i) births and deaths

20 December 1943: birth of Jacqueline Pearce, who played Chessene in The Two Doctors (1985), Prime Miniister Sherilyn Harper in Big Finish audio The Fearmonger (2000), Admiral Mettna in the webcast Death Comes to Time (2001-02) and of course Servalan in Blake’s 7.

20 December 1978: birth of Eddie Robson, author of many Big Finish audios and various short stories.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

This is the first day since 24 October with no broadcast anniversaries, and the last such day in the calendar year.

iii) date specified in canon

20 December 1992: St Christopher’s Church in Cheldon Bonniface is transported to the Moon, as recounted in Paul Cornell’s 1991 novel Timewyrm: Revelation.

• life and opinions of andrew rilstone: Homosexual Frogs (1)
  Andrew Rilstone forensically dissents and demolishes the attacks on 'Political Correctness' (UK version at least). It always baffled me why conservatives were so keen on attacking politeness.
  (tags: sexandsexualityandgender)
• life and opinions of andrew rilstone: Homosexual Frogs (2)
  (tags: sexandsexualityandgender)
• life and opinions of andrew rilstone: Homosexual Frogs (3)
  (tags: sexandsexualityandgender)
• life and opinions of andrew rilstone: Homosexual Frogs (4)
  (tags: sexandsexualityandgender)
• Meet the DICKHEADS, and pity them | afoe | A Fistful of Euros | European Opinion
  Alex reckons that today's terrorists are Desperate, Incompetent, Converts, Kids, Harmless, Economically insignificant, Aimless, Disconnected, and Suicidal.
  (tags: waronterror)
• Posts From the Past – NYTimes.com
  The best of Five Thirty-Eight.
  (tags: usa politics)
• Robert Fisk: Stay out of trouble by not speaking to Western spies – Robert Fisk, Commentators – The Independent
  That La Clinton should want her State Department slaves to play secret agents on the poor old UN donkey – the beast that forever clip-clops on stage to mop up America's failed policies in the Middle East, this decrepit skyscraper on the East River packed with enough asbestos to kill a nation of peacekeepers, this bureaucratic shambles with its pathetic Secretary-General whose English is still in need of vast improvement – shows what an utterly worthless institution the US State Department has become.
  They were supposed to spy on the encryption details of delegates, credit card transactions, even frequent flyer cards. But who would want to read the nonsense that the UN's overpaid staff write, or how much they spend on lunch at Nobu's with the Nicaraguan consul, or who paid for whose mistress to fly to Havana on the shavings of his UN flights?
  And why spy on the UN when they are the most leak-prone organisation on the globe?
  (tags: wikileaks)

The first edition of this book was published in 1969, and the pre-1969 text takes up slightly more than half of my fourth edition from 1994. This earlier core is an excellent historical analysis of a paramilitary movement which had at one point been central to Irish politics and had steadily been moved more and more to the fringes, as decade after decade crucial members of the leadership either defected to democratic politics or died (often through violence). Coogan has got deeply into his subject and assembled names, dates, numbers (though I can’t quite believe that the I.R.A. still had 30,000 members by the late 1920s – they would surely have had more of an impact if that were the case) and has a detailed picture of who the I.R.A. were and also why it didn’t really matter that much in the context of how politics developed in the Irish Free State, and eventually the Republic of Ireland.

Unfortunately the book is probably more often bought and read for the second half, the post-1969 story, which has several very serious flaws.

First, from the narrative point of view, Coogan skips over the 1969 split between the Provos and the Stickies with indecent haste and almost no detail, in stark contrast to the chapter and verse he gave for the divisions between the ‘mainstream’ I.R.A. and other micro-groups in the previous four or five decades. It means that the subsequent description of the activities of the Provisionals and the Officials is almost without context of why they became two separate organisations. There are other gaps, but this is the most serious one and it is pretty huge.

Second, from the analytical point of view, Coogan has the Dublin journalist’s tin ear for Northern politics. He makes little of the differing agendas of the British Government, the mainstream Unionists, and the Loyalist paramilitaries. The 1974 power-sharing executive and Brian Faulkner are barely mentioned. In the short paragraph on the 1982 Assembly, almost every detail is wrong apart from the name of the body and the year in which it was elected. This persistent indifference to accuracy on such points may well reflect the interests of his subject matter and core readership as well as his own preferences, but it means that the casual reader expecting to find guidance on the wider Northern Irish political situation here will be not only disappointed but misled.

Third, from the organisational point of view, the claim on the back cover that the fourth edition has been ‘completely updated and revised’ is simply incorrect. While the earlier material is clearly the work of a historical thinker presenting his material in a careful structure, the successively bolted-on chapters for the later editions are poorly organised and sometimes repetitious, with no pause for global reflection.

Fourth, from the moral point of view, the missing element – for those of us who are not in Coogan’s core audience, the readership in the Republic, who may be more likely to have an instinctive understanding of this issue – is any serious analysis of how and why opinion in the Twenty-Six Counties swung both against and in favour of the Republican agenda over the years. I remember vividly both the H-Block demonstrations of 1981, and the post-Warrington demonstrations of 1993. Coogan gives many other examples of popular support for Irish prisoners but deep popular disapproval of the barbarous acts that they have committed, going back over the decades. I’d love to read some decent unpacking of how and why the plain people of Ireland have been able to discriminate between men and method in this way, and am disappointed that Coogan, well-placed to do so, has not provided it.

Having said all that, there are some other interesting points in the second half. I hadn’t realised that Greek Cypriots were so closely involved with the arming of the Provos – not only as middle-men for Arab suppliers (as is to be expected given the geography and geopolitics) but, Coogan suggests, directly as well. More recently, Coogan’s analysis of the correspondence between the I.R.A. and the British government in the early 1990s is detailed and useful, though unfortunately lacks a balancing perspective from the British side (not that there is likely much that could be added, but the gap is there). More tellingly than perhaps intended, his profile of Gerry Adams betrays hypnotised fascination with his subject rather than any real unpacking of said subject’s political agenda.

