page_title: BT Tower
section_title: Appearances in fiction
hierarchical_section_title: BT Tower / Appearances in fiction
caption_attribution_description: English: Model of BT Tower in Miniland, Legoland Windsor
context_page_description: The BT Tower is a communications tower located in Fitzrovia, London, owned by BT Group. It has been previously known as the GPO Tower, the Post Office Tower and the Telecom Tower. The main structure is 177 metres high, with a further section of aerial rigging bringing the total height to 189 metres. Its Post Office code was YTOW.
  Upon completion in 1964, it overtook the Millbank Tower to become the tallest building in both London and the United Kingdom, titles that it held until 1980, when it in turn was overtaken by the NatWest Tower.
context_section_description: In the film Three Hats for Lisa (1965) the characters take refuge in the tower. In the story it is under construction.
  Large portions of the Doctor Who serial The War Machines (1966) are set in and around the tower.
  In the film Smashing Time (1967) it appears to spin out of control, creating a fairground centrifugal effect for the occupants and short-circuiting the whole of London's power supply.
  The tower is featured in Stanley Donen's film Bedazzled (1967) as a vantage point from which Peter Cook, playing Satan, launches various forms of mischief.
  The tower is featured in The Goodies when it is toppled over by Twinkle the Giant Kitten in the episode "Kitten Kong" (1971). This scene was included in the title sequence of all later series.
  Characters in Iris Murdoch's novel The Black Prince (1973) frequently reference the Post Office Tower both literally and metaphorically. The restaurant is the setting for a lunch involving Bradley Pearson, the novel's first-person protagonist, and Julian Baffin, daughter of Pearson's friends, rival novelist Arnold Baffin and his wife Rachel. In his postscript, Francis Marloe refers to Pearson as a "sort of human Post Office Tower, erect and steely."
  The tower is destroyed in the James Herbert novel The Fog (1975) by a Boeing 747 whose captain has been driven mad by the eponymous fog.
  In The Judas Goat (1978), the fourth novel about Robert B. Parker's detective character Spenser, Spenser eats in the revolving restaurant even though it violates Spenser's Law (that the quality of meals in revolving restaurants never match their price).
  The tower is destroyed by an apparently alien robot from Mars – in fact a device operated by Baron Silas Greenback –  in an episode of Danger Mouse (series 1, episode 11, 1981).
  In Alan Moore's graphic novel V for Vendetta (1982) 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 is also featured in the film adaptation (2005) although it is not destroyed. It is renamed Jordan Tower in the film and is the headquarters of the "British Television Network".
  Frank Muir's short story "The Law Is Not Concerned With Trifles" is set in the tower's revolving restaurant.
  Harry Adam Knight's sci-fi novel The Fungus (1985) climaxes in the tower, which undergoes a dramatic transformation: "It resembled an enormous mushroom. Fungus, dark and malevolent, had accumulated around its bulbous summit."
  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.
  It appears on the cover of, and features in, Saturday by Ian McEwan (2005).
  The bombing is a central plot feature of Hari Kunzru's novel My Revolutions (2007), 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.
  In Sky1's adaptation of The Runaway (2011) the bombing of the tower is featured in episode 4.
  In J.K. Rowling's novel Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1998), a newspaper report shows the enchanted Ford Anglia 105E flying over the BT Tower.
  In the film The Girl with All the Gifts (2016), the fungi pods grow up around the tower.
  In David Holman's novel ‘Countdown to Terror’ (2017) there is a scene in the Post Office Tower on the day of the 1969 Daily Mail Air Race which had the tower as its starting and finishing point.
caption: Model of BT Tower in Legoland Windsor
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