Three Old Who stories that I’ve been watching.

The Dæmons, first shown in 1971, is presumably the only Doctor Who story featuring a character in the title outside the standard 26 letters of the alphabet (plus numbers and punctuation). I’m a bit stunned that it is remembered as the peak of the Pertwee era by some. It’s not very good; it’s not very bad either; perhaps that makes it an archetypal Pertwee story, and so those who like that sort of thing will like this sort of thing. Delgado is good; Benton and Yates are good (and this story has clearly provided much inspiration for slash writers); both the Third Doctor and Jo are bad, as usual; and the monster is just awful, as is the final twist (it is destroyed when Jo offers her life instead of the Doctor’s as such self-sacrifice CANNOT COMPUTE).

This does at least mark my pasing the half-way point in Pertwee stories: of the 24 broadcast I have now watched 13 (Spearhead from Space, Inferno, Terror of the Autons, The Claws of Axos, The Dæmons, The Curse of Peladon, The Mutants, The Three Doctors, Frontier in Space, Planet of the Daleks, The Green Death, The Time Warrior, and Invasion of the Dinosaurs) which leaves 11. Wonder how long that will take me.

Resurrection of the Daleks: In keeping with my practice of watching the later Davros stories backwards (see Revelation of the Daleks, Remembrance of the Daleks), I tried the Fifth Doctor’s only encounter with his chief foe, from 1984. Well, its did explain the plot line about there being two different factions of Daleks, which had passed me by completely. Apart from that the story makes little sense. It is memorable for lots of big name actors – Leslie Grantham in his first TV role, apparently – all getting shot (apparntly this has the largest number of on-screen violent deaths of any Dooctor Who story) and running around for no apparent reason. When Turlough reappears in the middle of it I was taken by surprise as I had forgotten he was in it. I did like Rodney Bewes’ performance. (And Sneh Gupta.)

There’s some dire Doctor/Davros dialogue (note alliteration) but some good Davison moments too, like when he remembers the previous companions and incarnations, and his reaction to Tegan’s farewell (and she’s been laid out horizontal for most of the story and so missed most of the gore). Basically, this is one for completists. (But if you’re reading this, you probably are a completist.)

Robot was the first of Tom Baker’s stories as the Fourth Doctor, its first episode shown at the end of December 1974. I should really have watched it before getting the first set of Sarah Jane Smith audios, as they turn out to be a sort of sequel. It is particularly remarkable (even now, when Pertwee’s Doctor is a distant memory) for Baker’s jarring, eccentric performance in the title role. In the very first episode, after the hilarious costume change scene, he mimes the sinking of the Titanic while standing in a jeep. This is why Baker was and remains my favourite Doctor – the sense that he is not only a hero, but an alien hero, which only Hartnell and Ecclestone really have come close to. He turns what is basically a standard Pertwee/UNIT story into a real feast of entertainment. Everyone else is good, including the fascist scientists. (Shame about the tank and the final dodgy CSO of the growing and shrinking robot, but you can’t have everything.

In summary, Robot is recommended; the other two really for completists.

The Rapture: Lots of Who stories begin with the Doctor trying to take his companions to some noted holiday spot to unwind and then ending up somewhere they didn’t expect. This time round, however, they actually arrive in contemporary Ibiza; only, of course, to discover that there are angelic beings, with an evil agenda, running the top night-club, and that Ace’s family history is catching up with her. I had my doubts about the attempts to give Ace some family background in Season 26, but I thought this was working rather well. (Perhaps if I’d slogged through the New Adventures I might have a different view.) All rather well done, with a jazzed-up version of the theme tune introduced by veteran DJ Tony Blackburn.

NB Irish character (first of several this week): troubled Caitriona, played by Anne Bird.

The Sandman: This is another of those Doctor-returns-to-the-scene-of-a-previous-adventure stories, which generally don’t grab me, combined with the Is-the-sixth-Doctor-evil? theme which did so much to blight his years on the programme. Good marks for a complex and detailed alien culture with which the Doctor has to grapple (one of the Galyari is played by Anneke Wills, aka Polly). Poor marks for lots of expository passages and for not really working a plot into the situation. Probably my least favourite Six/Evelyn story so far.

