This first appeared in Fortean Times FT 209 way back in May 2006. I'm putting it online for the first time in the run-up to the Doctor Who 50th anniversary (23 November).
Pedler's photo of part of a gecko's retina - from of his early 1960s electron microscope work in the field of eye cells
CHRISTOPHER Magnus Howard Pedler was born in 1927 into a fourth generation medical family and trained in medicine at London’s King’s College Hospital. In his own words, “as a doctor and biological scientist I have lived in various experimental laboratories since the age of eighteen.”
[1] Earning a second doctorate in Experimental Pathology, he lectured at the University of London and set up the Anatomy department and electron microscopy unit at the University’s Institute of Ophthalmology, where he undertook 12 years of research on eye diseases and the functions of the retina, publishing 38 original medical papers. Dr Pedler’s entry in the Medical Directory of 1969, his last year in practice, listed the highlights of his distinguished career, modestly summing up his other achievements with the word “etc.”
But that “etc” masked several self-reinventions by this extraordinary polymath who was Dr Kit Pedler, or just plain Kit: his hobbies included building racing cars and, like his mother, he was an artist and sculptor. And, forty years ago this October, Kit Pedler’s coldly rational silver spare part cyborgs the Cybermen made their first TV appearance in Doctor Who, terrifying a generation of children hiding behind the sofa. The Cybermen returned to
Doctor Who in 2006.
As well as giving chillingly plausible monsters to
Doctor Who, Kit brought us
Doomwatch, a British
X-Files with a terrifying environmental catastrophe each episode – from plastic-eating bacteria to missing nukes and transplanted pig hearts affecting their recipients in terrible ways. Kit then went beyond science fiction, and renounced “the harmful side effects of technological medicine” and the “technogenic” disorders of industrial society in
The Quest for Gaia – a “deep-green” rant that was decades ahead of its time. Kit’s final reinvention was as a popular prime time TV Fortean investigator, in the series
Mind Over Matter. He brought a charming bedside manner and a scientific rigour to popular science investigation of the paranormal, which the medium of television has not seen in the quarter century since its transmission.
Kit’s “voyage of discovery” into the paranormal moved the former
Doctor Who scriptwriter to comment, “the science of physics has moved sharply towards a view of the universe. … which shows the real fabric of things to be so strange, mysterious and fascinating that any well brought-up science fiction writer would give up in sheer despair.”
[2]
Dr Pedler’s medical achievements included The Fine Structure of the Corneal Epithelium – cutting edge work on eye cells including “cytoplasmic organelles of basal cells tissue from anaesthetized kittens.” His paper
The Fine Structure of the Radial Fibres in Reptiles’ Retina was among the first to examine the “profuse” fibre in the eye cells of lizards and geckos. To 21st century readers, his nonchalant description of how “after decapitation, the eye was removed” from his subjects, sounds as disturbing as any of his
Doctor Who scripts. Kit later denounced the excessive vivisection of the medical establishment – “There is conditioned brutality among scientists, especially in the universities of Britain.”
[3]
Kit’s long immersion in the world of pure medical research provided him with material for creepy medical horror stories, in which he explored feasible yet frightening forms of immortality. In
The Long Term Residents, a biochemist is lured from a world of “biomedical conferences, grant applications and experimental data” to a strange seaside hotel, whose owner turns out to be a scientist from his past who continues working after death through injecting compounds into an implanted “lumber unit.” The narrator is sentenced to immortality confined to a chair in a room filled with ancient scientists discussing pure science problems for all eternity.
White Caucasian Male concerns a microbiology lecturer, whose routine of “monotone and pedestrian lectures” and “effect of A on B research” changes when he accidentally re-arranges human brain cells grown in a culture into a miniature mind, which drives him to self-destruction with its hallucinatory telepathic death-screams.
[4]
Kit suffered a near fatal illness – he wouldn’t go into details – an experience which he felt gave him a different outlook on life. He gradually drifted away from the medical establishment; “It was years after I had qualified as a medical doctor before I realised I had been subject to a six-year long conditioning process. I had been turned out of school as an efficient medical and surgical technician, but woefully bereft as a healer.” Over time, these criticisms could turn into fully-fledged rants. He was particularly scathing of the infant science of heart transplants; “£18,000 and 25 graduates to give patients a life expectancy of an extra seven months.”
