Three more Doctor Who audio dramas from Big Finish to review.

The Fearmonger: Seventh Doctor and Ace get mixed up in future fascist leader’s plans to take over Britain. Jacqueline Pearce (aka Servalan in Blake’s 7) is excellent as the fascist leader herself. There is some interesting business with Ace’s perceptions of herself and of the Doctor, being shaped by the Fearmonger creature (which itself had certain resonances with the Timewyrm of the New Adventures). But there were some definite plot implausibilities, and Sophie Aldred’s husband, Vince Henderson, playing the shock-jock radio presenter, really didn’t seem to have much of a clue what was going on, using accent rather than acting to establish the character.

The Marian Conspiracy: Sixth Doctor and new companion Evelyn Smythe visit the court of Queen Mary I. A peculiar combination of character and cliché, which really suffered in my estimation because I listened to it so close to the broadcast of The Shakespeare Code. Evelyn Smythe, played by Maggie Stables, is a delight and I look forward with great interest to future audio plays featuring her. But the play itself: oh dear. The reign of Queen Mary is not a well-known part of British history, and you can either deal with it properly or just go for a period romp; I don’t think The Marian Conspiracy does either. And time-travel clichés are piled atop one another.

The Genocide Machines: The Seventh Doctor and Ace visit a ginormous library and confront the Daleks. Excellent. I loved: the Daleks themselves; the concept of a library storing all knowledge in the galaxy (impossible though I know it to be); the duplicate Ace demonstrating the Sophie Aldred can act (something I have occasionally had cause to doubt); and especially the many many references to other Dalek series – jungle planet with unseen indigenous species (Daleks’ Master Plan), Daleks modified by their own plan who turn against the leadership (Evil of the Daleks), the Doctor’s references to the interests of the Time Lords and the Matrix (Deadly Assassin), and a slight nod forward to the Dalek absorbing all human knowledge in 2005’s Dalek story. Was this the first time Nick Briggs did the Dalek voices? He’s very good. My one quibble is that I found it difficult to tell apart Louise Falkner, playing Bev Tarrant (who I understand is a recurring Big Finish character) and Sophie Aldred as Ace. Probably my hearing.

In summary: I’m generally enjoying these, and thought that The Genocide Machine was very good indeed – the first really gripping one I have heard. Though I think I may switch to one of the spinoff series for a while for variety’s sake.

9) Glasshouse, by Charles Stross

And so, continuing with this year’s Hugo nominees… I think this is my favourite of Charlie’s books so far. In his previous sf books I’ve tended to find myself overwhelmed by the ideas about far-future post-Singularity existence; those are all still here, but very nicely balanced by the experience of the narrator who has signed up for a social experiment attempting to simulate the “dark ages”, ie human society from 1950 to 2040, a period from which most information has been lost because paper was being used less and the digital media used for storage all became obsolete. This gives us an excuse for many sideswipes at the nature of American/European society as it is today; but in the meantime the far-future background is being unfolded in more and more detail, and the narrator becomes conscious of his/her own unreliability – often I find the “unreliable narrator” a really annoying excuse for incomplete world-building or sloppy characterisation, but Glasshouse very much avoids that trap.

So far my favourite of the Hugo shortlisted novels; but I do have three more to go!

Top UnSuggestion for this book: East of Eden by John Steinbeck. I think 

autopope

 will be amused (or bemused?) by some of the other books which figure on that list, such as C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia at #9.

I liked it. If I want to know what really happened in 1599, I’ll read James ShapiroThere were a lot of cute one-liners. I liked the Harry Potter references (three altogether?); the “57 academics” line (and pretty much all the Shakespeare stuff); Martha’s reference to Ray Bradbury (which of course is particularly good if it’s a nod to this year’s overarching “Mr Saxon” theme); and the scene on the bed where Tennant’s Doctor is being particularly alien, and Martha is hoping in vain that he will act human.

Oddly enough I’ve been having a bit of a Tudor Who period in the last week; apart from this, I have been listening to the Sixth Doctor audio The Marian Conspiracy, which is set in the reign of Elizabeth’s sister Mary (separate review coming up), and my own small contribution to fanfic, inspired by this exchange from The Sensorites. Funny how the Doctor seems to have had unseen quarrels with Tudor monarchs, rather than those from other time periods, isn’t it?

