Now that a contract has been well-and-truly signed and returned, dear blog reader, a tale can be told.
As revealed during the last-but-one From The North update, with Return to the Vault of Horror now published (and available from the publisher's website and Amazon for Kindle), this blogger was busy working on a pitch for the next Stately Telly Topping meisterwerk of (alleged) literary genius a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately, what with him ending up spending five days in the hospital and all that, this somewhat delayed the completion and submission of said pitch. However, by Friday of last week, Keith Telly Topping felt enthused enough to chance his arm and send, to his publisher, a five-paragraph outline complete with a mysterious opening paragraph, a list of proposed contents and a couple of (not particularly funny) jokes for good measure. In the most recent From The North update, this blogger promised to reveal more to all of you, dear fiends, when the time was right. That time ... is now.
The blogger was expecting it would be, maybe, a week or two before he got a reply, that's usually about average. But, that-there David J Howe, bless his little cotton socks, e-mailed back within an hour of getting the pitch to ask, in all seriousness, 'is this the fastest acceptance in publishing history? Yes please!' Now that's how publishing should always work but seldom does, dear blog fiends. In fact, for 'seldom', read 'pretty much never.'
This was the full pitch, which began with the following question: 'What do 1936's acclaimed HG Wells adaptation Things to Come, the greatest film ever made - Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life & Death, the Oscar-winning 1950 nuclear terrorism thriller Seven Days to Noon, the 1953 Hammer double-bill Four Sided Triangle and Spaceways, two prime examples of the 'aliens down the pub'-strand of British-SF, the magnificently daft Devil Girl from Mars and the somewhat more earnest Stranger from Venus (both 1954), The Quatermass Xperiment and Quatermass 2 and what is, quite possibly, the worst film ever made by anyone, ever (bar none), Fire Maidens from Outer Space, have in common?'
This blogger then provided a helpful answer to his own, rhetorical, question: 'They will be among the first movies to be considered by Telos-regular yer actual Keith Telly Topping in a brand-spanking-new Sexy Stately Telly Topping Manor production-type thing, Island of Terror: Sixty Great(*) British Science-Fiction & Fantasy Movies 1936-1984 (* … and not-so-great). Island of Terror will look at almost fifty years of a curiously British vision of where we are going to in days to come. And, what we'll find when we get there.' (A mock-up cover which this blogger also sent along, incidentally, was just something this blogger quickly knocked-up himself for a bit of a laugh and as a visual aid to go along with the pitch. He'll leave the actual design of the actual cover to the actual professionals. He knows his place.)
'The book,' this blogger continued, 'will also include (and the list in not all-inclusive) reviews of Behemoth, the Sea Monster, The Strange World of Planet X, First Men into Space, BAFTA-winner and a particular favourite of this author The Day the Earth Caught Fire, The Day of the Triffids, The Earth Dies Screaming, Dr Who & The Daleks and Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150AD (big selling point there), Help! (featuring a popular beat combo of the 1960s, you might've heard of them plus a 'hackneyed, trite Mad Scientist' who wants to rule the world ... 'if he can get a government grant'), Fahrenheit 451, Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, the downright ruddy bonkers They Came from Beyond Space, the magnificent John Wyndham adaptation Quest for Love (another major favourite), Michael Moorcock's The Final Programme, Nic Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Boys from Brazil, Alien, Flash Gordon and many others. It will conclude with 1984's utterly terrible, but curiously endearing, Lifeforce. Five decades of various examples of British SF and fantasy, Island of Terror will, by necessity, also include around a few movies which have already been covered in the two Vault of Horror volumes - The Trollenberg Terror, Village of the Damned, Invasion, Night of the Big Heat, Scream & Scream Again, Doomwatch et cetera - albeit in suitably different ways with far more emphasis on the SF aspects of the films in question.'