[5]
But while he still felt at home in the world of the retina, Kit’s expertise led to a new outlet for his many talents – television. He had already appeared on the BBC science programme
Tomorrow’s World when, in the spring of 1966, Gerry Davis from the science series Horizon came to Kit’s lab for a programme on heart transplants. They were impressed enough to engage him “for help and advice” on the
Doctor Who serial that became The War Machines. “Mr CMH Pedler … agreed a payment of £25 for each episode”.
[6] The War Machines featured the brand new futuristic Post Office Tower – now the Telecom Tower – visible from Kit’s lab window and at the time London’s tallest building. The story foreshadowed the Internet by having as its villain the supercomputer WOTAN, controlling all the world’s computer networks via telephone lines. It wasn’t so much Kit’s science ideas that gave
The War Machines its realism, as his feel for “science and society” issues – a key scene takes place at a press conference for the launch of WOTAN.
Kit’s relaxed bedside manner was already endearing him to many. Veteran broadcaster Joan Bakewell called him “my favourite scientist.” A co-worker said, “He was an easy man to work with, a regular guy, good fun, and although a double doctor, approachable. … A thoroughly nice guy …. You didn’t feel you were dealing with a man with 27 million qualifications,” or as the
TV Times put it - “with almost twice as many letters after his name than in it.” [footnote 7]
The Post Office Tower featured again in the genesis of Kit’s next
Doctor Who creation, the Cybermen. In the spring of 1963, he looked out of his laboratory window and daydreamed silvery space beings landing at the foot of the tower. There followed a discussion that evening with his wife – also a doctor – on what would happen if someone had so many mechanical spare parts they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between their human self and a machine anymore.
A display of cyberman designs from the original 1966 version (front row, left) to the current 2022 design (standing on left). From the 2022 Doctor Who exhibition, World Museum, Liverpool. Photo by the author.
Kit imagined the Cybermen as having plastic and metal prosthesis – their more robot-like all metal design evolved later in the Doctor Who series. The first Cybermen – in the series
The Tenth Planet – still had a recognisable facial bone structure and identifiable human hands sheathed in clear plastic. Spare part surgery at the time was a world of frighteningly huge “electro-magnetic” mechanical heart-lung machines, while prototype Soviet prosthetic hands made it possible to operate faster than with a natural hand. Spare part surgeons were predicting that microsurgery, grafts and transplants would take over from prosthesis by the 1990s. Yet the medical ethics of spare part surgery was in its infancy. Experts were seriously suggesting wiring amputees’ nerve-endings directly to machines, sending “intention signals” directly from the brain to work them faster,
[8] With such attitudes, Kit was right to express anxieties on spare part surgery. [See Cyberman sidebar]
Kit had little formal experience as a writer for television, and worked closely with script editor Gerry Davis – a veteran of
Softly, Softly. At the end of Kit’s stint at Doctor Who, Kit admitted he still hadn’t learned to write sci-fi properly. His Cybermen scripts had to be extensively reworked by Davis and others. But he was an excellent ideas man, and the BBC was happy to leave the narrative structure to others.
Kit’s association with the Cybermen attracted controversy, and he was forced to defend them against enraged parents after a
Tomb of the Cybermen scene showed fluid spurting from a dying Cyberman’s innards. Then there was the incident in which “Pedlar took one of
Doctor Who’s Cybermen into a busy shopping area of St Pancras, he almost blocked the street and ‘got into trouble with the police’”. Recalling the occasion, he doesn’t sound very penitent…‘I wanted to know how people would react to something quite unusual … but I also wanted to be a nuisance.’”
[9]
The last Kit Pedler Cyberman story,
The Invasion, ended with the Cybermen repulsed – just three weeks after Kit appeared on Horizon talking about the retina. By then Kit had departed the “genial hokum” of
Doctor Who and announced his next collaboration with Gerry Davis. Having scared the nation’s kids, Pedler and Davis found a way to keep adults awake with scientifically plausible anxious eco-nightmares.
Doomwatch’s first episode aired on 9th February 1970, breaking all records for a new series, with 13 million viewers.
