Timeslip – SF Universe

TOM’S MIDNIGHT GARDEN (1958) by Philippa Pearce

This time out, I’m going to take a look at something completely different. It’s a classic Young Adult/children’s novel written by a British author who is very famous on this side of the Atlantic, but is probably a lot less-known to readers in the US.

Ann Philippa Pearce OBE (22 January 1920 – 21 December 2006), better known simply as Philippa Pearce, was a famous English author of children’s literature. She wrote over thirty books during the years 1955–2008, and quite a few of her books and short stories fall under the fantasy and supernatural heading, including this particular novel, Tom’s Midnight Garden.

TITLE: TOM’S MIDNIGHT GARDEN
AUTHOR: Philippa Pearce
COVER ARTIST/ILLUSTRATOR: Susan Einzig
CATEGORY: Novel
SUB-CATEGORY: YA/Children’s Fantasy
FORMAT: 1st Edition Hardback, 229 pages
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press, December 1958.
ISBN: 0-19-271128-8.

Tom’s Midnight Garden belongs firmly in the classic timeslip fantasy sub-genre, which was so popular in British fantasy literature during the second third of the twentieth century. It’s a charming, gorgeous, beautifully-written tale about the relationship between a young boy, time-slipping from the late-1950s back to the 1890s (and moving closer in time as the story progresses), and the young girl he meets and befriends there.

SYNOPSIS:

Tom Long is a young boy sent to stay with his Uncle Alan and Aunt Gwen, when his brother Peter gets measles. They live in a small upstairs flat of a huge house, which was once an impressive Victorian mansion. There’s nowhere for him to play, as there’s no garden, nothing but a tiny yard to park cars. The old landlady, Mrs Bartholomew, who lives in a room at the very top of the stairs, is a strange one. She keeps to herself, and hardly anyone ever sees her. She certainly doesn’t like children running about, so Tom is expected to be quiet and behave himself (some chance of that – young boys must get up to mischief).

Most strange is the grandfather clock down in the hall. Tom can’t get to sleep at night, so he lies listening to it as it strikes midnight. But instead of striking twelve times, the clock strikes thirteen! Overcome by curiosity, Tom sneaks downstairs, opens the back door, and finds not a dingy little back yard, but a huge sunlit garden (hey, it’s supposed to be midnight!). So every night when the clock strikes thirteen, Tom runs downstairs and out into the gorgeous Victorian era garden.

He meets and befriends a lonely little girl called Hatty, who becomes his only playmate. Tom sees many other people in the garden, but only Hatty (and the gardener) can see him. All the other kids think that Hatty is playing alone, and that she’s a bit of a weirdo. But strangely, on each nightly visit to the garden, Tom seems to be jumping around in time, mostly forward. Hatty is getting older, at first slowly, from a little girl a fair bit younger than Tom, to a girl his age, then faster and faster until she is much older than Tom, eventually becoming an adult. At this stage of the novel, she is courting a suitor (Barty), and she doesn’t seem to see Tom any more. He is becoming more and more insubstantial until he fades away altogether.

On the very last night before he’s ready to go home, Tom runs downstairs as usual. But the garden is gone. There’s nothing there but the dark, dingy back yard. Tom crashes into bins, knocking them over and causing quite a racket, waking up the residents. He lies there sobbing, calling out Hatty’s name. His Uncle Alan picks him up and helps him back into the house, excusing what happened to be a result of Tom “sleepwalking”.

The next morning, Tom is summoned up the stairs to apologise to Mrs. Bartholomew. But instead of getting a major telling-off, he is greeted warmly and is astonished to find out that the old woman is actually Hatty, who had heard him calling out to her the previous night. She explains everything to Tom, including what happened after his final visit to the garden. On leaving her, he rushes back up the stairs and, to the amazement of his Aunt and Uncle, gives Mrs. Bartholomew a big hug, like he’s known her all his life, and as though she is still a little girl.

Tom’s Midnight Garden was Philippa Pearce’s second novel, and was published by Oxford University Press in 1958. It is by far her most famous book, and it won the prestigious Carnegie Medal in 1958, an annual British literary award (first awarded in 1936) given to that year’s outstanding new book for children or young adults (its nearest equivalents in the US would be the Newbery and Printz Awards). It’s beautifully written, from the intelligent story, to the touching relationship between Tom and Hatty (and her older self, Mrs. Bartholomew), and the regular correspondence between Tom and his brother Peter, to whom he writes daily accounts of his adventures in the garden with Hatty, as Peter recovers from his bout of measles. Quite a few of the scenes in the book are exquisite and genuinely moving.

