Please tell me what you think are the funniest moments in the history of cinema. This one is one of my favourites:

Stephen Cole has rarely disappointed me, and I thought that this was one of the better Doctor Who audiobooks out there: read by Arthur “Rory” Darville, whose own character isn’t actually in it, we have the Eleventh Doctor and Amy getting mixed up in an environmental protest in the Orkney Islands and discovering, inevitably, that there are aliens behind the new technology involved. But it’s not quite your standard alien invasion story – turns out in fact to be rather a clever plot, assisted by excellent sound effects and other incidentals. Strongly recommended.

This book is about the woman who might possibly have been at the back of Richard Curtis’s mind as he wrote the character of Nursey, played so memorably by Patsy Byrne in Blackadder II. Originally from the bilingual county of Herefordshire, from a long Welsh-speaking lineage (as were her cousins the Cecils) she happened to get assigned a position in the household of the baby princess Elizabeth when in her mid-20s, and by the time Elizabeth took the throne a quarter century later was basically the only survivor of the early days. She lived to her early 80s, dying in 1590, at the heart of the court to the end. She never married, and so amassed a substantial property empire, which provides a lot of documentation of her life.

The book is a local historian’s labour of love: thorough in its research on documents (including several poems in Welsh about Blanche Parry’s immediate ancestors) and also on artworks which may depict her and places with which she was associated. It does not have a lot of scholarly apparatus; there’s little here about the nature of kingship or queenship, and I found the discussion of religion a bit confusing – Richardson suggests that Blanche Parry must have played an important part in getting the Bible translated into Welsh, but there is no smoking gun.

The Welsh link does intrigue me as an area where I would like to understand better what was going on. Apart from Blanche’s family, and her cousins the Cecils, another Welsh family had made it big in politics a bit earlier – their home county of Hereford had seen the beheading in 1461 of Welsh knight Owain ap Tewdwr, whose grandson Henry Tudor took power in England in 1485 and was Elizabeth I’s grandfather.

However, I was entirely satisfied about the one thing I really wanted to know – did Blanche Parry have any dealings with Sir Nicholas White in Ireland? As it turns out, it’s absolutely clear from his surviving correspondence that she was his channel to the queen. His main contact in London was Cecil / Burghley, who he had known since they were both young men; presumably he had encountered Cecil’s slightly older cousin as well. When he successfully raided the Earl of Desmond’s treasure train, he sent the spoils to Cecil with instructions to split them with Blanche. (See previous entry.) So I got what I wanted from the book, even if it’s not the most academically rigorous volume I have read on the period.

My occasional bits of research into the life of my ancestor continue, here with a lengthy account of a military expedition against the Earl of Desmond in June 1580, which took him and the Lord Deputy from Limerick right across what we now call County Kerry, as far as Dingle. I have cut and pasted this from an online edition of Selections from Old Kerry records : historical and genealogical : with introductory memoir, notes and appendix, edited by Mary Agnes Hickson and published in 1872 by Watson and Hazell of London. The notes in parentheses are hers; there is much here that I would like to comment on some time but it will have to wait.

Lymericke, July 22, A.D. 1580.

MY singular good Lord, — I do here send your Lordship a diary of our late journey in Munster, from our first setting forth from Lymericke until our return thyther agayntwelfth of June we set oute of Lymericke, with the whole armie, the Lord Justice taking his way to Askettyn (Askeaton) and the Erle of Ormond to Kylmallocke.

The twentyeth we came to the Dingell, where Sir William Wynter, Captain Bingham, and Mr. Fowlke Greville came to us from aborde the Queen's shippes, which laye in the Bay of Dingel, a mile to the west of the Haven of Dingell. A part of that daie we passed in reviewing both havens and the towne, and also in considering what place were fittest to fortify for defence of both, which, after a long debating between the Lord Justice and the Admiral, was agreed to be in the Haven of Ventrie ; they are both notable havens, and such as into which the greatest ships of charge may at all times enter. In the Irish Ventrie is called Coon Fyntra, which is almost as to saie " White Sand Haven," because the strand is white sand, full of white shells ; and Dingle Haven is called in the Irish Coon e daf deryck, which is almost to say " Red-ox-Haven," and took that name of the drowning of an ox in that haven, at the first coming over of the Englishmenne from Cornwall, which brought some cattel with them. We find the chiefest merchantes of the towne's houses rased, which were very strong before and built castel-wyse, — done by Sir John of Desmond, and the Knight of Kerrie, as they say, cursing him and Doctor Saunders as the root of all their calamities. The Burgesses were taken into protection by Sir William Winter before our coming, to helpe buildinge the towne againe, whose names are those following,