NB Irish character: a slightly improbable interstellar peddler, Mordecan, played by the versatile Robin Bowerman.

The Church and the Crown is a straight historical story, with absolutely no sfnal content apart from the presence of the Tardis crew, and the fact that Peri is the exact double of the Queen of France (a previous Fifth Doctor companion found she had a local double in the last televised purely historical story, and of course this happened to the Doctor himself in France a few decades earlier).

It’s all done rather well, and Caroline Morris as ancient Egyptian companion Erimem is fab (though I thought Andrew Mackay’s King Louis was too demotic and too exaggerated). But there is a basic problem with the plot: the Doctor takes it upon himself to thwart an English invasion of France, purely because he knows it didn’t happen in 1626. In this story, the alien force intervening to alter history is the Doctor himself, which (if this is the same Doctor who would not intervene to save Anne Chaplette in 1572) raises all kinds of issues that are not properly addressed, never mind resolved.

No Irish characters this time (all French or English).

Bang-Bang-A-Boom! ought to be a disaster – Doctor Who trying to satirise popular entertainment usually fails dismally. But it largely works, partly due to the all-star cast – former Goodie Graeme Garden as the doomed but slightly comical professor, former Sheriff of Nottingham Nickolas Grace as the sinister Mr Loozley, and former interstellar vampire Patricia Quinn as an alien princess (so no type-casting there then). There is also an alien which can only crackle rather than talking.

And lots of piss-taking of other sf stories – the space station where the contest is taking place is called “Dark Space Eight”, and the rather colourless station doctor thinks she is in Star Trek – while at the same time the Doctor is trying to solve a murder mystery – one of whose victims is this play’s Irish character, Commentator WLogan, played by David Tughan (presumably the jazz musician).

Jubilee was of course the basis for the superb Ninth Doctor story Dalek. I was surprised, though, by how different it was. There are similarities – the first confrontation between Doctor and imprisoned Dalek, the relationship between Dalek and companion (done more convincingly on TV), the Dalek’s quest for orders (done more convincingly here); but there is a huge difference in setting, the audio play taking place in an alternate 2003 where the world is ruled from London by the villainous Mr and Mrs Martin Jarvis, thanks to the Doctor’s intervention a hundred years earlier. And yet this doesn’t fall into the category of Doctor-returns-to-the-scene-of-a-previous-adventure stories, because the earlier Sixth Doctor is still there. It’s a good one, but the TV version is I think better (not always the case; see Spare Parts).

So, in summary, all good stuff, with The Rapture the best and The Sandman the least impressive.

6) Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett

Novel about a hostage crisis in an unnamed Latin American country rather similar to the 1996-97 hostage crisis in Peru (so the second book about Latin America I’ve read this weekend). Actually it’s much more a relaxed character study of the key individuals among hostages and captors, and their relationships with each other and with music, before the brutal ending that of course we know is coming. Slightly disappointing that all the different nationalities are exactly out of central casting (the Russian is particularly embarrasssing). But quite an interesting read.

After I’d had an exchange on the subject of daily meditation with , one of my relatives on Facebook posted a link to the British Jesuits’ Pray-As-You-Go website, which supplies you with daily meditations for the MP3 player, lasting about a quarter of an hour each.

It’s a nice format. They start with bells to get you in the mood (there’s also an option of breathing and meditation exercises to get started properly), then a hymn (not always, even not usually, in English), then a scripture reading, then a reflection on the reading, then the reading again, then the Gloria to finish with. However, I think the content is so explicitly Christian that it probably wouldn’t be much use to someone whose personal preferences were not very close to Roman Catholicism.

The timing fits neatly into the second train journey of the three in my regular daily commute – the sixteen minutes or so from Leuven to Brussels North – so it’s been very easy to integrate into my daily routine. More so than the gym, anyway…)

After people complained that my last numbers quiz was too easy (congrats to and for getting it – and but for a slip of the keyboard), has put forward this counter-challenge:

1111110
12220
321
222
250
110
132
156

He says it’s related to the original, but, he asks, how?

