i) births and deaths

16 April 1936: birth of Derrick Sherwin, script editor of Doctor Who from The Web of Fear to The Mind Robber (in 1968) and producer for The War Games (1969) and Spearhead from Space (1970).

16 April 1954: birth of Antony Root, briefly script editor of Doctor Who in 1981.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

16 April 1966: broadcast of “The Dancing Floor”, third episode of the story we now call The Celestial Toymaker. Steven and Dodo must deal with a not-very-threatening kitchen and some rather more threatening dancing dolls.

16 April 2005: broadcast of Aliens of London. A spacecraft crashes into the Thames; the Doctor is among experts on aliens summoned to 10 Downing Street, but all is not as it seems.

iii) date specified in canon

16 April 1746: Battle of Culloden, followed by the events of The Highlanders (1966).

• New Statesman – The bugger, bugged
  Hugh Grant, journalist, taped conversation – not in the order you might expect.
  (tags: journalism)

i) births and deaths

15 April 1922: birth of Peter Moffatt, who directed State of Decay (1980), The Visitation (1982), Mawdryn Undead (1983), The Five Doctors (1983), The Twin Dilemma (1984) and The Two Doctors (1985).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

15 April 1967: broadcast of second episode of The Faceless Ones. Polly and Ben have disappeared; Jamie meets Samantha Briggs; the Doctor is knocked out by gas.

15 April 1972: broadcast of second episode of The Mutants. The Marshall forces the Doctor to work with Jaeger, while Jo is a captive of the Solonians.

15 April 2006: broadcast of New Earth. The Doctor and Rose visit a far-future hospital where they encounter some former acquaintances.

iii) dates specified in canon

15 April 1912: the Titanic, struck by an iceberg late the previous evening, sinks in the early hours of the morning in the North Atlantic with over 1500 lives lost, as seen in the 1979 DWM comic strip Follow that TARDIS!, Kate Orman’s 1993 novel The Left-Handed Hummingbird and the 2010 Big Finish audio Wreck of the Titan, also referenced in The Invasion of Time (1978), Rose (2005), The End of the World (2005) and Voyage of the Damned (2007).

15 April 1912: birth date of Charlotte Pollard, companion of the Eighth and Sixth Doctors in many Big Finish audios.

15 April 1980: birth of Samantha Jones, companion of the Eighth Doctor in many BBC-published novels.

Sequel to The Meaning of Tingo, with more strange words from other languages. I actually found this a bit more impressive and better organised than the first volume, with some very interesting idioms which I may try out for myself: the Puerto Rican expression for being very nervous which translates as “like a crocodile in a wallet factory”; or the Swahili saying that the day you decide to leave your house naked is the day you bump into your in-laws. And I loved the French tongue-twister, “Combien de sous sont ces saucissons-ci? – Ces saucissons-ci sont six sous.”

Nice little novel about a Californian teenager whose grandparents from India come to stay for a year, adding a sudden awareness of cultural difference to the usual bundle of teenage angst. There’s a particularly good bit when Sunita realises that Casablanca and The Secret Garden are told entirely from the white folks’ point of view. Otherwise, I’m out of the target market for this but I would certainly buy it for kids who are in that market.

Written for Stratagem, 14 April 2011

This will be the twentieth election held at regional level in Northern Ireland. The old Stormont House of Commons managed twelve elections between 1921 and 1969; we then had elections for an Assembly in 1973, a Constitutional Convention in 1975, another Assembly in 1982, a Forum in 1996, and this will be the fourth Assembly election since the Good Friday Agreement. It is, however, the first time since 1969 that we have voted for a devolved system of government that was actually operating at the time of the election.

At the same time, of course, we have the tenth and quite possibly the last elections for the 26 local government districts, which also go back to 1973. The 690 places to be filled by voters – 582 local councilors and 108 members of the Assembly – are a record for any one day since the 1970s reform of local government (I do not recall how many local councillors were elected before then).

In addition, voters will have a chance to participate in the UK-wide referendum on changing the voting system to the Alternative Vote, which would elect the House of Commons in single member constituencies using the same method as is used, in multi-member constituencies, for all other elections here. I’m not aware of any other occasion when the whole of Northern Ireland voted simultaneously on three different questions.