Over the holiday weekend I did a number of Georgian recipes, some for the first time, some that I had succeeded with before. I know a few of you are interested in cooking, and anyway posting them here is a good way of keeping the recipes to hand if I should ever find myself somewhere without the recipe book but with an internet connection (and adds to previous posts).

1) Chicken with herbs (Chakhokhbili) – total preparation time about an hour and a half; recipe claims it serves 6 to 8 but in fact I found it about right for five. The recipe stipulates that you must chop up the chicken by hand yourself into about ten pieces. Probably you could do this with just pre-packed legs or breasts, but it goes against the spirit of it.

2 tablespoons/30g/1 oz butter
One 3-pound/1.5kg chicken
4 medium onions, peeled and chopped
8 medium tomatoes, peeled and coarsely chopped
3 garlic cloves, peeled and minced
Generous ½ cup chopped mixed herbs (parsley, cilantro/coriander, tarragon, basil, dill) – really worth buying them fresh and chopping by hand
pinch of dried hot red pepper flakes
Salt
Ground black pepper

Melt the butter; brown the chicken pieces; stir in the onions and cook for ten minutes.
Add the tomatoes and cook, covered for 30 minutes (or until the chicken is done).
Stir in the garlic, herbs, hot pepper and salt and pepper to taste; cook, covered for another five minutes.
Let stand for another five minutes and serve.

2) Green beans with egg (Mtsvane Lobios Chirbuli) – total cooking time about 45 mins; recipe claims it serves 4 but I think that is only as a side dish (in our case, with the chicken). I found I had used too much water and butter, and had to add a second egg to even things out, with much more stirring and cooking towards the end than perhaps should have been the case.

2 sprigs basil
1 sprig tarragon
2 sprigs summer savory/rocket
1 sprig dill
1 sprig parsley
½ pound/250g green beans
water
1 small onion, minced
¼ teaspoon/1g salt
6 tablespoons/80g butter
1 egg, beaten

Coarsely chop the herbs. Trim the beans and cut into small pieces. Place the beans in a single layer (hah! that’s what the recipe says, but it is simply impossible!) in a pan and add enough water to half cover them. Bring to a boil, stir in the onion, salt and chopped herbs. Cover and simmer until the beans are soft and the water has been absorbed, 10-15 mins. Add the butter and sauté the beans lightly until the butter has melted. Then pour on the beaten egg, cover and cook for 2-3 mins, or just until the egg has set. Stir lightly and turn out into a bowl.

3) Khinkali/ხინკალი. These are real Georgian delicacies, dumplings stuffed with meat (though you can use cheese as well) and poached. See the Wikipedia article for a picture of them. I really love them, and approached the cooking process with reverence and trepidation, not least because it is years since I last grappled with any cooking involving pastry; I couldn’t actually remember the last time I used a rolling pin. I didn’t use enough flour on the working surface, so found that the result was a bit sticky, and unfortunately the bottoms fell off the earlier ones I made. Still, they tasted delicious even if the presentation wasn’t quite what I had hoped. This recipe claims to make 25 but my unpracticed technique delivered only about 18. It’s enough food for four or five people though. Took me about two hours but that would be less with practice.

4 cups/500g white flour
1¼ teaspoons/5g salt
1¼ cups/300ml warm water

1 pound/450g mixed minced beef and pork
½ teaspoon ground black pepper
1¼ teaspoons/5g salt
Pinch cayenne pepper
¼ teaspoon ground caraway seed (I used cumin instead)
3 small onions, peeled and minced
½ cup/120ml warm water of beef bouillon (I used beef stock)

Combine the flour, salt and warm water to make a firm dough. Knead for 5 mins, and leave, covered, for 30-40 mins.
For the filling, mix the minced meat and spices; stir in the onions; and then knead in the water or bouillon by hand.
Divided the dough into 25 pieces. Roll each piece out to a six-inch/15cm circle. Place about 2 tablespoons/30g of filling in the centre of each round. Then (and this is the really tricky bit) fold the edges of the dough in to the centre making accordion pleats; move clockwise, allowing each fold to overlap the previous one; twist the pleats together at the top to seal. (Again, consult the Wikipedia picture for an idea of what is wanted.)
Cook the Khinkali in boiling salted water for 12-15 minutes, then serve hot, with black pepper.

