Skip to main content

Tom Salinsky - Five Way Interview

Tom Salinsky is a writer, podcaster and corporate coach living in London with his wife and too many cats. With Deborah Frances-White, he is the author of The Improv Handbook (Methuen Drama, 2008). With Robert Khan he is the author of five plays and many audio dramas for Big Finish. With his podcast colleagues John Dorney and Jessica Regan, he is the author of Best Pick: A Journey Through Film History and the Academy Awards (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022). As a solo author, he has published Star Trek: Discovering the Television Series (Pen & Sword, 2024), the second volume of which is due for release in 2025. His latest title is  Red Dwarf: Discovering the TV Series.

Why science fiction?

I’m sure there are countless theories about why awkward teens gravitate towards science fiction and fantasy, but everyone likes a bit of escapism. And if your ordinary life is dull or scary or isolating or confusing, then you may well be drawn to escapism which is set in a world as unlike your ordinary life as possible. Ordinary well-adjusted young people can read bodice-ripper romances, watch mystery shows or enjoy comedy movies. But if there’s a secret world which you know the rules to and other people don’t, then there’s a power in that. Plus, you can make lists.

I wasn’t quite in the bullseye of that description, but as a child I was a voracious reader and I included a healthy dose of science fiction along with classic authors like Robert Louis Stevenson, Lewis Carroll, Arthur Ransome, Conan Doyle and PG Wodehouse. Then alternative comedy hit our TV screens, and I became obsessed with The Young Ones and Fry and Laurie. Red Dwarf captured all of my tastes in one package.

Why this book?

This book grew out of another obsession, which itself grew out of a previous one. Having recently completed a podcast series in which two friends and I watched every movie which had won Best Picture at the Academy Awards, I was contemplating another project and it occurred to me to wonder how much Star Trek I had seen. When I realised I could watch everything from the original series to Star Trek: Enterprise in just two years if I watched an episode a day, I decided to blog my progress. The blog became a book and when the publishers asked what else I had, I began to wonder how much Red Dwarf I’d seen. I drifted away from it in the late nineties, and I didn’t think I’d watched all of the recent Dave shows. And once again, if you aren’t obsessively cataloguing your progress, what are you even doing?

Why do you think so little SF humour works well on screen? (I can only really think of Red Dwarf and Galaxy Quest…)

It’s a weird blend of tones, and they’re both verbal/conceptual. Horror comedy works well because the horror part is visual and the comedy part is verbal (as a general rule) so you can dial both of them way up if you want and have something as insanely silly and gleefully gory as Evil Dead II. But the thing that makes Isaac Asimov stories compelling occupies the same space as what makes PG Wodehouse stories funny – especially when you take prose away in the move to the small screen. So, there is a bit more funny sci-fi and fantasy in prose form. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy works best in prose, so do Terry Pratchett and (more obscurely) Robert Sheckley.

That having been said, if you’re hungry for a bit of on-screen science fiction humour, here are a few more to add to your list. On TV: Star Trek Lower Decks, Futurama, Rick and Morty, Mork and Mindy, 3rd Rock from the Sun, My Parents Are Aliens, The Orville, Avenue 5. And on the big screen: Back to the Future, Bill and Ted, Men in Black, Ghostbusters, Hot Tub Time Machine and of course, the one which inspired Rob Grant and Doug Naylor to create Red Dwarf: Dark Star. [Ed. My list was of SF humour that works on screen - many of these didn't work for me (while some are arguably fantasy). Ironically, despite loving Red Dwarf, I found Dark Star painfully unfunny - but that's the trouble with sense of humour...]

What’s next?

I have a play called The Gang of Three coming to the Kings Head in Islington about the British Labour Party in the 1970s, and the show I produced at the Edinburgh Fringe, 16 Postcodes, is going on tour.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

I can’t wait for the return of Saturday Night Live which has been off the air during one of the most bonkers American summers I can remember. Speaking of long-running shows, it’s also going to be going into its 50th year, which is amazing.

These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee:
Interview by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin Five Way Interview

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (born in 1999) is a distinguished composer, concert pianist, music theorist and researcher. Three of his piano CDs have been released in Germany. He started his undergraduate degree at the age of 13 in Kazakhstan, and having completed three musical doctorates in prominent Italian music institutions at the age of 20, he has mastered advanced composition techniques. In 2024 he completed a PhD in music at the University of St Andrews / Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (researching timbre-texture co-ordinate in avant- garde music), and was awarded The Silver Medal of The Worshipful Company of Musicians, London. He has held visiting affiliations at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, and has been lecturing and giving talks internationally since the age of 13. His latest book is Quantum Mechanics and Avant Garde Music . What links quantum physics and avant-garde music? The entire book is devoted to this question. To put it briefly, there are many different link...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Bright Side - Sumit Paul-Choudhury ***

When I first saw The Bright Side (the subtitle doesn't help), I was worried it was a self-help manual, a format that rarely contains good science. In reality, Sumit Paul-Choudhury does not give us a checklist for becoming an optimist or anything similar - and there is a fair amount of science content. But to be honest, I didn't get on very well with this book. What Paul-Choudhury sets out to do is to both identify what optimism is and to assess its place in a world where we are beset with big problems such as climate change (which he goes into in some detail) that some activists position as an existential threat. This is all done in a friendly, approachable fashion. In that sense it's a classic pop-psychology title. For me, Paul-Choudhury certainly has it right about the lack of logic of extreme doom-mongers, such as Extinction Rebellion and teenage climate protestors, and his assessment of the nature of optimism seems very reasonable, if presented at a fairly overview leve...
Post a Comment
Read more

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on...
Post a Comment
Read more