Various spinoff media have addressed the question of what happened to the Doctor’s companions after (and in some cases before) their time with our favourite Time Lord. I don’t pretend that the list below is complete but I think it is fairly comprehensive, and at least is a good place to find out what other writers may have done with your favourite companion (unless your favourite companion is Steven Taylor).

Susan

Unlike most companions, but for obvious reasons, there is a fair amount of spinoff media about Susan’s life before her first TV appearance. I particularly recommend the Telos novellas Frayed by ‘Tara Samms’ (a pseudonym for Stephen Cole) and Time and Relative by Kim Newman, which explore respectively the Doctor and Susan’s choice of names and what happened in London in the winter of 1962. There are also a bunch of short stories in the various Short Trips anthologies set in the pre-Ian and Susan period.

Susan appears in The Five Doctors as one of the main characters, but we hear nothing about what she has been up to since leaving the Tardis. The Eighth Doctor novel Legacy of the Daleks by John Peel has her helping the doctor defeat the Delgado!Master. The Eighth Doctor audio An Earthly Child has her and her son (who is played by Paul McGann’s son) thwarting an alien invasion. The BBC audio Whatever Happened to Susan Foreman? has her becoming European Commissioner for Education in the mid-1990s. There are also two Big Finish stories featuring an alternate Susan with Geoffrey Bayldon as the Doctor; she becomes President of the Time Lords. Take your pick.  (She is also in Dimensions in Time, but we don’t talk about that.)

Ian and Barbara

It is pretty much received wisdom that Ian and Barbara got married after leaving the Tardis ans returning to 1965. In David McIntee’s novel The Face of the Enemy they are roped in by UNIT to join the Delgado!Master in dealing with curious events relating to many televised adventures. their son, rock singer Johnny Chess full name John Alydon ganatus Chesterton) turns up in Keith Topping’s novel The King of Terror and has a fling with Tegan. We heard in Death of the Doctor (SJA) that they had both become professors at Cambridge and had not aged since the 1960s.

Vicki

In a brilliant short story, “Apocrypha Bipedium” (Short Trips: Companions), Vicki/Cressida meets up with the Eighth Doctor, Charley Pollard and a young William Shakespeare in the immediate aftermath of the rather duff Eight/Charley audio The Time of the Daleks. The Big Finish audio Frostfire by Marc Platt has quite a substantial framing narrative set in Carthage many years after The Myth Makers, though most of the plot involves Jane Austen in 1814.

Katarina

Apparently Steve Lyons’ short story, “Katarina in the Underworld” (Short Trips: The Muses) describes her afterlife following her death in The Daleks’ Master Plan, but I haven’t read it. Lyons is a good writer though so I shall look out for it.

Sara Kingdom

Big Finish have done three Companion Chronicles featuring Jean Marsh as Sara Kingdom, with an imaginative solution to how you can write stories about a dead character: Home Truths, The Drowned World and The Guardian of the Solar System, all by Simon Guerrier, all recommended.

Steven

Uniquely, nobody seems to have written anything about what happened to Steven on the planet of the Elders and the Savages, despite Peter Purves’ repeated and increasingly plaintive statements that he would love to reprise the role in such a story. (Maybe he should write it himself – see below under Mike Yates and Harry Sullivan.) I’m really rather surprised by this: how can it possibly have come about that there are more post-Tardis stories about Kamelion than about Steven??? [Edited to add: Apparently this is due to problems with the estate of Ian Stuart Black, who retain copyright in the planet of the Elders and Savages.]

Dodo

Having had one of the worst write-outs of any companion, Dodo gets one of the better afterstories in David Bishop’s novel Who Killed Kennedy?, in which the narrator, James Stevens, discovers her after years of treatment for psychiatric problems, and has a love affair with her which ends tragically. Though in “Ships” by Jamie Woolley, published in DWM 185 in 1992, she is still alive.

Ben and Polly

There are a couple of short stories about Ben and Polly finally getting together (unlike Ian and Barbara, their love is not generally assumed to be plain sailing) and in Death of the Doctor (SJA) we are told that they are running an orphanage in India. However…

Polly without Ben

In Marc Platt’s typically intricate Big Finish audio The Three Companions, Polly joins forces with the Brigadier and audi-only companion Thomas Brewster to thwart alien forces casuing climate change. We are told that she is now working in a senior position in Whitehall, so presumably Ben has found someone else of the same name to run his orphanage with.

Victoria

Victoria foolishly returned to Det-Sen monastery in the early 1990s and became possessed by the Great Intelligence; under its direction she ended up running a sinister north London university and had to be rescued by the Brigadier and Sarah Jane Smith, as shown in yet another Marc Platt story, Downtime. In The Great Space Elevator, she is expecting her first grandchild (presumably in 2008).  (She is also in Dimensions in Time, but we don’t talk about that.)

