In this extract from a longer programme, Derek Hart speaks to novelist John Wyndham, whose science fiction novels include 'The Kraken Wakes' and 'The Day of the Triffids'. As his latest novel, 'Trouble with Lichen', reaches bookshops across the country, the author is quizzed about the limits of evil as represented in his books, and how the attitude of British readers towards science fiction differs from that of their US counterparts. ohn Wyndham was one of a number of British authors discussed in 1960 report into Science Fiction in BBC Drama. The document, which described Wyndham as 'the best practitioner' of British science fiction, led to the creation of the TV serial 'Doctor Who'. The producer of this programme, Donald Baverstock, was the son-in-law of writer Enid Blyton and the man who, in 1963, eventually gave the green light for 'Doctor Who' to move into production. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXhQvAOZj-s

Newsreel footage of the potato harvest, from the island situated off the west coast of Scotland. Originally broadcast 10 October 1949 ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQBSHvvNXJ8

“We decided sometime just at the end of the football season that we needed something to keep us going, to fight off the withdrawal effects of the summer.” Gerry Anderson investigates the Subbuteo scene as part of his guide to his home city, My Derry. Originally broadcast 17 March 1987 ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_msDIAQd5P0

Le Voyage Dans la Lune (Trip to the Moon, in English) is perhaps Georges Méliès‘ most famous film, and is considered to be the first science fiction film in cinematic history. The 12 minute film follows a group of astronomers who travel to the Moon in a cannon-propelled capsule, explore the Moon’s surface, escape from an underground group of native moon inhabitants (known as Selenites), and return to Earth with one of them as captive. While at once a spoof of more serious science fiction, the film can also be seen as a comment on France’s colonial exploits (it was at the time the world’s second largest colonial power). Méliès himself plays, as was his wont, the main role of the wonderfully named Professor Barbenfouillis. When asked in 1930, Méliès cited Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon as the main influences for the film, but cinema historians have also mentioned the influence of Adolphe Dennery’s stage adaption of Verne, and also H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon, a French translation of which was published only a few months before Méliès made the film. Jacques Offenbach’s operetta Le voyage dans la lune (an unauthorized parody of Verne’s novels) and also the “A Trip to the Moon” attraction at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, have also been talked of as being possible inspiration. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBExXhcVGGE