One of the best stories ever written – then the BBC got to work on it

I THINK The War Of The Worlds is one of the best books ever written. I first read it 60 years ago and even now, when I pick it up again, I find it hard to stop reading. Was there ever a man with a head so full of ideas and pictures as Herbert George Wells? He fills your mind with vivid images and pulls you into the book with superlative, simple story-telling, so simple most authors cannot manage it.

The scene in which the ironclad ‘Thunder Child’ rams the Martian fighting machine off the Essex coast is one of the most intensely exciting things ever written. The slow opening of the first space capsule is among the most sinister and suspenseful.

Now we have the technology to make this wonderful story come to life on the screen, and what do we get from the BBC? A saga about a miserable single mother – played by Eleanor Tomlinson, left – moping about the place and repeatedly squealing with fear (the best way to attract hungry Martians, as it happens), and about her almost unbelievably stupid boyfriend, who keeps looking for her and then, when he finds her, losing her again. Someone very like Dr Who seems to have crept into the story, too, an irritatingly wise astronomer with fiddly Left-wing glasses.

This is mixed up with a dim teenage caricature of the imperial age with some digs at Christianity thrown in. If the British ruling class of the Edwardian era had been as thick as they are made to look, I do not think they could have governed Woking, let alone the largest empire in the world.

For heaven’s sake, Wells’s original book is already a clever story about the rise and fall of civilisation, full of bright cynical thought about religion and morals in the midst of chaos and defeat.

But Wells, a ferocious Leftwing radical (and an appalling womaniser), had more sense than to clutter up his story with clunky, obvious propaganda. That is why it will survive the BBC’s theft of its great title and idea, replaced with something not remotely as good. You can only enjoy this if you don’t know the actual story.