Backlisted - Grinny & You Remember Me! by Nicholas Fisk
Episode Date: November 13, 2024Sam Leith, author of The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading, returns to Backlisted to discuss two novels by Nicholas Fisk, Grinny (1973) and its sequel, You Remember Me! (1984). Fisk's ...SF thrillers were tremendously popular with young readers during the 1970s and 1980s but his work is now rather forgotten, an error we wish to correct as a matter of urgency. The plot of You Remember Me! may be summarised as follows: a TV celebrity becomes the head of a mass populist movement in the UK, leading their country into fascism at the behest of an alien power. As such, Fisk's novel has something to tell us (and our children) right now, which is why we have released this episode early. Our conversation was recorded on Friday 8th November 2024, in the immediate aftermath of the US election results; in addition to Grinny and You Remember Me!, Sam, John and Andy offer suggestions of other books written for young people that warn of the reality of life under fascist regimes, including The Once and Future King, Watership Down and V for Vendetta. Just don't call it an emergency podcast. In the words of Timothy Snyder in his book On Tyranny: 'When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires more concepts, and having more concepts requires reading. So get the screens out of your room and surround yourself with books.' * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show and join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and get extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a patron at www.patreon.com/backlisted *You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast which gives new life to old books.
Today you find us standing in the kitchen of an English suburban house in the early
1970s.
A tall, eager man is filling up the glasses of his wife and two young children with sherry. At the centre of the room stands a very short but neat elderly woman wearing
a hat with a veil and gloves. She removes both, takes out a pack of gold bars from her
pocket and smiles. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, where people pledge
to support the books they really want to read.
And I'm Andy Miller, the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously.
And today we are joined by returning guest Sam Leith.
Hello, Sam, how are you?
I'm all right, thank you.
How are you both?
It's a great pleasure to be invited back.
Thank you.
I am quite well.
How about you, John?
I am good.
In fact, better than good.
Not traumatized by the week's election.
It's funny you should say that Sam, because that may come up during this podcast.
I think more inspired to think a little deeper and listen a little more carefully to the people around me.
I refuse the option of trauma.
Very good, John.
Sam Leith is the literary editor of the Spectator magazine.
His new book is The Haunted Wood, a history of childhood reading.
And he's also the author of You Talking to Me, rhetoric from Aristotle to Trump and beyond.
Gulp.
And Right to the Point, that's right, the W everybody.
Right to the Point, how to be clear, correct and persuasive on the page.
He has joined us on previous episodes dedicated
to Ray Bradbury in 2019 and Thomas Pynchon in 2022. Sam, how is it going with The Haunted Wood?
A wonderful book as listeners to Batlist did know. Well, thank you. I think it's going okay.
I mean, I'm doing what every author of a new book does, which is checking
my Amazon rankings far more often than is good for my mental health, though,
no doubt it's good for Jeff Bezos' clicks, but so far it's holding up.
I think, I mean, I've been very lucky.
Have you got a window open while we record this so you can just keep an eye on it?
I beautifully closed it.
And as I was saying, I think it's going to actually, you know,
vastly improve my outlook on life.
Not to check it for an hour and a half.
Um, but no, it's going all right.
I think it seems to have found or had as much publicity, thanks in
part to backlisted that those people who might want to know about it probably do.
And now let's just hope the bastards buy it.
I think one world have done a great job
I have to say. Looks great. Looks it's a really nice bit of bookmaking. It is
beautifully published and I can't take credit for that. I think it's a Christmas
gift. I was gonna say Sam, will it be available in the run-up to Christmas?
I very much hope it will. That's good. You're talking about having and checking your Amazon ranking. One of the
things that really makes me laugh in the world in which we now live is I'm forever seeing authors drawing attention to the fact made it to number one in any niche charts?
It has found itself at the top in various niche charts.
I think it was doing quite well in histories of children's
literature, number one, because there aren't that many haven't
been for about 30 years.
So, you know,
well, that's, you know, that's a triumph.
Now we are recording this episode of Batlist on Friday, November the 8th, 2024.
It's been in the diary for some time.
We've been talking for several months about finding the time to discuss the
books we're going to discuss, but in the light of events in America this week,
we wanted to get it out to you as early as possible.
We wouldn't stoop to calling this an emergency podcast, as the American historian Timothy
Snyder writes in his book on tyranny, when we repeat the same words and phrases that
appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework.
Instead, and this being backlisted, I like to believe this quick response show is in
the tradition of John Lennon's instant Karma, a single written, recorded, and released in a
matter of days in early 1970, which of course makes Sam our
Yoko Ono, which is a compliment, which is a compliment.
I love Yoko.
Andy, does that mean Nicky's our Phil Spector?
Hey, hey, Spector did a lot of good things, a lot of good things.
Well anyway, after the US election result, it dawned on us that a book we are here to
discuss, Grinny, my Nicholas Fisk, has a sequel entitled You Remember Me, the plot of which
may be summarized as follows.
A TV celebrity becomes the head of a mass populist movement, leading the country into
fascism at the behest of an alien power. Fancy that. Literature is news that stays news, as Ezra Pound memorably said, but sometimes
the news is literature you wish had stayed literature. Very good. Also, it's about time we
stopped quoting Ezra Pound. So on this show we'll be discussing both Grinney and You Remember Me, plus other
books written for children that warn of the reality of life under an authoritarian
regime and how to resist it.
Quoting Tim Snyder again,
When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept
the absence of a larger framework.
appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires more concepts and having more concepts requires reading. So get the screens out of your
room and surround yourself with books. Here, here. Before we get into the wider discussion,
let's give you a quick introduction to the two books we're discussing.
Grinney, one of Nicholas Fiske's many novels of science fiction written primarily for children
and young adults, was first published by William Heineman in 1973. Set in the suburban home
of the Carpenter family, it is told mostly through the diaries of the 11-year-old Timothy
Carpenter. It covers the unexpected arrival of his mysterious great aunt Emma.
Nicknamed Grinny because of her difficult-to-shift smile, she quickly ingratiates herself into
the rhythms of family life, but her eccentricities and odd questions soon arouse the suspicions
of Beth, Tim's seven-year-old sister.
It turns out that Grinny is not at all who she appears to be, and Tim
and Beth's clever unveiling of the terrifying threat she embodies, and their even more clever
strategy for disarming it, have helped to make the book a children's classic.