To eat them, hold up by the topknot, and carefully bite off the bottom corner so that you can catch the stream of juice in your mouth. After eating the meaty part, you don’t have to eat the topknot itself (traditionally thrown to any passing dogs). Yummy.

Ἰησοῦν ζητεῖτε τὸν Ναζαρηνὸν τὸν ἐσταυρωμένον: ἠγέρθη!

8) Temeraire, by Naomi Novik

This is the first Hugo year I can remember (since about 2000) when I had not read a single one of the nominated pieces of fiction before the shortlist came out, but this probably reflects more on my efforts to catch up with classic non-genre literature over the last while than on anything about the quality of the list. I reckon this is the front-runner, though: LibraryThing users own more copies of it than of the the other four nominees combined (as of today, 621 to a combined 479 for the rest), and while general exposure to the book-buying public doesn’t necessary correlate directly with Hugo voters’ preferences, it seldom runs exactly opposite to them either.

I enjoyed it. I was one of the teenagers who really loved Anne McCaffrey’s books on first reading them and then realised that they were rubbish – one of my worst experiences of disillusionment with any author. This story of dragons in the Napoleonic wars is a brilliant counterblast: the internal politicking of the dragonriders is all too true to life, and the girl dragons (and their girl riders) get to fight as well as their male counterparts (though for some reason this is not public knowledge). I’m also in the camp of those who enjoyed Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, though I hated David Weber’s efforts. And I also liked the few Patrick O’Brian novels I have read, so it’s not a big surprise that I liked this.

Novik scores in my book for a sensitivity to nineteenth-century language which few writers can manage; also for her convincing portrayal of a subtly different history and society from what we are used to (as I said above, I found the internal politicking of the dragonriders most compelling). Towards the end of the book she changes one important detail in a well-known historical event in our timeline, with the result that the reader is suddenly thrown into real suspense as to how closely her world’s history is going to map our own – a difficult trick to pull off.

I don’t rate this as highly as the last three Hugo winners, but it is a good start to my Hugo reading season none the less.

Top five UnSuggestions for this book:

1. A generous or+hodoxy by Brian D. McLaren
2. Institutes of the Christian religion by John Calvin
   
3. Libra by Don DeLillo
   
4. The power of now : a guide to spiritual enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle
   
5. Laughable loves by Milan Kundera
   

Well, I see that the Philip K Dick award went to Spin Control by Chris Moriarty, which I thought a respectable enough nominee, though at least they gave a special commendation to Elizabeth Bear’s Carnival which was the book I would have voted for.

(Anyone want to see how the First Doctor met Henry VIII? Movin’ swiftly on…)

7) The Last Temptation, by Neil Gaiman

I have found a nice little second hand bookshop near work, on the rue Froissart between rue Belliard and place Jourdan. It has a decently eclectic selection of books in English, which rather look like they were mostly bequeathed by retiring British officials in the European Commission. Not all, though, and this graphic novel by Neil Gaiman sort of jumped out at me saying “Me! Me! Buy me!” And when a book says that, then I usually succumb to temptation.

And appropriately enough, this book is about temptation, written by Neil Gaiman in consultation with Alice Cooper, tying in with Cooper’s album of the same name. I know almost nothing about Cooper except that he wears make-up. Even so, I really enjoyed this brief tale of Steven, an adolescent who is tempted by the sinister manager of the Theatre of the Real (a Cooper lookalike) with the offer of eternal life at an unspeakable price. It would have been better to read it at Halloween; it would certainly have meant more if I was a Cooper fan; but I felt it was also in some ways a trial piece for Gaiman’s American Gods, and all the more interesting for that.
——————

splinister

 has the links.

It’s just over three months since I left my previous place of work. I see that of the 25 people listed today on the website as working in the Brussels headquarters, five are new since I left (plus one intern promoted to a paid position), and there are another two whose positions are advertised as vacancies (so are presumably leaving). And that doesn’t include my successor, who is doing my old job but hasn’t moved to Brussels yet.

Hmm. I think I am well out of it.

My review of this year’s Philip K Dick shortlisted novels is up at Strange Horizons.

It may or may not be significant that five of the seven novels are published by Bantam Spectra. It may or may not be significant that five out of the seven authors are women. It is probably not significant that five of the seven have one-word titles.

Comments turned off on this entry to encourage people to comment over there.