(At first glance I wonder if the last three are in the right order.)

After my earlier musings on the lifespans of the women who have been married to the presidents and vice-presidents of the USA, has had a go at doing a better graphic representation of the data. This is what he came up with by plotting age at death against birthdate for the 83 women in the sample, using a ten-point moving median, presented as a stepped line.

The big jump in longevity at the end of the nineteenth century is still there – accentuated, to be sure, by the very short life of Alice Roosevelt, but even without her it would be pretty clear.

I think that there is still a discernible drop in longevity among the women born in the earlier part of the nineteenth century compared with those born in the eighteenth. is more sceptical. You can decide for yourselves.

Little U is four and a half years old. She cannot talk, and doesn’t understand much of what other people say to her, so she often finds the world a frightening place, especially if her big sister B (who also cannot talk) is being upset.  (Actually, U, a sensitive soul, doesn’t much like it if anyone is upset or shouting near her, but her big sister is particularly frightening.)

U likes music, and she can follow different versions of the same tune through different voices, different musical instruments, even different keys.  Late at night, U can often find a space to curl up on her daddy’s lap when he is playing on the computer, and this is nice and comforting and safe from her scary big sister. 

A few months ago U decided that there was a particular thing to see on the computer that she especially liked.  It starts with a nice man saying what sounds like some comforting words, and then there is music, and pretty pictures to go with the music; and the music changes interestingly and yet remains the same, and the pictures change too but they get prettier and prettier, and are also very interesting and soothing to watch. (Near the end it gets interrupted again by some more people talking, but then it comes back.)  U often falls asleep on her daddy’s lap watching this particular web page.

The web page in question is here.

This evening I have had not one but two emails on obscure historical epsiodes, which are worth noting here.

Jeffrey Dudgeon got in touch to urge me to read his article in tonight’s Belfast Telegraph about H. Montgomery Hyde, born a hundred years ago today.  Hyde was the Westminster MP for North Belfast from 1950 to 1959, when he was deselected because of his outspoken support for the decriminalisation of homosexuality, especially after the 1957 Wolfenden Report (published fifty years ago next month).  I replied pointing out that the Belfast Telegraph is in short supply on the streets of Brussels, and Jeff kindly sent me the article which is a fascinating read.  If anyone else would like to see it, I’ll happily put them in touch with him.  (NB I myself was a candidate for North Belfast in 1996; I don’t recall anyone asking me about this issue on the doorstep.)

Humphry Knipe got in touch about the assassination of the Roman emperor Domitian in 96 AD.  Admittedly this was largely in the hope that I would publicise his new novel about the emperor Nero (hey, it worked!) but also to put right a mistake in this essay by Michael Molnar about Domitian’s death on my website.  Molnar puts Mars in the wrong sign (Taurus instead of Gemini) at the time of Domitian‘s assassination (mid-morning on 18 September).  I am very irritated by the facts that that i) this is indeed a crucial difference to the interpretation of the horoscope and ii) I have had both Molnar’s essay and my own earlier analysis, in which I actually got the position of Mars correct, on my website for years, without myself noticing this crucial difference.  I’ve linked to Knipe’s article and website above; judge for yourselves if you want to read his book.

Just thought you would like to know.

Thanks, everyone, for your kind words yesterday. It does make a difference.

Today has been a lot better, though still some howling at bedtime. I appear to have the honour of being specially chosen to administer carefully measured dots of toothpaste to her thumb for subsequent sucking.

Further updates as necessary. No big news yet.

4) About Time: The Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who, 1975-1979, by Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood

I loved the first two books in this series, but felt it would be difficult for the same quality to be kept up for all volumes. This one, covering six of the seven Tom Baker years as Doctor Who, is, frankly, squashed, with fewer than nine pages on average for each story covered, compared to eleven-ish per story for the first two volumes. (Though in pages per episode broadcast it comes out better, at 2.2 which is the same as Vol 1 and a shade more than Vol 2.)