Anyway. There are many better books than this about Irish history since 1969 (and in fairness Coogan may have written one or two of them himself). But the first half is an excellent micro-study of a dangerous fringe movement. And I’m grateful to him also for quoting one of my own father’s best lines, regarding a small rabid Catholic movement of the 1950s: “Perhaps it was only a lunatic fringe, but it was still of interest as a symptom. One can learn something of the tendencies in a society by observing on which particular fringe of it the lunatics break out.”

I’ve been distinctly under the weather for the last few days – woke up on Wednesday with a very sore throat, and have been very grotty indeed since; struggled into Brussels for a meeting on Wednesday afternoon, and again for another meeting and a dental appointment on Friday (a journey that turned out more exciting than I anticipated) but otherwise have spent the last four days in bed. Almost certainly I picked up the bug from young F, who went down with it on Monday and has been hit rather worse, diagnosed with incipient (though fortunately not yet full-blown) pneumonia and so unable to enjoy the snow that has been falling off and on all week (though again we are not as hard hit as Eng-er-land seems to have been). He too is resting up, therapeutically watching classic Second Doctor stories.

So I have woken up this morning and feel somewhat better, at least ready to do on-line Christmas shopping (late) and write a promised guest blog piece (not quite as late) and think about cooking (will do boar as usual). But I’m still taking it easy.

The dental appointment on Friday was for the final stage of fixing the lower molar that I blogged about back in May. The story since then was extraction by a specialist surgeon, emergency cleaning-up on Easter Sunday (we delayed Easter eggs to Monday as a result), titanium screw implant, two unsuccessful goes at fitting a crown and finally plugging the gap successfully on Friday (also asking the dentist to check for bruising from being hit in the mouth, but she gave me the all clear on that score). So that particular problem is now sorted.

Unfortunately that’s not yet all for my teeth. When I was in Moldova last month, just before I took this picture, I managed to break another tooth, this time the left upper molar beside the ones that gave me so much trouble last year; biting on a piece of bread – which seemed to me chewy as bread of that part of the world often is, but not excessively so – I felt something move that shouldn’t move, and realised I had a problem.

Having a dental emergency in a country where you don’t speak the language(s) is not the most reassuring situation to be in, but I got my hotel to sort me out – and full marks to them, if you’re ever in Chişinău I do recommend the VisPas Hotel for many other reasons quite apart from their ability to deal with their guests’ dental emergencies. I literally had to go straight to the dentist from my meeting with the acting Foreign Minister, and was driven there direct from the ministry by a senior official (who fortunately also is a long-standing friend).

The dentist was as good as I could have wished for; they all spoke Russian rather than Romanian (as many do in Chişinău) but got the admin guy to translate for me (my Russian is pretty vestigial and oddly enough was not honed for this situation). They detached the broken bit of tooth, cleaned it up a bit and did an X-Ray, and then charged me 80 Moldovan lei for the whole lot. That would be US$6.50, UK£4.20, or €5; I would certainly have paid five or ten times that amount in Belgium, and I shudder to think what it would cost in the US. Not surprisingly, my pocket map of Chişinău has no fewer than five advertisements for dental clinics servicing foreigners who prefer to fork out for flying to Moldova and getting their teeth done there rather than spend the same money or more for the same service at home. (Will provide details to anyone who is interested – Chişinău is perfectly safe, to the extent that everyone in the central park downtown is surfing the free WiFi on their laptops, and has a very good local medical tradition, though not the easiest place in the world to get to from Western Europe let alone the US; I would also guess that the clinics advertising on the tourist map speak better English than the guys who fixed me up.)

Anyway, I still have only half a tooth up above, my Belgian dentist (who, to add complexity, is actually French) feeling it better to wait until the lower molar was sorted before starting upstairs. But at least it’s not uncomfortable, as the other dental problems over the last couple of years have been. So I am hoping against hope that the end of this tedious saga is in sight.

At least my mysteriously infected finger has returned to normal size and (almost) normal colour, after a week of antibiotics.

i) births and deaths

19 December 1915: birth of Simon Lack, who played Kettering in The Mind of Evil (1971) and Zadek in The Androids of Tara (1978).

19 December 1923: birth of Elwyn Jones, who co-wrote The Highlanders (1966-67).

19 December 1961: birth of Matthew Waterhouse, who played the Fourth and Fifth Doctor companion Adric from 1980 to 1982.

19 December 2009: death of Donald Pickering, who played Eyesen in The Keys of Marinus (1964), Blade in The Faceless Ones (1967) and Beyus in Time and the Rani (1987).

ii) broadcast anniversary

19 December 1964: broadcast of “The Waking Ally”, fifth episode of the story we now call The Dalek Invasion of Earth. Jenny and Barbara are betrayed by the women in the woods and captured by the Daleks; Ian manages to break into the mine but hides in the missile which is headed for the earth’s core; Susan and David kiss.

Just picked up my unread copy of The Dark Is Rising and realised that it is in fact the second book in the series. (Yeah, I know, only forty years late discovering that.) How important is it to have read Over Sea, Under Stone before starting The Dark is Rising?

i) births and deaths

None that I noted.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

18 December 1965: broadcast of “Coronas of the Sun”, sixth episode of the story we now call The Daleks’ Master Plan. The Doctor, Steven and Sara give Chen a fake tarranium core; and land somewhere with a really poisonous atmosphere.