'Most of the popular categories from A Vault of Horror and Return to the Vault of Horror will remain, but there will be some new ones added specially for this volume - 'They're Here & They Want ... (goes along with 'Themes' and details whom these particular naughty aliens invaders are and what their plans are for Earth and its inhabitants - 'battery sex-bunnies' in the case of Devil Girl From Mars, for example), 'Aliens Down The Pub?' (somewhat self-explanatory - and there are far more examples of this conceit than you might think!), 'Science-Friction?' (the twin sister of 'Logic, Let Me Introduce You To This Window', specifically detailing all the utterly bollocks science conceits on display) and 'Flying Saucers Rock 'n' Roll' (a new title for 'Soundtrack', looking at the music).'
'The book will begin with an introduction - Invasion: Albion - in which the author discusses - in addition to his ambitions to be a flying left-winger for his beloved United and pilot Thunderbird 2 and (in the evenings) be the tambourine-player with Slade - how he became fascinated with SF as a child of 'The Space Age' in the late 1960s; a time of the real-world Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions and the launching of communication satellites (including the British Ariel programme), mind-expanding TV series like Doctor Who, The Avengers, UFO and Captain Scarlet & The Mysterons and the imported delights of Batman, Star Trek, The Time Tunnel and The Invaders. Plus the era's space-influenced pop-music ('I'm the Urban Spaceman', 'Space Oddity', 'Rocket Man', 'Starman' et al). And, during the 1970s, by the BBC's regular Saturday Night at the Movies showings of many classic US SF (The Day The Earth Stood Still, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, The Blob, The Andromeda Stain, Colossus: The Forbin Project). Yet, interestingly, British cinematic SF tended to be rather ghettoised on TV; more of a BBC2 staple, often included in those memorable Saturday late-night horror double bills of the mid-1970s. Unlike horror, SF movies didn't acquire their own regular slot on the ITV regions either - often, you had to search quite hard to find these films when they did, occasionally, turned up on television. The introduction will also discuss the development of British science-fiction literature during the late-Nineteenth and into the Twentieth-Century and the themes of the genre. How, for example, British SF of the 1950s and 1960s was - like their US counterpart - heavily informed by the fears generated by The Cold War but, unlike most American movies, also included many direct references to British's experiences during the Second World War.'
'There will also be a, brief, discussion on whether "sci-fi" is, as some genre fans seemingly believe, a sneeringly insulting term for the genre (this author doesn't believe it is, but he does tend to use 'SF' as an preferred alternative. Because he's like that). Another essay, More or Less Discovered in a Junkyard, discusses the parallel development of the BBC's (and early ITV's) interest in SF from 1938 and the first TV performance of R.U.R. through adaptations of the works of important authors like HG Wells, JB Priestly and John Wyndham, to 1963 and something sinister stirring in Totter's Lane.'
'Overall,' the pitch concluded, 'the book will be of a similar size and dimensions to Return to the Vault of Horror, approximately sixty titles covered, two hundred thousand words, four hundred to four hundred and fifty pages; it will include a dedication, many acknowledgements, extensive footnotes, a full bibliography and the usual (highly self-indulgent) About The Author piece. Keith Telly Topping remains a self-unemployed award-winning author, novelist, journalist and broadcaster and is, like, totally groovy and just a little bit dangerous. In his mind. As well you know.'
So, here's where this blogger is likely to be over the next few weeks, dearest fiends. If you want him, you'll have to shout loudly over the noise of all the spaceship.
Meanwhile, on a somewhat-related theme, on Saturday of this week it was exactly sixty one years ago that very evening that the greatest TV format in the history of the medium (bar none) began. But, enough about The Chars starring Elsie and Doris Waters, much has already been said and written. There was also some right old toot about a madman in a box which started that night, apparently. Wonder whatever happened to that.
According to this website, a man in Mobile, Alabama, was attacked by owls twice in less-than-a-week. Maybe it was something he said? Well, they're vicious funkers, them owls. Just ask some voles. They're also not what they seem, apparently.
