Spartacus (USA, dir.: Stanley Kubrick, wri.: Dalton Trumbo, 1960)

I've just started teaching a course on Classics and Cinema for the University of Roehampton.  I'm enjoying it a lot.  I've decided to blog about the movies that we're examining in detail.  The first is the 1960 classic Spartacus.

I've written about Spartacus before.  I have a few comments as part of this article, which is an introductory piece, that began as a a session in a dayschool for an Open University Roman history course, and then became an article in a fanzine.  It's a very introductory piece, and draws heavily upon the works of the more sensible.  I've read and taught a lot more on movies and films since I first wrote this back in the early 2000s, and I should really completely rewrite it now, but for now, let it stand as it is.

Anyway, Spartacus.  One thing I noticed this time round was how long the movie is.  I mean, I always knew it was long, but there are sequences that more obviously could have been cut, such as a long montage where the slaves are crossing the Apennines, which gives the impression that they have actually crossed from one side of the United states to the other, rather than from one side of Italy to the other.  And yet, as the students noticed, the movie is incoherent, with characters appearing and disappearing almost out of nowhere.  Many relationships are underdeveloped, both the marital one between Spartacus and Varinia, and the pseudo-parental one between Spartacus and Tony Curtis' Antoninus, the latter of whom could have been cut out of the movie altogether.

I think that this derives from the number of people involved in the shaping of the movie.  Stanley Kubrick was the director, but he did not have complete control as he would with later movies.  Kirk Douglas, as Executive Producer, initiated the project, and in theory was in charge.  Dalton Trumbo wrote the screenplay, drawing upon Howard Fast's novel.  Fast had been the original screenwriter, and performed rewrites on Trumbo's script.  Anthony Mann had been the original director, shot the first ten minutes of the movies, and prepared a shooting script that was used for the movie's first act.  Peter Ustinov, Laurence Olivier and Charles Laughton were pressuring Trumbo to improve their parts, and/or writing their own dialogue (the last particularly in the case of Ustinov).  And Ed Muhl, the studio head at Universal, had final approval of the script and cut.  All these individuals were pulling in different directions - Fast and Trumbo, both left wing authors, nevertheless had slightly different views of Spartacus.  Douglas wanted to make him more heroic and develop the romantic side.  Muhl was desperately trying to remove any controversy from a movie that was already controversial because of the subject matter (a hero of the Left since the nineteenth century), and the choice of source novel and screenwriter (both Fast and Trumbo had gone to prison for refusing to co-operate with the House Un-American Activities Committee).  What results is a somewhat unsatisfactory compromise between all these approaches.  And also good evidence that the auteur theory is not wholly applicable to the Hollywood production system, though of course some auteurists have been determined to find a place for Spartacus in Kubrick's overall body of work.

The other thing I noticed was how really really good Laurence Olivier is.  He is the movie's villain, but he is not a cardboard villain.  He does genuinely seem to believe that what he wants to do is for the good of Rome, and not just for his own ambition.  When he talks of the order he will bring to Rome, he almost makes   Fascism seem attractive.

There is also one scene I hadn't appreciated properly.  Ustinov and Laughton have a scene together, written by Ustinov, where Laughton talks of how they are both corpulent individuals, and that the corpulent are easy-going - the nastiest tyrants are thin.  Underlying this scene, however, is the past careers of Ustinov and Laughton.  Both had played Nero, Laughton in The Sign of the Cross (1932) and Ustinov in Quo Vadis (1951).  And Nero, of course, was both the nastiest of tyrants and corpulent.  I'm sure Ustinov had that subtext in mind.

Richard III

Archaeologists are claiming that they have found the body of Richard III under a car park in Leicester. I am suspending judgement at present; whilst there is good reason to think that they are looking in the right place, all I am prepared to accept so far is that they have found the body of a man with curvature of the spine, who died violent circumstances, quite possibly in battle, and who may or may not be Richard III.

The discovery, if that's what it is, has once again, of course, shone attention on the thorny question of whether Richard III was really responsible for the death of his nephews, the Princes in the Tower.  In The Times (behind a paywall, so no link), Ben MacIntyre is saying "Would Richard really have done away with the sons of a brother to whom he was demonstrably loyal, inviting scandal so early in his reign?"

I've long been interested in the Princes in the Tower.  I wrote the following piece orignially for the fanzine Banana Wings, issue 24 (November 2005).  It was initially sparked by something one of the editors, Claire Brialey, wrote in another fanzine, Paraphernalia, back in Easter 2001 – while writing a long article about history and film, she talked about the Battle of Bosworth Field (close to that year’s Eastercon), and mentioned "vile opportunist weaselly mean-spirited Henry Tudor". Clearly, Claire had an opinion on one of the most controversial figures of English history, Richard III.  I was further moved to write by conversations with my friend Hester Duffy.  I've done a bit of a polish to what follows, but my conclusions remain unchanged. 

The question of Richard’s responsibility or otherwise for the death of the Princes in the Tower is a controversial topic, one that can be argued over incessantly because the evidence is pretty slim and vague.

The bare facts, which are beyond question, are that in 1483 the Yorkist King, Edward IV, having finally disposed of his Lancastrian rival Henry VI, died, leaving the throne to his young son, Edward V. Edward and his brother Richard, Duke of York, were placed in the hands of their uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who would act as Lord Protector. But within months the Duke of Gloucester had deposed Edward V and taken the throne himself as Richard III. The Princes went into the Tower of London. They were technically not 'imprisoned', as they certainly weren't charged with anything, save not being legitimate heirs to the throne. 'Protective custody' probably covers it better, but to all intents and purposes they were imprisoned, and were never seen again.

After Henry Tudor defeated Richard at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, and took the throne as Henry VII, blame for the Princes’ death was firmly laid on Richard.  There it lay, encouraged by Shakespeare's portrayal ("The sons of Edward sleep in Abraham’s bosom" he has Richard say, in Richard III, Act IV, Scene III) until the nineteenth century, when the alternative theory that Henry VII was the guilty party was first aired. Since then bodies such as the Richard III Society have been pushing this latter view.

Many people’s interest, including mine and Hester's, was sparked by Josephine Tey’s 1951 novel The Daughter of Time, a fictional account of a bed-ridden detective investigating the death of the Princes; the detective concludes that Henry VII, not Richard, was the culprit. Tey’s novel is very persuasive – when I read it over twenty years ago I was prepared to accept its case. But I no longer do. And I thought I’d set out my reasons.

First of all, let us eliminate two minor suspects: Richard's ally and then enemy, Henry Stafford, the Duke of Buckingham; and Margaret Beaufort mother of Henry VII. They can be ruled out, because neither of them had access to the Princes. This leaves Henry and Richard.

Then, let me remove one piece of evidence from consideration. In 1674, two skeletons were found in a chest hidden in the substructures of the Tower of London. It was immediately assumed that these were the Princes, and it’s certainly a possibility. If it could be proved that they were, this would settle the issue beyond doubt, as the elder boy was between eleven and thirteen years old, consistent with Edward V’s age in 1483, but not with how old he would have been in 1485. But the evidence isn’t quite strong enough to make this certain, so we need to look at other arguments.

The first point made by Richard’s defenders is that it is obvious that our picture of Richard is a fabrication of the Tudors. Plainly it’s difficult to believe that Henry VII would not have taken every opportunity he possibly could to blacken Richard’s name.  He had to - Richard was a legitimately-crowned king, for all that the legitimacy of his coronation rested on dubious assertions about his nephews (to which we shall return), and Henry needed to paint him as a tyrant to justify removing him. Clearly the picture of Richard III that comes through Shakespeare is an exaggeration, presenting the Tudor-approved picture of an evil monster. I have no issue with the idea that Richard III was nothing like as black as the Tudors, and their mouthpiece Shakespeare, painted him.

But one must not over-react. Just because Richard was not as black as Tudor propaganda paints him, that does not mean he was entirely innocent of all charges laid against him. Yes, the depiction of him as hunchback is done in a malicious way,* meant to suggest that the deformed body was accompanied by a deformed character. But Richard’s defenders seem to assume that if he wasn’t deformed then he couldn’t have been a bad man, and deploy this as an argument. This is to do exactly the same thing as the Tudors, and make a link between physical form and character. We ought to be taking the view that whether or not Richard had a hunchback is irrelevant to his character.

It is argued that Richard was a popular ruler in his day. Well, he was probably more popular than the Tudors and Shakespeare would have us believe. And there is evidence that suggests he tried to be an enlightened and just ruler. But nonetheless, he did have to face two major rebellions within the twenty-six months that he ruled, in 1483 and 1485. Many of those who joined the 1483 revolt had been those who, a few months earlier, had helped him to the throne.  In any case, again, this is not strictly relevant to whether or not he killed the Princes.

