Sci-fi - Andrew Martin found echoes of Quatermass and John Wyndham in the fuel crisis
Last year my car broke down on the M40, so I pulled over to the hard shoulder and, shouting into my mobile over the drone of the traffic, summoned the AA. But as I waited for the rescue service to appear, the flow of cars began, rather worryingly, to dry up. Eventually, it stopped entirely, and I thought about walking along the fast lane, just because I could. I found out later that the police had, for some reason, halted the traffic in both directions, but normality, with all its soothingly familiar racket and stench, was soon restored.
In that moment, I thought of two things: first, those stories of people who relocate to the country and have to return to the town because the silence begins to deafen them; and second, social breakdown/disaster movies such as The Birds or Escape from New York.
During the petrol crisis - with those haunting scenes of empty roads - I couldn't help thinking that we were all living in some science-fiction film or novel of the late 1940s to mid-1960s period, when the fear of nuclear catastrophe created what was referred to in the characteristically paranoid 1956 film The Day the World Ended as "the age of anxiety".
In this genre, the need for strong narrative thrust, combined with an absence of cash, dictates an important role for newspaper bills. In the 1967 Hammer film Quatermass and the Pit, the discovery of the devil himself beneath a Central Line Tube station is underlined by shots of bills reading "Underground Ape Man" and, later (and rather lamely), "More Finds".
It was the same with the petrol crisis. Those news bills seemed almost suspiciously omnipresent, as if carefully placed by props people. I saw one of them, reading "No Fuel For Motorists", directly next to a garage whose proprietor was turning away angry motorists. As I looked on, I was thinking: "This scene is too crass - it's completely implausible." But you can't criticise reality as implausible.
The news bulletins also sounded contrived. Wherever I went, I heard wafted radio voices: "Petrol crisis worsens . . ."; "For more news on the petrol crisis and how it affects you, over to . . ." And in our kitchen, I observed my wife doing something that I've seen hundreds of times in films - namely, turning off the radio with a resounding click as the newsreader said "And now, other news . . ."
In sci-fi of the period in question, this resounding click happens when the crisis begins really to take over. With Americans, this tends to come early on. The film When Worlds Collide, for instance, begins with a scientist looking through a telescope and saying: "If our findings are accurate, this could be the most frightening discovery of all time." And, at the start of 1984, George Orwell cuts straight to weirdness with the clock striking 13.
In Britain, there is a lot of normality to lose, and in the 1950s disaster novels of John Wyndham - just as in the petrol crisis - normality is made the central issue by the agonising slowness with which it succumbs. The early, calm pages of The Midwich Cuckoos, before the alien brood takes over the village, are stuffed with the words "ordinary" and "normal". Blair, by promising at the outset of the fuel crisis to get us "on the way back to normal" within 24 hours, sounded like one of those misguidedly optimistic stooges who pepper the beginnings of sci-fi tales. He especially reminded me of "The Minister" in Quatermass, who refuses to believe that the discovery of some fairly large monster-type things in central London is any cause for alarm.
As things begin to turn sinister in Midwich, one character says "This is a job for the army", or words to that effect. But the army is always hopeless in sci-fi, typified by the bumbling brigadier who accompanied Dr Who. I recalled the brigadier, in fact, as I read that not many people in the army could drive petrol trucks.
In postwar sci-fi, there is usually a definitive moment at which normality ceases. In Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids, it occurs as the hero - with everyone in the world except himself apparently blinded - staves in the window of a shop in a deserted street in order to take some food. I had a similar feeling as, two days into the petrol crisis, I drove around St James's Square in central London and found every parking place there for the taking.
At that moment, I experienced a mixture of anxiety and exhilaration - wasn't it nice without all those dammed cars? - that is so characteristic of postwar sci-fi. There is real relish in Wyndham's scenes where the triffids munch their way through coastal bungalows; there is enjoyment of social breakdown, too, in John Christopher's 1956 novel, The Death of Grass.
As I write, the crisis seems over, but if Blair has read The Day of the Triffids, he won't be relaxing. The book is full of false dawns, including the following sentence, occurring a quarter of the way in: "The first wave of public interest soon ebbed away. The triffids were, admittedly, a bit weird, but that was - after all - just because they were novelties . . ."
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