The last two Assembly elections, in 2003 and 2007, both saw pretty big shifts towards the DUP and Sinn Féin, and away from the formerly dominant SDLP and UUP. Those who believe in the swing of the electoral pendulum will expect that at some point the natural cycle of democracy will move voters in the other direction, and that at some point in the future the mantle of leadership within each section of the community will return to those who previously bore it. This, after all, is what we are used to from our neighbours: the alternation between Labour and Conservative in the UK, or between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in the Republic.

I am not so sure that this will happen. It seems to me more likely that Northern Ireland’s politics is characterized by having dominant parties and challengers within each bloc of voters – nationalist, unionist, and cross-community – and that in fact it is the position of the challengers which is more vulnerable; in other words, in historical terms, I think it is the SDLP or UUP who are as likely to be replaced by different junior nationalist or unionist challengers than once again to overtake SF and the DUP. (It should also be said that the pendulum model is failing anyway; the current UK coalition slightly changes the picture there, and the collapse of Fianna Fáil earlier this year, makes their return as a dominant party seem doubtful.)

I feel that the 2011 Assembly election will be one of consolidation, not change. I admit that there is little to go on; no votes have been cast or counted in Northern Ireland since last year’s Westminster election (and a local council by-election held the same day). Opinion polls are notoriously unreliable. But there is no sense of welling dissatisfaction within the ranks of DUP or Sinn Féin supporters, or of swelling confidence from SDLP or UUP supporters, which will drastically upset the 2007 results. Perhaps there is an element of that from Alliance, which now has both a minister and an MP, which may enable a gain or two; and we also have challenges to the system both from Jim Allister’s TUV and from éirígí. There will be change of detail, of course – the passage of time and the new constituency boundaries make sure of that. But the big picture is likely to be pretty much the same when the new Assembly meets in mid-May. And stability is not necessarily a bad thing.

broadcast anniversaries

14 April 1973: broadcast of second episode of Planet of the Daleks. The Daleks capture the Doctor; Jo links up with Wester the Spiridon; a second Thal ship lands.

14 April 2007: broadcast of Gridlock. The Doctor returns with Martha to New New York, where everyone is locked in a perpetual traffic jam, unwittingly serving the Macra.

i) births and deaths

13 April 1924: birth of Christopher Tranchell, who played Roger Colbert in The Massacre (1966), Steven Jenkins in The Faceless Ones (1967), and Andred in The Invasion of Time (1978).

13 April 1951: birth of Peter Davison, who played the Fifth Doctor from 1982 to 1984, and subsequently. Happy 60th birthday, Peter!

13 April 1984: death of Richard Hurndall, who played the First Doctor in The Five Doctors (1983).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

13 April 1968: broadcast of fifth episode of Fury from the Deep. Weed and foam spread throughout the refinery.

13 April 1974: broadcast of fourth episode of The Monster of Peladon. The Pels unite against the Ice Warriors, but the Doctor is unable to prevent Ettis from firing the sonic lance.

• Maps from the Hobbit
  Many translated versions of the maps from The Hobbit.
  (tags: sf)
• 509 – Magical Siberia: A Russian Take on Middle-earth | Strange Maps | Big Think
  Parsing the Russian translation of the map in The Hobbit.
  (tags: sf)
• Will Martin McGuinness be First Minister?
  My answer: not this year.
  (tags: northernireland)
• Making Light: A digression on literary categories
  The Transnistrian Infundibulator (nothing to do with the fact taht I am currently in Moldova).
  (tags: sf)

(Written for Stratagem, 12 April 2011)

The St Andrews Agreement is perfectly clear: the nominating officer of the largest political party after the election gets to nominate the new First Minister of Northern Ireland; the largest political party of the other designation shall nominate the new Deputy First Minister.

At both the last two elections in Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin had more support than any other party, with 171,942 votes to the DUP’s 168,216 in the 2010 Westminster election, and with Bairbre de Brún winning 126,184 first preferences to 88,346 for the DUP’s Diane Dodds in the 2009 European election. If the unionist vote is again sufficiently dispersed, and SF are able to retain their level of support, Martin McGuinness could look forward to swapping jobs with Peter Robinson.

However, I do not think that this is likely. Not because I anticipate any slippage in SF’s support – they have consistently delivered results in the 25%-26% range for the last several elections, and I see no reason to anticipate that this year will be drastically different. But I do expect the DUP at least tomake up the 3,700 vote difference from last year, and probably more than that.

