BT Tower - Appearances in Fiction

Appearances in Fiction

• In Sky1's adaptation of The Runaway the IRA bombing of the tower is featured in episode 4.
• Large portions of the 1966 Doctor Who serial The War Machines were set in and around the tower. It is also mentioned in the 1968 serial The Web of Fear and the spin-off Sarah Jane Adventures serial The Mad Woman in the Attic.
• In the 1967 film Smashing Time it appeared to spin out of control and short-circuit the whole of London's power supply.
• The tower is featured in Stanley Donen's 1967 film Bedazzled as a vantage point from which Peter Cook, playing Satan, launches various forms of mischief.
• The tower is featured in the most famous scene in The Goodies when it is toppled over by Twinkle the Giant Kitten in the episode Kitten Kong. This scene was included in the title sequence of all later series.
• A later episode of The Goodies, Alternative Roots, includes a brief, chaotic visit to the tower's revolving restaurant.
• The tower is destroyed by an alien robot from Mars in an episode of Danger Mouse.
• In Alan Moore's graphic novel V for Vendetta the tower is headquarters for both the "Eye", and the "Ear", the visual and audio surveillance divisions of the government. The tower is destroyed through sabotage. It's also featured in the film adaptation although it is not destroyed. It is renamed Jordan Tower in the film and is the headquarters of the "British Television Network".
• The tower is destroyed in the James Herbert novel The Fog by a Boeing 747 whose captain has been driven mad by fog. Domain, another James Herbert novel, mentions the tower's destruction when London is attacked by nuclear weapons.
• In The New Avengers (TV Series) episode Sleeper, the heroes Steed and Gambit view the deserted city from the 34th floor of the Tower - at the time, photography and filming were not permitted in the Tower due to it being covered by the Official Secrets Act.
• The tower appears abandoned and covered in pleurococcus in a BBC TV adaptation of The Day of the Triffids.
• The design of the starship HMS Camden Lock from the BBC 2 science fiction sitcom Hyperdrive is based on the tower.
• In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry is spotted flying over the tower in a Ford Anglia with his friend, Ron Weasley.
• It appears on the cover of, and figures in, Saturday by Ian McEwan.
• Frank Muir's short story The Law Is Not Concerned With Trifles is set in the tower's revolving restaurant.
• Rowan Atkinson in Not the Nine O'Clock News plays a Frenchman who claims that the Post Office Tower was not a communications tower but a London phallus.
• In The Bourne Ultimatum movie, there is a helicopter's view shot of the tower building for a brief period of time to show the location.
• In Season 4 of ReBoot, a tower closely resembling the BT tower is seen in the first episode as a control tower being able to open the system of Mainframe to the net.
• In Patrick Keiller's film London (1992) the narrator claims the tower is a monument to the love affair between Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, who lived nearby.
• The bombing is a central plot feature of Hari Kunzru's 2007 novel My Revolutions, in which the bomb is the work of political radicals who are never caught.
• In Daniel H. Wilson's 2011 novel, Robopocalypse the tower is used by the sentient artificial intelligence named Archos to control and jam satellite communications. It is destroyed by a hacker known as Lurker to help win the human/computer war.
• In the book Spiral by Roderick Gordans and Brian Williams, the BT Tower is entered for some kind search using microwaves, to detect Darklight activity by Drake.