The Forgotten World John and Mick fall foul of some extreme potholing

TOPIC 2 The one where it all kicks off

TERM 2 The birth of the 1980s - Blake’s 7, Blondie and battles in space

Waen Shepherd 2 Waen’s heroic antics in the far-flung future of 2007 AD!

< The Mountain Called Tyrannosaurus Rex

War of the Worlds >

The Flame in the Desert An evil fire threatens the safety of the world

Apeth Badly-spelt high-jinks with a purple gorilla from outer space!

Captain Carnivore Gary Shepherd is hunted down by a deadly flying meteor

Florence Nightingale

Thursday March 6th, 1980

The second of two pieces I wrote about Florence Nightingale on March 6th 1980 (the first was in my History book, and I obviously couldn’t wait to get it finished so I could start on this one), it’s also the first of two consecutive stories based on The War of the Worlds. I’ve no idea why I suddenly wanted to give Florence Nightingale a futuristic make-over, or why I was so interested in the HG Wells classic, but the latter had been reproduced in comic strip form in Doctor Who Weekly just a few months beforehand, and maybe I filed both Nightingale and Wells away in my head as ‘Victorian,’ so the pairing of ideas isn’t completely out of the blue. I’ll talk more about War of the Worlds when we get to the next piece, but there are two things that leap out at me here: 1. ‘The Year 2000’ seems to be shorthand for ‘a mythical time in the future when aliens are accepted as real and technology has advanced to an almost magical state’ - this wasn’t my idea, but quite a common thing in the culture back then, as evidenced in the title of that comic I keep banging on about. But here it’s also a time of great strife, with an apocalyptic revelation about aliens, a strand of thinking about the millennium that would become louder and louder as the actual year 2000 approached. It’s now obvious, looking back on it, that the Year 2000 was always bound to be a bit of a disappointment. 2. Florence performs a heroic self-sacrifice - well, she would, wouldn’t she? - in a spectacularly violent fashion. I guess I must have picked this sort of thing up from various films and TV shows. Ironically though, once we got past the real 2001, Florence would have been viewed as a suicide bomber and therefore not a heroine at all. Maybe that’s because, between the years 1982 and 2013, the number of suicide attacks in the world increased exponentially, which made them less and less appealing. Another parallel worth noting: around the same time as I wrote this, I also posited the idea of Super Jesus, another historical figure that I’d decided to update for the modern kids of 1980. Sadly neither Super Jesus nor Florence 2000 ever returned after this week, but one day, who knows? Maybe I can organise some kind of team-up…