One writes a book. It involves perhaps much of one’s inner self. Your publisher accepts it, while possibly suggesting ways of improving it. The best part of a year passes before your book appears before the public. Possibly it may be reviewed: possibly not.

But supposing you are an actor. You are on stage.The curtains part. You stride forward. The audience bursts into applause.

So it was that in the nineteen-eighties when, for a year or two, I became an actor. Frank is much to blame for this. Well, Frank and my vanity. BBC TV, in its earlier days, devised a strange operation. This is what Frank was up to, in his own words.

‘I was ‘Senior Lecturer in Television Production’. It was a job I had lucked into on the whiff of 10 years as, first Script Editor, then Producer in the esteemed Plays Department of BBC TV. I went on to produce briefly for Thames Television. Then, rather desperately needing a job, I had applied for a 10 week ‘replacement teaching’ job advertised in the Guardian. The Polytechnic of Central London became the University of Westminster in 1991, and we all moved to flash new premises in Harrow. I remained a Senior Lecturer for 18 years.’

The BBC had a big hall in – was it Mill Street? Mill Road?

There, plays were made, work starting on a Monday, to be transmitted live on the Saturday night of the same week. All folk of all trades worked madly there. A week for everything! Organised chaos!

Frank was then newly at the BBC and part of this operation. I was conscripted with another writer (name forgotten); we sat there in the midst of things, of hammering and hoping, writing something we entitled HOT LOCAL AND GALACTIC NEWS. An actor had to walk on water. Instead he stood in a full bucket. Later, he got the lead in Star Trek.

So there we were, and on the Saturday night our play was broadcast live to the nation.

I went round to see Frank. In his words:

‘We often met and did whiteboarding together at the Polytechnic of Central London, an organisation that owned rickety buildings and many esteemed courses scattered around Upper Regent Street.’

The School of Communications was in narrow Riding House Street, which runs one-way into Langham Place just below Broadcasting House. I absolutely loved working so centrally, a stone’s throw from Oxford Circus. Equally, I loved calling in there. Together we hatched the idea of SF Blues – rather in the way the Eiffel Tower was planned.

Many of those who feature here are no more, alas. Happily, Frank is alive and kicking, though now back in his native Australia. He has sent me a list of the towns in which we gave performances of SF Blues.

‘1987:
11 Nov Hemel Hempstead (World Premiere!)
12 Nov Luton
14 Nov Barnet
15 Nov Greenwich
16 Nov Birmingham
17 Nov Cardiff
20 Nov Northampton
21 Nov Salisbury
13 Dec Young Vic, London

1988:
21 May Cambridge
8 Oct Beverley, Yorkshire (Jeff Rawle in for Ken)
29 Oct World Fantasy Convention (my diary says no more than that)
16 Nov Welwyn Garden City

1989:
26 Jan Munich (that’s what it says in my diary ? damned if I can’t remember going to Munich! ? maybe I stayed behind?)
2 Mar My diary says ‘SFB at Brian’s’. We played in your living room!)
21 Apr Bedford (I played Ken in the two final perfs)
10 Jun Kidlington

There was a certain crazy joy in bringing our show to an audience of, say, 13 ‘somewhere in England‘. BWA’s never-failing delight and enthusiasm powered each event, making the hard work seem effortless and the whole enterprise worthwhile. And I clearly remember Ken’s friendship, easy professionalism and certainty; Petronilla’s beauty, warmth and humour.

What fun we had!’

Yes, it was fun. And we made a book out of it. All went smoothly because Frank was a genius at fixing lighting so that we could perform on a snug little stage, even in a vast aircraft hangar.

Here’s what I can tell you about ‘Eleventh Hour’. Frank speaking.

‘The 10-week series was the imaginative brainchild of established BBC producer Graeme McDonald, at that time (1975) perhaps the leading producer of the weekly ‘Play For Today’.

It was a time of great technical brilliance in BBC television studios. Electronic cameras in great big studios ruled the day. Film was a decade away.

Graeme’s idea was that each half-hour play would be devised, researched, written, cast and produced in a week. Writers would come in carefully blended teams of two or three. A team would meet on the Monday morning at the BBC’s Lime Grove Studios in Shepherds Bush with a designated director, designer, technical staff, producer and script editor. I was that script editor.

All would intently discuss the news, the state of the nation, etc, and an idea would emerge that was exciting for the writers and they would be herded by the script editor to the prepared ‘Writers’ Room’. Hopefully, by the end of Tuesday enough of the first draft would have been written to allow the director to gather a cast and the designer to get cracking.

With luck rehearsals got going by the end of Wednesday, definitely by Thursday. The pace quickened, pulses raced, actors often panicked: the play was broadcast live at 11 pm Saturday night — coming, ready or not.

John Bowen, Robert Muller and Fay Weldon formed one very formidable team, Iremember. As did Clive Exton and Tom Stoppard. Then there was Robin Chapman and Brian Aldiss.

Robin was (still is, according to Wikipedia) a most elegant and erudite dramatist (and novelist), not – at first glance – a natural fit with the SF master. But McDonald had chosen well and the two personalities got straight to work on their play, Hot Local and Galactic News. They decided almost immediately not use the Writers’ Room: they preferred to write in the middle of the general buzz and disorder.

Their director was a young and ambitious Mike Newell, whose television and film career took a while to get going, but whose recent movie credits includes one of the huge Harry Potters (Goblet of Fire).
The main character in the Chapman/Aldiss drama was a super-scientist. Newell cast Patrick Stewart, then a solidly reliable stage actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He was quite brilliant in the quirky role. Stewart (now Sir Patrick) is known worldwide for his leading roles in such sf sagas as Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-94) and the X-Men movie franchise in which he plays Professor Xavier.

The half hour play was a definite success. I here quote from a critical article by reviewer Peter Fiddick which appeared in The Listener (7 August 1975):

The following week brought what was, perhaps, the most extraordinary exercise of the lot. Written by Brian Aldiss and Robin Chapman, Hot Local and Galactic News was, not unexpectedly, science-fiction.

Dr. Moebius, paleo-biochemist, has discovered one of the secrets of the universe: that life plus water equals energy. We discover him appalled by his computer stolidly confirming his figures. He drowns himself, but the ocean yields him up; he returns to life, now endowed with a new power: he can make lamps light by putting the plugs in water, others can drive cars fuelled with it — he can even stand on it. Faith, as a scientific formula.

Cold, on paper, in synopsis, it naturally sounds somewhat ludicrous. Nor would it do, if Aldiss and Chapman merely fleshed out a wild-eyed scientist yarn in corroborative jargon. They managed much more, touching nerves about the nature of faith, about the place of science in society, about our own place in the universe — a useful nudge to be given now and again.

Around this central set of questions was another set of ideas, mostly satirical, about the narrow preoccupations of the news media and the government, and a touching relationship between the scientist and his wife.

I have been astonished —and it is not too strong a word —by the technical ambitiousness of many of the ten productions… Hot News deployed constant news flashes on the bottom of the screen, Moebius descending naked into a perfectly real-looking, oily dock, dazzling sun-bursts, and, apart from the electronics, the most perfectly atmospheric scene in the shack by some distant ocean where Moebius’s recovered body lay, the light shimmering through a slatted window, and the breeze you could almost feel.