18 December 2003: webcast of sixth episode of Scream of the Shalka. The Doctor blows up the Shalka with Alison’s help. (And there’s a rather peculiar bit with the Master, but watch and judge for yourself.)

iii) date specified in canon

18 December 1953: disappearance of the Sky Gypsy flying from Dublin to Cardiff (see yesterday’s Torchwood anniversary).

• http://m.readwriteweb.com/archives/now_yahoo_says_delicious_will_live_onsomewhere_els.php
  Yahoo maybe not closing Delicious but selling it
• Political Satire and British-American Relations in Five Decades of Doctor Who – DIPAOLO – 2010 – The Journal of Popular Culture – Wiley Online Library
  “In all my travels I have battled against evil, against power mad conspirators. I should have stayed here! Power mad conspirators! Daleks, Sontarans. Cybermen! They're still in the nursery compared to us!”
  (tags: doctorwho)
• Is Yahoo Shutting Down Del.icio.us? [Update: Yes]
  Damn. How will I do daily linkspams now?
  (tags: internet delicious)
• Report: Unemployment High Because People Keep Blowing Their Job Interviews | The Onion – America's Finest News Source
  Yes, this explains it.
  (tags: economics careersadvice)

Went to Leuven police station after work (they were a bit surprised to see me, since I don’t live or work in their direct catchment area, but my local police station at home closes inconveniently early for this kind of thing and the ones in Brussels are not handy for my office) and spent an hour giving them a statement, which I believe will have included enough details for them to call round and talk to my interlocutor of this morning, which I hope will have a salutary effect. As a commenter to my previous post said, it’s unlikely it will come to much more than that in the end, but my civic duty is done and I will sleep easy tonight.

This is really hot off the press (as it were) – Big Finish released The Four Doctors only last night, and I managed to listen to it in the car today in the intervals between being assaulted by a fellow motorist and the consequent trip to the police station to make my statement.

The Four Doctors is a special release, available for BF subscribers only, uniting Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy and Paul McGann as the Fifth to Eighth Doctors, in a story which Peter Anghelides says was partly an attempt to do the Daleks and time travel, like in The Chase, but to get it right this time. (In the same interview he also says that his own favourite of his own stories is “The Tip of the Mind” in Short Trips: Companions, which proves that he has good taste and judgement, or at least that he agrees with me.) It’s a rather nice romp, not too intricate (as it might have been if Marc Platt had written it) but intricate enough to please the average sf fan, with the Doctors separated for most of the time but some very nice interaction between McGann and Davison, which I don’t think we have ever seen before. David Bamber (who played Hitler in Valkyrie against Tom Cruise and Kenneth Branagh) here plays the unfortunate time-travelling general who gets sucked into the Daleks’ evil plans, and he and the other guest cast, Nigel Lambert, Ellie Burrow and the ubiquitous Alex Mallinson, add welcome colour, but basically it’s the Doctors and Nick Briggs as the Daleks that we want to hear, and we get them all very nicely thank you.

By a very fortunate quirk of my reading list, I had reread Mirror Dance immediately before starting Cryoburn (which by the way I read in electronic form, downloaded from the publisher's website, though I will still go and get a paper copy). Cryoburn is very much a sequel to Mirror Dance, though I guess it will stand on its own, set ten years later, on a planet which isn't even mentioned in the earlier book, and with only Miles Vorkosigan, his cloned brother Mark, and a couple of other characters carried over.

The setting is Kibou-daini, a largely Japanese world where the inhabitants tend to freeze the dead and dying n the hope that they can eventually be revived when advances in medicine allow for their potential cure. Bujold has put some thought into the economics and political culture of how such a society might operate (if you're not definitely dead, what happens to your assets? to your vote?) and untangling the ramifications of how it might go wrong accounts for the majority of the plot. Miles Vorkosigan arrives in this situation because of a potential threat to the interests of the Barrayaran Empire, though rapidly gets involved in the local politics; the viewpoint characters are Miles himself, his bodyguard Armsman Roic, and a local boy whose mother turns out to be central to the plot (ie both the story and the conspiracy). As usual the story is witty and well-paced; it's also, at 350 pages, relatively short (Mirror Dance was over 440).

And there's a sharp twist at the end, but enough about that. An excellent read, and a welcome return to the Vorkosigan universe.

A collection of short stories featuring the first eight Doctors, all set in Prague. Like some of the other Short Trips collections I found the clunkers more memorable than the better stories – there’s a dire First Doctor / Ian tale, for instance – but I’ll also note that the stories I found best tended to be those by authors I had already heard of, though not usually as Doctor Who writers: Stephen Dedman, Keith DeCandido, Mary Robinette Kowal, Gary Braunbeck and Lucy Snyder, and a couple of others. I think I’ll start going through the Short Trips anthologies more systematically when I have exhausted my in-house stocks, but I can see that the series had its weaknesses as well as its strengths.

Was stuck in traffic driving in to work this morning – trying to work our what my options were for turning in one of the lanes leading from the E40 to the inner ring – when the woman in the car behind me got out, walked up to my car door and asked me to wind down the window; she then yelled at me in Dutch (I was too surprised to listen to what she was saying) and then hit me on the mouth before stomping back to her own car. Not too hard, but rather shocking behaviour. Needless to say, I noted her licence plate number, got away as fast as possible, pulled in when I found a safe place and called the police. Other people’s driving sometimes frustrates me, and I’m sure my own has frustrated many, but there are appropriate reactions and there are reactions which will lead to hassle beyond merely arriving at work a bit late.