Zoe

Zoe appears as an illusory flashback in The Five Doctors, and has a post-Tardis framing narrative in the audio Fear of the DaleksLegend of the Cybermen. But I particularly want to flag up Peter Anghelides’ short story “The Tip of the Mind” in the Short Trips: Companions anthology, which features a rather moving encounter between an amnesiac Zoe and the Third Doctor.

Jamie

Jamie also appears as illusion in The Five DoctorsThe Two Doctors and Terrance Dicks’ novel World Game. The recent Big Finish audio sequence comprising City of Spires, Night’s Black Agents, The Wreck of the Titan and Legend of the Cybermen brings back an older Jamie for adventures with the Sixth Doctor (and in the last of these also Zoe). DWM got there years before, though, actually killing Jamie off in a Six/Peri comic story, “The World Shapers”, published in 1987 in ssues 127-129. [Edited to add: see also the framing narrative of Big Finish audio The Glorious Revolution.]

Liz Shaw

Her actual departure isn’t shown on TV, but it is covered in Gary Russell’s novel The Scales of Injustice. Liz also appears briefly in Who Killed Kennedy? and as an illusion in The Five Doctors, and apparently features in several novels I haven’t read – Blood Heat, The Devil Goblins from Neptune, The Wages of Sin and Eternity Weeps in which she is killed off. The four P.R.O.B.E. videos feature her as the leader of the Pretenatural Research Bureau, with Louise Jameson playing her sidekick and numerous other Who actors involved (in particular the first features Jon Pertwee, Colin Baker, Silvester McCoy, and the third Peter Davison), but only Caroline John is explicitly playing the same role as on Who. [Edited to add: According to Death of the Doctor she is on the Moon.] (She is also in Dimensions in Time, but we don’t talk about that.)

Jo Grant

Her reappearance in last month’s Death of the Doctor (SJA) was what prompted me to write this entry. She had previously sent the Metebelis crystal back in Planet of the SpidersGenocide) or stayed with him (Death of the Doctor, Big Finish audio The Doll of Death). She also had a very weird experience doing her Christmas shopping in late 2010 (Big Finish audio Find and Replace). It is reported in 2040 that she died in a house fire in 2028 (“Carpenter/Butterfly/Baronet” by Gareth Wigmore in Short Trips: 2040).

Mike Yates

The first TV companion to get a comeback after his departure, if you count Planet of the SpidersThe Five Doctors. Also features in Paul Cornell’s Seventh Doctor novels No Future and Happy Endings, and is also the central character of the Doctor-less novel The Killing Stone by none other than Richard Franklin, which brings him together with the Brigadier and Benton to confront the Master (published as an audiobook by BBV in 2002). Most recently, of course, he has teamed up with the Fourth Doctor for two series of audio adventures. (He is also in Dimensions in Time, but we don’t talk about that.)

The Brigadier

Crumbs, where to start? Apart from the TV stories Mawdryn Undead, The Five Doctors, Battlefield and Enemy of the Bane (SJADowntimeSpectre of Lanyon Moor, Minuet in Hell, Zagreus and The Three CompanionsUNIT series; the Big Finish stories with David Warner as the Doctor; various novels including No Future and Happy EndingsThe Warkeeper;s CrownTerror of the Zygons. [Edited to add: According to Death of the Doctor he is in Peru. Again.] (He is also in Dimensions in Time, but we don’t talk about that.)

Benton

Benton is the central character of Wartime, which was the first serious spinoff Who video; I haven’t seen it (though reports are not terribly encouraging). Other post-Android Invasion appearances include the novel No Future and cameos in the novel Happy Endings and John Peel’s novelisation of The Power of the Daleks. The Brigadier reports that he is now a used car salesman in Mawdryn Undead.

Harry Sullivan

Harry actually gets prequelled in The Face of the EnemyHarry Sullivan’s War, which was published by Target back in the 1990s (Marter also wrote novelisations of two of Harry’s TV stories, Ark in Space and The Sontaran Experiment). Apparently he is in Justin Richards’ novels Millennium Shock and System Shock which are both reasonably high on my to-read pile. He is reported to have died in both Jacqueline Rayner’s novel Wolfsbane, and The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith (SJA), though in Russell T. Davies’ novel Damaged Goods, set in 2015, he is still alive. Sarah says in Death of the Doctor (SJA) that he saved thousands of lives by vaccinating people. His brother Will features in the second run of audio sarah Jane Smith stories.

