My rewatching of Old Who has now brought me to Season 15, the first season with no native earthlings on the Tardis.

Horror of Fang Rock is a strong start to Season 15, with Terrance Dicks proving once again that he can actually write. Sure, it’s a base-under-siege story; but it’s one of the better ones, with everyone being killed off except our crew in the end.

It is a particularly good story for Leela, who is utterly exasperated by the screamy Adelaide (she does a brilliant eye-roll when Adelaide faints) and stuns the other Edwardians with her relaxed attitude to death; it makes her horror when Reuben-the-Rutan is unharmed by her knife all the more striking. It’s a bit un-Doctorish to wipe out the entire Rutan mothership as they land, but gives a satisfying bang at the end of the story.

The Invisible Enemy is three excellent episodes of space opera story – the Doctor possessed by an evil virus that feeds on sophisticated intelligence, andd therefore leaves Leela alone! – whose quality is then killed with the signal visual catastrophe of the giant prawn virus. Until then it’s been excellent – the closest we’ve been to standard space opera since Frontier in Space, and fairly successful at that; with extra spookiness of the cloned Doctor and Leela exploring the real Doctor’s brain, while the real Leela holds off the attackers (and betrays some body-image insecurity).

But the giant prawn is a striking example of an ill-designed effect wrecking viewer enjoyment of the story (and this after several episodes of excellent model work). It’s not quite as catastrophic as the dinosaurs in Invasion of the Dinosaurs, but that’s only because it’s in just one episode out of four rather than six out of six. Kim Newman has opined that this is the story where Doctor Who starts going downhill because of the introduction of K9; I disagree, but the moment when the giant prawn emerges at the end of the third episode is a low point in a season which doesn’t have a lot of high points.

(Also I’m a bit troubled by Leela and the infected Lowe driving the Tardis to get the unconscious Doctor to the Bi-Al asteroid. It’s out of character for the infected Lowe not to clobber Leela, it’s out of character for Leela to know how to pilot the Tardis, and it’s out of character for the Doctor to let anyone else do it. A sad precursor of the Tardis-as-taxi syndrome of the Fifth Doctor’s era.)

This is, so far, a season of re-trying tested formats. After the base-under-siege story and the space opera story, we have a new take on the Hinchcliffe-era horror story in Image of the Fendahl. It mostly works, and if it weren’t for the fact that it comes so soon after the even more successful horror stories done in the Hinchcliffe era this would have a better rep among fans. But I think it does a lot of things better than, say, The Masque of Mandragora or the Pertwee stories which used similar themes, and the Fendahleen themselves are memorably icky. The tension between and among the scientists and the Tyler family keeps us guessing as well.

It’s also yet another brilliant story for Leela, by her creator Chris Boucher, who wrote three of the six stories featuring her and the Doctor without K9. She is great at challenging and teasing the Doctor, efficiently violent but also pragmatic, also just a little vain about her new dress. More on this later, but Jameson’s performance is tremendously enjoyable here as elsewhere.

I have a feeling that last time I watched The Sun Makers, for some reason it was immediately after watching Underworld so it looked rather good in comparison. However, in sequence after the brilliance of Season 14 and the more modest successes of Horror of Fang Rock and Image of the Fendahl, it is pretty awful. I think I can establish several specific reasons for the awfulness, one of which was not really anyone’s fault, but the remainder of which could have been corrected.

The unchangeable factor is that the weather for the location filming was dull, so the story gets off to a tremendously dull start; it’s difficult to make the roof of a cigarette factory in Bristol look much like the top of a kilometer-high apartment block on Pluto, but it helps if the weather cooperates. I wonder if there’s also a bit of an unconscious assumption on my part that cuddly blurry film should represent contemporary Earth settings, and sharp-edged videotape the future; so the setting looks even more like Bristol than Pluto.

But the other factors were simply mistakes made by Holmes in the script and not sufficiently rounded off in the editing process. The story is simply very nasty. The rebels are really very unpleasant people, threatening to kill him and Leela; we don’t really see why the Doctor should choose to help such unlikeable (and otherwise unmemorable) individuals. The Company of course are even worse, which is OK since they are the baddies, but the attempted steaming of Leela is a really horrific prospect, much worse actually than any of the supposedly extreme violence of the previous season.

It does have its good points. The interplay between Gatherer Hade and the Collector is great fun (though again Holmes is usually smarter than to give all the good dialogue to the villains) and K9 gets to be very useful in his first proper story after joining the Tardis. Though even then, the framing narrative of the chess match in the console room doesn’t quite gel. I don’t think I’ll watch this one again, unless the DVD commentary is particularly good.

My previous memory of Underworld placed it as by some way the worst Tom Baker story, bolstered by both the Doctor Who Dynamic Rankings site and the DWM Mighty 200 survey (which both put it fourth from the bottom, ahead of only Time and the Rani, Timelash and The Twin Dilemma in that order). It’s not quite as bad as I remembered. There are some fairly serious holes (like, the length of time the Minyans have been on the quest, to the point that one wonders how useful the race banks would be to them once they brought them home), but it’s decently set up and resolved. The first two episodes in particular hang together rather well, the first being set-up on the Minyans’ ship and the second the initial exploration of the P7E world. It’s also the first serious expansion of the history of the Time Lords since Leela arrived. (Of course we get more of that in the next story; incidentally, this is the last story before Four to Doomsday in which the Doctor is the only Time Lord to appear.)