One of the eldest of them told me that soone uppon the conquest of Englishmen in Ireland, a gentleman named "De La Cousa" was lord of that town and builded it, whose issue in manic years after finding the towne escheated to the House of Desmond, and by that reason it is called to this daye " Dingell de Couse."

N. W.

The bit about the two senior officials gathering cockles for supper is rather sweet. Though I somehow doubt that they picked enough for all of the troops…

This is all just a few months before the Siege of Smerwick.

…will I see you at the DiscWorld Convention over the weekend?

(I expect to be around most of Friday and Sunday, and Saturday afternoon and evening.)

date specified in canon

25 August 2006: Maria Jackson and the annoying Kelsey team up with Sarah Jane Smith to thwart the invasion plans of the Bane and rescue the young Archetype, who is adopted by Sarah and renamed Luke. (As seen in Invasion of the Bane, SJA 2007)

i) births and deaths

None that caught my eye.

ii) broadcast anniversary

24th August 1968: Broadcast of episode 3 of The Dominators (1968). Zoe, Cully and the other Dulcians are being used by the Dominators as slave labour. Cully escapes, but the Doctor is captured, and yet another episode ends with falling masonry.

iii) date specified in canon

24th August 2006: Maria Jackson and her father move in across the road from Sarah Jane Smith; later that night Maria sees Sarah talking to an alien being. (SJA: Invasion of the Bane, 2007)

Pauline, the American girl mentioned in the previous extract, seems fated to play the supporting female romantic role in Florence Barclay’s 1910 novel, The Rosary. But I was startled by a phrase in this passage from Chapter X of the book, where she reflects on how she will never marry Garth “Dal” Dalmain, the male lead:

But after her maid had left her, Pauline switched off the electric light and, drawing back the curtain, stood for a long while at her window, looking out at the peaceful English scene bathed in moonlight. At last she murmured softly, leaning her beautiful head against the window frame:

“I stated your case well, but you didn’t quite deserve it, Dal. You ought to have let me know about Jane, weeks ago. Anyway, it will stop the talk about you and me. And as for you, dear, you will go on sighing for the moon; and when you find the moon is unattainable, you will not dream of seeking solace in more earthly lights—not even poppa’s best sperm,” she added, with a wistful little smile, for Pauline’s fun sparkled in solitude as freely as in company, and as often at her own expense as at that of other people, and her brave American spirit would not admit, even to herself, a serious hurt.

Not even whose best what???!!!???

(And do you find it gives you a wistful little smile like Pauline’s????)

One of the July crop of New Who books, by of this parish. Starts by hinting that it may be a Doctor Who version of Beowulf (main setting is the small city of Geath, ruled by Beol) but goes in quite a different direction – ending up with a nod or two towards Star Trek with a running subtext of sardonic political commentary. This will all be above the heads of the age group who are the main audience for this series of books, but their parents will enjoy it all the same.

The more I hear and read about Afghanistan, the more I realise I don’t know. I recently attended a conference of experts where a full day was taken up with discussions of how quickly, and with how much dignity, Western troops can realistically be withdrawn; this not being one of my areas of expertise, I mostly sat and listened.

Seierstad’s book rather adds to my confusion. The book purports to be her interpretation of the lives of the Afghan family she lived with in Kabul for three months, anonymised and told through their viewpoint rather than hers. She vividly depicts an intensely patriarchal society, religious in observance rather than belief, traumatised and decapitated by years of war; much along the lines of what I have read in Khaled Hosseini’s novels, though restricted in time to those few months of 2002 shortly after Karzai first came to power (and reminiscences of earlier periods).

