two thousand years (or six hundred pages) saying so would get smug and boring. He tells the story and lets us make our own decisions except where he really can’t help himself and that’s fine. Apart from the tedious Thatcher jokes of course. I’m not defending her – I just tend to roll my eyes when cutting edge satirist (which O’Farrell is) can’t move on even after Ben Elton himself has hung the sparkly suit up, sold his soul to the West End and become someone that his earlier self would almost certainly have beaten to death with a microphone.

One other thing I promised myself I’d mention is that I was reading this when the Clare Balding vs AA Gill thing became news. Balding reported Gill for describing her as a dyke. All the leftists on Twitter rallied to her cause which is fine as Gill is odious and Balding isn’t. But it did make me think that it wasn’t really about the word dyke – or any other anti-gay quips – so much as it was who it was who said it. The same Twitter leftists probably love John O’Farrell and are happy to ignore equally dubious remarks in this book. Matilda was England’s first Queen... "If you don’t count William II" or when Offa wanted to put a dyke between England and Wales one of the comedy locals suggested "What about Olaf’s sister?" Neither of these is what I would consider offensive but it does suggest the current round of homophobic sensitivity is more about who it was who used a word like dyke or queen rather than any genuine disgust at its use.

You can pick the book up for a very slender £4 from Amazon and it’s well worth it. I always dwell more on the negatives in these reviews (unless it’s a Wodehouse in which case I refuse to believe that there is anything negative to say and just gush like an entertained river) which may give a false impression about a book like this one. The comedy does get in the way at times – more than once he’s being genuinely interesting and segues into a joke when we actually want him to finish the serious point – and at other times I was genuinely unsure whether he was being serious or not (for example his apparent suggestion that the Great Exhibition should’ve better reflected what life was like in Britain rather than just being about innovation and industry) but if you want a solid and entertaining history of this remarkable island then this is a good one to get.

"Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic" by Terry Jones

Starship Titanic was a computer game released in the late 1990s with a lot of hype and, in fairly quick succession, a lot of disappointment. Douglas Adams had said a lot of very exciting things about Starship Titanic – him being the creator and writer of the game plus techie inspiration on everything from the AI to the fixtures and fittings – but it couldn’t stop the game being no fun to play. I should know – I bought it three times and would’ve returned the third copy for a refund (just like copies 1 and 2) had it not been (a) so cheap, (b) from a shop that didn’t do refunds for stuff you don’t like and (c) for the step-by-step guide I got with it to show me exactly what I should and shouldn’t be doing. The gist of the game is that the Starship Titanic crashes on your house during its maiden voyage. You go inside, chat to the robots, solve impossible puzzles, earn upgrades, find missing bits of the ship’s computer and eventually mend the ship and take it home. Or something. I’ve never met anyone that completed it. I’m not even sure the step-by-step guide gets all the way to the end. If it does then kudos to whoever wrote it.

Adams was too busy doing cool stuff on the game side to write the tie-in novel of Starship Titanic. Yes, obviously there had to be one. Don’t all computer games have tie-in novels? That job was left to Terry Jones which is odd as the only possible value a novel of Starship Titanic could’ve had was if it was written by Douglas Adams himself. A Douglas Adams novel is important. A Terry Jones novel in the style of Douglas Adams isn’t. It’s not that a Douglas Adams novel would’ve been better – it probably wouldn’t – but there is just something that being a Douglas Adams novel has that being a Terry Jones novel doesn’t.

In the novel we have the back story of the Starship Titanic’s construction – which isn’t very interesting but includes lots of Adams-style asides about silly alien races. The ship then crashes on a house belonging (sort of) to a group of humans – who aren’t very interesting. They climb aboard and sort of play the role of you in the computer game. They have to get an upgrade, they have to try and defuse the bomb (in the novel it is sadly not played by John Otto Cleese) and eventually they have to try and find all the bits of the computer’s brain.