I did this for the first time in June this yearJean-Claude Juncker (born 1954), Prime Minister of Luxembourg since 20 January 1995 (EPP)
José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (born 1960) Prime Minister of Spain since 17 April 2004 (PES) 
Lawrence Gonzi (born 1953) Prime Minister of Malta since 1 May 2004 (EPP) 
José Manuel Barroso (Portuguese, born 1956) President of the European Commission  since 23 November 2004 (EPP)
José Sócrates (born 1957) Prime Minister of Portugal since 12 March 2005 (PES)
Andrus Ansip (born 1956) Prime Minister of Estonia since 12 April 2005 (ELDR)
Fredrik Reinfeldt (born 1965) Prime Minister of Sweden since 6 October 2006 (EPP)
Angela Merkel (born 1954) Chancellor of Germany since 22 November 2005 (EPP)
Nicolas Sarkozy (born 1955) President of France since 16 May 2007 (EPP)
Donald Tusk (born 1957) Prime Minister of Poland since 16 November 2007 (EPP) 
Dimitris Christofias (born 1946) President of [Greek] Cyprus since 28 February 2008 (PEL)
Brian Cowen (born 1960) Taoiseach since 07 May 2008 (ELDR)
Silvio Berlusconi (born 1936) Prime Minister of Italy since 8 May 2008 (EPP) – previously PM 1994-95 and 2001-06
Borut Pahor (born 1963) Prime Minister of Slovenia since 21 November 2008 (PES)
Werner Faymann (born 1960) Chancellor of Austria since 02 December 2008 (PES)
Andrius Kubilius (born 1956) Prime Minister of Lithuania since 09 December 2008 (EPP) – previously PM in 1999-2000, before Lithuania joined the EU
Emil Boc (born 1966) Prime Minister of Romania since 22 December 2008 (EPP)
Valdis Dombrovskis (born 1971) Prime Minister of Latvia since 12 March 2009 (EPP)
Lars Løkke Rasmussen (born 1964) Prime Minister of Denmark since 05 April 2009 (ELDR)
Jerzy Buzek (Polish, born 1940) President of the European Parliament since 14 July 2009 (EPP)
Boyko Borisov (born 1959) Prime Minister of Bulgaria since 27 July 2009 (EPP)
George Papandreou (born 1952) Prime Minister of Greece since 06 October 2009 (PES)
Yves Leterme (born 1960) Prime Minister of Belgium since 25 November 2009 (EPP) – still surviving as caretaker prime minister, six months after losing the election
Herman van Rompuy (Belgian, born 1947) President of the European Council since 01 December 2009  (EPP)
David Cameron (born 1966) Prime Minister of United Kingdom since 11 May 2010 (ECR)
Viktor Orbán (born 1963) Prime Minister of Hungary since 29 May 2010 (EPP) – previously PM 1998-2002, before Hungary joined the EU
Mari Kiviniemi (born 1968) Prime Minister of Finland since 22 June 2010 (ELDR)
Iveta Radičová (born 1956) Prime Minister of Slovakia since 8 July 2010 (ECR)
Petr Nečas (born 1964) Prime Minister of the Czech Republic since 13 July 2010 (EPP)
Mark Rutte (born 1967) Prime Minister of the Netherlands since 14 October 2010 (ELDR)

i) births and deaths

17 December 1929: birth of Jacqueline Hill, who played the First Doctor companion Barbara Wright from 1963 to 1965 (she is the first regular cast member to actually appear on screen), and then returned to play Lexa in 1980.

17 December 2009: death of James Cairncross, who played Lemaitre in nThe Reign of Terror (1964) and Beta in The Krotons (1968-69).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

17 December 1966: broadcast of first episode of The Highlanders, introducing Fraser Hines as Jamie. The Doctor, Ben and the McCrimmon menfolk are captured by Redcoats in the aftermath of Culloden; Polly hides out with Kirsty McCrimmon.

17 December 1977: broadcast of fourth episode of The Sun Makers. Leela is rescued, Gatherer Hade thrown off the roof and the Collector disappears down the plug’ole.

17 December 2006: broadcast of Out of Time (Torchwood), the one with the accidentally time-travelling plane passengers from 1953.

• How trust was restored at Cancún
  My colleague Dean reports from the climate change talks
  (tags: climatechange)

Readers may remember the ongoing saga of my battles with Belgacom over my office phone line. I finally took the step of signing up with Toledo Telecom, both for the office landline and for my mobile phone (which I switched to the infamous HTC Desire about the same time).

At first I quite liked Toledo; unlike Belgacom, where I could never get through to a human being if there was a problem, at least there was always a real person on the end of the line to help, and minor technical issues would get sorted on the day, often within the hour.

But. More complex stuff seemed to fall between the cracks – for instance, just a small issue, but wanting to plug two computers into the model rather than using WiFi in the office (for obvious and real security reasons); a request for technical assistance has gone a week without response.

Also, even more seriously, my mobile phone bills have gone through the roof. It’s possible that this is partly due to some quirk of the Desire; it’s certain that Toledo have not responded to my repeated requests that they look into it.

So I am on the lookout for a better, probably Belgian, mobile phone provider (and open to offers on the landline as well). I suspect that at the large data usage I am looking for there won’t be much difference in price; customer service is the key issue for me, where both Belgacom and Toledo have failed to give satisfaction.

Does any of my Belgian friends reading this have experience of dealing with customer service at Mobistar, Proximus or Base? I used to be a Base customer, and they were OK until I was seduced by Toledo’s empty promises; but I don’t feel compelled to go back to them if I can do better elsewhere.

Or is there perhaps some more imaginative solution that I had not thought of?

Gosh, the last time I did a roundup of Big Finish audios was September. My travels in October and November, and then catching up afterwards, mean that once again my intention of writing them up individually is breached rather than observed. Anyway, this is what I’ve been listening to lately, in continuity order rather than release order; juts finished in time for this month’s releases, I hope.

I read the Moris Fahi’s scripts for the unbroadcast stories Farewell Great Macedon and The Yellow Arc of Fragrance when they came out a year ago, and really liked them; Big Finish, faced with the difficulty of doing them for audio now that William Hartnell and Jacqueline Hill are unable to contribute, have gone for an extended Companion Chronicle type format, with William Russell and Carole Ann Ford reprising the characters of Ian and Susan, also taking on various other incidental characters, joined by John Dorney as Alexander the Great for the first story and by Dorney and Helen Goldwyn for the second. As I said on reading them, they are both very sad stories which would have been unlikely to make it to the screen i 1964; but they are excellent pieces, and though each of the seven episodes (six for Macedon and one for Fragrance) extends well beyond the usual 25 minutes, they are well worth it. In particular, I was able to form a much better idea of the characters in Alexander’s entourage thanks to Russell and Ford’s performance than I could from simply reading the script. Strongly recommended for First Doctor fans in particular but really for anyone; these are good stories in their own right.