Sarah Jane Smith

Now in her fourth series of spinoff TV show, which follows two Big Finish series of audio plays about her and her appearances in K9 and Company: A Girl’s Best Friend, The Five Doctors (and Downtime) and her New Who appearances in School Reunion. (and The Stolen Earth / Journey’s End and The End of Time II). Also appears in Lawrence Miles’ two-part Interference novel, and appears to be killed off in David McIntee’s Bullet Time though is clearly alive and well some time later in other stories. (She is also in Dimensions in Time, but we don’t talk about that.)

Leela

We see her life on Gallifrey with Andred and K9 Mark 1 in the novel Lungbarrow and the audio story Zagreus, and she then joins forces with Romana for Big Finish’s three excellent series of Gallifrey audios; apparently a fourth is on its way. In three Companion Chronicle audios – The Catalyst, Empathy Games and The Time Vampire – she appears to be imprisoned and dying, but we don’t really find the sequence of events leading up to this. (She is also in Dimensions in Time, but we don’t talk about that.)

Romana

Romana ends up returning to Gallifrey (Big Finish audio The Chaos Pool) and becomes President (Paul Cornell’s novels Goth Opera and Happy EndingsShadaThe Apocalypse Element, Neverland and Zagreus), eventually teaming up with Leela to try and save Gallifrey in the excellent Big Finish Gallifrey series (which at one point also brings back Mary Tamm as a development of Romana’s first incarnation). A regenerated third version of Romana appears in the novels The Shadows of Avalon and The Ancestor Cell. (She is also in Dimensions in Time, but we don’t talk about that.)

K9

Mark I:  Having stayed on Gallifrey with Leela, is destroyed during the finale of the second series of Gallifrey audios, but somehow gets transferred and regenerated to future London for the K9 spinoff TV series.
Mark II: Returns to Gallifrey with Romana and has quite a sparky relationship with Mark I before the other one gets destroyed. Fate after the Great Time War is unknown.
Mark III: May possibly be the K9 who travels with the Fourth Doctor and Adric in the stories of the 1982 Doctor Who Annual, before being sent off to join Sarah Jane Smith. Broke down irretrievably in “Moving On” by Peter Anghelides (Decalog 3: Consequences) and dismantled by Hilda Winters in the first Sarah Jane Smith audio series, before being repaired by the Doctor in School Reunion.
Mark IV: shouldn’t really be on this list as has never travelled with the Doctor; but continues to appear occasionally on SJA and New Who. In David Martin’s 1986 Make Your Own Adventure novel, Search for the Doctor, set in the year 2056, he is bequeathed to an unnamed viewpoint character [thanks for correction].
(Other/Unknown: There is also a K9 in Dimensions in Time, but we don’t talk about that.)

Adric

Adric was rather boldly brought back from the dead by Big Finish in The Boy That Time Forgot, this time played by Andrew Sachs (or as Peter Davison puts it, “this time played by an actor“). It turns out that he survived the freighter crash and now rules over a race of intelligent scorpions, which works better than it sounds.

Nyssa

Peter Darvill-Evans’ novel Asylum has Nyssa meeting the Fourth Doctor after she has left the Tardis but much earlier in the Doctor’s timeline. Two of the four stories in the Big Finish audio Circular Time are vignettes of her life after the Tardis, and fifty years after Terminus she rejoins the Fifth Doctor, Tegan and Turlough in Big Finish audios Cobwebs, The Whispering Forest and The Cradle of the Snake, with more to come. (She is also in Dimensions in Time, but we don’t talk about that.)

Tegan

Apart from the possibly non-canonical incident where she teams up with the Sixth Doctor (In A Fix With Sontarans), we next find Tegan in Brisbane in 2006, briefly reunited with the Fifth Doctor but apparently suffering from a terminal illness, in the Big Finish audio The Gathering. However she seems to have recovered; according to Sarah Jane in Death of the Doctor (SJA) she is fighting for Aboriginal rights.

Turlough

Turlough appears with the Sixth Doctor and Peri in Michael Holt’s 1986 Make Your Own Adventure novel Crisis in Space. He also has an entire spinoff novel about his subsequent career, Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma by Tony Attwood, which is really for completists only.

Kamelion

To my astonishment, there are several stories featuring Kamelion post-Planet of Fire. In Christopher Bulis’ novel The Ultimate Treasure he is resurrected and destroyed again; in Matthew Griffiths’ short story “The Reproductive Cycle” (Short Trips: Life Science) it is revealed that he somehow had a child with the Tardis; and he makes an appearance also in the last part of the Circular Time audio.