I’ll say this for it – having played the game I could really visualise the ship and all the robots, lifts, cabins, spaces, canals and parrots that the book describes. It did give me warm memories of the early days of wandering through what was a pretty impressive looking game for the late 1990s. It was only when the story started and they had to do arbitrary things and wait for massively convenient coincidences that I started to sour on the book (just as the same arbitrary tasks and massive coincidences soured me on the game).

The new stuff – the parts of the story not lifted from the game – are no better. We have two alien races that have absolutely nothing interesting or amusing to contribute to the galaxy. They are a mix of human clichés and sub-Adams wackiness. Like the race that uses fish paste sandwiches on ceremonial occasions even though no one likes them and they don’t even know what fish paste is on their world. Chuckle. Or the race that has exactly the same marriage customs as Earth but, because one of the humans gives herself to an alien when she thinks they’ve only got five minutes to live, they assume humans have no such customs and just shag at will. Chuckle. In the words of Hugh Laurie, "What an almost amusing misunderstanding."

There is a lot of very mild sex in this book – plenty of groping of boobs and bums, a fair bit of actual shagging and endless remarks from smitten males of at least three species about how nice one of the characters’ breasts are. Couple that with the mild swearing which litters the book and you have something that seems to be trying quite hard not to be suitable for the 10 year old audience that is about the only demographic that could possibly enjoy this book. I don’t know how much of it is Jones and how much is Adams telling him what to write but it feels way to much like internet Adams fan-fic with childish smut thrown in to make the author feel a bit edgier than everyone else.

In the end I’m glad I went through with it – I’ve spent twelve years not reading the novel and now I can stop intending to do it one day. It’s done now. Never again. It isn’t the story the game should’ve been. It’s basically what you’d expect when a sketch writer pens a novel based on a boring computer game and does so in the style of someone who hadn’t written a decent novel for over fifteen years. I wanted to like it just as I tried so hard to like the computer game but I just couldn’t. The game was too stupidly hard and the novel is just too stupid. Such a shame as I still have a glimmer of belief that there was something good inside Starship Titanic – and the best work seems to be the websites set up to promote the game which are amazingly still up as I write this – but that we’ll never find out what it was.

"Once More, With Feeling: How we tried to make the greatest porn film ever" by Victoria Coren and Charlie Skelton

Victoria Coren and Charlie Skeltern, two young journalists who reviewed pornography together for a magazine, decided one day over the naked buttocks and spray-on sweat that it couldn’t be that difficult to make a porn film, could it?

They went to Las Vegas to write the script, they went to Los Angeles to meet the nicer side of the American porn industry and then they went to Amsterdam to actually make the thing. Along the way they met pornographic icons, sensitive souls, industry survivors, industry victims and innocents caught up in a world that only really makes sense from the inside. They also do a lot of soul searching and have a lot of laughs.

The book they wrote – the advance for which helped fund the project – is an amusing look back at the film, “The Naughty Twins” from conception to the final edit. It also takes an objective look at the porn industry from the perspective of two well brought up, middle class, liberal journalists whose fathers are a man of the cloth and the editor of Punch magazine.

Obviously it helped that neither was put off by porn. This isn’t a conversion tale – the prudish, anti-porn feminist writer who is won over by the empowerment she discovers and so on. Nor is it a revulsion tale – the young writers who thought it was all a laugh but who discovered the darker side and were appalled at themselves for making jokes about Anal Ninjas IV. Instead it wants to make people understand that there is no blanket “sex industry” that is good or bad. No more so than “the film industry” or “the government”. A lot of people in porn are good, kind people who take care of their stars, a lot of stars want to be there and enjoy the work and many of those who leave the industry on their own terms stay within it to help the next generation stay safe and sane. But there is a darker side too – drugs, violence, coercion and worse. The authors want us to be aware of this but make it clear they’re not investigating porn – they’re making it. So they keep clear of the bad people as far as they possibly can. And they want to keep the mood as light as possible because it is a book that would hopefully be sold alongside Alan Coren’s latest collection of essays or something humorous from Frank Muir.

