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Whoniversaries 8 November

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i) births and deaths

8 November 1927: birth of Lennie Mayne, director of The Curse of Peladon (Third Doctor, 1972), The Three Doctors (Third Doctor, 1972-3), The Monster of Peladon (Third Doctor, 1974) and The Hand of Fear (Fourth Doctor, 1976)

8 November 1941: birth of Nerys Hughes, who played scientist Todd in Kinda (Fifth Doctor, 1982) and Rhys’s mother (therefore Gwen’s mother-in-law) in the exceptionally silly Torchwood episode Something Borrowed (2008)

8 November 1956: birth of Richard Curtis, executive producer of The Curse of Fatal Death (interim, 1999) and writer of Vincent and the Doctor (Eleventh Doctor, 2010)

8 November 2012: death of Roger Hammond, who played Francis Bacon in The Chase (First Doctor, 1965) and Dr Runciman in Mawdryn Undead (Fifth Doctor, 1983).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

8 November 1975: broadcast of third episode of Pyramids of Mars. The Doctor and Sarah fail to blow up the rocket, and the Doctor is transported to Sutekh’s chamber.

8 November 1980: broadcast of third episode of Full Circle. The Doctor and Dexeter analyse their samples, but Romana lets the Marshmen onto the starliner.

8 November 1986: broadcast of second episode of Terror of the Vervoids (ToaTL #10). One of the Mogarians turns out to be a detective in disguise, and the Isolation Room contains a plant/human hybrid.

8 November 1989: broadcast of third episode of The Curse of Fenric. The Haemovores attack the church and Judson is possessed by Fenric.

8 November 2010: broadcast of first episode of Lost in Time (SJA). Sarah and the gang are separated by the enigmatic Shopkeeper to find themselves in three different time-zones throughout history.

8 November 2014: broadcast of Death in Heaven, final episode of the 8th series of New Who. With Cybermen on the streets of London, old friends unite against old enemies and the Doctor takes to the air in a startling new role.

Blade Runner, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

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It's a bit difficult to concentrate this evening! (For people coming across this blog post years from now, we just heard that Joe Biden won th election. Today is Saturday, the election was on Tuesday.)

But to my normal Saturday busioness. Blade Runner won the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1983. The other finalists were all cinema films; I have seen two – Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which came second, and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which came third – but not the other two – The Dark Crystal, which came fourth and Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, which came fifth. I wonder where Airplane II came in the nominations tally? I think of the three I have seen, I would have gone with the majority and voted for Blade Runner.

This was the third Hugo-winning film in a row to star Harrison Ford, leading as Deckard here, having been Indian Jones in last year's Raiders of the Lost Ark and Han Solo two years ago in The Empire Strikes Back. He was also of course Solo in the original Star Wars.


There is just one cast member who had a speaking role in an Oscar-winning film: it's M. Emmet Walsh, who is Deckard's boss, police captain Bryant here, and was the swim coach in Ordinary People two years back.

Kimiko Hiroshige, credited here as "Cambodian Woman", and Howie Lee, who plays the Sushi Master, were both also uncredited extras in Around the World in Eighty Days, 26 years ago.

I remember daringly going to the cinema on my own to see this in London, when I was fifteen, so it has a lot of nostalgia for me, and I still like it a lot, even though the year 2019 has now been and gone without android replicants threatening Los Angeles. To get the obvious out of the way, it's a Bechdel fail. Dave points out on Facebook, in response to this review:

Blade Runner didn’t just fail the Bechdel test, it has the leading male character coerce a woman to sleep with him, and has a female replicant wearing virtually nothing be shot in the back and fall through plates of glass. It’s thoroughly sexist throughout.

There are also no visible African-American characters, though many Asians, in a city which actually has about equal numbers of both groups in its population. More subtly, Sarah Gailey has pointed out what is really going on here:

There is a whole class of slaves. It is illegal for them to escape slavery. The cops are supposed to murder the slaves if they escape, because there is a risk that they will start to think they’re people. But the cops know that the slaves are not people, so it’s okay to murder them. The greatest danger, the thing the cops are supposed to prevent, is that the slaves will try to assimilate into the society that relies on their labor.

Assimilation is designed to be impossible. There are tests. Impossible tests with impossible questions and impossible answers. The tests measure empathy. It is not about having enough empathy, but about having empathy for the correct things. If you do not have enough empathy for the correct things, you will be murdered by a cop who does have empathy for the correct things.

The actual plot is straight out of pulp sf, and has been stripped of much of what made the book special. But it's a chilling story, and Deckard engages our sympathy largely by being good-looking Harrison Ford, conflicted over what he is doing, particularly when he falls in love with one of the replicants.

But. It still looks and sounds fantastic. The cityscapes of LA in 2019, pouring rain, crowded underclass, glitzy commercial offices but abandoned residential buildings, are superbly conveyed. Rutger Hauer's dying words as lead replicant Roy Batty remain one of those moments you'll never forget in cinema, as Deckard begins to realise what his journey has really been about.

And I was thoroughly addicted to Vangelis's music – I had a cassette of the album and played it incessantly as a student. I think it holds up as at least the equal of his work for Chariots of Fire last year.