Peri

I have to say that in my personal fanon poor Peri is mindwiped and killed during the events of Mindwarp, and the subsequent assurances that she survived are false. However, I’m in a minority. In Age of Chaos, a full-length comic story by Colin Baker himself, the Sicth Doctor goes to Thoros Alpha to find her; David Carroll’s 1992 short story “Reunion” in DWM 191 has her still annoyed with the Doctor; and in Matthew Jones’ novel Bad Therapy the Seventh Doctor returns her to Earth. (She is also in Dimensions in Time, but we don’t talk about that.)

Mel

Mel reappears in Steve Lyons’ novel Head Games, and her subsequent travels feature in two short stories in the More Short Trips anthology, Gary Russell’s “Missing, Part One: Business as Usual” and Robert Perry and Mike Tucker’s “Missing, Part Two: Message in a Bottle”. She is reported to have died in Dale Smith’s novel Heritage. The Big Finish Unbound audio He Jests At Scars… explores what might have happened if the Valeyard had won. (She is also in Dimensions in Time, but we don’t talk about that.)

Ace

Last but by no means least (indeed featuring in more spinoff literature than any other TV companion), because the TV series ended with her still in the Tardis, Ace features in 34 novels of the New Adventures series, all of which are presumably set after Survival, in 22 main sequence Big Finish audios (as well as others set before Survival), and in 18 DWM comic stories. Her ultimate fate is not clear: according to Sarah Jane Smith in Death of the Doctor (SJA) a “Dorothy something” is running a company called A Charitable Earth (initials suggesting that this is Ace rather than Dodo Chaplet); she is apparently killed in “Ground Zero”, a DWM comic story by Scott Gray published in issues 238-242 in 1996; and most radically of all, in the webcast Death Comes To Time she actually becomes a Time Lord herself.  (She too is in Dimensions in Time, but we really really really don’t talk about that.)

This piece is much longer than I expected anyway but once I got started it just grew! Please do comment if I have made any particularly egregious omission. I had originally meant to link to my reviews of books mentioned above, and may still do that, but writing this has taken me all day and I want to finish up now. I think this all illustrates the wisdom of Paul Cornell’s essay on canonicity from a couple of years back. Much briefer thoughts on the subject are embedded in a typically long and witty review of Death of the Doctor by an unspecified Daddy (probably Richard) on Millennium Elephant’s blog.

Everyone else is linking to these, but I will too: two brilliant scenes made for the DVD of the most recent series of Doctor Who, the first of which could actually be a fairly good introduction to Doctor Who for people who know nothing about it:

And the second will go some way to reconciling fans of Old Who with the latest version:

Hmm, it’s a bit of a blur, but I make that Rose, Sarah Jane, Romana I, Liz, Martha, Romana I again, Rose again, Donna, Polly, Jo, Romana I again, Zoe, Katarina (!), Romana II, Leela, Barbara, Tegan, Peri, and lots of Leela. (And then back to the first set of shots looping again.)

Brilliant stuff.

i) births and deaths

7 November 1950: birth of Lindsay Duncan, who played Adelaide Brooke in The Waters of Mars (2009).

ii) broadcast anniversary

7 November 1964: broadcast of “Dangerous Journey”, second episode of the story we now call Planet of Giants. Ian and Barbara are trapped inside the laboratory; the Doctor and Susan scale a drainpipe to rescue them but are themselves threatened by the water.

ii) date specified in canon

7 November 1987: Peter Tyler is killed crossing the road to a friend’s wedding – oh no he isn’t – oh yes he is – as seen in Father’s Day (2005).

I’ve seen a couple of people doing this: go thorugh the list of UNESCO world heritage sites and note the ones you have been to. I count 83, so only 828 more to go… rather shamefully, there are two in Brussels (this and these) and one in Antwerp that I have not seen. It’s just as well that so many old capital cities are on the list or my tally would be considerably lower…

Austria

Azerbaijan

Belgium

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Croatia

Cyprus

Czech Republic

Estonia

Finland

France

Georgia

Germany

Greece

Holy See

Hungary

Ireland

Italy

Jerusalem

Kosovo

Luxembourg

Macedonia

Malta

Montenegro

Netherlands

Portugal

Russian Federation

San Marino

Spain

Switzerland

Turkey

Ukraine

United Kingdom

United States of America

I wrote a while back that I was likely to vote for Tim Farron in the election of the next President of the Lib Dems. Having perused the candidates’ election leaflets, I see no reason to change my mind. Indeed, the two elections are so similar – straight out of the ALDC school of QuarkXPress – that it’s rather easy to compare and contrast and to see that Tim basically has the harder edge. For example, take the “3 reasons to vote for me” given by each candidate:

It is notable that all three of Susan Kramer’s statements are in the future tense, while Tim Farron starts with the past, moves to the present and switches to the future only halfway through the third point. It’s also notable that the future tense statements are all pretty woolly, and you would have to wonder why any candidate thought any of them was actually worth making as part of staking out your own ground. Note also that while the second of the three points is very similar for both candidates, Tim edges it by a) putting it in the present tense and b) pointing out that as an MP he has easier day-to-day access to the leadership.