Indeed. But perhaps less well known is You Remember Me, a loose sequel published over a decade later by Viking Kestrel in 1984.
Timothy Carpenter is now 15 years old and working as a cub reporter at the local Gazette.
He has plenty to write about. The whole country seems to have fallen under the spell of the smart
and charismatic TV celebrity Lisa Treadgold, whose popular movement Rule of Law aka The Rollers is
dedicated to a moral crusade built around the three D's decency discipline
dedication. As the movement gathers pace it is once again Beth now 11 years old
who spots the uncanny resemblance of the seemingly irresistible Lisa Treadgold to their previous nemesis,
Grinny.
Can it be happening again?
But this time around, her brother Timothy seems unwilling or unable to help his sister.
We'll discuss this and much else besides in the course of the next hour, but first here is a message from our sponsors. Chris Evans. It might just go back to the car. Let's save Christmas. I'm not gonna say that.
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And we're back. So let's start with the usual question. Sam, where were you? Who were you?
What were you when you first encountered a book or books
by Nicholas Fisk? And which book was it? Well, I'm pretty sure it was Grinney. And Grinney
is certainly the one that I think made the most profound impression on me when I was a kid,
because I mean, this isn't a very literary judgment, but it scared the shit out of me.
And everybody I've ever met in adult life who read it as a very literary judgment, but it scared the shit out of me. And everybody I've
ever met in adult life who read it as a kid, when you mention it, they go, oh my god, yes,
that scared the shit out of me. So it's had a profound effect, I think, on my generation of
puffin club members. And Grinney had a huge impression, not just because of the scariness
of the plot, but the sort of
texture of the language. I mean, because it's in diary form, it's got that strange to the
moment happening in real time found footage quality about it. And it sort of does sound
like a precocious 11 year old diary or whatever he is, he's 11 or 12, I think, isn't he?
For example, I remember he was in sentences,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,
which I thought was pronounced, et, et, et.
And I think my own diary writing practice
started to mimic that, you know,
my diary entries were in et, et, et.
But it's kind of like he's slightly in love
with long words and aphorisms,
and he pontificates on things,
and he takes his father's sayings and recycles them.
And the needle with his sister, it's all very recognizable, which I think grounds the fantasy
of it.
Yeah.
They call Grinny, Grinny, obviously as a pun on granny because she's grinning all the time.
And it's doing a thing that they loved doing in Dr. Who in this era,
which if partly for budgetary reasons as well, which was setting horrible things in recognizable
domestic settings. It's a trope of early seventies SF on TV and, and in literature. And I think Samuel writes, I think one of the reasons that Grinney
still works so well, which having just reread it for the first time since the 1970s, I was
delighted to find that it does, is it's not just the domestic setting of it, is it? It's
the sense that because it's found a found document, it can't be changed. Do you see what I mean? It's like
it's a report of something that has happened and is happening in the moment for the reader.
ALISTAIR Yes, exactly. You're experiencing it forwards.
Also, I think there's something about that domestic setting that really sort of snags
me and why I think it's so profoundly horrifying is because it's a home invasion fantasy.
And you know, vampire stories and zombie stories also tend to be home invasion fantasies.
So much horror is about the home, the safe place being under threat, the calls coming
from inside the house.
And when you're a kid, and so much children's literature is about home being the sort of safe place from which you sadly fall through your wardrobe or through, you know, a rabbit hole or whatever to have your adventure.
And then you come back, but home is the safe place.
And here, you know, it just opens on page two, this weird old creature presents himself at the door.
And you as a kid go, what the hell? Who's this? to this weird old creature presents himself at the door.
And you as a kid go, what the hell, who's this? And the parents go, what the hell, who's, oh,
oh yes, I remember you, come on in.
Why don't you come and stay?
And so the parents who are protectors,
you know, you would get the parents out of the way
in children's stories one way or another.
But in this case, they're there, but they're just useless because something's going on that has washed their minds.
So I think that's a really profound digging into a particular sort of childhood terror.
The people who are supposed to protect you are in fact incapable of protecting you.
John, I had a memory of Grinney being read on Jack and Ori, but a trip to the BBC Genome,
the amazing BBC Genome site confirms in fact that it was not read on Jack and Ori, but
it was serialized on ITV's program, The Book Tower, in probably 1979 or 80. Sam, you're a few years younger than me. I wonder whether
you got to it via that route could be or just on the shelf in the library.
I think on the shelf. I don't remember hearing it dramatized.
Nicholas Fisk, we should emphasize was one of the reasons this is such a perfect backlisted
is such a perfect backlisted subject, John, is Nicholas Fisk, who is probably quite an obscure name to anybody listening to this under the age of 30, possibly 40.
But if you grew up in the 1970s, he was a really popular writer, wasn't he?
I think he was kind of the entry level for a lot of us for sci-fi before you went on
to Asimov or Heinlein or some of the other stuff.
It was, there were big ideas, but as Sam has said with that, the domestic, very, very,
it's a very 70s setting.
The mum and the dad are both in their 30s.
He's kind of doing a Roman dig.
He's a bit of an archaeologist.
It's a classic seventies family.
And as you say, the feeling is very, very much Doctor Who, but there's also quite a
bit of Molesworth in the diaries.
I mean, I think, you know, he's always hemming and harring and et cetera and et cetera-ing,
which only makes the horror, as the horror begins to ramp up even more.
There's a particular scene in this book that lives with every,
everybody who read it in their sort of early teenage years, which is when I
read it, I think remembers it.
Like I remember him being a feature of my childhood and obviously it was for
yours, but he was, I mean, there's a book called Twentieth Century Children's
Writers, which described him as the Huxley Windham Golding of children's
literature.
So, you know, it's like depressing to think that he's now completely forgotten. We haven't made an episode about all this Huxley Windham Golding of children's literature. So, you know, it's like depressing to think that he's now completely forgotten.
We haven't made an episode about Aldous Huxley, have we? But we have made episodes about William
Golding and about John Windham. And Windham, certainly, he's, Fisk's earlier book Trillions
seems to me to owe quite a lot to John Windham.