There are two problems with Underworld, both of which really manifest much more in the second half than the first. One is the persistent use of CSO to show the cast exploring the P7E world’s caves. Seen out of context, this is jarring and distracting; in the context of mid-70s Who, it is not quite as bad, apart from the awful scene at the start of the third episode where Leela, Idas and the Doctor float to the centre of the asteroid by vaguely waving their hands, which is the moment when the story was killed for me on first watching when I was ten and which has destroyed my suspension of disbelief every time I’ve rewatched it since. The second is that some of the cast are not very good. In particular, the Seers and their minions (as opposed to the Minyans) are very lack-lustre in their delivery, and Tom Baker stops pretending to take it seriously. It’s all rather reminiscent of The Sensorites, and not in a good way.

Once again, I found that The Invasion of Time was not quite as bad as I remembered. In particular, Tom Baker, who always loved a chance to be evil!Doctor, is very watchable in the first few episodes as he invites and then destroys the Vardan invaders. The rationale for his behaviour even makes sense, given the Vardans’ powers. Indeed, there’s a recognisable theme in the story of being drawn into a situation that then turns out very different. John Arnatt actually makes a better Brush than his predecessor, more confident, suspicious and cunning, and Milton Johns and Chris Tranchell are at least adequate as Castellan Kelner and Commander Andred. The special effects for the pre-materialisation Vardans are poor but just on the edge of acceptable; the anticlimax when they just turn out to be blokes in cheap helmets could have been worked rather better though.

Then we have one of the best episode endings in the whole of Who when the Sontarans show up – and older viewers will recall the discussion of Gallifrey as a Sontaran military target back in The Time Warrior. This promising setup for the last two episodes is then completely wasted in 25 minutes of running around outside the Tardis followed by another 25 running around inside the Tardis. Nothing interesting is done by anyone, the Shobogans in particular turning out to be completely superfluous.

In addition, the stakes of the overall narrative of the Whoniverse are raised unfeasibly high – the key hidden from every President by every Chancellor (so no Chancellor ever became President? Did anyone tell Goth?) and the Weapon Too Terrible To Use (which, of course, is used) followed by Leela’s abrupt departure which at least reasonably well performed though it comes out of the blue. But I think I would recommend first-time viewers to stop at the fourth episode, and make up their own ending.

There are two ways you can cut the Doctor Who companion: either have them as someone pretty ‘normal’, a contemporary earthling with whom viewers can identify (as with Ben and Polly, and throughout the whole Third Doctor / Sarah Jane, Sixth and Seventh Doctor, and New Who eras) or else as someone who is different to us, who has to explain themselves to us in the same way that the Doctor does. For much of Old Who, the companions were actually a mixture of the two; the only periods when the Tardis has absolutely no contemporary Earthlings on board are the early run from The Time Meddler to The Massacre, the two seasons and one story with Jamie and Victoria/Zoe, and the four and a bit seasons from The Deadly Assassin to The Keeper of Traken. This last phase is not only the longest, but the most alien: at least Steven, Vicki, Katarina, Sara Kingdom, Jamie, Victoria and Zoe are all putatively born on Earth (three in the past and four in the future), while this is true of none of Leela, K9, Romana, Adric or Nyssa.

One of the things I love about Tom Baker as the Doctor is that he is so alien; there seems to have been a definite decision by Holmes and Hinchcliffe, followed by Graham Williams and his script editors, to make the companions alien as well. It’s a risk, of course; Leela could easily have been a one-joke character – think of Katarina, way back in 1965, who was rescued from the ruins of burning Troy and then killed off four episodes later during the Daleks’ Master Plan. Originally she was supposed to be only in The Face of Evil, and then only for a couple more stories, and of course Leela’s character is a bit limited in that the more she develops, the less she becomes like Leela, so she had a rather finite lifetime.

But Louise Jameson is superb – it’s not surprising that of the Old Who companions not already established professionally, she had much the best subsequent career. She lifts the one-joke savage to a fascinating human being – rather like Tom Baker’s Doctor, we keep watching because we really want to know what she will do next.

Fellow Leela fans will want to track down her six spinoff novels and even more so the fantastic Gallifrey audio from Big Finish which bring her together with Romana II, both K9s, and various others (including Romana I and the Prosecutor from Trial of a Time Lord). I have been less convinced by her appearances in the Companion Chronicles.

So, a season where Hinchcliffe has gone and Holmes is going; where several stories simply lose their way after decent starts, for a combination of script and technical reasons. I hate to be harsh, but the last season with similar difficulties was the last Letts/Dicks season in 1973-74, just before Hinchcliffe and Holmes took over. My memory of the Key to Time season is that it was mostly better; at an episode a day, I should be reporting on it in the first week of February.

< 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 >

Brilliant video presentation of world viday statistics. (hat-tip to .)

i) births and deaths

7 January 1913: birth of Francis De Wolff, who played Vasor in The Keys of Marinus (1964) and Agamemnon in The Myth Makers (1965).

