This was an unexpected pleasure. It’s a very short book, with the framing narrative actually set in Belgium, concerning the wonderful society of Utopia which the main narrator claims to have visited in the coat-tails of Amerigo Vespucci’s explorations of the continent which now bears his name. The Penguin editor, writing in 1965, is much exercised with More’s advocacy of what he calls communism, and whether or not it can be taken as a serious reflection of More’s own views given his rather non-communist record when actually running the government of England. I was much more struck by two other points. First, on religion, where Utopia is actually contradictory: in one passage, he describes freedom of religion, and indeed the success of Christian proselytism undertaken by his narrator among the Utopians, but later on he describes the Utopians as being fairly rigidly divided into two sects; from which I deduce that 1) More thought that religious tolerance was at the very least an idea worth discussing but 2) that Utopia is intended more as a thought-provoking piece than as a political manifesto. Second, his description of the way in which the Utopians have imposed peace on their neighbourhood, in a combination of military supremacy and also acculturation of the elites of neighbouring states into the Utopian way of doing things, is in fact eerily similar to the approach of the USA today. the Utopians have a stronger military position, and a more coherent ideology, than the Roman Empire (which no doubt More was really thinking of). Anyway, a surprisingly good read.

i) births and deaths

28 November 1987: birth of Karen Gillan, who plays Amy Pond in New Who (2010-). Gosh, isn’t she young!

ii) broadcast anniversary

28 November 1964: broadcast of “The Daleks”, second episode of the story we now call The Dalek Invasion of Earth. On the flying saucer, the Doctor passes the Daleks’ intelligence test and is made ready for robotisation.

This one really did blow me away. Just a couple of weeks ago I read the Analog 6 anthology from 1968, a rather staid collection of stories in the classic sf mode. Most (though not quite all) of this 1973 collection are tremendous, many of them somewhat subversive – particularly on gender issues, this at a time when the author was still believed to be a man (and is referred to in the masculine in Harry Harrison’s introduction. The one that particularly lingers with me is “The Man Who Walked Home”, which I had forgotten was by Tiptree – the one about the time traveller who appears on the spot of his own demise once a year. There’s also a rather atypical time travel romance, “Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket”, and the Hugo-winning “Painwise” which I didn’t remember having read before. A really excellent anthology – I think I prefer it to the later Star Songs of an Old Primate which I also enjoyed a couple of years back.

An interesting and well-observed novel about the dislocations of a household caught up in both the 1986 Gorkhaland demonstrations in West Bengal, and the effects of India’s relationship over the decades with both Britain and the US (or, more specifically, Cambridge University and the catering industry in New York). It didn’t really blow me away, though it obviously worked better for many other people (including the Booker Prize judges).

i) births and deaths

27 November 1918: birth of Peter Tuddenham, who was the voice of the computer in Ark in Space (1975), the voice of the Mandragora Helix in The Masque of Mandragora (1976), and the voice of the Brain in Time and the Rani (1987). Blake’s 7 fans remember him also as Orac, Zen and Slave.

27 November 1935: birth of Verity Lambert, who was the very first producer of Doctor Who.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

27 November 1965: broadcast of “Devil’s Planet”, third episode of the story we nowcall The Daleks’ Master Plan. The Doctor, Steven, Katarina and Bret Vyon escape Kembel but land on the prison planet Desperus; as they take off again, a deranged convict holds Katarina captive.

27 November 1993: broadcast of second episode of Dimensions in Time, but we don’t talk about that.

27 November 2003: webcast of third episode of Scream of the Shalka. The Doctor confronts the Shalka, who fling him into their wormhole.

i) births and deaths

26 November 1929: birth of William Dysart, who played Alexander McLaren in The Highlanders (1966-67) and Reegan in The Ambassadors of Death (1970).

ii) broadcast and webcast anniversaries

26 November 1966: broadcast of fourth episode of The Power of the Daleks. The rebels try to use the Daleks; but the Daleks are reproducing…

26 November 1977: broadcast of first episode of The Sun Makers. The Doctor, Leela and K9 land on the planet Pluto, where the sinister Gatherer oppresses the people with heavy taxes.

26 November 1993: broadcast of first episode of Dimensions in Time, but we don’t talk about that.

26 November 2006: broadcast of Greeks Bearing Gifts (Torchwood), the one where Toshiko finds a pendant and is seduced by an alien.

26 November 2009: webcast of sixth and final episode of Dreamland.

broadcast and webcast anniversaries

25 November 1967: broadcast of third episode of The Ice Warriors. The Ice Warriors injure Jamie and capture Victoria.

25 November 1978: broadcast of first episode of The Androids of Tara. Romana finds the fourth segment of the Key to Time, but she and the Doctor get enmeshed in the local dynastic struggle.

25 November 1983: UK first broadcast of The Five Doctors.

25 November 2009: webcast of fifth episode of Dreamland.

This is a neat and slim little volume, containing the seventeen letters written by Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn in the 1520s which somehow mysteriously found their way to the Vatican archives, where they still remain. None of Anne’s letters to Henry during their courtship survive; but the collection includes a letter she wrote to her father as a child, two letters from her to Cardinal Wolsey, and finally a letter of disputed authenticity from Anne to Henry a few days before her execution, pleading for mercy and a fair trial (she got neither). Finally, we get a surviving love letter from Henry to Jane Seymour, commiserating with her about “a ballad made lately of great derision against us” so presumably written after their relationship had become public but before Anne’s execution.

There is an illuminating introduction by Jasper Ridley, including also the introduction to the 1745 edition of the letters, by William Oldys, and plenty of illustrations. The letters themselves are not immensely interesting, but do convey Henry’s passion and general intense activity – two of them apparently came with a dead deer attached, personally hinted by the king and sent to Hever for the Boleyns’ dinner table. I was pleased to recognise several authentic phrases from the letters in the episode of The Tudors we watched last night (episode 7, the one with the outbreak of sweating sickness and the Pope), so the writers clearly did their research.

A nice little presentation of some primary source material.

