This was Gareth Roberts’ first Doctor Who book (in the Virgin New Adventures series), laying the groundwork for a subsequent career that has most recently produced The Lodger (though we have a couple more Sarah Jane Smith stories by him coming out towards the end of the year). A small plot element – London commuters whisked through a wormhole in space to encounter an alien menace – was re-used in Planet of the Dead, by Gareth Roberts and RTD. Fannish opinion on this one seems a bit polarised; I thought it was OK but not brilliant, with the best bit being the introduction of the alien Chelonians, a race of militant cybernetic tortoises who crop up in other, later Who novels and who were recently name-checked on screen in The Pandorica Opens. I was less impressed by galactic war criminal Sheldukher who I felt varied between dull and nasty. Poor Benny Summerfield has a hard time of it, with her brain being partially rotted by a spiked soft drink. Various other elements jumbled together, not completely successfully, but a fairly satisfactory Big Reveal at the end. The prelude to the book, published in DWM in 1993, is online here.

Births and Deaths

28 July 1946: birth of Kenny McBain, who directed The Horns of Nimon (1979-80).

Yeah, slim pickings, I know. We will finish the month with a more interesting trio of dates.

I very much enjoyed the 1971 Annual, but there was a gap of two years before the next in the series was published and unfortunately the improvement in quality was not maintained. Most of the stories appear to be by an author with little knowledge of the show – the Doctor is repeatedly referred to as “the scientist” (except in the one story featuring the Master, where the fact that they are both Time Lords in exile gets slipped in) and Jo at one stage is described as having dark hair. The plots of the stories rather weakly reflect those of the first half of the Pertwee era, though have a tendency to end rather abruptly and sometimes limply. One is set in Australia, presumably to compensate Aussie viewers for their loyalty (hang on another few years, folks, and you will be further rewarded, if that is the word, with Tegan). The artist who produced the copious illustrations did a very good Pertwee, if rather obviously copied from various pulicity stills, but the depictions of Jo, Yates, the Brigadier and the Master are pretty unrecognisable (though at least Jo is blonde in the pictures if not in the text). The total page length has dropped down to 80 from 96, so all in all I think I would have felt a bit ripped off even at the time.

Nothing particularly grabbed me for yesterday’s date.

i) births and deaths

27 July 1925: birth of Harry Towb, whose death last year, three days before his 84th birthday, I commemorated at the weekend.

ii) broadcast / performance anniversary

27 July 2008: broadcast (and performance) of Music of the Spheres in conjunction with Proms concert. I watched this the other week and it is pretty brilliant – wish I had been there for the real thing.

iii) date of real event, implicitly specified in canon

27 July 2012: scheduled launch of the Olympic Games, as seen in Fear Her (2006)

A couple of telling photographs from the current trip. First, me and my colleague T with the Minister and his Undersecretary, who are both just under 2 metres tall:

And then, me with (left) the head of their Addis Ababa office and (right) two colleagues from their Kampala office.

Ador Akok Athuai, on the far right above, is 7’2″ (2.15m) tall, and I think is the tallest person I have ever met. He is related to the basketball player, Manute Bol, who died last month and was even taller.

I will never be able to pass myself off as a Southern Sudanese. At 5’10”, 1.79 m, I am simply too short. (Quite apart from other problems with such a project.)

I had almost no expectations or knowledge of this book before I opened it; my only other Hemingway, read and much enjoyed a year ago, was The Old Man and the Sea so I was mildly braced for more tales of Atlantic fishery, rather than for the intense story of disillusioned young things in Paris in the mid-1920s, drinking too much, shagging each other, and heading off to Spain for the bullfights. I must say I loved it; though the book starts off by telling us about Robert Cohn, in fact it is much more about the narrator, Jake Barnes, and his discreetly undescribed war wound; and a quest for courage and death by him and Brett, his and Cohn’s mutual love interest. Hemingway’s staccato writing style is enviably clear and crisp, telling us much more with some of the individual punctuation marks than you sometimes get with entire paragraphs. On the basis of this and The Old Man and the Sea I shall try and expand my Hemingway collection fairly rapidly.

It really took me ages to grind through this, and I’m not sure that it was worth it. Rather ambitiously I got hold of the Wordsworth edition which includes not only Part I and Part II of Faust, but also an earlier draft of Part I (the Urfaust) just in case you are sufficiently interested to know what the original version might have looked like.

