The sex machine

Sex sells. This holds true whether you are trying to shift cars, chocolate bars or books programmes. Hardly a month goes by without a new revelation about a long-dead writer's predilection for whips, or hamsters, or both.

Bookmark's two-part portrait of HG Wells (right) opens with Jill Craigie recalling that one of the first things the writer told her husband, Michael Foot, was that: "The more sex you have, the better work you do." The programme continues in a similar vein, as Wells's grandson Martin describes him simply as "hypersexual". It goes on to suggest that Wells's passion for writing was matched - and quite possibly exceeded - by his passion for sex. The one fuelled the other. "It was a woman that gave him that recharging of energies necessary for the recreation of his energies as a writer," opines one critic.

Sharon Maguire, the producer and director of the Bookmarks which mark the 50th anniversary of the writer's death, also claims that libido and literature are intertwined in Wells, and that her programmes are not just going in for gratuitous sex. "It is an accusation that is often levelled at programmes about artists - 'Why deal so much with their personal lives?'," she concedes. "But in this case, I think it's very, very relevant. It was never my intention to focus on it to begin with, but in reading about Wells, I discovered that his passion for women was in most aspects of his life. You get more out of the novels by knowing about the personal life in this case. People think he's a bit Boys Owny and just did science fiction. They don't realise his character was so intriguing.

"He used sex again and again to fire up his energies as a writer," she continues. "He's in most of his books, and his affairs are just grist to the mill. All his writing is about being torn between world affairs and passion. In his love letters - which have never been shown on television before - he oscillates from baby language to being a complete sod. At the same time as he was meeting Lenin and trying to save the world, he was writing these baby letters to Rebecca West. That's more insightful than any interviewee. It's quite a gripping tale. It would make a great drama."

Foot, who presents the programmes, believes, too, that Wells's sexual appetite fed his writing. "He learnt from the women he had affairs with. After his affair with Rebecca West, he wrote better about women - as in Joan and Peter. He would have thought it disgraceful not to include the women in his work. He thought women should have equal rights."

Maguire is more sceptical about Wells's role as an evangelical feminist. "He wanted them to be sexually liberated so that they were available rather than equal," she reckons. "At the end of his novels, women are in the thrall of men again, back in the position they are supposed to be. [The critic] Peter Kemp thinks Wells's women are like erotic secretaries. Their role is to spout on about Wells's cause. They would type up his ideas by day and provide erotic solace by night."

A biographer of Wells, Foot rejects the notion that the writer exploited women in this way. "It's all a scandalous charge against him," he maintains. "Previously, people had thought that only men could have passions, but he showed that women could have them too."

The other charge laid at Wells's door is that his ideas about racial eugenics prefigured Nazism. Again, Foot vehemently rebuts the accusation. "It's all drivel. There were lots of people talking about eugenics at that time. Wells wanted a civilised approach to controlling population. He was certainly not seeking to do it by methods that would justify Hitler. That's absolute nonsense. It is impossible to think that the man who wrote Mr Polly was engaged in that kind of thinking."

Maguire, once more, is not so convinced. "It's very hard to interpret some of his writings other than as racist," she counters. "Like when he talks about 'swarms of dirty white and black and yellow people who can't keep pace with the rest of us and will have to go.' An excuse is that a lot of people were racist in those days. That's true, but it's still quite shocking."

All are agreed, however, on the fact that Wells's writing was astonishingly prescient - and not just in his celebrated works of science fiction. "He wrote about things that are bang up-to-date," Foot observes. "In The World Set Free in 1914, at the time scientists were working on the atom, he said that if we don't have international controls on this, we're going to have terrorists carrying bombs around in suitcases blowing us up. The same set of proposals Wells made in 1914, Gorbachev was carrying out in the 1980s with his anti-nuclear plans. Wells was a man ahead of his time."

Foot, who says that Wells's writings helped him become a socialist, asserts that he was a genius. "It's the combination of heart and mind. He foresaw what was going to happen, but translated it into great fiction. He was also absolutely honest. Whenever he discovered the truth - about love- making or women's rights or the way of the world - he would tell it. Conventional forces would try to stop him, but he was the greatest of all 20th-century writers in his determination to tell the truth."

That's all very well, but, as Jill Craigie puts it, he was also "a naughty boy in many ways".

'Bookmark: HG Wells' is on tomorrow at 8.55pm and Sunday at 8.45pm on BBC2