That was my first Fisk Trillions. Again, it's this sort of
alien invasion idea. It's about the world being kind of, you know, invaded by these sort of strange kind of particles
Yeah
Nicholas Fisk was so well known and
Preeminent even by the publication of Grinney that this book was reviewed in 1973 in the Times by Philippa Pierce, the author of Tom's Midnight
Garden who described it as disarmingly informal, brilliantly controlled and unfailingly exciting.
And would you like to know the three other children's novels, or can you guess the three other children's novels alongside which Grinney was reviewed in the Times?
Oh, I couldn't begin to guess that sort of level of specificity.
Okay, no.
Are they were famous.
That this is how famous. So we're talking about Grinney by Nicholas Fisk, the ghost of
Thomas Kemp by Penelope Lively.
Wow.
The dark is rising by Susan Cooper.
Wow.
And Charlie and the great glass elevator by Roald Dahl.
What a roundup.
Right.
In the same week or month.
All by Philippa Pierce.. All by Philippa Pierce?
All reviewed by Philippa Pierce.
Did she give old Dahl a kicking?
I mean, she doesn't say this is the worst sequel ever written, but she is noticeably
chillier towards it than she is towards Grinney and indeed towards
The Dark is Rising.
She particularly likes The Dark is Rising.
But anyway, this is the point I'm making.
We have all heard, everyone listening to this has heard of the three other books.
They may even have read all three of those other books, but Grinney for whatever reason
and Fisk for whatever reason for a writer who was concerned with the future, seems to have been locked Sapphire and Steel-like in the 1970s.
Another reference you'll have to explain on the website.
Yes.
He's like, no, Alan, hey, Alan Garner, no lesser figure than Alan Garner has said how
influenced he was by the final Sapphire and Seal story,
which if anybody hasn't seen it, I know spoilers, but you know, it doesn't end well for our
heroes. So Sam, would you care to speculate why then we are able to treat this as a kind
of archival book rather than a contemporary one? Well, that's a good question. I wonder whether it's the case that science fiction dates faster
than fantasy. I don't know whether that's true, but I think actually 60s and 70s SF,
I don't think people... I mean, you were talking about Asimov and Heinlein, I wonder whether
millennials and Gen Z read those either. I wonder whether SF does have a danger. I remember talking
to William Gibson about science fiction, the futurism in it. And he said, oh, writing a
science fiction novel is like carrying a kind of ice cream cone in your kind of predictions of the future just sort of melt as you go through it. So maybe it's that. I mean, the odd thing about Fisk,
I think, and one of the things that's captivating about him is that he's not sort of straight SF.
His world building is wackier than that and more off-beam. John, you mentioned trillions, which there's no real
explanation for what's going on with the trillions. And there's a lot of extraordinarily strange and
suggestive work on, are they sort of alien hive minds? And there are sort of weird existential
things. I mean, you've got these soldiers shooting them with guns and tactical
nuclear weapons and so forth, which reminds me nothing so much as that bit in Heart of Darkness
where there's the warship just firing, shelling the jungle. And in his other books, Ragabonahanker
Hare, which starts as a science fictional premise, there's some cloned characters who are set in some tiny little
1940s to a apartment.
I read that this week.
I'd never read it before.
God, that's fantastic.
And you think it's one sort of science fictional thing,
and then it sort of shifts gear.
And you get a character appearing
who appears to have been willed into existence
by some sort of collective act of fictional imagination. And in Grinney, I think the stuff that stays with you is the
stuff that's deeply unheimlich on a kind of Freudian line. It's not like there's an explanation for,
oh, she's an alien or she's a robot or this is the setup. I mean, the details are things like
she doesn't have a smell and the top's first shoes aren't creased. All of the sort of stuff
about her with no explanation is just odd in a sort of dream-like way. So I think he's halfway
between science fiction and kind of outright horror. Do you want to read us a bit, Sam?
Okay.
He has an example of where one of the probably two moments in the book that
everyone who was terrified by it as a child will remember.
But we know that there are lots of strange things about Guiney, these
uncreased shoes, the fact she smokes cigarettes to constantly to conceal the
fact she doesn't smell like a human being.
She appears to be frightened of electricity.
She's got all sorts of sort of strange characteristics.
Beth sees her walking out across snowy, icy paving stones
and she slips and falls.
And Beth, who's constantly trying to convince Timothy
that something is not right.
Eventually confesses Timothy what she saw
that upsets her so much.
Grinney slipped on the ice and broke her wrist.
And Tim, again, this is in his diary, so it's mediated,
records Beth's horrified witness to the incident.
The skin was gashed open, but there was no blood.
The bones stuck out, but they were not made of real bone.
They were made of shiny steel.
She said there was no blood, no blood at all.
The skin was just split open.
I asked her what color the skin was, and she said the same color outside as in.
I said, well, there must have been meaty stuff where the bones were, but she said no.
There was nothing but the steel ribs, ribs and the skin was just a thick layer
like the fat on a mutton chop before it's cooked but with a
tear in it.
I know it's so good.
I love that.
And those spokes it's like the spokes umbrella. She's a sort of
kind of collection of rods in her arm,
rather than even just a single metal bone. But again, where's that come from?
It's funny she said a collection of rods, because these Fisk novels most reminded me of
Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone. They take a what if and run with an idea. Fisk wrote a really interesting essay
called One Thumping Lie Only in which he says what you can do with a SF story is present
one thing that is untrue to your child reader and then ensure that everything else
that flows from it feels totally authentic. And I think for what it's worth, that sense
of terror, what we would come to call body horror in a David Cronenberg way is right
there in Grinney, isn't it? And as you say, Sam, the decision to compare that non-body to a
piece of animal meat is very, very full on for a 1970s novel, supposedly for children.
AC It is. It's dramatic.
CB They pick up the animal analogy in the extraordinary final sequence of the book.
But the other thing, I think, the visceral Unheimlich is also, feels like a very 1970s
thing.
It's kind of language and attention to language.
And Beth in particular spots that she does inappropriate things.
She offers a cigarette to Timothy,
do you smoke, Timothy?
She tells Beth that she's,
she asks her about having babies
and that she can't have babies at nine or 10 in a way that,
and then there is the great scene where she assumes
when they're talking about a cast iron
Conker, very 1970s, people still playing Conker, that it is actually made out of cast iron.
