Fire up the DeLorean!

I’ve always loved time-travel stories. I think there’s something about them which drills right down into one of the most fundamental and universal truths that every single human ever born has to face – that time will go marching on whether you bloody well like it or not.

So, the idea of being able to cheat time, or manipulate it – it’s easy to see why that’s going to appeal. I mean, just imagine being able to go back and spend time with loved ones who are no longer with us, seeing the distant future, or travelling back in time to do whatever needs to be done to prevent Mrs Brown’s Boys from ever being pitched to the BBC. That would be amazing.

So, I'm going to do my own bit of travelling back in time right now… because if I cast my mind back, I can clearly remember one of my first introductions to the time-travel narrative - watching the re-runs of the 1960 film, The Time Machine. Based, of course, on the 1895 novella by the legendary H.G Wells. One of the first time travel stories to use a machine to do the chronological tomfoolery, rather than it just being a by-product of being some religious deity or something.

I suppose, a little inevitable that H.G Wells (or Herbert to his friends) trusted the business of warping time to a machine, coming at the peak of the Victorian industrial revolution. This was the new age of steam alchemy. A time when there wasn’t a river or mine which couldn’t be tamed by the application of iron, steam and the era’s seemingly inexhaustible list of engineering virtuosos.

It must have seemed like an age in which almost anything was possible – I guess similar to the later space-age, the silicon chip age of the last 30-40 years, and of course the current burgeoning AI age we’re living through (and, just to be clear, when I’m talking in positive terms about AI, I’m thinking about the stuff like developing life saving vaccines and cancer cures… not Robbie the Robot trying to vomit out a meaningless book or some uncanny-valley video slop).

I completely fell in love with the concept of being able to twist time to our own will, and the often unpredictable and unwanted consequences that come with it. Now, speaking of films, that whole play with the classic grandfather paradox was something that’s never been captured more popularly than in the Back To The Future trilogy. A cornerstone of cinematic memories built upon the decade which belonged to the home VHS machine.

And then there’s honourable mentions for a host of other films which feature time-travel in one form or another… 12 Monkeys, Frequency, Interstellar, Tenet, Predestination, and I think we can sneak Groundhog Day in there too, can’t we? That counts as time-travel? Right?

And so, all this talk of time travel films brings us on to this week’s guest, Joseph Eckert, author of the book The Traveller. Where the protagonist gets flung through time without his consent, in ever growing exponential intervals. The first thing we said to each other after reading it, was that it’s got Hollywood blockbuster written all over it. It would make a brilliant film or even streaming series. So, we weren’t as surprised as perhaps we should have been when Joseph told us it’s actually been optioned by studios for ages already. Imagine that! Getting your blummin’ novel given the Hollywood treatment before you’ve even got it published. That can’t be something that happens too often?

Of course, we have our suspicions, that Joseph might know more than he’s letting on about all this time-travel stuff. And maybe in a few months time, when his debut novel has got the attention it most definitely deserves and has shot up the sales charts, he’s going to fire up the machine in his garage and skip back a few years and get his successful book turned into film pitch in order help his book launch go well enough that he can then take it the book back in time to get it optioned, so that extra hype helps his book to do well on launch, so that he can take it and go back and pitch it to the studios, so that it gets optioned and that plays favourably into the sales at launch and after it’s done well in the first few weeks and months, he can hop into the time machine in his garage and...........