The Invasion of E-Space is a Companion Chronicle told by Lalla Ward’s Romana II, with herself, the Doctor and Adric preventing, well, an invasion of E-Space. A decent enough story which however doesn’t fit all that well with the established continuity of the E-Space trilogy.

A Town Called Fortune is yet another Wild West story – I think we’ve had three or four audio tales with that setting in the last couple of years – but a good one, with Richard Cordery playing Sam the sheriff, and Maggie Stables playing her own character Evelyn, and the Sixth Doctor, and everyone else as well. It’s interesting in that the only sfnal element in the story is the Doctor’s own presence. Stables is excellent and it’s a good tale of revenge and confusion, written by Paul Sutton.

For Doctor Who’s 45th anniversary two years ago, Big Finish released four single-episode stories collectively called Forty-Five, of which the last and best was The Word Lord by Steven Hall. A Death In The Family picks up on the cliff-hanger of the end of Project: Destiny and packs in mases and masses of different stories, including the Word Lord’s verbal duelling with Ace, the Seventh Doctor disappearing and reappearing in his own timeline, and the ultimate fate of Evelyn Smythe. It’s not a play that will make much sense to those unfamiliar with the Big finish continuity, but excellent for those of us who are.

I’ve been impressed more often than not with various authors’ attempts to link Doctor Who with H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos (most of which, come to thin of it, feature the Seventh Doctor), and I liked Marty Ross’s Lurkers at Sunlight’s Edge too; one of the key characters is the peculiar patient C.P. Doveday, who writes down his weird fantasies and sometimes gets them published; but there is much more going on in Alaska than one might think. Excellent riffs on various pieces of Lovecraftiana, though perhaps a bit less emphasis on the Doctor, Ace and Hex than usual.

The current season of Eighth Doctor stories got off to a bit of a duff start with a new and not terribly engaging companion, Tamsin Drewe played by Nikki Wardley. Somehow in Jonathan Morris’s two-parter Deimos/The Resurrection of Mars it catches fire, with the return of Sheridan Smith’s Lucie Miller and Graeme Garden as the Meddling Monk, and various agonising about Ice Warriors and the fate of planets and whether or not the Doctor can or should take responsibility for the consequences of his actions. Oddly enough it’s McGann who sometimes doesn’t sound quite sure if he should be taking it seriously, but everyone else (including especially a guest performance from Tracey-Ann Obermann) is excellent.

I was underwhelmed by An Earthly Child, released earlier a year ago, which brought Paul McGann together with Carole Ann Ford as Susan and McGann’s son Jake playing Susan’s son Alex. Relative Dimensions, also by Marc Platt, seemed to me to work a little better because it was trying less hard. I am not a huge fan of McGann’s Doctor, but this time he seemed to me to nail the character of the moody, neurotic, somewhat needy Time Lord who is trying to do a little bit of good. I wasn’t wild about the plot – the idea of pets taking over the Tardis has been done before, and done better; and I’m not convinced by the younger McGann. But as a story about the Eightht Doctor I thought it worked well.

So, of these, I heartily recommend the First Doctor Box Set to pretty much anyone who knows what Doctor Who is, and A Death in the Family and Deimos/The Resurrection of Mars for those who are familiar with the respective continuities.

i) births and deaths

16 December 1929: birth of Nicholas Courtney, who played Bret Vyon in The Daleks’ Master Plan (1965) and Colonel, later Brigadier, Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart from The Web Of Fear (1968) to Enemy of the Bane (SJA, 2008), the longest-running character on TV apart from the Doctor himself.

16 December 1940: birth of Ronald Allen, who played Rago in The Dominators (1968) and Ralph Cornish in The Ambassadors of Death (1970).

16 December 1971: birth of Ashley Way, director of Torchwood episodes Captain Jack Harkness (2007), End of Days (2007), Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang (2008), Reset (2008), Something Borrowed (2008) and Exit Wounds (2008); also of the New Who two-parter The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood (2010) and the Sarah Jane Adventures stories Death of the Doctor (2010) and The Empty Planet (2010).

ii) broadcast and stage anniversaries

16 December 1967: broadcast of sixth episode of The Ice Warriors. The Doctor manages to repair the ioniser and uses it to destroy the Ice Warriors and their ship.

16 December 1974: first night of Doctor Who and the Seven Keys to Doomsday, a stage play starring Trevor Martin as the Doctor and Wendy Padbury as his companion Jenny.

16 December 1978: broadcast of fourth episode of The Androids of Tara. The Doctor defeats Count Grendel in a thrilling sword fight, and he, Romana and K9 depart.

It’s Season 14, and my 15th write-up of my rewatching of Who. I usually try and note my thoughts on these as I am watching them, but the system doesn’t always work, so I’m afraid these are a bit late (I’m already on episode three of Horror of Fang Rock) and a bit more disjointed than usual.

I had forgotten the rather spooky start of The Masque of Mandragora in outer space – it’s been a while since we had any scenes set in the featureless void – and the somewhat unnerving switch to the new control room, though we get used to it. Apart from that, it’s a decent enough story – looks good rather than gorgeous, with Sarah actually getting a hint of romance with Giuliano, which I think is the first time she gets any such thing and the last before Nigel Havers in 2009. The plot has an awful lot of running around and getting captured though.

The Hand of Fear is two decent but not terribly memorable stories joined together – the first two episodes being the Nunton nuclear plant invaded by an alien, and the second two being the Destiny of Kastria once Eldrad arises. I remember first time around being really shocked by the moment the female Eldrad is apparently crushed to death. Most of the story is however fairly unremarkable; what makes it linger in the memory is of course Sarah Jane’s farewell, scripted on the spot by Baker and Sladen – I found I had something in my eye while watching it.

