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.
Ian Fleming’s story of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang! the Magical Car
adapted by Al Perkins; ill. B Tobey (Collins and Harvill, 1969)
Lurking irresponsibly in the otherwise excellent Beginner Readers series, this gobsmacking tripe features a domestically lobotomised housewife and Fleming-modelled gung-ho husband. “Let’s blow up all this stuff,” said Jeremy. “That’s a fine idea,” said Mrs. Pott. “Then we can have our picnic.”
The Great Blueness and Other Predicaments
by Arnold Lobel (World’s Work, 1970)
One day during the Great Greyness a wizard invents colour. This fairy tale starts off with grey illustrations then makes memorable use of colours in explaining how the world (after several mishaps) came to be the bright, beautiful place that it is.
I, Claudius / The Epic that Never Was
dir. Josef von Sternberg (1936) / hosted by Dirk Bogarde (BBC, 1965)
Fittingly for a piece exploring why von Sternberg’s big screen adaptation of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius was never completed, the documentary itself has a rough, unfinished feel to it. Surviving footage reveals a lavish production. Charles Laughton mesmerises as the emperor Claudius.
Payback
dir. Brian Helgeland (1999)
Though somewhat sanitised for cinematic release (in story and character and most particularly its score), Payback remains a very watchable piece of revenge noir. Mel Gibson stars as Porter, a double-crossed gangster who goes up against the Outfit to recover his $70,000.