Doomwatch was born out of scrapbooks of newspaper cuttings on environmental hazards which were “slowly cutting our throats” according to Davis – such as a death from noise pollution at Fylingdales radar station. Davis had realised through a process of “picking Pedler’s brains with
Doctor Who” that he and Kit were fellow doom merchants. Davis insisted, “
Doomwatch is not science fiction.”
[10]
The programmes’s title is the codename for the Department of Measurement of Scientific Work, a trio of government scientists who dealt with the worst excesses of science, and fought constant battles against central government and M16.
Brilliant Nobel Laureate Dr Spencer Quist headed the fictional Department, whose ever-changing staff included argumentative M16-trained burglar Dr John Ridge and baby-faced heartthrob Tobias Wren.
The opening episode – The Plastic Eaters – centred on Aminostyrene, a genetically engineered bug for breaking down biodegradable bottles, that acquires a taste for aircraft electrical wiring insulation. Kit rewrote it as
Mutant 59 The Plastic Eaters – a Doomwatch novel with Gerry Davis. The gleefully Luddite novelisation is more funny and exciting, with scenes of Gremlins-type chaos as a prototype lunar survey robot on display in a department store runs amok and demolishes Santa’s grotto: the “smell of rotting plastic” fills the air, gas meters burst, and radios and TVs disintegrate. Other
Doomwatch subjects tackled super resistant GM rats or mass male impotence caused by hormone-laced manure from a battery chicken farm leeching into the soil. Kit correctly predicted that, while the moral dilemmas of the 1950s and 1960s were around physics, biology would be the new ethical minefield.
Doomwatch even got its own Oxford English Dictionary entry: ‘the surveillance of the environment to prevent harm to it from human agencies.’ Labour MP Ray Fletcher proposed creating a real-life parliamentary Doomwatch committee – with Kit sitting on it.
Producer Terrence Dudley moved
Doomwatch away from science and turned it into a thriller for its second series, with the Pedler-Davis team now having little input into the programme and even criticising its direction. They wrote two more novels, the long-winded
The Dynostar Menace – a race to shut down a brand new orbital fusion reactor before it starts transmitting power to earth and destroying the ozone layer – and
Brainrack – a mass dumbing-down of the population through petrol additives.
Kit’s firm grounding in environmental sciences through
Doomwatch led to environmental consultancy work for industry on waste reduction and energy saving, decades before European Union regulations forced these issues into the corporate mainstream. A 1975 Man Alive documentary had him as its nuclear waste expert. Kit’s next project left sci-fi behind and took him in a deep-green philosophical direction, with
The Quest for Gaia – A Book of Changes.
Gaia was a damning but futuristic indictment of “technologist toymakers” and of ‘cybernarchy’ – the “parasitic industrial society” of packaging, supermarkets and hamburgers. Another target of Kit’s wrath was baths and how much energy they used – both in hot water and in the casting and enamelling of the tub: “I regret the passing of my bath immeasurably…marvellously relaxing. But there it is, in a Gaian society, baths are out.” The mainstream did not ignore The Quest for Gaia: New Scientist called it “searching and deadly.” [footnote 11]
Gaia led to more environmental consultancy work for Kit, which in turn led to an appearance on the Thames TV consumer programme Money Go Round, interviewed in a scrapyard near Shepperton, to show how the infant science of recycling could work. In the “local boozer afterwards” the conversation turned to “UFOs and ghosts and all the rest of it.” Kit asked, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if someone did a proper science programme” on these phenomena?
The result was “a very brave decision,” seven half-hour episodes of
Mind Over Matter, which went out at 7pm on Tuesdays on ITV in the summer of 1981. Kit was the main presenter and wrote the tie-in book
Mind Over Matter: a scientist's view of the paranormal. His co-presenter was the man who had interviewed him at the scrapyard –Tony Bastable, presenter of the 1970s children’s programme
Magpie.
The focus was on precognition, telepathy, clairvoyance and psychokenesis. The book included do-it-yourself experiments in Ganzfeld, psychokenesis, telepathy, Remote Viewing (RV) and metal bending – the latter a nod to the Uri Geller phenomenon.
Kit’s presentation had a Fortean’s healthy distrust of orthodoxy. “I have always distrusted ‘experts’ and ‘specialists’ who try to exclude ‘laymen’. There was never anything difficult about science: it was only made so by some scientists.”