Part I is the more digestible version (and the Urfaust even more so). Heinrich Faust, a scholar who is trying to reconcile the life of the mind with the lusts of the flesh, signs a deal with Mephistopheles (who9 first appears, and I am not making this up, in the shape of a poodle) to get whatever he wants, notably the pretty girl Gretchen. There are various rustic and studenty comic interludes, but it all goes wrong and she is executed for infanticide (I think; it’s a bit obscure).

Part II, in five tedious acts, is more a pageant of Goethe’s knowledge (and adaptation) of German and classical mythology than anything resembling an actual plot. Faust sets up a kingdom which seems to be co-located between medieval Germany and ancient Greece in order to seduce Helen of Troy (after the end of the Trojan war). There are complicated bits with emperors battling each other (one of whom may be Napoleon, who was around at the time of composition) and I really didn’t follow much of it.

I think that either part would be pretty much impossible to stage. The characters do very little but wander up and down declaiming verse, and some of the directions are surely unimplementable (the well-trained poodle, as noted above; various stunts required in Part II). I assume that Goethe wrote it for intellectual house parties to recite to each other while lounging around the formal gardens sipping white wine.

Despite the fact that I really didn’t enjoy Faust much, I did have some fun spotting themes that have carried through to later literature. Quite a lot of Part I reminded me of Buffy, with the students, young lurve, supernatural powers and diabolical figures tempting our lead character. That may be my imagination; I’m quite sure, however, that Roger Zelazny drew on Faust’s construction of his magical castle to seduce Helen when writing the latter part of Jack of Shadows – he was a fan of German literature.

I suppose I should read (or, better, somehow watch) the Marlowe version to get another perspective on the story. (And then reread Michael Swanwick’s take on it.)

broadcast anniversaries

25 July 1964: broadcast of ‘Kidnap’, the fifth episode of the story we now call The Sensorites. The Doctor, Ian and Susan start to get to the bottom of the mysterious poisonings, but the internal political machinations of the Sensorites are reaching a conclusion as well…

25 July 1985: broadcast of first and second episodes of Slipback on radio. The Doctor has a hangover and Eric Saward thinks he is Douglas Adams. Episode two ends with Peri falling down a ventilation shaft, poor girl.

i) births and deaths

24 July 2009: death of Harry Towb, a few days before his 84th birthday. He played Osgood, the lunar controller in episode 1 of The Seeds of Death (Second Doctor, 1969) and McDermott, the old-school plastics factory man in episode 2 of Terror of the Autons (Third Doctor, 1971). Both get killed off early on. Here's a small tribute:

Osgood bids his farewell as he heads up to the moon…

…disappearing in the T-Mat booth…

…to find that his management problems…

…have been made worse by…

…the unseen intruders…

…(actually the Ice Warriors)…

…who shoot him. And he dies.

McDermott is puzzled by the plastics factory…

…and the new advisor with the natty beard…

…who wants to show him a new invention…

…the chair you can just sink into…

…this is the forerunner of the bin that eats Mickey in Rose…

…and so McDermott dies.

Towb also returned rather bizarrely to play the Brigadier's aged Italian Uncle in The Ghosts of N-Space, Jon Pertwee's last outing as the Doctor, a 1996 audio. There are no pictures from The Ghosts of N-Space, but perhaps that is just as well.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

24 July 1965 – broadcast of 'Checkmate', the fourth and last episode of the story we now call The Time Meddler, ending the original second season. The Monk reveals his plans to equip Harold Godwinsson's army with atomic bazookas to change history. The Doctor outwits him and sabotages his Tardis. Closing titles play over arty shots of the Doctor, Steven and Vicki against a starry background.

iii) date specified in Who literature

24 July 1989: the Sixth Doctor meets Mel Bush for the first time, in Gary Russell's 1997 novel Business Unusual (which I haven't read myself).

