I was not quite sure what to make of this book. It outlines ten paths of action, all of which might be found in a good self-help book (they include “Embracing Family”, “Working With Others” and “Participating in Politics”), referred to a specific mandala in the shape of the eponymous wheel. But for me the book fell between the two stools of explanation and instruction. The reader is assumed to be already familiar with the history and culture of Buddhism; while mandalas in general are rather briefly explained, the background of this Wheel is not. So I didn’t learn much from it, except to discover that Engaged Buddhism exists (but even there I found Wikipedia more informative).

• reading_gibbon: Gibbon’s Vindication
  "It is not without some mixture of mortification and regret, that I now look back on the number of hours which I have consumed, and the number of pages which I have filled, in vindicating my literary and moral character from the charge of wilful Misrepresentations, gross Errors, and servile Plagiarisms… I am impatient to dismiss, and to dismiss FOR EVER, this odious controversy, with the success of which I cannot surely be elated; and I have only to request, that, as soon as my Readers are convinced of my innocence, they would forget my Vindication."

LibraryThing lists these authors as having the most ‘completist’ fans, ie that those who have one book by the author are likely to have a lot more. (I’m a bit surprised not to see Lois McMaster Bujold here, or more classic crime writers.) Not all of them are in fact single authors, but we live in an imperfect world.

Myself I have at least tried Terry Pratchett, Terrance Dicks, Anne McCaffrey, David Eddings, Franklin W. Dixon, David Weber, Dick Francis, Carolyn Keene, and Agatha Christie. Recommendations (and disrecommendations) welcome in comments.

I had never particularly aspired to read Ruth Rendell, but acquired this by mistake from a BookMoocher who had meant to send me an Ian Rankin. It is a gripping and somewhat grim read, of a lonely old woman and her obsessive lodger; he kills his Bosnian girlfriend, and hides her body under the floorboards. It’s a crime novel rather than a mystery novel, since we know what the murderer has done and why he has done it all the way through; the police barely feature in the story. The other main character in the book apart from the murderer and his landlady is the city of London in the Noughties; socially and ethnically mixed, but on edge and easily fractured. There are a lot of memorable minor characters as well – the model who the killer is obsessed with, the landlady’s long lost love, the fortune-teller who the victim worked for, even the Iraqi refugee who emerges rather abruptly in the final pages. If Rendell’s other books are this good I shall start looking out for them.

Top LibraryThing Unsuggestion: rather surprisingly, Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman, followed by a whole lot of Pratchett, Gaiman and Robert Jordan. Shows a sharp divide between crime writing fans and sf fans – certainly the latter would have no reason not to enjoy this, and I’d have rated Smoke and Mirrors as one of Gaiman’s more accessible books for the reader who doesn’t usually buy sf. Also shows that LibraryThing haven’t updated the Unsuggestion database since before I accidentally acquired this book.

For those of you who care what I listed in my response to Doctor Who Monthly’s poll:

TV Specials
The Next Doctor: 7/10
Planet of the Dead: 6/10
The Waters of Mars: 7/10
The End of Time: 8/10 

Doctor Who Books – Fiction
Realised that the only ones published in 2009 which I have read are the ten Darksmith Legacy books, and decided not to vote for them. (The others are Prisoner of the Daleks, Judgement of the Judoon, The Slitheen Excursion, Autonomy, The Krillitane Storm, The Taking of Chelsea 426, The Sontaran Games, Short Trips: Indefinable Magic, Short Trips: Recollections, The Doctor Who Stories [the good bits from The Doctor Who Files], and The Doctor Who Storybook 2010.)

Doctor Who Books – Non-Fiction
Only one I have read published in 2009 is the second edition of About Time 3, which gets my vote.

Doctor Who Audio Dramas (Big Finish)
First and second choices were easy; third place was a close call with The Cannibalists, The Drowned World and The Eternal Summer
1) The Mahogany Murderers
2) Death in Blackpool
3) Key 2 Time – The Destroyer of Delights

Doctor Who Audio Releases (BBC)
Again an easy ranking esp since I haven’t got any of the audio novelisations:
1) Beautiful Chaos
2) The Eyeless
3) Hornet’s Nest 1: The Stuff of Nightmares

Doctor Who DVD releases a) favourite release of 2009
1) The War Games
2) The Deadly Assassin
3) The Rescue/The Romans

Doctor Who DVD releases b) favourite special feature
All three of mine are from the War Games DVD:
1) Talking About Regeneration
2) On Target – Malcolm Hulke
3) Devious

Doctor Who DVD releases c) Most wanted DVD release
1) Terror of the Zygons
2) Terror of the Autons
3) The Tenth Planet
Despite my general lack of enthusiasm for the Pertwee era I have to admit that there are some significant gaps in the currently available range; if we can have the whole Sixth Doctor era, then why not Day of the Daleks or The DæmonsThe Gunfighters as a guilty pleasure, but no, if I can choose The Tenth Planet then I think it gets priority.
(And can we pay them not to release The Dominators?)