7 January 1924: birth of Geoffrey Bayldon, who played Organon in The Creature from the Pit (1979) and the alternate timeline Doctor-who-never-left-Gallifrey in Big Finish audios Auld Mortality (2003) and A Storm of Angels (2005). Also Catweazle.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

7 January 1967: broadcast of fourth episode of The Highlanders. The Doctor rescues everyone, Grey is led off to jail, and Jamie leaves with the Tardis crew.

7 January 1978: broadcast of first episode of Underworld. The Doctor lands on the Minyans’ ship, and they are bombarded by space debris. I watched this again last week and the first two episodes are not as bad as I remembered (the second two, however, are).

• Were champagne glasses modeled on the breasts of Madame de Pompadour?
  Looking at the question objectively, I think we'd have to agree that the female breast, however interesting in situ, would make for a singularly misshapen champagne glass. But you know how it is with these male fantasies.
  (tags: history genderandsexandsexuality)
• The Twelfth Doctors | Tor.com | Science fiction and fantasy | Blog posts
  Speculation on past and future other Doctors, including Rowan Atkinson (who turns 55 on 7 January).
  (tags: doctorwho)

Following on from the Sowerby resonance of just over a year ago, I now find myself having just finished one book and reading two more which feature a character called Barquentine. Granted, Gormenghast is the sequel to Titus Groan so in fact it’s the same character, the heir and successor of Sourdust, the Master of Ritual; but I was then startled to encounter his cousin or descendant Susan Barquentine in Dave Stone’s Doctor Who novel Heart of TARDIS. Both characters are sinister and somewhat faily (Mervyn Peake’s Barquentine is sinister partly because he has a wooden leg and scoliosis, the Dave Stone one is a sinister succubus-like entity) but I’ll discuss those problems later. What interests me now is, has anyone reading this ever actually met a real person whose real name was Barquentine?

My Delicio.us posting skipped a beat yesterday but seems to be back on form today. These were the links it should have posted:

What, child? What child? – comments on Upcoming Edition of Huckleberry Finn to Have N-word Removed and Replaced with Slave. “While I can smile at the intentions here, the method turns my stomach to the point of vomiting…the word “nigger” is a fact of American history and the current cultural fabric and every attempt to run away from the problem of its existence only buttresses the negative forces of ignorance powering it.”

Because I’m Clever – Nasty Canasta on the Tenth Doctor

New Year… New Money – “So as Estonia enters the new year, it adopts a new currency. In fact, given the horrors of Estonian history over the past century, it is the ninth time that Estonia has been forced to change its money: 1910: Tsarist Roubles, 1916: Occupation Marks, 1918: Estonian Marks, 1928: Estonian Kroon, 1940: Soviet Rouble, 1941: Occupation Marks, 1944: Soviet Roubles, 1992: Estonian Kroon. The difference is that this time the symbolism is one of peaceful prosperity and not of occupation.”

Chicks Dig the Eleventh Doctor – Tara O’Shea and Lynne Thomas on the Eleventh Doctor

Fezzes Aren’t Cool – Mark Waid on the Eleventh Doctor

If you have $8.5 million to spare, the Moldovans would like to sell you half a dozen warplanes (not used since 1997 though).

From the British Medical Journal this week:

the paper was in fact an elaborate fraud… not one of the 12 cases reported in the 1998 Lancet paper was free of misrepresentation or undisclosed alteration, and that in no single case could the medical records be fully reconciled with the descriptions, diagnoses, or histories published in the journal… A great deal of thought and effort must have gone into drafting the paper to achieve the results he [Wakefield] wanted: the discrepancies all led in one direction… Wakefield has been given ample opportunity either to replicate the paper’s findings, or to say he was mistaken. He has declined to do either.” – Fiona Godlee, editor in chief, Jane Smith, deputy editor, Harvey Marcovitch, associate editor

How the case against the MMR vaccine was fixed – Brian Deer

Everything about this case fills me with disgust and rage.

i) births and deaths

6 January 1955: birth of Rowan Atkinson, who played the Ninth Doctor in The Curse of Fatal Death.

6 January 2009: death of John Scott Martin, Dalek operator and player of many parts in Old Who.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

6 January 1968: broadcast of third episode of The Enemy of the World. The one surviving episode of the story, with Denes kept prisoner in a corridor (!), Victoria working in the kitchen, and Salamander realising that something is up.

6 January 1973: broadcast of second episode of The Three Doctors. The Second Doctor, the Brigadier, Benton and the Tardis are transported to Omega’s world to join the Third Doctor and Jo.

6 January 1979: broadcast of third episode of The Power of Kroll. The Swampies try to execute Romana, the Doctor and Rohm-Dutt, but they manage to escape by screaming; and Kroll rises from the deep.

6 January 1982: broadcast of second episode of Warriors of the Deep. The Silurians attack the seabase and the Doctor and Tegan are trapped by the Myrka.