14) Doctor Who – The Writer’s Tale: The Final Chapter, by Russell T. Davies and Benjamin Cook
15) The Book of Lost Tales I, by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien

Both of these books are about the creative process of writing, though writing in very different situations. Davies and Cook exchanged emails and texts for the last two years of Davies’ tenure as show-runner of Doctor Who (ie 2007-2009), so the narrative is spontaneous, spur of the moment, and feels very genuine (though of course the reader cannot know what has been edited out in the process). I had already read the first half, and Cook and Davies spend some time in the second half discussing the reception of the original version. The Book of Lost Tales, on the other hand, was published in 1983, interpreted from a series of longhand notebooks started by J.R.R. Tolkien in 1917, as later interpreted by his son Christopher. Davies is perpetually struggling with deadlines, with his other responsibilities as showrunner, with his role as a public figure and spokesman not only for his own show but for his industry. It is rather different from Tolkien’s series of linked short stories, written in his spare time from his academic career and family obligations; once he decided to abandon the Lost Tales and start over, he probably did not expect that they would ever see the light of day – this is essentially a private set of thoughts whose author did not deem them ready for publication.

But both books, though written ninety years apart, offer insights into the process of writing, crafting and drafting, trying to get it right, be it over the period of weeks and months of producing Doctor Who, or the decades which led to Tolkien’s great works. Occasionally one can trace particular elements to the outside world: Ben Cook, normally a passionate but detached observer, persuades Davies not to end Journey’s End with a Cyberman teaser for The Next DoctorThe Writer’s Tale is much more interesting than The Book of Lost Tales. Structured as a dialogue between two writers, with lots of pretty pictures and extra amaterial, it is also about a success: whether or not one is a fan of Who or of Davies’ treatment of it, the fact is that he revived a faded franchise and made it a hit, and that in itself is a good story even if we are only getting the final years. I commented about the first edition that there were a lot of deaths in it; there is only one in the second half, but it is significant – the mother of the Executive Producer, Julie Gardner, of the same illness which Davies’ own mother had succumbed to a few years earlier. While of course all authors draw on many life experiences, it’s not too fanciful, I think, to see a direct link between this and the creation of the Claire Bloom character in The End of Time, who in Davies’ mind is very explicitly the Doctor’s own mother.

The Book of Lost Tales, on the other hand, is of interest more because of what it eventually led to, and also to an extent because of what fed into it, than because of the content. Of course Tolkien drew on the ancient literature with which he was very familiar in crafting his own work; but the style seemed to me to have strong links with Lord Dunsany and with the earlier and less weird Lovecraft. Dunsany’s The Gods of Pegāna had of course been published in 1905, but I see that Lovecraft only started publishing horror in 1919, so I guess it is a case of two contemporaries drawing from a common well.

I couldn’t really recommend The Book of Lost Tales to anyone but a Tolkien enthusiast (and I have been one for most of my life, but have only now got around to reading it 27 years after it was published). The Writer’s Tale, however, is probably the best book about Doctor Who that will ever be written, and of immense interest to anyone who cares about television, sf, or indeed the creative process.

broadcast and webcast anniversaries

24 November 1979: broadcast of first episode of Nightmare of Eden. Two spaceships collide coming out of hyperspace; the Doctor, Romana and K9 start to uncover murky doings with the addictive drug vraxoin.

24 November 2008: broadcast of second episode of The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith. Sarah’s parents sacrifice themselves to prevent the Graske’s plan.

24 November 2009: release of fourth episode of Dreamland.

Nothing very significant today, is there?

Oh, hang on…

i) broadcast anniversaries

23 November 1963: broadcast of “An Unearthly Child”, first episode of the story we now cal An Unearthly Child, and the first ever episode of Doctor Who. Teachers Ian and Barbara follow their mysterious pupil home to a police box, which contains the time and space ship – the TARDIS – of the enigmatic Doctor. It transports them – but to where?

23 November 1968: broadcast of fourth episode of The Invasion. The Doctor and UNIT rescue Isobel and Zoe; and Jamie and the Dioctor witness a Cyberman emerging from its cocoon.

23 November 1983: first broadcast of The Five Doctors, in the USA. (British audiences see it two days later.) The First, Second, Third and Fifth Doctor are united on Gallifrey to play the Game of Rassilon.

23 November 1987: broadcast of first episode of Dragonfire, introducing Ace. The Doctor and Mel land on Iceworld where they encounter their old friend Sabalon Glitz, and a stroppy waitress.

23 November 1988: broadcast of first episode of Silver Nemesis. The Doctor and Ace go back and forth between Windsor Castle in 1988 and 1638, dealing with the Nemesis meteor and Lady Peinforte’s status; then the Cybermen arrive.

23 November 1989: Silvester McCoy records the voiceover at the end of episode three of Survival, the very last words of Old Who.

23 November 2009: release of third episode of Dreamland.

ii) births and deaths

23 November 1914: birth of Roger Avon, who played Saphadin in The Crusade (1965), Daxtar in The Daleks’ Master Plan (1965) and Wells in Daleks – Invasion Earth 2150 AD (1966)

23 November 1963: birth of Joe Ahearne, who directed Dalek, Father’s Day, Boom Town and Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways (all 2005).

23 November 1990: death of Mostyn Evans, who played Dai Evans in The Green Death (1973) and the High Priest in Death to the Daleks (1974).

23 November 2003: death of Bill Strutton, writer of The Web Planet (1965) and the novelisation Doctor Who and the Zarbi.

iii) dates specified in canon

23 November 1638: The Doctor launches the Nemesis status into space. (Silver Nemesis, 1988)

23 November 1863: death of Victoria Waterfield’s mother (according to Marc Platt’s 1996 novel Downtime).

23 November 1997: Re-coronation of Elizabeth II, attended by the Fourth Doctor, Romana and K9 in Lance Parkin’s 1997 novel The Dying Days.

I didn’t know Stanley Crossick well, but like a lot of us in the Brussels beltway I was very sad to hear of his death at the age of 75 at the weekend. When I first moved here in 1999 he was particularly visible as the founder of the European Policy Centre, which has published a decent tribute to him today. But what particularly impressed over the last few years was his adoption of new media: this septuagenarian grandee of the Brussels policy community took to the internet like a duck to water, despite his increasing physical infirmity. It is nice that he managed to pass the milestone of his 500th blog entry before he was called to a different level of communication. He will be missed.

i) births and deaths

22 November 1920: birth of Paul Erickson, author of The Ark (1966).

22 November 2007: death of Verity Lambert, the very first producer of Doctor Who (1963-65).

ii) broadcast and webcast anniversaries

22 November 1975: broadcast of first episode of The Android Invasion. The Doctor and Sarah arrive at the village of Devesham, to find peculiar behaviour from the villagers, a lost astronaut and sinister guards in white suits.