5) The Search For Roots: a personal anthology, compiled by Primo Levi
6) The Book of Imaginary Beings, compiled by Jorge Luis Borges

Quite by accident, this turned into an interesting paired reading: both books are selections from literature and science made by writers who were great in their own right. Levi‘s collection is the more interesting of the two: a series of extracts ranging from one page to six of thirty favourite pieces of reading. I only knew four of them (The Book of Job, Gulliver’s Travels, Moby-Dick and Murder in the Cathedral) and some of the others I think lose rather in translation (eg the Italian vernacular poetry of Giuseppe Belli) but there were a few pieces here from authors I would like to follow up for myself some time (Thomas Mann, Rabelais).

Job chapter 40, on the Behemoth, pops up again in Borges’ light-hearted compilation of tales of strange animals from the ancients to C.S. Lewis (whose Perelandra is quoted twice at length). Not really a lot more to say about it than that, though I realised that it had provided much source material for another important work of my youth.

Top UnSuggestion for The Book of Imaginary Beings: Sophie Kinsella’s Confessions of a Shopaholic.

…to

wwhyte

 and Steph on their new arrival! And rather thrilling to hear her little voice down the phone just now.

(And I must say it’s nice to have a niece. I have an eight-year-old nephew on the other side of the family, but until today no nieces.)

4) [In Search of Lost Time #1] The Way By Swann’s, by Marcel Proust

I haven’t done very well in my sampling of Great Literature so far this year, so was braced for another bout of reading drudgery. But in fact I found myself completely captivated by this first of Proust’s classic series; his evocations of children’s perceptions of the world of grownups, and of what it is like to be a man in love, are simply superb. Sure, you have to smile a bit at the very long sentences – the editor protests that Proust’s reputation for this is a bit unfair, in that “only” a quarter of the text consists of sentences that are longer then ten lines – yeah, right. But it would be impossible to unwind them. The pace of the book is of course very slow but I found that part of its charm. Roll on the second volume.

Also I was taken aback by the amount of girl-on-girl action. I’m not used to that in classic literature.

Top three UnSuggestions for this book:

1. How to read the Bible for all its worth : a guide to understanding the Bible by Gordon D. Fee
2. Undead and unwed by MaryJanice Davidson
3. Brightly burning by Mercedes Lackey

3) After Dinner Speaking, by Fawcett Boom

I do quite a lot of public speaking, but there is always room to improve one’s technique. Unfortunately I found almost nothing of use in this jumble of tips, snippets and quotations. I only bought it because it was cheap, but it was a waste of £2 and of the 35 minutes it took me to read it.
——————

2) Field of Bones: An Irish Division in Gallipoli, by Philip Orr

A few years ago I posted a letter from my grandfather written from Palestine in January 1918, during the first world war, and over the last year or so I’ve been trying to get a better picture of his experiences at the end on 1915 and in 1916 with the 6th Royal Dublin Fusiliers as part of the 10th Division in Macedonia. For some reason I had not especially got into the Gallipoli side of his military career, despite the explicit reference to “9^th August” in the 1918 letter. But I spotted this book in a Belfast book shop when I was there last month, and discovered to my delight that it actually contained two references to my grandfather – one at the end to his death in 1949, but also another to his being wounded on 15 August 1915, during the British attempts to push east on the seaward side of the ridge north of Suvla Bay. This is practically the first reference I have found about him outside existing family lore. It seems that one of his friends left a fairly detailed account of the war, now in the National Army Museum archives in Chelsea.

Apart from my personal interest, I think this is a pretty good effort. Orr has very much gone for the soldier’s-eye-view of the Suvla Bay campaign (with a minor excursion to follow the Irish soldiers detached to support the Anzacs further south).Of course, it seems that in this case the geopolitical or wider strategic aspects of the campaign would not make a lot of sense; he is deliberately concentrating on the experience of the 10th (Irish) Division, not the Allied forces as a whole. Also his source material is vivid stuff and he has put it together well. I think my biggest criticism is that he does not make as much as he could of the military failure of the campaign: the total failure of the landing to achieve any of its objectives, ie holding the high ground around the bowl-like bay from which the Turks eventually shelled them out, linking up effectively with the Anzacs a few miles to the south, let alone pushing up the peninsula to Istanbul over 200 km away.