But is it accurate or fair? Her host vehemently protested the fairness of her depiction (and her utter failure to disguise his identity adequately) and the latest news is that his younger wife has won damages for what the book says about her. And the fact that the details are so intensely disputed by those in a position to know about them makes one suspicious about the extent to which Seierstad has got the big picture right.

We all bring our own baggage to our interpretation of what is going on in other people’s lives, and I suspect that Western journalism – or perhaps more broadly, the instinct to tell a story which is interesting to a Norwegian or European audience – may not be the best way of letting the voices of Afghans themselves be heard where it matters. My own feeling (which of course reflects my own biases of intellectual formation and professional experience) is that anthropologists, more than other commentators, have quite a lot to offer in helping the understanding of situations like Afghanistan, certainly more than journalists who drop in (let alone the ‘military experts’ who tend to dominate domestic discourse in the West). I don’t know of any such work on Afghanistan itself, but if I ever need to work up a more detailed knowledge of the country, I will start there, rather than with any more books like this one.

I’ve given up on this “unofficial and unauthorised guide to Doctor Who 2005”, after ploughing through a first half composed entirely of secondary reports gleaned from the media and checking out the write-ups of the first two episodes, and I won’t buy any of the rest in the series. I picked it off the shelf at the Doctor Who shop hoping for something at least as insightful and interesting as the ol’ Discontinuity Guide and if possible approaching the standards of the About Time series, but this isn’t it. The reviews of each story were written almost immediately after broadcast, so have the qualities of enthusiastic reflection rather than the detailed reflection which I know several of the writers can deliver. A disappointment.

“In my country we should call it real mean to laugh, at people who had been our guests and performed in our houses.”

“In your country, my dear,” said Myra Ingleby, “you have no duchesses.”

“Well, we supply you with quite a good few,” replied the American girl calmly, and went on with her ice.

We have been debating over breakfast whether or not the new museum in the next village to ours is the Brabant Museum of Radios or the Museum of Brabant Radios. (Report in Dutch here, video in Dutch here.) Mr Janssens, the proprietor, has 6000 radios stashed about the house, and has now put 1900 of them on display. (It is not clear if there are any other human occupants of the house.) In an inexplicable display of shortsightedness, none of the various state funding bodies offered funding for this enterprise, which has cost Mr Janssens €380000 of his own money. It is open on Friday evenings and all day at the weekends, should you wish to drop by. I am immeasurably excited by the prospect.

The Sea Devils starts strongly, with the first episode containing one of the funniest scenes ever in the whole of Doctor Who, when the Master encounters the Clangers. (Am I right in thinking that this is the only reference to any other sf show in Old Who anywhere? New Who of course has referred to Star Trek, the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Harry Potter)

It’s a politically complex story, as one often gets from Malcolm Hulke, with easily the most evil character being the Permanent Under-Secretary from London, come to wipe out the non-humans because they are different. Even the Master’s motivation is a bit more three-dimensional than usual, and the Sea Devils themselves behave in good faith for a race which has been awakened from millions of years of slumber to find themselves under attack.

Note also Declan Mulholland as another Ulster actor to appear in Who apart from Harry Towb (and of course Lalla Ward). And Malcolm Clarke’s music is really good – I see he scored several later Who stories from Earthshock on, but don’t remember those being as memorable.

I didn’t like The Mutants when I first watched it, out of sequence, and I don’t like it any more watched in sequence either. The political message is entirely reasonable; if anything it loses by being laid on so thick. It’s nice to see George Pravda again from The Enemy of the World as Jaeger, and Paul Whitsun-Jones returns from The Smugglers as the Marshal. But the show is dragged down by the exceptionally poor performances of some of the other cast, and by the inadequacy of the script. The resolution of the episode 5 cliff-hanger at the start of episode 6 defies most laws of science, and one has to query why the Time Lords go to such elaborate lengths to get the message to Ky, considering that it is of so little immediate use to him.