The 2010 and 2009 elections were notably bad results for the DUP, for slightly different reasons which largely no longer apply. Both elections saw Jim Allister and his TUV eat into the DUP’s core vote. But Allister’s 13.7% in 2009, where he was unable to win a European seat despite being a competent incumbent, had dwindled to a mere 3.9% in 2010, at a time where the DUP’s leadership were under the cloud of unprecedented scandal and one would have thought it a good time for alternatives to break through.

More important, in 2010 two independent unionist candidates, both supported by the DUP, gained over 21,000 votes each in constituencies where the DUP was the largest unionist party in the last Assembly election. It seems a fair extrapolation that, if Rodney Connor and Lady Sylvia Hermon had not stood, and there had been a DUP candidate on the ballot paper in either or both of North Down and Fermanagh – South Tyrone, the extra votes gained would have been enough to make the DUP the biggest party in the election.

The DUP had an exceptionally good election in 2007, winning 36 Assembly seats on 30.1% of the vote – the best result in percentage terms for any party in a regional election since 1973 (unless one tallies together the various divided factions of the UUP in that year). That is unlikely to be repeated. But they were almost four percentage points of vote share, and eight seats, ahead of SF in the 2007 election, and I would be astonished if they lost even half of that margin this year. The DUP are likely to remain the largest single party.

More interesting, perhaps, is the competition for third place between the SDLP and UUP. The SDLP, like SF, have delivered consistent results in the last few elections, in the 15%-17% range. They actually won more votes than the UUP/Conservative alliance in 2010 (where the UUP vote is perhaps depressed by the Rodney Connor and Sylvia Hermon factors, but was also enhanced by the DUP’s travails). Alban Maginnis was a hair behind Jim Nicholson in first preference votes in the 2009 European election. But the SDLP was also – just – ahead of the UUP in the 2007 Assembly election, with 105,164 first preferences to the UUP’s 103,145.

Those 2,000 extra votes actually delivered two fewer seats for the SDLP, and one less minister in the Executive. Their own disorganisation lost a seat that they should have won in West Tyrone, and the UUP benefitted from other parties’ disarray in Upper Bann to win a second seat that they should not have won. Under the Single Transferable Vote, that can sometimes be the breaks. But if I were looking for interesting bets in this election, I think that the margin in both seats and votes between the third and fourth placed parties might repay scrutiny more than the margin between the winners and the runners-up.

i) births and deaths

12 April 1989: death of Gerald Flood, who played Kamelion in 1983 and 1984, and also King John in The King’s Demons (1983)

ii) broadcast anniversaries

12 April 1969: broadcast of sixth episode of The Space Pirates. Caven is defeated and captured; the Space Pirates are neutralised.

12 April 1975: broadcast of sixth episode of Genesis of the Daleks. The Daleks take over the bunker, killing everyone including (apparently) Davros; but the Thals bury them for centuries.

12 April 2003: webcast of “No Child of Earth, part 3”, tenth episode of Death Comes to Time.

• Jason O Mahony » Blog Archive » For my British readers: AV is the voting system for non-fanatics.
  "Melissa Kite in the Daily Telegraph has been doing that other thing the No side have been engaged in for weeks now, deliberately shutting down their brain functions and going on about how complicated it all is… By her own words, it took Melissa an hour to count eight votes. I’ll say no more on the subject."
  (tags: politics ukpolitics)
• Revolutions and youth movements « Neighbourhood
  But the 2011 protesters are different not because just Facebook and Twitter replaced sms. They are different in a deeper sense. The current protest movements are not stricto sensu youth movements, but a blend of young urban middle-class facebookers, mild and not so mild conservative islamists, and (sometimes radical) leftists. Compared to the 2000-2005 wave of youth movements the current protest movements can be equally romantic, but they are less organised, with no chain of command, no training, and ultimately more fluid. This is sometimes a weakness (only the Muslim Bortherhood seemed organised enough to provide the public good of  crowd management during the protests in Egypt). But it is also partly a strength since they are also more inclusive and more open to people that are not urban middle-class kids and their social base is ultimately larger. This also makes them more dangerous to the regimes.
  (tags: politics)

Several years ago I read the collected sayings of the Desert Fathers (and Mothers)Rūmī, who was able to develop profound philosophical insights while living his daily life without fleeing from society or concerning himself too much with mortification of the flesh. Again I observed that there is a certain amount of eremitical one-upmanship here, and while there are many reflections on how to set one’s soul right within oneself and with God, there’s not a lot about other people, who are usually an important part of whatever problems one may have. So I fear that the Desert fathers may not be for me.