The film itself is a strange tale of two twins who start out innocent, encounter various strange sexual scenarios along the way but who remain pure throughout. Or pure-ish at any rate. The sex on screen should represent both writers’ tastes so there is some girl on girl for Charlie, some boy on boy for Victoria (an aspect of straight female sexuality that isn’t as widely understood as the male equivalent), a bit of light BDSM and an orgy for everyone. Some of the scenes ended up being cut or changed and there is a terrible realisation at the end that they’ve wrapped the film without actually showing a man shagging a woman. But, being hardened pornographers by now, that’s no problem and they make a couple of calls. Next thing you know, a woman is happily bouncing up and down and the chap between her and the ground is enjoying every minute of it.

It’s an entertaining enough book – Charlie is portrayed as a bit of a shy loser who find the whole experience rather exhilarating while Vicky is more concerned with ensuring the performers get a fair payoff and aren’t being asked to do more than they’re comfortable with. She also has a tender moment with a young bisexual boy who is in the country illegally and works as a rent boy because he can’t get a job without papers. But not all those involved are victims – some are hard, some are pragmatic and some love every minute of it. It’s hard to keep track of who most of them are but the pen-pics at the start of each scene help a little.

I won’t lie – I had a little look on the internet to see if any clips of the film are available on YouTube. Not because I want to see wacky sex but to make the people in the book exist as more than just names on a page. Vicky I know from television, Charlie I can imagine because he’s a bit of a Brit-com cliché but the rest of them are just ink on paper. Plus I want to see whether their makeshift sets are even more tacky than the episode of “Thunder in Paradise” which was set in England but shot in Epcot Centre, Florida. That’s what kept popping into my head whenever they described this magical kingdom with castles and dungeons and a budget of fifty quid for sets and lubricant.

It’s a book that is in equal parts about porn, people and the people in porn. It’s amusing rather than funny, naughty rather than sexy and surprisingly thought provoking for something that’s ultimately all about the “Dildo of Krun-Ra”.
 

"Why England Lose: And other curious phenomena explained" by Stefan Szymanski and Simon Kuper

It has an eye catching title and for a while it sort of lives up to it. It’s a book in which a statistician and a sports journalist decide to crunch data and prove/disprove some footballing lore. It sounds great and in places it is but the book is too long and goes off in too many dull directions for it to be a great book.

Firstly, the good. Some of the analysis is painfully simple. England, they explain, are a top 10 side in the world. We are consistently in the top group of the FIFA rankings and this shows that we’re consistently amongst the 10 best teams in the world. But, and this is the bit people overlook, if you’re the 8th best team in the world then you can reasonably expect to be a World Cup quarter finalist. Any more and you’re over achieving, any less and you’re under achieving. The belief that England should be semi-finalists or even finalists isn’t realistic. Top 8 means quarter finals and that seems to be where we generally end up on a good day.

It isn’t all as simplistic as that of course. They have a database which lets them show who are the best teams in the world, who are the best if you include factors such as GDP and population size as well as results on the field, who is getting better, who is getting worse and so on. The problem with all this is that we know who the best teams are – it’s Brazil, Argentina, Germany, Italy, Spain – and when the numbers are twisted to try and prove this isn’t the case then the whole book becomes pointless. I actually don’t care about any list which places Georgia or Iraq as the best team in the world using some mix of criteria beyond purely results in top flight matches.

Nor do I care about all the pages wasted on football fans. It is apparently a myth that lots of people kill themselves after their team goes out of the World Cup. I never really thought they did. Apparently, football saves more people from suicide than it prompts to take their own lives. They waded through a lot of data to bring us tables and tables of numbers proving this. Just as they provided pages of numbers about TV ratings (never as straight forward as just telling us how many people watched in each country – they had to diddle further or anyone could’ve done it) and the tiny percentage changes as the tournament progressed, the local team did well and what times the matches kicked off. To sum up, if you’re country does well in the World Cup and the game is in prime time, more people watch it than if two obscure teams are playing a pointless group game at 2 in the morning.