It’s weird because while I don’t rate Baker and Martin all that highly as writers, they are usually rather better than this, and Christopher Barry is one of the great Who directors. One can’t get it right all the time, I suppose.

There is a bit of a feeling of the show running out of steam by the time we reach The Time Monster, where the fact that the Brigadier and most of UNIT spend several episodes in suspended animation is almost symbolic of the lack of plot.

Since the actual narrative makes no sense, our attention is held by the dynamic between the three central couples – Stuart and Ruth, the Doctor and Jo, and the Master and Galleia; and unfortunately the first of these, which carries the weight of the story in the early episodes, doesn’t really work – we never get a convincing sense of the dynamic between them, and Stuart’s totally rubbish moustache out-acts him in every scene.

It does pick up. The sequences of the Doctor and Jo marooned in the Tardis are as emotionally charged as RTD at the height of his powers. The dynamic between Delgado and Ingrid Pitt is very sexy, though badly written. John Levene has his best outing yet as Benton, even if he does get regressed to infancy. But really, this is not a lot better than The Mutants.

I know The Three Doctors more or less by heart (my DVD is the very one which was originally sent by the BBC to Verity Lambert as a complimentary copy), but it’s interesting to watch it yet again in the context of what has gone before and what is yet to come. Partly that it’s a welcome uptick in quality after the wobbles of the last two stories; partly also that it’s a reboot of the show’s setting, both a formal launch for the new format of Doctor and female companion wandering the universe and a farewell to UNIT as the default context and incidentally to the previous two Doctors, whose itinerant lifestyle is now to be re-adopted.

It is great to see both Troughton and, however intermittently, Hartnell once again, and although there are weaknesses (the anti-matter monsters, Omega’s dark side, the comic yokel Ollis, the pointless physicist Tyler, and the Brigadier losing his marbles), the story is a decent feelgood effort for the anniversary.

And Carnival of Monsters takes us to an alien planet, with one of the great Robert Holmes scripts: he specialised in having a couple of characters whose dialogue informs us all about their world, and here he does it twice over, with Kalik and Orum (and to an extent Pletrac) revealing Inter Minor to us, and Vorg and Shirna representing the outside world. The idea of a closed and bureaucratic society dealing with the decadent entertainment possibilities of its neighbours is a rather good one. The first episode is espeically good with no apparent connection between Inter Minor and the SS Bernice, until Vorg’s hand removes the Tardis.

Michael Wisher is excellent as the villainous Kalik. Maybe they should bring him back to, I dunno, play a mad scientist who invents the Daleks. I love Cheryl Hall as Shirna as well, though admittedly more for her costume than her acting. The Drashigs rather let it down though. And I noticed a continuity goof: as Jo flees from being thigh-deep in the marsh, her trousers dry instantly (and her close-fitting pockets don’t seem to contain the bulky set of skeleton keys)..

Yet another political tale in Malcolm Hulke’s Frontier in Space, where a cold war about to turn hot between Earth and Draconia is being exploited by the Master with his Dalek and Ogron allies. The plot itself meanders a bit – essentially all we do is get from Earth to the Ogron planet via the Moon – but (as I’ve so often said in the Pertwee era) – watched an episode at a time it keeps the attention. The scene where the Daleks appear at the top of the cliffs is the first Doctor Who I can remember clearly catching when it was first shown in 1973 (I was five).

For the first time this season, the production values more or less match the ambition of the story, lots of spaceship model shots and plenty of sets, none of which wobble. The short sequence of the Doctor in a spacesuit outside the Master’s ship is particularly well done. The Earth president, played by Vera Fusek, is particularly memorable, though she and General Williams have a more hands-on approach to dealing with espionage suspects than the presidents and senior military officials who I have dealt with in real life, and they are on the young side for such senior officials.

Another reference to sf outside the Doctor Who canon involving the Master: he reads a copy of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds in Episode 4. (Wells himself, of course, turns up as a character in the Sixth Doctor’s era.) And did I pick up Ramsay Williams, as Congressman Brook, putting on a mildly Ulster accent as Congressman Brook?