I can forgive it. What’s been cut is the back-stage gossip about the relations between and among the production team and the cast, with enough left in to make it very annoying that you don’t get more; but I felt that the book is as good as the others in the series at looking at the roots of the stories covered, and impassioned in its assessment of the dramatic impact of the programme as broadcast.

Also, it is my favourite period of Doctor Who. This is when I was watching it most assiduously when first broadcast (the second episode of Revenge of the Cybermen was shown on my eighth birthday), and also, frankly, I think it includes a disproportionate number of the truly great stories of Old Who. The Doctor Who Dynamic Ratings Site agrees, with five of its top six Old Who stories dating from this era (The Talons of Weng-Chiang, Genesis of the Daleks, City of Death, Pyramids of Mars and The Deadly Assassin, with The Robots of Death, The Seeds of Doom and The Ark in Space not far behind).

Miles and Wood explain really well how it was that Hinchcliffe and Holmes made it so good, and how and why Williams simply wasn’t able to deliver the same product (and Tom Baker is fingered as a major culprit in that process). There are also the usual enlightening essays about bits of Who-lore, BBC procedures and British culture of the day (of which the best is surely the piece on Top of the Pops). So, while I didn’t learn as much from this book as I did from Volume 1 or 2, I did enjoy wallowing in nostalgia as I read it.

Over at , Samuel has bought a new slide rule. He spent most of 10 August wandering in and out of the engraver’s, watching with fascination as the new plates for the slide rule were being prepared, and on 11 August it was finished for the princely sum of fourteen shillings. Samuel can’t resist his new toy: “I late to my office, and cannot forbear admiring and consulting my new rule, and so home to supper and to bed.”

We tend to forget that Pepys was a real geek. The slide rule is of course the seventeenth-century equivalent of the computer. By 1664, about the same time has elapsed since the first slide rules were produced (in the early 1630s) as has passed for us since the launch of the personal computer in 1977. But Pepys is in part a coder as well; he spent much of the previous summer (1663) commissioning his own design for a slide rule, and then playing with it.

(This is the man who would go on to publish Newton’s Principia.)

1) Until I deleted the relevant paragraph, Wikipedia recorded the following incident as having occurred during the making of The Seeds of Death:

According to Peter Bryant, William Hartnell made an unscheduled visit to the studio during recording of this serial. Bryant claimed Hartnell voiced his disaproval of Wendy Padbury’s “skimpy” clothing, accusing the production team of making “pornography” and telling them that they were all “cursed”. Bryant claimed that Hartnell argued with Patrick Troughton and told the production team that he wanted his old role back. Bryant said he later concluded that Hartnell had been “reduced to such foolishness” by his illness.

The source is given as Eric Luskin, Doctor Who in the 60s, p. 98. If this is true, I’m a bit surprised that nobody refers to it in the commentary for the DVD. But I am made suspicious by a more detailed account of what is said to be in the source. This web page says:

UNIT was, according to Peter Bryant, “set up to prevent Earth being attacked by aliens”, and was quite successful, prompting the production team to decide that from 1970 the Doctor would be exiled to Earth and forced to help UNIT as their Scientific Advisor. Patrick Troughton was very excited by this idea, but problems arose for him whilst working on The Seeds Of Death, when William Hartnell arrived unexpectedly in the studio, thinking that he was still the Doctor and began ordering people around. In an American book about the series, Peter Bryant recalled what happened:

“Pat was very irritated by Bill’s mad behaviour, and went over and told him to get out, but Bill started telling everyone about the time he said, ‘One day, I shall come back’, and explained that the time was now. Things got worse and worse, particularly when Bill saw Wendy Padbury [who played companion Zoe], as she was wearing a very sixties ‘dolly bird’ costume. He called it explicit porn, and said we were all cursed. The BBC security men then threw him out, but I was saddened by such a great man being reduced to foolishness by his illness.”

This incident disturbed Troughton greatly, and he announced that he wanted to leave the programme, as did Frazer Hines and Wendy Padbury. This caused a great deal of consternation, as Peter Bryant was also bent on leaving to work on more adult drama programmes.