Orr also reflects on the way in which the Suvla Bay campaign has been ignored by later Irish historians, in total contrast to the nation-forging effect of the Anzac landings on the people on the far side of the world. He credits Shane McGowan of the Pogues for doing more than anyone else to raise public awareness of it in the most recent period. The problem was that the 10th Division was too broad-based in its membership; within a year of its landing at Gallipoli, more exclusive military myths had been generated by each side much closer to home (the Easter Rising and the Battle of the Somme). And while there have certainly been greater efforts made of late by the Irish state to recognise the Irish contribution to the first world war, it has tended to concentrate on the Western Front rather than events further east. This readable book will help to redress the balance. And I now know the true identity of the Stuffer.

1) In Search of the Dark Ages, by Michael Wood

This appears to be a book-of-the-TV-series dating from 1981, revised in 1987 (my copy is a 1994 reprint). I imagine the TV series must have been reasonably interesting; sadly, for much of the book I found myself wishing for more relevant illustrations and better maps.

Wood takes a straightforward tack of structuring his narrative around nine individuals from Boadicea to William the Conqueror (not that I would really have counted either of them as belonging to the ‘Dark Ages’, but there you go). It doen’t always work. One of the nine is the Sutton Hoo Man, and it’s difficult to construct a good narrative around someone when the only thing you know for sure about him is that he is dead. And the chapter on Athelstan promised to open our eyes about him and also reveal why he has been allowed to fall into obscurity; I am afraid I found my eyes glazing rather than opening, and if there was an explicit explanation of why we never hear much about him I missed it.

However, the chapters on King Arthur, Offa and Alfred were all good. (The other two are on Eric Bloodaxe and Ethelred the Unready.) I especially enjoyed the Alfred one; I found myself musing on the history of the Danelaw, which as a result of Alfred’s efforts seems to have been completely incorporated into the English polity, disappearing completely as a political entity in its own right. The Danelaw extended much further both south and west than I had realised, including both the ancestral origins of my mother-in-law in Lincolnshire and of my father-in-law in Derbyshire. And I realised something very important that had never occurred to me before (but perhaps should have):

I married a Viking.

Top UnSuggestion for this book: It, by Stephen King.

Much drama this morning. B. managed to get hold of a freshly bought bottle of photographical chemicals, and was found by my sister beaming with pride at having removed the lid and bitten through the foil top.

The bottle was covered with stickers saying ‘if ingested seek medical advice immediately’ in umpteen languages, so I called 101 for emergency services and ended up getting both police (who I hadn’t asked for, but who may have been having a boring Sunday morning and in need of some excitement) and an ambulance.

B., who like many autistic people generally prefers her own company, took it all in her stride and greeted each new set of uniformed visitors with a big smile. She was of course unable to tell us how much of the chemical she had swigged, so it was off to the hospital we went, B. clearly somewhat thrilled by the ambulance ride.

Once there, the nice folks in casualty had a look at her and determined that the chemical in question was largely citric acid, so heavily concentrated that it has a pH of 1; if B. had had enough to do her any harm, she would not have been in such a sunny mood. So we went home relieved.

My sister had bought the stuff for her husband’s photographic studio. He is colour-blind, so works only in black and white photography. Apparently the equivalent chemical in the process of developing colour photographs is much nastier. One should be thankful for small mercies.
——————

In case you are interested in what other people write about Doctor Who, here are all the links (so far) off my f-list about last night’s episode:

wwhyte, jekesta, puritybrown, purple_pen, Paul Cornell, jeanne_dark, Neil Fawcett, me, watervole, qatsi, blue_condition, matgb, doyle_sb4, megolas, lonemagpie, grahamsleight, pickwick, and snapesbabe. Everyone liked it (at least a little, sometimes a lot). It’s funny how people pick up on different details – only , for instance, remarked on the literary allusion of the name of the alien’s first victim!

It was good.

Nice to see a few more people popping up on the friends notifications recently – feel free to introduce yourselves below, and maybe tell me how you found me.