It’s a slight cheat to blog this separately from Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women, because they are bound between the same covers of my Everyman edition. But they are definitely different books, written decades apart, so there you go.

Mill’s argument here is in favour of political equality between the sexes, in particular that woman should be allowed to vote, a proposition to which he gently demolishes all the opposing arguments. He is less passionate than Wollstonecraft but has better one-liners:

Women who read, much more women who write, are, in the existing constitution of things, a contradiction and a disturbing element…
…laws and institutions require to be adapted, not to good men, but to bad.
If no one could vote for a Member of Parliament who was not [themselves] a fit candidate, the government would be a narrow oligarchy indeed.

I was also struck by his invocation of women rulers throughout history, in particular:

The Emperor Charles the Fifth, the most politic prince of his time, who had as great a number of able men in his service as a ruler ever had, and was one of the least likely of all sovereigns to sacrifice his interest to personal feelings, made two princesses of his family successively Governors of the Netherlands, and kept one or other of them in that post during his whole life (they were afterwards succeeded by a third). Both ruled very successfully, and one of them, Margaret of Austria, as one of the ablest politicians of the age.

To divert onto another topic entirely, this made me realise how little I still know about Belgian/Dutch history. The princesses in question are Charles V’s aunt Margaret of Austria, his sister Mary of Austria, and his daughter Margaret of Parma. Must read up that period some time.

This turns out to be the third in a trilogy, the two previous books being The Knife of Never Letting Go and The Ask and the Answer, neither of which I had read: it’s a huge long young adult book about conflict between humans and indigenous inhabitants on a planet where telepathic projections (‘Noise’) are common but not universal, both among the locals and among their Earthling invaders. It’s an unusual comment to make about a book, but the typography is startling – not just a different font for each viewpoint character, but also letters jumping around the page for dramatic effect. My copy came with a transparent dust jacket with more jumbled words on it. The writing is dense but also gripping – very tight first-person POV from the teenage couple who are the centre of the story, and from the alien forces acting upon them; the plot veers from conflict to deadly threat to negotiation to assassination, a real roller-coaster. I do wish I had started with the first book, especially if it’s as good as this (and it won the Tiptree award so cannot be completely devoid of quality).

i) births and deaths

11 April 1940: birth of Sheila Dunn, who played Blossom Lefavre in The Daleks’ Master Plan (1965), the computer voice of the Electromatic company in The Invasion (1968), and Petra Williams in Inferno (1970). She was married to television director Douglas Camfield

11 April 2005: death of John Bennett, who played General Finch in Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974) and Li H’sen Chang in The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

11 April 1964: broadcast of “The Sea of Death”, first episode of the story we now call The Keys of Marinus. Arbitan, Keeper of the Conscience of Marinus, sends the Tardis crew to find the lost keys of the machine.

11 April 1970: broadcast of fourth episode of The Ambassadors of Death. The aliens go on the rampage at the Space Centre.

11 April 2009: broadcast of Planet of the Dead. A London bus is transported to a desert planet via a wormhole, its passengers including the Doctor and high-class thief Christina de Souza.

One of those classic political texts which everyone should read, written in the revolutionary moment of 1792, and making the daring argument that women should be educated rather than infantilised, indeed, boys and girls should be educated together. Many of her arguments are unfortunately still valid; her analysis of power and oppression is pretty acute, and must be one of the earliest examples of applying arguments about socieo-economic equality to gender relations. I was interested that she clearly has a great deal of respect for Talleyrand, who I’d always thought of as wily statesman rather than advanced political thinker in his own right, which may just show my ignorance.

I was startled by a line in the introduction by Pamela Frankau, who writes that “with feminism we are surely done. It went out – didn’t it? – some twenty-five years ago.” This was written in 1954. I’m glad to say that a second reading (not sitting in the warm sunshine) reassured me that she was being ironic.