The next argument in Richard's defence is that Sir Thomas More is the only source that says Richard killed the Princes. More was writing well into the sixteenth century (around 1514-1518, with subsequent revisions in the 1520s), and so was removed from the events by several decades.  Moreover, at the point he was writing, he was a strong proponent of the Tudor government. Therefore, the argument goes, he cannot be trusted in this respect.

Well, it is true that More's is the most detailed account, and there is almost certainly a large amount of dramatic invention in what he wrote. But that doesn’t mean the central point is necessarily untrue. And there are other sources from the time when More was writing, in the early sixteenth century, who name the same individual as More does, Sir James Tyrell, as being the man sent by Richard to do the deed.

Richard’s supporters might accept that, but will then argue that there was no talk of Richard killing the Princes during his reign. This is not true. There are several contemporary records that show that there was speculation about the Princes’ fate as early as the late summer of 1483.

Dominic Mancini, an Italian cleric who was in London in summer of 1483, but left soon after Richard’s coronation, wrote after his return to the Continent that ‘there was a suspicion he [Edward V] had been done away with’, but that he could not ascertain if this were true or not. There is a note written by a wool merchant, George Cely, in late June 1483, saying that there were rumours that Edward V was dead (admittedly, even if Richard was the murderer, Edward possibly was not dead at the time of Cely's note, as he may have been seen in early July). In January 1484 the Chancellor of France delivered a speech in which he alleged that the Princes had been murdered. The Croyland Chronicle states that there were such rumours in September 1483, just before the Duke of Buckingham’s revolt, but that was written in April 1486, so may not be entirely reliable. Nevertheless, whilst it could be said that these rumours and accusations were spread by Richard’s enemies, with the exception of the Croyland Chronicle, it cannot be stated that they were an after-the-fact invention of people writing under Henry VII.

Certainly, no-one saw the Princes after June or early July of 1483. It is no good arguing that this does not prove they "disappeared" then, that one would not expect anyone to have seen them between 1483 and 1485. Disappearances are dated from the last time the people concerned were seen (see, I watch Without A Trace!), so the Princes disappeared at the point that they were last recorded as being seen, in 1483. It is often said that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”, but whilst this is a good rule of thumb, it is only that, and is better formulated as “absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence”.    Arguments from silence are not always invalid, and if there is no evidence where evidence ought to be expected, then it’s legitimate to draw inferences. (Compare Sherlock Holmes’ curious incident of the dog in the night time.) Moreover, the trouble with attacking the argument that there is no evidence for the Princes being alive as an argument from silence is that the counter-argument, that there is no evidence that they were dead, is equally one from silence.

It is true that the Princes’ entourage was probably progressively reduced until there would only be a couple of jailers – it is known that they had a doctor who used to visit from outside, but he stopped being summoned after July; possibly evidence that there was nobody to be summoned for after that. In any case, not many people would have direct contact with them.

Nevertheless, the Tower was, among other things, a royal residence (which is why the boys went there in the first place), right in the middle of London. There were people coming and going on a regular basis. In two years, someone ought to have caught sight of them, and I find it suspicious that no-one did. Other royal personages of similar ages, such as their sister Elizabeth of York, or Richard III's illegitimate son, John of Gloucester, are recorded in the sources as being alive in this period, making the Princes' absence even more worthy of comment.

As I have said, in the summer of 1483, there were rumours that the Princes had been killed, but when no evidence was forthcoming either way, the rumours died down. Had there not been these rumours, maybe the Princes’ continued presence would have gone unremarked; but given that there were rumours, I would have thought someone might have recorded that the rumours were untrue, had the Princes been seen. Basically, the evidence does not admit that they were. And if they were not seen, then it is more likely that they were killed than that Richard III kept them alive but completely incommunicado – why should he do that? Also, by late June 1483 Richard was already giving some of Richard of York’s titles away to favoured supporters.

The pro-Richard camp would counter this by asking why Richard would kill his own nephews. That’s the wrong question. The right question is “why wouldn’t he kill them?” Once he had seized the throne, their continued existence posed a threat to his power. Had they fallen into anyone else’s possession, they could have been used to legitimate a challenge to his power. Getting rid of them made solid dynastic sense. I cannot see why Richard would have kept the Princes alive, except out of sentiment - but if he was sentimentally attached to them, why declare them illegitimate and depose Edward V?

And it is no good pointing out that the Princes had already been declared illegitimate, and asking why Richard needed to kill them as well. Declaring the children illegitimate wouldn't remove them as political pawns. Their illegitimacy was based on suspect, or at least arguable, grounds, that Edward IV was already precontracted to marriage when he married Elizabeth Woodville. Given the lack of clarity around the alleged precontract, many people (Elizabeth Woodville herself, for a start) would have disputed this, and the illegitimacy was quite reversible (in effect, Henry VII declared them legitimate when he married their oldest sister, Elizabeth of York).

But, the argument goes, all through Edward IV’s reign Richard had been a loyal servant of his brother and defender of his brother’s family. And when he took possession of Edward V, he was just asserting his position as Protector, as appointed by Edward IV.

This makes unwarranted assumptions about continuity of behaviour. How Richard behaved under a strong king, and how he behaved under the rule of a twelve year-old boy, when many people were jockeying for position, might well be two quite different things. The trouble with this argument is that if Richard was so concerned for the welfare of his nephews, why didn’t he just stop when he’d made himself Protector? (A role, incidentally, which it is not absolutely certain Edward IV granted him on his deathbed.) He could have been content with that. Instead, he went for the throne, deposing his nephew and declaring thier parents' marriage invalid.  That is not the most loyal thing he could have done for his dead brother, and something that is, I think, very hard for Richard’s apologists to argue away.

They try to, by saying Richard only took the throne because a priest declared that the Princes were illegitimate. Supposedly, that took Richard by surprise, because he hadn’t summoned any troops yet, which he would have done if the declaration of illegitmacy were part of a coup plot.

But the notion that somebody very powerful who had a lot to gain, i.e. Richard, was not behind the attacks on Edward V’s legitimacy is really hard to take. One did not causally declare the reigning monarch a bastard, especially on such disputable grounds. Richard had no need to accept the arguments if he didn’t want to – I just don’t buy the idea that he was forced into declaring his nephew illegitimate (even if, as might be the case, there was truth to the matter). Moreover, it’s not true that the summoning of troops came afterwards. Richard called for troops from York on June 10th or 11th 1483. The sermon attacking Edward V’s legitimacy came on June 22nd. Richard III’s coronation was on July 6th. He moved pretty quickly for someone taken by surprise.  Moreover, he had delayed Edward V's coronation twice; might that not suggest he was planning to seize the throne, and was playing for time?

Richard’s defenders then ask, if he killed the Princes, why didn’t he produce the bodies? But had Richard produced bodies, whatever gloss he had tried to put on it, he would have been accused of murder. Far better to have them quietly disappear. Okay, he would have had to cope with the rumours, but since no-one quite knew what was going on, public opinion wouldn’t necessarily turn against him. And it is notable that though he did not provide clear evidence that the Princes were dead, neither did he crush rumours of their demise by producing them alive when he might have had the opportunity.

The way Richard treated the Princes’ sisters and his nephew Edward, Earl of Warwick (the son of George, Duke of Clarence, younger brother of Edward IV, but elder brother of Richard III) needs attention. He did not have them killed, and it is argued that this proves that Richard couldn’t have killed the Princes. After all, if they stood between him and the throne, weren’t they threats as well?

Yes, they were, but Richard's failure to kill them doesn’t prove that he didn't kill the Princes. Edward of Warwick was rather different to Edward V. He was already disqualified from the succession because of the Attainder against his father Clarence (who was a dangerous traitor, rather than the dupe of Richard that Shakespeare describes), so he was less of a threat. Moreover, he was related to the Nevilles, the family of Richard’s wife and Richard’s allies, so there was reason to keep him alive.

The Dowager Queen Elizabeth Woodville and her daughters were holed up in Westminster Abbey until February 1484. When they emerged, Elizabeth Woodville extracted very clear, public and witnessed guarantees for their safety – if anything happened to the girls, it would soon become known. Richard accepted that because it was better than sending troops into the Abbey to drag them out. Elizabeth had manoeuvred Richard into a position where he couldn’t immediately have her tried for treason or executed. She was very clever, and won that round. The Princes had no such protection.