That’s all a matter of style, I suppose. On substance, Susan Kramer has more (though not a lot more) to say about using the position of President to service the party membership, and Tim Farron is crystal clear that he sees the role as another potential public platform for a senior Lib Dem to use. If I were more active in the party, perhaps I would have a sense of things going wrong that Susan Kramer could fix, but I’m not so I don’t; and my ballot goes off with an X in the Farron box.

Two grand traditions of British sf meet in this book, where the Eleventh Doctor and Amy Pond try to save the universe while dealing with the piratical Captain Cornelius and also with the Terraphiles, re-enactors of Old Earth culture who have rather garbled views of the activities of Edwardian England (it should be noted that both Doctor Who and a Dalek appear in the original Jerry Cornelius series). It’s some way from being a standard Who novel, and rather closer to a normal Moorcock production if there is such a thing; having said which, the plot is relatively straightforward if not always elegantly expounded. There are some good rollicking descriptive passages, and Moorcock has fun with the misinterpretation of the rules of cricket perpetrated by the Terraphiles. It’s more of a curiosity than a classic, but I enjoyed it.

Posted via LjBeetle

Like a lot of people who were around in British student politics in the mid-80s, I am unhealthily gleeful about the voiding of Phil Woolas’ election in Oldham East and Saddleborough by an election court. (Edited to add: After starting to write this entry yesterday, I went out for dinner last night with someone who had dealt with Woolas in a different capacity many years later, and was equally delighted by the result.) I urge anyone who feels the slightest twinge of sympathy for him to read the full election judgement (BBC excerpt, official PDF). It’s all very well to have robust political debate, but to win an election by telling lies about your opponent’s entirely fictional links with Islamic extremism is surely a different matter. I won’t blame the Labour Party as an institution for this, and applaud the suspension of Woolas’ membership, though note with interest blog entries from Chris Davies, written just before the judgement, and Jonathan Fryer, immediately after, illuminating the local political style.

The full content of the offensive literature is in the judgement linked to above, but I thought some might be amused by the text that caused the last unseating of an MP on these grounds, as a result of the North Louth election petition of 1911, as dug out by David Boothroyd here. The loser in North Louth was the famously polemic and controversial T.M. Healy, who ten years later would end up as the first Governor-General of the independent Irish Free State, though of course nobody knew that then. Running as a dissident candidate against the mainstream Irish Nationalists of the day, he had had all the nastiest of campaign techniques thrown at him, and a dozen of his opponent’s activists were personally deemed to have broken election rules to get him defeated. His opponent, Richard Hazleton, was unseated as a result of the court case, inter alia for publishing lies about Healy.

To quote David:

The North Louth case started with a letter, published in the Freeman on 2 December 1910, written by George McSweeny. Part of it ran:

"Now, let me come to Mr. Healy, pure, great, and impeccable. Even the great Tim was absolutely pap fed with British gold. For years he nourished his hatred of a member of the Irish party by suggesting that he had procured some relative to be appointed a postmaster. Yet all the time Mr. Healy, senior, was secure in the possession of the snug postmastership of Lismore, and rumour has it indeed that the great Tim began his career in the Queen’s uniform, delivering letters, with the familiar rat-tat."

"Then there is the case of Mr. Anthony Carroll, Crown Solicitor of Cork. He was the hero of the Tallow Conspiracy Case and got his job immediately afterwards, yet he incurred no denunciation from Mr. Healy. People will say that had he been the cousin say of Mr. Devlin instead of being the cousin of Mr. Healy he might have fared worse."

"Then there was the case of Mr. Heskin, one of the defendants in the same Tallow Case. Mr. Heskin stood against the brother of Mr. Healy for the clerkship of the Lismore Union. Mr. Healy’s brother was beaten by the test of popular election. But he was not doomed to be long disappointed, for shortly afterwards he was appointed a Local Government Inspector at £500 a year. The recent family history does not even stop here. For it was only the other day that Mr. Joseph Sullivan, another member of the family, received an appointment of £800 a year in the Irish Land Commission. And all this under the corrupt Liberals. So far have matters gone up to the present. But from the number of Mr. Healy’s relations who are already or about to become barristers, doctors, engineers, attorneys, and politicians, I have no doubt that the list will soon be extended. Meanwhile when Mr. Healy next talks of ‘place-hunters’ let him chew these facts."