• First Past the Post: a damning report on a system that 'fails the fairness test' | openDemocracy
  "FPTP fails on its own terms"
  (tags: ukpolitics)
• Chatham House – Publications – The World Today – Archive – View Article
  "Conspiracy theories are often used to justify political actions. This is especially true in Russia where the 1990s are regularly portrayed as the decade when the West set out deliberately to 'weaken and humiliate' Russia… But when it comes to western motives and policy, there is one problem with the Putin and Karaganov line of argument. It just does not accord with the facts. "
  (tags: eu russia)
• 10-year-old Canadian youngest ever to discover supernova – thestar.com
  God, I used to dream about that sort of thing when I was ten!
  (tags: astronomy)
• democracyarsenal.org: What Does It Mean To Support Terrorists?
  The problems of the recent Supreme Court ruling
  (tags: waronterror)

Back when I was an undergraduate I spent two years living in the “Colony”, the sprawl of buildings owned by Clare College at the foot of Castle Hill. The central building of the complex is a late Victorian mansion called Castlebrae, which had the following inscription on a plaque in the front hall:

I never went much to Castlebrae (see melancholy footnote at the end of this review) but was always intrigued by the plaque and hope that some day I would find out the story behind it. Thanks to Janet Soskice’s book, Sisters Of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Found the Hidden Gospels, I now know much more: the Smith sisters, Agnes and Margaret, born in Scotland and fabulously rich, developed a strong interest in the roots of ancient scripture and had the means, motivation and ability to cultivate the monks of St Catherine’s monastery in Sinai, where in 1892 they discovered a palimpsest which contained the oldest Syriac text of the Gospels known today. Then in 1896 they alerted Jewish scholars to the existence of the Cairo Genizah, which is still being transcribed in Cambridge to this day (see Mark Glickman’s awestruck account of a visit to the Porter’s Lodge at Castlebrae). For these efforts the University of Cambridge gave them no official recognition at all (it was not until 1921 that women were even awarded degrees for which they had qualified, and not until 1948 that they were given formal equality with men in the university). They also founded Westminster College, which nestles at the corner of Madingley Road. Janet Soskice has made it a fascinating story of women infiltrating the intellectual establishment (granted, rich women who had no children and no need to actually work) in the social and geopolitical context of the day. Strongly recommended.

One small point that interested me personally was reference to Sir Robert Ball, the Irish astronomer, as being a fellow-worshipper with the twins at the small Cambridge Presbyterian church (which opened in 1891). Ball, a Protestant from Youghal, Co. Cork, and former professor at Trinity College Dublin, must surely have been brought up Church of Ireland rather than Presbyterian; in addition I happen to know, because he wrote about this in a letter to Oliver Lodge which I have seen, that he was in fact an atheist, but deliberately concealed this from his very devout wife. Her father was from Belfast and I guess it’s therefore more likely that she was a Presbyterian, so presumably Ball himself mixed with the church circle (and probably attended even though he did not believe). You’ll find them both buried under a large Celtic cross in the cemetery off Huntingdon Road. John Couch Adams, Ball’s predecessor in the Cambridge chair who famously failed to discover the planet Neptune, lies under another Celtic cross not far away (his wife was also Irish).

Both of the Smith sisters married rather late (Agnes in 1883 and Margaret in 1887), and each was widowed after only three years of marriage, a grim coincidence. The only person who I knew at all well who lived in Castlebrae was a charming medical student, a year or two younger than me, who often invited me for delicious meals which she would cook with her boyfriend, a fellow medic, studying at Churchill College. They got married shortly after their graduation, and I’m sorry to report that he fell ill and died about three years later; he was only 25. I’ve totally lost touch with her now; her married name is not uncommon, and I think she may have become a GP in the south of England (at least Google reveals two GPs in the south of England with that name). That is my melancholy footnote.

The Gormenghast trilogy did well in my 2011 reading poll, so I’ve got underway; I realised that I have in fact read the first two books, so this is my first reread of 2011.

Titus Groan starts with the birth and ends with the first birthday celebrations of the heir to the grand, tradition-bound castle of Gormenghast; every grand fantasy citadel since owes something to Mervyn Peake (thinking, most recently in my reading, of Isse Tower in Cecilia Dart-Thornton’s The Ill-Made Mute, but there are many others). Peake weaves a grand miasma of doom and foreboding over the sterile rituals of the castle, introducing also the villainous Steerpike who seeks to exploit the gaps between the formal rituals and the emotional needs of the ruling family for his own profit.

It’s not terribly clear what era Peake imagines the novel to be set in. The internal workings feel rather Edwardian in a way, conscious of past glory and ignorant of the future. The description of the mud-huts of the villagers outside the castle sounds medieval at best. It also has to be said that not a lot actually happens; my memory is that this is mostly scene-setting for the second book.

I’m going to try and track Bechdel passes and fails for the fiction I read this year. Titus Groan is a technical pass. There is more than one woman characterr; they do talk to each other. Sometimes they talk about Titus, who is a baby not a man, so perhaps such conversations do get through the Bechdel test. The earl’s demented twin sisters burble to each other about many things, not all of which are men, but it’s not clear that those are really conversations in the full Bechdel sense. Anyway, towards the end, Titus’s sister Fuchsia reminisces about her childhood with her nanny, which I guess does qualify in that no men are mentioned.

Anyway, on to Volume II now.

i) births and deaths

5 January 1929: birth of Norman Kay, who composed the incidental music for An Unearthly Child (1963), The Keys of Marinus, (1964) and The Sensorites (also 1964).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

5 January 1974: broadcast of fourth episode of The Time Warrior. Rubeish and the Doctor return the kidnapped scientists to the twentieth century; Linx kills Irongron and is in turn killed by Boba Fett Hal; and his spaceship explodes on take-off, destroying the castle.