On 24 July 6012, the Tenth Doctor, Martha Jones and Donna Noble arrived on Messaline, the TARDIS having brought them there against their will. Upon their arrival, the Doctor “gave birth” to Jenny, a generated anomaly grown from a sample of his DNA. With the Doctor’s new “daughter”, the TARDIS crew together ended the Human-Hath War, which had started only seven days earlier. Jenny was shot by General Cobb, but was revived by energy from “the Source” after the Doctor and his companions left, escaping in a rocket to lead a new life. (TV: The Doctor’s Daughter)

In 1764, a road works overseer asked the First Doctor for his papers on the Time Lord’s way to Paris. When he had none to present, he was forced into slave labour. Meanwhile, his companions — Susan Foreman, Barbara Wright and Ian Chesterton — were to be guillotined the following day. They were placed in cells at the Conciergerie, but all three had an idea of how to escape. Barbara and Susan abandoned their plan of digging their way out when the hole caused their cell to be infested with rats. The Doctor, however, did manage to get out of his predicament by distracting and knocking out the road works overseer. Ian too managed to get saved — he was crossed off the execution list when his captors thought he knew something of value. (TV: “Guests of Madame Guillotine”)

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I was rather unimpressed by the Pinker book I read last year, but this seemed to be a more coherent assembly of facts and theories relating to linguistics, psychology and philosophy. I’m afraid I still wasn’t gripped by it, but that is more to do with my own preferences for intellectual exercise than any fault of the book; I can’t get very excited by deep philosophical questions, and psychology has never been an attractive field for me.

There were some points of interest.

• I was startled to read of an old family friend making her reputation by observing and writing up the process by which her daughters learned to speak, and indeed nervously wondered if I too had been an unwitting subject of her research. But on reflection, by the time we knew the family her daughters were well past the stage of language acquisition (in English anyway, though for all I know she may have also exploited the linguistic consequences of their subsequent emigration to the Netherlands).
• Good quote on linguistic determinism: “The idea that Eskimos pay more attention to varieties of snow because they have more words for it is so topsy-turvy (can you think of any other reason why Eskimos might pay attention to snow?) that it’s hard to believe it would be taken seriously were it not for the feeling of cleverness it affords at having transcended common sense.”
• A joke about Eastern European aristocrats having a drinking contest where the winner is the one who can think of the biggest number. After long thought the first one says, “Three.” The second one ponders long and hard, and finally says, “You win.”
• But the reason that peoples who count ‘one, two, many’ don’t have larger numbers is that thye don’t really need them; Pinker quotes a researcher who finds that the Yanomanö warrior knows each of his arrows individually and so does not count them.
• Rude words for sex are transitive (take a direct object); polite words for sex are intransitive (require a preposition) – “John bonked Mary”; “John made love to Mary”. I wonder how true this is in languages other than English.
• Politeness strategies in many languages use similar strategies to make direct questions more acceptable – he gives an example from Tzeltal, “You wouldn’t perhaps sell your chicken, it was said” – similar in concept to English “You wouldn’t be selling your chicken by any chance, would you?”

That last point was rather unusual in that Pinker for once drew from languages other than English for his conclusions, and I would have enjoyed the book more if he had done so more often. I’m glad to have read a better book by him than How The Mind Works, but I won’t go out of my way to track his stuff down in future.

Still trying to get details but it seems that the International Court of Justice has, very sensibly, ruled that Kosovo’s declaration of independence in February 2008 did not violate either general international law, or, more specifically, UN Security Council Resolution 1244. (The court’s own website is down, but I’ve been folowing through Twitter where the updates are usually ahead of the news websites.)

I’m glad and surprised. I had expected a much less clear-cut ruling, the court possibly even refusing to give a judgement (and probably doing so at great length), in order to play it safe. And of course just havinog an ICJ advisory ruling in your back pocket may not actually help – Morocco is still in the Western Sahara, the wall still snakes across the West Bank. But it certainly does no harm.

As with most of the stories of this run, I found myself enjoying The Mind of Evil more this time than previously. Already, the Doctor / UNIT / Jo ensemble feels comfortable and reassuring. It is quite amazing how much Manning’s performance pretty much sets the agenda for all subsequent female companions. I will write more on this when I get to The Green Death in a couple of months, but it’s striking how routine she has made it become even in her second story (indeed, even in her first). Also it’s nice to get the impression that UNIT does more than sitting around waiting for the Doctor to shout at them.

The Mind of Evil has a lot of similarities with The Ambassadors of Death, except that it is better. The Master’s means and motivation are no more convincing than General Carrington’s, but Delgado pulls it off far better than Abineri (and of course we also get shown his motivation very explicitly). One could wish for a slightly more evil-looking mind parasite, but apart from that the special effects are pretty good, and the monsters returning from the black and white era in the Doctor’s nightmares are practically the first indication in the colour era (bar Tardis, Benton and Brigadier) that this is the same show that Troughton and Hartnell used to be in.