I'm putting this right at the top of my list, in fourth place behind 2001 but ahead of Superman. A very welcome return journey.

I reread Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? again as well. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

As he unlocked his office door, his superior, Police Inspector Harry Bryant, jug-eared and redheaded, sloppily dressed but wise-eyed and conscious of nearly everything of any importance, hailed him. “Meet me at nine-thirty in Dave Holden’s office.” Inspector Bryant, as he spoke, flicked briefly through a clipboard of onionskin typed sheets. “Holden,” he continued as he started off, “is in Mount Zion Hospital with a laser track through his spine. He’ll be there for a month at least. Until they can get one of those new organic plastic spinal sections to take hold.”for a month at least. Until they can get one of those new organic plastic spinal sections to take hold.”

It's a short book, but it's amazing how little of it actually made it into the film – sure, the core plot of the replicants is there, but we lose the fact that the factory is in Seattle not LA; we lose the obsession with live animals (there's an awful moment when the chap taking what he thinks is a robot cat to be fixed realises that it was real and it has really died); we lose Deckard's home life, and Mercerism and the empathy boxes; and we lose the single most chilling moment of the book, when the replicants set up a fake police station and Deckard is almost fooled into thinking that he is the android – it's a typical Dick moment of questioning reality.

It's also worth noting that the book is set in 2021 (in more recent editions – when first published in 1968, it was set in 1992.) I'm preparing piece on twentieth-century SF set next year; this is certainly the best known.

Next year's Hugo winner is Return of the Jedi, but before that we have to get through Gandhi.

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Whoniversaries 7 November

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i) births and deaths

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

ii) broadcast anniversaries

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.

7 November 2017: broadcast of The Zygon Inversion. With the splinter group of Zygons now ahead of the Doctor, there is only one thing standing in their way of obliterating the human race and taking the Earth for themselves: a moral dilemma! Is Bonnie willing to compromise the peace already in place, just for the sake of Zygons not needing to hide, even if it means making enemies not only of humanity but of her own race?

7 November 2021: broadcast of War of the Sontarans, Part 2 of Flux. Thrown back into the Crimean War, the Doctor finds the Light Division are about to enter senseless battle with… an army of Sontarans? Yaz and Dan are pulled away from her, and each find their task will be restoring Time. The Sontarans are ready for eternal conquest, and in the Temple of Atropos, the enemy has arrived to take it all.

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).

October 2008 books

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This is the latest post in a series I started last November, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging which will fall in 2023. Every six-ish days I've been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I've found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.

I started October 2008 with a day in Paris, and visited The Hague overnight mid-month. For half term we visited my sister in France, to meet very new baby S. F was enchanted; U fascinated, though we had to monitor her interactions quite carefully.

The big political news of the month for me was the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to former president Martti Ahtisaari of Finland, who I had worked with quite a lot in my time with the International Crisis Group. He is not so healthy these days, but still one of the most impressive people I've ever met.

At work, my super-effective American intern D moved on; she is now a foreign service officer wiith the US State Department. Her replacement was Spanish S.

I read 25 books in October 2008.

Non-fiction 5 (YTD 56)
The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street, by Charles Nicholl
The English: A Portrait of a People, by Jeremy Paxman
Jean Sibelius, by Guy Rickards
Edmund Spenser, by Rosemary Freeman
Waterloo, by Andrew Roberts

Non-genre 3 (YTD 22)
Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, by William Makepeace Thackeray
The Duke and I, by Julia Quinn (did not finish)
The Moving Toyshop, by Edmund Crispin

Scripts 5 (YTD 16)
Love's Labour's Lost, by William Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare
Richard II, by William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night's Dream, by William Shakespeare
The Life and Death of King John, by William Shakespeare

Poetry 1
Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney

SF 5 (YTD 40)
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
Gossamer Axe, by Gael Baudino
The Sword of Shannara, by Terry Brooks (did not finish)
Astra and Flondrix, by Seamus Cullen
Sunrise Alley, by Catherine Asaro

Doctor Who 5 (YTD 165)
The Gallifrey Chronicles, by Lance Parkin
All-Consuming Fire, by Andy Lane
Doctor Who and the City of Death, by David Lawrence
Winner Takes All, by Jacqueline Rayner
Interference Book One: Shock Tactic, by Lawrence Miles

Comics 1 (YTD 4)
The Cruel Sea, eds Tom Spilsbury, Scott Gray

6,200 pages (YTD 76,100)
5/25 (YTD 39/323) by women
none (YTD 6/323) by PoC

Gonna call out four excellent reads here: Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, which you can get here, and Romeo and Juliet, which you can get hereBeowulf, which you can get here, and Thaceray's magnificent Vanity Fair, which you can get here. Worst of the month was Julia Quinn's The Duke and I, which I cast aside after two chapters; you can get it here.


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Whoniversaries 6 November

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i) births and deaths

6 November 2017: death of Scott Fredericks, who played freedom fighter Boaz in Day of the Daleks (Third Doctor, 1972) and turncoat scientist Maxilian Stael in Image of the Fendahl (Fourth Doctor, 1977).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

6 November 1964: broadcast of "Horse of Destruction", fourth episode of the story we now call The Myth Makers

6 November 1976: broadcast of second episode of The 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?)