It’s quite a different kind of book to the mainstream fantasy that most readers devour today. Pearce’s novel comes from a storytelling tradition of an earlier age, from an era before mainstream fantasy became dominated by Tolkein and the endless stream of clones/copycats that took over the bookshelves in the wake of the meteoric rise in popularity of the Lord of the Rings books during the 1960s, and which still rule the bookshelves today, more than half a century later. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings trilogy was written during the years 1954-1958, so Tom’s Midnight Garden was a contemporary literary work. However, it is an entirely different kind of fantasy to the Lord of the Rings books. Thankfully, I may add, as I am certainly no fan of the Tolkeinesque brand of high fantasy.

Tom’s Midnight Garden has been a lifelong favourite of mine, ever since I was a young boy. I first read it when I was nine or ten, picking it up from the school library. I also had easy access to it over the years as it was readily available from local libraries (it was a very popular book in the UK back in the day). So I was able to revisit it quite a few times during my teens and twenties. I eventually bought my own paperback copy back in the 1970s (the 1976 Puffin paperback edition), which I dig out every couple of years for a re-read.

Philippa Pearce’s classic novel was one of those remarkable childhood favourites that made an indelible mark on me as a young boy, and my love for this book will remain with me till the day I die. This is a true children’s fantasy classic, and every young boy or girl really should read this gem at least once in their lives. Hell, even if you are not quite so young any more, if you have never read this book, put it right at the top of your “To Buy” list.

Sci-Fi on Television (Part 1)

I\’m a big fan of sci-fi on television, which I almost always refer to by its \”proper\” name, telefantasy. The 1950s-1990s were, in my opinion, the Golden Age of telefantasy, and the first real telefantasy started about a decade or so before my birth (in December 1960), when Captain Video and His Video Rangers first appeared on US television in 1949, followed closely in the early 1950s by the likes of Space Patrol, Tom Corbett: Space Cadet and Rocky Jones: Space Ranger.

UK telefantasy was slightly slower to get off the mark, and it was mostly with one-offs like the 1949 adaptation of H. G. Wells\’s The Time Machine and the prestigious 1954 adaptation of George Orwell\’s 1984. The first ongoing, serialized sci-fi productions of any note were the three Quatermass serials which aired in 1953, 1955 and 1958. These were the first real stars of pre-Doctor Who UK telefantasy, and, in my opinion, the classic 1958 six-part serial Quatermass and the Pit remains, to this day, one of the greatest examples of telefantasy ever produced.

But those were all produced and televised well before I was born, and it\’s only really been in more recent years that I\’ve discovered and begun looking back at some of the much older telefantasy series, which aired in the years between the first appearance of Captain Video and His Video Rangers in 1949 and the very first episode of Doctor Who, in November 1963. It would be the mid-1960s before I started to show the first glimmers of interest in any kind of sci-fi on contemporary television.

I\’ve been an avid viewer of sci-fi television of all kinds ever since the time that Doctor Who first began to register in my very young and impressionable mind around 1966-1967. But it was when Jon Pertwee first fell out of the Tardis at the beginning of Spearhead from Space, in January 1970, that marked the moment where I can definitely say that I made the leap from merely enjoying Doctor Who, to becoming an obsessive, life-long fan.

I also became a huge fan of the original Star Trek, which first appeared on UK television channel BBC1 in July 1969, and also the new live-action Gerry Anderson series UFO, which first aired on ITV in 1970. I\’d previously watched, and enjoyed, the various Anderson puppet shows such as Captain Scarlet, Thunderbirds and Stingray, but I preferred the live shows, and UFO was where I first became a real Anderson fan.

By December 1970 (when I\’d reached my tenth birthday), with Pertwee almost a year into his tenure on Doctor Who, Star Trek at the height of its popularity on BBC1, and UFO featuring prominently on ITV, I was now old enough to really start understanding and appreciating television sci-fi in general. These were the first three telefantasy series that I really got into, and it\’s no big surprise that these series have always remained right at the very top of my list of favourites.

As I moved into the 1970s, things really started to heat up. I began to get heavily into other UK telefantasy series such as Timeslip, The Tomorrow People, Space: 1999, Blake\’s 7 and Sapphire and Steel. I was also hooked on then-current 1970s US telefantasy such as the animated Star Trek, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Wonder Woman, The Incredible Hulk, Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galactica. And, of course, UK television was also awash with re-runs of the various Irwin Allen series, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Land of the Giants, The Time Tunnel and Lost in Space, plus re-runs of other classic US \”cult\” TV sci-fi series such as The Invaders, The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits.