Also Pik-Sen Lim, cast in a story written by her husband, gets the first speaking role for a woman of colour since Carmen Munro played Fariah in The Enemy of the World, and while it’s not exactly a strong and empowered role she is very watchable in it.

The Claws of Axos has a number of interesting ideas, which aren’t quite delivered as well as they might have been. The portrait of civil-military relations, with the civilians definitely the bad guys, is quite fascinating. Peter Bathurst, last seen trying to run the Vulcan colony in The Power of the Daleks, is selfish civil servant Chinn, bullied mercilessly by his minister but in turn bullying UNIT while trying to cut a deal with the Axons (and then being caught out deceiving the Axons about the global distribution of Axonite). The best bit, though, is Roger Delgado’s Master, outfoxed for once by Axos, forced by circumstance to collaborate with te Brigadier, and at the end of episode 3 rather regretfully wiping out the Doctor and Jo in order to save the world.

It doesn’t quite amount to the sum of its parts, though it is still better than I remembered. The worst bit is the leaden performance of Paul Grist as US agent Bill Filer, though some responsibility rests with the writers for not deciding whether he was a love interest for Jo, or explaining why he is a civilian in an otherwise military team. The second worst bit is of course comic yokel Pigbin Josh. The other apparent reversal, the Doctor pretending to ally with the Master to flee and let the Earth die, is not as convincing; somehow the Doctor’s desire to escape his exile is a comic character flaw rather than a driving obsession (as it would have been in, say, Christopher Ecclestone’s hands).

Note that, as in Inferno, nuclear power is much better for you than any other kind of electricity.

Gosh, with Colony in Space we’re back to the old days: the Tardis goes to another planet for the first time since The War Games, ending the run of seven consecutive Earth-bound stories. When was the last time we had robots? Autons and Krotons don’t really count, so it’s either the White Robots of the Land of fiction, or the Quarks. When was the last time we had aliens in rubber suits which are not invading Earth? The Silurians, I suppose, on the technicality that Earth is their own planet and humanity the invaders. Apart from that – the Krotons and Dominators aren’t in rubber suits – it’s quite a long way back; probably the Cybermen on Telos, if it is their planet; the Macra aren’t in rubber suits, and before them it’s the Monoids. And because it’s Malcolm Hulke, there have to be giant reptiles, even if they are imaginary (though the Primitives do also look a bit reptilian).

This being Malcolm Hulke, it is a somewhat political story, but the message seems somewhat dodgy. The evil capitalist exploiters are of course evil, but the local indigenous inhabitants are denied agency and conveniently destroy their only source of power, leaving the virtuous peace-loving colonists to inherit the planet. In the context of what was actually happening in Africa at the time, this is unbelievably crass.

However, it is mostly well done the story is better structured to watching an episode at a time rather than in one swell foop. John Ringham is particularly good as Ashe, and it’s good to remind viewers about the Time Lords, and that the Tardis actually goes places.

The Dæmons is surely the greatest of the UNIT stories, and one of the most English stories of this very English show. Evil morris dancers! A white witch! The Master is your local vicar! The first time I watched this I didn’t like it much, but taken in context, and an episode at a time, I can see why this Barry Letts script is seen as a high point of the Barry Letts years; it is the first time, apart from The War Games, that we have had a season finale as such, pulling all the characters together and ending with the Master’s disgrace and capture.

The Brigadier is off the main field of action for most of the story, which actually gives him a chance to shine on his own rather than be snarled at by Pertwee, and generates a nice the-boss-is-away dynamic among the other UNIT folks, augmented by Delgado on top form and by Damaris Hayman’s wonderfully batty performance as Miss Hawthorne (who we assume had a jolly good fertility dance with Benton throughout the following night). Apart from Richard Franklin, who is clearly the weakest of the regulars, everyone is excellent. (I enjoyed also watching the Return to Devil’s End documentary, bringing Pertwee, Courtney, Franklin and Levene back to the village along with director Christopher Barry.)

I commented back in The Abominable Snowmen that Who has four ways of treating religion: squabbling sectarians, deluded cultists, religious buildings used for nefarious purposes, or true believers. The Dæmons includes both the second and third categories. As far as I remember it is also the first time religion has been portrayed on the show since The Abominable Snowmen, and the only time apart from Steven’s profession of faith (or at least denomination) in The Massacre and the unecclesiastical antics of The Smugglers that we have had anything explicit about the Church of England. More on this in the story after next.

