Andrew Nette returns to Derry and Toms as we continue to muse over some formative telly, novelisations and other stuff but on this occasion to talk about Nigel Kneale’s enduring and iconic character Professor Bernard Quatermass (and a load of other digressions, naturally, including brief musings on a favourite mercenary war flick). We roam around the original Hammer films, the impact of Quatermass on the zeitgeist and, most specifically, the 1979 serial and its novelisation by Nigel Kneale himself.

HUFFITY-PUFFITY PUFF!!!

Loz returns to Derry & Toms to talk about the remaining tales we haven’t covered that complete The Weird of the White Wolf. 

Elric tests some early chat-up lines in While the Gods Laugh, Moonglum finally shows up in The Singing Citadel and Loz bares all (though not his nipple) in a grievance-filled tirade against neopolitan ice cream.

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Here we are in March and the schedule is hotting up. As of yesterday, we have three episodes in the can queued for editing and many more on the itinerary.

Yesterday I recorded with Andrew Nette for the third time and it’s always a pleasure Andrew, particularly when you tell me it’s a balmy evening down under whilst drinking an iced Tullamore Dew and I’m sitting there freezing my knackers off drinking lempsip on a grey, miserable and wind-swept Bradford morning.

Anyway, minor grumbles aside it was a great conversation as always and we went off down various rabbit holes, as is de rigueur for Breakfast in the Ruins. One, in particular, was around the English character actor Percy Herbert, who will be a well-known and instantly recognisable face to anyone of my ilk as he appeared in around 90 films over the post-war period up until his death at the age of 72 in 1991.

Sometimes it takes such an observation to kick off a brief investigation into folk like Percy and he had a staggeringly eventful life. He served in WW2, was injured in the Far East, and ended up in Singapore’s Alexandra Hospital, the scene of the notorious 1942 massacre of doctors, nurses and patients by the invading Japanese Imperial Army. Subsequently, along with just a handful of other survivors, he was sent to Changi POW camp and over the remainder of the war was put to work on the Burma Railway, where not only would he work on the Bridge Over the River Kwai, but post-war be cast in the film and pull dual-duty serving as consultant to director David Lean.

Later he would go on to feature in Carry On films, dozens of other war movies (including a personal favourite of mine – Too Late the Hero – if you haven’t seen it it’s a great example of the very rare selection of acerbic and deeply cynical war movies that focus upon the British army in the Far East in WW2*, albeit it’s a US-produced Robert Aldrich flick) and even genre flicks like One Million Years B.C. 

And, naturally, he rocked up in The Wild Geese alongside Richard Burton, Roger Moore, Richard Harris and a busload of other British war cinema bit-part stalwarts…

What a fucking dude!

He has now made it onto my fantasy casting list. I gave this some considerable thought and I’ve settled on von Villach, chief lieutenant to Count Brass. His final appearance was in the 1987 film The Love Child alongside a young Peter Capaldi who, incidentally, would make a pretty great Bowgentle.

In podcast news, the first of those three queued-up pods will be appearing in a week or so and we’ll be back with Elric as Loz and I complete our reading of The Weird of the White Wolf, which we started way back in episode one with The Dreaming City.

But first, Phil and I have the small matter of decamping to Great Yarmouth for our annual nerd-in Sci-Fi Weekender where we generally just hoot it up staying in a trailer for a long weekend talking to comic artists, drinking over-priced beer and forcing down our free VIP Jagermeister. I’ll probably post another report from that very trailer so stay tuned…


*See also The Long and the Short and the Tall

Derek AKA Imrryr returns to Derry and Toms to talk about fellow New Yorker Robert Sheckley, the late master of SF satire and absurdist parables, and his rather unusual and wigged-out 1975 opus… Options.

Spoiler… it’s out there… AND I LOVE IT!

All of the Imrryr catalogue is available via Bandcamp, including merch, and when I get the links for the upcoming physical releases I’ll add them here.

This week the podcast passed 100k downloads on Podbean, a momentous occasion worthy of celebration here at D&Ts.

We’ve been going just about four and a half years, give or take a few weeks, and we have no intentions of slowing down. There are two episodes in the can for editing and they will be numbered 79 and 80.

Ep 79 signals the arrival of one of my favourite SF novelists at BITR, Robert Sheckley who, despite being a New Yorker, was entirely unknown to Derek. So a service rendered there methinks (Derek may disagree). I picked up a few Sheckleys from Pops back in the day and we’re kicking off with possibly the most challenging. This chat also further prized open another rabbit hole that we’ll be delving into in the coming months.

Ep 80 is a return to the Elric saga in the company of Loz (plus a host of traditionally syrupy libations).

Post-recording we also reminisced about our 1994 trip to Prague when, thanks to the bravery/folly of youth, we booked flights with a return two weeks later and just decided to wing it re accommodation and everything else on arrival. Of course, we had no idea that the Czech Republic’s second language was German, with English coming around 17th on the list. Nevertheless, the locals were amazing and we got by on their positivity and our complete lack of front. Probably the most entertaining two weeks of my life. And this morning I have a slight strain from laughing so hard at the recollections.

This occasion also marked our first use of a pair of shotgun mics that I picked up off eBay. I’m always looking for ways to refine our sound where I can and this marks my first venture into using them so… Results to follow. When recording online with pards overseas or residing in Parts Unknown I also got fed up of Zoom causing issues so the last couple have been recorded using Riverside.fm and that has resulted in a better workflow. So steady improvements across the board. I had thought about revisiting older episodes recorded when I knew less and looking to upgrade the sound. I decided against though. There’s something raw about the earlier episodes and, for example, taking away the character and ambience of recording in Tash’s kitchen complete with dogs, pots and pans and the constant intrusions of her electric fag lighter would harm them I reckon. So listening to our catalogue (all soon-to-be 80 episodes) can just remain a curve as listeners can hopefully hear the results of our ongoing development.

That said, I probably worry about this far more than I need to given that the upload to podbean compresses the hell out of it all anyway. But still. I like to arse about with it all. It’s therapeutic.

So it turns out there’s a ‘Britain is Fucked’ novel about Hawkwind tonning around in a van fighting ghosts and squares with guns that shoot their music AND that happens to feature Moorcock as a tertiary character with a saucy house computer.

WHO KNEW???

Well, some of you did obviously… but I didn’t until my mate Yarks sent me a copy for my birthday a few years ago. It turns out that I was dimly aware of author Michael Butterworth at the time as I’d had some of his Space 1999 novelisations on my shelf for f’n years without realising that he was one of the dudes behind Savoy Books and appears to be a really cool cat.

So who better to drop by Derry and Toms to talk about it than Joe Banks, author of Hawkwind: Days of the Underground: Radical Escapism in the Age of Paranoia?

Nobody. Nobody better.

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