JEREMIAH BOURNE IN TIME: AN INTERVIEW WITH NIGEL PLANER

‘Witty, charming and extremely clever. It makes you laugh, it makes you think and of course, you can’t put it down’

Tim McInnerny

‘Dazzling and very funny. I loved it’ Miriam Margolyes

Nigel Planer is a writer and actor and an original member of the 1980s alternative comedy scene. He famously played Neil in the BBC’s The Young Ones.

Jeremiah Bourne in Time is Nigel’s ninth book, and the first instalment in his new fantasy trilogy, The Time Shard Chronicles. Read on as Unbound’s co-founder and publisher, John Mitchinson, asks Nigel about the inspiration for this resourceful, young hero, the research into Edwardian London and his love of London cabs.

John Mitchinson: This is your first novel in twenty years – what led you back to writing fiction?

Nigel Planer: Have to follow the idea, really. This just seemed the best way to realise the idea and it was fun. I’d been writing plays for a few years and working on shows for the theatre, which didn’t leave the time needed to draft a book.

Jeremiah is a very likeable and resourceful modern teenager. Did he spring into being fully formed or has he been stalking you for some time?

I have two sons who are no longer teenagers, I’ve been a stepfather twice to teenage boys now grown-up, and I have four step-grandsons who I’ve known through their teenage years. So you could say I’ve been living with Jeremiah for decades. The original spark for his story was wondering what it would be like for a teenage boy to be visited by a woman from 1910, Phyllis Stokes, and that despite their obvious disagreements he might find they had more in common than he has with his contemporaries from school.

Which books, films or TV shows acted as inspiration for the timetravel element of the novel?

I’ve tried to make the time-travel aspects of the book more Shutter Island or The Sixth Sense than, say, Doctor Who or Blake’s 7. I like the disorientating and psychological. Having said that, I think I’ve ended up with something more Blackadder than Game of Thrones.

The Edwardian London Jeremiah visits seems to be based on detailed research, is that authenticity important to you – and why that period in particular?

For twenty years, I’ve lived in the area where the book is set –south-east London from Blackfriars to London Bridge. I love the feeling of the past of London being ever present all around you. Generally, I do find the unusual corners of history more interesting and exciting than made-up stuff. Truth is not only stranger than fiction but also tends to be more bizarre and funnier. I have a sort of nostalgia for this era because I think we (European society/ culture) were really getting somewhere just before the First World

War, which sent us back into a dark age and ruined the twentieth century, when I was born.

Can you explain what’s distinctive about your vision of the London of the future?

About fifty years from now there have been two massive digital meltdowns. We’ve lost all our data. All of It. Society has had to be rebuilt from scratch and people who can remember things – stories, maps, how things work, how to make things, how to grow things – have become very important again. Some of them have developed super-memories. And then they start experimenting with inherited genetic memory…

You have become known as the ‘voice of Discworld’ for your readings of Terry Pratchett’s work. Did his version of comic fantasy have an influence on Jeremiah Bourne?

I love the Discworld books; for their humour and characters, obviously, but also for Pratchett’s underlying humanity and philosophical wisdom. I’ve been very influenced by him when writing Jeremiah Bourne in Time. And I’ve also learned the joys of a pointless footnote…

The contemporary genre of speculative fiction seems to hark back to the golden age of science fiction in the fifties and sixties. Did you read a lot of sci fi and if so, what were your favourite books and who were your favourite writers?

When I was a child I read all the main stuff; Orwell, Huxley, Bradbury and, in fact, I seem to remember doing John Wyndham and H. G. Wells for GCSE. I loved the C. S. Lewis sci-fi trilogy too. Then in my late teens, it got freakier with Philip K. Dick, and Kurt Vonnegut. Brian Aldiss and Arthur C. Clarke may have got a look-in along the way, but I was not a sci-fi junkie.

There seems to be a fondness for London cabs that runs through the novel – are you a fan?

Yes. I know they are allowed to use SatNav like everyone else now, but you can’t beat the Knowledge. Four years of learning every street in London – their hippocampi must be massive. And I like a good moan too, another great London cab driver skill. And they can turn the vehicle round on a sixpence. I get a bit carried away with cabs. Perhaps I’ll be reincarnated as one.

The ending of the novel is left very open – can you say what adventures you have planned next for Jeremiah or where he might travel to?

Well, time travel in Jeremiah’s world is not so much a physical journey through space, because you stay exactly where you are but go backwards (or forwards) in time. So he’ll still be in south-east London, but he’s going to stumble into another era of great scientific progress and invention; the late-seventeenth century, after the Royal Society was formed. A time when everything was on the table, no concept was off limits – from Newton’s theory of gravity to microscopic men and women swimming around inside our bodily fluids. Daisy will have had her baby during the lockdown and Jeremiah has become baby literate.

If there was an historical period or event you could travel back to witness, what would it be?

Well, firstly I’d like to know that I can take some modern medicines with me, and money of course, because I don’t think any period in history would be that much fun to arrive in without either of them. But assuming that was all in the deal, I’d like to be in Paris in the late 1880s. The smell of paint from the Impressionists, discussions with writers at soirées, big bicycles, moustaches, smoking in cafés, sitting by lakes in fantastic outfits or even in nothing at all…