Dundee’s Martian Autopsy was performed live by Dame Professor Sue Black, one of the UK’s leading forensic scientists, as the highlight of our programme of events for the 2016 Being Human national Festival of the Humanities, which was themed around H.G. Wells @150 Hope and Fear. It was commended by Professor Sarah Churchwell, director of Being Human itself (based at Senate House) as the festival’s ‘national flagship event’ for 2016.
The whole event was created through workshops conducted by colleagues Keith Williams and Daniel Cook. The Martian specimen was made by Dundee art students (supervised by design programme leader, Gary Gowans), following Wells’s anatomical specifications in The War of the Worlds. It was scripted and filmed by our creative writing and film colleagues and students, led by Eddie Small and Brian Hoyle, with additional material and improvisation by Dame Sue. ‘Huxley’, Dame Sue’s Igor, is played by our director of Museum Services, Matthew Jarron (channelling famous comedy stooges and the spirit of George Bond Howes). The animation at the beginning of the film is based on one of the strips created by Chris Murray and artist Helen Robinson for our Comics anthology, H.G. Wells: Space and Time.