The source is given as Doctor Who In The Swinging Sixties, by Eric Luskin (Star Books, 1988). There is a lot of circumstantial detail that doesn’t check out about this story; apart from anything else, the front page of the site makes it clear that it is not a serious assemblage of facts. Argument from silence is never foolproof, but it’s surprising that Wood and Miles, Howe and Walker and Cornell, Day and Topping all chose to draw a veil over this incident, if they knew of it. (I know that Cornell for one is no big fan of Hartnell’s.)

If the story was indeed The Seeds of Death, Hartnell’s reported reaction to Zoe’s costume is rather surprising, as she spends most of it in a fairly modest outfit, certainly in comparison with some of her other costumes. The timing in this account of Troughton, Hines and Padbury’s decisions to leave the programme do not square at all with the much more detailed sequence recorded by Wood and Miles (with back-up from BBC archives).

And I do not believe in the source either. Having checked the Library of Congress and the various on-line used book sites, I have found no record of any book anywhere on any topic by Eric Luskin (the earnest presenter of a couple of American documentaries on Doctor Who). There are a couple of books with similar titles: Stephen Baycroft’s The Promethean Magician: Doctor Who in the Sixties (apparently self-published by the author in Sydney, in 1996), and of course Howe, Stammers and Walker’s Doctor Who: The Sixties (Virgin, 1994).

So I have concluded that the story is a joke in rather poor taste, and deleted it from Wikipedia; but I am open to persuasion if anyone else has seen it in a real source. Does anyone know any more?

2) On a rather less sordid note, Episode three of The Face of Evil ends with the disturbed computer Xoanon breaking down and eventually saying, in a child’s voice, “Who am I?” Doctor Who lore records that the voice was provided by “seven year-old Anthony Frieze, who had won a Design-A-Monster competition administered through the BBC exhibitions at Blackpool and Longleat.”

It’s not a hugely common name, and I see that there is a 41-year-old Anthony Frieze who was a Conservative candidate in Darlington in 2005 and ran unsuccessfully for the Conservative nomination in Hammersmith earlier this year (the nomination went to rising Tory star Shaun Bailey).

The ages don’t quite check out – a 7-year-old in 1976 would now be 38, not 41 – but it would not be the first time that Doctor Who lore got someone’s age wrong.

Incidentally, the current MP for Hammersmith and Fulham was the Conservative candidate who I defeated in a students union election in 1989. He claims that I am still the only person who has beaten him in an election. Due to the redrawing of the constituency boundary, he is shifting to the new Chelsea and Fulham seat, hence the open spot in Hammersmith.

Started wondering about this, you may not be entirely surprised to hear, after listening to recounting this story last weekend.

Has anyone else received a spam mail like this?

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I am sympathetic to the political ends, but the means suck, and there is no way I am participating in this.

Two stories from Old Who which were both better than I had expected.

Notoriously, the first episode of Invasion of the Dinosaurs exists only in black and white, while the other five are in colour (it would all have been in colour when shown in January/February 1974). Also notoriously, the actual dinosaurs themselves are absolutely terrible as special effects. There are no two ways about it: they are embarrassing puppets pasted onto their scenes by unconvincing CSO.

If you can ignore the awfulness of the dinosaurs, it’s not such a bad story; like many Pertwee tales, it is a bit too long, but the two basic bits of plot – conspiracy at the highest levels of government to Take Over/Destroy England, and the people who think they are on a spaceship to colonise the nearest star – are both rather good and well enough worked out, with their motives a bit of a reprise of The Green Death but with the environmentalists now the bad guys. The cliff-hanger where Sarah is told that she’s been in space for three months, and the scene where she proves she isn’t by walking out of the airlock, are both real jewels.

The main plot twist involving the regular cast, however, is a slightly different matter. Captain Yates, the Brigadier’s deputy since Terror of the Autons, turns out to be in league with the bad guys, yet can’t quite bring himself to do the Doctor harm. The scene where we discover his betrayal is handled with no dramatic tension whatever, and his motivations are not really explored at all. The Brigadier and Benton get all the good lines, but there’s interesting narrative tension among the villains as well.

