Even more Science Fiction Brittania

Another night of SF from BBC 4 last night....
Tom Baker Doctor Who, another episode of Day Of The Triffids, the final episode of The Martians And Us and and adaptation of a John Wyndham story called Random Quest.

The Doctor Who episode had Sarah Jane in it, looking very young. Otherwise lots of white scenery and green aliens.

Day Of The Triffids continues to be excellently creepy, and quite faithful to the book.

The Martians And Us was about British apocalyptic SF, covering M. P. Shiel up to Christopher Priest, via John Wyndham, John Christopher and JG Ballard. A selection of talking heads offered their opinions, including Doris Lessing, Brian Stableford, Kim Newman, John Christopher (aka Sam Youd), Christopher Priest and Brian Aldiss. Brian Aldiss was very funny, slagging off Day Of The Triffids ("They go to the Isle Of Wight!"), he invented the term cosy catastrophe. He then went on to say how brilliant The Death Of Grass was, and also made some witty remark about how some people don't read SF stories because they have long words like "Oxygen" in them.

I came away with a list of books to read:

• The Purple Cloud by M. P. Shiel


• The Death Of Grass by John Christopher


• The Drowned World by JG Ballard (which I've been meaning to read for ages).


• Fugue To A Darkening Island by Christopher Priest

All in all an excellent series of three documentaries, although I'd have liked them to go up to modern day instead of stop in the 70's.

Random Quest was an hour long adaptation of a John Wyndham story, which I haven't read so I can't comment on its accuracy. It was however entertaining, about a particle physicist who gets blasted into an alternative universe when his collider explodes(!). He falls in love with his wife in the other universe, where he is a SF writer, then gets sent back to his first universe where he tries to find the divergent point of the universes and track down his wife. I liked it.