Deathhunter
by Ian Watson (Gollancz, 1981)
In attempting to cure his patient’s delusions, death guide Jim Todhunter must confront the possibility that Death is a creature to be captured and caged. Deathhunter combines slightly cumbersome world building with trippy existential ideas. It’s SF styled with a 1980s twist.
Doctor Who: The Time Monster
by Robert Sloman; dir. Paul Bernard (BBC, 1972)
Roger Delgado is a tour de force as the Master but once again a Pertwee-era story does his character no justice. The Time Monster is overlong and shambolic — its threat false, the scheme pea-brained — with bafflegab and deus ex machina to burn.
Sherlock Holmes: His Last Bow
by Arthur Conan Doyle (John Murray, 1917); audiobook read by Derek Jacobi (BBC, 2010)
There are few more beguiling characters in literature than Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, the great detective here (as ever) charming with his interpretation of clues beyond the reader’s access, in narratives no writer today would dare submit. The feat is most singular.
Pigs Have Wings
by P. G. Wodehouse (Doubleday, 1952); audiobook read by Jeremy Sinden (AudioGO, 1994)
The era of Blandings Castle may be well and truly bygone, the language with which Wodehouse describes it may not endear modern writers to their prospective publishers, yet Wodehouse’s charm is undeniable and his weaving together of plot strands constitutes a masterclass.
The Great Escape
by Paul Brickhill (Faber & Faber, 1951)
Brickhill’s eyewitness description of the infamous tunnel break from German POW camp Stalag Luft III — enshrined still further by the film of 1963 — remains a sincere and clearly written record, and a lasting testament to its protagonists’ spirit, ingenuity and sheer perseverance.
At the Narrow Passage
by Richard C. Meredith (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973)
Forty years before Pratchett and Baxter’s ‘The Long Earth’, the multiverse played host to Richard C. Meredith’s Timeliners Trilogy – pulpy, engaging, alternative SF military history with aliens and gratuitously accommodating females thrown in (this objectification undermining what had been a promising start).
Heat
dir. Michael Mann (1995)
Lengthy, engrossing crime drama Heat is a modern classic, affording its characters and plot space in which to develop. Robert De Niro and Al Pacino star respectively as the uncompromising armed robber and the equally single-minded police lieutenant charged with stopping him.
Doctor Who: Terror of the Zygons
by Robert Banks Stewart; dir. Douglas Camfield (BBC, 1975)
The Zygons engineer a creature that can withstand nuclear weaponry, but themselves are one of the few aliens not impervious to UNIT bullets. Dynamically directed with plenty of location filming and lush, organic sets, Terror sadly peters out to become Sock Puppet.
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
by Douglas Adams (Pan, 1980); audiobook read by Douglas Adams (BBC, 1990)
Like the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy before it, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe is a satirical explosion of SF ideas, its brilliant droll humour being marred (this time around) only by Adams’ determinedly facetious approach to prose narrative.
Doctor Who: The Edge of Destruction
by David Whitaker, dir. Richard Martin (BBC, 1964)
Jacqueline Hill out-acts her fellow regulars in this, the third ever Doctor Who serial, a remarkable two-parter set entirely within the TARDIS. The tense, eerie and unsettling, claustrophobic drama of disorientation and distrust prefigures by forty-four years the David Tennant story Midnight.