5 January 1980: broadcast of third episode of The Horns of Nimon. The Doctor and Romana discover the source of the Nimons’ energy, but Soldeed catches them.

5 January 1982: broadcast of second episode of Castrovalva. Tegan and Nyssa jettison a quarter of the Tardis rooms, and bring what’s left to Castrovalva.

5 January 1983: broadcast of second episode of Arc of Infinity. Tegan goes to Amsterdam to find her cousins; the Doctor is apparently executed by the Time Lords.

5 January 1984: broadcast of first episode of Warriors of the Deep, starting Season 21. The Tardis lands in an undersea base in the year 2084, and is caught up in human Cold War politics and the rise of the reptiles.

5 January 1985: broadcast of first episode of Attack of the Cybermen, starting Season 22. The Tardis lands in London, where Lytton is doing something sinister; meanwhile on Telos, something else sinister is happening.

My first completed read of 2011 is a download from Google Books, rejoicing in the title: The Hiſtory of That moſt Eminent Stateſman, Sir John Perrott, Knight of the Bath and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, a 1728 edition of a manuscript probably written by his son Sir James Perrot in the 1590s, after Perrot’s death but before Elizabeth I’s. Perrot is important in my project on my ancestor Nicholas White in that they worked together in Ireland when Perrot was a senior English appointee and White one of the most senior Irish-born government officials; also, they both died in the Tower of London (awaiting execution in Perrot’s case, awaiting trial in White’s) in the trails of the bizarre Denis O’Roghan conspiracy. I was particularly hoping to find our more about this last from this book, since it actually promises on the front page that it will describe “His Fatal CATASTROPHEILL and TESTAMENT and his DEATH in the Tower, 1592″, but unfortunately the writer decides to skip the crucial details with frustrating discretion:

Now havinge related Sir John Perrott’s Life and Services thus farre, my wearied Pen is unwilling to proſecute his Storie any farther; partly becauſe the Finiſhing thereof will be laborious, and aske ſome Lengthe of Time and of Diſcourſe; but principally for that the Cataſtrophe of his Life was very tragicall; and to writte all that happned therin, may, perchaunce, breede Offence, and touch the Proceedings of Times paſt too much: Therfore for this time, there ſhall noe more be ſayd of hym, but this, that his whole Life was lyke to a tragical Comedie, in the Beginninge prosperous and joyfull; in the Ende unfortunate and lamentable

So we will not find here the reasons for Perrott’s fall from grace, let alone the unfortunate fact that he was unable to convincingly deny having described the Queen as a ‘base bastard piss-kitchen’. We do, however, have Perrott’s own will, written when he was already under sentence of death, in which he explains of course that it is everyone else’s fault, inspired by a startling though perhaps not very surprising source:

And nowe I make my Complaints to God and all good Men, that I have bene moſt falſelie accuſed through the Malice and Envie of ſome wicked and evill diſpoſed Perſons, Schollers of Machiavelli, that I have been a Tratour to my Soveraygne Queene and Countrie

Sir Nicholas White gets three direct mentions, first as helping to deal with the ‘Canenaughs’ (presumably the Kavanaghs of Carlow), then as one of a number of officials writing a joint letter to the Queen in defence of Perrott in 1585, and then writing a farewell poem to commemorate Perrott’s departure from Ireland in 1588.

It’s an interesting enough primary source, but I’ve done enough reading by now to know that it somewhat exaggerates Perrott’s achievements and almost completely omits his failings. There are more recent and more scholarly (but also much more expensive) books about Perrott, so I will just have to obtain them somehow.

Having missed the lunar eclipse two weeks ago due to the snowfall (still not completely cleared), I managed to see the partially eclipsed sun rising this morning as I drove to Tienen (where U now spends two days a week). In fact it was pretty difficult to miss, directly in front of me along the line of the motorway, huge and crescent; it would have been terrifying to people in prehistoric cultures who might see such a sight once or twice in a lifetime. No wonder that the ancient Babylonians buckled down to eclipse prediction as soon as they could.

This is a fun little exercise – seeing which books were published 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 150 years ago and so on. I’ve imposed arbitrary cut-offs based on LibraryThing ownership, which means that, for instance, we lose Brian Aldiss’ The Primal Urge and Harry Harrison’s The Stainless Steel Rat, but it’s a diverse enough array as it is.

I invite further discussion and recommendations (or dis-recommendations) in comments.

broadcast anniversaries

4 January 1964: broadcast of “The Escape”, third episode of the story we now call The Daleks. Susan meets Alydon the Thal in the forest, and returns to the others in the city, where they capture a Dalek.

4 January 1969: broadcast of second episode of The Krotons. Zoe and the Doctor take the test and enter the machine; the Krotons manifest themselves.

4 January 1975: broadcast of second episode of Robot. K1, the robot, kills a cabinet minister and threatens to kill the Doctor.

4 January 1982: broadcast of first episode of Castrovalva first full story with Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor, starting Season 19 of Old Who. The new Doctor collapses; Adric is captured by the Master; and the Tardis is heading back to the Big Bang…

4 January 1989: broadcast of fourth episode of The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, ending Season 25. The Gods of Ragnarok are behind the circus; the Doctor defies them and the circus collapses into rubble.

