Bear Alley: Dan Dare on the Today programme

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Saturday, December 08, 2007

Dan Dare on the Today programme

An interesting interview appeared on the Today programme (Radio 4) this morning (8 December); Colin Frewin of the Dan Dare Corporation was promoting the new Dan Dare comic and mentioned that there were a number of upcoming projects for 2008, including 3 books, an audio book that was being produced by the son of the writer/producer of Lost in Space -- presumably a slip of the tongue for Journey Into Space, which would make him the son of Charles Chilton. (I make the presumption because he went on to say that the show was one of the most successful BBC audio books -- and that fits Journey Into Space far better than Lost in Space.) Frewin mentioned that the audio book will "probably" be broadcast by the BBC and that he was in negotiations with the Science Museum to host of major Dan Dare exhibition.

He also revealed that the Eagle Annual: The Best of the 1950s Comic has been a sell-out, shifting 35,000 copies, much to the pleasure of the publishers. We know already that there is to be a follow-up volume next year and the editor of those volumes, Daniel Tartarsky, is to write Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future: A Biography for publication on 17 September 2009 (it was issued an ISBN number -- 978-0752888965 -- some time ago and is already listed at Amazon). Quite how he will be "talking to the original writers and illustrators" -- most of whom are dead -- already has fans scratching their collective heads.

Ignoring the biography, it seems likely that the other two books will be from Titan's ongoing Dan Dare reprints line, so the only new project is the audio book. Hopefully that was also a slip of the tongue for full-cast audio adventure, which would be much more along the lines of Journey Into Space. The BBC did one way back in April 1990 which turns up on BBC7 fairly regularly.

The broadcast is available on the BBC's Listen Again. The easiest way to hear it, I found, was to go to the Today listen again home page, hit the "listen to today's programme in full" and then jump forward an hour and twenty minutes -- the Dan Dare segment (about 5m 19s) starts at 8:21.