Richard’s treatment of the eldest daughter of Edward IV, Elizabeth of York, is distorted by the later Shakespearian tradition that he planned to make her his wife. But marrying Elizabeth of York, far from strengthening Richard’s claim to the throne, would have weakened it. Doing so for dynastic reasons would have conceded that Elizabeth was legitimate. If she was, so were her younger brothers, and if that was the case, even if they were dead, Richard would still be by his own admission a usurper. Moreover, he was already married, with no good reason to put aside his wife Anne Neville. The suggestion that he planned to marry Elizabeth only appeared after Anne’s death, and if planned by Richard was probably a desperate measure meant to weaken Henry Tudor’s position, as Henry would then not have been able to strengthen his claim to the throne by marrying Elizabeth. Alternatively, it could just be lies spread by Richard’s in-laws, the Nevilles, who were concerned that the death of Anne had weakened their own position, and wanted to forestall any possibility of Richard III marrying his niece; these lies were later picked up on and exaggerated by Tudor propaganda.

I have two further problems with the argument that Richard’s treatment of Elizabeth Woodville and her daughters and Elizabeth’s acceptance of that treatment shows the two were on good terms, and therefore the boys were still alive. Firstly, even if Richard was not the man who killed Elizabeth’s sons, he was still the man who deposed one of them from the throne of England. So there is likely to have been little familial love there anyway, and Elizabeth’s accommodation with Richard was more probably politically motivated, or simply motivated by a desire to stay alive. Secondly, if the Princes were still alive in 1484, but just being kept in the Tower for their own safety, why is there no evidence that their mother and sisters ever visited them?

Richard subsequently treated Elizabeth Woodville well, but he may well have been operating on the principle of "Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer". Elizabeth was a formidable woman, potentially hostile to Richard (indeed, she was already intriguing with her late husband’s Lancastrian enemies). Richard was trying to buy her off. Elizabeth, for her part, was taking advantage of all of this for her own purposes, to whit manoeuvring to get Henry Tudor on the throne of England (something that has a bearing, as we shall see, on whether or not her sons were alive). She did write to her son from a previous marriage, Thomas Grey, Marquess of Dorset, to encourage him to come to England and make his peace with Richard (no doubt after getting similar public guarantees of safety as she extracted for herself and her daughters); but this was part of her political plotting, giving her another ally with freedom of movement, whilst Richard was encouraging the move in order to deprive Henry Tudor of another ally (renouncing his allegiance to Henry Tudor was the condition Richard laid down), or at least to sow dissension in his enemies’ ranks. (In this he succeeded – though Dorset in the end did not come over to Richard, Henry no longer trusted him.)

It is in any case entirely possible that Richard could be lenient when political expediency suggested that this was the best course of action – he was by no means secure on his throne, so too many executions might have worked against him. He could, however, be utterly ruthless when he needed to be – viz. the fate of Lord Hastings, arrested and beheaded in a matter of hours. He also ruthlessly eliminated the Woodvilles, Edward V's maternal family. It is too simplistic to suggest that if he was lenient to one person he would be lenient to another, and especially so to suggest that he would be lenient to his family because he was lenient to others outside his family. As with all monarchs, how Richard dealt with people depended on how much of a threat to his position they posed, and the Princes posed a very great threat.

Henry VII treated Elizabeth Woodville quite badly, and deprived her of her estates. But this proves nothing with regard to the fate of the Princes. As I said, Elizabeth was a formidable woman, and may have hoped to influence Henry’s reign. Henry wanted to be his own man, so took her off the political scene as soon as it was safe to do so. There is no need,  in order to explain that, to believe that Elizabeth had discovered any complicity in the Princes’ death on Henry’s part.

Nevertheless, it is argued that surely Henry VII is a better candidate for instigating the Princes’ deaths. He had much more to gain from having them killed. This is perhaps true. I’m sure had Henry found them in the Tower in 1485, he might well have thought it expedient to get rid of them, as otherwise he would not be king himself.  They posed exactly the same threat to Henry as they posed to Richard.  They were potential figureheads around which opposition to Henry's reign could coalesce, and thus were clear threats to his rule. And the option of declaring them illegitimate was not open to Henry, as it would mean that Henry's wife, and therefore his children, were not legitimate descendants of Edward IV; Henry wanted the descent to be legitimate to strengthen his own position.

But I don’t think Henry did find the Princes in the Tower in 1485. The Princes disappeared in 1483, not 1485. For two years, years when Henry Tudor had no influence in London, there was no sign of the Princes. Again, I ask why no-one saw them at all, even a brief glimpse, if they were still alive.

Also, it can be argued that Elizabeth Woodville’s move to secure an alliance with Henry Tudor by betrothing her daughter to him would not have happened were she still expecting that her sons could emerge from the Tower. In other words, Henry Tudor got in a position to claim the crown because it was already known, or at least assumed, that the Princes were dead.

One might then ask why Henry didn’t make use of Richard’s crime in his propaganda in 1485 before Bosworth. That is an odd one, and I’m not sure I know the answer. Possibly, even though he was pretty sure that the Princes were dead, he couldn’t take the risk that they weren’t, and that Richard would respond to such attacks by producing the boys, which would have been the last thing Henry wanted. But actually, there is a reference in the Act of Attainder passed by Henry against Richard, by which he argues that Richard was an illegitimate king, to the “shedding of infants’ blood”. Now, that’s frustratingly vague to us. But it may well have been that in the context of late 1485/early 1486, it was plain to everyone what he meant.

In any case, the question of why Henry didn’t make use of the Princes in his propaganda is one that needs to be asked whether you believe Richard or Henry had the Princes killed. Because even if Henry did the deed, who would contradict him if he pointed the finger at Richard? No-one, as far as we know, had seen the Princes in two years, except possibly a few Tower servants, and they were not going to risk contradicting the new king. In the end Henry’s failure to mention the Princes explicitly is equally curious whichever side of the debate you’re on, and proves nothing either way.

And if the Princes were alive up until Henry’s arrival at the Tower, why did no-one on the Yorkist side ever accuse Henry of the murders? He spent more than a decade putting down residual opposition, yet not even either Perkin Warbeck or Lambert Simnel ever accused Henry of killing the Princes. I can see why Warbeck, who was pretending to be Richard, Duke of York, shouldn’t – it was not in his interests to give any legitimacy to Richard III’s acts. But Simnel was pretending to be Edward of Warwick, so why didn’t he bring it up? It’s all very well saying that no-one before the Tudors accused Richard of the murders, but it was the Victorian period before anyone pointed the finger at Henry.

The philosophical weakness of the whole Tey/Richard III Society argument is that it leans heavily on what a nice man Richard was, whom we only think of as evil because the Tudors did a hatchet job on him. That really won’t wash at all. Yes, the Tudors did do a hatchet job, but nevertheless he was Not A Nice Man At All. This is a man, who entrusted by his dying brother (allegedly) with the Protectorate over his nephew, instead took advantage of that position to depose the new king and be crowned in his place. The allegations of Edward V's bastardy could have been easily dismissed, if Richard had wanted to. Nor did he need to be king himself to assert his position against his enemies, the Woodvilles, though their position was certainly weakened by not being related to the reigning monarch. One can only conclude that he wanted the crown, and took it. And I find it very hard to believe that, having done that deed, he would have stopped short of bumping off two such serious threats to his position as the Princes.  The other problem with the Richard III Society position is that it not only makes Richard out to be a very nice man, it also makes him out to be a bit of a chump.

Showing that Richard was capable of the act of killing the Princes may well not be enough to show that he did it. But neither is it enough to point the finger at HenryVII just because he had it in him to do the deed (which I don’t dispute).

Anyway, when one of the arguments advanced for Richard’s innocence is that he didn’t have it in him, I think it’s entirely legitimate to point out that a man capable of deposing his own nephew was probably quite capable of having his nephews killed as well. So if we concede that Henry and Richard were both equally capable of the deed, and both had equal motivation, we come round to opportunity, and we are left with the unavoidable fact that the Princes were in Richard’s way to the throne first.

So we come back to what I consider to be the key point. Richard seized the throne in 1483, but the Princes could still be the focus for conspiracies against him. He had the example of Edward IV’s treatment of Henry VI before him – Edward had spared Henry’s life in 1465, and whilst we might well admire his humanity, it’s undeniable that he could have saved himself a lot of trouble, including having to flee the country in 1470, had he not done this. So why would Richard III have let the Princes live? For me, none of the oddities in Richard’s behaviour are sufficient to deny my basic point, that the logical thing for an usurper to do is to eliminate the monarch he has usurped, and I want good reason to believe Richard didn’t do this. There is simply no evidence that the boys were alive after the summer of 1483, and some slim, if not conclusive, evidence that it was known that they weren't.