It’s not all tables of numbers and numbness though. The section on the European Cup slash Champion’s League is fascinating. For example, the main capital cities of Europe never win the Champion’s League – Paris, London, Rome, Berlin, Moscow, Istanbul, Lisbon – with the only exceptions being Madrid (which became a football power only because of Franco and without his influence would be no different from the rest) and Amsterdam (which is the capital in name only). Their reasoning is that capital cities have pride and a sense of belonging merely from being the capital. They don’t need a football team to think themselves great. Unlike the industrial cities where the men from the factories needed a sense of community spirit and either founded a football club which became Manchester United or Milan or supported the club that was already there.

Plenty of space is also given over to analysis of the penalty shootout. Economists and their ilk love penalty shootouts as they are game theory in the raw. The Moscow shootout between United and Chelsea in 2008 is poured over in minute detail. Chelsea had a plan and it was working until Anelka let Van der Sar psyche him out and he deviated from that plan. But the moral of the entire penalty shootout story is that what was once a pure test of nerve has become a science where goalkeepers are pumped with data about where each kicker will aim. Thus the only way for a kicker to regain the advantage is to learn how to be random. Either that or just learn how to take an unsaveable penalty. It doesn’t matter which way the keeper dives, if it is right in the corner and hit with power it won't be saved.

They stray beyond football to look at which is the best sports nation in the world using world cups in various events, the winter and summer Olympics and world championships of sports where the Olympics aren’t the pinnacle. It felt rather pointless as you can’t realistically compare motor racing, cricket and snooker with baseball, basketball and gridiron. The gist was that the super powers can turn their hand to any sport they decide they want to dominate but they seldom do because America is happy in sporting semi-isolation and China only feels the need to prove anything (even if it is the skill of its scientists rather than the natural talent of its people) when it is hosting an event and wants to bring glory upon itself.

I sound overly negative about this book. The chapter on how to play the football transfer market was very interesting (albeit in a way that makes me doubt it as it is such a simple set of principles that I can’t believe every club doesn’t already do it) and it has made me look at things in a slightly different way. But it had certain points it wanted to make and it made them in a very heavy handed way. I genuinely don’t believe that race plays a factor in clubs choosing a manager and that black managers are being held down. They concluded that it does but the logic of it escapes me. It was more than just counting the lack of black managers in English football. They used case studies (individual examples can't prove statistical trends) and drew parallels with black players but they didn’t give any numbers on how many white and black ex-professionals take the coaching qualifications, how many apply for jobs and other statistics which could go some way to proving things one way  or the other. There are a lot of black players but if few of them try to be managers, it isn’t a surprise that few of them become managers.

This review is pretty back and forth, up and down, good and bad and that’s what this book is like. For every analysis of the transfer market there is a pointless table ranking countries using irrelevant factors. For every Champions League dissection there is a chapter on baseball. For every interesting nugget about the realities of football (for example, even the most expensive foreign signing in the modern game is given almost no help settling into his new country and is left to fend for himself without so much as a translator to help him out) there is a list to three decimal places of how many goals the top African countries score per game above what their socio-economic data suggests they should score. If you’re interested in football and a new slant on the history of the game then I would recommend it. Just skip past almost everything in table form and give up on any chapter that begins to bore you because once it stops being interesting, it doesn’t get any better until the subject is well and truly changed.
 

"At Home: A Short History of Private Life" by Bill Bryson

A few years ago Bill Bryson wrote a book called “A Short History of Nearly Everything” in which he set out to learn how the universe came into being, what makes it tick, when the Earth was made, why physics does what it does and so on. In short, nearly everything. It is a fantastic book and I’ve whizzed through it a couple of times. Now he’s turned his attention closer to home. Actually, scrub the word “closer” as he’s just turned his attention to home. His home in Norfolk to be exact.