22 November 1980: broadcast of first episode of State of Decay. The Doctor and Romana explore a very low-tech village, and are attacked by bats.

22 November 1985: Children in Need features four Doctors and fifteen companions.

22 November 1986: broadcast of fourth episode of Terror of the Vervoids (ToaTL #12). The Doctor kills off the Vervoids and is accused of genocide.

22 November 1989: broadcast of first episode of Survival. The Doctor brings Ace back to Privale, where a black cat is transporting people to another world, wheret he Doctor meets the Master.

22 November 2009: release of second episode of Dreamland.

iii) date specified in canon

22 November 1963: assassination of John F. Kennedy, as described in Who Killed Kennedy? by David Bishop, and apparently witnessed by the Ninth Doctor according to Clive’s research in Rose (2005).

i) births and deaths

21 November 1924: birth of Malcolm Hulke, co-author of The Faceless Ones, The War Games and (uncredited) The Ambassadors of Death, sole author of Doctor Who and the Silurians, Colony in Space, The Sea Devils, Frontier in Space, and Invasion of the Dinosaurs, and writer of seven novelisations (DW&t Cave-Monsters, DW&t Doomsday Weapon, DW&t Sea Devils, DW&t Green Death, DW&t Dinosaur Invasion, DW&t Space War and DW&t War Games) and co-writer of The Making of Doctor Who.

21 November 1937: birth of Ingrid Pitt, who played Galleia in The Time Monster (1972) and Solow in Warriors of the Deep (1984) and co-wrote The Macros (originally submitted in the mid-80s, made by Big Finish as a Sixth Doctor story in 2010).

ii) broadcast and webcast anniversaries

21 November 1964: broadcast of “World’s End”, first episode of the story we now call The Dalek Invasion of Earth. The Tardis lands in a future devastated London; Susan and Barbara fall in with the human resistance, and the Doctor and Ian are captured by the Daleks.

21 November 1990: broadcast of Search Out Space, an episode of the BBC show Search Out Science featuring Silvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor, Sophie Aldred as Ace and John Leeson as the voice of K9. Haven’t seen it and it’s not in most people’s concept of canon.

21 November 2009: release of first episode of Dreamland, animated story starring David Tennant as the Doctor, Georgia Moffatt as Cassie Rice and Tim Howar as Jimmy Stalkingwolf. The Doctor lands at a diner in Nevada, where a mysterious artifact attracts the Men in Black…

iii) date specified in canon

21 November 2059: setting for most of the events of The Waters of Mars (2009).

My eye was caught by a confident Sinn Féin prediction that the party can win a second seat in Upper Bann next year, with constiruency chairman saying in public what I have heard privately from a couple of SF supporters:

In recent elections Sinn Féin’s vote in Upper Bann has increased and, when taken with the demographic changes in the make-up of the population of the constituency, it is clear that Sinn Féin is in a position to win a third nationalist seat. The political break-up of Upper Bann is approximately 50-50 and if the nationalist electorate turns out on Election Day, Sinn Féin will win a second party seat. That sixth seat is not a ‘unionist seat’ as recent speculation in the media would have us believe.

Well, I think that SF are.in a position to gain a second seat in Upper Bann next time, but it is much more likely to be from the SDLP. Looking at real numbers rather than fantasy, the community background of Upper Bann’s inhabitants in 2001 came out at 55% Protestant (just under four quotas) to 43% (just over three) Catholic, which is not really 50/50 though would be on the cusp of delivering a third Nationalist seat if there was a direct mapping from community background to politics.

However the Nationalist vote in past elections was not high enough to credibly talk of a third seat. In the 2007 Assembly election the combined SDLP and SF total vote share was 38% – exactly the same as in 1998, nine years earlier. That demographic change is taking an awful long time to manifest itself.

That 38% vote share in 2007 was split almost 2 to 1 in SF’s favour: the two candidates got 10,851 votes to the SDLP’s 5,450. With a handful more votes, and better balancing, the Sinners could have ensured that both John O’Dowd and Dessie Ward stayed ahead of Dolores Kelly. As it was, O’Dowd was elected on the first count, topping the poll, and Ward struggled on as runner-up. I understand he has since left the party, so perhaps this week’s statements are better interpreted as an attempt to boost internal morale than any reflection of reality.

I have been debating the question of differential turnout in Northern Ireland by email with a correspondent, and this has prompted me to actually do some more analysis, cross-referencing the election results with census data.

The results are rather interesting. The 2001 census found 43.8% of the population to have a Catholic background, and 53.1% to have a Protestant or other Christian background. The votes cast in 2010 were 42.0% for Nationalist candidates and 50.5% for Unionist candidates. Strikingly, the Nationalist vote in 2010 was 38.4% of the 2001 Catholic population, and the Unionist vote in 2010 was 38.0% of the 2001 Protestant population, within a whisker of each other. This I take as support for my basic thesis that the variation in turnout across Northern Ireland is more of a geographical effcet than a sectarian one; Catholics and Protestants, and indeed others, are all voting at about the same rate these days.

