Chris Church

This audio clip is from a series of 100 life history interviews with environmental campaigners in the UK, 1970-2020. A quotation from this recording features in the book Voices for Change, published by UCL Press in November 2026 (available in print as well as a free PDF download). The full interview, along with the summaries, transcripts and recordings for this and the rest of the interview collection, is available at the British Library (Sound and Moving Image Collection, under the shelf-mark C2037). For more information, including educational materials and other resources, visit the Oral History of the Environmental Movement project website at www.royalholloway.ac.uk/ohemQuotation:Chris Church: We can’t have had a TV when we moved in because I went round to someone else’s house to watch the first ever episode of Doctor Who and I can remember that quite vividly. I was getting into science fiction at that point and I remember that being quite scary and really exciting.Saskia Papadakis: What kind of science fiction were you reading?Chris Church: I started out with I think I picked up an Arthur C Clarke, as you might have done in the 60s, to read, the classic kind of golden age stuff. Looking back on it now, some of it is politically fairly dubious but at the same time, it was definitely expanding your ideas about what is possible. Reading Frank Herbert’s Dune which I waded through at an early age. So, that became quite a major part of my reading.British Library catalogue number: C2037/01 Project clip number: 25