The Showstoppers (novel)

There’s a new TV show about to hit the airwaves, but Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart won’t be tuning in. With the future of the Fifth Operational Corps in doubt he’s got enough to worry about, but a plea from an old friend soon finds Lethbridge-Stewart and Anne Travers embroiled in a plot far more fantastical than anything on the small screen.

Can charismatic star Aubrey Mondegreene really be in two places at the same time? What lengths will ailing entertainment mogul Billy Lovac go to in order to reach his audience? And is luckless journalist Harold Chorley really so desperate that he’ll buy into a story about Nazi conspiracies from a tramp wearing a tin foil hat?

There’s something very rotten at the heart of weekend television, and it isn’t all due to shoddy scripts and bad special effects.

Plot

to be added

Characters

Colonel/Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart
Anne Travers
Lance Corporal William Bishop
Lieutenant Colonel Walter Douglas
Private Gwynfor Evans
Lance Corporal Sally Wright
Major General Oliver Hamilton
Harold Chorley
Samson Ware

References

The real-life near collapse of London Weekend Television forms the backdrop to the story.
Travers and Evans are watching the second day of riots in the Battle of the Bogside in chapter 3.
They're later caught watching The Flower Pot Men.
The TV show BLIMEY shows several parodies of Pertwee-era Doctor Who, including the tortured military acronym (ala UNIT). The villain's roar of "Nuzzink in ze vorld can schtop me now!" is a joke at the expense of The Underwater Menace.

Notes

As Lethbridge-Stewart says Northern Ireland's riots started "last night", when the book started, the story begins on 12th August 1969.

Continuity

Travers refers to Quark remains from Mutually Assured Domination.
HAVOC still haven't completed their move to Dolerite Base.