Inspirations - Ghost Light

 

One of Ghost Light's principal inspirations was the day job of its author, Marc Platt. He had spent some time with the BBC helping to catalogue its radio archive. You would expect the work to have reduced as the catalogue progressed, but instead it actually grew into a bigger and more complex task as the categories were refined. This feeds into the finished story as Light gets frustrated by the constant changes which mess up his catalogue of life-forms on Earth.

Platt had no professional writing experience but had submitted a story called "Lungbarrow" to the Doctor Who production office. This involved the Doctor going back to Gallifrey, to visit his ancestral home. It was vetoed by JNT, as it gave too much away about the Doctor's origins. Lungbarrow was the name of the Doctor's house, and this was one element which Platt kept for Ghost Light - the setting of a big old house full of bizarre characters. Inspector McKenzie's suspended animation derives from a character in "Lungbarrow" who had been trapped into a transmat for 300 years.

One of the inspirations for "Lungbarrow" was the Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake, another ancient household full of odd characters and even odder incident - so you can argue that this another inspiration for Ghost Light.

Instead of a story exploring the Doctor's origins, Platt ended up writing a story about Ace's origins, as it delivers a great deal of information about her life before she encountered the Doctor.

He was a great fan of all things Victorian / Edwardian, which prompted the historical setting, and the dialogue references many Victorian books. One such would be the notion that Ace is like Lewis Carroll's Alice, going down the rabbit hole into a strange world.

The Doctor mentions Bandersnatches and Slithy Toves - which also come from Carroll (the 1871 poem Jabberwocky). 

The housekeeper of Gabriel Chase is Mrs Grose. This was the same name as the housekeeper in Henry James' supernatural classic The Turn of the Screw (1898). Mrs Pritchard seems to be modelled upon Mrs Danvers, from Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. Written outside Platt's favourite historical era, but it is very much a 1930's version of a Victorian Gothic novel.

Josiah Smith calls himself "a man of property", which comes from Galsworthy. The Man of Property is one of the books in The Forsyte Saga.

Big game hunter Redvers Fenn-Cooper gets his surname from James Fenimore Cooper, author of Last of the Mohicans (1826).

Control's desire to become a "ladylike" obviously derives from George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion (1913).

The clergyman who visits Smith is the Rev. Ernest Matthews. This might be a reference to Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (Ghost Light has a reference to Reading Gaol), but is more likely to come from Platt's own relations (Ernest is his dad's name).

The Rev Matthews brings us to the other big inspiration - Charles Darwin's theory of Evolution, and its Creationist opponents. The story could be seen as being about the conflict between science and religion, or as the conflict between change and conservatism / technological advance and tradition.

There's a 1960 movie with Spencer Tracy and Fredric March called Inherit The Wind, which is based on the infamous 1925 "Monkey Trial". Conservative town leaders take a school teacher to court for advocating Darwinism. The film was seen at the time as an attack on McCarthyism.

The costume design for Light was based both on a William Blake angel, and an insect with a wing case. There was supposed to be third husk creature in the cellar - with a fish-like head. Smith would therefore have evolved through the four main fauna groups - insect, reptile, fish and mammal.

A couple of more recent references for Ghost Light include the draft version of The Evil of the Daleks, in which the Doctor would have collected a Neanderthal named Og from prehistoric times in order to help identify the Human Factor for the Daleks - bringing him to a big old Victorian mansion. 

The other is the Doctor's query "Who was it said Earthmen never invite their ancestors round for dinner?". This comes from Douglas Adams and The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Some people have also seen parallels with The Rocky Horror Show - big old spooky house; strange inhabitants (who turn out to be alien); the main character in the house seeking a form of perfection and being overthrown by his servants at the end; and one of the characters being served up for dinner. The house takes off and flies into space at the end.

Next time: more character development for Ace. And Bram Stoker's Dracula...