Event time: 14:00 to 15:00

We will be livestreaming this talk, with login details available on this page on the day.

Malcolm Hulke (1924-1979) was a successful writer for radio, television and the cinema from the 1950s to the 1970s.  His work included episodes for Armchair Theatre, Danger Man, and The Avengers as well as eight serials for Doctor Who between 1967 and 1974, including “The Faceless Ones”, “The War Games” and “The Sea Devils”.

Malcolm was a socialist, belonging for twenty years to the Communist Party of Great Britain, and his political views fed into his work.  He once said: “It’s a very political show. Remember what politics refers to, it refers to relationships between groups of people. It doesn’t necessarily mean left or right…so all Doctor Whos are political, even though the other group of people are reptiles, they’re still a group of people.”

Our speaker Michael Herbert has been connected with the Working Class Movement Library for 40 years, having been inspired by Library founders Ruth and Edmund Frow to begin to research and write about radical history.  His published work includes Never counted out, a biography of the black Manchester boxer and Communist Len Johnson; “For the sake of the women who are to come after”: Manchester’s radical women 1914-1945, and Doctor Who and the Communist: Malcolm Hulke and his career in television, published by Five Leaves Press in 2015.  He blogs on radical history at Red Flag Walks and on science fiction at Fantasies of Possibility.