The rest of the poll questions are all to do with DWM itself, and I think I need to start reading it more thoroughly before expressing a judgement.

…have selected Julian Huppert.

I don’t know him but wish him well.

The last year before I was born which was a prime number was 1951. There was a long gap then until 1973. So far I have lived through seven years which were prime numbers:

1973, 1979, 1987, 1993, 1997, 1999 and 2003.

There was an unusual concentration between 1987 and 2003, five in seventeen years. The next few are in general more widely spaced (apart from one pairing in the late 2020s): 2011, 2017, 2027, 2029, 2039, 2053, 2063, 2069 and another big gap to 2081, which very few of us will see. I have probably lived through the majority of the prime number years of my lifetime; another seven takes me to 2063 when I will be 96.

Yesterday it became apparent that the office phone had problems yet again; we could not hear outgoing or incoming calls, though the people on the other end could hear us fine.

I went out and bought a new handset (the old one was rather crappy and we needed one with a better loudspeaker anyway), but the problem remained, so clearly it’s something to do with the line.

I called Belgacom’s customer service – after the usual insane delving through their website to find the number – and after 20 minutes on hold finally spoke to a technician. He took my details, said he would look into it, and promised to call me back on my mobile number in a few minutes. Needless to say, he never did.

I called them again this morning before leaving home to find out what had happened to my report from yesterday. Needless to say, the technician I spoke to (and I wish I had taken his name; I will always do that with Belgacom staff in future) had made no record of my call. That really is the last straw.

Not being in the office yet, I couldn’t give the technical details needed. I got them to promise to call me back mid-morning; but I am not holding my breath.

ETA: In fairness, they did call mid-morning and appear to have fixed the problem! Yay! But I am still unimpressed with their failure to do anything about it yesterday.

Meanwhile I am looking at the other service providers I can go to. If Telenet now cover Brussels (they didn’t last time I checked) they will get my business; they have been perfectly acceptable providers at home.

Back in the days when I worked on Kosovo I had a lot of dealings with Hédi Annabi, a Tunisian UN official who was then deputy head of the Department of Peace-Keeping Operations. I remember several brown-bag lunches hosted by him inside UN headquarters where I would expound on why the UN should be doing better, and Annabi, in the courteous way of a Mediterranean official with the best Parisian education, would explain to me that I was partly wrong and that where I was right it was not the UN’s fault. His staff seemed to enjoy our sparring and the events were always vigorous and I hope educational all round.

Annabi moved from New York in September 2007, when he was appointed head of the UN Mission in Haiti. Reports from there indicate that the UN mission building there was completely destroyed yesterday’s earthquake, and that over a hundred people inside, including Annabi, were killed.

Edited to add I hear that the victims probably also include Gerardo LeChevalier, who I knew vaguely at NDI when he was head of their Latin American operations: a former political activist from El Salvador who was entertaining company, and had a special personal insight into the US Central America policy of the 1980s.

No need for condolences to me; I didn’t know him all that well. But a chill goes down the spine none the less.

Collection of essays on evolutionary biology by Gould, which topped the non-fiction section of this poll. Some of these pieces are a bit dated (not so surprising in a book published in 1980); his rather daring efforts to finger Teilhard de Chardin as a participant in the Piltdown Man hoax were easily refuted by the first researcher to check the documentary evidence. But his thoughts on punctuated equilibrium are pretty convincing, as is his (less developed here) criticism of Dawkins for obsessing about genes rather than individuals. And his essay on heartbeats and breaths in the lifespan of a mammal was very sobering.

Top LibraryThing Unsuggestion: Blue Like Jazz, by Donald Miller – I read this after it figured in a couple of other unsuggestions, and was deeply unimpressed.

Well, I am feeling a little better now, but it didn’t prevent me watching the second of the two Doctor Who films starring Peter Cushing. It is much inferior both to the original six-part TV Dalek Invasion of Earth and to its own predecessor which I reviewed earlier. Somehow where the TV series succeeded in making the sets appear a realistic future occupied England, the big screen fails to do so; the sequences around the mines are particularly striking, where the original show achieved five times the effect for perhaps a tenth of the money. The music is often terrible, though of course the TV version had some of the best incidental music ever to feature in Who. Peter Cushing and Roberta Tovey, returning from the previous film, are much less effective; the more striking performances are Jill Curzon as Dr. Who’s niece Louise, Philip Madoc as a short-lived black marketeer, Andrew Keir as a Scottish freedom fighter, and particularly Bernard Cribbins as Tom Campbell, a 1960s policeman who accidentally enters Tardis thinking it is a police box and gets swept forward to 2150.

