Things Are Not Always What They Seem, by Michael Herbert

“This individual is a poseur and a professed agnostic with an exaggerated idea of his own importance.”

Special Branch report on Mac Hulke, 1 March 1948, cited p. 35.

The subtitle of this book is, “The writing and politics of Malcolm Hulke”, an author probably best known for his work on The Avengers and Doctor Who. Hulke knew and worked with David Whitaker, and when I was researching my biography of Whitaker, I swapped notes with Michael Herbert as he was working on this, which he’s been kind enough to acknowledge in the end notes. 

The first, 66-page chapter gives an overview of Hulke’s life, which is often extraordinary. He was apparently born on 21 November 1924, a year and 10 months after the death of his supposed father, Colonel Walter Backhouse Hulke — though there’s no record of Malcolm Hulke’s birth beyond what his mother told him. Indeed, when he applied for citizenship in 1948, “the most exhaustive enquiry and search” by Special Branch could find no record of him at all and succeeded only in casting doubt on the details he provided. It also noted his late mother’s two convictions for larceny (see p. 37).

The latter case, in 1926, involved Elsie Hulke distracting a shop assistant at a draper’s in Deal while her partner, Winifred Boot, hid “two cardigans down her [own] skirt” (p. 16). Herbert tells us that “Elsie teamed up with Winifred”, and that they lived together from 1929 until Elsie’s death in 1943, but doesn’t speculate further on their relationship. Yet Hulke’s former neighbour, Lauraine Palmeri, recalls that Hulke was,

“brought up by a much-detested Aunt whom he called ‘Miss Boot’. When he had to turn out her house after she died, he was still full of bitterness [and] at one time he was having sessions with a psychiatrist … learning to heal and rewrite his childhood to replace some of what had happened with happier memories” (pp. 45-46).

Even so, right up until Miss Boot’s death in 1967, Hulke lived round the corner from her and managed the house she rented out — which is how Hulke met and ending up working with my current subject of research, Terrance Dicks: a tenant from 1962. Years later, Miss Boot continued to cast some shadow over Hulke and his romantic relationships, such as when he mentioned the hypothetical prospect of marriage in a letter to a friend:

“Maybe I could at last do it. Bootie’s been dead a long, long time now and my super-conscience is fading a little.” (Letter to Jean Tate, 29 October 1974, p. 49)

What hold did she have over him?

After this overview, there are then chapters on specific periods of Hulke’s career: his relatively brief membership of the Communist Party; his time with the left-leaning Unity Theatre in an administrative role; his relatively late start as a writer in the 1950s, in TV, film and the stage; his nine episodes of The Avengers (four co-written with Terrance Dicks); his work on Doctor Who 1963-1969; his other work in TV 1964-75; Doctor Who 1970-74; his spat with the TUC 1967-70; and the books and short stories he wrote. An appendix gives details of his radio plays. Much of these later chapters comprise synopses of TV episodes, with quotations from dialogue and screengrabs. 

Bits of this stuff I knew; I detail the spat with the TUC in my biography of David Whitaker, based on the same sources, though I see it quite differently from what’s described here. To me, it seems extraordinary that Hulke fought for and won full payment for a script he never even wrote, based on a first-draft outline co-written with Gerry Davis that did not meet the original brief, as Whitaker later said candidly to Hulke, having been with him in that initial meeting. Hulke was certainly tenacious in the matter but I suspect won himself few friends.

The real treasure here is the information and direct quotations from 40 letters Hulke wrote to his friend Jean Tate between August 1974 and January 1977, providing insights into his thoughts, feelings, health and work. He makes light of his heart attack in January 1975; he’s furious that the editor of the book Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion has seen fit to, er, edit it.

There are lots of other fascinatingly odd things. For example, Herbert says Hulke’s first Crossroads novel — based on the creaky but popular tea-time soap opera — features some “surprisingly explicit” sex (p. 420), while the second novel involves Meg being involved in a plane crash, ending up in a Victorian mansion that is “cut off from the rest of the world” and then taking a teenage boy from there back to the motel, “to integrate him into the modern world”. Herbert says this seems to have been lifted from James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon, which Hulke had already adapted for BBC radio in 1966.

I’m especially delighted by Hulke’s novel Roger Moore and the Crime Fighters — The Siege (1977), which features a dog called Dalek and a would-be assassin pretending to be an extra on Doctor Who until his deception is spotted by Roger Moore, “who informs the police” and so foils the plot. I wonder how that conversation went.

“Look, chief inspector, I’m telling you this man wasn’t Pat Gorman, Max Faulkner or Terry Walsh. There’s only one explanation: an attempt to kill the President of Walinga.”

I’m glad I wasn’t Hulke’s editor.