Day of the Daleks brings back the malignant pepperpots for the first time since Season Four (we’re now on Season Nine). Again, though last time I watched it I wasn’t all that impressed, particularly in contrast to Terrance Dicks’ novelisation which is probably the best of his many Who books, watched one episode at a time and in context it is actually a very clever story. The plot reflects a couple of utterly outdated elements of the Zeitgeist; this was a time when international peace was still a matter of staving off thermonuclear war by holding grand summits among the elite, one the one hand, and when terrorists tended to be earnest lefties in combat uniform whose methods were wrong bt whose ideals were comprehensible, on the other. The future Dalek-controlled Earth is more overtly fascist than that in The Dalek Invasion of Earth, but not quite as obviously so as the Skaro of Genesis of the Daleks, but in contrast to those stories it’s not really the point, which is a plot of time paradoxes.

The flashback sequence at the end of episode three is the first time we have seen the previous Doctors visually referenced since they left (apart from the still picture of Hartnell seen in Troughton’s first episode). It’s interesting that after a first colour season which might as well have been a completely different show, with only the Brigadier and the dismembered Tardis, followed by a season which had an unprecedented level of internal continuity, we’re now starting a run of three consecutive stories which do look back to the earlier history of Doctor Who, as if Letts now feels comfortable enough to acknowledge the origins. Fans of New Who will recall that it also seemed to take RTD a while to get comfortable with the programme’s past.

It’s not actually been so very long since I watched The Curse of Peladon, which is and remains one of my favourite Pertwee stories, so not all that much to say about it; viewed in context, it is notable for Jo’s first real love interest, and the first serious love interest for a companion since Jamie’s snog with Samantha in The Faceless Ones. (Apart from Zoe and Isobel in The Invasion, of course.) It makes Filer in The Claws of Axos look even worse than he did at the time.

Is Hepesh a deluded cultist, a true believer, or someone using religious instituions for nefarious purposes? Discuss.

In general, I am enjoying these stories a lot more than I thought I would. When I first rewatched the Third Doctor era I found myself irritated by the grouchy Pertwee characterisation, the tedious fights, the overstretched plots and Jo’s cutesy blondeness. But in fact Pertwee rather grows on one given a chance, the fights are of course there to remind us that the show is better than The Avengers, the stories taken episode by episode work better (and in any case are not as excessive as the seven, eight, ten and twelve-parters of previous eras), and Jo is recognisable with hindsight as setting the pattern for almost all subsequent companions. Also my ten-year-old (who turns eleven on Sunday) tells me that he rather likes Jo, and I think I can see why – small and childlike, she is essentially the viewpoint character for the younger members of the audience.

I am now 38% through the Old Who stories, 44% by screen minutes and episodes, and 32% 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 >

22 July 1937: birth of Adrienne Hill, who played the short-lived Katarina, a companion of the First Doctor, in the last episode of The Myth Makers and the first few episodes of The Daleks’ Master Plan in 1965.

22 July 1964: birth of Bonnie Langford, who played Melanie Bush in 1986-87 alongside the Sixth and Seventh Doctors.

They are not the only two Doctor Who regulars to share the same birthday – more on that come October.

Posting late because I have been on the road.

21 July 1994: publication of the first of the Virgin Missing Adventures, Paul Cornell’s tale of the Fifth Doctor and vampires, Goth Opera. I won’t normally track publication dates here but this is a significant event in the development of Who books, the first spinoff book featuring a non-current Doctor. (And also nothing else really caught my eye for today’s date.)

Yet another new series starting from Big Finish, this time with Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor auditioning four potential new companions in a set-up intended more for comedy than common sense. Not all of the potential companions are exactly who or what they say they are; I thought the show was stolen by Joanna Kanska as the manager at the hotel where it all took place, rather than by any of the formal contestants. Lots of stuff happening but it didn’t quite hang together for me.

