As a child my imagination was very active, it being fired by such innovative television series as The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman, which tell the stories of Steve Austin and Jaime Sommers respectively, who both suffer terrible injuries resulting in bionic (robot) reconstruction.

Steve has a bionic right arm and legs, as well as a bionic eye – which give him super strength, speed, and ‘zoom’ vision. In Jaime’s case it is the exactly same, except she has a bionic ear rather than an eye. Both series were huge hits in the 1970s, the era of my childhood.

Following on from his success on the aforementioned shows, writer, director, producer Kenneth Johnson was asked to adapt the comic book character The Incredible Hulk to television.  

He did this by dispensing with the military background and the super-villains of the comics, and instead rechristened Dr Bruce Banner as Dr David Banner, who while obsessively researching the human body’s hidden strengths is exposed to a massive dose of gamma radiation, which mutates his DNA cells. He remains unaffected … until he gets angry.

The Creature he becomes is the embodiment of his rage. Tabloid reporter Jack McGee witnesses the man-beast in action when Banner’s laboratory goes up in flames, and determines to pursue the Creature, whom he believes killed Dr Banner. David is forced to go on the run and allow the world to think that he is dead until he can cure himself.

The fugitive helping those whom he meets in his travels became the formula for the television series which ran for five years between 1977 and 1982.

The longest running of my favourite childhood television series is Doctor Who.  The first episode was shown in black and white on the 23^rd of November 1963 – seven years before my birth.

In the first episode An Unearthly Child, the mysterious nameless Doctor (‘Doctor who?’ is a question asked by the characters in the first story. He’s not actually called Doctor Who) was played as a crotchety old man by William Hartnell. Then in a story broadcast in 1966 his body wears out and he ‘regenerates’ into a younger, tramp-like character played by Patrick Troughton.

The programme went into full colour and Jon Pertwee became the Third Doctor in the year I was born, 1970. But my childhood hero was really the Fourth Doctor, as portrayed by Tom Baker. He played the part as an eccentric, intelligent wanderer, for seven years. He took over from Jon Pertwee when I was four, and relinquished the role to Peter Davison as I was approaching my eleventh birthday.

So Tom Baker played the Doctor for the whole of my primary school years and had quite an impact.

Peter Davison played the character as a youthful aristocrat, until when in 1984 he regenerated into Colin Baker, the Sixth Doctor.

Irascible, detached, loud and very alien, I closely identified with this Doctor during my mid-teens. He was my hero.

Sylvester McCoy became the Seventh Doctor in 1987, started out as a manic clown, and then settled into the role of a darker manipulative figure, always one step ahead of his enemies.

The last episode of the original Doctor Who series was transmitted on the 6^th of December 1989, by which time I had reached my nineteenth birthday and had started my first full-time job.

So I literally grew up with Doctor Who!

In 1996 a co-production between the BBC and Universal saw the Doctor regenerating into a dashing adventurer, as played by Paul McGann in a one-off TV Movie. Then, in 2005, Christopher Eccleston arrived as the Doctor’s hardened detached ninth incarnation, when the programme returned to BBC One as an ongoing new series.

At the end of that first season, the Doctor regenerated again, this time into a pinstripe suited, trench coat wearing fun loving character played by David Tennant.

Then in 2010 David Tennant became the dotty professor-like Matt Smith. The programme continues to thrill a new generation of children. It certainly had a massive impact on me!

Blake’s Seven ran from 1978 to 1981 and was set hundreds of years into the future.

Earth and its colonies are languishing under the oppressive run of a totalitarian Federation. Roj Blake leads a band of convicts in a salvaged alien spacecraft named Liberator with the intent of overthrowing the Federation and bringing freedom to think and speak.

At the start of the third season, the Federation is dealt a blow by the neighbouring Andromedans, and Blake goes missing. By the time the crew catch up with him in the last episode of Season Four, he is a shadow of his former self.

In a grave misunderstanding, second-in-command Kerr Avon shoots Blake at point blank range, killing him, thus bringing the saga to a tragic end.

During my early teens I was hooked on The Tripods, the BBC adaptation of John Christopher’s most excellent trilogy of children’s novels The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead and The Pool of Fire.

The first series is based on the first book and tells the story of a future Earth where technology has been eradicated and the pace of life has been put back to something reminiscent of the 18^th century.

Massive alien machines called the Tripods now rule Earth and condition the populace to accept their rule by ‘Capping’ them – a process involving the implanting of a wire mesh in the skull of all those who reach the age of 16.

Young Will Parker learns about a band of free thinking un-Capped rebels hiding in the Austrian Alps, and journeys there with his cousin Henry and a French boy nicknamed Beanpole. They witness a decimated Paris before taking refuge at a chateau. It is here that Will falls in love with the beautiful Eloise.

He is only brought to his senses when she chooses to serve the Tripods in their mysterious city of gold. Then Will is caught by a Tripod and implanted with a tracking device. The removal of the device makes him very weak and the trio take refuge again, this time with a family of grape harvesters. When the Tripod becomes a threat, the boys succeed in destroying it, which brings a whole army of them out in force. The first season climaxes with the boys reaching the Freemen’s hideout.