• Ambling Along the Aqueduct: The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2010, pt. 28: Haddayr Copley-Woods
  Review of Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá. "I have not read such delightful, convincing, and readable science writing since the dearly lamented Stephen Jay Gould. This book is funny, absorbing, clear-eyed, and deeply anti-patriarchal in a way that feels incidental to the facts rather than rising from any agenda — which I find utterly, gleefully vindicating and deeply satisfying."
  (tags: sexandsexualityandgender)
• Asking the Wrong Questions: The 2011 Hugo Awards: An Appeal to the Hugo Nominators
  "Dear Hugo nominators: please do not nominate Connie Willis's Blackout/All Clear as a single work."
  (tags: sf)
• The Walking Wounded | Tor.com | Science fiction and fantasy | Blog posts
  Graham Sleight on the Ninth Doctor: "Eccleston and the Ninth Doctor may now be remembered for their refusals, but refusals can sometimes be the bravest thing to do."
  (tags: doctorwho)

Fans of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien should check out their guest appearance in Jonathan Morris’s comic strip story in the latest Doctor Who Magazine (dated 12 January, cover featuring Matt Smith in a Santa hat with Michael Gambon and Katherine Jenkins). Very pleasing.

edited to add: Today is Tolkien’s birthday! (3 January 1892)

It seems that Fianna Fáil have suddenly discovered the virtues of abolishing the upper house of the Irish parliament (see today’s Irish Times, here and here). Obviously, given my previous post on the subject, I think this is a good idea. However, I also have to agree with the opposition spokespeople quoted in the Irish Times who see the latest initiative as an attempt by the government to put off the general election for a couple more months.

Abolishing the Seanad is not quite as straightforward as deleting Articles 18-19 of the constitution, which deal with the composition of the Seanad, and Articles 20-24, which deal with its relationship with the Dail. There are a few other issues to be addressed as well.

1. The Seanad does allow for extra time and space for draft legislation to be tweaked before it is enacted. Will the Dail add some extra committee stage to its own procedures, and/or (my own favoured option) establish a pool of external experts to give their non-binding but formal opinions on Bills?
2. Article 14.2: At present, in the case of the death, incapacity, or absence of the President, the presidential powers are exercised by a three-member commission consisting of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the Ceann Comhairle, and the Cathaoirleach of Seanad Éireann. Do you just delete the last of these, or add a different third member?
3. Article 27.1: half of the Seanad, plus a third of the Dail, may at present petition the President to call a referendum on a Bill before it is signed. This has never been used. Obviously it’s impractical to just allow a third of TDs to call a referendum; but should the entire provision be scrapped, or perhaps go for some kind of provision for say 5% of registered voters to trigger a referendum by petition (as in the long-forgotten Article 47 of the Irish Free State constitution, also never used)? Myself, I hate referendums and would prefer the first option, but there’s room for a debate.
4. Article 31.2.i: The Cathaoirleach is a member of the Council of State. Simply delete, or replace with someone else? (Probably the former.)
5. Article 12, Article 33.5, and Article 35.4: The President, the Comptroller and Auditor General, and judges of the High Court and Supreme Court, can at present be removed from office only by vote of both Dail and Seanad. Is it reasonable to make that possible by vote of the Dail only? (Probably it is.)

I’m not totally convinced by the line that the Seanad should only be abolished as part of a wider programme of institutional reform – the case against its retention seems overwhelming and urgent to me. But I must say that given these tedious but necessary details which need to be ironed out, the case against rushing to abolish the Seanad in time to hold the referendum on election day seems pretty compelling.

i) births and deaths

3 January 1920: birth of Peter Stephens, who played Cyril, the Kitchen Boy, and the Knave of Hearts in The Celestial Toymaker (1966), and Lolem the high priest in The Underwater Menace (1967).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

3 January 1970: broadcast of first episode of Spearhead from SpaceThe Brain of Morbius. The Doctor and Sarah land on the desolate planet of Karn. The sinister brain surgeon Solon drugs the Doctor and the mysterious Sisterhood take the Tardis.

3 January 1981: broadcast of first episode of Warrior’s Gate. Biroc the Tharil escapes from Rorvik’s ship; the Doctor, Romana, Adric and K9 arrive at the intersection between N-Space and E-Space.

3 January 1983: broadcast of first episode of Arc of Infinity, starting Season 20. Two backpackers in Amsterdam are terrorised by the Ergon; the Doctor is attacked by a strange being in the Tardis, goes to Gallifrey and is shot by his own future self’s twin.

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I had been expecting a consolidated set of conclusions as to what we have learned from three volumes and 38 chapters; but less than half of this short essay consists of Gibbon’s brief (though penetrating) general observations on what has happened so far. Gibbon the diverges from his usual topic to apply the experience of the Roman Empire to contemporary Europe. I found this absolutely fascinating, partly because I am interested in Gibbon’s very English and Enlightenment articulation of the early stages of the European ideal as it has developed, partly also because he is a useful reality-based antidote, even after more than two centuries, to the neurotic apocalypticism one sometimes hears about the imminent fall of Western civilisation.