The letter was reprinted in the Dundalk Democrat on 3 December by suggestion of the agent of Richard Hazleton, the successful candidate in North Louth. Meanwhile on 2 December an order was placed for 20,000 leaflets in the following terms:

"Place-Hunting at Home. Tim Healy’s Family List. Mr. Carthage Healy, Brother, appointed Local Government Inspector, 1907, by the Corrupt Liberals!! 500l. a year. Mr. Joseph Sullivan, Cousin, Examiner of Titles, Irish Land Commission, 800l. a year. Anthony Carroll, Cousin, Crown Solicitor of Cork, 500l. a year! Arthur O’Connor, Ex-M.P., for years Healy’s fellow-wrecker in the Irish Party. An English Judge! 1,700l. a year. M. Healy, Senior, Father, Postmaster, Lismore, Co. Waterford. A. N. Sheridan, Election Agent of Mr. Healy, Dundalk, Clerk of the Crown and Peace, Louth, 600l. a year. The Corrupt Liberals again!! Jeremiah Howard, Henchman of William O’Brien, Director U.I.L., and Wrecker, 1907. Land Commission, 800l. a year. The Corrupt Liberals again!! Joseph Mooney, another Henchman and fellow-wrecker of Healy’s. Director Irish Independent, Labourers’ Cottage Arbitrator, Local Government Board, paid by the job. The Corrupt Liberals Again!!!! William M. Murphy, Railway Director, Contractor, Director Irish Independent, etc.., etc., recommended by Lord Aberdeen to build Government Railways in Africa; estimate, 100,000l. Maurice Healy, M.P., Brother, Postman at Lismore."

Unlike in Oldham East and Saddleborough, however, Hazleton’s campaign was also found to have been guilty of bribery, intimidation, and treating; also unlike Phil Woolas, the winning candidate was not found to be personally guilty, and so wasn’t barred from standing for office for three years (and in any case had also been elected for Galway so stayed in the House of Commons). It is slightly amusing that the accusation that Healy was on the British government’s payroll, probably not in itself a defamatory statement but obviously relevant in an election between two candidates trying to out-Green each other, was found by the judges to be sufficiently offensive to merit the rerunning of the election.

Woolas will probably appeal, but I do not wish him well. Judging by the statements he made yesterday he has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. He said that:

“It is vital to our democracy that those who make statements about the political character and conduct of election candidates are not deterred from speaking freely for fear that they may be found in breach of election laws.”

It is also vital that you don’t win elections by smearing the other guy as a fellow-traveller of terrorists.

broadcast anniversaries

6 November 1964: broadcast of “Horse of Destruction”, fourth episode of the story we now call The Myth MakersThe Deadly Assassin. The Doctor is put on trial, realises that the Master is behind the assassination, and enters the dream world of the Matrix.

6 November 2009: broadcast of second episode of The Eternity Trap (SJA). Sarah destroys Erasmus and his machine with the sonic lipstick and rescues Professor Rivers. (But what about Lord Marchmont?)

6 November 2010: broadcast of The Last Precinct (K9).

i) births and deaths

5 November 1983: birth of Andrew Hayden-Smith who played Jake in Rise of the Cybermen, The Age of Steel, and Doomsday (all 2006).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

5 November 1966: broadcast of first episode of The Power of the Daleks. Ben and Polly are getting used to the mysterious new bloke in the Tardis; they land on the planet Vulcan where Stevenson has been experimenting with Daleks from a crashed ship.

5 November 1977: broadcast of second episode of Image of the Fendahl. The mysterious skull is taking over Thea, terrifying Mrs Tyler, and forces the Doctor to touch it in agonising pain.

5 November 2006: broadcast of Cyberwoman (Torchwood), the one with the, er, Cyberwoman.

5 November 2007: broadcast of second episode of Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? (SJA). Maria’s father saves her and Sarah Jane from the Trickster; poor Andrea remains drowned.

5 November 2009: broadcast of first episode of The Eternity Trap (SJA). Clyde, Rani and Sarah investigate the mysterious manor of Lord Marchwood and Erasmus Darkening (Luke gets a week off).