Using the rooms of his rectory as a map he tells us the stories behind the every day items and places that make up the modern home. He starts with a potted history of homes in general in the chapter on the hall (the hall is one of the least important parts of the modern home but the home itself evolved out of the hall as once upon a time there was just the hall, then little offshoots were built and eventually these offshoots were given names and rooms took over) and moves around the house in similar historic vein. He’s taken the decision not to go much further back than the 18^th century where he can help it as that’s where the modern home really started to take shape and it saves too many tales of mud huts, thatched roofs and burying poo in the back garden.

The book is a wealth of well told stories and fascinating glimpses back into our past. Sometimes though his tangents and diversions can go on a bit too long and I’ll forget how he got onto the subject. The format of the book – moving room by room rather than chronologically – means we get a certain amount of repetition. We get too many stories popping up of bizarre medical ideas and practices, we get too many separate tales of people revolutionising architecture or garden design and we get all together too many moments where American leapfrogged Europe to become the powerhouse of the world. I don’t know how you’d get round that as it happened and if you’re telling different strands of history in different places it is unavoidable but it felt like each room had more or less the same tale to tell. Britain invented it, a bunch of people died for reasons we don’t really understand today, the empire helped make Britain rich from it, American started doing it better and cheaper, it changed the world forever and now we take it for granted.

Not that I want to put you off this book. It’s like reading a really long episode of QI. It is amazing that Bryson hasn’t been on the show as he’d be perfect for it. I’ve learned so much from it, albeit not such useful things as from “Nearly Everything”, but things to drop into conversations if I ever have any. It’s a bit too long and a bit too rambly but you can always jump ahead a page or two if you’re stuck in another slightly familiar story of 18^th century poverty or aristocratic angst. It’s definitely worth sticking with though. It’s not quite as good or worthwhile as “Nearly Everything”, and if you were going to buy one Bill Bryson I’d suggest you buy that one instead, but if you liked “Nearly Everything” I think you’ll like this too.

"The Daleks' Masterplan: Mission to the Unknown" by John Peel

If the last two Target novel audio books I listened to were ones that scared me (for different reasons) as a child, this one was picked because it was my absolute favourite of the range. I’ve probably only read about six Target novels in my life and the Daleks’ Masterplan is the two best ones. The TV serial can get a bit – perhaps – baggy in places. The change of writers half way through, the shifting tone from melodrama to serial to comedy and back again, and just that it is thirteen episodes long and feels it. All of that makes it hard to keep going all the way to the end. The novel – I remembered from years ago – smoothes it all out. The shifts in tone aren’t so jarring, the pacing is more consistent and the author makes an effort to explain a few things that in the serial just happen because they just happen.

The novel – of which this audio book is the first volume – throws in references to other Doctor Who stories to help context the piece. This might seem annoying but somehow never does. Mentions of the Draconians don’t feel out of place, referencing back to the Chase (and speculating that it may well have taken place after this story in the Daleks’ own time line) adds to the story rather than detracting from it and all these little things make it feel like a bit more than a straight script-to-page adaptation. It’s a nice middle ground and one the author, John Peel, would stray from with his later Dalek novels by adding far too much invented back story, prologues and other sawdust to pad the novel out to "proper" length.

The narrators are Peter Purves and Jean Marsh and they split the duties roughly along episodic lines. So Purves takes Mission to the Unknown and Marsh picks up with the first chapter of DMP ep 1. They have different reading styles as you would expect. Purves is by far the better of the two in my ears. Marsh throws herself into it but her base voice – the one she uses for the bog standard prose and from which she has to get more dramatic as the script demands – is essentially the one she uses in Battlefield to deliver the line "and become his hand maidens... in hell" (or whatever it is – you know the one I mean). She uses the same voice to narrate her Companion Chronicles but it’s ok there as she’s in character as an older and more tragic Sara Kingdom. Here it feels a bit awkward as she’s acting every word on the page and not quite doing it right. Purves on the other hand reads it like the little thriller it is. His base voice is keen and energetic but sensibly reserved. He’s Peter Purves on Blue Peter introducing a film about ducks or skateboards or whatever they did on Blue Peter before I was born. Both narrators come into their own when acting out the other characters though. We’re never left in any doubt about who is speaking and how they are feeling as they do so. They may be different genders and have very different styles but they’re both ruddy good at this sort of thing and can audiobook with the best of them.

