#100days - '52: Doctor Who and the Killer Smog

Over four days in December 1952 a deadly smog settled over London, killing an estimated 12,000 people. When I first read about that, the sheer scale of  it haunted me. What must it have been like to live through such an event? Imagine such an event happening today in London or New York - we'd have 24/7 news coverage. The Great Smog of 1952 led directly to the Clean Air Act, one of the UK's first environmental laws.

In 2001 I was pitching to write a Doctor Who novel, and the Great Smog of 1952 felt like the perfect cover for an alien invasion. London was paralysed, visibility was as far as you could reach, it was a catastrophic crisis. From that came Amorality Tale, featuring the Third Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith. It was quite a brutal book, set around Old Street and Shoreditch - areas of London that in 2001 were still run down and neglected.

The book was published in 2002 and got a decent reception from Doctor Who fans. Fast forward to 2015 and Amorality Tale was reissued with a new cover by BBC Books. This time round it seemed to be better received, readers appreciating the book for what it was [rather than criticising the novel for not matching their expectations - always a joy for writers!].

It was a shock when I watched the first season of Netflix's mega-budget show The Crown. One whole episode is devoted to the Great Smog of 1952, showing how it affected London, Churchill and much more. If the BBC ever turned Amorality Tale into a TV story, that episode of The Crown was pretty much exactly what it would look like - just with more zombie policemen, malevolent aliens and East End gangsters.

In case you're wondering, today's blip title is a reference to the lurid new names early Doctor Who novelisations gave to adaptations of TV stories...