Take all these great telefantasy series, and the fact that the early 1970s marked the time that I was moving into my teens, and it was a great time for a young fan of sci-fi television like myself.

To Be Continued…

Classic British Telefantasy: My Top Ten Favourites (Part Two)

Here\’s the second part of my rambling list of favourite Classic British Telefantasy series:

At Number Four is Sapphire and Steel, one of the strangest telefantasy series ever. Short on budget, hence relatively scarce (but effective) special effects, but oozing with quality writing, and oppressive, frightening mood and terror, this was a truly classic sci-fantasy series, featuring two of the most charismatic and mysterious central characters in telefantasy history, Sapphire (played by Joanna Lumley) and Steel (played by David McCallum). The sheer mystery, the fact that nobody ever found out who or what the main characters really were, where they came from, or what the hell was actually happening most of the time, added greatly to the attraction of the show. The fact that Sapphire and Steel was rarely repeated on television also added to the effect, as all we had to go on for many years were our fading memories. Luckily the series has been made available in recent years, firstly on VHS video, and then on DVD. And even more fortunately, it definitely lives up to our fond memories of the show.

At Number Three, it\’s UFO, by far my favourite of the Gerry Anderson shows, not a stone\’s throw from the top of my list of favourite British telefantasy series. First airing in 1970, and set in the not so far off future of 1980, the gorgeous hardware, the aliens, sexy women (those gorgeous moonbase babes – Gay Ellis, oh my poor heart!), and interesting characters were a huge attraction for a young boy like me. From an adult perspective, that totally kitsch, retro futuristic feel (unintended at the time, of course), gives UFO an undeniable charm that allows the series to still hold up really well today. The complex alternate-universe 1980-that-never-was, combining a mix-mash of styles from 1970 and the imagined future \”1980\” (which actually feels more mid- or late-21st Century) give it a retro but also an undefinable \”sometime just a few years from now\” feel which makes the show work even in 2013, although its version of a 1980 \”future\” is actually thirty-three years in our past.

At Number Two, it\’s Quatermass. If there\’s any British telefantasy that might give Doctor Who a run for it\’s money, it has to be Quatermass. The original Quatermass serials were well before my time (I wasn\’t born until 1960, and those serials appeared in 1953, 1955 and 1958), although I really enjoyed the three film versions and the 1979 Quatermass serial featuring John Mills as the Professor. Reading a number of excellent Quatermass articles in various telefantasy fanzines during the 1980s really fired up my interest in the original 1950s serials. I was also fortunate, at some point during the early 1980s, to come upon three books containing the scripts/teleplays of all three original 1950s serials (complete with nice b&w photos). I was hooked on the original serials even more by that time, and, just to complete the circle, soon afterwards I also bought the novelization of the 1979 serial. I was now a hardcore fan of Quatermass in all its forms, both serials and films.

A few years later, I was absolutely elated to get my hands on the VHS video release of the third (and the best of the three) 1950s serial, Quatermass and the Pit, and finally got to see what all the hype was about. I\’d always loved the 1967 film version of Quatermass and the Pit, but the original serial absolutely blew my mind. It was way, way better than the film, and remains, to this day, my favourite ever single piece of British telefantasy. If the first two serials had been as good as the third (only two episodes of the first serial still exist), Quatermass might\’ve made it to the Number One spot in my list. I was doubly delighted, about ten years ago, to get my hands on the excellent three-DVD release of The Quatermass Collection, featuring the beautifully restored Quatermass and the Pit, the entire (unrestored) Quatermass II, and the two surviving episodes of the Quatermass Experiment. This remarkable DVD set is an absolute treasure, and any British telefantasy fan worth their reputation should have a copy of this in their collections.

And finally, at Number One, it\’s Doctor Who, just about my favourite telefantasy series of all time. I\’ve been watching Doctor Who since I was five or six years old, way back in the mid-1960s. I like the modern version of Doctor Who, but not as much as the classic 1963-1989 series. I love the classic 1960s Hartnell and Troughton b&w stories, but my favourite Doctor Who eras were the Jon Pertwee years and the first half of Tom Baker\’s run on the show. In my opinion, the Tom Baker/Philip Hinchcliffe years were, without a shadow of a doubt, the best ever in the show\’s history. This show had (and still has) so much history, continuity and detail. The Doctor(s) and the Tardis, travelling anywhere in time and space, Daleks, Cybermen, Ice Warriors, Sutekh the Destroyer, Omega, the Master, the list goes on and on and on, spanning the alphabet, from Autons to Zarbi, Doctor Who is immense. It was a huge part of my growing up process from early childhood right up into adulthood and to the present day (I\’m now 52), this is the British telefantasy series (indeed THE telefantasy series, British or not) that has had the biggest effect on my life.

