Doctor Who: Slipback
by Eric Saward (BBC Radio 4, 1985)
Slipback captures much of the Sixth Doctor zeitgeist but also attempts a Hitchhiker’s-style humour, which entirely fails to land. Valentine Dyall is given no interaction. The plot strands are barely developed (yet shamelessly rehashed). Hardly an advertisement for a programme on hiatus.
Death on the Cherwell
by Mavis Doriel Hay (Skeffington & Son, 1935)
audiobook read by Patience Tomlinson (Soundings, 2015)
Hay starts off with amateur detectives (students from the Oxford women’s college whose setting elevates the novel) then discards them—along with the obvious suspects—in favour of an avuncular Scotland Yard man whose deductive skills at no point outstrip the reader’s.
Yes Minister, Series 1
by Antony Jay & Jonathan Lynn (BBC 2, 1980)
A slightly patchy satire, which in later series would become truly sublime in deriding British government and the Civil Service—both gleefully caricatured yet tellingly believable! The well-meaning but ductile Jim Hacker struggles to make headway against silver-tongued bureaucrat Sir Humphrey Appleby.
Third Year at Malory Towers
by Enid Blyton (Methuen, 1948)
audiobook read by Beth Eyre (Bolinda, 2021)
Once again, Darrell is largely sidelined, Blyton leaning a little too heavily into everyday depictions… while reserving all the drama for three new characters! Still, the term breezes by and offers some tear-jerking highs amidst all the idyll of Malory Towers life.
Benny Hill’s Greatest Hits
(Thames Video, 1990)
Hill’s humour was largely one-dimensional, his urgently titillated, naughty schoolboy expressions suggesting an immaturity that persisted through overweight middle-age and somehow found resonance across two decades of British viewership, tainting even the occasional clever (‘Weather Pair’) or madcap surreal (‘Wicked Warden’) piece.
Murder After Christmas
by Rupert Latimer (Macdonald & Co., 1944)
audiobook read by Kris Dyer (Soundings, 2021)
A murder mystery most notable for obfuscating events behind a blanket barrage of affability. All the suspects have blithely joked about doing in Uncle Willie. Latimer plays endlessly with motive and opportunity, meandering up false trails until it all becomes quite tedious.
A Canticle for Leibowitz
by Walter M. Miller Jr. (J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1959)
audiobook read by Tom Weiner (Blackstone, 2011)
Award-winning but over-hyped. A drawn-out, wasteland-without-hope, of-its-time fix-up novel exploring notions of—and interactions between—religious belief, cyclical history, information systems and nuclear apocalypse. Miller builds detailed (if bleak and self-indulgent) scenarios. All three sections come to weigh portentously upon the reader.
Guess Who?
by Philip E. High
New Worlds Science Fiction, Vol. 19, No. 56 (February 1957), 88-99.
SF short story in which High attempts to show up the military’s hard-ball pre-emptive aggression while also postulating how to deal with a ruthless species of telepathic shape-changers—an odd juxtaposition, as the latter come across as no better than the former.
Legwork
by Eric Frank Russell
Astounding Science Fiction (April 1956); reprinted Vol. XII, No. 9 (British Edition, September 1956), 49-86.
Published soon after Russell’s classic novel ‘Three to Conquer’, this SF invasion novelette upends the scenario by pitting everyday human grunts against what should be an all-powerful alien telepath. Russell’s distinctive prose ensures that, 70 years on, readers are still carried along.
The Battle of Squashy Hollow
by P. G. Wodehouse, Argosy (UK) Vol. XXVI, No. 10 (October 1965), 14-28.
By Wodehouse’s standards a fairly tame and inconsequential short story—involving golf and marriage proposals, two staples of the Wodehouse diet, but also hypnotism, which isn’t. Droll enough, but the protagonist’s troubles are never really plumbed and he is extricated without difficulty.