So in the context of the conversations we're having about AI, what machine learning can do
and what it can't do, this book is absolutely brilliant on human beings being able to sniff out
a constructed. Grinney is a machine learning experiment, you know, a large language kind of
program that is, is able to write itself quite quickly, but it's still vulnerable
to actual human intelligence.
I mean, everyone can tell this podcast is AI, but in a couple of years time, you
won't be able to tell that this is all gone on a computer, right?
This will be like, you know, indistinguishable from human frailty.
Can I read you the blurb on the back of the original edition of Grinney, 1973?
Grinney appears from nowhere in the station taxi and says she's great Aunt Emma,
but Tim and Beth soon realize that she isn't even human, that
she is as dangerous as a time bomb and has some fearful tasks
to perform, which involves them.
Another highly original, exciting science fiction story by the author
of space hostages and trillions.
That's it.
That's it.
No messing about. They it. No messing about. No messing about. And what's Sam, what's on the cover of this original puffin edition?
It's an image of another of the seeds, but they, Timothy at one point goes in to try and wake Grinney up, I think because they've just seen a flying saucer and they want as many witnesses as possible. So typically goes up to Grinney's room in the middle of the night.
A classic 70s moment.
I should read this little bit because it's another of the indelible bits. Grinney was
lying flat on her back on the bed with her arms by her side above the covers. She was
rigid and still like a corpse or an Egyptian mummy. But she was luminous.
There was even a faint glow through the bedclothes. I went closer. I wasn't frightened yet and saw
another thing. Her eyes were wide open. She was staring at the ceiling, staring at nothing. And
her eyes were lit up from inside, like water when you put the lens of a lit torch in it.
eyes were lit up from inside, like water when you put the lens of a lit torch in it. Her mouth was open. She was grinning. I don't mean she was making the movement of smiling. I mean her mouth
was set in a grin. And from her open mouth, I thought I heard a slight fluttering, twittering
sound, but it might've been my own pulses. I think it was the reflection of her luminosity
on her teeth that made me give a sort of scream.
Yes, it's so good. The teeth, the teeth, the teeth are wrong.
It was the wrongness and the image of the torch in water. I mean, you can see that so clearly.
And you know, that's the point at which I think Timothy's fully on board with the idea that all is not strictly okay with great aunt Emma. Hey,, Sam, you write about this section, I think, in the haunted wood itself in your
rock.
I'm going to ask you to share that with us in a moment.
But could you just for listeners say, say what the haunted wood is in your conception
of this book and how it applies to Fisk?
Well, I argue in the book that children's writing has always been closer to those original
forms of
storytelling, fairy tale and folktale and myth. And of course, in folktale, certainly in European
folktales, the wood is the place that the protagonist goes in order to face danger.
It's the wood at the centre of which is Baba Yaga's chicken-legged hut or the wolf or the candy house.
It's Hansel and Gretel's wood. The idea was that in children's writing, very often one way or
another, the protagonists are going to head into a place, a haunted wood, which is at the same time
exciting and a little bit scary and that you come back from back from changed. And I think for Fisk,
which is the connection I make with that concept of the haunted wood, I think outer space is his
idea of the haunted wood. It's somewhere really alien and dangerous and transformative. And one of the oddest subplots of trillions is that there's an
astronaut in it who's a sort of retired astronaut who has been completely traumatized by his
experiences when his mission went wrong and he was drifting in space. And he tries to explain
to the child protagonist, you know, space is just, you know, you think there's nothing there,
but it's not just nothing, it's alien.
It's completely, what do you mean by alien?
Just alien, I can't understand it.
It's too radically different for us to understand.
And I think that's sort of what he does with his science fictional world building is that
the creatures he brings in from the beyond are just beyond understanding in any real way.
That section Sam really reminded me of Nigel Neal and Quatermass. You cannot underestimate
the influence of Quatermass on the British creative psyche from the 1950s onwards into
which we put Doctor Who, but all sorts of other things. But that idea of being suspended in space and space doing things
to the human body and mind that cannot be truly expressed, only the symptoms can be witnessed,
and often the symptoms are dangerous and menacing, that's very, very of its era.
IAEA 100%, I think, yeah. And And actually there's stuff like that in Ray Bradbury.
There's a wonderful Ray Bradbury story in which I think three people are in a spaceship
that breaks up and they're heading in opposite directions and still talking to each other
as they realize that they're drifting off.
Sam, there's a bit in The Haunted Woodway specifically you talk about for Nigel Neal
and for Nicholas Fisk's generation
who have been children during the Second World War.
There's a section in the Haunted World
where you write about Fisk and you write specifically
about how this may have affected his writing.
Oh, well, I think undoubtedly, you know,
in the same way that when you read J.G. Ballard's memoir,
Miracles of Life, you could suddenly see
that all the things you thought were surrealard's memoir, Miracles of Life, you could suddenly see that all the
things you thought were surreal, the empty swimming pools, the abandoned airplanes,
that were his childhood. And there is a sense in which if you read Fiske's really interesting
memoir, Pig Ignorant, which is a memoir of his late adolescence and young adulthood,
it's suddenly a lot of what- And when was that published in the early 90s?
Is it?
That was published in 92, that's right.
Fisk, we should say, incidentally, his real name was David Higginbottom.
So Nicholas Fisk was a sort of, wasn't even mentioned himself.
But yeah, in 1992, he looked back and he described his wartime experiences, some of which go
very directly into Ragabonahankerpare, and one of which I think goes into Grinney.
And I'll read this bit. In a short memoir published as part of Walker Books' teenage memoir series,
Pig Ignorant, Fisk describes his adolescence and young manhood in the run-up to the Second World War.
It has as its epigraph a line from Victoria Wood,
I believe we all have a certain time in our lives that we're good at. I wasn't good at being a child.
Much of that short book narrates his attempt
to leave his child and find a secure identity
as a young adult.
For Nick, school is over.
He's free.
He's his real self at last.
But the child is never quite left behind.
Fisk's narrator self introduces us to his adolescent self
as a walking, talking, breathing, solid ghost. Not the ghost of someone
dead. I'm still alive. His flesh is my flesh. His heartbeat is my heartbeat because he is me,
but so long ago. This Nick, tall, gawky, pink-faced, both is and is not the boy jeered
out by bullies as a mother's darling, like the protagonist of Monster Maker.
But the furniture of his identity is unstable.