Drilling down a bit into constituencies, the pattern is very much more complex (table below ranked by the difference between the two last columns):

	Prot ’01	Cath ’01	Oth ’01	U vote ’10	N vote ’10	Oth ’10	U ’10-Pr ’01	N ’10-Ca ’01
EAST BELFAST	87.0%	7.5%	5.4%	59.3%	3.4%	37.2%	-27.7%	-4.1%
SOUTH DOWN	28.7%	69.6%	1.7%	19.4%	77.2%	3.4%	-9.3%	+7.6%
SOUTH BELFAST	52.6%	41.0%	6.4%	41.0%	41.0%	18.0%	-11.7%	0.0%
WEST BELFAST	16.1%	82.8%	1.1%	10.7%	87.5%	1.9%	-5.4%	+4.6%
FOYLE	22.9%	75.7%	1.5%	15.1%	76.6%	8.3%	-7.8%	+0.9%
NORTH BELFAST	51.6%	45.1%	3.3%	47.7%	46.3%	6.0%	-3.9%	+1.2%
MID ULSTER	33.7%	65.3%	1.0%	32.8%	66.3%	1.0%	-1.0%	+1.0%
NEWRY AND ARMAGH	31.8%	67.2%	1.0%	33.4%	65.4%	1.2%	+1.5%	-1.7%
LAGAN VALLEY	81.1%	14.2%	4.7%	79.5%	9.0%	11.4%	-1.5%	-5.2%
FERMANAGH S TYRONE	43.0%	55.6%	1.4%	45.5%	53.2%	1.3%	+2.5%	-2.4%
SOUTH ANTRIM	68.3%	27.4%	4.4%	69.7%	22.6%	7.7%	+1.5%	-4.8%
EAST ANTRIM	75.3%	19.8%	4.9%	75.5%	13.4%	11.1%	+0.2%	-6.5%
STRANGFORD	78.8%	16.7%	4.6%	79.3%	10.2%	10.4%	+0.6%	-6.4%
EAST LONDONDERRY	57.2%	40.1%	2.7%	59.8%	34.7%	5.5%	+2.5%	-5.3%
WEST TYRONE	31.3%	67.8%	1.0%	33.9%	62.4%	3.7%	+2.7%	-5.4%
UPPER BANN	54.7%	42.9%	2.5%	59.5%	37.5%	3.0%	+4.9%	-5.4%
NORTH ANTRIM	70.3%	27.4%	2.4%	75.5%	21.2%	3.2%	+5.3%	-6.1%
NORTH DOWN	81.6%	11.7%	6.7%	88.5%	2.8%	8.7%	+6.9%	-8.9%
NI total	53.1%	43.8%	3.1%	50.5%	42.0%	7.5%	-2.6%	-1.8%

The biggest and least recoverable part of the variation will be the drift in population between 2001 and 2010. The 2001 figures include those aged under 9 who were not able to vote this year, those who have died since 2001 and those who have moved away since 2001, not to mention those who lived there throughout but did not vote in 2010; they do not include those voters who have moved in since 2001. Just from the nature of modern life one can speculate that this may have had the biggest effect in South Belfast, and in other more urban and suburban areas; but we have no way of quantifying it.

However we can be pretty clear about the two seats where the difference is most striking. In East Belfast, assuming (dangerously) that turnout was more or less the same across the communities, over a third of voting Protestants and over half of voting Catholics supported Alliance, resulting in the biggest difference between the Protestant population share and the Unionist vote. And in North Down, again assuming equal turnout, three-quarters of voting Catholics may have supported candidates other than the SDLP and Sinn Fein.

There is some suggestion from the figures of ‘tactical voting’ by Protestants for Nationalist candidates (presumably the SDLP) in South Down, West Belfast, and Foyle (there is also something interesting going on in South Belfast, but due to the mobility of the population it is difficult to be sure of what exactly that is); there is also some suggestion of ‘tactical voting’ by Catholics for Unionist candidates, presumably to prevent a more hard-line candidate getting in, in North Antrim (the likely beneficiary being, of all people, Ian Paisley Jr) and Upper Bann (possibly support for the UUP’s Freddy Mercury lookalike candidate). It’s fairly clear also that Alliance draws a lot of support from Catholics in East Antrim and Strangford.

I don’t think we can really take it much further than that, though of course that will not stop people trying.

i) births and deaths

20 November 1930: birth of Bernard Horsfall, who played Gulliver in The Mind Robber (1968), a Time Lord in The War GamesPlanet of the Daleks (1973) and Chancellor Goth in The Deadly Assassin (1976).

20 November 1994: death of John Lucarotti, writer of Marco Polo (1964), The Aztecs (1964) and The Massacre (1966).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

20 November 1965: broadcast of “Day of Armageddon”, the second episode of The Daleks’ Master Plan. The Doctor infiltrates the Daleks’ meeting in disguise, and seizes the terranium core from Mavic Chen.

20 November 1976: broadcast of fourth episode of The Deadly Assassin. The Master fakes his death and attempts to unleash the forces of the Eye of Harmony. The Doctor defeats him, though with much devastation to the Capitol.

20 November 2003: webcast of second episode of Scream of the Shalka. The Doctor blows up Alison’s cafe and her house to stop the aliens, but then gets taken up by the army; meanwhile the Master [played by Derek Jacobi] has got into the Tardis.

20 November 2009: broadcast of second episode of The Gift, ending the third season of the Sarah Jane Adventures. K9 persuades the Rakweed to explode, killing off the Blathereen / Slitheen.

20 November 2010: broadcast of Eclipse of the Korven (K9).

i) births and deaths

19 November 1924: birth of William Russell, who played Ian Chesterton from 1963 to 1965 and has done a number of Big Finish plays, including the just released Lost First Doctor stories by Moris Farhi.

19 November 1971: birth of Naoko Mori, who played Toshiko Sato in the first two series of Torchwood (2006, 2008) having first appeared in Aliens of London (2005).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

19 November 1966: broadcast of third episode of The Power of the Daleks. The rebels capture Polly, and the Doctor and Ben erode Lesterson’s trust in the Daleks.

19 November 1977: broadcast of fourth episode of Image of the Fendahl. The Doctor kills the Fendahleen with salt, blows up the cottage and drops the skull into a supernova.

19 November 2006: broadcast of Countrycide (Torchwood), the one with the cannibalistic villagers.

19 November 2007: broadcast of second episode of The Lost Boy (SJA), ending the first series of Sarah Jane Adventures. Luke defeats the Slitheen and K9 reappears to dael with Mr Smith.

19 November 2009: broadcast of first episode of The Gift (SJA). The Blathereen, hunting the Slitheen, give Rani the Rakweed which however starts to take over the world.

iii) historical event in canon

19 November 1863: Abraham Lincoln delivers the Gettysburg Address, as observed by the Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara in The Chase (1965).

i) births and deaths

18 November 1932: birth of Trevor Baxter, who played Professor Litefoot in The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977) and has reprised the role in Big Finish audios over the last year or so.

