Not The Colour Of Television, Tuned To A Dead Channel

Although I didn't quite get the madeleine rush I'd expected from listening to the original Dr Who theme music, the British Library's science fiction exhibition, Out of this World, was otherwise excellent - particularly as respite from my landlord's insistence that I have quite unreasonably inconvenienced him by refusing to voluntarily make myself homeless for a fortnight and demanding instead to continue to pay rent to live in his flat. It's hardly revolutionary in that it thematically connects various movements in and around sci-fi to various perennial human concerns, only made more vivid by the expanded scope of technology, both real and imagined. It doesn't need to be though, since it has such a wonderful range of material to play with: Cthulthu toys in the same display as novels by a Booker winner; artists' imaginings of H. G. Wells' Martians along with the 18th century's visions of the 20th; musings about the origins of steampunk across the aisle from a copy of short story in which the term cyberspace was first used; a typed and annotated draft of The Day of the Triffids and Gallileo's speculations about the possibility of life on the moon. Quite enough madeleine rushes even without the Dr Who theme music, I suppose.