Well, did warn me

This short (170 pages) and digestible book of essays on the Russell T. Davies era of Doctor Who was published last month by the Science Fiction Foundation; the editors kindly invited me to contribute when it was first mooted two years ago, and I wish I had had the time (and scholarly resources) to do so, as it is always nice to be in good company (two of the three editors and are also contributors).

To run through the contents: we start with a foreword by Robert Shearman about what it felt like to bring the Daleks back. It’s a story he has told before, but he tells it well, and it’s worth reading again. The editors then give a brief introduction noting the unexpected impact of the show under RTD, and summarising the articles. The articles themselves are as follows:

1) "The Big Picture Show: Russell T. Davies’ Writing for Doctor Who", by Graham Sleight, analyses how Davies gets away with breaking some of the ‘rules’ of writing and yet manages (usually) to turn out very successful product, by his use of spectacle, emotion, fast pacing and scale, but also by distancing himself from ‘science fiction’ as it is usually understood and interpreted.

2) "The Reasons and Functions behind the Use of Deus ex Machina in Series One of the New Doctor Who", by Paul Hawkins, is more readable than its title suggests, and looks one particular aspect of Davies’ writing which breaks the ‘rules’, his use of endings which don’t actually tell us more about the characters but usually work anyway.

3) "He’s not the Messiah: Undermining Political and Religious Authority in New Doctor Who, by Una McCormack, looks at the subversive tendencies of New Who in political terms using a lot of ideas from Foucault which more or less made sense to me, and then looks also at the way in which Davies, who is not shy about his own atheism, repeatedly uses religious imagery to tremendous effect in New Who. I’d have added to this the point that the Ninth Doctor came to us at Easter 2005, and the Tenth was revealed in his full manifestation on Christmas Day that year, which may not have been completely planned by Davies but is perhaps also germane.

4) "Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?", by Tony Keen, argues very strongly that only Sarah Jane Smith, of the whole range of Old Who companions, could have been brought back for School Reunion, and looks at the fates of all other companions to examine what this tells us about the weaknesses and strengths of the show’s set-up – probably the essay that will most gladden the hearts of Old Who fans.

5) "How Donna Noble Saved the Universe (and Had to Pay for It)", by Sydney Duncan and Andy Duncan, examines the fate of Donna in Journey’s End and goes in some depth into why it isn’t really a satisfactory ending for her, given her role in the story, the Doctor’s own abilities (note how the humanised Doctor doesn’t get mind-wiped or destroyed) and the viewers’ (well, these viewers’) expectations for how women characters should be portrayed. I would add that it’s not terribly satisfactory in dramatic terms either, and not relly helped by her reappearance in The End of Time.

6) "Does the Doctor Dance? Heterosexuality, Omnisexuality, and Spontaneous Generation in the Whoniverse", by Catherine Coker, rather joyously examines sex and relationships in New Who and Torchwood, the only essay in the book to really look at either spinoff series.

7) "Conflict, Hybridity and Forgiveness", by James Rose, is again a better essay than its title, considering the Ninth and Tenth Doctors as sharing a single character arc from trauma to healing, and looking at the role of hybrid creatures (the Daleks, the humanised Doctor) in that process.

8) "The Importance of Language Converted to Knowledge in the Arsenal of the Tenth Doctor", by Leslie McMurtry,
is a very entertaining and informative look at the way in which the Doctor takes other people’s words and learning and uses them to win; while the essay mainly looks at the obvious Tenth Doctor stories, McMurtry makes the point that it is a long-running theme in Old Who too.

9) "Philosophies of Time Travel in the New Doctor Who", by Richard Burley, takes a rather sober approach to the way in which time travel actually "works" in the Whoniverse. Burley acknowledges that Steven Moffat’s approach in the RTD era was different, and of course Moffat-era time travel has turned out to work by Moffat’s rules rather than RTD’s. This was one essay that might have benefited also from an engagement with Old Who, which also had a variety of approaches to this (compare The Aztecs, The Space Museum, Earthshock, Mawdryn Undead, just as the first examples that came to my mind).

10)"Approaching Character in New Doctor Who", by Clare Parody, provides tools for analysing why characters are written the way they are in New Who, particularly considering how it has become extensible as well as unfolding, with cheerful violence to continuity and spinoff shows and other phenomena. I hope that a future essay will go a bit more into the other manifestations of Who, including the stage shows which have now become almost routine.