But
Mind Over Matter had hard science credentials, with “more Nobel Laureates interviewed than you could shake a stick at.” Kit insisted, “Although it sounds outlandish, it’s really a very down to earth series. We’re dealing with proof, not speculation.” The first two episodes looked in detail at ground rules for evidence, and Kit demanded the same double blind experimental protocols he had learnt on the hospital wards.
[12]
Kit concluded that there was plenty of room in quantum physics for paranormal phenomena - “Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger and Dirac …… imagined such unfamiliar immensities as to make what I have referred to as the ‘paranormal’ almost pedestrian by comparison”, in a quantum universe where the act of measurement may change the object being measured, where cause may not always precede effect, and where it may eventually turn out that “future events cast a shadow back into the present.” In the quarter century since then, quantum physics has, of course, got a lot weirder.
Mind Over Matter featured what is believed to be the first filmed real-time RV experiment at Indian Rock in Berkeley, California. Sceptical photographer Hella Hammid, who’d become “rather good at RV”, drew the features of Indian Rock, the location randomly picked from an envelope, as Kit wandered up and down the rock. Except that Hammid’s sketch showed another location from the experimenter’s list. This was “the displacement effect” well known in RV. Kit confessed that it was his fault. Before the experiment, he wrote on a bit of paper “During the experiment, a part of the equipment will inexplicably fail” and sealed it in an envelope. The experiment’s random number generator also crashed.
This “displacement effect” reared its head again when Kit donned the cut-in-half golf balls for a filmed Ganzfeld (whole field) experiment. While Carl Sargent and others tried to mentally send Kit an impression of a randomly chosen photograph, he described one of the other pictures that had stayed in its envelope. While the Ganzfeld environment was supposed to relax Kit, it has the opposite effect, and he confessed to being “anxious and tense at different parts of my mind working against each other … What rubbish you‘ve got yourself into, Kit.” … “My God, what if I succeed, I don’t want to be a psychic!”
Kit interviewed Stephen North, who could apparently bend metal in pyschokenesis experiments conducted by Birkbeck College’s Professor Hasted. North said of his wild talent – “Certainly I don’t know how I can do it, but there are ways I can stop it from happening. For instance, when I started to do it, everything in my house began to bend. All the cutlery bent and gradually I found I could stop that when I wanted to, and I can stop it from damaging my watch or my own keys.”
Mind Over Matter revisited the mid-1970s case of ‘Philip’ – a fictional ghost “living at the time of Cromwell in 1600,” who was deliberately made up by a “group of eight meeting for two hours a week for almost a year…. to see whether ordinary people could generate some sort of spirit.” The group was of a “sceptical turn of mind,” but they eventually found their “table itself began to move” – an event filmed for Canadian TV – then the “table [was] flying around the room.” Kit interviewed one witness, Dr Lawrence Lesham, who had a “fair amount of experience with conjuring” and “was convinced no-one present was rapping the table.” Kit dryly concluded that psychokenesis was “the least implausible explanation.”
[13]
Kit’s medical experience informed
Mind Over Matter’s look at faith healing – “I am afraid we have to face the real probability of professional bias” – and the placebo effect, for which he drew on his time on the wards: “I worked for a doctor who cured people simply by looking magnificent … he would intone with exquisitely measured mellificence ‘You are much better.’ And they got better.”
On May 26th 1981, Dr Kit Pedler was found dead outside his house in Sittingbourne, Kent, by his girlfriend Cherry Gilliam. The doctor who had been so disparaging of heart surgery had dropped dead from a heart attack, aged 54.
Mind Over Matter’s Episode 5, which went out the next week, was – appropriately – about out of body experiences.
Why have there been no programmes like
Mind Over Matter in the 25 years since 1981? Bastable points to endless UFO programmes on Sky TV, but none with Kit’s scientific rigour. Kit’s tone throughout
Mind Over Matter suggested that a breakthrough in the science of the paranormal was around the corner, but he admitted the situation was not helped by “a very large number of completely gullible people in the field who accept absolutely everything they hear about the paranormal, from sharpening razor blades under pyramids to UFOs from Atlantis.” ITV’s own publicity for the series trivialised
Mind Over Matter by introducing it through a piece in which pop star Alvin Stardust, actor Donald Sinden and other celebrities gave their own “spooky” – and uninteresting – accounts of paranormal hauntings.