So, Sarah Jane Smith leaves two stories into her fourth season – as did the First Doctor; only the Third Doctor at this point had lasted longer. (And only the Fourth and Tenth Doctors exceeded that record in later years. I’m not really counting the Brigadier for these purposes, since he is not in consecutive stories. And NB that Tegan Jovanka lasted a net story short of three full seasons, even if chronologicaally she was on screen longer than Sarah.) It’s also worth noting that of all companions who experienced a change of Doctor, only she and Rose Tyler (and of course the Brigadier, second time round) had an entire season to establish themselves before their Doctor changed (Adric, not that it matters, had four stories, Ben and Polly had three, Nyssa, Peri and Mel had two, and Tegan had one).

Having rewatched all of her stories now, I am even more firmly of the opinion I formed at the age of eight or nine, that Sarah Jane Smith is the best companion of Old Who. It seems amazing in retrospect that it took until 1971 for the production team to realise that the companion’s role is really to be the audience identification figure in the story, to say to the Doctor what we wish we could say to him if we were there with him, and to be the person we imagine we might be like if we could travel with him too. Previous male companions were generally too mature to quite fill that role, though Jamie came closest; previous female companions tended to be either too brainy or too screamy. Jo Grant establishes a new and intense relationship between companion and Doctor; Sarah is more interesting than Jo Grant because she is an independent person who has chosen to travel with him rather than having been assigned to him by her uncle’s patronage.

And it also works because Sladen’s chemistry with first Pertwee and then Baker is totally convincing. More demands are put on her than on any previous companion – though she gets Harry as a full-time fellow traveller in her second season, and has a few UNIT stories, she is otherwise dealing with the Doctor single-handed. But she rises to it brilliantly, and we should not be at all surprised that New Who has basically copied the dynamic of the Sarah/Doctor relationship.

It’s also not at all surprising that she’s had much the best afterlife of any Who companion – central character in the first ever spinoff, one of many who come back in The Five Doctors, gets a Big Finish audio series and then comes back in School Reunion before not one, not two, not three but four series of her own show in the new century. What is interesting is that K9 and Company, and the 1990s Pertwee audios gave her a gormless young male companion, which I don’t think really worked; both the Big Finish audios and the more recent TV series made her the centre of a larger entourage of younger followers, which somehow resonates much better.

Having said that, I always loved The [companionless] Deadly Assassin, and rewatching it made me realise once again how brilliant it is. It is as if Sarah Jane Smith’s departure liberated Robert Holmes from the constraints of the show’s previous history, to go back to the Doctor’s own origins and rewrite them completely. We’ve been gradually moving towards Gallifrey as not so much a place of magical, ineffable power, as we saw in The War Games, but as the fading bureaucracy glimpsed in Colony in Space and The Three Doctors, subject to the political corruption that could give rise to a Morbius. Now it all comes together. I suspect that my own professional fascination with politics may be partly rooted in watching this at the age of nine; the reality that the most powerful people are none the less fallible individuals, operating to their own private agendas as much as to public perceptions, is well portrayed here.

There are so many delights in this: the nightmarish world of the Matrix, the Engin/Spandrell [Pravda/Chitty] double act, Runcible the Fatuous, the final battle amidst crumbling architecture (so dismally copied by the TV Movie). It seems almost churlish to mention two flaws. First off, the re-introduction of the Master worked much better for me at the age of nine, when I barely remembered his existence in the Pertwee era, than it does in sequence – apart from anything else the Time Lords have forgotten him now, having specifically warned the Doctor about him in Terror of the AutonsWarriors’ Gate, The Power of Kroll, The Pyramids of Mars, Planet of Evil, Revenge of the Cybermen, The Mutants, The Abominable Snowmen, The Moonbase, The Smugglers and The Rescue – but this is the only one with no visible speaking female character at all (the voice of the Matrix is played by Helen Blatch. It’s a sad lacuna in what is otherwise one of the greatest stories.

And, even if Sarah Jane is the greatest of Old Who companions, we then hit Leela’s introduction in The Face of Evil. This is the first time we have had a new companion who does not arrive in the the first story in the season since The Wheel In SpaceThe Highlanders, so it’s a disruption to the normal cycle of these things, just as Leela herself is a disruption – primitive, instinctual, sexy and violent. Just watch the clash of characters between Jameson the professional method actor and Baker the accidental instinctive actor, as the relationship develops. Last month’s Doctor Who Magazine ran an interview with Louise Jameson, where she reflected that she hadn’t quite realised that Leela was a sexy character at the time. We’ll hold over discussion of that point until next month.

The other thing to notice about The Face of Evil, viewed in the sequence of fourteen years of Old Who, is that it seems rather a riposte to The Savages from elevent years before (a story which was incidentally also followed by a story written by the same author about homicidal machines). I haven’t seen any serious questioning of Chris Boucher on this point, but it seems to me that the parallels of Elders/Savages vs Tesh/Sevateem, the playing around with absorption of the Doctor’s personality, and even the use of a hand-held mirror to reflect a death ray at a critical plot moment are a set of references to the older story. They are both jolly good scripts, and both repay the casual viewer (or, sadly, listener in the case of The Savages) even now.

I am ambivalent about references to unseen adventures; Terrance Dicks dealt with this in the novelisation by explaining that the Doctor went for a spin during the events of Robot and ended up dealing with Xoanon, which isn’t perfectly satisfactory but is better than we get from the screen version. My other reflection, more personally, is that as it happens my wife’s maiden name was Tesh, so certain lines from this story have extra entertainment value in our household. At least for me.