One thing that surprised me a little was how much this first volume felt like a book with a beginning, a middle and an end. If you read or listened to this in isolation you wouldn’t feel massively ripped off. The ending – the Daleks taking the fake core and the Doctor believing that’s put paid to their invasion naughtiness – is no more of a stop gap than freezing the Dalek army on Spiradon or burying the Daleks in Genesis. That this particular story picks up again next week (or next month if you’re waiting for the compact discs) is good but not absolutely essential.

My only slight quibble is that the Daleks have been given new series movement noises. Their eye stalks make a sound when they shift around to glare at people. I can accept the use of new series Dalek voices – hooray for Briggs and all that – but the sound effects are as out of place as putting the Cyber-stomp noise into old Cyberman stories. It’s a little thing but as it’s the only issue I have with this particular production I thought I’d mention it.

These Target novel CDs just seem to get better and better. I don’t know why it took them so many years to think of making them but thank goodness they did as I doubt they would've been this well made had they come out on cassette tape in the 80s or been done half-heartedly in the 90s for what was left of the target (no pun intended) audience.

Be the Person You Really Want to be by Jamil Qureshi

I remember promising never to read anything like this ever again. I know I did. But I found this one in an old box of stuff and it seemed rude not to try to get something back for the eight quid I'd wasted on it a year or two ago.

The first thing to say is that there is nothing in this book which is a bad idea or which is bad advice. It is all sound stuff. If you do everything he says, you'll be fine. But that's not really much of a recommendation. It's like reviewing a restaurant by saying that eating their food will stop you feeling hungry and won't kill you. I could write a book of truisms and platitudes which would be every bit as valid and sound as much that is in this book. You shouldn't be so hard on yourself. Don't let past guilt drag you down. If you don't enter the contest, how will you ever win? Etc.

Secondly, most self help books have a hook or concept that is the selling point. It might be a snappy acronym, a radical diet or a diagram - something they can patent and go round the world talking to groups of business people about in auditoriums. Most of these ideas are either ridiculously simple and the authors have to pad 90% of the book with the sort of truisms I mentioned above, or the ideas are so absurdly complicated that the whole book is unreadable because it is just a series of trademarked buzz phrases strung together.

This particular book does have a lot of general "you're great - you really are - and don't listen to people who say you're not" filler material. It also lacks a central idea that you can come away with and say "At least I've mastered the P.I.Z.Z.A.Z.Z. system and look forward to applying it to my life". But that's not a bad thing. By not trying to shoehorn all his advice into a convoluted "system" he can take a more ad hoc attitude to self improvement. It actually feels like he's written a book to help people rather than constructing a system he can sell to them.

So he seems like a nice, genuine guy but it isn't a book I could recommend to anyone. There are nuggets of useful advice in there. He makes a few suggestions which may sound obvious but which are explained in a way which make you stop and ponder them rather than simply skimming over and tutting "well obviously". But he spends too much time on "stories" which I don't believe actually happened and too much of what he says he general advice rather than specific suggestions for how to apply that advice. It's harmless and pointless but not completely useless.

