I am on the road this week, and have been listening inter alia to Big Finish’s recent production of three Doctor Who plays originally written for the stage.
Seven Keys to Doomsday, by Terrance Dicks, has the Doctor acquiring two new companions, regenerating into Trevor Martin, and then going on a rather pointless quest to find seven bits of crystal which fit together to form a mystical key. It obviously inspired the Key to Time season a few years later, but I think it looked better than it sounds.
The Ultimate Adventure, also by Terrance Dicks, has Colin Baker, a French companion, and several songs, as at the request of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher they try and rescue the American delegate to the world peace conference who has been captured by Daleks and Cybermen. Unlike Seven Keys to Doomsday, it is not actually bad, but it is on the whimsical side.
The best of the three plays is the earliest, Curse of the Daleks, written in 1965 by Terry Nation. I was amused to note that we begin with convicts on a spaceship which they manage to take control of and bring to another planet where they have to do a deal with the local baddies – the second episode of Blake’s Seven reworks this with surprisingly few changes. Later parts of the plot, with the Daleks’ human stooge reviving them, were recycled by David Whitaker in the first Troughton story, Power of the Daleks. On top of providing the source material for those two excellent later pieces, Curse of the Daleks has a rather good “who’s the traitor” plot, and Nick Briggs does the best linking narration for any of the three plays. Recommended.
Related
I’m not sure I get what they’re on about with Protocol 12. Protocol 12 TEU/TFEU is the Excessive Deficit Procedure, which contains no mechanism of the kind described. Possibly they mean Article 126(14) TFEU, which could be used to amend Protocol 12, but by virtue of the European Union Act 2011, Cameron can’t vote in favour of such an amendment without Parliamentary approval. I don’t think anyone’s interests would have been served by delaying matters for him to try to get Parliament to vote in favour of anything involving the EU in the current UK political climate, least of all the interests of the weaker Eurozone countries.
I think the truthfulness or otherwise of that comment by Nick Clegg depends very much on (a) what timeframe the comment about repatriation of powers is intended to refer to and (b) what view one takes of subjective terms like “modest” and “reasonable” in political statements (i.e. whether one assumes that they have some literal meaning, or whether they are just fluff, like the things that estate agents say about houses. Of course I’d rather live in a world in which neither my party leaders nor my estate agents felt the need to generate fluff, but I fear that day is a long way off.