I have some suggestions as to why this film manifestly fails where its predecessor did not, and where the TV story succeeded. First off, the TV series has an ensemble of regular characters with established relationships; the film loses time and momentum setting that up (and also has no particularly good reason for it). Second, the switching round of the narrative strands fails to work in the film’s favour. Here, Tom and Louise, rather than Ian and a local, head up to Derbyshire in the Dalek saucer; and Dr. Who and granddaughter Susie travel by land separately rather than together. (Susie follows roughly the route of Barbara on TV, accompanied by Weir’s Scottish resistance fighter.) Opportunities are missed to generate much spark between Tom and Louise, let along their terrestrially travelling friends. Of the good scenes from the TV story, only Dortmun’s last stand and the treacherous women in the woods survive, and are done less well. (The women are played by Eileen Way and Sheila Steafel.) Finally, the geology of the Daleks’ plan actually – and this is difficult to believe – makes less sense than the original TV version.

Anyway, this is really for completists only.

(I have a memory of seeing a version where Roberta Tovey’s character is locked out of the Tardis at the end à la Carole Ann Ford’s departure, but I guess I must have dreamed it.)

I see that Dan O’Brien of the Irish Times and the Economist Intelligence Unit has come around to my point of view on requiring government ministers to be members of parliament, though he is wrong about the electoral system. (Though right about referendums, and, for all I know, about judges too.)

Hat-tip to Ian, whose second post I await eagerly.

…if you like. 

When Arlene Foster resigned from the Ulster Unionist Party and joined the DUP, I reckoned that it was. probably a good career move on her part. But I must say I didn’t imagine (and I am sure that she didn’t imagine) that it would lead to her becoming acting First Minister of Northern Ireland a little more than six years later. And frankly I think it is likely she will stay in place; it’s not easy to see Peter Robinson coming back in six weeks’ time.

Ten years ago, who would ever have thought that the first woman to lead a devolved government in the UK would be from the party of Ian Paisley?

PS: Much the best blogosphere coverage of the Robinson and Adams stories is on Slugger O’Toole.

I resolved last year that I would keep better track of the films I watch this year. I have been lying in bed finding it difficult to concentrate today, and this was just about the right level of intellectual engagement to start off this particular resolution.

As a Doctor Who fan, it is impossible not to judge this film in comparison with the original seven-part Dalek story, so I won’t really try. The positives: it is in colour, which is a huge difference. It looks better (except, oddly enough, the interior of Dr. Who’s Tardis, which just looks like a film set with some machines dotted around it). The plot is tighter – it’s difficult (with one exception, which I’ll get to) to remember what has been cut from the original story to produce a film half its length, and some of the best bits are still there. The music is decent – not as unearthly as in the TV version, but not offensive either.

The huge difference, however, is in the performances and portrayals. Peter Cushing plays elderly slightly comical scientist Dr. Who, who keeps a time machine called ‘Tardis’ in his back garden, shaped like a police box for some reason. He doesn’t have the grumpy gravitas of William Hartnell, but I detect some homage to his portrayal in the approach taken by Silvester McCoy. Roberta Tovey as his nine-year-old granddaughter Susie is actually rather good, and recasts Carole Anne Ford with perhaps a bit more grit.

When I first saw this on a Saturday morning repeat aged about 11, the surprise was that Ian is played by Roy Castle, who of course I knew as the presenter of the BBC children’s programme Record Breakers. This was actually his second film role – he had also appeared with Peter Cushing in another Max Subotsky film with a doctor in the title (Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors) earlier in 1965. Castle’s Ian starts as a clown but more or less settles into the heroic sidekick to Cushing’s Who by the end, probably the closest of the four main characters to the TV version (though William Russell’s Ian is much brainer).

The most serious cut in the film as compared to the TV original is Barbara, Dr. Who’s other grand-daughter, played by Jennie Linden. She gets almost nothing to do, except that her over-vigorous embrace of Ian sets Tardis going in the first place. (And even that is portrayed as Ian’s clumsiness.) She is practically background scenery, especially when compared to Jacqueline Hill’s history teacher.

Well, unless I start feeling better, I shall watch the other Cushing film later on.