There’s one last point to make. Some years ago, Tony Robinson made a television programme for Channel Four on Richard III, in which he included a bit on the legitimacy of Edward IV. Robinson then made a subsequent programme in which he searched for the "true monarch of Britain" if the line descended from Edward IV was illegitimate (actually this would only be the true monarch of England, as Elizabeth II’s right to rule Scotland has nothing to do with Edward IV); he turned out to be a sheep farmer in Australia, descended from the Duke of Clarence.

It seems that records from the cathedral at Rouen, where Edward’s mother was when he was conceived, show that Edward’s supposed father, Richard, Duke of York, was somewhere else entirely around the time of the conception. So, if, as Richard’s agents alleged briefly at the time, Edward was himself illegitimate (though Richard’s propaganda soon dropped this to concentrate on the less provable illegitimacy of Edward’s children, probably because Richard didn’t want to alienate all of Edward IV’s supporters), then Richard, in his own eyes, was the legitimate King (and let’s not get into an argument over the fact that the Yorkists had usurped the throne from the Lancastrian Henry VI, himself a descendant of the man, Henry IV, who usurped his cousin Richard II).

The suggestion made by Robinson was that Richard took power from the illegitimate Edward V because he felt it was the right thing to do, and then had the Princes killed because it was too risky not to (with which last statement I agree). But the suggestion was that he did this because he knew he had to, not because he wanted to. This might well explain why he was so cagey about the fate of the Princes – it wasn’t something he was particularly proud of. I can see the appeal of that, though I have to admit I still think Richard could have suppressed the illegitimacy of Edward IV and V had he wished.

To conclude, though I accept that Richard III was not as black as he is painted, and that he had many redeeming features as a King, he remains by far the most likely candidate for instigator of the murders of Edward V and Richard, Duke of York. * I originally wrote that the depiction of him as a hunchback was malicious, accepting the notion that this deformity was entirely Tudor propaganda. Now that the DNA seems to point to the skeleton in the Leicester car park being Richard, then, as there is severe curvature to the spine, Richard was a hunchback. What is malicious is the association of that with character, rather than the attributing of the feature to the Plantagenet King.

July BSFA meeting

Roz Kaveney interviewed by Pat Cadigan. http://www.bsfa.co.uk/july-bsfa-meeting-roz-kaveney-interviewed-by-pat-cadigan/

Two seminars and a review article

I spent yesterday at Masks, Echoes, Shadows: Locating Classical Receptions in the Cinema.  This was a conference organised by Jo Paul and Anastasia Bakogianni of the Open University, aiming to look at less obvious receptions of Classics in movies, i.e. not things set in the ancient world, like Gladiator or 300, but movies using, or apparently using, classical themes in other settings.  Like Jo, who expressed this opinion in her excellent review article in the 2010 issue of Classical Receptions Journal, I am a little suspicious of identifying similar themes in two separate texts, and saying that one is a reception of the other.  For a start, I think this is territorialising, attempting to suborn other fields of study to the interests of Classics.  We Classicists have a habit of doing this, and I'm not sure it's done us a lot of favours in the past.

I also worry that once one similarity between two texts is identified, it can be too easy to go look for other similarities, and impose them upon the texts.  For instance, there is a clear similarity between Virgil's Aeneid and both versions of Battlestar Galactica  - there is a very long war locked in stalemate, which is won by one side with a ruse, leaving a few survivors from the other to flee for a new home that they have been promised in prophecy.  But not everything in the Aeneid is then repeated in Galactica - people have been looking for a Dido figure in BSG, but I don't believe there is one there.

However, Ricardo Apostol made a very interesting point in his paper on Horace and Black Swan; if readers want to see a link between a Classical text and a modern one, who are we to deny them this?  I can see this point - I have no problem with, say, using Steptoe and Son to help explain Aristophanes' Knights, without implying that I believe that Ray Galton and Alan Simpson were thinking of Attic Old Comedy when they created Albert and Harold. 

It becomes more of a problem when one starts suggesting authorial intent for these receptions on tenuous grounds.  I suspect Apostol's not interested in authorial intent anyway.  I have more regard for it - I've never fully held with 'the death of the author', as creative texts are the products of human beings, who clearly had intentions, though I am sympathetic to the idea that authorial intentions and context shouldn't be the only considerations when responding to a text.

I also am concerned about the solipsism of this a bit.  If a reception is apparent to me personally, does it have any value for anyone else?  Possibly not, but if I am going to write about it, I must believe that it does, otherwise why bother communicating this?

Anyway, an excellent day, enhanced by the fact that the afternoon's papers were all on science fiction.


The second seminar is the online e-seminar of the Classical Receptions Studies Network. This has been put together by Jessica Hughes of the OU and Alastair Blanchard of the University of Sydney. The object of the seminar is to compile a list of resources for Classical Reception scholars in the area in which they wish to study the receptions, to which end a number of experts in those fields (or people like me who straddle disciplinary boundaries) have been asked to contribute some suggestions for initial reading. My contribution is, of course, the page on science fiction. I've always said that reception scholars need to work both in Classics and in the field of the reception, and there's really no way round some solid hard work here. But this seminar should help. Go have a look and make some comments. I've already had some good feedback on my page.


The review article is Brett Rogers and Ben Stevens' 'Classical receptions in science fiction'. I knew this was coming, and had, to be honest, some trepidations - what if I didn't like it, or disagreed radically with their theoretical approach? I have a chapter in their forthcoming Classical Traditions in SF, and that could have been awkward. Fortunately, I liked this piece a lot. They engage with sf scholarship in the form of Adam Roberts and Darko Suvin, and whilst there are some odd gaps in the bibliography (such as citing Istvan Csicsery-Ronay's original 'Seven Beauties' article from Science Fiction Studies, rather than the more recent book), in a field as big as sf studies this is hardly surprising.

Their article ends with seven desiderata for the study of Classical reception in sf. I can see why a survey volume that does for sf what Jon Solomon's The Ancient World in the Cinema did for the movies might appear to be something that is needed, but I'm not sure it's possible - the field is already too diverse (to be honest, I'm not sure an update of Solomon, which is already a decade out of date, is practical now either). I'm certainly not interested in writing such a work. And I think the necessity for such a book is removed by their second desideratum, an online database of Classical receptions in sf.  The other desiderata  all seem sensible, and I certainly strongly agree that people interested in Classical receptions in sf need to get out and go to the sf conferences and conventions and present there, something I've been doing for the last decade or so.

Overall, this article has spurred me to get on with my own books in the field, the forthcoming Martial's Martians and Other Stories, which will collect a number of papers I've written on various aspect of this, and a follow-up, tentatively entitled From Constantine to Palpatine, which will be a more theoretical approach.


While I'm here, I should plug a few other events.  The BFI is running a short season of television versions of Greek drama.This has been curated by Amanda Wrigley. I've been peripherally involved - Amanda was kind enough to invite me to be her viewing buddy in the BFI archives on a couple of occasions. And I shall be speaking at the associated symposium, on the sf aesthetic in The Serpent Son. And I can't go to this event (because I shall be teaching an earlier iteration of this course), but it looks really good, and I encourage others to go and tell me what I've missed.

CFP Reminder: Swords, Sorcery, Sandals and Space: The Fantastika and the Classical World

Apologies for cross-posting.  Please distribute to anyone who might be interested.

Swords, Sorcery, Sandals and Space: The Fantastika and the Classical World.  A Science Fiction Foundation Conference

29 June – 1 July 2013

At The Foresight Centre, University of Liverpool 

Guests of Honour/Plenary Speakers: Edith Hall, Nick Lowe, and Catherynne M. Valente

Call for papers

The culture of the Classical world continues to shape that of the modern West.  Those studying the Fan­tastika (science fiction, fantasy and horror) know that the genres have some of their strongest roots in the literature of the Graeco-Romanworld (Homer’s Odyssey, Lucian’s True History).  At the same time, scholars of Classical Reception are increasingly investigating all aspects of popular culture, and have be­gun looking at science fiction.  However, scholars of the one are not often enough in contact with scholars of the other.  This conference aims to bridge the divide, and provide a forum in which sf and Classical Reception scholars can meet and exchange ideas. 