The Robots of Death is another jewel of a story – Baker and Jameson on top form, a stellar guest cast, a claustrophobic and believable scenario, understated but convincing special effects. Gregory de Polnay’s heroic D84 stands out as a particularly great character – “Please do not throw hands at me!” – but everyone is good; Davids Baillie and Collings as baddie Dask and good guy Poul, and Russell Hunter as the besieged commander Uvanov, Pamela Salem as loosely-dressed Toos. And Louise Jameson, now playing Leela in a high-tech envornment, is just fantastic. I really found it something of a struggle to keep to my one-episode-a-day discipline while watching this.

It’s also interesting that The Robots of Death has a substantial aftertrail. Chris Boucher’s novel Corpse Marker takes up the story of the Doctor and Leela returning to Kaldor City to see what happened to the Sandminer crew, and there are then a series of excellent audios set in Kaldor City by Alan Stevens, Jim Smith, Fiona Moore, Daniel O’Mahony and Chris Boucher, including not only Uvanov but also Paul Darrow playing a sinister character who is obviously Avon under a pseudonym (Boucher was of course script editor for Blake’s 7). Strongly recommended.

I always loved The Talons of Weng-Chiang, and rewatching it made me realise once again how brilliant it is. (I know, I said this about The Deadly Assassin too, but it’s true in both cases.) There are two big problems with the story: the fairly useless and unterrifying giant rat, and the racism including having the lead Chinese role played by a non-Chinese actor. However, the settings are beautifully done, the plotting is tight enough, Magnus Greel’s distorted face is truly horrible, and everyone takes it seriously and does it well. The script has some particular delights: “I can play the ‘Trumpet Voluntary’ in a bowl of live goldfish”; “sleep is for tortoises”; etc.

It is fantastic that Big Finish have manged to take the Jago and Litefoot partnership and turn it into a thumping success, starting with last year’s Companion Chronicle, The Mahogany Murderers, and then on to this year’s mini-series with another one promised for next year. I’ll be buying it.

One thing that really strikes me over this season is the extent to which Robert Holmes had become the equivalent of the New Who ‘Chief Writer’, be that RTD or Moffatt; and how successsful the show turned out to be. Hinchcliffe was obviously exerting a fair bit of creative influence from behind the scenes too, but unlike some of his predecessors he doesn’t seem to have done much scripting himself (Barry Letts and Derrick Sherwin wrote stories, Peter Bryant was script editor as well as producer). Between them they had got rid of UNIT, said farewell to Sarah Jane Smith, and returned the Doctor to where he had first started, as an alien cosmic vagabond and hero travelling with a mysterious young woman. (After Sarah, the next contemporary earth human to travel in the Tardis is Tegan, four years later.) But really this is the time of Robert Holmes, with the last four stories here being a superb run of quality barely matched in any other era. Sadly, it ends halfway through the next season (and Hinchcliffe left with Talons).

< An Unearthly Child – The Aztecs | The Sensorites – The Romans | The Web Planet – Galaxy 4 | Mission To The Unknown – The Gunfighters | The Savages – The Highlanders | The Underwater Menace – Tomb of the Cybermen | The Abominable Snowmen – The Wheel In Space | The Dominators – The Space Pirates | The War Games – Terror of the Autons | The Mind of Evil – The Curse of Peladon | The Sea Devils – Frontier in Space | Planet of the Daleks – The Monster of Peladon | Planet of the Spiders – Revenge of the Cybermen | Terror of the Zygons – The Seeds of Doom | The Masque of Mandragora – The Talons of Weng-Chiang | Horror of Fang Rock – The Invasion of Time | The Ribos Operation – The Armageddon Factor | Destiny of the Daleks – Shada | The Leisure Hive – The Keeper of Traken | Logopolis – The Visitation | Black Orchid – Mawdryn Undead | Terminus – The Awakening | Frontios – Attack of the Cybermen | Vengeance on Varos – In A Fix With Sontarans | The Mysterious Planet – Paradise Towers | Delta and the Bannermen – The Greatest Show in the Galaxy | Battlefield – The TV Movie >

Mirror Dance won the Hugo award for 1995; the other nominees were John Barnes’ Mother of Storms, Nancy Kress’ Beggars and Choosers, Michael Bishop’s Brittle Innings and James Morrow’s Towing Jehovah. The only other one I’ve read is the Kress, which I really didn’t think was very good. This was the year that the inexplicably award-winning Robert Sawyer got a Nebula for The Terminal Experiment, but the BSFA shortlist included three excellent books – Baxter’s The Time Ships, McDonald’s Chaga and Priest’s The Prestige. (Baxter won.)

I’m a huge Bujold fan, and Mirror Dance is the start of the superb four-book sequence of the Vorkosigan series that continues with Memory, Komarr and A Civil Campaign. I had forgotten just how much I liked it. It’s a tale of redemption, of Mark, the lost clone twin, discovering his own place in the universe rather than being defined as Miles’ double; it’s a tale of resurrection, Miles himself dying and being brought back to life; and it’s a tale of unorthodox families, Mark’s relationship with the Vorkosigans of Barrayar contrasting with the corrupt and brutal dynasties of Jackson’s Whole, with the Durona clones caught in the middle. It’s the first book apart from Ethan of Athos in the series which is not largely told from the viewpoint of Miles or his mother, but from the point of view of a character who has previously been defined by their relationship with Miles. But also Bujold uses Mark to show us Miles’s flaws in a way she had not previously done: her unlikely hero has a dark side as well, and Mark both resembles him and differs from him. It’s an excellent book and I think might even be a good one to recommend to newcomers to the Vorkosigan universe.

(Only two more Hugo winners to go.)

i) births and deaths

15 December 1940: birth of Pennant Roberts, who directed The Face of Evil (1977), The Sun Makers (1977), The Pirate Planet (1978), Shada (unbroadcast but would have been 1980), Warriors of the Deep (1984) and Timelash (1985).

15 December 1945: birth of Sarah Hellings, who directed Mark of the Rani (1985).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

15 December 1973: broadcast of first episode of The Time Warrior, starting Season 11. First appearance of both Elizabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith and the Sontarans. Scientists are being kidnapped through time to the medieval castle of Irongron, where his mysterious guest Linx is forcing them to repair his spaceship.