• reading_gibbon: Chapter XVI: Early Christianity and the emperors
  A run through the historical record, staring with Tacitus on Nero's blaming the Christians for the Great Fire, then Pliny on his administrative problems in Bithynia, then a long section on Cyprian (who I think gets more coverage than any other non-emperor); then a period of relaxation, which however is abruptly reversed by Diocletian (though that period of persecution seems to be more effective in the East). A rather more detailed but slightly less interesting chapter than the previous one, and I wonder if he might have been better to organise the material more chronologically across the two.
  (tags: gibbon)

For several years in the 1990s I gave tutorials on Darwin and evolution in support of Peter Bowler’s history of science course in Belfast, but I had never actually read the book that started it all. My recommendation to the casual reader would be to skip about half of it. Darwin basically has three startling ideas here, and the chapters where he talks about them are excellent, almost exciting, as he modestly challenges the received wisdom of the day. He wanders off topic, though, into areas like hybridism and geographical distribution, and I found those chapters much tougher going.

Darwin’s three ideas are these:

1. Most fundamentally, that it is possible to come up with a scientific explanation of how species change. (This is actually the second argument in the book, but it is the most important.) Although most of the book is a massing of evidence in favour,he takes one or two moments to tilt against any idea that species originate through acts of supernatural creation. “To admit this view is, as it seems to me, to reject a real for an unreal, or at least for an unknown ,cause.  It makes the works of God a mere mockery and deception; I would almost as soon believe with the old and ignorant cosmogonists, that fossil shells had never lived, but had been created in stone so as to mock the shells now living on the sea-shore.”
2. Darwin works up to this gradually, reviewing in considerable detail how humans change domesticated species of both animals and plants through artificial selection. He is not in general as lucid a writer as Gould, or even Dawkins. But the first four chapters on their own set out a compelling case that the answer to the question posed by the book’s title is that species generally originate by descent from other species with modification by natural selection. (The word “evolution” is not used.)
3. The third new element introduced by Darwin is the enormity of geological time. Having proposed a very slow process of change, he needs long ages to have passed for it to operate. This also helps him with another difficulty – he needs the fossil record to be incomplete in order to account for the fact that we don’t find many intermediate stages of species change (though there are other factors here). He is coy about the details but does propose that the Weald has taken 300 million years to erode to its present situation. I think today’s estimate is more like 100 million years, but he’s within an order of magnitude.

We are still hazy about some of the details on all of this – in particular, the development of genetics has bolstered the general argument while muddying some of the details. But basically Darwin was right on all three of his big ideas, and on all three of them he was challenging received wisdom – though of course he was not alone, and in an appendix lists other writers who had come to similar conclusions in recent years

It is worthing also noting what Darwin doesn’t do. He doesn’t use the word “evolution”; he says little about God and nothing about the Bible; he has precisely one sentence about the relevance of this to humanity, saying that as a result of his book, “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” But the implications are pretty clear.

Top LibraryThing Unsuggestion: Lucy Sullivan Is Getting Married by Marian Keyes

Spent the afternoon preparing dinner for Mr and Mrs , and then realised that I am suddenly not feeling well enough to eat it. Have retired to bed while the rest of the household eats.

I’ve messed around a bit with the map I found of antipodes on Wikipedia to produce this, outlining the northern hemisphere bits:

The only parts of the continental USA with land antipodes are a small patch in Montana, opposite Kerguelen Island (which also straddles the border into Canada), and two small patches of Colorado which are opposite the remote Île Amsterdam and Île Saint-Paul. Parts of the far north of Canada and Alaska, and most of Greenland, are antipodal to the coast of Antarctica.

The only parts of Europe with land antipodes are the parts of Spain and Portugal opposite New Zealand (which also grazes Morocco), and Svalbard, which has antipodes in Antarctica.

Africa contains the antipodes of a number of Pacific islands: Hawai’i, and everything from French Polynesia to Vanuatu and New Caledonia.

South America contains the antipodes of parts of eastern Asia: most of eastern China (with Mongolia mapping onto the tip of Argentina and Chile), Taiwan, sothern Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, and most of Indonesia.

It’s not much, is it?

India Foxtrot Yankee Oscar Uniform Charlie Alpha November Uniform November Delta Echo Romeo Sierra Tango Alpha November Delta Tango Hotel India Sierra, Charlie Oscar Papa Yankee Alpha November Delta Papa Alpha Sierra Tango Echo India Tango India November Tango Oscar Yankee Oscar Uniform Romeo Lima India Victor Echo Juliet Oscar Uniform Romeo November Alpha Lima.

• Daily Kos: Freak Current Takes Gulf Stream to Greenland
  The Gulf Stream has gone west; will it come back?
  (tags: climatechange)

Another sf anthology revisited from my bookshelves (though I found I’d left a bookmark at page 402, and don’t remember previously reading the last few stories). This is Hartwell’s selection of the best stories of 2002: of his 23 choices, I think I count precisely one which made it to the Nebula shortlist, and two which were Hugo nominees (one of which, Michael Swanwick’s “Slow Life”, won). That year’s double winner was Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, which I guess is excluded from Hartwell’s collection as fantasy rather than science fiction.