We invite proposals for papers (20 minutes plus discussion) or themed panels of three or four papers from a wide range of disciplines (including Science Fiction, Classical Reception and Literature), from aca­demics, students, fans, and anyone else interested, on any aspect of the interaction between the Classi­cal world of Greece and Rome (including post-Roman Britain and the Byzantine empire) and science fiction, fantasy and horror. We are looking for papers on Classical elements in modern (post-1800) examples of the Fantastika, and on science fictional or fantas­tic elements in Classical literature.  We are particularly interested in papers addressing literary science fiction or fantasy, where we feel investigations of the interaction with the ancient world are relatively rare.  But we also welcome papers on film, television, radio, comics, games, or fan culture. 

Please send proposals to conferences@sf-foundation.org, to arrive by 30 September 2012.  Paper pro­posals should be no more than 300 words. Themed panels should also include an introduction to the panel, of no more than 300 words.  Please include the name of the author/panel convener, and contact details.

Any enquires should be sent to the e-mail address above.

Swords, Sorcery, Sandals and Space is organised by the Science Fiction Foundation, with the co-operation of the School ofArchaeology, Classics and Egyptology at the University of Liverpool.

Tony Keen

Chair, 2013 Science Fiction Foundation Conference

Conference Website: http://www.sf-foundation.org/conference

Conference Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Swords-Sorcery-Sandals-and-Space-The-Fantastika-and-the-Classical-World/208433862562456?sk=wall

Conference Official Twitter Feed: http://twitter.com/#!/SFFConf2013

The Chair of conference being interviewed about the conference: http://classicsconfidential.co.uk/2011/11/19/swords-sorcery-sandals-and-space/

2012 BSFA Lecture at Eastercon

The 2012 BSFA Lecture at Eastercon will be given by Dr Marc Morris, and is entitled 'Regime Change in England, 1066'. It draws on his recently-published book The Norman Conquest. The lecture will be given at 2.30 on Saturday April 7th, in the Commonwealth Hall of the Radisson Edwardian Hotel, Heathrow. The lecture is open to any members of Eastercon (if you're not already a member, I'm afraid membership is now closed).

Marc is a mediaeval historian and broadcaster.  He presented the television series Castle in 2003, and wrote the accompanying book (a new edition comes out in May 2012).  He is also the author of The Bigod Earls of Norfolk in the Thirteenth Century, and A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain.  His new book, published on March 29, is a history of The Norman Conquest.  Copies will be available to purchase at Eastercon. He also appeared in the most recent episode of Time Team.

The BSFA lecture is intended as a companion to the George Hay Lecture presented at the Eastercon by the Science Fiction Foundation. Where the Hay Lecture invites scientists, the BSFA Lecture invites academics from the arts and humanities (with a particular bias towards history), because we recognise that science fiction fans aren’t only interested in science.  The lecturers are given a remit to speak “on a subject that is likely to be of interest to science fiction fans" – i.e. on whatever they want!  This is the fourth BSFA Lecture.

Science Fiction Foundation SF Criticism Masterclass 2012

The application deadline is approaching for the 2012 Science Fiction Foundation SF Criticism Masterclass (28 February). I've been on three of the six Masterclasses, and found them extremely useful in learning about the craft of writing about sf, and in making new contacts in the sf community. This year has a particularly good set of class leaders. The Masterclass is good value, and I highly recommend it.

Details:

http://www.sf-foundation.org/masterclass/criticism2012

Science Fiction Foundation SF Criticism Masterclass 2012

Class Leaders:

• Edward James
• M. John Harrison
• Kari Sperring

The Science Fiction Foundation (SFF) will be holding the sixth annual Masterclass in sf criticism in 2012.

Dates: June 22nd, 23rd, 24th 2012.

Location: Middlesex University, London (the Hendon Campus, nearest underground, Hendon).Delegate costs will be £190 per person, excluding accommodation.
Accommodation: students are asked to find their own accommodation, but help is available from the administrator (farah.sf@gmail.com)

Applicants should write to Farah Mendlesohn at farah.sf@gmail.com. Applicants are asked to provide a CV and a writing sample; these will be assessed by an Applications Committee consisting of Farah Mendlesohn, Graham Sleight and Andy Sawyer.

Completed applications must be received by 28th February 2012.

BSFA Awards nominations

For a number of reasons (largely because we can), the BSFA awards nominations deadline has been extended until 2200 UK time, Thursday 19th January. If you're a BSFA member, please nominate here, or e-mail awards@bsfa.co.uk.

To give you an idea of what's been nominated so far, you can look at this list. Those that get the most nominations will get on the final ballot.

For the record, I've nominated Christopher Priest's The Islanders (Gollancz) in Best Novel. For Best Art I've nominated Anne Sudworth's cover of Liz Williams’ A Glass of Shadow. and in best non-fiction, I've nominated David Seed's Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction, Mike Ashley's Out of This World: Science Fiction But Not As You Know It, and Adam Roberts' introduction to Justina Robson's Heliotrope.

And I'm delighted that the collection I edited with Simon Bradshaw and Graham Sleight, The Unsilent Library, has been nominated, and that the cover by Pete Young has also been nominated.

Royal Holloway Classics Day

A few months ago, the Principal of Royal Holloway came up with a wheeze for the Classics Department - amalgamate it with History and lose six of its posts. I was amazed. This was not some minor department with a few staff too busy concentrating on their own navels to produce decent work. This was one of the best-respected departments in the country. The department's success had been recognised in more benign days by the promotion of a number of its staff to chairs.

I was lucky enough to teach a few courses there for a year in 1998-99, and it was the best experience in my teaching life up to that point. At the end of the year one student listed me as one of the best teachers they'd had - I was tremendously honoured, because I knew how good the other staff were there, and to be so considered was extremely flattering.

The College management has since modified considerably their proposals (see http://supportclassicsatrhul.wordpress.com/). But they still need to be reminded how vital the subject is. Tomorrow, there's a Classics day at the college. It kicks off at 10, and has lectures, quizzes, and a version of Aristophanes' Clouds. Unfortunately, I'm off to Germany, so I can't go. But I'll be thinking of my friends and former colleagues.

Swords, Sorcery, Sandals and Space: The Fantastika and the Classical World. A Science Fiction Foundation Conference in 2013

Swords, Sorcery, Sandals and Space: The Fantastika and the Classical World. A Science Fiction Foundation Conference

At The Foresight Centre, University of Liverpool

Guests of Honour/Plenary Speakers: Edith Hall, Nick Lowe, and Catherynne M. Valente

Website: http://www.sf-foundation.org/conference

Call for papers

The culture of the Classical world continues to shape that of the modern West. Those studying the Fantastika (science fiction, fantasy and horror) know that it has many of its roots in the literature of the Graeco-Roman world (Homer’s Odyssey, Lucian’s True History). At the same time, scholars of Classical Reception are increasingly investigating all aspects of popular culture, and have begun looking at science fiction. However, scholars of the one are not often enough in contact with scholars of the other. This conference aims to bridge the divide, and provide a forum in which SF and Classical Reception scholars can meet and exchange ideas.

We invite proposals for papers (20 minutes plus discussion) or themed panels of three or four papers from a wide range of disciplines (including Science Fiction, Classical Reception and Literature), from academics, students, fans, and anyone else interested, on any aspect of the interaction between the Classical world of Greece and Rome and science fiction, fantasy and horror. We are looking for papers on Classical elements in modern (post-1800) examples of the Fantastika, and on science fictional or fantastic elements in Classical literature. We are particularly interested in papers addressing literary science fiction or fantasy, where we feel investigations of the interaction with the ancient world are relatively rare. But we also welcome papers on film, television, radio, comics, games, or fan culture.

Please send proposals to conferences@sf-foundation.org, to arrive by 30 September 2012. Paper proposals should be no more than 300 words. Themed panels should also include an introduction to the panel, of no more than 300 words. Please include the name of the author/panel convener, and contact details.

Swords, Sorcery, Sandals and Space is organised by the Science Fiction Foundation, with the co- operation of the School of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology at the University of Liverpool.

Tony Keen
Chair, 2013 Science Fiction Foundation Conference

Relaunch of FA Online

One of the things that occupied what turned out to be the last months on Martin Skidmore's life was FA Online, a relaunch of a (or as Martin had it, the) critical comics magazine that Martin had edited in the 1980s. Martin didn't do this simply as a vanity project - he had enough outlets for his writing about comics through Freaky Trigger and his LiveJournal (and if they were Japanese, his Japanese Arts site). But Martin felt that there was a need for a good comics review site to exist, so set about creating it.

Martin could have done something wonderful with FA Online, had he been given the chance. His friends can never do the same, but at least we can stop the site ossifying, and keep it growing as a tribute to Martin's memory - and also because we think there's a need for a good comics review stuff. Which is how Will Morgan, Andrew Moreton and (very much in a junior role) myself have come together as the new editorial team. We've just done the relaunch this evening, with new reviews and features, including an article on Captain America and a review of the new Cap movie by me.