[14]
The final
Mind Over Matter episode was meant to take the form of Kit in a panel discussion with experts. Co-presenter Tony Bastable was in the chair, filling dead man’s shoes, and recalls putting it to Supernature author Lyall Watson that “Anybody who goes into this field automatically suffers derision.” The
TV Times listing for the panel discussion, transmitted 23rd June 1981, asked “If we accept such things as telepathy, do we have to change our view of the world around us? Is there a future for the subject, or will it simply fade away?”
THE CYBERMEN FOR BEGINNERS
Is it just me, or do those "stub your cigarettes out here" bins attach to posts not look like the advanced guard of some sort of cyberman invasion, especially given their resemblance to the faces of the cybermen in their latest design? Photo: Matt Salusbury
Kit Pedler admitted he was influenced by Dan Dare from
Eagle comic, and the evil green Treens in particular. He originally envisaged the Cybemen as Jedi-like ‘space monks’, but Gerry Davis urged him to follow his anxieties about spare part surgery.
Kit’s first Cyberman adventure, The Tenth Planet, (1966) introduced the Cybermen back-story: they exhausted their planet’s natural resources and were driven underground as their planet’s atmosphere began stripping itself away. In desperation they started to convert themselves into immortals with superhuman strength, but without any emotion. Cybermen come from Earth's evil twin planet Mondas, which split from earth billions of years ago, just as the Moon did. Some of the 160 “exoplanets” (planets outside our solar system) that been discovered in the last decade have “bizarre orbits,” and a ‘rogue’ planet like Mondas, which breaks up at the end of the The Tenth Planet as it nears the Earth’s atmosphere, is beginning to seem more plausible.
The original Cybermen came to superficially resemble humans through parallel evolution, while Cybermen from subsequent stories are just people like us taken prisoner and ‘converted.’ Part of their terror lies in the seductive possibility that we might actually want to be ‘converted.’ In Tomb of the Cybermen, the almost deaf-mute character Toberman is found by his colleagues to be partly-converted, with a metal and plastic arm, while Tobias Vaughn – one of Doctor Who’s most convincing villains – is converted from the neck down, but finally dies helping the Doctor thwart a Cyberman invasion.
The original Cybermen were plastic and metal, with identifiable human hands and facial bone structure. Cyberman design has evolved in a more metal, robot-like direction over the years – their costumes have featured plastic hoses, golf balls, silver-sprayed wetsuits, and Wellington boots. 1970s Cybermen had flares, while 1980s Cyberman had a baggy silver jumpsuit and a recognizable human throat that moved when they spoke. The 2006 Cyberman redesign has a completely metal exo-skeleton.
Cybermen have superhuman strength, and can punch through walls and throw people around – in some not very convincing scenes where you can see the wires. The Doctor found several obscure ways of killing off the near-indestructible Cybermen – fuel rods from a nuclear reactor, giant X-ray lasers; nail varnish remover-type solvents that affect the “respiratory units” in their chests, and gold – either as dust or in bullets. Gold ‘s density would give it good armour-piercing properties.
Kit himself found test tube people a much more terrifying than Cybermen.
If they were built with 21st century technology, Cybermen would probably have a ceramic skeleton with Teflon and carbon-fibre ligaments. Modern Cyberpeople include: the artist Stelarc, with electrodes implanted in his muscles to allow his limbs to be operated over the internet, and scientist Kevin Warwick, who has a transponder in his arm which allows him to open the door of his lab. Barcelona Baja Beach Club members have their pass and bar tab on chips implanted in their arm (FT 206, p34).
Cybermen voices also evolved over time. The original Cyberman voices from their debut in The Tenth Planet were staccato and with that weird discordant intonation like those automated telephone response services you get when you ring banks and cinemas. As they got more robot-like, Cybermen had buzzing ring-modular voices, and the actors had to open and close a little slit for their mouths when they spoke. Later Cybermen had a booming, more human-like voice.