He affects to smoke a pipe because a girl he fancies,
pig ignorance, seethes with remembered lust,
doesn't like men who smoke cigarettes.
He gets a job as a receptionist and typist
with theatrical agent.
He finds his shy faltering way into the jazz clubs
where he would come to moonlight as a guitarist and witnesses frightening eruptions of a world still alien to him, a fight with a cutthroat razor,
sex, gin, but over all this hangs the war. One image from the aftermath of an air raid,
a fisk and a warden finding someone half buried in the rubble, chimes with that horrible scene in Grinney.
It was an elderly man, very thin, wearing a sort of striped waistcoat.
The ghastly face is masked in plastic dust.
A butler?
There you are mate, coming along nicely soon, have you?
Are you alright?
But the man is not alright.
There is only the upper half of him left.
Shiny wet tubing.
Yes, on that cheerful note, we will just take a break and when we come back, we will hear
an excerpt from an adaptation of Grinney from the early 1980s. But in the meantime, here's word from our sponsors.
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Welcome to CBS Story Break.
Usually it's fun when a relative comes for a visit.
But what would you think if a relative showed up whom nobody remembered?
That's what happens to Tim and Beth when great-aunt Emma arrives at their house.
And that is when the trouble starts.
Today's story is about a close encounter of a dangerous kind.
Based on Nicholas Fisk's book, here is Rinny.
Instant reaction.
That's when the trouble starts.
I think it's more jocular, really.
I'd have preferred for the book that traumatized my childhood. Put some
respect on her name.
As we've established this week, they do things differently in the States. So now we're going
to move on to discussing Nicholas Fiske's sequel to Grinney, which was published in
1984 and it's called You Remember Me!
And we should just say that you remember me are the magic words that in the first book
Grinney uses to hypnotize any adults that she comes into contact with. She says, you
remember me? And they go, yes, of course, come in. So this book repeats that phrase.
You remember me, not question mark, exclamation mark.
And I'll just read you the blurb on the back here.
And then I'll ask John, I think, to comment on this novel.
So this was published in 1984.
Timothy Carpenter is a junior reporter
on his local newspaper.
His lucky break is a chance to interview the famous TV personality Lisa Treadgold.
Her effect on him is so hypnotic, it's not long before Timothy and his friends are persuaded
to join her new political party.
Yet, as Timothy is to discover, Lisa has some very odd traits, like constantly eating chocolates.
When boiling water is accidentally spilt over her, she seems to feel no pain.
And Timothy's young sister Beth and her friend Mac seem to hate Lisa and all she stands for.
Why are they so desperately opposed to her?
And what on earth are they so frightened of? A tense, exciting science
fiction story by the author of the immensely popular Grinney. John, what did you think when
you were reading this novel this week? Well, I'd not read it before. I'd never even heard of it
before. It's fairly early on in the book you get the
feeling that you're revisiting familiar ground. Sam's rather brilliantly used the word Unheimlich
and there is a visit early on in the book to Lisa Treadgold's house, which is full of
these little hints and guesses that Lisa Treadgold is not all that she appears. And the eating
of chocolate, but it's not just the eating of chocolate, it's the disappearance of the rappers that really plays on Timothy's mind.
But I think the thing that really grabs you by the lapels is the opening,
which is a rally for this, what we would now call a sort of far right populist movement.
The very opening of the book gives you, they've already got a song that's,
they're called the rule of law party or
they're ROL or rollers for short. It sounds strangely familiar, doesn't it?
Rolling along side by side and they love that there's kind of people singing at the seat. The
police are kind of complicit because these people, these are just a bunch of people out having fun
and the 3Ds, you know, decency, what is it, decency, dedication and...
Discipline.
Yeah.
It's very much not a 70s novel now.
You feel this is definitely the 80s where TV celebrity is suddenly the thing that is
going to get into the homes of millions of people.
Everybody loves Lisa.
They just, you know, she looks great.
They love the way she talks.
She talks a lot of common sense. She's brilliant. There's a lot of very good stuff about when she's asked about these
policies, she makes them sound rather kind of reasonable and sensible. As the book gathers pace,
it becomes more and more sinister. It's an unbelievably prescient book for this moment.
She actually says we need to put Britain first. That's the thing she says in 1984.
She says that she believes in conscription for young people.
I don't know if anybody remembers the election in Britain a few months ago where Rishi announced
that as a policy.
There's all sorts of resonances, which I found thrilling and really quite disturbing.
Sam, I think we can agree that You Remember me isn't as good a book in literary terms as Grinney, but you must concede that reading it now is a is a slightly unheimlich experience in its own right.
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, it's got that. I mean, it does nail that kind of populist, you know, bring back the birch, of course, is no longer a great
catchphrase. But not yet. No, but the but not only the content of what she's saying seems familiar,
but also as John says, the form the fact that it's, it's all about tele celebrity, and it is
literally through the television, rather than as in Grinney on the doorstep,
that she, you know, hypnotises and brainwashes her supporters.
Yeah. There's a very telling bit at the end of the book.
For those who are listening, I'm sorry to spoil it, but it turns out that Lisa Tchegold isn't human either. But one of the reasons this book is not as good as Grinney is there is one of those kind of bond villain confessions
where she gets all the main characters together into a room and explains to them exactly what the cunning plan has been.
But one of the things that she does say is that we got it wrong the last time around. Families are too, they're too close knit and there is too much kind
of essentially phatic communication in families which makes them very, very difficult to pass
as a family member. Whereas the implication is that on television you can gole huge numbers
of people. Nicholas Fisk was writing this book considerably before social media, but everything that he says about the ability of television to manipulate people,
thought processes, is even more relevant to a world as we have just seen where social
media is able to make people respond.
Another other confession she makes is she realized,
last time we didn't bother with children. She says, we didn't bother trying to hypnotize
children because they were no threat. And we've realized they are more of one. And I think
a thing that's interesting that he does in this book is that because Timothy is
because Timothy is on the cusp of adulthood, he half is and half isn't hypnotized,
and he can't remember what happened about Grinney. And so Beth, who was his great ally in the first book, she can't quite rely on him. And she goes, you remember Grinney, remember this happened? It
all kind of floods back to him. She gives him a shock and he kind of can remember, but he has to constantly make an effort to stop the
brain fog seeping in. And so he goes sort of in and out of hypnosis in the course of the book.
