ABOUT Robin Squire

However, this led via a bizarre set of circumstances (as Tom Lehrer might have said) to being attached to BBC TV for six months in the Doctor Who office. During this time I made the tea, fooled around, dreamed up the story of what became ‘Inferno’, and found myself playing – in a story called ‘Spearhead From Space’ – the Auton in all the close-ups on location (I was also the gofer and unit driver transporting actors to and from the station). The Auton was the first Doctor Who monster to move across our TV screens in colour, pursued by a suave Jon Pertwee and the lovely Caroline John. And terrifying many a watching child in their formative years, some of whom have since written to me to complain about their psychological wellbeing having been jeopardised by the horror of my appearance.

Other novels followed, including A Portrait of Barbara, published by Bachman & Turner and Sphere Books in London and St Martin’s Press in New York. After meeting film director Norman Cohen, I found myself working on a script in South Africa, a country to which I’ve returned several times. The film was titled Bloodhounds and has vanished without the slightest trace being left for future generations to marvel over. Norman was unguarded enough to say he’d like to direct another script of mine (now titled Little Dearie), and showed it to a young actress by the name of Helen Mirren. She said she’d like to play ‘Merry’ in it, but felt she wasn’t well-known enough to raise the finance on (sigh). And when Norman and I set out to make a film of Thomas Hardy’s The Trumpet-Major (a book we both loved) we were met with blank faces by distributors and financiers, who all said “Thomas who?” Not long afterwards Far From the Madding Crowd was released, and Hardy was hot. But then dear Norman went to that great film studio in the sky, and that was that. Among other directors I’ve worked with as screenwriter have been Robert Young, Fred Burnley, Pierre Granier-Deferre, John Irvin and James Bond director John Glen. As well as others I prefer not to mention.

Since then I’ve written and rewritten numerous rewritten rewrites of rewritten versions of earlier rewrites of my rewritten screenplays. The experience of shaping and reshaping these into their final form has created an intriguing portfolio (well, it intrigues me). While a film on which I was an increasingly isolated writer as others unsystematically wrecked the increasingly battered and bewildered script (real title Knife Edge) – which featured a rather pompous British actor who has since become internationally famous, and a brilliant classical actress I can only assume was being kind – inspired my diary-based memoir The Unmaking of a Britflick, which the lovely Anthony Grey’s Tagman Press was kind enough to publish. This account of all-too-real happenings in all their awfulness as they unfurled still retains the power to make me chuckle into my whisky mac at the day’s end, or cry into my beer in lonely corners of pubs while dreaming of what might have been.

More recently, Little, Brown Book Group dug a book of mine out of the archives and re-published it as The Mystery of the Stolen Brides. They then went and buried it on their Crime Vault site as an ebook, where few might find it. This actually began life as a mystery-thriller film script with Christopher Lee in the main role. I even met the great man at Richmond Golf Club to talk about the character he was to have played. Sadly, he went to that mighty Transylvanian castle beyond the clouds before I could approach him for another crack at the thing. Who could play that towering character now? Claes Bang? No, wait a minute, er… (wanders off muttering)