If it hadn’t been for the dinosaurs, this would probably be remembered as one of the great Pertwee stories despite the not-quite-connected plot. As it is, you just have to close your eyes when they are on-screen; but it’s still way ahead of, say, The Mutants. (I wonder if an audio version of this, with linking narrative by Elisabeth Sladen or Nicholas Courtney, might work a bit better?)

When I expressed the view that none of the Sixth Doctor stories was any good at all, , , and all recommended I try Revelation of the Daleks (with mild dissent from and ). The Dynamic Doctor Who Rankings page currently has Revelation of the Daleks at a princely 51st out of 200 stories ranked, better by far than any other Sixth Doctor story – The Two Doctors is now at 100th place, and Vengeance on Varos at 102nd, while The Twin Dilemma has rather surprisingly been shifted from last place in the list by Daleks In Manhattan and Evolution of the Daleks, presumably by voters who have not actually seen The Twin Dilemma themselves.

I realised that I’m a bit out of phase with Davros’ history – I have seen Genesis of the Daleks many times, and was then rather baffled by Remembrance of the Daleks (which is this month’s pick on ), but have not seen either Destiny of the Daleks or Resurrection of the Daleks. I’m also not well up on the Sixth Doctor generally – I think I saw The Twin Dilemma, Vengeance on Varos and The Two Doctors when first broadcast, and this is the first of his stories I have watched since. (I must add the standard rider – “but the audio adventures are so much better” – because on the whole they are, especially the ones with companion Evelyn Smythe.)

I don’t think it matters. This is almost a 1985 version of the more recent “Doctor-lite” episodes, with him and Peri not really there much, and Davros playing a role which is incomprehensible given his past and future as we know it. If you can overlook the huge plot flaw of Davros feeding the entire galaxy with the corpses of a few rich people, it’s very well done, with various different factions of characters motivated for different reasons. In fact it’s odd to consider that this was a time when, despite the generally lousy production values, really big names wanted to appear on Doctor Who – here we have Alexei Sayle, Eleanor Bron, Clive Swift (Hyacinth’s husband in Keeping Up Appearances), and William Gaunt (who I can’t remember seeing in anything else, but he is very good here). Shame about Jenny Tomasin but you can’t have everything.

So, basically, I liked this – not a great story, but at least a good one, and definitely under-rated.

I was vox-popped yesterday lunchtime by a TV journalist from Al-Jazeera wanting to ask English-speaking passers-by in the Rond Point Schuman about the current turmoil in the financial markets. I said I didn’t know anything about money and declined the invitation, exchanging friendly nods with the cameraman who has filmed numerous interviews with me by Balkan journalists.

I was a bit surprised, to be honest. Al-Jazeera seemed to have given their man a slightly weird assignment: “Go out onto the street in Brussels and see if you can find someone who will talk to you in English about global finance.” I hope they managed to get something worth broadcasting in the end.

Like a lot of people in my line of work, I don’t use the media for news. I have my Google and other services set up to send me the latest stories on the parts of the world I am most interested in; I will often buy the Economist to find out what everyone else is reading; I buy the Guardian several times a week, but more for entertainment than information.

Since they got their RSS feed sorted out, I have found , the LJ feed for articles from the openDemocracy website, a really compelling read. Just today, for instance, there are three quite fascinating articles: my old friend Tom Gallagher on the SNP and Islam, the very respectable Paul Rogers assessing the vaunted US success in Iraq, and an article by a Belarusian journalist on the algebra of revolutions. Interesting reading, whether you agree with them or not.

What is next in this sequence?
  42

  46
  52
  60
 110
 132
 222
1120

Clue: they are all the same.

3) Real Fast Food: 350 recipes ready-to-eat in 30 minutes, by Nigel Slater

Bought this in the same shop as Brave New World, for the same price (50p). It’s been a real inspiration to me this holiday; the concept is a very straightforward one, cooking really tasty meals reasonably quickly. I can’t say that it always took me less than half an hour to do the recipes, but the results were worth it. Slater encourages experimenting, and this evening’s meal was my substition of stewed leek instead of fennel in his pork and lemon dish. All very yummy.