Although the focus of the book is on the five years of the Russell T. Davies era – from Easter 2005 to New Year’s Day 2010 – almost all of the authors seem pretty solidly committed to looking at Who not only with the tools of interpretation of contemporary media and literature, but also as a phenomemon which started in 1963 rather than 2005, and indeed which continues past Davies’ handing over the reins to Steven Moffat in 2010. For old school fans like me this is rather comforting, and hopefully it may tempt any New Who fans who pick it up and have not yet been converted to give Old Who a try as context. In any case it’s a very good set of essays, more profound than Chicks Dig Time Lords, more diverse than Triumph of a Time Lord, and better than any of the other analytical books I’ve read about New Who.

Gibbon takes four and a half pages to tell us what will be in the next 24 chapters, and then takes 55 pages to cover 550 years of Byzantine emperors.

If you head to the next village south of us, and wander out to the west a little, you will find a mysterious ridge departing the village in a northwesterly direction, roughly here. F and I cycled down to find it yesterday, and he took this picture of it from the road:

What could this mysterious structure be? A dike? Unlikely, give its relationship with the river Dijle, not 25 metres away and intersecting it diagonally. A disused road? Well, there are plenty of used roads around, and this one doesn’t appear to go anywhere.

But if you trace the ridge back into the village, you will eventually find that opposite the railway station (itself somewhat dilapidated) is this building (ignore the strange man in red shorts checking his Blackberry):

This, believe it or not, is the former station in Sint-Joris-Weert of the steam tram line which ran between Tervuren and Tienen from 1905 to 1957. If you look over the door you can still see where the name “Sint-Joris-Weert” would have been written, over half a century ago.

An easy enough Saturday outing. All photos taken by young F.

Good if somewhat gloomy selection of short SF first published in 2006; the only one I had read before was Michael Flynn’s “Dawn, and Sunset, and the Colours of the Earth”, which was also the only one of the 26 stories here to make it to either Hugo or Nebula shortlist (though the Locus Best Novelette winner, Cory Doctorow’s “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth”, is also here). Other stories here that I liked included Gardner Dozois’ “Counterfactual” and Carol Emshwiller’s “Quill”. 2007 was the year when I wasn’t able to write up the various Hugo nominees in my usual detail, but my main memory is that they were a bit more cheerful; winners were “A Billion Eves” by Robert Reed, “The Djinn’s Wife” by Ian Mcdonald and “Impossible Dream” by Tim Pratt.

broadcast anniversaries

10 April 1965: broadcast of “The Wheel of Fortune”, third episode of the story we now call The Crusade. Barbara remains a captive; the Doctor is forced to reveal Vicki’s true gender.

10 April 1971: broadcast of first episode of Colony in Space. The Time Lords send the Doctor and Jo to a colony planet where the Doctor is attacked by a robot.

• How We Have Changed
  Life in modern Ireland
  (tags: ireland)

More spinoff literature, this time the latest installment in the series of audio plays about Romana II, Leela and K9 Mark II (Mark I came to an apparently sticky end, but somehow escaped to make his own Australian TV series). The third series in this line, which came out a whole five years ago, got a bit caught up in its own continuity and one felt almost a bit revived when our heroes fled from a devastated Gallifrey to make their way elsewhere in the universe. This fourth series has a very clever premise: each of the four stories explores an alternate Gallifrey where Time Lord history took a different path to the original timeline. Some time ago, Big Finish did a series of plays called Doctor Who: Unbound looking at alternative Doctors, and this is along those lines; it doesn’t require much knowledge of the previous three series, other than that Romana has been President of the Time Lords, Leela has been struck blind, and their allies from their home world are the obscure Irving Braxiatel and former Citadel securocrat Narvin.

The first story, Gallifrey: Reborn by Gary Hopkins, brings us to a world where Time Lords are mercenary and ultra-capitalist, trading regenerations with each other; and Mary Tamm plays a Romana who never left with the Doctor, while Leela is celebrated as the Doctor’s companion during the quest for the Key to Time to the point of being made President with K9 as her Castellan. It all ends in disaster of course. Conrad Westmaas, who several years ago had played audio companion C’rizz for Big Finish, is much more comfortable here as Romana’s rising young Time Lord son. We had Mary Tamm and Lalla Ward spark against each other as the two Romanas in earlier Gallifrey plays, but this takes a gloomier look at the dynamic.