Kit and Gerry Davis also conceived the Cybermats – cat-sized reconnaissance cyborgs (cyber organisms) modelled on silverfish and delivering a toxic bite. Such animal cyborgs are already with us – in the form of “RoboRat” – a rat with implanted electrodes whose every action could be controlled by a computer, and flying 1mm square ‘microbots’ that use the antenna of a real male silk moth to follow a pheromone trail (FT 186).
The glory days of the Cybermen were in the era of the Second Doctor, played by Patrick Troughton. The Tenth Planet was quickly followed by The Moonbase (1967) – credited only to Kit Pedler only as Gerry Davis was also working on the series as its script editor. In The Moonbase, The Second Doctor turns the Gravitron - an anti-gravity device that manages the earth’s weather – on the Cyberman invasion fleet.
Then came Tomb of the Cybermen (1967) – the one in which the Cybermen burst out of their frozen tombs and throw humans around, and the Cybermats make their debut. Next was The Wheel in Space (1968) – written by former Who script editor David Whitaker – based on a Kit Pedler’s tense but convoluted story about a space station hypnotically attacked by space-walking Cybermen and Cybermats
Scriptwriter Derrick Sherwin made only “casual” use of Pedler's concepts for The Invasion (1969) – the one where the Cybermen come up through the sewers around St Paul’s Cathedral. The Invasion correctly predicted that all the world’s computer operating systems would be in the hands of one corporation – although its name was International Electromatics, and it was a Cyberman front company.
Gerry Davis went on to write Revenge of the Cybermen (1985) alone – the one where the Cyberman have guns in their head units and nearly rip off Tom Bakers head after he calls them “a bunch of pathetic tin soldiers.”
Post-Pedler and Davis Cyber-stories were often nostalgic retreads of old ideas. These include Earthshock (1982) – in which the Doctor’s companion Adric is killed and the Doctor crumples his gold star badge into the Cyber leader’s control unit, and Attack of the Cybermen (1985) – in which partly converted prisoners attempting to escape knock the head off a Cyberman. These stories were almost as confused as the 1988 Silver Nemesis, the one when the Cybermen fight Nazis and a living, screaming 17th century silver statue. A squad of Cybermen also has a very bad day when they stray into the Time Lord’s gladiatorial zone in The Five Doctors (1983).
UPDATE - the revived Doctor Who had an alternative origin for the Cybermen on a parallel Earth. The latest outing from the Cybermen, Nightmare in Silver, scripted by Neill Gaiman, featured nano-technology Cybermites.
The now ubiquitous Cyber-prefix comes, via a very convoluted route, from Cybernetus, helmsman of the Styx ferry that carried the dead to the Greek underworld. Cybernetus’ steering to adjust for the strong River Styx current was a primitive ‘self-regulating control system.’ Mathematician Norbert Weiner’s 1948 book
Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine coined a new term, associated with the control of complex systems, both in the natural world and in machine networks. Weiner, like Kit, recognized the ethical implications of his work, and after World War Two refused to take on any US government contracts.
1960 saw cybernetics evolve the term ‘cyborg’ (cyber organism) with Manfred C. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline’s physiological research at Rockland State Hospital, New York. Clynes and Kline were looking at the interface between humans or animals operating machines in the harsh environment of space – possibly, though not necessarily, augmented by surgery, implants or drugs.
‘Cyborg’ was still a relatively novel term when Kit invented the Cybermen in 1966. But the increasing interaction between humans and machine systems – computers and the internet in particular, spawned a whole host of Cyber-terminology, helped along by sci-fi writer William Gibson, whose term ‘cyberpunk’ was joined by ‘cybersex,’ ‘cybercrime’, ’cyberconferencing,’ and so on – none of which involves creepy silver-suited spare part immortals with superhuman strength.
FATHER OF THE CYBERMEN - FOOTNOTES
Fortean Times article, May 2006
1.
Mind Over Matter – a scientist'sview of the paranormal , Kit Pedler, Eyre Methuen London 1981
2.
Mind Over Matter – a scientist"s view of the paranormal, Kit Pedler, Eyre Methuen London 1981
3.
Experimental Eye Research , volume 2 no 3, 3 July 1963, Academic Press, London and New York. Dr Pedler quoted on the www.ivu.org/people/quotes/experim.html International Vegetarian Union website, no date or source given.