And just outside the Top Ten, in no particular order:

The Avengers – I quite enjoyed the weekly exploits of John Steed and Emma Peel, and later Tara King (I was too young to remember the earlier stories with Cathy Gale). Emma and Tara were certainly extremely easy on the eyes, and those two ladies absolutely kicked ass each and every week. The series was extremely psychedelic (hey, it was the Sixties!) and was overly camp at times. I was never a fan of the camp thing (hated it, actually), a major reason why I didn\’t enjoy the show quite as much as other UK telefantasy shows. I also quite liked The New Avengers, although it only occasionally crossed into telefantasy from its primary action adventure format. But it was worth watching for Joanna Lumley, playing Purdey, another gorgeous yet kick-ass Avengers female.

The Champions – enjoyable super-spy hokum in which three super-powered agents save the world each and every week from mad scientists and other menaces. I quite enjoyed this, although, with the exception of a handful of episodes, there was very little real sci-fi in the series, other than the agents showing their weekly portion of super strength, super speed or telepathy. I mostly liked it for the great theme tune and the epitome of eye candy provided by the absolutely gorgeous Alexandra Bastedo (who played Sharon McCready), who was, as far as I\’m concerned, one of the most beautiful women ever in the history of telefantasy.

Thunderbirds – loved the hardware, but, unlike Captain Scarlet, most of the stories themselves were not sci-fi enough for my tastes, even at that early age. Also, and despite my liking for Captain Scarlet, I was never really a fan of those damned puppets. I hate those wooden actors! I always preferred the live-action Gerry Anderson series.

That\’s about it for the more famous British telefantasy series. At some point in the future, I\’ll be devoting one or more blog posts to other, more obscure British telefantasy, particularly series aimed at children. My own memories of most of these are very incomplete and vague, so I\’ve been buying a few of the more recommended classic children\’s sci-fi series on DVD from Amazon UK. So far, I\’ve got my hands on the entire original series of The Tomorrow People, Timeslip, Sky, Children of the Stones, The Owl Service, The Demon Headmaster and the 1980s version of Tom\’s Midnight Garden. I think I\’ll nab a few more series so I can post a reasonably comprehensive blog review.

Classic British Telefantasy: My Top Ten Favourites (Part One)

I love television sci-fi (also known as telefantasy). But as much as I like the US sci-fi television shows, I\’ve always been an even bigger fan of British telefantasy. So I\’ve compiled a list of my favourites, in this case sticking to the more famous classic series, avoiding the more obscure shows, as they\’ll be a subject of another article at a later date. I\’ve also made a point of staying away from more modern series, preferring to concentrate on series from the 1980s and earlier.

There are also a few other series that I haven\’t listed, as I never really watched them when they were on TV. Star Cops is a perfect example. I liked what little I did see of it (and it was VERY little), but I didn\’t see enough of it to make any kind of informed comments about the series as a whole. Maybe one of these days I\’ll get around to picking up Star Cops on DVD from Amazon UK, and rectify that situation.

I\’ve also deliberately avoided listing the classic children\’s telefantasy series, as those are a different category, and will also be the subject of a later article. Some of them, like The Tomorrow People and Timeslip, are quite well known, but most are pretty obscure these days, at least in comparison to Doctor Who, Blake\’s 7 and the other more famous telefantasy shows, and are remembered only by those people who saw and loved them back when they were kids. I have only vague memories of most of them from my own childhood (I was only nine years old when Timeslip aired back in 1970). The ones I do remember, or that I actually have on video/DVD, will be the subject of a later post in the Classic British Telefantasy series.

So here, in reverse order, is the first half of my list of Top Ten Classic British Telefantasy series, spanning the period from the 1950s to the 1980s:

Firstly, at Number Ten, we have Survivors, the extremely grim Terry Nation post-apocalyptic series in which 95% of the human race has been wiped out by a plague, and a small group of survivors tries to piece together a semblance of normal life and re-establish civilization. Despite most of humanity being eradicated by a virus, thankfully there isn\’t a single bloody zombie in sight. Every viral apocalypse in telefantasy these days ends up with freakin\’ zombies taking over the world – I\’m totally sick and tired of the endless zombie crap pushed in our faces. The most dangerous enemies that our central characters faced in Survivors were themselves and other humans. With the structure of society gone, we saw the best, and worst of humanity in this dog-eat-dog world. I also really liked the modern version of Survivors. A very good remake indeed.