Gallifrey: Disassembled by Justin Richards brings us to a world where the Time Lords are actively interventionist in the time lines and, frankly, evil: the power-hungry President Romana, aided by Leela, her Interrogator-General, keeps a tight grip on matters; and what of the character played by Colin Baker who responds to, but doesn’t like being called, the name “Doctor”? There’s a lot of continuity-style speculation also about the true relationship between Braxiatel and the Doctor, and a rather odd rule of Time about meeting someone who you killed in a different timestream (never heard of this before, and it’s flatly contradicted in the fourth play in the series), which weakens the promising start of the story, but it is still fun.

Gallifrey: Annihilation by Gary Russell and Scott Handcock takes us to a devastated, depopulated Gallifrey, where one of the oldest Time Lord conflicts, resolved æons ago in our more familiar timeline, is still continuing. One of the disadvantages of paying for the downloads but not the CDs is that you miss out on the cast lists for each, and I found myself trying to work out why Magistrix Borusa sounded so familiar: turns out she is actually Katy Manning, playing what she describes as her own voice with no Jo Grant perkiness or Iris Wildthyme bawdiness, and doing it rather well. Other guest stars include Geoffrey Beevors as Lord Prydon, who may or may not be an alternate and altered Master; Wendy Padbury’s daughter Charlie Hayes; and co-author and director Gary Russell, in a rare appearance as performing artist (though of course we should remember that his career began as Dick of the Famous Five in 1978).

Gallifrey: Forever again starts with an alternate Romana who is a ruthless ruler of Gallifrey, but she is assassinated in the first couple of minutes, and ‘our’ Romana then has to work out what is going on in this slave-owning, non-time-travelling society, posing as its president, under the vicious supervision of the alternate Narvin who works out pretty quickly what is going on. The voice from the past this time is Carole Ann Ford, playing one of the slave labourers working on the Eye of Harmony (and John Leeson gets to do a different funny voice, a couple of other characters from the previous Gallifrey series return in alternate form). We end up with a situation which liberates Leela either to go into the three Companion Chronicle audios by Nigel Fairs which kill her off, or else for more adventures first.

Author David Wise, I note with interest, is one of only two contributors to the Doctor Who franchise to have also written an episode of televised Star Trek, co-writing the 1974 animated episode “How Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth”, which became the first and only episode of so-called “classic era” Star Trek to win an Emmy Award. (The other such writer is , who co-wrote the 1987 TNG episode “Where No One Has Gone Before” and has had at least three Who short stories published.)

All in all, I think the four audios are relatively approachable considering that they come after three series of a spinoff line of plays. Lalla Ward and Louise Jameson, of course, carry it, greatly helped by John Leeson and in the first two plays by Miles Richardson’s Braxiatel. But I think any fan with a vague knowledge of the standard Whoniverse timeline of Gallifrey should be able to enjoy these. See also reviews by Andrew Hickey and here and here.

These four books, published in 1980, tell the further adventures of K9 Mark I as troubleshooter for the Time Lords, flying around the galaxy in his miniature spaceship the K-NEL. (“Kennel”, geddit?) They are available on the DVD of K9 and Company, and I suppose constitute the first spinoff Who novels (as opposed to the Dalek Annuals), years in advance of Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma or Harry Sullivan’s War. Although half of the rather meagre 36 pages of each book are illustrations, the artwork is absolutely gorgeous; the art credits are given to “R.C.S. Enterprises Ltd” and I wonder which gifted artist’s name lies behind those initials. The books cost 65p each at the time, which the Bank of England assures me is only £2.17 in today’s money, good value for the art alone.

April Books 7) K9 and the Time Trap

The first of the books is the most interesting from a continuity point of view. K9, investigating some mysterious spaceship disappearances, allows himself to be caught by the eponymous Time Trap and is transported to “an immense museum of space exploration, with craft from every civilisation ever to have leapt the stars.” The proprietor of this museum turns out to be a bloke in a funny helmet called Omegon (see right), who says that he has met K9’s Master, reveals that he was once a Time Lord but was betrayed, and indeed

He had been a great engineer. It was he who had created the system that gave the Time Lords time-travel. ‘I harnessed the power of a thousand suns for them,’ he said. ‘They made me emperor – then plotted to destroy me, and marooned me here! They think I am trapped in this crimson bubble of time,’ roared Omegon, ‘but soon I shall have my revenge!’

