It's a wide ocean

In autumn 1989 I had a friend with a seemingly unlimited comic collection, which he was kind enough to lend to me freely.

Amongst them were many copies of Deadline, and I was particularly taken with the Hugo Tate episode 'Waiting in Vain' from the October 1989 issue. I fell out with my friend and lost access to the collection, but I remembered the episode and would try and draw frames of it from memory over the years.

This year I belatedly read that there was a collected Hugo Tate, and got a copy off eBay which I read earlier this week. I realised I had misremembered the end of 'Waiting in Vain'. The sunset I thought I recalled is actually the sun emerging from clouds in the evening sky. The final frame is a photo that we see, not the person looking at the photo.

I thought nothing of the memory cheating, it happens with all kinds of revisited media, even with my own diaries where I've caught myself remembering things from quite the wrong year and in the wrong order.

With my new-found comic confidence I looked up the issue of Deadline in which WIV appeared, because I wanted to get an idea of when exactly I might have read it. And I made a shocking discovery. The final frame is different in the collected version.

The frame features a photo. In the collected version the photo is just of Mattie. In the original version in Deadline (October 1989) Hugo is in the photo too. I had had a vague idea that he ought to be there, but I gaslit myself into thinking that because I had misremembered other things about the episode, I must be wrong about that too. But I wasn't.

It's not been cropped either, it's been redrawn so that the background is there instead of him.

This is a very potent metaphor about memory and my own past, and the things I was going through in 1989, and the tellers of stories, and a seemingly harmless nostalgia trip ending with the abyss gazing.

Also I feel like my 1989 self has travelled forward through time to berate me for not believing her.

Juno and the Hancock

One of the playlets in the Hancock episode The Drama Festival is John Eastbourne's Look Back in Hunger, where Bill Kerr delivers a monologue about tea with the splendidly delivered mocking line '"Have a cup of tea, Jim."'

That's very Osborne, but the rest of the speech ('Tea, tea? Is that your answer to it all') is much more Sean O'Casey. 'Tay, tay, tay! You're always thinking of tay. If a man was dying, you'd try to make him swallow a cup of tay.'

The Power of Eel

As a child I was very fond of Arthur Ransome's books about polite 30s children exploring and sailing, even though I barely knew one end of a boat from the other.

I've been re-reading them lately. There's a later entry, Secret Water, which takes place on the salt-marshes in Essex, and has a climactic scene where they chant and dance around a 'human sacrifice' to the Great Eel.

I wonder if Robert Holmes read it as a kid, and it unconsciously influenced another story set in a marsh and involving a giant water creature. Incidentally the swamp scenes in Power of Kroll were filmed only 25 miles away from Hamford Water where the book is set.

Bilbo's treasure

Bilbo asked Dáin for as many coins as one strong pony could carry, and they were half gold and half silver by volume - one chest of coins of each type.

(Shrewd move, much better deal than an equal number of coins of each type, gold being 1.84 times denser than silver. Though it occurs to me now that if one chest was on each side of the pony, the load would have been very unbalanced).

Ponies can carry 20% of their own weight.

Pony weight range 130-350kg, so let's say a strong one weighs 300kg and could carry 60kg.

So Bilbo brought home 60kg of coins, divided 1.84/2.84 and 1/2.84 between gold and silver respectively. That's 38.4kg of gold and 21.6kg of silver.

Now, our sole monetary standard in Middle-earth in the Third Age is that a clapped-out pony (again with the ponies) costs 4 silver pennies.

Tolkien had a lot of time for the Anglo-Saxons and was doubtless thinking of their silver pennies, weighing 1/240 of a troy pound (373g) = 1.55g.

So Bilbo's 21.6kg of silver was 13,935 silver pennies.

Let's say a clapped-out, but still driveable car costs £1000, so 1 silver penny ≈ £250, so the silver was worth £3.5 million.

For most of history gold was worth ≈ 10 times as much as silver.

The 38.4kg of gold would be 24,774 pennyweights (although Tolkien probably imagined it in the chunky 4g gold pieces current in the silver penny era, ie ≈ 9600 gold pieces, that doesn't affect our calculation) each worth £2500, total value £62 million.

So, Bilbo brought back to Bag End the equivalent of £65 million. Enough to buy quite a few fancy waistcoats.

Joe Orton and SF

To go with Orton's Doctor Who links, I found another genre connection lurking in the Diary where I'd previously failed to spot it.

On July 18th 1967 he does a photoshoot for Queen magazine - a group of celebrity 'goodies' to be contrasted with another group of baddies. With him amongst the goodies is Lucy 'Survivors' Fleming.

She was also in the Avengers ep Invasion of the Earthmen. We know Orton and Halliwell were watching The Avengers in 1966, because Kenneth Williams mentions it. Sadly though, Invasion of the Earthmen didn't complete production till after Orton was dead.

Little Women/Good Wives

I've just learnt that Good Wives is a purely British way of referring to vol 2 of Little Women. I wonder though what accounts for the textual differences between GW and vol 2 of the two-volume version?

So for example, in the opening scene of the one-volume Little Women, Jo examines the heels of her boots in a gentlemanly manner while urging her sisters to spend their money as they wish, whereas in the two-volume version, it's the heels of her shoes.

Susie Brann's Harpoon voice

Listening to the 1962 Carleton Hobbs adaptation of Thor Bridge, I find one Beryl Calder playing Grace Dunbar, with a voice that's uncannily similar to the posh 30s one Susie Brann deploys in The Harpoon. I wonder if that's where the latter modelled it from?