More here.

i) births and deaths

2 January 1948: birth of Deborah Watling, who played the Second Doctor’s companion Victoria in 1967-68.

2 January 2006: death of John Woodnutt, who played George Hibbert in Spearhead from Space (1970), the Draconian Emperor in Frontier in Space (1973), Broton and the Duke of Forgill in Terror of the Zygons (1976), and Seron in The Keeper of Traken (1981).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

2 January 1965: broadcast of “The Powerful Enemy”, first episode of the story we now call The Rescue, introducing Maureen O’Brien as new companion Vicki. The Tardis, now without Susan, lands on the planet Dido where the two survivors of a crashed space ship are terrorised by the mysterious Koquillion.

2 January 1971: broadcast of first episode of Terror of the Autons, starting Season 7 of Old Who and introducing Katy Manning as Jo Grant, Richard Franklin as Captain Mike Yates, and Roger Delgado as the Master. The Master takes over a circus, a radio telescope and a plastics factory.

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I read 278 books in 2010, counting the ten volumes of the Bloody Sunday Report as a single work (and I seem to have mislaid another book somewhere in my counting). This is down a bit from 2009’s 346 and 2008’s 374, mainly because I’ve been watching a 25-minute episode of Doctor Who every day, usually on my commute, and then writing it up. (Total page count however is down only to about 91,000 from 100,000, so in 2009, so I’ve been reading longer books.) 65 (23%) were by women (20% in 2009, 12% in 2008) and 24 (9%) by people of colour (5% in 2009, 2% in 2008) so I feel I am getting a little more diverse. 25 (9%) were rereads (11% in 2009).

Non-fiction

Total 66 (24%); about the same as 2009 (26%) and up from 2008 (19%).

Top non-fiction book of the year:
The Bloody Sunday Report, whose 5000 pages I read over the course of late June, July and early August. A tremendous and necessary enterprise.

Also excellent in category:
Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (vols 1 and 2 of the original, vol 1 of the Penguin edition)
Russell T. Davies and Benjamin Cook, Doctor Who: The Writer’s Tale: The Final Chapter
Thomas More, Utopia

Fiction (other than SF)

Total 50 (18%), same as 2009 (also 18%), very much up from 2008’s 7%.

Top non-genre book of the year:
Tove Jansson’s Fair Play. This may not be completely fair, as it is the freshest in my mind; certainly all the others blew me away when I read them.

Also excellent in category:
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
James Joyce, The Dubliners
Nevil Shute, A Town Like Alice
Leifur Eiricksson, Njal’s Saga

SF (other than Doctor Who)

Total 73 (26%), up from 23% in 2009 and 19% in 2008

Top sf book of the year:
Ian McDonald’s The Dervish House

Also excellent and read for the first time:
Terry Pratchett’s The Wee Free Men
Ursula K. Le Guin’s Lavinia
Lois McMaster Bujold’s Cryoburn
Chris Beckett, The Turing Test (short story collection)

Comics

18 (6%), though that goes up to 21 (8%) counting the Doctor Who comics, which would be the same as last year and well up from 2009’s 2%.

Top comic / graphic novel of the year
I voted without hesitation for Neil Gaiman’s Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? for the Hugo. It didn’t win.

Other comics / graphic novels particularly enjoyed:
Charles Burns, Black Hole
Bryan Lee O’Malley, Scott Pilgrim vols 1, 2 and especially 4 (less so 3 and 5 though still good)
Fumi Yoshinaga, Ooku: The Inner Chamber, Volume 1
Keiko Tobe, With the Light… Vol. 3
Gareth Roberts, The Betrothal of Sontar (Tenth Doctor)
Justin Richards, The Only Good Dalek (Eleventh Doctor)

Doctor Who (books and audiobooks)

Total 71 (26%) counting three comics, up a tad from 2009’s 70 (19%), but nowhere near 2008’s *cough* 177 (47%).

Top Doctor Who (audio)book of the year:
James Goss, Dead Air (audiobook); the very last Tenth Doctor story to be released.

Other decent efforts in the Whoniverse:
Best 11th Doctor story (other than the ones on TV): Stephen Cole, Ring of Steel
Best New Series Adventure: Dale Smith, The Many Hands
Best EDA: John Peel, Legacy of the Daleks
Best Virgin New Adventure: Mark Gatiss, Nightshade
Best Missing/Past Doctor Adventure: Jonathan Morris, Festival of Death
Best Doctor Who annual: 1971
Best other Whoniverse story: Joseph Lidster, In the Shadows (Torchwood audiobook)

Best audios:
Tough choice between Solitaire (Companion Chronicle with the Eighth Doctor companion Charley Pollard, and the Celestial Toymaker) and Legend of the Cybermen (end of the Sixth Doctor and Jamie McCrimmon trilogy, also bringing back Zoe).

Other good Big Finish audios:
I liked a lot of the BF main sequence this year, especially the Seventh Doctor stories A Thousand Tiny Wings, Project: Destiny and A Death in the Family, and the Fifth Doctor stories Cobwebs and Cradle of the Snake. Apart from Solitaire, mentioned above, I also liked A Town Called Fortune in the Companion Chronicles range.

I was less impressed by the revival of the ‘lost’ Sixth Doctor stories; the only one I felt was much good was Brian Finch’s Leviathan which was also the only one not originally written for the Sixth Doctor (or indeed for television). Likewise the year’s Eighth Doctor stories only really grabbed me with their conclusion, The Resurrection of Mars.