• Iraq, war and WikiLeaks: the real story | openDemocracy
  Iraq Body Count has patiently and consistently tabulated recorded deaths since the invasion. It has now conducted a preliminary analysis of a sample of the incidents recorded in the documents (including all the larger ones) (see Paul Rogers, “The harvest of war: from pain to gain”, 28 October 2010).This concludes that the logs both confirm the majority of the deaths it has already recorded, and the need for a definite upward revision of the estimated toll. IBC’s existing, pre-logs total was a little over 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths, which has now been amended to 150,000, By comparison, fewer than 5,000 members of the US-led military coalition have died.
  (tags: iraq waronterror usa)

i) births and deaths

4 November 1971: birth of Robyn Moore who plays Jorjie’s mother June Turner in K9 (2009-2010).

4 November 1998: birth of Bear McCausland, who played Jack’s ill-fated grandson Steven in Torchwood: Children of Earth (2009). I doubt if I will note any more recent birth than his.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

4 November 1967: broadcast of sixth episode of The Abominable Snowmen. The Doctor and friends destroy the Yeti controls, and Padmasambhava dies cutting the Intelligence’s link to earth. Travers spots a real Yeti.

4 November 1978: broadcast of second episode of The Stones of Blood. The stones attack Boscombe Hall, and Vivien Fay attacks Romana, who disappears into thin air.

• Former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich: 'Obama Failed to Connect the Dots' -SPIEGEL ONLINE – News – International
  1) We have got an unprecedented degree of concentrated income and wealth at the very top of our society. The top one-tenth of one percent of Americans now makes more than the bottom 120 million. 2) Courtesy of a grotesque opinion by the Supreme Court of the United States, we now have virtually unlimited money flowing from the rich and from corporations through secret devices that make it impossible to know who is contributing what to various campaigns and to advertising for and against various candidates. Such anonymous groups have spent more than $400 million on the latest election, according to estimates. 3) We have a broad electorate still unemployed or in danger of being unemployed, still in danger of losing their homes or already having lost their homes, still experiencing a major drop in their savings or their net worth. This frustrated and anxious population is easy prey to demagogues who will blame others for their problems rather than explain what needs to be done.
  (tags: usa)

Some of the greatest lines of the former Russian prime minster who died today (alas, no translation can really capture the tortured syntax of the original; many more on Russian Wikiquote here):

Что говорить о Черномырдине и обо мне?
What can I say about Chernomyrdin and me?

Хуже водки лучше нет!
Better than vodka there is nothing worse!

В Югославии катастрофа. Катастрофа – это всегда плохо!
In Yugoslavia it is a disaster. And disasters are always bad!

Пиво без водки — деньги на ветер
Beer without vodka is money down the drain.

Были у нас и бюджеты реальные, но мы все равно их с треском проваливали.
And we had a real budget, but we still failed miserably.

Учителя и врачи хотят есть практически каждый день!
Teachers and doctors want to eat practically every day!

Вино нам нужно для здоровья. А здоровье нам нужно, чтобы пить водку.
We need wine to be healthy. And we need to be healthy so that we can drink vodka.

Хотели как лучше, а получилось как всегда.
We wanted the best, but things turned out as usual.

The keen-eyed reader may spot a recurrent theme.

Lord Tebbit (Conservative): My Lords, is my noble friend aware that I had the pleasure of being seated at dinner last week next to our right honourable friend Mr Kenneth Clarke but that he did not talk to me, whereas the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who was opposite, was quite chatty? I particularly enjoyed a long conversation with our coalition partner the Viscount Thurso, who is of course a Member of the House of Commons.

Lord Strathclyde (Leader of the House of Lords, House of Lords; Conservative): It is immensely interesting to hear of my noble friend’s dining partners and the conversations that he had. I hope that he will update us regularly.

i) births and deaths

3 November 1910: birth of Richard Hurndall, who played the First Doctor in The Five Doctors (1983).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

3 November 1979: broadcast of second episode of The Creature from the Pit. Adrasta interrogates Romana and K9; the Doctor, now in the Pit, meets Organon and then the Creature.

3 November 2009: broadcast of first episode of Mark of the Berserker (SJA). Clyde’s father turns up and takes possession of a peculiar pendant found by Rani and Luke.

Back in the mid-1980s, as a regular train passenger between Belfast and Dublin, I used to cringe at the sound of American tourists pronouncing “Drogheda”. This was entirely the fault of the mini-series based on The Thorn Birds, starring Richard Chamberlain as the dashing Father Ralph, and set on an Australian sheep station named after (but pronounced differently from) the Irish town.

The book isn’t really all that great. It is quite well written, but loses focus by letting characters drift in and out of view. The core narrative is the doomed love between Meggie and Ralph, but then there are an extra 200 pages tacked on of what happens to Meggie’s children, not really resolving the fates of the characters from earlier in the book (apart from those who are killed off). The ending, where Meggie’s daughter Justine dithers between several different destinies, felt rushed and disengaged. It’s all epic human interest stuff but the first two thirds could have been trimmed down to make a better book, and the last third expanded slightly to make another. I know it sold like hot cakes back on the 1970s so it obviously scratched some collective itch among the bookbuying public.