15 December 1979: broadcast of fourth episode of Nightmare of Eden. The ships are separated and the Doctor captures the bad guys in the projection.

i) births and deaths

14 December 1919: birth of Michael Bilton, who played Charles de Teligny The Massacre (1966), Collins the butler in Pyramids of Mars (1975) and a Time Lord (one of the guys who isn’t Gold Usher) in The Deadly Assassin (1976).

14 December 1926: birth of Alan Rowe, who played Evans and the voice of Space Control in The Moonbase (1967), Edward of Wessex in The Time Warrior (1973-74), Skinsale in Horror of Fang Rock (1977), which I am watching at the moment, and Garif in Full Circle (1980).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

14 December 1963: broadcast of “The Firemaker”, fourth episode of the story we now call An Unearthly Child. Ian makes fire for Za, who defeats Kal and tries to force the time travellers to stay with the tribe; but they escape.

14 December 1978: broadcast of seventh episode of The Invasion. UNIT successfully uses a Russian rocket to destroy the source of the Cybermen’s signal.

14 December 1988: broadcast of first episode of The Greatest Show in the Galaxy. The Doctor and Ace land on Segonax and are captured by the Psychic Circus.

broadcast anniversaries

13 December 1975: broadcast of fourth episode of The Android Invasion – last appearance of Ian Marter as Harry and John Levene as Benton. The Doctor and Sarah successfully thwart the Kraals. Hooray!

13 December 1980: broadcast of fourth episode of State of Decay. The Doctor kills the Great Vampire with a rocket through his heart and he, K9, Adric and Romana escape. Hooray!

A BBC Quick Read book, which has the Tenth Doctor and Martha rescuing King Edward VII from kidnapping by the Judoon, who themselves are ensnared in someone else’s evil plan. Does what it says on the tin, in standard Terrance Dicks mode, with random added Arthur Conan Doyle for extra colour.

The last few Emperors of the West stagger on, with Ricimer, a Germanic general in the Roman army, effectively ruling what is left from behind the scenes, more or less ignored by Byzantium, alternatively invaded and propped up by Genseric from the African Vandal kingdom, with a brief spurt of activity under Majorian. After Ricimer’s death, the Gothic leader Odoacer simply abolishes the position of Emperor in Italy; it is not even clear what year this happened in.

births and deaths

12 December 1961: birth of Sarah Sutton, who played Nyssa, companion to the Fourth and fifth Doctors, in 1981-83.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

12 December 1964: broadcast of “The End of Tomorrow”, fourth episode of the story we now know as The Dalek Invasion of Earth. Barbara and Jenny break out of London in the truck; Susan likes the idea of a fresh start; Ian is menaced by the Slyther.

iii) date specified in Who-linked fiction

12 December 1901: John Lafayette is transported to ancient Babylon, in Kate Orman’s novel Walking to Babylon (1998) – yet another December date in one of her books. I can’t remember if the date is also specified in the audio version, where he is played by Barnaby Edwards and the High Priestess by Elisabeth Sladen.

• Neil Armstrong Talks About The First Moon Walk : Krulwich Wonders… : NPR
  Neil Armstrong responds to NPR piece about the first moon walk.
  (tags: space)

I’ve written obituaries for political parties here on previous occasions – for the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition, the Newtownabbey Ratepayers Association, and the southern Progressive Democrats. This week, to use a medical analogy, life support was turned off for the Northern Ireland branch of the Conservative Party, though it has not yet quite stopped breathing. From the Newsletter, Sam McBride reports and Alex Kane analyses last week’s decision by the Conservative headquarters in London that the party will stand no candidates for the Assembly election next year, but will support the UUP; it may stand candidates for the local council elections on the same day, but they will be expected to work with the UUP once elected. (See also commentary from Ian Parsley and “Chekov”.) It’s really a best possible outcome for the UUP, which now has essentially unconditional support from the main party in the UK government without the hassle of having to deal with its local activists, and a worst possible outcome for the Northern Ireland Tories, who don’t even have the rather minor satisfaction of a decent burial but are being let wither on the vine.

As I’ve said frequently enough, I never saw any virtues in the integrationist project – the proposition that Northern Ireland should simply be treated the same way as Yorkshire by the UK’s central government – let alone its ‘equal citizenship’ mutation – the proposition that the solution to Northern Ireland’s problems would come if only the English political parties would organise and fight elections there. However, it is entirely right and fair that the latter proposition should be put to the test. I expected that it would fail that test, and I am not at all surprised that those who were most closely engaged with it have now reached the conclusion that it has indeed failed. They are of course blaming the fiendish UUP for stitching them up, and the spineless London Tories for rolling over to UUP demands, but the simple fact is that the voters never supported the project in sufficient numbers to make it viable, and so it was doomed.

Oddly enough I bumped into Tom Elliott, the new UUP leader, at a reception in Brussels on Thursday night, and congratulated him on doing in a few weeks what others had been trying to do for years, i.e. killing off the Northern Ireland Conservatives. He grinned modestly but appreciatively. His leadership has had a rocky start, with numerous high-profile defections, but this is a concrete achievement in clearing the undergrowth.

i) births and deaths

11 December 1945: birth of Zienia Merton, who played Ping-Cho in Marco Polo (1964) and the registrar in The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith (2009), a 45-year gap between appearances in Who and its spinoffs which is unlikely to be repeated.

ii) broadcast and webcast anniversaries

11 December 1966: broadcast of “Counter Plot”, fifth episode of the story we now call The Daleks’ Master Plan. Sara, the Doctor and Steven are transported to Mira and menaced by the invisible natives before being captured by the Daleks.

11 December 2003: webcast of fifth episode of Scream of the Shalka. The Shalka activate the other sleeper communities and the end of the world draws nigh.