K9 deals with him pretty rapidly after that, but it’s obvious who Omegon is meant to be, especially considering who wrote The Three Doctors. (For other Omega revivals see the excellent Big Finish audio Omega, and Arc of Infinity which I’m less wild about but will reach in my rewatch very soon.)

April Books 8) K9 and the Beasts of Vega

Here we have K9 sent to investigate an outbreak of catatonic insanity among the crew of spaceships working in the Vega system; he is assisted (all too briefly) by a Professor Romius (see left, so obviously not Romana). In the end K9 saves the day by taking over the mind of the (unnamed) spaceship captain using his extendable data probe, something we’ve never seen him do before or since, to appreciate what the humanoid crew are experiencing (which that they are under attack by the Beasts of Vega). These turn out to be imaginary monsters playing on emotion; K9 having no emotion is smugly immune, which rather oddly twists the Cybermen’s weakness into being an advantage. As it turns out, however, this is setting up that audacious concept, a character arc for K9, to be developed in the next two books

April Books 9) K9 and the Zeta Rescue

Another day, another crisis: K9 is sent to investigate vast explosions in the Zeta Cancri system (also referred to Zeta Four Sector) where it is feared that if the stars collide the whole galactic neighbourhood will be devastated. (I checked, and ζ Cancri is indeed a well-known and complex multiple star system, though of course any the consequences of two of the stars colliding would be neither as immediate or as widely devastating as the book would have it.) Here for the first time we see the Time Lords who give K9 his orders, and they are indeed a rum bunch (see right), though reminiscent of the Time Lord Council we were to encounter shortly in The Tides of Time.

The plot is a bit unfocussed: K9 finds a vast prison ship and an attractive young prisoner called Dea (see left); he frees her, and she explains that they are witnessing the last stages of a war between the Telians and Megallans; K9 and Dea then watch as the two sides’ leaders mutually destroy each other. K9, having not actually done anything to resolve the crisis, then stays behind to help Dea care for the remaining victims, explaining to the Time Lords on his return that he was aiming to improve his “understanding of the humanoid race”, though with negative results. It’s an interesting counterpart to the previous book in that K9 appears to feel that his lack of emotions is a potential disability after all.

April Books 10) K9 and the Missing Planet

The last is the most political of the books: K9 is called in to assist the capitalist, colonialist leadership of the heavily polluted planet Tellus (or, as we call it, Earth) to track down a missing colony.

‘It’s not there,’ snarled the president [see right]. ‘It should be there and it’s gone. The whole planet, gone. We own that planet, we’ve invested billions in it, and we need its raw materials to fuel our power plants and supply our factories. Tellac Inc wants it back. Apart from that they tell me it’s playing havoc with navigation … 0h, and there are a dozen families missing too. Miners, it says here. You better get it back!’

K9 gets caught in a timewarp and finds the missing planet and miners, who are constructing a new Eden with animals from all periods of geological history which they survey by balloon. Votri, the miners’ leader, begs K9 to keep his secret; and K9 does so, in defiance of his orders, reporting back to Gallifrey only that the planet has “disappeared from the universe as we know it”.

A couple of general observations. Martin is clearly keen on using real star systems – the first book features Rigellian spaceships, the second Vega, the third Zeta Cancri, and the fourth Earth. He’s also keen on Greek letters – Zeta and Omega/Omegon, also the Doctor’s Gallifreyan name of Theta Sigma, first used in The Armageddon Factor and referred to again several times here. I note that that each book has precisely one other named character (Omegon, Professor Romius, Dea, Votri) which is a bit of a weakness.

However, I do like the mini-character arc of K9 getting to grips with humanity over the last three books; it’s an old sf trope, the robot who deals with these puzzling humans, but I had not really seen it done before for K9. For what they are, this a very pleasing set of books.

broadcast anniversaries

9 April 1966: broadcast of “The Hall of Dolls”, second episode of the story we now call The Celestial Toymaker. Steven and Dodo, competing with the King and Queen of Hearts, must find the two safe chairs to sit in.

9 April 2005: broadcast of The Unquiet Dead. The Doctor and Rose, with the help of Charles Dickens, investigate reanimating corpses in Cardiff in 1869.

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