But I was delighted both with the first series of Jago & Litefoot and with the dramatisation of Moris Farhi’s lost First Doctor stories.

Best non-Big Finish audio:
Aliens in the Mind.

Most read author of the year: Ian Rankin (7 books) unless you count the ten volumes by Lord Savile of Newdigate and his colleagues. Also-rans in this category: Lois McMaster Bujold, Justin Richards and Brian Lee O’Malley with 5 each. (2009: William ShakespeareTerrance DicksIan MarterCharles Stross.)

Book of the year:
Certainly the one I spent longest reading, and wrote and thought most about: The Bloody Sunday Report.

Least favourite book of the year (that I actually finished):
Timeless Adventures: How Doctor Who Conquered TV, by Brian J. Robb

Sorry for the annoyance caused by my poll yesterday; I think I had jammed too much HTML into it for those who share my reading tastes reasonably closely. I’m therefore trying again, leaving out the hyperlinks to reviews this time; hopefully this will work better. (Leaving yesterday’s poll up, though, and will post grand totals from the two in due course.)

I started this project on 1 July last year, and expect that I will see it through to the end on 30 June, but thought I’d just put down some notes at the halfway point as to how I have been doing this.

I do the research for each day’s anniversaries on the Tardis Index File (Doctor Who wiki), but rather than just use the individual pages for each date (such as the one for today) I use the list of pages linking to that date (again, such as the one for today) and follow through each link to see if it is worth noting. Actors get listed if they have played a significant speaking role in more than one story. Writers, directors, and senior production team get listed if they have worked on any story at all and their birthdate is known to the Tardis Index File. Broadcast anniversaries always get included; other significant performance and production anniversaries almost always. I may sometimes skip dates supposedly specified in canon if it’s a spinoff story I haven’t heard of, or worse have actually read / watched / heard but can’t remember, but will try and err on the side of inclusion as well. I usually prepare the posts a couple of days in advance – they are synchronised across my various computers and my phone using Evernote, which I heartily recommend.

I started by posting to both my own LJ account and to , and will probably continue this but will lj-cut the posts to my own account even more than I currently do. The posts go through to my Twitter account (@nwbrux) but not to my Facebook feed which is full enough anyway.

Now that I’ve put the work in for half the year, I am thinking abou how to preserve the project, or even add to it, in some way other than in LJ archives. If I had the time and energy, I’d put some effort into updating the Tardis Index File daily pages, but there may be scope for some other way of presenting the info as well. I’d be very keen to hear thoughts from other people.

Anyway, on with today: three births, and seven broadcast anniversaries (including a record-breaking three on the same day, 1 January 2007), but no dates specified in canon other than follow-ons from yesterday’s rather large crop.

i) births and deaths

1 January 1935: birth of Dave Martin, co-author with Bob Baker of The Claws of Axos (1971), The Mutants (1972), The Three Doctors (1973), The Sontaran Experiment (1975), The Hand of Fear (1976), The Invisible Enemy (1977), Underworld (1978) and The Armageddon Factor (1979) as well as four spinoff novels.

1 January 1969: birth of Sophie Okonedo, who played Alison in Scream of the Shalka (2003) and Liz 10 in The Beast Below (2011).

1 January 1979: birth of Freema Agyeman, who played Martha in New Who’s third season (2007) and returned for a few episodes of the fourth season and the second season of Torchwood (both 2008) and a cameo in The End of Time II (2010).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

1 January 1966: broadcast of “Volcano”, eighth episode of the story we now call The Daleks’ Master Plan. The Daleks realise that the Taranium core is a fake; the Doctor, Steven and Sara encounter the Meddling Monk on the planet Tigus, also passing through Lord’s cricket ground and Trafalgar Square for New Year’s Eve.

1 January 1972: broadcast of first episode of Day of the Daleks, starting Season 9. Diplomat Sir Reginald Styles is under attack by mysterious guerrillas from a Dalek-dominated future.

1 January 1977: broadcast of first episode of The Face of Evil. First appearance of Louise Jameson as Leela. Leela is exiled from the tribe of the Sevateem for blasphemy; the Doctor finds that the Evil One has a familiar face.

1 January 2007: broadcast of Invasion of the Bane, the first episode of the new Sarah Jane Adventures. Sarah, her young neighbour Maria, and Maria’s annoying friend Kelsey (who is never seen again) team up to discover that the alien Bane are behind the new Bubble Shock! soft drink; Sarah adopts the human boy at the centre of their plan.

Also 1 January 2007: broadcast of Captain Jack Harkness (Torchwood), the one where the team get timeshifted back to 1941 and Jack falls in love with his namesake.

Also also 1 January 2007: broadcast of End of Days (Torchwood), the one where the big demon thing kills both Rhys and Jack but they come alive again.

1 January 2010: broadcast of The End of Time II, the last episode for the Tenth Doctor. The Time Lords return; the Master is persuaded to blast them back into the Time War; and the Doctor rescues Wilf, at the cost of his own life. And the new Doctor yells, “Geronimo!!!!”

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Thanks to those who have filled in my unread books poll community, of listing all the books one has read during the year and seeing who else has read the same ones.