18 November 1934: birth of Mitzi McKenzie, who played Mrs Martin in Colony in Space (1971) and Nancy in The Green Death (1973).

18 November 1948: birth of Paul Jerricho who played the Castellan in both Arc of Infinity (1983) and The Five Doctors (also 1983).

18 November 1953: birth of Alan Moore, acclaimed comics writer whose early work included five stories published in Doctor Who Weekly (as it then was) in 1980.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

18 November 1967: broadcast of second episode of The Ice Warriors. Varga captures Victoria and prepares to unfreeze his comrades.

18 November 1978: broadcast of fourth episode of The Stones of Blood. The Doctor evades the justice of the Megara and transforms the Great Seal of Diplos into the third segment of the Key to Time.

18 November 2005: broadcast of the first New Who Children in Need Special. The new Doctor tries to reassure Rose of his identity.

I notice that both my feed of LJ entries to facebook and my feed of Delicious links seem to have stopped working. Any thoughts about what I should do to reinstate them?

More from , the second round in the contest to vote for the best (and worst) Who stories ever. Cast your vote by Monday.

Poll #1: "This is not life. This is tickness."

Choose up to four best stories from: Dalek, Fathers Day, Horror Of Fang Rock, Human Nature/The Family Of Blood, Partners In Crime, Terror Of The Zygons, The Daemons, The Dalek Invasion Of Earth, The Daleks, The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit, The Seeds Of Doom and The Time Warrior.

Choose one or two worst stories from: 42, Daleks In Manhattan/Evolution Of The Daleks, The Idiot’s Lantern or The Long Game.

(42 and The Idiot’s Lantern currently close in race for the second spot.)

Poll #2: "I am definitely a mad man with a ticky box"

Choose up to four best stories from: An Unearthly Child, Blink, Carnival Of Monsters, Doctor Who And The Silurians, Love And Monsters, Mawdryn Undead, State Of Decay, The Eleventh Hour, The Invasion, The Lodger, The Unicorn And The Wasp and The Unquiet Dead.

Choose one or two worst stories from: Doctor Who [the movie], The Lazarus Experiment, The Waters Of Mars or Time-Flight.

Poll #3: "No! Not The Tick Probe!"

Choose up to four best stories from: Amy’s Choice, Inferno, Planet Of The Spiders, Snakedance, The Caves Of Androzani, The Dalek Master Plan, The Fires Of Pompeii, The Five Doctors, The Keeper Of Traken, The Stones Of Blood, The Talons Of Weng-Chiang and The Time Meddler.

Choose one or two worst stories from: Gridlock, Planet Of The Dead, The End Of Time or Victory Of The Daleks

Poll #4: "Lots of planets have a poll"

Choose up to four best stories from: Castrovalva, Ghost Light, Revelation Of The Daleks, Rose, Silence In The Library/Forest Of The Dead, The Ark In Space, The Girl In The Fireplace, The Invasion Of Time, The Next Doctor, The Ribos Operation, The Time Of Angels/Flesh And Stone and The War Games.

Choose one or two worst stories from: Love And Monsters, Silver Nemesis, Time And The Rani or Utopia/The Sound Of Drums/Last Of The Time Lords.

Poll #5: "You’re a beautiful poll, probably"

Choose up to four best stories from: Black Orchid, City Of Death, Enlightenment, Remembrance Of The Daleks, School Reunion, The Brain Of Morbius, The Christmas Invasion, The Curse Of Fenric, The Happiness Patrol, The Romans, The Three Doctors and Utopia/The Sound Of Drums/Last Of The Time Lords.

(NB currently a close run thing between Remembrance of the Daleks and The Three Doctors for the last qualifying spot.)

Choose one or two worst stories from: Boom Town, The Time Monster, The Twin Dilemma or Voyage Of The Damned.

Poll #6: "You ham-fisted tick-vendor!"

Choose up to four best stories from: Army Of Ghosts/Doomsday, Doctor Who [the movie], Genesis Of The Daleks, Midnight, Shada, Terror Of The Autons, The Deadly Assassin, The Green Death, The Mind Robber, The Pirate Planet, The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End and Turn Left.

(NB last two qualifying places very tight between Deadly Assassin, Green Death and Mind Robber)

Choose one or two worst stories from: Aliens Of London/World War III, Destiny Of The Daleks, Fear Her or Terror Of The Vervoids.

Poll #7: "Somewhere else the tea’s getting polled"

Choose up to four best stories from: Earthshock, Frontier In Space, Spearhead From Space, Survival, The Aztecs, The Evil Of The Daleks, The Mind Of Evil, The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang, The Robots Of Death, The Sea Devils, The Tomb Of The Cybermen and Warriors’ Gate.

Choose one or two worst stories from: The Chase, The Runaway Bride, The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End or Timelash.

Poll #8: "Tick Lord Victorious!"

Choose up to four best stories from: Bad Wolf/Parting Of The Ways, Gridlock, Kinda, Logopolis, Marco Polo, The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, The Face Of Evil, The Power Of The Daleks, The Pyramids Of Mars, The Shakespeare Code, The Waters Of Mars and Vincent And The Doctor.

Choose one or two worst stories from: Four To Doomsday, Planet Of The Ood, The Doctor’s Daughter, or The Dominators.

broadcast anniversaries

17 November 1979: broadcast of fourth episode of The Creature from the Pit. The wolf weeds kill Adrasta; Erato eats the wolf weeds; the Doctor prevents Chloris from being destroyed.

17 November 2008: broadcast of first episode of The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith. The Trickster persuades Sarah to prevent her parents’ deaths.

i) births and deaths

16 November 1931: birth of Kenneth Watson who played Craddock in Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 AD (1966) and Duggan in The Wheel in Space (1968).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

16 November 1965: broadcast of third episode of The Invasion. Vaughn takes the Doctor and Jamie to meet Professor Watkins; they escape, and Jamie has an encounter with a sinister cocoon.

16 November 1987: broadcast of third episode of Delta and the Bannermen. The Chimeron child is growing and Billy opts to become one too; the Americans and the Doctor defeat the Bannermen.