I'm going to take on the chin what John is saying about it not being as a good a book as Grinney,
but my goodness, it is an extremely effective and interesting book to
read right now.
And I think one of the things that really struck me is that thing you were talking about,
about brain fog and memory and forgetting as you get older, Sam, the book is called
You Remember Me, because A, you remember this, it's fascism, it's coming
back. But also you have to remember fascism, because if we don't remember it, its lessons
aren't learned. We have to keep reminding ourselves of it. And that seemed to me powerful
and depressing this week. Also, there's a fantastically witty thing in it,
which I'm sure you, Sam and John, and many of our listeners would greatly appreciate,
which is it contains a letter from Nicholas Fisk to Timothy. So Timothy writes to Nicholas
Fisk saying, hmm, something's up, but I'm not quite sure what.
And Nicholas Fisk, the author Nicholas Fisk replies to him and he says, Dear Timothy,
many thanks for your letter.
I'm very pleased to hear from you that you are applying yourself seriously to your journalistic
work.
I know that your real concern in writing to me is to elicit my opinions regarding Lisa
Treadgold.
I am not in the least surprised that you find her impact
disturbing. So are the reactions experienced after being inoculated against smallpox and
other unpleasant diseases. One must endure discomfort in order to achieve a long-term
protection of future benefit. You are passing through the discomforting stage. I passed
through it some time ago. My first opinion of Ms Tregold was that she was another
artificially created television personality and a woman of no importance. I now consider
her to be a wholly admirable phenomenon. All the more so since I have had the privilege
of reading her written words. My publishers are to produce her forthcoming book. She is
astonishingly clear and frank about the implications of the three Ds. We
must strive to restore decency to our personal, local and national lives, discipline ourselves
to accept various restrictions. What these restrictions are, as she points out, really
are freeways to a greater liberty. And above all, we must dedicate ourselves to a concept of obedience. With cordial regards
to yourself and your family, your sincerely, Nicholas Fisk. Come on, that's very witty.
It's very funny. It also plays on the fact the frame story of Grinney is that Nicholas
Fisk, the writer friend, helps Timothy to publish his diaries, the first
book. So Nicholas Fiske has kind of forgotten. Yeah, well, so
it's an extra level of talk there as well. But it's lovely
that he kind of sends himself up.
Sends himself up as being you can't trust me either.
And his publishers up.
I might just read this little section, Andy, just going back
to your point, it is quite, it is quite remarkable to read a book that is written
in 1984 that is as kind of on point as this.
It's early in the book when Fanny, the reporter who's a kind of left leaning kind of feminist
reporter for the Gazette, is upbraiding young Timothy for not seeing that Lisa Treadgold
is potentially operating the fascist playbook.
I mean, it's a conversation that's being run in kind of social media and households
across the world at the moment.
But I think it's very well done.
You should read some history, Sonny Boy.
Read about the black shirts and the Gestapo and concentration camps. That's not the same thing as Lisa Treadgold.
Hitler was a fiend. Lisa's just a very beautiful woman with strong opinions. Do you mind her
being so beautiful? Timothy asked innocently. These words made Fanny so angry she stopped
the car. Listen, Dumbo, she said, glaring. I realize I'm no oil painting and I'm not
rich and I'm not rich and I'm
not famous and no one wants my autograph.
And you smoke too much, Timothy said cheekily, trying to make her smile.
Really, he was quite afraid of her at that moment.
She looked fierce.
And I smoked too much, Fanny agreed.
But there's one thing I'll tell you, and it's this.
Learn to be frightened.
When you see some magic type person, a person, hogging the media to talk about bringing
back the birch and hanging, it's time to get a little nervous, because the person who gets
beaten or hanged might turn out to be someone you know.
Are you with me so far?
Timothy said, okay, so far.
But when that sort of person talks about action groups and banded together brotherhoods of
citizens and vigilantes, get terrified, because the person who gets dragged away in the middle
of the night for a flogging might turn out to be you. Yes, you, simply because you're
a decent, normal, pleasant, dim human being. The sort of person who just happens to get
in the way of the bully boys and bully girls. Do you understand, Timothy? And so on. It's
good, you know.
Sam, I wonder whether you would care to comment on the female roles in Grinney and You Remember
Me?
Well, as our former Prime Minister used to say of his religious faith, I think Fisk's
feminism is a bit like Magic FM in The Chilterns.
The reception kind of comes and goes.
Oh, glorious.
Beth, in some sense, is the hero of both books.
Absolutely.
And that's absolutely terrific.
But on the other side of the ledger, in Trillions, there's a very sort of disturbing subplot,
which has to do with a good- know, a good looking nine year old
who's constantly flirting with the soldiers that I think would tend to be red penciled in almost any
publication. Different times, Sam, different times. And Fanny's not being as attractive as Lisa
Treadgold is, you know, it's very frequently referred to, but you
know what, you know what I'm going to, again, I slightly stick up for Nicholas Fisk here,
right? It seems to me, one of the things that he's very interested in and gets energy from
is challenging a stereotype. So a little girl is supposed to be sugar and spice and all
things nice, but the little girl in both
Grinney and You Remember Me is the most switched on and the most bloodthirsty and the one most
willing to see through what she's being sold. Grinney herself, the central idea of that book
is you take the sweet little old lady and you make them a demon, you know, a robot demon,
inhuman, you make them inhuman. And Lisa Treadgold in You Remember Me, we're constantly being told
how beautiful she is. You can't trust these women, clearly is the unfortunate message coming through. But at the same time, you can, because
as you say, he gives agency, you know, the dad in these books and Timothy kind of blunder
along.
Feckless.
Unseeing. And it's down to the women to help them see the truth. So I don't know, I think
it goes both ways. But you know, Timmy and his dad have this whole thing, Timmy pops through Pete's dad's maxim,
women always win, W-A-W. And there's a whole series of riffs on how the problem with Beth is
that you try arguing with her at one point and she's completely irrational and comes in on another,
and you can't really have a proper argument with a woman, which feels like straightforward
old 1970s sexism to me.
But you're right, Beth is the heroine.
I also would like to say, Sam, I think it's so true what you were saying earlier about
science fiction being the dominant storytelling mode of a particular era of the 60s into the
70s.