Alas, the end of Frontier in Space is also the end of Roger Delgado as the Master. I will miss him. I can’t be alone in finding Mavic Chen and Tobias Vaughn the two most memorable characters of the black and white era after the Doctors themselves – evil is always more interesting than good. The Daleks and Cybermen are not characters in their own right (until we get Davros, of course). So inventing the Doctor’s nemesis was a very smart move.

It helps immensely that Delgado and Pertwee clearly worked very well together. Since the Third Doctor is haughtily dismissive of the Brigadier and UNIT, and needs a companion he can patronise, it is only the Master who is really his equal. His plans are almost always completely ludicrous, but the Doctor takes them deadly seriously and so therefore do we. He really does combine both menace and charm, and actively seduces both Queen Galleia and Captain Chin Lee as well as the audience.

I liked most of these stories about the same as last time I watched them – the two real turkeys, The Mutants and The Time Monster, remain turkeys, but the Season 10 stories seem more forgiveable somehow.

I am now 42% through the Old Who stories, 48% by screen minutes and episodes, and 36% of the time from November 1963 to December 1989 has elapsed.

< 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

23rd August 1991: death of Innes Lloyd, producer of Doctor Who from The Celestial Toymaker to The Enemy of the World, who overhauled the show by getting rid of all the regular cast including the star, thus ensuring its long-term survival.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

23rd August 1975: Tom Baker presents Disney Time as the Fourth Doctor. (If you don’t know what this means, you really haven’t missed anything worth explaining.)

23rd August 2002: Webcast of episode 4 of Real Time. Evelyn is faced with becoming a Cyberman; the Doctor confronts the bloke played by Yee Jee Tso and discovers why his acting is so bad why he is not completely human.

Only 23 pages in this chapter, covering the immediate aftermath of Theodosius’ death – the power struggle between Rufinus and Stilicho, resolved in favour of the latter, and a revolt in Africa by Gildo the Moor. Various points detail, but for once Gibbon doesn’t really manage to make it sing, I suppose because we are setting the scene for Alaric in the next chapter.

A nicely constructed novel of the Tenth Doctor and Martha, taking them to a contemporary English village where there is Something Narsty in the well. A good set of local characters filling out a fairly standard alien menace story; I wasn’t completely convinced by the engineering aspects of the secret tunnel, but prepared to forgive it for overall charm.

Q: How can you tell if a mathematician is an extrovert?

A: If he looks at your shoes when he is talking to you.

It’s good to have visitors, and it’s also tremendously helpful when the younger members of the household help out with the catering arrangements for the smaller guests:

i) births and deaths

None that grabbed me

ii) broadcast anniversaries

22nd August 1964: broadcast of ‘A Change of Identity’, third eisode of the story we now call The Reign of Terror. Susan and Barbara are rescued; Ian escapes; the Doctor disguises himself as a Regional Officer (magnificent uniform), but the jailer has rumbled him…

22nd August 1985: broadcast of episodes 5 and 6 of Slipback on radio. Eric Saward still thinks he is Douglas Adams and the Doctor manages not to prevent the Big Bang. In response to queries from Alex, it seems that the story was broadcast twice fortnightly rather than weekly; I don’t know if that was also true for Pirate Radio Four in which it was embedded.

iii) dates specified in canon

22nd August 1572: The Doctor reappears, and he and Steven make it back to the Tardis, leaving poor Anne Chaplet to face the awful events of the following day. (as shown in The Massacre, 1966)

22nd August 1941: climax of the earlier timeline of Gary Russell’s 2008 Torchwood novel, The Twilight Streets.

The Fifth Doctor, Tegan and Turlough, reunited with Nyssa in Cobwebs, find themselves in a mysterious human colony where the original settlers have forgotten what they are there for and are now the prey of mysterious forces. To be honest the plot isn’t the strong point here, but Lyon is rather good at catching the dynamics of Team Tardis of 1983, and Hayley Attwell turns in a notable guest performance as the potential young leader of the locals. A decent enough sf play which would engage but not fascinate the non-Who fan; sometimes that is enough.