One of several classic Dickens books which I had not previously read, and which eventually worked to the top of my list. I am sure that it was spell-binding social commentary in 1838, but the character of Oliver seemed to me much too good to be true. Any child coming from that sort of brutal institutionalised background would have pretty serious psychological issues; in fact all Oliver need is a comfortable bed and a cuddle and he turns into an angel. The implication is that Oliver, as a Good Boy, is therefore part of the deserving poor, and the Artful Dodger and so on, as Bad Boys, are part of the undeserving poor, a distinction I find rather invidious – copper-fastened at the end by the fact that Oliver does inherit wealth, but on condition of his goodness rather than his absolute rights as his parents’ son. There seems little room for redemption, and Nancy, the fallen woman who tries to redeem herself, gets killed off. The portrayal of Fagin must surely have appeared gratuitously anti-Semitic even by 1838 standards. I’m glad that I have read and enjoyed later Dickens, because I think if I had started here I would have written him off.

For the first time in my life I’ve been refused entry to a country on, as far as I can tell, purely political grounds. Preparing for my fourth trip in eight months to Sudan, I applied as usual for a visa at the Sudanese Embassy here in Brussels. Immediately the vibes were a lot less positive than previously – not unexpected since the ambassador and consul have both recently been replaced, and their president has just been indicted for genocide so they are not in a mood to be nice to foreigners. Given that I am leaving for a nine day trip this evening, I was more than a little concerned as to what to do.

But it is (probably) all right in the end. The autonomous government of Southern Sudan issues its own ‘travel permits’ which gain you access to its territory (though not to the northern part of the country) and since that is where I am going, I should, in šāʾ Allāh, be able to collect such a travel permit from the Southern Sudan office in Kampala tomorrow morning in the brief window between my flights landing from Istanbul and taking off for Juba at Entebbe. (Fans of Evelyn Waugh will remember a very similar dilemma for William Boot in Scoop.) Wish me luck.

(Explanation of the title of this post – ‘PNG’ = persona non grata. Another distinction for my CV.)

From the extra tracks of Situation Vacant:

“I had a brush with Doctor Who you know… you could say! It was fantastic job, because most of the time I was in bed with Peter [Davison], which was quite nice – coming to work and jumping into bed and have bed scenes – yes, I enjoyed it!”

I didn’t forget about this yesterday, just didn’t spot any 19 July anniversaries that appealed.

i) births and deaths

20 July 1923: birth of James Bree, who played the Security Chief in The War Games (1969), Nefred the Decider in Full Circle (1980) and the Keeper of the Matrix in The Ultimate Foe (1986)

ii) broadcast anniversaries – none

iii) dates specified in canon

20 July 1966: the day that the First Doctor leaves London with Ben and Polly in The War Machines (1966) and the Second Doctor brings them back in The Faceless Ones (1967), only to find that he and Jamie need to find the stolen Tardis in Evil of the Daleks (also 1967).

20 July 1969: Neil Armstrong walks on the moon (21 July European time), an event Martha Jones says she saw four times in Blink (2007).

20 July 2006: forty years on from her depature and return, Polly Wright emails Sir Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart as a result of reading an article about Jo Jones (née Grant) in the first installment of The Three Companions audioplay (released in 12 monthly episodes 2009-10).

This is one of the most audacious ideas Big Finish have had: reuniting Team Tardis from 1983 for three new audio plays, with Peter Davison as the Doctor, Sarah Sutton as Nyssa, Janet Fielding as Turlough Tegan and Mark Strickson as Turlough. (I’m trying to think of any previous Big Finish play which reunited more than two contemporaneous members of the cast of the classic series, and so far failing. Adric’s return two years ago saw him played not by Matthew Waterhouse but, as Peter Davison cruelly said, by an actor.)

Cobwebs is a good start to this mini-season. The set-up is decently spooky: the Doctor, Tegan and Turlough encounter Nyssa – for whom many years have elapsed since she left the Tardis – on a deserted space station filled with, well, cobwebs, also robots and a deranged computer. The plot develops into a tale of cures for space plague and temporal paradoxes, and impressively manages to wrench two of the three cliff-hangers from what is apparently the same situation viewed from different time periods. I wasn’t quite sure that the temporal paradox was satisfactory in the end – to what extent did the Doctor cause his own involvement in the situation? – but perhaps this will be resolved in the two sequels – the loose ends here seem to indicate that the three stories will be linked.

What makes it of course is that the core cast are obviously having a whale of a time getting back into the spirit of ’83. Tegan if anything is more spiky than I remember her – did she ever have a go at Nyssa in the original series? She lets fly at everyone here. Of the cast of creepy scientists and others, Raymond Coulthart stands out as the various artificial intelligences, though the other guest cast (all moderately well-known actors) are decent as well.