I liked very much almost all of Hartwell’s selection. The one that really got under my skin was A.M. Dellamonica’s “A Slow Day At The Gallery”; two others that had stuck in my mind from first reading were Charles Stross’s “Halo” and Greg Egan’s “Singleton”. There were unfortunately a couple of mawkish stories about cute old people, which I note is a disturbing and not particularly funny or interesting trend in American sf these days. All the others are very good. Worth returning to.

LibraryThing Unsuggestion: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. Also numerous other books I have read, some of which I even enjoyed.

I was already becoming a fan of Rankin’s novels about Edinburgh policeman John Rebus, but particularly enjoyed this one for the Northern Ireland dimension. Last time Rebus went outside Scotland (to London, in Tooth and Nail) it wasn’t really a success, but here he takes an effective day trip to Belfast(though he mysteriously visits a fictional Malone Road police station) to chase up Loyalist terrorists who may be planning to attack the Edinburgh Festival. The whole picture came together rather neatly at the end, in an arrangement of events reminiscent of the better Agatha Christie novels but in a believable police procedural setting – including high-level collusion with the terrorists, and the blurred lines of demarcation between organised crime, the forces of law and order, and the press. I did wonder about the sub-plot with the seductive and mildly psychotic lady lawyer, but perhaps this is a set-up for something in a later volume. Apart from that, all nicely done.

LibraryThing Unsuggestion: Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein

Just went and got my eyes tested for bifocals.

(In French they are progressifs, which sounds much more optimistic.)

I have been getting a lot of Japanese comment spam in the last couple of months – always from anonymous users, usually entirely in Japanese though with the odd random word in English; no links, just text. I have set up automatic screening for anonymous comments, so nobody apart from me sees them before they are deleted; but I am surprised that this has persisted, even after I switched on the option requiring anonymous commenters to identify the letters in a randomly generated image. This must mean that someone is physically going to the trouble of posting these comments which I cannot read and nobody else will read.

Why?

Grinding through the numbers from this poll, the numbers of books from my 2009 list reported by each respondent are as follows:

101; 80; 79; 75; 73; 73; 73; 66; 65; 64; 63; 61; 60; 60; 60; 59; 59; 58; 58; 57; 56; 56; 56; 54; 52; 51; 51; 50; 49; 48; 48; 47; 47; 46; 46; 45; 44; 44; 44; 43; 43; 43; 42; 42; 41; 41; 41; 41; 39; 39; 39; 39; 39; 38; 38; 38; 38; 37; 37; 37; 36; 36; 35; 33; 33; 32; 32; 31; 31; 30; 30; 30; 30; 29; 29; 29; 29; 29; 28; 27; 27; 26; 25; 24; 24; 24; 24; 24; 23; 21; 21; 20; 20; 20; 20; 20; 19; 19; 18; 17; 17; 16; 15; 15; 15; 14; 13; 13; 12; 10; and 6.

And of those of you who responded to this poll, the book tallies were:

62; 53; 52; 51; 48; 40; 36; 35; 34; 32; 32; 31; 30; 29; 29; 28; 28; 28; 27; 27; 25; 25; 24; 23; 22; 21; 20; 20; 18; 18; 18; 18; 18; 18; 18; 17; 16; 16; 15; 15; 15; 14; 13; 13; 12; 11; 11; 11; 11; 11; 10; 2 and 1

, our bookshelves are obviously linked through L-Space!

So, my first book of 2010 was published exactly 150 years ago. Framley Parsonage is the fourth of Trollope’s six Barsetshire novels, mainly concerning the initial hostility and eventual approval of Lord Lufton’s mother towards her son’s love for the more humbly born Lucy Robarts; a substantial subplot concerns the financial problems of Lucy’s brother Mark, who is the vicar of Framley and whose home therefore gives the book its title. Although it recapitulates much the same plot as Doctor Thorne, the third in the series, I think it is rather better: the characters are more likeable, and the rather nasty sneering at the lower orders which crept into Doctor Thorne is replaced by some jabs at the comfortable contemporary reader which are a little (though only a little) more savage than Trollope’s usual gentle mockery: “There are two classes of persons in this realm who are constitutionally inefficient to take any part in returning members to Parliament—peers, namely, and women.” “You millionaires always talk of Christian resignation, because you never are called on to resign anything. ” And, summing up pretty much the whole book: “A lady who can sell herself for a title or an estate, for an income or a set of family diamonds, treats herself as a farmer treats his sheep and oxen”. Trollope is particularly cynical about party politics; he sees almost no ideological difference between Whigs and Tories, simply different styles of snobbery and patronage. But his cynicism is not especially vicious, and he sees the situation as part of the natural order, peculiar and quirky though it may sometimes seen. (There is no suggestion that women might perhaps be given the vote, let alone that the peerage could be reformed.)