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i) births and deaths

None that grabbed me.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

2 November 1968: broadcast of first episode of The Invasion. The Tardis lands invisibly, and the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe seek help successively from Isobel Watkins, and Tobias Vaughn of International Electromatics.

2 November 1981: BBC broadcast repeat of “An Unearthly Child”, the very first episode of Doctor Who, kicking off the “Five Faces of Doctor Who” repeat season.

2 November 1987: broadcast of first episode of Delta and the Bannermen. Ken Dodd sends the Doctor and Mel to 1950s Wales where a holiday camp is being infiltrated by aliens.

2 November 1988: broadcast of first episode of The Happiness Patrol. Helen A rules Terra Alpha ruthlessly by killing anyone who is unhappy, supported by the sinister yet ridiculous Kandyman.

2 November 2010: broadcast of second episode of The Empty Planet (SJA).

iii) dates specified in canon

2 November 1657: death and burial of Richard Maynarde, as described in Silver Nemesis (1988).

2 November 1941: The Eighth Doctor and Izzy Sinclair visit Coyoacan, Mexico, as seen in comic strip The Way of All Flesh (published in DWM #306 and #308-310, 2001).

• On Not Being Obliged To Vote Democrat
  Why abstention may be the right choice – with reference to Tuesday's elections, but with wider applicability.
  (tags: usa politics)

I don’t know about you guys, but I have been friended by seven Russian LJ accounts in the last week or so, none of which appear to have any mutual friends or interests in common with me.

I cannot escape the suspicion that this is related to my recent professional interest in Moldova, where in four weeks’ time elections will take place, in whose outcome various Russian forces have a keen interest.

I shall not be posting anything remotely sensitive about my work with Moldova here, even in locked entries, but will be interested to know if anyone else has been experiencing anything similar.

(Also noteworthy that I had a spate of friend requests on Facebook from people with Slavic or Turkish names, none of whom had mutual friends with me, over the last couple of weeks.)

Another shortish chapter, mainly about Attila the Hun with quite a long account of the mission of the Byzantine official Maximin to Attila’s headquarters in 448, presented as a first-hand travelogue by Priscus. At the end Theodosius II dies and is replaced by Marcian who marries his sister Pulcheria. Lots about Genghis Khan also for some reason.

I must have first read this when I was seven; of course as an older reader one realises the depths of the narrative a bit more, understanding a bit better the warped family dynamic between Huck and his father on the one hand and his various prospective adoptive households on the other. Indeed families are a major theme of the book in a way I hadn’t realised before – Jim’s search for his own lost wife and children, the feud between the Grangerfords and the Sheperdsons, the fake dynastic history of the duke and the king, the affair of Peter Wilkes’ estate and will, and finally of course the Phelpses who adopt Huck as Tom Sawyer and then Tom as his own brother Sid.

Even at seven I was disturbed by Tom Sawyer’s failure to grapple with the reality of Jim’s situation in the final chapters of the book. He sets up an elaborate plan to abuse the hospitality of his aunt and uncle, setting Huck’s and Jim’s lives at risk as well as his own, gets wounded in the process, and all for the sake of a rescue which he alone knows to be completely unnecessary. As a child I felt he got away with it rather too lightly and indeed is unfairly rewarded with Huck’s continued admiration and a minimum of chastisement from his family, and my views haven’t changed in 36 years.

Of course I’m even more disturbed as a mature reader by Twain’s own failure to really rise above the racial stereotyping of his day. Jim is an instrument of Huck’s own growing up rather than a three-dimensional character himself, and Mark Twain resorts to racist humour rather too often for comfort.

But it still remains a very enjoyable read, much better than Tom Sawyer (I think; though it is decades since I read the earlier book).

broadcast anniversaries

1 November 1975: broadcast of second episode of Pyramids of Mars. Scarman and the mummies chase the Doctor and Sarah around the Priory. I was just watching this the other day and it is still brilliant.

1 November 1980: broadcast of second episode of Full Circle. The Marshmen take the Tardis, with Romana inside it, and she gets to meet the spiders at close quarters.

1 November 1986: broadcast of first episode of Terror of the Vervoids (ToaTL #9), and first appearance of Bonnie Langford as Mel. She and the Doctor investigate mysterous goings on aboard the spaceliner Hyperon III.

1 November 1989: broadcast of second episode of The Curse of Fenric. Mysterious goings-on with Millington and the Haemovores.

1 November 2010: broadcast of first episode of The Empty Planet (SJA).

Four months down, eight to go!