16 November 1988: broadcast of third episode of The Happiness Patrol. The Doctor and Earl bring the blues back, and Helen A is defeated.

16 November 2007: broadcast of Time Crash. The Tenth Doctor and Fifth Doctor meet when their Tardises crash.

16 November 2010: broadcast of second episode of Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith, ending the fourth series of Sarah Jane Adventures.

My cunning plan for rewatching Who from the beginning has now brought me to the point where the next few posts will be of complete seasons – Season 13 in this case, with the Hinchcliffe / Holmes era getting into full swing.

Well, Terror of the Zygons is a great start to the season – tight writing, memorable aliens, Baker and team on form, John Woodnutt excellent as Broton/the Duke, the UNIT team all together for one last time, and not least the late Geoffrey Burgon’s memorable incidental music, a cut above the usual.

It’s a real shame that the Zygons were never brought back on TV. They do appear in a good Tenth Doctor novel and a couple of very good Eighth Doctor audio plays. I suspect that if I actually knew the Loch Ness area the fact that it’s fairly obviously Sussex would bother me, but I don’t so it doesn’t. NB also the female prime minister, assumed by most viewers at the time to be Margaret Thatcher a few years into the future, though I prefer the Wood and Miles theory that it is actually Shirley Williams (for whom I cast the only vote I have ever exercised in a Westminster election) in an alternate 1976. Tom Baker has a rather mad anecdote about being mistaken for Williams in the street.

There will be more about UNIT later on in this post but I just want to point out here that Terror of the Zygons shows Baker, Hinchcliffe and Holmes able to pick up the Pertwee format and take it to strange and different places, if they wanted. It’s not such a very different story from Claws of Axos, but it is ten times better, basically because it is trying to look like a horror film rather than The Avengers.

Slightly unexpectedly, this is the Brigadier’s last story as a recurring character (he comes back three more times in the next thirteen years, and indeed gets brought out of retirement for Sarah Jane in the following century, and the occasional Big Finish audio). Although it’s a shame that we don’t get a proper goodbye from him, it’s a good place to end; the Second Doctor saw him as a friend and ally, the Third Doctor used to snarl at him unpleasantly, while the Fourth Doctor regards him with tolerant amusement, pretty much as his straight man, and he finishes as a comfortable and respectable figure rather than the buffoon of the middle years. He’s had a good long afterlife, appearing in Big Finish audios and even the Sarah Jane Adventures, and is of course the focus of various spinoff novels, of which the most interesting, from a Brigadier point of view, is probably Gary Russell’s Scales of Injustice. I will shout out also to the 1971 Doctor Who Annual, one of the best in that series, which has a lot of good Three / Liz / Brigadier stories.

When I was a student at Clare College, Cambridge (ie around the time that I voted for Shirley Williams in 1987), we had reciprocal catering rights with the students at Girton College, which is far out of town; this arrangement generally benefited Girtonians who needed a cheap college meal near their lectures in the middle of the day, but some of us would occasionally make the great trek north on Sundays, when the Clare Buttery did not serve lunch but Girton put on a pretty decent spread. On one such occasion, one of my friends nudged me and said, ‘That man sitting over there used to play the Brigadier on Doctor Who!’ I refused to believe my friend but accepted the dare to go and ask the bloke in question if he actually was Nicholas Courtney. He confirmed that he was, and in huge embarrassment I must admit that I became completely tongue-tied and couldn’t think of anything else to say to him. Not the highlight of my personal encounters with celebrities, and certainly not his fault. (Incidentally, two important Who figures graduated from Girton – Delia Derbyshire, who arranged the original theme music, and my cousin Brian Minchin, who is the producer of the Sarah Jane Adventures.)

In the video collection The Baker Years, where Tom B reminisces about each of his stories in turn, he manifestly could not remember anything at all about Planet of Evil. It’s a bit odd how it doesn’t quite come together: the alien planet looks a bit more like some scenery dotted around a studio than usual, the script requires the Morestrans to fail to spot that Sorenson is behind it all for far longer than is at all believable, and the mechanics of the anti-matter and alternate universe are never terribly well explained (I seem to remember that Terrance Dicks does it a bit better in the novelisation).

It’s surprising because while Louis Marks was not one of the great writers, he was usually better than this, and David Maloney is one of the great Who directors. There are some good bits – Frederick Jaeger is excellent as Sorenson (poor guy plays possessed scientists every time he appears on Who), and the effects of both the monster he becomes and and the desiccated corpses are well done. But really it’s an unexciting space opera tale, which I’m coming to realise is not the sub-genre where Who is at its best.

NB that Louis Mahoney is the first PoC to have a speaking role since his own much briefer speaking role in Frontier in Space three years ago. On another casting note, I was intrigued that the camera seemed deliberately not to linger on Michael Wisher, appearing here for the third time in four consecutive stories, in case we might recognise him despite his heavy masks as Davros and Magrik. No real risk as it is certainly his least memorable appearance on Who, as well as his last.

This is a strong season of Who in any case, but it would have been even stronger if as originally planned Pyramids of Mars had been the first story of the season. It starts with the Doctor declaring his independence from UNIT, proclaiming a break with the past, and ends with UNIT HQ being destroyed (well, the building on the site anyway). The Doctor restates his fundamental purposes several times in the first episode, reminding us that this is a show about an alien Time Lord, not UNIT’s eccentric Scientific Adviser.

In other news, it is a particularly good story: Holmes as so often comes up with a good script, where pace and wit disguise the occasional hole in the plot, and stellar performances from Bernard Archard, Michael Sheard and Gabriel Woolf, as well as Baker and Sladen, combined with Paddy Russell’s inspired directing and some excellent design – note particularly how seamlessly we move from studio to location shots – make this one of the most effective stories of one of the better seasons. As it happened I was able to watch most of it with 11-year-old F and so can confirm that it remains good family viewing after 35 years.

Lewis Greifer, who wrote the first version of this script, also wrote an episode of The Prisoner (The General, the one with the teaching computer). He would qualify as the only person to have written for both great cult shows, had Robert Holmes not preformed such radical surgery on Greifer’s original text as to leave it unrecognisable (and, one suspects, much better).