This has been my Blackberry book for a couple of months – progressing at about a chapter a day. I’ll download the next from Project Gutenberg in due course, but may try something other than Trollope first.

LibraryThing unrecommendation: Prey by Michael Crichton

In general I am doing these write-ups in groups of six stories at a time, regardless of season breaks or (for next time) changes of Doctor. By most counts, however, this entry covers seven stories, not six. But I persist in my own eccentric view that Mission To The Unknown should be considered as part of The Daleks’ Master Plan, in the teeth of everyone else’s opposition (and of the evidence from BBC official documents that it should be considered, if not separately, then as a fifth episode of Galaxy Four). So The Myth Makers is the first story of those reviewed below, and Mission to the Unknown in effect is the zeroth story for this month’s write-up. OK?

One thing that struck me as never before about Mission to the Unknown: it is a terribly bleak story, with the human characters all dead by the end, their mission an apparent failure – pretty edgy for a children’s programme, and puts Adelaide’s fate in The Waters of Mars into a long-term context. And of course we are further disoriented by the unprecedented (and unrepeated) non-appearance of the Doctor or any of the Tardis crew. But I also noted that this story is clearly to be understood as being in much the same part of space and time as Galaxy Four – the Tardis crew ended the last episode looking at Kembel and wondering what might be happening there (NB also Mavic Chen’s comment in The Daleks’ Master Plan about relations with the Fourth Galaxy, and the fact that Zephon is Master of the Fifth Galaxy). This makes The Myth Makers the odd story out in the first half of the third season, which is otherwise set in the far future of the Drahvins and the Daleks. (Though the confusion about the difference between galaxies and solar systems – which Wood and Miles have mercilessly chronicled – remains; note also Malpha’s remark about where the Daleks come from.) Good music, good scenery (as far as we can tell) but only 7.69% of a plot.

The first three episodes of The Myth Makers are tremendous fun, rather in the spirit of Carry On Cleo which came out a few months earlier. The switch to epic drama and tragedy in the last episode is rather effective and sets the tone for the next story better than I had remembered. Donald Cotton presumes that the audience will have sufficient familiarity with the Trojan legends to appreciate the paradox of the various heroes being vain, cowardly, stupid, greedy or alcoholic. I wonder also if he deliberately reversed the events of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, where Cressida leaves Troilus for Diomede rather than the other way round. I know that the received wisdom is against me on this, but mention two further, admittedly weak, hints at a deberate reversal: Vicki arrives in Troy while Shakespeare’s Cressida leaves the city; and Hector is killed at the end of the Shakespeare play but the beginning of the Who story. Also, though this may not count, Troilus kills Achilles here, whereas Shakespeare has Achilles triumphant and alive at the end. The lore is that Hartnell was in bad form while this was being made, but he seems to me to greatly enjoy his banter with Ivor Salter as Odysseus. Mind you, I felt a bit sad when I realised that John Wiles’ name had replaced Verity Lambert’s in the credits, and I am sure Hartnell must have started wondering how much longer he would last as the sole survivor of the original cast and crew. (Another year, as it turned out.)

Vicki surprised me as I watched her stories in sequence. She is a huge contrast to Susan – she takes the initiative, she rather likes the thrills. Susan would never have armed the rebels of the Space Museum or stowed away on a Dalek time machine; but she would also never have skipped blithely off to ancient Rome or to Richard the Lion-Heart’s court. Vicki comes into the Whoniverse as a very young woman who has already had a certain amount of self-sufficiency forced on her, and her character is all the more interesting for it. And she assertively chooses her time of departure, before she even knows for sure that Troilus will have her.

Maureen O’Brien has done a couple of Big Finish audios, one as Vicki/Cressida – a suitably surreal but compelling tale of alien forces and Jane Austen, by Marc Platt. There is also a brilliant short story, “Apocrypha Bipedium”, featuring her and Troilus meeting up with the Eighth Doctor, audio companion Charley Pollard and the young William Shakespeare, in one of the Short Trips collections. I am not wild about any of the spinoff novels featuring Vicki, but the novelisations of both her debut (by Ian Marter) and her departure (by Donald Cotton) are among the best of the Target range, as is Cotton’s novelisation of The Romans. (I am on the lookout for any of Maureen O’Brien’s own detective novels.)