This book, about the career of Russian spy Sergei Tretyakov before his defection to the US, was strongly recommended to me by someone who said that its portrayal of how intelligence agents handle contacts was scrupulously accurate (and my source is in a position to know). This was before the recent revelations about the group of deep cover Russian agents in the US and UK, and indeed before Tretyakov’s own sudden death in June this year (not revealed until July); my informant may have known about the former but I hope he was not tipped off about the latter in advance.

There is some interesting material, but the whole feels a bit shallow. For instance, Earley doesn’t seem to know much about the European Union and his account of COREU telegrams is confused and inaccurate; when his details on points that I know about are poor, I naturally become suspicious about the rest. Though other bits rang true: there is one beautiful Kafka moment (which Earley calls ‘a catch-22 situation’): one section of the Russian intelligence establishment in New York had the job of recruiting and converting FBI and CIA agents, but were also forbidden by their own regulations from having any contact with known FBI or CIA agents. This of course led to significant padding of reports, making it appear that the rather few genuine US contacts were more impressive than they were.

Earley does not examine the extent to which Tretyakov’s work actually affected Russian policy and actions more than would have been the case had he been an ordinary diplomat, and that is the biggest gap in the book (though of course it’s a much broader question equally applicable to Western intelligence agencies). There are two interesting passages about spreading disinformation among the academic community. I remember the Transdniestrian astroturf affair from a couple of years back, as chronicled by Edward Lucas at the time, which was a rather good example of this; but a more audacious claim is that the KGB simply invented the idea that the widespread use of atomic weapons would result in a “nuclear winter” in order to strengthen the anti-nuclear lobby in the West. I’ve no idea what the current status of nuclear winter theory is among climate scientists, and Earley doesn’t investigate this, simply accepting Tretyakov’s account that his colleagues made it all up, and again I wish he had checked a bit further.

One of the more interesting but less believable claims in the book is that Strobe Talbott, then a senior US official, was ‘played’ by a Russian official who was really in intelligence but pretended to be matey with him. Talbott, asked to respond, contends (entirely credibly, though Earley doesn’t seem to believe him) that he always expected and believed that his interlocutor was passing the entire contents of their conversations back to various contacts in Moscow, and spoke to him on that basis; he doesn’t add, but might have, that that is what makes such conversations worth while in the first place. The fact that Tretyakov (or his FBI/CIA handlers) wanted this story published is itself perhaps significant.

There is a cautionary tale there. My own policy with contacts who I know or suspect to be in that line of work is to treat them as I do ‘ordinary’ officials, or indeed reasonably motivated graduate students. If my interlocutors fancy they are getting better information from me than their competition, that is their lookout; any such conversation, from my point of view, is always at least partly about influencing government decision-makers or the wider epistemic community. This is a game played in both directions, of course; the details of how one of the world’s most famous services handles HUMINT are fascinating, and the general guidelines and specific judgement calls that Tretyakov and his colleagues made when deciding how and when to develop contacts make for interesting reading.

The other interesting human story, though of course one has to treat it with due caution, is the slow disillusionment of Tretyakov and his family with Russia after the fall of Communism: the increasing surrender of Russian territory as well as the economy to criminal oligarchs, backed by what passed for the central government, must have been an awful process of disillusionment for all patriotic Russians. Each has made their own accommodation with the new state of affairs; Tretyakov chose to turn his back on it and seek a new beginning. He enjoyed it for less than ten years.

date specified in canon

21st August 1572: Admiral de Coligny is shot and wounded; the Abbot of Amboise, suspected of being an impostor who has deraied the assassination plans, is killed by his own allies; Steven (who is fresh from the mayhem of The Daleks’ Master Plan) thinks it is the Doctor who has been slain. (as shown in The Massacre, 1966)

A book about a posthuman society – most people exist as virtual entities in the datanet of vast supercomputers – dealing with astrophysical disaster striking the earth and then trying to explore parallel universes. Lots of mathematical theory, but rather short on interesting characters or plot resolution; perhaps a bit like Stapledon without his trademark breathlessness. Glad to have finally ticked this off my list.