Season Two deals with the Freemen’s daring plan to infiltrate the Tripods’ city of gold.

Posing as Capped athletes, Will and his new German companion Fritz are chosen as champions and are taken by the Tripods into their city. Here the boys discover that the Tripods themselves are just machines, and that the real enemy are the alien Masters.

Will discovers that the Masters originally came to stop the human race from taking its violent ways into the peace of space and so descended to curtail our aggressive thoughts. But the intention has changed, and now they plan to colonise the Earth and alter the environment to suit their needs.

In a desperate moment, Will kills his own Master and escapes from the city. Once back outside he meets up with Beanpole and the pair of them become part of a travelling circus – a way of returning to the White Mountains without attracting attention. To the boys’ horror, the Tripods have beaten them to it, and the duo face the obliteration of the mountain camp.

A tearful Will laments, ‘Has it all been for nothing…?’

The BBC cancelled the making of the third and final series of the trilogy to save money after creating their new soap opera East Enders and for the launch of daytime television.

Other series broadcast in the 1980s include those shown on Children’s BBC/ITV.

Chocky was a big favourite of mine. Based on a novel by John Wyndham, it tells the story of Matthew, a boy who is contacted by a strange ethereal being who names herself Chocky. She helps Matthew with his school work, which attracts attention, and questions many of the things we take for granted. A lot of these are dismissed as pointless and silly. Matthew’s new found genius leads to his being kidnapped by a bunch of dodgy psycho-analysts.

The other big favourite was Stig of the Dump (not the lavish adaptation made by the BBC in 2002, but the 1981 production by Thames Television, which was much more loyal to the original book).

This is about a young boy called Barney who finds a caveman living in a rubbish tip near his grandma’s house. At first we cannot be sure whether Stig actually exists or whether he is just Barney’s ‘pretend friend’. Having a caveman as a best friend is an enchanting idea.

And still other favourites include The Famous Five, Worzel Gummage, Heidi, Aliens in the Family, Moondial and Knights of God.  

A plethora of much watched kiddies programmes include Play School, Trumpton, Chigley, Camberwick Green, Bagpus and Bod, as well as classic cartoon series Hong Kong Phooey, Battle of the Planets, Scooby Doo, Tarzan - Lord of the Jungle, The Space Sentinels, and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.

You will notice that so far I have listed television programmes as my influences. I don’t see a problem with this, as scriptwriters are still writers. They have skills which they must hone and are imaginative.

A number of people have observed that my Anne Droyd books read like they’ve been adapted from episodes of a television series. I have no problem with this either.

As a semi-dyslexic I used to find reading a bit tiring. I didn’t have word blindness or see letters back to front, but the speed at which I read was affected, which meant that I frequently gave up. However, if a book really captured my imagination, I persevered with it.

My favourite childhood books include Stig of the Dump by Clive King and Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator by Roald Dahl.

My all-time favourite was/is The Tripods Trilogy (The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead and The Pool of Fire) by John Christopher. I found this vastly superior to the television series. There are no grape picking families and no circuses, just pure adventure.

It’s not without reason that the back cover blurb describes it as ‘John Christopher’s almost unbearably exciting trilogy’. You also get the full story in the books!

For older readers I enjoyed The Pigman by Paul Zindel and The Chrysalids by John Wyndham.

When I reached secondary school I began to read the novelisations of TV Doctor Who stories. Most of them were adapted by one of the series’ script writers Terrance Dicks, who was first approached by Target Books in the 1970s to turn many of the Doctor Who TV stories into novels.

You see, before video, DVD and BBC Three, the only way you could enjoy a Doctor Who adventure again after it had been shown once or twice on TV was to read the novelisation.

I especially enjoyed Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure With the Daleks by David Whitaker (the very first novelisation and based on the very first TV Dalek story by Terry Nation, later reissued simply as Doctor Who and the Daleks), and Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters by Malcolm Hulke (adapted from his own script The Silurians).

Doctor Who and the Daleks is written from the viewpoint of school teacher Ian Chesterton, who stumbles into the Doctor’s time machine, the TARDIS, and gets whisked away to the planet Skaro to confront the Nazi-like machine creatures.  It works exceptionally well as a novel and is exciting.

The creation of Anne Droyd was certainly influenced by elements of the above. I wanted a series of stories where the children are the heroes, and that comes straight from The Famous Five.

 

Only this is the Famous Four and one of them is super-human, an idea spawned by memories of The Bionic Woman. Anne’s observations and remarks about human behaviour reflect those of Chocky, while the underground base scenes are more than a little reminiscent of Doctor Who.

 

The scenes with Anne Droyd on the housing estate and at school follow a rule set by TV Incredible Hulk writer Kenneth Johnson – if you’re going to ask your audience to believe the unbelievable (in his case the Hulk, in my case a robot school girl), surround it with the normal and everyday things of life. In writing Anne Droyd and Century Lodge I followed that principle to the letter.

 

It is a curious irony that many who have read the book have said it would translate very easily to television, especially as a just-got-home-from-school Children’s BBC type serial, which is exactly the sort of thing I imagined it to be way back in 1996.