I am an unabashed fan of The Daleks’ Master Plan, and had listened to the Peter Purves narration several times. This was the first time I had watched the reconstructions in series with the surviving episodes, and I have to say it took all my self-discipline to stick to one a day; I like it even more now. The longest single Who story ever (I don’t accept Trial of a Time Lord), it pushes the buttons of Doctor vs Daleks and treacherous humans far better than any of the New Who season finales.

What struck me this time is that the Doctor has become a mildly superhuman hero from a far future society rather than the mysterious eccentric of the first and second seasons (a trend which began with Galaxy Four). He spontaneously decides to infiltrate the Daleks’ summit meeting himself and steal the tarranuim core; he is insufferably snobbish about the quaint technology of the year 4000; his non-human physiology survives the Time Destructor. John Wiles’ version of the Doctor is much more closely related to the Time Lord we know today than Verity Lambert’s was. But the heroism of Wiles’ Doctor comes at a terrible cost to those who encounter him – ask the Drahvins, the Trojans, the Huguenots, Bret Vyon, Katarina, Sara Kingdom.

Going back to the story, some have complained that the comedy episodes (#7 and half of #8) are intrusive. Again, seen in the pattern of Season 3 as a whole, it makes more sense: by the time we hit the half-way mark of DMP we have had seven episodes of non-stop drama, departure and death, and a bit of light relief, harking back in tone to the first three episodes of The Myth Makers is in order. The return of the Monk is actually a signal that we are back to serious business: last time we saw him, he was changing history for laughs; now he is terrified and out for revenge.

And there are some super performances here as well – Kevin Stoney as Mavic Chen is my favourite Who villain ever; Nicholas Courtney makes a first appearance, as Bret Vyon; Peter Butterworth returns as the Monk; apart from episode 7 and parts of episode 8, everyone is taking it very seriously and the whole thing is marvellous. And Tristram Carey’s music plus the sound effect of the Time Destructor make episode 12 brilliant to listen to, which is just as well since we can’t watch it.

Katarina will never make anyone’s list of Top Twenty Companions. Killed off a few minutes into her fifth episode, she is a rather one-note character, a young woman from a pre-industrial society who simply does not have the mental vocabulary to deal with the far future. Having said that, her story is a poignant one – she begins her travels with the Doctor thinking that she is already dead, and ends up killed by her first and only self-directed usage of future technology. As far as we can tell from the remaining material (one of the five episodes and a few other clips) Adrienne Hill played the part with charm and integrity, considering how little material the scripts gave her to work with. Hill appears (but does not speak) in one of the 1980s Children in Need Who reunions; she died in 1992.

Sara Kingdom is one of the best companions in the whole of Doctor Who, if also one of the shortest lived. Her journey with the Doctor and Steven is one of dealing with the betrayal of her ideals by the leader she once trusted and obeyed. She gets more character development in her seven episodes than the Fourth Doctor got in seven years. But she takes it too far – her death is a direct result of her disobedience, not of Mavic Chen but of the Doctor – motivated by the affection that has built up between them on their travels. Those who saw it assure us that her death scene was every bit as gripping as she deserved.

Jean Marsh must have been the highest profile actor to appear as a companion so far, other than perhaps William Russell, and after her probably only Bonnie Langford, Billie Piper and Catherine Tate exceeded her level of celebrity at the point they came on board the Tardis (others went on to great things of course). She also played major roles in Who stories both before (The Crusade) and after (Battlefield) this. The two Big Finish stories she has done as part of the Companion Chronicles series are good, and ingeniously get around the fact that we all know that the narrator is dead.

More heavy drama in The Massacre, another downbeat story in which lots of people are killed. Again, I was familiar with the Peter Purves audio narration and less so with the recon, which is very impressive given the limited source material, and also gives a sense of what we are missing – director Paddy Russell’s trademark of people creeping around the set hiding from each other. This is also the first “Doctor-lite” story, though of course Hartnell is in it as the Abbot. (Are the two middle episodes the only ones in the whole of Who which have no actual credit for the Doctor? And I don’t think he even speaks in ep 2.) The story keeps us guessing as to whether the Abbot is the Doctor in disguise, as Steven thinks and as is also hinted at by the Abbot’s failure to deliver effectively on his fearsome reputation. Then at the end of episode 3, he is dead in the street – and bearing in mind that we have lost Sara, Bret and Katarina in the last few weeks, it looks very grim for our hero. Yet episode 4 fairly effortlessly shifts focus, and once the political story line has its grim resolution established, it becomes all about the Doctor – will he take Anne with him? (No.) Whose reaction do we focus on after Steven storms out of the Tardis? (The Doctor’s.) Will he take Dodo with him? (Yes.) It’s back to the old mysterious time-traveller, working to his own set of rules which we do not know: “None of them could understand.” And this is entirely under the control of Donald Tosh, who drastically altered Lucarotti’s original script though had by now handed over as story editor to Gerry Davies.