Checking out whose blogrolls I am on (other than Livejournal) and there are more than I thought. Some I know (Making Light, A Fistful of Euros, Old Rottenhat, The Genre Files, The Early Days of a Better Nation, Paul Cornell's House of Awkwardness, Love and Liberty, inuit bikini scarlet carwash/Hunting Monsters, Percy's Depressed, Young Fogey, Yank in Ulster, Sixth International, Adventures of a Drama Queen, Nicu Popescu, Belgian Waffle, Tim Roll-Pickering) and some I don't, or don't think I do (EU Pundit, Random Acts of Alex, Corcaighist, De Leyenda, Quotidian Hell, Kay Abroad). Anyone in the latter category seeing this entry, or any other casual readers, do feel free to introduce yourselves as well.

Ten months on from hearing the first of them, I have spent my commuting time this week alternating between reading Proust and listening to the next three audio plays in the Big Finish audio series, dating from 1999 and 2000. Phantasmagoria takes the Fifth Doctor and Turlough to the early 18th century in London; Whispers of Terror takes the Sixth Doctor and Peri to a political assassination in a future Museum of Aural Antiquities; and The Land of the Dead takes the Fifth Doctor, but this time with Nyssa, to contemporary Alaska besieged by creatures from the Permian era.

There was nothing very special about Phantasmagoria, except that it shared a plot twist with The Stones of Blood and I thought got away with it better. The soundscape of London was quite nicely done, though the writers seemed confused about who Queen Anne’s father was (making me wonder for a bit if this was supposed to be some parallel universe; but no, it was just a mistake). Since I was never a huge fan of Turlough, his presence here didn’t really excite me.

Whispers of Terror did make something special of the audio environment, with the Museum of Aural Antiquities being a place which for obvious reasons loses little by being portrayed through sound alone rather than vision as well. The Six/Peri banter was pleasantly nostalgic too. Sadly the plot was fairly obvious right from the word go, with a silly twist at the very end.

I enjoyed The Land of the Dead much more, not for the reasons I had expected. I would defend Nyssa against the likes of The Guardian who put her far down the list of companions, but Sarah Sutton is not especially outstanding here. Davison, however, is, and has a brilliant rapport with guest actor Lucy Campbell, whose performance here is memorable but appears to have done almost no other acting work apart from a bit part in another Stephen Cole Big Finish audio. Also the story is surprisingly good, with the archaeological delvings of the scientific researchers mirrored in the psychological delvings of the two main male characters into the circumstances of the tragic accident involving their fathers from decades before. The two actors slightly struggle to bring it off but it kept my attention.

Well, tonight we have the real thing starting again!

At least the first round: see her own jubilant entry and Eolas' slightly greater detail (in French). Congratulations to her and Tadpole.

If you don't know what this is about see my earlier coverage here.

No surprise.

I’m a Mandarin!

You’re an intellectual, and you’ve worked hard to get where you are now. You’re a strong believer in education, and you think many of the world’s problems could be solved if people were more informed and more rational. You have no tolerance for sloppy or lazy thinking. It frustrates you when people who are ignorant or dishonest rise to positions of power. You believe that people can make a difference in the world, and you’re determined to try.

Talent: 36%
Lifer: 28%
Mandarin: 79%

Take the Talent, Lifer, or Mandarin quiz.

I see the Hugo nominees are now out (and the story of how the list hit the web is an interesting study in the transmission of information in itself).

For the first time since I started following these things properly, I don’t think I have read a single one of the fiction nominees, either short or long. Will put that right of course. I have at least seen three out of five of the Short Form Best Dramatic Presentation nominees (the four Doctor Who episodes) and read one of the Best Related nominees.

One or two people have noticed the rather shocking fact that precisely one of the twenty fiction nominees is by a woman (His Majesty’s Dragon, by Naomi Novik). On the one hand, she should be comforted that women have scored better in the Best Novel category over the last few years (four of the last ten winners, with eleven novels by women among the fifty-one nominees).

On the other hand, as I’ve pointed out before, the Hugos are much more male than the Nebulas: in the last ten years (ie Nebulas dated 1996-2005, Hugos 1997-2006) women have won 23 of 40 Nebulas (57.5%) but only 9 out of 40 Hugos (22.5%). I’m critical of the Nebulas in general but this is one respect in which they have a better record than the Hugos.

This was a fortuitously good paired viewing of Doctor Who stories, the first being the 1968 Second Doctor story with Jamie and Zoe, shown between The Dominators and The Invasion, and the second a Fourth Doctor story without companions, which I remember vividly from its original broadcast in 1976.