And we know it goes above ground, don't we? In the mid to late, well, probably starting with 2001, a space Odyssey, but then
it becomes massively popular in the mid to late seventies when we're kids because of
Star Wars.
It was about a decade and a half, isn't there? Where it's basically, it's the respectable
genre.
Grinney got a fantastic review when it was published in the TLS.
But then a few years later when A Ragabone and a Hank of Hair is published, that too
is reviewed in the TLS.
And this is the first paragraph of the TLS's review of this book and a couple of others.
And it's fair to say by this point SF fatigue has set in.
Young readers, possibly already somewhat infected
by gathering gloom about their continuing future on this planet, can hardly be expected
to welcome novels which simply reiterate that the worst is indeed going to happen without
also having something a little more consoling to offer as well. In some futuristic stories,
for example, most humans are seen to have reverted to a brutish
type of feudalism.
Another favourite vision describes a more orderly but arid universe closely overseen
by passionless arbiters.
Children today, putting such books down at the end, therefore, can at least be grateful
that they are still in the 1980s, warts and all, rather than living in much worse conditions
during the centuries to come.
So while all three novels under review here assume that there will at some time be a nuclear
holocaust, what remains of the future after that is usually shown to be an unpalatable, dreary
business. I mean, I think that says it all in terms of what was shiny and new in 1970 is
terms of what was shiny and new in 1970 is dystopian hack work as far as critics are concerned 10 years later.
It's interesting dreariness is what they pick out.
I mean, there's always been a sort of twin strand, hasn't there, in science fiction?
There's the sort of post-Moon landings, rocket ships to the stars, colonizing Mars,
adventuring in foreign planets like 19th century
tales of Imperial adventure gone interstellar. And then there's been the post-bomb type of
science fiction, which relies very heavily on the idea that we're all screwed. But that's not that itself. Ordinarily, those futures are sort of exciting, but horrible.
You think of them as sort of Mad Max-y rather than...
I mean, look, in cinema, you go from say,
2000, Biner Space Odyssey, where you're overwhelmed by the technology that's being presented to you,
the mystical vision, right? Whereas by the time you get to alien,
everything is dingy and boring, right?
The march of pseudo realism into sci fi seems to me quite a significant
thing or sci fi noir.
I think that's well put. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
It's interesting. Sci fi noir.
You could call it. Yeah.
Now, Nicholas Fisk was the editor of the Puffin
book of science fiction, which is notable for two reasons.
First of all, because he complains in his introduction
about the term science fiction. He says it really should be
called not SF, but I F imaginative fiction. He said it
was miserable. And science fiction writers complain about it nowadays,
don't they? They also have speculative speculative fiction, exactly. And in a sense, that's what
Fisk is all about. Right. It's speculative fiction. He says here, what if an old woman turned up at
your doorstep who turned out to be a robot? What if the world is going to end next Tuesday? What if we are about to swap
high tech for mystical powers? That's the one big lie he talks about. And then from there,
you build the speculation about what that world will be like. But I thought you would both be
amused by what Fisk included in the Puffin book science fiction and remember this was published by puffing
An extract from the Clipper of the clouds by joule verne an
Extract from the war of the worlds by HG Wells an
Extract of the horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle. He's just warming up
Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut
Confluence by Brian Aldis.
Of Polymorph Stock by John Christopher. The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clark.
And There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury. You know, Nicholas Fisk was not mucking about.
No, I don't think one of those is a children's story. No, none of them are.
None of them are children's stories.
Those puffing anthologies are amazing though.
It's like Alan Garner's Book of Goblins.
It's got poems by Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams in it.
I mean, the idea of an anthology for, you know, of stories that you would read to your
children at night.
No, that's not what the, none of these guys were into that at all.
Now listen, I think what we also want to talk about here very, very lightly and briefly
is just to say, picking up what Timothy Snyder said in On Tyranny about the importance of
being surrounded by books.
And certainly in a world where book banning is becoming
increasingly common in schools, I wonder whether we could,
in addition to urging our listeners to read Grinny
and You Remember Me and certainly sharing them
with their children, I wonder, Sam,
are there other books for young people
that would be good to read at the moment?
You mentioned before we did this,
is it unusual for children's books to deal with totalitarian
and fascist movements, things like that?
I find myself thinking, no, it isn't really.
I remember from my own childhood reading Morton
Roo's book, The Wave, which I think is now very much out of print, which was about a high school
club, a high school society, which was pretty much like the rollers and they had their own
armbands, it was quite on the nose. And it turns out it's all an experiment by their
social experiment by their geography teacher who organizes a rally at the end. And he says, at last, you're going to meet the leader.
And then they open the curtains and it's an enormous picture of Adolf Hitler.
Now I see now. Yeah, this isn't very good. We're going to disband the wave, I think.
It's a very tense and because it tries to inhabit from the inside out,
the attraction, particularly to young people, of an organization which allows you to feel
a sense of belonging, of empowerment, and licenses you to kick the stuffing out of the people who
aren't getting with the program. But in more oblique ways too, you know, water shipped down,
I think, was definitely something of the fascist dictator in general, Windward, the great villain.
It's brilliant.
They also have that, which isn't quite a sort of straightforward fascist setup,
but there's that section in it, if you remember, where they initially, before they come across
Windward, they find their way into what seems like this sort of utopia, where all the rabbits are
fat and happy, and there's plenty to eat, and food seems to be raining from the sky.
I mean, it's patterned as that book is on the Odyssey, and that's the Lotus Eaters section.
And what they discover is that actually this isn't a wild worm, but they're all being fattened up for the pot. And so,
they just have to accept or turn their eyes away from the fact that every now and again,
a certain number of them will vanish. The author of Warship Downwich Adams was himself shaped by his
wartime experiences. And so, I think for writers of that generation,
it's quite natural that they thought this is a very, very, very frightening and dangerous thing
we've been through. And we need to, as you say, remember. We should say with Richard Adams,
again, the horror, the body horror element of Watership Down is not to be dismissed. And certainly if you go
on to Plague Dogs and Shardic, they are both horribly visceral texts about things that
can go wrong with the body through disease, through experiment, through corruption.