The Ark is one of those stories which I did not like as much as before, watching in sequence this time. I don’t think it’s just because we can actually see it for a change (of the 21 previous episodes, only three from The Daleks’ Master Plan survive). The fundamental idea is sound and even a bit daring, but the script is very oddly paced and yet also cliched. (A security kitchen?) It is not surprising that neither the writer nor the director did another Who story, and I wonder how much morale was affected by John Wiles’ imminent departure as producer. One thing which always tells me that the director didn’t quite Get It is that the crowd scenes are lacking in dynamism – it’s interesting to see children in Who, but it’s odd to see them and their parents all standing around with their hands by their sides. Imison does better with the Monoids, in the first half at least (and I see that the lore claims they were his idea), but the script doen’t help. Both halves of the story suffer from over-long exposition and rushed climax. Poor Jackie Lane starts quite well but seems to gradually have the enthusiasm sucked out of her.

I think The Celestial Toymaker is the story I know least well of this run. It’s an odd one, commissioned as an innovative variation within John Wiles’ long-term plan, but broadcast as a peculiar debut for Innes Lloyd, and apparently needing a lot of rewriting by him and Gerry Davies from Brian Hayles’ original script (not that that deterred them from inviting him back) Making allowances for the lost visuals of the first three episodes, I liked it a little more this time round than on previous listens to the Peter Purves narration. It certainly gets marks for originality and everyone is performing well (Hartnell being absent for a lot of it). I had forgotten how cuddly Dodo and Steven get in the last episode, and she raises genuine questions about the ethics of what happens to the Toymaker’s minions which Stephen would prefer to ignore. Unfortunately the reconstruction of the missing three is not particularly inspiring – Loose Cannon did better in some cases where there is even less material to work with..

I have an unfashionable affection for The Gunfighters, and that has deepened a little now that I see it in the context of Wiles’ thwarted experimentation and Lloyd’s attempt to get a grip on the show. The sets and costumes look very good, the plot holds together, and John Alderson is excellent as Wyatt Earp (“Mr Werp”, as the Doctor calls him), though one can quibble about wobbly accents and performances from some ofthe other supporting cast. I have been suffering dental problems of my own recently, so felt sympathetic to the Doctor’s plight; note also his aversion to carrying guns, which resonates even in the most recent episode. But that is not all; thirty-five years before “Once More With Feeling”, Old Who experimented with a musical element. I really like the “Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon”; I think it makes an intriguing dramatic frame for the story, and teases the viewer with the question of whose story we are watching, and how. I know this is a minority view. Also nice to see Dodo and Steven being cuddly in the first episode, though poor Steven ends up just wearing a silly costume and getting captured (normally the role of the female companion).

I had listened to the audio releases of these stories a couple of years ago, and there was some discussion in comments about the changeover from Wiles/Tosh to Lloyd/Davis, which I didn’t really twig to on that occasion. This time round, with the surviving videos, and also in the context of having watched what’s left of the previous two years’ stories, it really jumped out at me. Wiles was I think ahead of his time; his Who stories are much more like those of the colour era than any other period of Hartnell. It clearly didn’t work for Hartnell or for the BBC hierarchy, but it works for me.

< An Unearthly Child – The Aztecs | The Sensorites – The Romans | The Web Planet – Galaxy 4 | Mission To The Unknown – The Gunfighters | The Savages – The Highlanders | The Underwater Menace – Tomb of the Cybermen | The Abominable Snowmen – The Wheel In Space | The Dominators – The Space Pirates | The War Games – Terror of the Autons | The Mind of Evil – The Curse of Peladon | The Sea Devils – Frontier in Space | Planet of the Daleks – The Monster of Peladon | Planet of the Spiders – Revenge of the Cybermen | Terror of the Zygons – The Seeds of Doom | The Masque of Mandragora – The Talons of Weng-Chiang | Horror of Fang Rock – The Invasion of Time | The Ribos Operation – The Armageddon Factor | Destiny of the Daleks – Shada | The Leisure Hive – The Keeper of Traken | Logopolis – The Visitation | Black Orchid – Mawdryn Undead | Terminus – The Awakening | Frontios – Attack of the Cybermen | Vengeance on Varos – In A Fix With Sontarans | The Mysterious Planet – Paradise Towers | Delta and the Bannermen – The Greatest Show in the Galaxy | Battlefield – The TV Movie >