By Matthew Guerrieri

Obverse Books, out now

 

Obverse Books’ ongoing series of monographs focusing on a Doctor Who serial or story hits Terrance Dicks’ 1977 Fourth Doctor story, Horror of Fang Rock, and as author Matthew Guerrieri explains, there’s a lot more to lighthouses than you might first imagine.

For me, this serial is best remembered as the one with the glowing ball (a Rutan) gliding up the stairs of the lighthouse, and where Leela’s eyes turn blue at the end. I enjoyed the first September 1977 transmission in the UK, but as Guerrieri shares, the first US transmission in Chicago 10 years later would see Episode 2 getting interference for a minute by a man pretending to be Max Headroom!

The author makes the point that the show was in a period of transition at the film, filmed at Pebble Mill Studios in Birmingham, to Tom Baker’s surly chagrin, and that director Paddy Russell would never return to the show, such was her frustration around her leading man’s behaviour.

I was fascinated to read that Robert Louis Stevenson’s family played important role in the development of lighthouses and how the young writer spent time watching their construction. I was also unaware that book Lighthouses, Lightships and Buoys gave writer Dicks the basics on how lighthouses were run and the tech that was employed to light it. Guerrieri has done his homework, pulling out the facts so that we don’t have to.

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and its use of class is used as an example of the class structure that exists in a lighthouse, and it’s argued that the serial is like ‘weird tale’ from the same territory as H P Lovecraft’s sole lighthouse-set 1919 story The White Ship, and also boasting parallels with The Colour Out of Space.

The oft-used tale of the Flannan Isles Lighthouse and the disappearance of its three occupants is contextualised as an obvious influence, and I genuinely didn’t know that there’s an unfinished Edgar Allen tale of a lighthouse.

Verdict: As last year’s The Vanishing (with Gerard Butler) and the upcoming Robert Pattinson movie The Lighthouse show, there’s a continued interest in these lonely, vulnerable structures, and my knowledge on this subject has increased infinitely thanks to the author’s endeavours. Big credit also to Matthew Guerrieri for taking what is essentially a traditional ‘base under siege’ story and giving us new levels of context and detail that really aren’t that obvious. 7/10

Nick Joy