The Dalek Invasion of Earth by Terrance Dicks

Having enjoyed "And the Cybermen" on audio CD I decided the obvious one to get next was the other Target novel that scared me as a child. I never actually read either of them - the covers alone were enough to put me off (but in that way that makes you keep coming back to be scared all over again). In the case of the Dalek Invasion of Earth it was the front rather than the back cover which terrified me. As I remember it, we were staying for a week in North Wales and there was a book shop with a second hand copy of the DIoE. Actually, no, the way I remember it is that we went to Wales every year and the same book shop had it year in, year out and I used to visit it when we were in that particular town as a horrific annual ritual. I can't believe that's literally true though. I know why it scared me - it's the Roboman looking far more sinister and nasty than they were ever realised on screen. In the film they were figures of fetishy fun, in the serial they were lumbering zombies with Millennium Arches on their heads. But in the cover painting they were evil shock troops with face masks, black gloves and guns. These Robomen were unthinking, mindless, brainwashed human robots and that scared the pants off me.

The novel does a very good job of conveying the grimness of post-Invasion London. It's the grimness that really gets to me whenever I try to watch the serial. Every Doctor Who story has people suffering, often under the yoke of alien invaders but there is something uniquely horrific about the Dalek Invasion of Earth that has never been matched since. Even though it is a tale of hope and triumphing over adversity, I still find it too uncomfortable to sit through. And the novel hasn't helped that - I tried the DVD only last week and still couldn't do it.

One thing the novel does that I never really appreciated before (mainly for the reason explained above - that I can't quite bring myself to watch it) is the way they split the Tardis crew into three teams and each independently gets from ravaged London to the mines in Bedfordshire. The story uses this simple structure to not only explain the background to the invasion but also to make the trip to Bedfordshire much more interesting than it would otherwise have been. It also shows just how good Ian and Barbara were. Each was able to take the lead of their little party and be a stand in Doctor for two or three episodes. Susan less so but she was still with the old man so that's fine. Speaking of Susan, Uncle Terrance cut the "one day I will come back" speech. Unacceptable.

DIoE really is a superb story - let down a bit by the silliness of the Daleks' plan - which has few rivals in terms of the setting, the structure and the fundamental reality of the story. It played on peoples fears about a German invasion of Britain and it still does. There is still a little part of anyone with an education which wonders what would've happened had the Nazis invaded. Thinking about it, there is something a bit strange about how the fear of a German invasion is still there inside us but the idea of having sensible, middle class, thirty something teachers like Ian and Barbara as leads in a television programme feels so old fashioned.

Irrationality by Stuart Sutherland

What I wanted from this book was a bit of an insight into why people behave irrationally – and by "people" I mean all of us, not just morons – and what we can do to change that. I wanted dazzling insights, I wanted specific examples I could ponder over and be told why I was wrong. I wanted to learn how to be a better thinker and, by extension, a better person. I wanted to come away from this book armed with new ways of thinking so that, when faced with a situation, I could be more rational and thus get a better outcome.

What it turned out to be was a lot of tedious statistics, some conclusions that I simply couldn’t agree with, some very self-satisfied hindsight and a lot of complicated waffle that might – if it does anything at all – turn you into Mr Spock. Each chapter ended with a series of "morals" but these often contradicted other bits of the book so I felt a bit confused. To give you a couple of examples of things he said were irrational –

You got a vase from your grandmother, she paid £10 for it fifty years ago, it’s now worth £10,000 but it gets broken. Most people will think "Oh no – that was granny’s vase" or "they’ve broken the vase that cost £10" when they should actually think "Oh heck – that’s just cost me £10,000". Leaving insurance claims aside (because he didn’t mention it), he said it would be rational to view the accident in terms of your real loss. This is surely nonsense – you would feel a lot worse if you lost £10,000 than if you lost £10 or indeed nothing because you didn’t pay for it in the first place. Counting the true "cost" of something is Sutherland’s idea of rationality. Personally, I think the opposite is true. Focusing on the £10 rather than the £10,000 is going to help you get over the incident and is therefore rational for a human being. No one likes feeling miserable (except possibly Morrissey) so you should take every chance to limit the distress you feel, even at the expense of clinical rationality.