We're also keen to reproduce some of Martin's older comics journalism, back before most of this was done online, and the first of these is up, a treatment of the 'Viet Blues' story of Alack Sinner.

So go read, comment, and if you're so inclined, write for us.

A science fiction bibliography

I've recently been appointed as an external supervisor for a graduate student working on Greek mythology and science fiction novels. I'm very excited by the project, and having my first graduate student since 1998 (I'd long assumed I wouldn't get any more). As part of the initial work for my student, I prepared a core bibliography of sf academic/critical works, which I thought I would share with you all.

I wouldn't necessarily expect any serious sf academic to have read all of these books cover to cover - I certainly haven't. But I would expect any Ph.D. proposal to make reference to at least two or three of them, and I would hope that a book-length work would make reference to most of them.

They are:

Brian W. Aldiss and David Wingrove, Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (New York: Athenaeum, 1986)

Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts and Sherryl Vint (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009)

John Clute, Pardon This Intrusion: Fantastika in the World Storm (Harold Wood: Beccon Publications, 2011)
John Clute, David Langford and Graham Sleight (eds.), The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (third online edition due soon - see http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/; the second edition, ed. John Clute and Peter Nicholls, London: Orbit, 1993, corrected paperback 1999, is also worth consulting)

Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008)

Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)

Roger Luckhurst, Science Fiction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005)
Adam Roberts, The History of Science Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)

David Seed, Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)
David Seed (ed), A Companion to Science Fiction (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005)

The following works are not perhaps so essential - some of them are primarily about fantasy, but have useful insights for sf, others are on subsidiary areas of sf. But they do come highly recommended (and not just by me):

Michael Ashley, Out of this World: Science Fiction, but not as we know it (London: British Library, 2011)

John Clute and John Grant (eds.), The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (London: Orbit, 1997)

Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011 [not yet published])

Paul Kincaid, A Very British Genre: A Short History of British Science Fiction and Fantasy (London: British Science Fiction Association, 1995)

Paul Kincaid, What it Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction (Harold Wood: Beccon Publications, 2008)
Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007)
Farah Mendlesohn, The Inter-Galactic Playground: A Critical Study of Children's and Teens' Science Fiction (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009)

I'm open to comments here. Are there any obvious texts I've missed? I won't invite you to argue that there are works I've included that shouldn't be on this list, because I think they all should be.

Martin Skidmore

My friend Martin Skidmore died last night, at the ridiculously young age of 52. It wasn't unexpected - he'd been diagnosed with cancer a few months ago, and with each examination it became clearer and clearer how aggressive his cancer was. I saw him in hospital yesterday afternoon - he was asleep, and deep down I knew he wasn't going to wake up.

I'd known Martin, at first through correspondence, the best part of twenty-five years. We weren't best friends - we didn't move enough in the same circles for that - but we did like each other and respected each other's opinions. We didn't always agree - he loved the Monkees and didn't love the Beatles, and whilst I do love the Monkees, I love the Beatles more. But Martin's opinions were always backed up by a deep knowledge of whatever it was he was talking about. He was one of the best-read people I knew, but 'best read' doesn't cover it, as his breadth of experience covered music, art, film and television, as well as book and comics (and football and wrestling).

Martin loved pop culture in all its forms, but never uncritically. I knew him through his love of comics; I first became aware of him when he edited his fanzine Worlds Collide. He then became editor of Fantasy Advertiser, at the time the main comics fanzine in the UK. Over the years he was in charge, he transformed the magazine, applying new standards of professionalism in terms of production, hosting a letter column that was more than happy to wander off the subject of comics when it was warranted, and encourging reviews that cut deep below surface impressions. Of course, this met some resistance, and there were some who considered that FA (as Martin officially renamed it) had become too pretentious in leaving behind its former role as primarily a news 'zine and becoming more of a critical magazine. But the contributors (who often disagreed with each other spectacularly in the lettercol) seemed to me tho have been attempting to apply to comics the sort of critical approaches that were being used elsewhere, and why not? If they often seemed negative, that stemmed from a refusal to tolerate the drivel that so many comics publishers thought (and still think) acceptable for the readers. The result was a serious rival, at least in terms of writing quality, for The Comics Journal, with perhaps a better sense that, deep down, the writers did love comics.

Martin himself epitomised that. He was never shy of calling something rubbish if he thought it was rubbish, but his praise for work he liked was effusive. And behind this was the fact that he was basically a kind man, and also modest about his own abilities - the naming of his own column as 'So-Called Critic' illustrates this.

In the late 1980s Martin got what must have been a dream job for him; he got to edit his own line of comics. Trident published early work by such writers as Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison and Mark Millar (whose first published work was put out by Trident). I'm not going to say that these writers would not have made it without Martin, if only because he would himself scoff at such an extravagant claim. But he did provide opportunities for them to do work they might otherwise not have done, and Morrison's St Swithin's Day remains, in my view, one of the best things he ever wrote.

Sadly, financial issues with the parent company killed Trident in 1991. Martin went away and successfully reinvented himself as a Computer Scientist, and was a Senior Analyst at UCL when he was diagnosed and took medical retirement. But his love of pop culture and comics never left him, and in recent years he was a prolific contributor to Freaky Trigger and The Singles Jukebox. Last October, he restarted FA as an online presence.

I don't think I write much like Martin Skidmore. But I think he was an influence on my writing, above all in teaching me that writing must always have integrity if it is to be worth anything. Martin was incapable of anything less.

Goodbye, Martin.



(And I would like to mention Hazel and Sarah, who were troopers in looking after Martin in his last days.)

Kidbrooke Lysistrata redux

I raved about this production a couple of months back. Well, it's back, so go and see it if you can.

Conference on "The Influence of Greek and Latin Antiquity in Contemporary Science-Fiction & Fantasy Works", Paris, June 2012

I've recently become aware of the following Call For Papers.

http://colloque.antiquite-sfff.over-blog.org/pages/Call_for_papers-4933306.html

I stress that I have no connection with this conference, and am merely posting it in case it has been missed by others.

Elisabeth Sladen, 1946-2011

On Tuesday night I saw a rumour over the Internet that I hoped wasn’t true. It was that Elisabeth Sladen, famous for playing the role of Sarah Jane Smith in Doctor Who and spin-offs, on and off, for over thirty years, had died at the age of 65,* which frankly, is no age at all. A few hours later, it was obviously true. The first thing I could think of to say was “No!” It’s been a long time since a celebrity death upset me to this degree.

Sarah Jane Smith was for me, as she was for David Tennant when he was growing up, the Doctor Who girl. She has long been one of the most popular companions in the show’s history. Part of this is the result of timing; Sarah Jane was a companion in the Pertwee and Tom Baker eras, when the show’s popularity was at its height. Part of it is the length of time Sladen stayed with Who; she first appeared in December 1973, in the first story of Season Eleven (The Time Warrior), and left at the end of 1976, in the middle of Season Fourteen (The Hand of Fear). As a result, Sarah Jane was the companion for a longer time period than any other non-Doctor series regular apart from Tegan Jovanka, if one excludes the various UNIT personnel. (Tegan was companion from February 1981 to March 1984, but only appeared in 69 episodes, as opposed to Sarah’s 80; shifting transmission dates and the fact that Tegan arrived at the end of Season Eighteen and left in the middle of Season Twenty-One meant that her less than three seasons equivalent was stretched out over a longer period than Sarah’s three and a third seasons. Because the first six seasons broadcast almost all year round, Sladen does not have as many episodes to her name as Frazer Hines [113], in the role of Jamie McCrimmon, another popular companion who returned to the show some years after his original departure.) Sladen was even on the show, in terms of actual broadcast period and/or episodes made, longer than some Doctors (e.g. Patrick Troughton and Peter Davison).

And finally, between them producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks came up with an excellent character, an independent woman who, whilst clearly the junior partner in the Doctor’s adventures, was nevertheless a partner. And they then cast, in Sladen, an excellent actress who had obvious onscreen chemistry with Jon Pertwee, and later, even more so with Tom Baker.

Young girls looked to Sarah as a role model, but as Nicholas has said, it wasn’t just young girls. The following is partly a rewritten version of an article published this time last year, in Lilian Edwards’ fanzine The End of Time sorry Fanzines (Part 2), entitled “‘There’s nothing “only” about being a girl’: or, how Doctor Who made me a feminist”.