After the increasingly fannish progression of the last mini-season (Legend of the Cybermen would be pretty impenetrable to listeners who had not seen a particular Second Doctor story, though very enjoyable to those in the know) I’m glad to say that Cobwebs would probably be accessible to listeners with only a vague knowledge of Who (basically, that it’s about this guy who travels in time), and probably a good starting point for Big Finish newbies. Recommended.

Answers to yesterday’s questions:

1) salted meal, sacred salt, great laurel, father river – Lavinia, by Ursula Le Guin
2) punishable assault, marrow wound, notice that the suit, full outlawry, fifth court, old beardless, nine neighbours, lesser outlawry, lawful notice, lawful request, property forfeit, quarter court, named witnesses, forfeited property, same bloodline, brain wound, greatest lawyers, internal wound – Njal’s Saga, identified by
3) grave handbook, word shaker, swampy eyes, standover man, dream carrier, duden dictionary, drop sheets – The Book Thief
4) most different climates, temperate productions, arctic productions, transitional gradations, modified descendants, naturalised plants, consecutive formations, sessile cirripedes, aboriginal species, unknown progenitor, transitional grades, domesticated productions, larger genera, doubtful forms, modified offspring, transitional varieties, profitable variations, diversified habits, neuter insects, systematic affinity, fossiliferous formations, mere individual differences, mongrel offspring, occasional means – The Origin of Species, identified by
5) camouflage foil, cryo pod, fairy technology, bum flap, secondary door, helmet mike, jade ring, metal man, oxygen canisters, plasma screen – Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code, identified by
6) dying earth, caribou herd, ultimate intelligence, anti entropic fields, arrestor rods, hawking mat, tesla trees, motile isles, farcaster portals, cryogenic fugue, crew clones, mini gun, standard months, flame forests, containment field, universal card, standard centuries, local years – Hyperion, identified by (and almost by ).
7) signs with falsehood, punishment doth await, shameful chastisement, grievous chastisement, thou mayest warn, herein truly, observe prayer, thou thy trust, best knoweth, hath knowledge, hath guided, thy lord, whoso believeth, believing servants, clear tokens, hath subjected, obey the apostle, hath sealed, hath cursed – The Koran
8) sensory motions, gusty air, atomic shapes, atomic compounds, sunlit world, component atoms – De Natura Rerum
9) old lady with mittens, dressing gong, gingerbread men – Charmed Life, identified by
10) expected brain size, altruist genes, sigmoidal growth, giant deer, juvenile features, antler size, periodical cicadas, organic diversity, gall midges, descent with modification – not Jones or Dawkins but Steven Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin
11) white saloon car, gone bad inside, mystery blonde – Dead Souls, identified by
12) divisional inquisitor, old broom, huge men – Witch Week, spotted by
13) ale house, lavash bread, cobblestone alleyway – Pomegranate Soup
14) green wind, third rail – Palimpsest, by Catherynne Valente

And I declare  the winner, by a substantial margin. Thanks to all who had a go.

Paddy Ashdown is one of the people I most admire in politics; I voted for him as Lib Dem leader, was a candidate and election agent for the party in Cambridge in 1990 and 1991, and then was the head of the local branch of the Lib Dems in Northern Ireland for several years (a position in no way incompatible with my Alliance Party activities). A few years later I found myself running the major source of informed but critical commentary on his tenure as High Representative in Bosnia. So I felt that I knew him a little, through politics both domestic and international.

I feel I know him better now. The book takes us through the start of his life in India, growing up in the northern part of County Down (his grandfather, from Rathfriland a bit farther south, supposedly owned the first motor car ever seen in Ireland), his decision to join the Royal Marines and the the SBS, his slipping into diplomacy and espionage, and then the momentous decision to give it all up and concentrate on a political career.

He adopted Yeovil (and the Liberals of Yeovil adopted him) in 1976, and decided then that it would take three elections to win the seat from the Conservatives. In fact it took only two, and he won in 1983 despite limited local resources and spells of unemployment. I think this part of the book is particularly instructive for anyone wanting to take up a career in representative politics; it’s tough for all political parties but particularly for smaller ones.