4. The Long Term Residents in
The Seventh Ghost Book, Barrie and Jenkins, London 1971, White Caucasian Male in
The Ninth Ghost Book, ed. Rosemary Timperley, Barrie and Jenkins, London 1973. Kit's editor Rosemary Timperley was heavily into pure physics as an explanation for ghosts, suggesting that ghosts could be made of neutrinos.
5.
The Quest for Gaia - A Book of Changes. Kit Pedler, Souvenir/Granada 1979
6. Memo from Gerry Davis, BBC Drama, referring to an earlier copyright brief of 18th May 1966, BBC Written Archives
7. Telephone interview with Tony Bastable, December 9th 2005. Margarette Driscoll on
Mind Over Matter, TV Times May 16th 1981
8
Spare Part Surgery – The Science of the Future, Donald Longmore Aldus, London 1968
9. The Day a Cyberman went shopping in St. Pancras,
Radio Times 23 November 1968 p. 39
10. "The honeymoon of science is over – and married life is not so rosy", Elizabeth Cowley,
Radio Times Feb 5 1970 p 5. Doomwatch – Past Perfect,
SFX magazine, September 2004, Future Publishing, Bristol.
Mutant 59 The Plastic Eaters , Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis, Vector, London 1972,
The Dynostar Menace, Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis, Souvenir, London 1975, Brainrack, Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis, Souvenir, London 1974.
A real-life African execution in the Sex and Violence episode of
Doomwatch resulted in the BBC finally pulling the plug on it long after Kit had left the series. Its final episode in 1972 was about killer dolphins. Dr Quist and his team appeared as walk-ons in the 1972 Doomwatch feature film, and Trevor Eve played him in a one-off 1995 Channel 5
Doomwatch episode.
During filming of
Mind Over Matter in 1981, Kit complained that he was still getting a considerable postbag of complaints about him killing off the dishy Tobias Wren character, played by Robert Powell, at the end of the third series, despite the fact that he had stopped writing for Doomwatch some years earlier. There was even a &rdquo:structural reader” abridged and edited for foreign students learning English who needed a bit of hard science in their studies -
Doomwatch – The World in Danger, Longman 1975. This featured The Plastic Eaters, Red Sky (the sound from experimental rocket engines resonates a lighthouse like a giant clarinet reed and drives its occupants suicidal) and A Bomb is Missing (defusing a washed up nuke on a seaside pier.) There are "comprehension and structure" English exercises at the back.
11.
The Quest for Gaia – A Book of Changes. Kit Pedler, Souvenir/Granada, London 1979. Kit promised in
The Quest For Gaia that he would produce a follow-up volume with "practical blueprints" for a Gaian society, but this new appeared. In 1969 he was working on a science fiction book that was to be a look back at human history from the viewpoint of the year 2016, but this remained unfinished. Although Kit was an ex-Catholic atheist,
The Quest For Gaia still features in theological debate on the role of environmentalism in Christian ethics.
12.
Mind Over Matter: a scientist's view of the paranormal, Eyre Methuen, London 1981. Author's telephone interview with Tony Bastable, December 9th 2005. Bastable admits that Kit and
Mind Over Matter director Richard Mervyn (a veteran of
The Tomorrow People) did most of the work. Margarette Driscoll on
Mind Over Matter, TV Times May 16th 1981
13.
Conjuring Up Philip, Owen and M. Sparrow, Harper and Row, New York, 1976, quoted in
Mind Over Matter
14. Bastable felt that
Mind Over Matter being mostly shot the then low-grade VHS videotape format (instead of film) hindered its chances of reaching a bigger audience, as it was not of sufficient quality to be sold to English-speaking TV networks abroad. The videos, stills and scripts for
Mind Over Matter are now with Freemantle Media Archive Sales in London.
Mind Over Matter feature including interviews with Alvin Stardust, Donald Sinden and Eurovision Song Contest winner Lindsay De Paul in
TV Times, June 16th 1981.
UPDATE: Bastable died in 2007, making my interview with him one of the last ever. This article and my interview notes were quoted (with permission) in The Quest for Pedler by Michael Seely.
Front cover images for the purposes of a critique or review (Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988)
words copyright © Matt Salusbury 2006
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