The Android Invasion is not quite as great as the sum of its parts. There are some great Who stories with dopplegangers – The Massacre, The Enemy of the World, Inferno, The Caves of Androzani – and some less great ones – The Chase, Meglos, Arc of Infinity, Journey’s End (neither of those lists is exhaustive), and The Android Invasion is definitely in the second set. The Kraals are rather good, and it’s a shame we never saw them again, even if their plan is completely bonkers and relies on the deluded Guy who has never thought to check what was under his eyepatch. The directing is much better than the plot – excellent use of location shooting, good special effects especially where you have the android doubles in place, Dudley Simpson comes up to the mark with the music. But the script doesn’t quite carry it.

The most disappointing thing about the story is that it is a very weak farewell to UNIT. We do get Benton and Harry back, but only in the last episode are they really themselves rather than simulacra; the absence of the Brigadier robs the story of a core element of continuity. This is the least satisfactory farewell for any of the regular characters (far worse than Dodo); at least the Brigadier eventually comes back, but this is the last we see of either Benton (after six years) or Harry (after the intensity of Season 12). In terms of the story taken on its own it is not such a big deal, but seen in the continuity of the show from The Web of Fear on, it’s a damp squib; worse, it seems like Who has become uncomfortable with its own very recent past.

John Levene as Benton has an unexpectedly long run, starting as the Doctor’s kidnapper in The Invasion and finishing up as his own evil twin (for a second time, after Inferno) in The Android Invasion, who still has time to take his sister dancing. In the meantime he has been transformed into a baby, flirted with the villagers of Devil’s End, and walked the Second Doctor round an anti-matter world which looked like a quarry.

Levene is not one of the great performers, but perhaps that is because he is not forced to be. The role is really one of the common man caught up in uncommon events, occasionally called on for courage but rarely for thought, and he fulfills it perfectly well. I thought his chemistry with Pertwee not as good as with Troughton or Baker, but he is not the only person of whom that is true. Slightly surprising that he hasn’t been persuaded back to participate in any of the various spinoffs, apart from the one standalone Wartime which I haven’t seen.

The half-hearted writing in and writing out of Harry Sullivan is one of The Android Invasion‘s most grievous weaknesses. Unlike the other UNIT characters, he does get a half-decent farewell, but it is at the end of his second last story, Terror of the Zygons. His slightly twittish but courageous character was rather a good lightning rod for the new Doctor’s lunacy in Season 12, and put him in several of the great Who stories. Unlike, to pick a recently covered example, John Levene as Benton, he lifts every scene he is in, and even the less good stories in which he appears tend to have some good and memorable Harry moments (again, The Android Invasion is a bit of an exception).

I have written elsewhere of Ian Marter’s subsequent (and sadly abbreviated) career as a Who novelist. When he was on form, he was very good, and even going through the motions he delivered readable product. He also wrote a spinoff novel called Harry Sullivan’s War, which isn’t great plotting but has nice character moments, a theme later developed further by Jacqueline Rayner in her rather weird novel Wolfsbane. A 20-years-older Harry also appears in Justin Richards’ novel System Shock, and he gets prequelled into the Third Doctor era in David McIntee’s The Face of the Enemy.

The Brian of Morbius is really rather stunning, especially in contrast with The Android Invasion, which must have had about three times as much money spent on it for roughly a third of the impact. It could all have looked so awful and John Nathan-Turner-ish – the Muppet-like monster, the peculiar cavorting of the Sisters of Karn, the under-par acting of Gilly Brown. And yet it all comes together. All praise particularly to Christopher Barry who manages to make Dudley Simpson’s stirring music, various peculiar sound effects, and well-planned lighting come together and conceal the relative poverty of the production and the unoriginality of the plot. It’s almost a return to the early days of Who – the studio as a very small theatre in which all the action must be concentrated, rather than as a window on the universe.

Also of course it is lifted by Philip Madoc, back again after The War Games, The Krotons and the second Peter Cushing film, and also by the regulars – the Baker / Sladen chemistry is one of the great things about this season; it really set my own expectations, as a nine-year-old, as to how the Doctor / companion relationship should always work. It’s also our only Time Lord-related story of this season; we will hear much more about them next year, but it’s worth noting that since they were introduced in The War Games, every year has seen a story which further developed Time Lord lore.

The Seeds of Doom, at the end of Tom Baker’s second season, is only his second six-part story – by contrast, the last Pertwee season had three, which just shows how the pace of the show has changed. Of course, it’s in some ways a two-part story in a very well realised Antarctica, followed by a four-part story in England. It’s another good story to end what was a very strong season; the guest cast are good – a good Who story requires a memorable villain or two, and here we have the glorious Harrison Chase and his sidekick Scorbie. One wishes there had been another story or two with Sir Colin, backed up perhaps by Amelia Ducat. Even they, however, are overshadowed by the horror of the anthropophagous Krynoid and, even more nightmarish, Chase’s mulching machine.

This is the first contemporary story since The Faceless Ones / Evil of the Daleks, nine years earlier, with no appearance by the Brigadier or the wider UNIT family (including the Delgado!Master) and, seen in continuity order, this is rather puzzling and throws the viewer (well, threw me). Yes, UNIT is mentioned, but the military who come to help the Doctor are the regular army and the RAF. To be very clear, since I have mentioned it rather a lot in this post, there is of course absolutely nothing wrong with writing UNIT out of the show; I just wish it had been done a bit more gracefully.

Geoffrey Burgon’s music is again artistically and technically rather striking, but sometimes seems a bit light-hearted for the scenes it is set to. However it comes together in the last episode.

This has been an interesting season – four out of six stories set in the British countryside, and only two in studio-bound sf settings – another experiment in format after last season’s travels without the Tardis. It has seen the end of UNIT as a constant point of reference. But it has also provided some of the most memorable images ever from Who – the fetal Zygons, the crackling anti-matter monster, the robot dummies, the android Sarah’s face falling off, Morbius’s patchwork body, and the Krynoid plus the mulching machine. Even Planet of Evil, the weakest story of the six, is some way better than most of the Pertwee era space opera scripts. There is a real feeling of the production team finding its feet; and of course this peaks in the next season (in my utterly unbiased view).