In one of life’s little ironies, I found myself writing the article the day after International Women’s Day. Actually, as it was early morning, I suppose in some places it still was International Women’s Day – Hawaii, for instance. But I wasn’t in Hawaii; I was in Kent.

I like to think of myself as a feminist. Some may say that, as a man, I can’t be. I don’t accept that. As someone wrote in a Guardian article a couple of years or so ago (and no, I can’t find it now), feminism is an ideological slant, not tied to any particular biological sex. I can be a feminist because I believe in the equality of women with men. This doesn’t mean that I am incapable of saying or doing sexist things. I was brought up as a male in a patriarchal society, so inevitably my ideals and my upbringing are in conflict with one another, and sometimes the latter will win. That isn’t an excuse, by the way – if you see me being a male chauvinist pig, then you have every right to call me on it. I’m just saying that I think it’s easier to deal with my inner sexist if I acknowledge that he’s there – the major thing I learnt from RaceFail ’09 (a massive row across the Internet about the representation of Persons of Colour and other minorities in science fiction) was that an awful lot of problems are caused by white liberals who deceive themselves into thinking that they have set aside their privilege, and get very upset when it’s pointed out that this isn’t so.

(Don’t worry, this will eventually have something to do with Sarah Jane Smith and Doctor Who. Pretty soon now.)

There are a number of factors that brought about my feminism. One is my general opposition to unfairness in all its forms (which I suspect derives ultimately from being bullied at school). One is that the girls were nicer to me at primary school than the boys (see above). One is that, after my father died in 1975, I was in a family environment that was dominated by strong women – my mother, my grandmother, and two aunts (my grandfather kept himself to himself mostly, and my uncle moved away, first to Morecambe and then to the United States). One is reading The Guardian at a very young age, and the “Naked Ape” section that then used to grace the women’s page, where egregious examples of sexism were exposed mercilessly (I wonder sometimes if the fact that The Guardian no longer has this feature is a contributory factor in the slow return of such egregiousness).

And another factor was Doctor Who, and specifically, Sarah Jane Smith (told you).

My mother used to watch Doctor Who with me on her knee, so I can recall a couple of Patrick Troughton episodes (including episode seven of Evil of the Daleks [1968], long since missing from the BBC’s archives). With the Jon Pertwee colour episodes in 1970, Doctor Who became something I watched through my own volition. And in 1973, as my views of the world were starting to form in my nine-year-old head, Doctor Who gave us a new companion. Sarah Jane Smith, played by Elisabeth Sladen.

Sarah Jane Smith was conceived to reflect the strength of feminism in wider western culture in the 1970s. This was the time of “second-wave feminism”, when the terms “feminist” and “feminism” came into common usage. Germaine Greer published The Female Eunuch in 1970, and stories of bra burning (which later turned out to be apocryphal) permeated the news media. It’s not surprising that Doctor Who should reflect those cultural developments.

Despite what is sometimes suggested, early Doctor Who didn’t have that bad a record for presenting capable, independent women, at least in the general context of the times. Barbara Wright was a history teacher, Sara Kingdom a security agent, Zoe Herriot a brilliant mathematician and Liz Shaw a Cambridge Professor. But for every Sara, Zoe or Liz, there was a Susan or a Dodo or a Polly, a girl who stood around, screamed at monsters and didn’t do much useful (and yes, I know that is unfair on all three). Sarah’s immediate predecessor was Jo Grant, who was, frankly, a bit wet. She was a member of UNIT, and supposedly had been trained as an agent – yet she spent a lot of time knocking things over and being sent to make the tea. In fairness, she got better in later stories, producing skeleton keys when the Doctor needed them in Carnival of Monsters (1973), or resisting the Master’s hypnosis in Frontier in Space (1973). But producer Barry Letts recognised that the presentation of the female companions was open to charges of sexism, and took action in an attempt to rectify this.

That action was the creation of Sarah Jane Smith, a freelance investigative journalist, who was very much her own woman, and was not afraid of challenging the imposed gender limitations that she saw around her. Of course, she was a feminist created by men, and subsequently written exclusively by men, at least through the 1970s – so undoubtedly they got things wrong about her. And, as the years went on, she became less impressive, as her role was hemmed in by the essential restrictions of the companion (who has to be someone to whom the Doctor can explain the plot, and who can advance that plot by getting in positions of peril from which the Doctor can rescue her). SF and Fantasy author Kari Sperring has told me that she never liked Sarah.

I thought, and still think, she was brilliant. Take, for example, The Monster of Peladon, a story from Sarah’s first season, broadcast in 1974. This is not a story that has a particularly good reputation. It is generally seen as a poor retread of 1972’s Curse of Peladon, with added unsubtle allegory about the 1973 miners’ dispute, which by the time of broadcast had developed into a full-blown strike, and ridiculous badger wigs for the supporting cast. This is a view that overall I think is justified, but the story does have some wonderful stuff for Sarah. Not so much the lecture about feminism that she delivers to Queen Thalira of Peladon, from which I drew the title quote for the original article; what Sarah says here is rather hectoring and cringe-inducing, and obviously a male view of what a feminist ought to say. But in Part Five, the Doctor is believed killed. Sarah is upset about this, but doesn’t just wander around in a state of shock. There’s still a crisis going on, and Sarah essentially takes over in the Doctor’s absence, leading the good guys, and chivvying them along. It’s Sarah who comes up with a plan. When the Doctor reappears, he doesn’t say that she has done wrong, or make her look foolish. He just picks the reins back up, apparently safe in the knowledge that his deputy has looked after things in his absence. He doesn’t even patronise her. This is quite astonishing for the Pertwee Doctor, who patronises everybody (in one glorious moment in Day of the Daleks [1972], a temporary time loop allows him to patronise himself!). It is indicative of how the dynamic between Doctor and companion changed with Sarah’s arrival. Indeed, all through this story, which I’ve just watched again, Sarah makes it quite clear that she isn’t going to let the Doctor get away with his patriarchal nonsense, and gives as good as she gets.

In the Tom Baker period, Sarah continued to be a trusted partner of the Doctor. She was never in charge, of course (the show is called Doctor Who, after all). But it is, for instance, Sarah that fires the shot to detonate the explosives that should (and eventually do) blow up Sutekh’s rocket in Pyramids of Mars (1975). Pyramids of Mars is actually an excellent showcase for Sarah, for the way she and the Doctor work as a team, for Sladen’s performance and for her chemistry with Tom Baker; and it is, special effects aside, every bit as good as anything that has gone out under the Doctor Who brand since 2005.

I realise I’ve been talking about Sarah Jane Smith here, not Elisabeth Sladen. But then I didn’t know Lis Sladen; I knew Sarah. Of course, Sarah would be nothing without Lis Sladen’s performance. In a very real sense, at least to the viewers, Sladen was Sarah Jane, so much so that it was jarring to see her in anything else, such as playing a shopkeeper in Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, as Michael Crawford unfunnily demolished the shop around her. For me, it probably also helped that she was a northerner; under her received pronunciation tones there flowed a foundation of pure Scouse.

Through three and a half years, I found Sarah inspirational. I wanted to know feisty, intelligent, capable women like that. Despite what some friends have assumed, I’ve never, as far as I can recall, had overt romantic or sexual feelings about Sarah Jane Smith (or Lis Sladen). Sex wasn’t part of Sarah’s appeal – the one time she wore a (very modest and proper) two-piece swimsuit, at the beginning of Death to the Daleks, it actually seemed rather incongruous. Sarah was more of a big sister type to me. But I suppose that she has something to do with my attraction in adulthood to intelligent, capable, independent women, one of whom I have since married. (And probably my inclination towards short brunettes - though actually I always thought of Sarah as taller than she was, perhaps because she acted taller, i.e with authority.)

The other thing about Sarah is that her relationship with the Doctor showed me that men and women could be friends, without there having to be Unspoken Sexual Tension. The sort of close, but non-romantic, relationship that the Doctor and Sarah had is rarely seen on television. Patrick Macnee and Honor Blackman decided that Steed and Cathy Gale would have a non-romantic relationship in The Avengers (though that didn’t stop viewers wondering if there was anything going on, and later relations between Steed and his female associates had more obvious romantic undertones). Apart from that I can think of few examples, and they are even fewer today. I thought the new Battlestar Galactica missed a trick when, having made Starbuck a woman, the creators then didn’t leave the Starbuck/Apollo relationship as just the same sort of friendship it had been in the first series; they had to introduce a sexual element. I think this is a shame, and doesn’t reflect reality, or at least my reality, where some of my closest friendships have been platonic ones with women. I’ve never been much of one for hanging out with the lads.