Checking up the latest on friendsreunited.co.uk after their latest reminder email, I’m rather horrified to see that someone who was in the same year as me at grammar school has just become a grandmother.

Well, it is 22 years since we left, and it isn’t anyone I remember. But still…

Of course, I should not really be surprised. I spent the weekend at a convention one of whose organisers was , who also attended that same school. Comparing notes with him I realised that he was born a year and a half after I had left the school, three months into my Cambridge undergraduate career, and attended Rathmore precisely twenty years after me.

But still. A grandmother. Gulp.

On Strange Horizons, here. Go and comment.

…to get an invitation to join a new consultancy in Brussels as one of the partners. I wasn’t really thinking of changing jobs again this soon, but it never does any harm to talk…

2) From the Holy Mountain, by William Dalrymple

I reported earlier in the year that I had rather bounced off Dalrymple’s The Age of Kali. This prompted responses from my wife, and to the effect that I should try From the Holy Mountain instead, and it also came up in conversation with over the weekend.

It is a tremendous book. Dalrymple travels through Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, the West Bank and Egypt, following the seventh-century travels of John Moschos, looking for the remaining evidence of Christianity in archtitecture, culture and population. It is a terrifically sad book. Many of the communities he visits were dwindling at the time of writing, in 1994; several of them wonder if they will even still be there in ten years’ time. He is fantastic at capturing the characters he meets, especially among the dwindling Christians: some are stupid, some are bigoted, some are deluded, but all are part of a chain of culture going back two thousand years.

He is also at pains to stress that Islamic fundamentalism is not really the problem. In south-eastern Turkey, the local Christians are bit-players in the war between the Turkish state and the PKK. In Lebanon, sections of the Christian community have been the authors of their own misfortune. In the Holy Land, Christian Palestinians face the same pressure from Israel as their Muslim neighbours (and do not understand why their co-religionists in the West do not speak up for them). In 1994, Islamic fundamentalists were a big part of the picture only in Egypt.

Turks and Israelis may well feel that Dalrymple’s picture is not balanced. I would agree; but I think it is fair. He is writing here of a particular religious tradition at a particular time, and the systematic destruction of their monuments and erosion of their population base is a big part of the story. Of course there are and have been Christian cities and countries where other religions have been oppressed, but that sort of point-scoring is not relevant to Dalrymple’s approach. Instead he is at pains to avoid essentialism; to attribute government policies to government leaders themselves, rather than to their religion or race; and to look for links between the cultures of the region, and for insights into how the past remains present.

It would be interesting to read a follow-up of what the situation is now for some of these communities. I can’t imagine that many of them (except perhaps the Lebanese) have seen much improvement in their lot since 1994. Anyway, this is fascinating stuff. Strongly recommended.

A shorter visit today.

I did attend the Doctor Who – Then and Now panel:

..the panellists being and . Much happier with this pic than with yesterday’s taken in the same room (not uploaded).

Back in the bar I was intrigued by the architecture which had our cosy table conversation being overseen by three chomping authors, and got to immortalise the moment:

Above: John Reppion; C.E. Murphy; Leah Moore
Below: ‘s shoulder; en bloc invaded one of the final panels and took it over as a collective syndicate. Unfortunately the brains of this exercise was impossible to catch with my camera from where I was sitting, but you can work out who it was from this picture of the other suspects looking at him:

John Reppion; the unfortunate chairman whose session was invaded; Iain M Banks; Alistair Reynolds; Ian McDonald
back of C.E. Murphy’s head; Leah Moore in profile

It was great fun, and I did manage to get a decent shot of one part of the audience reacting:

Caroline and – both their other halves were on the panel, but they appear to be listening to John Reppion’s anecdote about his toilet and Jonathan Ross (you had to be there really).

And so home again. Thanks to , , and once more.