< 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 >

i) births and deaths

15 November 1910: birth of Geoffey Toone, who played Temmosus in Doctor Who and the Daleks (1965) and Hepesh in The Curse of Peladon (1972).

15 November 1933: birth 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 anniversaries

15 November 1975: broadcast of fourth episode of The Pyramids of Mars. The Doctor is forced to transfer Scarman to Mars, where he destroys the Eye of Horus, liberating Sutekh. But the Doctor manages to trap Sutekh in a time tunnel, destroying him and the priory.

15 November 1980: broadcast of fourth episode of Full Circle. The Doctor helps the Starliner to leave Alzareus, and Adric stows away on the Tardis.

15 November 1986: broadcast of third episode of Terror of the Vervoids (ToaTL #11). The Vervoids are gradually killing off passengers and crew; Bruchner sets the ship’s controls for a black hole to destroy them all.

15 November 1989: broadcast of fourth episode of The Curse of Fenric. The Ancient One arises to challenge the Doctor; Ace realises that Audrey’s baby is her mother; and the Doctor challenges Ace’s faith in him to release the Ancient One who then kills Fenric.

15 November 2009: broadcast of The Waters of Mars. The Doctor lands at Bowie Base One on Mars, on the day he knows it will be destroyed; he tries to change the history of the day, but is thwarted by Adelaide.

15 November 2010: broadcast of first episode of Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith (SJA).

iii) date specified in canon

15 November 1966 (some sources have 1964): birth of Perpugilliam “Peri” Brown.

I see that I posted my review of The Dervish House just an hour before I started to read the 1977 Doctor Who annual (included on the DVD of The Hand of Fear). It is a pretty quick read – 78 pages, but a lot of them are filler. As with the 1976 annual, I found the artwork really striking, apart from the depictions of Sarah Jane Smith and Harry Sullivan – though the artist, whether Paul Crompton or Glenn Rix, is getting a bit smarter about this and tries to make a habit of showing them from behind or in shadow – did the BBC simply not provide him with any publicity shots? However his Tom Baker is excellent (see right for an example).

Apart from the artwork, though, the stories are much blander than the previous year’s, and the factual filler stuff is exceptionally basic information about the history of space flight and astronomy. It’s slightly longer than the 1976 annual, but if anything slightly worse value.

It’s 2027 and Turkey has joined the European Union. In an old tekke in Istanbul, six people find their lives intertwined around a plot involving nanotechnology, the Nabucco gas pipeline, and the arcane secrets of the mellified man. There is a lovely echo between microcalligraphy and encoding information on junk DNA. It’s Ian McDonald’s best disciplined novel so far, I think, with all the lush description and present tense intensity that we are used to, but somehow coming together rather beautifully. Nic Clarke has a longer review of it here

A Past Doctor Adventure with Harry and Sarah, which I picked up after last week’s post prompted a reaction on Twitter from Jacqueline Rayner saying

"Did I really kill off Harry? I’m sure it wasn’t proper killing off if I did, I love him too much."

To which Ian Potter responded rather telegraphically,

"Harry deaths possible branching future outcomes as I recall."

Jacqueline Rayner concluded the discussion:

"Oh yes, that sounds right. He definitely didn’t really die then, phew. Thanks for remembering my books for me, Ian."

I was sufficiently intrigued to say that I was now bumping the book up my reading list, upon which tweeted to me:

Intrigued what you make of Wolfsbane. I found it problematic – plugging into certain imagery to seek an emotional weight it lacked.

Well, despite all that preparation I found it a slightly perplexing read for continuity reasons: we have a situation where Harry leaves the Tardis somewhat accidentally one day in late 1936, and the Doctor and Sarah return two weeks later to find his tombstone and strange tales of werewolves. Meanwhile Harry, two weeks earlier, had met another Doctor, who I identified fairly confidently as Eight, but who seems unaware of Skaro, which I found odd (it turns out that the book is set in one of the periods of amnesia that various writers have seen fit to inflict on the Eighth Doctor, but of course this is not explained); and while I thought at first that Harry and Sarah were in the standard timeline between Revenge of the Cybermen and Terror of the Zygons, bolstered by the book’s back cover which specified the Fourth Doctor and by an early reference to "That height, that hair, that grin, that ridiculous long scarf", I was then completely thrown by a later statement that the other Doctor in the story "wasn’t a tall white-haired man, like Miss Smith’s friend" which made me wonder if I had misread the earlier line and this was some alternate timeline (a la ) in which the third regeneration had not happened. On reflection this must be a simple mistake, but it is a very serious one, and distracted me from the rest of the book.

So, werewolves. I’ve actually read/watched/heard all of the other werewolf stories of Who (The Greatest Show in the Galaxy and Tooth and Claw on TV, Kursaal from the Eighth Doctor Adventures and the early but very good Big Finish Five/Turlough audio Loups-Garoux) and rather surprisingly they do generally work as a Who concept. Here, Rayner combines it with Arthurian legend and the rise of Fascism in Germany, and some fairly explicit magic (there is a seductive dryad who has no sfnal justification), and unlike I thought that the imagery did bear the weight of the story. (I felt however that it flagged a bit in the third quarter, but picked up again before the slightly confusing last couple of pages.)

But it is not the werewolves or even the confusing Doctors that matter: the author in her tweets a week ago made it clear that the book was really meant to be about Harry, and it is an excellent tribute to the character who lifted pretty much every scene he was in, and who got a rather poor send-off in The Android Invasion for his pains. She draws very much not just on the slightly twittish but courageous character we saw on screen, but also on the Harry developed by Ian Marter (who better?) in his novel Harry Sullivan’s War, somewhat nervous about women, but happy to get stuck in to defend the good guys whether or not he really knows what is going on. If you always wanted to see a story that put Harry front and centre, this is it. Any other Who fan will enjoy it despite the minor flaws mentioned above.

i) births and deaths

14 November 1959: birth of Paul McGann, who played the Eighth Doctor in Doctor Who – The Movie, in numerous Big Finish audios since 2001, and in the webcast version of Shada.

ii) broadcast anniversary

14 November 1964: broadcast of “Crisis”, third episode of the story we now call Planet of Giants. Barbara is poisoned; the Doctor starts a fire to draw attention to what is going on; and all ends well.