For those of you who watched it in the old days, a full episode of Vision On in three different Youtube uploads:
This third part, with Sylvester McCoy as a fugitive from Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange and then meeting multiple versions of himself and Pat Keysell, is strongly recommended.
3rd September 1940: birth of Pauline Collins, who memorably played companion-that-never-was Samantha Briggs in The Faceless Ones (1967) and Queen Victoria in Tooth and Claw (2006).
3rd September 1977: broadcast of first episode of Horror of Fang Rock, starting Season 15. The Doctor and Leela land at the lighthouse of Fang rock, where the two keepers, Reuben and Vince, are behaving oddly (indeed, Reuben so oddly that he is dead). And a ship is wrecked on the Rock…
3rd September 1993 – broadcast of second episode of The Paradise of Death. The Doctor rather bizarrely recovers from his fall because he is able to turn his whole body to jelly. The bad guys capture Sarah Jane Smith and take her to the planet Parakon, while the Doctor, Jeremy and the Brigadier set off in pursuit but land insyead on the planet Blestinu.
3rd September 2007 [?] – events of Revenge of the Slitheen (SJA 2008), where the slimy green gits attempt to infiltrate Park Vale Comprehensive School, attended by Luke (and Clyde, and Maria) but are foiled by our young heroes and Sarah Jane Smith.
Got this because I was very much impressed by Bendis’ work on Alias, and this seemed a good place to continue following his œuvre. In retrospect I’m not sure if it was such a good choice – it’s part of the ongoing saga of the Daredevil, one of the many Marvel superheroes of whom I know pretty much nothing, so I was left a bit uncertain as to how much continuity the reader should be assumed to have absorbed. Taken on that basis, it’s good but not blow-me-away excellent; the story is essentially about a child who has unwillingly become a witness to the dark underside of the world of superheroes, and the journalist who is trying to establish the truth. I was rather more impressed by David Mack’s art, which uses pictures to tell bits of narrative in a way that text (or text bubbles) never could.
2nd September 1911: birth of Eileen Way who played the Old Mother in An Unearthly Child (1963), the old woman in the woods in Daleks – Invasion Earth 2150 AD (1966) and Karela in The Creature from the Pit (1979).
2nd September 1994: death, two days after his 60th birthday, of Roy Castle, who played Ian in Doctor Who and the Daleks (1965), the first of the Peter Cushing films.
2nd September 1967: broadcast of the first episode of Tomb of the Cybermen, starting Season 5. The Doctor, Jamie, and new companion Victoria land on a deserted planet and encounter an archaeological expedition exploring the eponymous tombs. But they may not be as dead as all that…
2nd September 1978: broadcast of the first episode of The Ribos Operation, starting Season 16 (the Quest for the Key to Time). The White Guardiuan visits the Doctor and gives him both a quest – the Key to Time – and a new companion, Romana. Landing on Ribos, the two Time Lords are trapped with the savage shrivenzale….
2nd September 1995: release of Downtime – I wouldn’t normally note the release of spinoff video like this, but the reunion of Victoria, the Brigadier, Sarah Jane Smith and the Yeti is quite remarkable. Usually in a good way.
2nd September 1666: The Fifth Doctor starts the Great Fire of London, as shown in The Visitation (1982); I guess we assume that most of the 17th-century scenes in the story are set on that day.
I managed to get to most of three days of the Discworld Convention in Birmingham last weekend; it was great fun as I expected. The headline for me was that Terry Pratchett himself is looking and sounding very well. I saw him speak at the opening ceremony on Friday and the "Man in the Hat" interview on Saturday, and my friend D won the draw to meet him in a klatsch and reported that he was just as lucid in a group conversation. Long may he continue.
The striking visual thing about the con was the number of people in costumes; some tremendously elaborate, others just striking (eg
I was staying with D in Kidderminster, an hour away by train, which meant no late nights and other commitments meant arriving around lunchtime all three days. D has just turned sixty-mumble and had never attended any kind of sf convention before, but also claimed to have enjoyed it greatly. Indeed, an oft-quoted statistic was that abut half of the 900 attendees had never been to any such event, which indicates that at least one part of fandom can still attract new blood. I suppose one test will be how many of them turn up for the next DWCon, or are attracted to other cons. (I saw no flyers for the next Eastercon, though its chair was in evidence and there were flyers for both Eastercon 2012 and the 2014 London Worldcon bid.)
As was pointed out by others, several con members were too young to have attended any such event. I was pleased to make the acquaintance of five-week-old Astrid, six-week-old Abigail and three-month-old Gwyneth and appreciated their (and their parents’) tolerance of me talking to them.
As well as the Pratchett sessions, I managed to narrowly win a round of Unseen University Challenge as captain of a scratch team including two Irish woman and a young Canadian guy who suggested that we should be the University of Buggerup. We were no doubt helped by our mascot, an inflatable kangaroo which we borrowed from a lady dressed as a witch. Unfortunately I missed the second round due to an unexpected work meeting in London on the Saturday morning; I was replaced at short notice by a werewolf from Tallaght, but we lost.
The other grand extra-curricular activity for me was the Election of the Low King, as voted by all members of the convention.
And I got drawn for a klatsch with Stephen Baxter, who is collaborating with Terry Pratchett on a series of sf novels. He was not over-pleased when I suggested that he was supplying the hard sf element to the collaboration, but got very entertaining about Doctor Who – his favourite story was The Mind Robber, and he had actually written the original 100th story for Big Finish in 2007 though in the end they went for a different concept. I am not always a fan of Baxter’s writing, but I did like both Voyage and The Time Ships, and he was very charming in person.
It was of course also great to see old (and new) friends such as
1st September 1974: birth of Burn Gorman, who played randy (and later undead) medic Owen Harper in the first two series of Torchwood (2007-2009).
1st September 1979: broadcast of episode 1 of Destiny of the Daleks, opening episode of Season 17. Romana regenerates; the Tardis lands on Skaro a radioactive planet; the Doctor is captured by the Movellans, and Romana threatened with extermination by the Daleks.
1st September 1991: happens over and over again in the Suffolk town of Thorington. Incidentally, what happened to the sea? (as told in the 2008 Eighth Doctor audio play, Brave New Town)
1st September 2982: funeral of Eighth Doctor Adventure companion Roz Forrester (in Ben Aaronovitch and Kate Orman’s 1997 novel, So Vile a Sin).