1) Licence Denied: Rumblings from the Doctor Who Underground, by Paul Cornell

Published ten years ago, this is a compilation of the author’s choice of interesting or remarkable writing from Doctor Who fanzines, mostly from the period between the show’s cancellation in 1989 and the TV movie in 1996, with a few bits from before and after – most notably the infamous panning of The Deadly Assassin by the then president of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society from 1976. There is a certain amount of linking narrative from Paul himself – and having spent much of this weekend talking to him it’s impossible not to hear his voice in my head as I read the words (even if it’s ten years since he wrote them) – expressing his love for the programme and for fanzines as a genre. There are some lovely pieces – a great Tom Baker interview, a meditation on the place of tea and other hot beverages in the Whoniverse, some of the early analysis by Tat Wood that has culminated in the About Time books. There are some other bits I could happily leave, but that is fanzine writing for you.

I was a bit surprised that there was no discussion at all of fan fiction, which even in my limited teenage excursions into Doctor Who fanzines was clearly a large part of the subculture, and almost no mention of the internet – Kate Orman, daringly, gives a web address. Fandom was very definitely on-line by this date – indeed, it didn’t take much googling to find a usenet discussion of a review of this very book – and while I appreciate that the best bits of the written record were certainly still in hard copy fanzine, it’s odd to find the internet so absent from the discussion.

Anyway, it’s a book of its time, and will be of interest to people concerned with the changing (and unchanging) nature of fandom.

A great day at MeCon yesterday – I post these pictures and a video to make you all feel jealous that you weren’t there.

Guest of honour in the glowing sunlight

An excerpt from Iain M Banks’ Guest of Honour speech, in which he is answering a question about how his writing career had got started. (Thanks to Mecon and Iain M Banks for permission to post this.)

But I spent most of the time just sitting around and talking.

Paul Cornell, ,

, , , and Caroline

The two Annas, and

The two Ia(i)ns, McDonald and Banks

Apart from the GoH speech the only panel I attended was a discussion of Doctor Who. None of my shots of the panel itself were particularly good, but here is a much better one of two of the panellists beforehand:

and

and here is another of the panellists plus two audience members immediately afterwards:

Paul Cornell, Leah Moore, Caroline

We settled back to chatting again, so that an observer who had left and returned might have believed that some of us hadn’t moved (indeed, I believe that one of us hadn’t)

Sleepy Paul, Caroline,

, , Leah Moore, John Reppion

while at the other end of the room the whiskey tasting was in full flow:

and in foreground, others visible in background including Iain Banks and the two Annas

Things seemed to be going well for the whiskey tasters!

Not sure if I will make it again today, but thanks to all for organising and doing it.

Bertie’s appointment of various party hacks to the Seanad yesterday has drawn a surprising amount of criticism. Face it, folks; the constitution gives the Taoiseach of the day total discretion to appoint 11 of the 60 senators, with no accountability to anyone and no criteria needing to be fulfilled. He did it because he could and because he has every right to do so, just like every other Taoiseach in the 70 years that Bunreacht na hÉireann has been in force.

I discovered a few years ago that Dev took this idea from the 1920 Government of Ireland Act, which would have created a Home Rule parliament in “Southern Ireland” to match what eventually became known as Stormont in the North. As well as the House of Commons of Southern Ireland (aka the Second Dáil) it had a Senate including elected representatives of local councils and precisely eleven members appointed by the Lord Lieutenant. It resembles the Seanad of de Valera’s constitution much more than either resembles the Irish Free State’s Senate, which was a peculiarly selected body (at one point 19 of its 60 members were chosen by a nationwide ballot of all voters over 30, ranking 76 candidates by STV).

Bertie’s actions yesterday are entirely consonant with the constitution, especially in the context that the last local elections left FF and its coalition partners unusually weak for the 43 seats elected by councillors. It’s a lousy system with lousy rules, but there is no point in criticising Bertie for operating the system as it was designed to be operated unless you have a better alternative.

Astrophysics postgraduate who abandoned his doctorate in 1974 in an attempt to become a rock star has now submitted his thesis.

He has not done too badly in the meantime.