At Number Nine, it\’s Captain Scarlet, the direct predecessor to UFO, and the only Gerry Anderson puppet show that I ever really liked. Almost certainly this was because of the more overt sci-fi content of the series, compared to, say, Thunderbirds, which was more of a hi-tech thriller with a few sci-fi elements, gadgets and visuals thrown in. I was too young to have anything but the most vague memories of anything before Thunderbirds (although I reckon I\’d have enjoyed Fireball XL5, as it was a hardcore space opera series, my kinda thing). As a sidenote, I\’ll also add that I REALLY liked the more modern CGI incarnation of Captain Scarlet. I actually preferred it to the original, to be honest, with the exception of the dire theme music, which doesn\’t remotely compare to the gorgeous theme music in the original series. It\’s a great pity that Gerry Anderson is no longer with us, as CGI could\’ve been the way forward for future possible revamps of other Anderson series, such as UFO and Space: 1999 (2099, 2199?). We\’ll never have the chance to find out now.

At Number Eight, it\’s Red Dwarf, the funniest sci-fi comedy, ever. I know a few sci-fi fans would consider this opinion as sacrilege, but I always greatly preferred Red Dwarf to Hitchhiker\’s Guide to the Galaxy, which I usually found to be very… unfunny. HHG was a good satire on serious SF concepts, but I guess I\’ve just never been a fan of the Douglas Adams brand of humour. Give me the crazy shenanigans of Lister, Rimmer, Cat, Kryten and Holly any day. Red Dwarf \”sent up\” sci-fi themes in a much more grass-roots, funny way that appealed to me and all its legion of fans. Some of the daft situations that Lister and co. ended up in were both mind-bending and hilarious.

At Number Seven, we have Space: 1999. As with UFO (and most Gerry Anderson series), I absolutely loved the hardware and visuals, although, I couldn\’t always say the same about the acting and stories, which could be hit and miss, particularly in the \”revamped\” Season 2. But my biggest beef with the series was the science, or, rather, the lack of it. I know that realistic science in UFO and the earlier Anderson shows was also pretty much non-existent, but Space: 1999 really took the biscuit, even by Anderson\’s usual naff-science standards. And by the time Space: 1999 appeared on UK television, I was a bit older, in my mid-teens, at grammar school, and increasingly interested in and savvy about science. I was starkly aware of just how ridiculously stupid the science and many of the plots in Space: 1999 really were, and it bugged me quite a lot, despite my overall enjoyment of the show, which was visually gorgeous and trippy, in a post-2001: A Space Odyssey kinda way.

At Number Six on the list, aptly enough, it\’s good old Number Six himself, The Prisoner. This was a really weird series, very cerebral and complex, and half the time, I didn\’t know what the hell was going on, but it was definitely great fun. To be honest, I think that everyone involved with the series was smokin\’ weed or something, it was so trippy. All I know is that I enjoyed it a lot, and made a point of tuning in every week to watch the adventures of Number Six, and his attempts to escape from The Village. My favourite bits always involved Number Six getting chased all over the place by those big, white ball thingies making those weird roaring noises. I certainly got a rollicking great surprise in the final episode, when it was revealed that the elusive Number One was none other than Number Six himself.

At Number Five in my list of Top Ten Favourite Classic British Telefantasy Series, it\’s Blake\’s 7, an inverted, dark mirror image of Star Trek. The human Federation of this series rules much of the galaxy, but this is no enlightened civilization. This Federation is a monstrous, oppressive, totalitarian dictatorship of a kind that the likes of Hitler or Stalin could only have had wet dreams about. Opposed by Roj Blake, Kerr Avon and their motley band of honourable outlaws, the ruthless and evil Servalan gave us one of the smoothest, most glamorous and icy-cold female villains in all of telefantasy. Despite liking the entire four-season run of Blake\’s 7, I had a preference for the \”Liberator Years\” of the show, as I got really miffed when they destroyed the Liberator and replaced it with that crappy garbage scow, Scorpio. Imagine replacing one of the best ships in all telefantasy with that POS! This was a stupid and overt attempt to imitate the Millenium Falcon, with Star Wars being the then-current box office phenomenon. Star Wars was riding a huge wave of popularity in all forms of media, and everyone was tripping over each other trying to imitate it in some way or another. It\’s a pity that the producers of Blake\’s 7 decided to downgrade from the Liberator to the Scorpio in order to follow a damned media trend.

OK, that completes the first half of my Top Ten Classic British Telefantasy series. The second half is coming up in Part Two.

(To Be Continued)