The second one is the old chestnut of the big project that is over budget and whether you should cancel it or not. I went on a project management course once and this was wheeled out using the channel tunnel as the case study. To this day I don’t understand why it would’ve been "right" to cancel the channel tunnel when it was nearly complete just because it was over budget and wasn’t going to be as successful as they’d hoped. If you abandon it, you have a hole in the ground. If you complete it then there is a chance you’ll make money over – say – the next hundred years. Sutherland’s examples were all similar to this and his conclusion was the same – can the projects and end up with nothing rather than trying to finish them and ending up with an asset which might recoup your costs. Obviously, each project is different and translating Harry Potter into binary isn’t quite the same as building a tunnel to France but I can’t see how it is rational to always stop a project when it starts looking grim just because it would be irrational to throw good money after bad. By all means do something – change of manager, refinancing, some new pie charts – but giving up should not be the first and only option.

I was disappointed because I came away with nothing but examples of how he would’ve fought the second world war differently (true story), lots of examples of medical statistics that I didn’t understand (though, to be fair, his point was that doctors don’t understand statistics either) and no real insight into anything. I wanted to be shown human behaviour and to understand why it was irrational. Instead I read his examples, saw his analysis and mostly concluded he was wrong and they were right. Not quite the insight I was hoping for.

And the irony of it all was that he has a section where he discusses walking out of movies because you aren’t enjoying it and how it is irrational to continue sitting there just because you’ve paid for your ticket. I wonder if that applies to books because if it does then ploughing through a book I enjoyed as little as this one makes me supremely irrational and thus I needn’t have bothered reading it in the first place. I didn’t learn a thing.

The Target Book by David J Howe

I’m pretty sure this started out life as a series of articles in Doctor Who Magazine back in the day. I have happy memories – possibly false ones if it wasn’t – of reading it in the bath. Those were the days when DWM was more fun than it is today. These articles (if they were articles) were collected together by Telos and fashioned into a beautiful book. A hundred and fifty glossy pages that felt satisfying before you’d even started reading it.

My only real complaint about the presentation was that the images – and there were many – felt a bit random. A page would talk about a particular book’s cover or the rejected sketches for that cover and... nope – nowhere to be seen. Those particular pictures were six or seven pages on (or half a dozen pages ago). It would’ve been a nicer read if the text and the images had been kept together. Equally, the sidebars giving us a potted history of the key players would’ve been better kept on one page – I don’t want to be jumping from page to page because the designer decided to keep the sidebars to two inch widths maximum. These are fairly minor quibbles – the design is the best feature of the book – but it feels like so much care went into making the book only for lapses like this to spoil bits of it.

The really disappointing thing about The Target Book is the story it tells. I’m sorry to have to say this – I really am – but the story of the Doctor Who Target novels turns out not to be very interesting. It is a tale of editors coming and going (none of whom made any real creating changes to the range – certainly nothing like an incoming producer changed the series), publishing politics, a few squabbles over the covers and Terrance Dicks’ tax troubles. The books were published for twenty years and were hugely popular but – with a couple of late exceptions (Remembrance of the Daleks and Curse of Fenric) – the books didn’t change at all. So in that sense the book wasn’t about the Target novels at all because they came into the world as 120 page script-to-page adaptations and they went out as 120 page script-to-page adaptations. The story it was actually telling was that of WH Allen – the publishing firm – and the people (none of whom I’d heard of apart from the last couple of editors who would cross over into the NAs) who worked there for a while.

This book exists because people have nostalgia for the Target novels. As a tribute it does a good job with the glossy covers, rare sketches, details lists of books and spin-offs and biographies of all those involved over the two decades. It’s only the actual text which lets it down and this isn’t the author’s fault – it’s just not a very interesting story. I’d love to read a book like this on the New Adventures which followed on from the novelisations – the NAs evolved, they changed, they were able to take creative decisions and move the series in new directions. That’s what you want from a story – things to be different at the end than they were at the beginning and for stuff to happen along the way.