I didn’t much care for Leela, Sarah Jane’s replacement. Oh yes, two of her stories, Robots of Death (1977) and Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977), are amongst the very best that the show has ever broadcast. But Leela herself annoyed me. Of course, part of the problem was that she wasn’t Sarah. But beyond that, whilst she was another capable strong woman, she seemed to need to express that strength through exposing lots of cleavage and thigh. She always struck me as more of a Red Sonja-style male fantasy character.

Given everything I’ve written above, you can imagine how pleased I was that Sarah was returning to Doctor Who in 2006, in “School Reunion”. And you might have some notion of how disappointed I was when Russell T Davies, who feels that placing a man and a woman on screen together automatically signals a love story, chose to construe the relationship between Sarah and the Doctor in those terms, and to portray her as a woman lessened by the lack of a man and children in her life. Lilian Edwards may be right that this hits an emotional truth about 40-something women who have lived life to the full and then find themselves single and childless, and this does seem to have been what attracted Sladen back to the role, though others would say this is Davies, as he often does, constructing middle-aged women through soap opera cliché. What it certainly wasn’t, as I’ve argued in “Whatever happened to Sarah Jane?”, my chapter in The Unsilent Library, was the Sarah we remembered. That Sarah wouldn’t have moped for thirty years about being abandoned by the one man that was ever good enough for her. It wasn’t that she was averse to emotional attachments; she was quite capable of flirtatious banter with a rugged (if slightly dim) naval officer, or a dashing renaissance nobleman. But that wasn’t the centre of her existence. She was all about the adventures, and she would have carried on having adventures. I know people like that, so I don’t think that’s any less valid an emotional characterisation than the one RTD seems to have fixed upon. (And though “School Reunion” establishes in dialogue that Sarah’s life has been put on hold since the Doctor left her, one has to ask, if that was the case, what was she doing investigating odd goings on at a school in the first place?) Matthew Kilburn has drawn attention to a line Sarah has when she comes back in “Journey’s End”: “I’ve learned how to fight.” As Matthew says, our Sarah always knew, right from the first moment she faced up to a Sontaran. Racheline Maltese writes (http://lettersfromtitan.com/2011/04/19/elisabeth-sladen-1948-2011) about how Sarah embodies the Who theme of being about loss and love after loss. That’s certainly a valid response, but again I think it is more about the post-“School Reunion” Sarah than the one from the 1970s.

Still, “School Reunion” did lead to The Sarah Jane Adventures, the spin-off series that Sarah had always deserved. Indeed, she was the first companion that one could imagine sustaining their own series, and there have been precious few since. This was recognised by John Nathan-Turner in 1981, and I still think that K-9 and Company might have had a better chance had it been promoted as “Sarah Jane Investigates”.

The more I think about it, the more I think that Sarah, and Lis Sladen, changed the role of the companion. The elimination of UNIT furthered the intensification of the one-to-one relationship between the companion and the Doctor that had begun with Jo Grant – but Sarah made it hard for the companion to be a wallflower again (though a few were). Companions such as Leela and Romana are variations on the Sarah Jane Smith theme. The same is true of more recent companions, especially Donna Noble, who seemed consciously modelled in some respects upon Sarah. Amy Pond is a natural descendant of Sarah Jane Smith. Sarah’s influence spread further. I had a student who had been named after her. (I deny suggestions that I took an interest in this student’s career simply to have someone to whom I could say “Come along, Sarah Jane!”) In an episode of The Archers, Lizzie Archer claimed to have been influenced by Sarah (a line which, for complicated reasons I won’t go into here, I suspect was a nod towards something I had written). And I can’t imagine there being any other regular Who actor, apart from a Doctor, whose death would get this sort of coverage in the news media – certainly Jacqueline Hill and Michael Craze didn’t. (Okay, Catherine Tate probably would, but that would be for her non-Who work; similarly I reckon when Peter Purves goes.)

As Russell T Davies said (sometimes he got it right!), the world was lucky to have Elisabeth Sladen, and is poorer for her loss.

* Obituaries originally gave her date of birth as 1948, but it turns out that this was not in fact the case. This is interesting, as it means she is the only Doctor Who female companion demonstrably over thirty in her time on the show since Jacqueline Hill and until Catherine Tate came along (Caroline John may have been, but as no-one seems to know exactly when her birthday was in 1970, it's not certain; and Janet Fielding definitely was, if the birth year given in Wikipedia is correct, but definitely not if that given by the IMDb is right). This also means that if we ever go to a second edition of The Unsilent Library, we’ll have to make some corrections.

Five lies told about AV

1. "It's too confusing."

No it isn't. It's no more confusing than going into a restaurant, asking for steak pie, being told it's off, and choosing something else from the menu. Eating out would collapse if the British people couldn't handle this level of complexity.

2. "It's ridiculous that the person who came second could win."

The sporting analogies deployed to support this argument are rather simplistic, and take no account of qualifying rounds. What essentially this argument is saying is that it is ridiculous that Lewis Hamilton won the Chinese Grand Prix at the weekend, because Sebastian Vettel had won pole position in the Qualifying.

In any case, it is rank hypocrisy for this argument to be deployed by a man who became leader of the Conservative Party after coming second in the intial round of the leadership election.

3. "Nobody uses AV."

Many more people use AV in some form or other than those against admit, including, as noted, the Conservative Party in its leadership elections.

4. "A vote for a mainstream party gets counted only once, but one for a minority party like the BNP could be counted two or three times."

Nonsense. All individuals' votes are counted an equal number of times, until a result is achieved. If anything, the opposite is true - a vote for the Conservative Party will be counted two or three times, whilst a vote for the BNP may be counted only once, before they are eliminated from the contest.

Minority parties like the BNP in fact have a much better chance of getting in under FPTP than under AV. Under FPTP, an MP could be elected with 20% of the vote, if no-one else polled more. But if that 20% were the only people who would vote for this party under AV, then the MP would be elected on the basis of second place votes.

5. "It breaks the link between MP and consituency."

No it doesn't. If anything, it strengthens that, as an MP has to be responsive to more of their consituency than just the 30% who voted for them as first preference, and constituencies end up with MPs who are at least acceptable to more than 50% of the electorate, as opposed to being preferred by 30% and despised by 70%, as can happen under FPTP.

What it does weaken (and why I think some in the political establishment are so hostile to it) is the link between MP and party. More and more MPs would have to put their constituency's interests ahead of their party's (q.v. Boris Johnson, who regularly puts what he perceives of as Londoners' interests ahead of what the government wants him to do). I'm all for that.

Notes from the world of me

It's been quite a good month for me, what with one thing or another. First, the Doctor Who story The Ark was released on DVD. Back in November 2008, I was interviewed for one of the the special features, "All's Wells that ends Wells". A lot of other people were interviewed for it, so there isn't much of me, but I'm happy to say that I haven't been misrepresented, though I'm pretty sure my comment about Brian Aldiss was linked to my saying that his novel Non-Stop was a major influence on The Ark, rather than to Aldiss' being consulted when Doctor Who was being devised. And I'm sorry that there wasn't space for my argument that isn't as firmly in the Wells via Wyndham and Quatermass tradition as it is sometimes thought - more Wells via Asimov and Aldiss. (Though Matthew Sweet does rightly say that it takes a long time for the Quatermass influence to assert itself in Who - I'd argue that there is in the early stages of conception a deliberate distancing from Quatermass). And irritatingly, 2Entertain have misspelt my name ('Antony', not 'Anthony'), though it's only a minor complaint.

The end of February saw publication of the volume I've co-edited, The Unsilent Library: Essays on the Russell T. Davies Era of the new Doctor Who. I'm very proud of this - it's about a year later than originally planned (but only six months later than what our original plan ought, in retrospect, to have been), but there's a lot of work went in at the editing stage, and there are some good articles, in particular those by Graham Sleight and Clare Parody. One of the better Who collections to have come out in the last couple of years, though I says so as shouldn't.

Then a week ago Vector 265 came out. This is Niall Harrison's last issue as editor, and is a special on Stephen Baxter. I've contributed "Putting the Past into the Future: The Time’s Tapestry sequence". There is also an edited version of my review of Ian McDonald's The Dervish House. And I also contributed a short introduction to an interview with Robert Holdstock that is in the tribute booklet to Holdstock that was sent out to BSFA members.

Coming up, I have my talk at Eight Years In Babylon. I also have a chapter I'm writing for a volume on cinematic receptions of ancient Egypt, a chapter in a volume on Neil Gaiman, and a paper at the Cinema and Antiquity conference in July. So I'll be busy for the next few months! And someone wants to use a photo of mine as the cover of a book.