Susan’s departure from the Tardis at the end of The Dalek Invasion of Earth was the first departure of a comopanion, and in some ways the least satisfactorily resolved of all; what sort of life does she face, presumably one of the Doctor’s own race, but living with humans for the rest of her life? (When she pops up again in The Five Doctors we are told nothing of what she has been up to in the meantime.) The 1994 radio play Whatever Happened to Susan Foreman? had her wandering back to the twentieth century and becoming European Commissioner for Education, but it is not a serious attempt to contribute to canon. Big Finish tried a bit harder with Marc Platt’s An Earthly Child at the end of last year, which brought Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor back to Earth decades after Susan’s departure, and guest-starred McGann’s son Jake playing Susan’s son Alex, but I wasn’t completely convinced.

By contrast, I loved John Peel’s Legacy of the Daleks. Peel is a bit of a guilty pleasure for me – I rate his novelisations of the black and white era Dalek stories very highly, and appreciate his attempts to wrest continuity and character from material which is not always promising. Here, he has Susan trying to manage her relationship with the aging David, putting on make-up to appear nearer his age when they are together in public, in a post-Dalek England which has become a patchwork of feudal fiefdoms. Throw into the mix not only the visiting Eighth Doctor, but also the Delgado!Master attempting to Take Over The Universe by reviving the Daleks and stealing their tech, and the book ends up pushing many of my fanboy buttons, ending with hope for Susan and a prologue to one of my favourite TV stories. Best Eighth Doctor Adventure I’ve read for a while.

I read and much enjoyed the first volume of this manga series last year. It concerns the education of Hikaru Azuma, a young Japanese autistic boy, as told largely from the viewpoint of his mother Sachiko. At this stage the series is settling down into being a regular feature in the Japanese magazine For Mrs, targeted at young mothers, so we get a certain amount of recapitulation and also re-education of the reader through new characters – first the parent of a new child in Hikaru’s class, who has had a much more difficult time of it and is much more traumatised by her dealings with authority, and then a difficult transition at school with a new special education teacher who isn’t really up to it and a new headmaster who doesn’t really care. Tobe’s art as ever captures the expressions of autistic children brilliantly, and is pretty good on other points too; and I was also fascinated by the various insights into Japanese elementary school culture which were included as local context but were often more educational for me than the main thrust of the story.

Keiko Tobe died earlier this year without finishing the series, but I will certainly get through the remaining four volumes.

i) births and deaths

A cracking selection today:

20th August 1932: birth of Anthony Ainley, who played the Master from the last scene of The Keeper of Traken (1981) till the final Old Who story, Survival (1989)

20th August 1943: birth in Dublin of Sylvester McCoy (original name Percy James Patrick Kent-Smith), who played the Seventh Doctor from Time and the Rani (1987) to Survival (1989) and returned for the 1996 TV movie. He continues to feature in Big Finish audios.

20th August 1962: birth of Sophie Aldred, who played Ace from Dragonfire (1987) to Survival (1989) and also continues to feature in Big Finish audios.

also 20th August 1962: birth of James Marsters, who smoulders through the second (2008) series of Torchwood as Jack’s lover and enemy Captain John Hart, though we knew him first as Spike on Buffy. Interesting that he and Sophie Aldred were born on the same day; isn’t it odd that we have never seen them in the same room at the same time?

ii) production anniversary

I don’t usually do these, but this is a significant one.

20th August 1963: first ever production session of Doctor Who, as the opening credits are created.

iii) date specified in canon

20th August 1572: Steven, trying to find the Doctor, bluffs his way into the Abbot’s presence and overhears the plot to assassinate Admiral de Coligny. (as shown in The Massacre, 1966)

• slacktivist: Please forgive me for the actions of extremists I have never met who commit acts of violence that I have never advocated
  Excellent commentary – transferable to many situations.
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• ailbhe: Omagh 1998
  Lest we forget
  (tags: northernireland)
• It's Sexy A-Levels!
  Judging by the newspaper coverage, successful A-Level students are mainly female and cute.
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