The only other one I was going to mention, and I want to mention just
because it's such a direct look at fascism and because he's a writer who I think is not as
appreciated now as he deserves to be, is T.H. White's Once and Future King sequence. And in
that first book, which is describing it, it's a riff on Mallory's morp d'Arthur, and the first book describes the future King Arthur, mort as he is, getting his education
at the hands of Merlin.
And Merlin educates him by turning him into different animals.
So he gets right fisk-like a sense of the alterity of the animal life.
So amazing descriptions of him spending a few hours as a fish or as an owl.
And finally, he becomes an ant and he goes down an ant burrow and he hears these sort of loud speakers in the ant's nest describing how they have to kill the next door ant tribe.
And it's absolutely straight fascism written like it's all about when the other blood flows,
then everything will be fine. We need all their resources and we need to kill
the others. And that was written, I mean, it's from 1938, he was writing, it was absolutely
directed towards the Second World War. Wow, wow, wow.
As Tolkien, obviously, after the war did. Can I ask a question? All these great books, these sort of disturbing
children's books, written post-war, terrible influence. If you think about what people have
been through during COVID in the last five years, why are there not those similar books now or coming now? Why is children's literature now not so dark?
I think it takes a while, Nikki, honestly. I think that if you look at the 60s generation,
that was 15 years after the war ended. They were writers who were probably under the age of 10
you know, under the age of 10 or between sort of, you know, eight and 15 who witnessed the war. All that generation, I'm particularly thinking about Alan Garner and Susan Cooper and Ursula Laguna,
who, for whom the war was an important part of their childhood experience. It operates,
and it's not on a, maybe in the direct way of them writing directly about conflict.
Yeah. What John's saying is come back in 20 years time.
I think there's a lag. Children's writers are so often, you know, they're imagining child
protagonists and the only thing they've got to draw on is their own childhood. So I think
there's a 20 year lag normally when
you start writing more directly about that stuff. And what you see after, for instance, the First World War, is all the people who were traumatized by the First World War write about
anything but. You can see the effect of the First World War on AA Milne or on Hugh Lofting,
the Dr. Too Little stories, by the fact they create these completely hermetic worlds
in which the war never happened and nothing like that could ever happen.
Talking too.
Tolkien is a book about the rise of authoritarian regimes is still an incredibly valid read. I would
also like to say just to pick up the point that my colleagues were making here, Nikki, that it means
we can blame millennials for the craze for books called things like Dr Poo Poo's book of wee-wees,
which seems to be the dominant literary form in children's literature. Thanks millennials for
your contribution there. Anyway, we look to Gen Z and the generation that follows it to
create fiction. Generation Alpha. Informed by the experience of COVID.
Generation Alpha, yeah.
John, do you have any recommendations
for books written for young people that cover this topic?
I think if you read The Weird Stone of Brisingham and-
By Alan Garner.
A lot more by Alan Garner.
There's a lot more going on than just the sense of threat.
It's actually in Garner's later work,
I think that there's some beautiful writing about,
particularly in Tom Fobble's day,
which is the last bit of the stone book quartet,
where the kids are collecting shrapnel.
They're watching the bombing raids on Manchester,
and they also find a pilot of a German plane.
And I think The Dark in The Dark is Rising
by Susan Cooper.
Well, Susan Cooper wrote that autobiographical novel about her experience as a child in
the Second World War.
That's another book, I think, that has that sense of children against fascism.
Well, you're laughing, but if there is hope, it lies in the children against fascism.
Indeed.
Youth against fascism.
It relies on the best of this world.
I mean, it's a great book to be giving a young child now.
I would like to recommend to people the following texts in whatever form you find it.
You should watch the Daleks.
Yes.
Or Genesis of the Daleks, the Doctor Who serials written by Terry Nation novelized respectively by Robert Whittaker and
Terrence Dix because they are directly informed Daleks as a metaphor for Nazis is complete with
experimentation. I would love to recommend to listeners you need copies if you don't already
have a copy of the tiger who came to tea, which of course you do. And when Hitler
stole pink rabbit by Judith Kerr, you need those in your house. They need to be in your
house so that anyone who visits, be they children or adults can pick those up, read them and
understand what they were informed by. And finally, I would very much like to say that if you have not read or the children
in your life have not read both Viv Vendetta and Watchmen by Alan Moore, different artists,
David Lloyd and Dave Gibbons respectively, they are fascinatingly deep,
intelligent explorations with no easy answers.
This is the point.
So anyway, everybody, thanks so much.
We hope you've enjoyed this discussion.
And that's where we must leave it.
Huge thanks to Sam for reminding us
that as far as ideas are concerned,
the past isn't even past.
And also to Nicky Birch for turning our loose talk
into a tight, broadcastable discussion.
If you would like show notes with clips, links,
and suggestions for further reading for this show
and the 225 that we've already recorded,
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get their names read out accompanied by lashings of praise like this. Kate Inglis, thank you. Lottie Clark, thank you. Robin Perra, thank you. Louisa Boe, thank you.
David Proud, thank you. Joe Duddy, thank you. Nicola Pouasi, thank you. Philip Eskenazi, thank you.
Michael Ross, thank you. Stu J Allen, thank you. Sam, is there anything, is there any
last nugget of wisdom or Cassandra-like warning regarding these books or Nicholas Fisk you
would like to leave us with?
Well, I don't have some nugget of wisdom, but I remember reading Alan Moore saying once
that he had people come up to him in the street saying, I love that character Rorschach. He's the best.
And more just wandering away in absolute horror.
Taken entirely the wrong message from this book about this violently inadequate psychopath and you're identifying with him, which I guess shows that, you know,
everything's available to the reader's interpretation.
Thanks Sam.
Yeah.
Also we should add Timothy Snyder, certainly in these troubled times, the
more you read, the better you get at decoding what's happening.
Yeah.
I know that On Tyranny book is a handbook for the next year.
Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny, indeed it is.
We'll put a link to that on the website as well.
Thanks very much everybody. We have so enjoyed this discussion and we have so enjoyed doing this
tiny, tiny, tiny thing to let you know that life goes on and so do we and join us in Fortnite's time when we will be quizzing somebody not about authoritarianism but
celebrity, Hollywood celebrity and that's all I'm going to say. That's all I'm going to say.
A different show.
Thanks Sam, thanks John, thanks Nikki. Good. See you next time everybody. Bye. Thanks for listening. Bye.