We then jump almost immediately from 1983 to 1988, when he was elected leader with my vote and many others, and was faced with a party in crisis, bumping along the bottom of the polls and often behind David Owen’s continuing SDP. What interested me here was that Ashdown was always on the lookout for the best political terrain to occupy: equidistance was appropriate between Major and Kinnock, but when Blair moved Labour to the right, Ashdown surged to the centre-left. He allowed himself to get seduced by Blair’s vision of a historic realignment of the British left, but once Blair had failed a couple of critical tests (most notably, binning the Jenkins recommendations for electoral reform) Ashdown decided that the project was over, as was his leadership.

The most moving parts of the book are about Bosnia; the prologue takes us to the camps of Manjača and Trnopolje, located in that long valley between Banja Luka and Prijedor which I came to know well at a later year. Always gifted for languages, Ashdown quoted pithy local proverbs – a particular favourite was “Lako je tuđim kurcem gloginje mlatiti”, which translates “it is easy to beat down thorns using other men’s pricks”. But he also did more in three years to create a sense of confidence and dynamism in Bosnia than the international community had managed in the previous decade. (All this progress, though Ashdown does not say it, was wilfully squandered by the indolence of his somnolent successor.)

The book ends with two bizarre episodes: first, Gordon Brown’s attempt to get him to join the cabinet in 2007 as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, and second, his near miss at becoming UN special envoy for Afghanistan – an interesting case study of what happens when all the conditions have been put in place but one key actor (President Karzai) changes his mind at the last moment. I’ve seen some speculation that he may return to the EU as a special Balkan envoy but I fear this may just be wishful thinking from activists rather than anything based on reality.

One constant theme from about Chapter 4 onwards is the presence of his wife Jane. Despite one well-publicised wobble, this is clearly a deep and strong political and emotional partnership, as is obvious to anyone who has met the Ashdowns in action. But what comes out from the book is that Ashdown does draw his strength from his family; as he gets formally invested as a member of the House of Lords, his granddaughter shouts down from the gallery, Je veux faire PIPI! and his sympathy is entirely with the little girl.

It’s a well-written and entertaining book, and I think even those with much less interest than I have in Northern Ireland childhoods, British liberal politics, or Bosnia will enjoy it.

Attracted to this graphic novel by the glowing blurb from Time (which I have found trustworthy in the past); it’s a combination of a) the coming-of-age story which I have enjoyed in the form of Fun Home, Blankets and Persepolis I and II, and b) the liminal fantasies of Neil Gaiman. The teenagers of mid-70s Seattle find strange things happening to their bodies: one grows an extra mouth on his chest, another takes to shedding her skin, a condition transmitted by sexual contact. Small groups of them form and dissolve in the woods, in deserted houses, trying to get out of town. In some ways it’s a similar take on the terrors of adolescence to Buffy; Burns’ stark monochrome rendering gives a bleak and gripping perspective. Not exactly a cheerful book but a memorable one. Slightly surprised I haven’t seen more recommendations of it.

i) births and deaths

18 July 1926: birth of Robert Sloman, who co-wrote The Dæmons (1971), and was sole author of The Time Monster (1972), The Green Death (1973), and Planet of the Spiders (1974) – the season finales for all but the first of the Pertwee years.

18 July 1967: birth of Paul Cornell, who wrote televised stories Father’s Day (2005) and Human Nature / The Family of Blood (2007), the latter based on one of his eight Who novels, and the webcast alternative Ninth Doctor story The Scream of the Shalka (2003), as well as four-and-a-bit Big Finish audios, contributing to The Discontinuity Guide, and editing one of the Short Trips anthologies. If you’re reading this, happy birthday, Paul!

18 July 2006: death of David Maloney, who was one of the great directors of the classic series: The Mind Robber (1968), The Krotons (1968-69), The War Games (1969), Frontier in Space (1963), Planet of the Daleks (1963), Genesis of the Daleks (1975), Planet of Evil (1975), The Deadly Assassin (1976), and The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977) all benefited from his talents.

ii) broadcast aniversaries

18 July 1964: broadcast of ‘A Race Against Death’, the fourth episode of what we now call The Sensorites. The Doctor is trying to save Ian, and tracks down the poison in the city’s water supply to its source. But something ‘orrible lurks in the tunnels…

• Turkmenistan – Darvaza – a set on Flickr
  The gateway to hell
  (tags: photos turkmenistan)