The Mind Robber features… Oh, let’s get it over with. Zoe. Nobody can keep their hands off her. Certainly not the Doctor (see right). Certainly not Jamie. And the first episode ends like this. In the fourth episode she has a catfight with a caped and masked comic book superhero and wins. No wonder today’s Guardian lists her as one of the top five companions ever! I have to say that I can’t think of a more confident and sexy performance from any of the companions in any other old Who story; Leela, I think, comes closest but that is not very close. (Of course, if we count new Who as well, nobody can hold a candle to John Barrowman.)

And the confidence on her part (and indeed that of the rest of the cast) is remarkable because in fact the story very clearly doesn’t make a lot of sense.

The Doctor and companions are trapped in the Land of Fiction by its Master (not that Master but a different cosmic villain of the same name). We have a forest made of words. We have Jamie transformed into a different actor for an episode, to cover up the fact that Frazer Hines contracted chicken pox. We have clockwork soldiers. We have Rapunzel, we have E. Nesbit’s Five Children, and best of all we have Lemuel Gulliver, played superbly by Bernard Horsfall (and more on him later). We have glorious moments of Jamie and Zoe becoming fictional, becoming hostile to the Doctor, being nostalgic for their lost homelands (to which of course they will be returned by the end of the season).

But we also have Doctor Who coming close to breaking the fourth wall, not in the overt way of the First Doctor in the Daleks’ Master Plan (or the charming Morgus in The Caves of Androzani), but in terms of exploring Story and what it means to be in one. It’s fascinating and bizarre and I’ll have to re-watch it soon, along with all the DVD extras. And not just because I want to ogle Zoe again.

As for the Deadly Assassin: I was really a bit worried about watching it this time round; could it possibly be as good as I remembered it being from when I was nine years old, over thirty years ago? But yes, yes it is. Tom Baker is at the top of his form, combining humour, moral outrage, and determination to do the right thing by his home planet and people, even if they seem at times equally determined to do the wrong thing by him. And Robert Holmes’ superb script has so many memorable moments – here’s an early one, spoken by the exasperated official trying to pin the Doctor down who comes closest to filling the companion role. There’s a great Doctor/Tardis love moment as well.

Yet there are a couple of oddities. One, which is nothing to do with the series as originally presented, is that it has been preserved only as a 90-minute movie, which is rather annoying for those of us purists who like the old cliffhangers. Another, which is very bizarre indeed, is that there are no women visible anywhere in the Gallifrey of The Deadly Assassin. (Helen Blatch plays the disembodied voice of the Time Lords’ computer system.) This is of course the only story featuring the Doctor with no companion (unless one counts The Runaway Bride), but it really does seem peculiar. One could probably do a short list of stories featuring only male guest stars (?The Moonbase?) but I think this must be the only one with no women on the screen at all.

The interesting linkage with The Mind Robber is that for much of the story the Doctor enters a constructed, invented world, in which he has to battle an artifical reality and try and impose his own will on it. There is an interesting compare-and-contrast between the Second Doctor urging Jamie and Zoe to deny the existence of the unicorn charging at them, and the Fourth Doctor denying the fact that he has been wounded in the leg – same theme but pointing to the very different ways the series as a whole was going in 1968 and 1976. Like the Land of Fiction, the world inside the Matrix of the Time Lords turns out to be under the control of a cosmic villain called the Master – and this time it is that Master, reappearing for the first time since 1973, but horribly altered; with an audacious plan to seize control of the universe by tapping the very power of the Time Lords themselves. (The reality-altering theme is nicely echoed in the final episode by Cardinal Borusa’s attempt to impose his own version of historical reality on recent events.)

   

As I hinted at above, The Deadly Assassin has Bernard Horsfall returning – this time not as Gulliver (left), but as Chancellor Goth of the Time Lords (right). (I believe he is a Thal officer in Planet of the Daleks too, but haven’t seen that yet.) Horsfall also appeared in the last episode of The War Games in 1969 (middle), pronouncing sentence of exile and regeneration on the Doctor. If we are meant to read the two characters as the same person – though they have very different haircuts – then The Deadly Assassin represents the Fourth Doctor not only overcoming the Third Doctor’s unfinished business with his arch-enemy, but also reversing the Second Doctor’s defeat by the Time Lords in general (and by this one in particular).

Anyway, these are both essential viewing for the Who fan, and I think The Deadly Assassin keeps its place at the top of my personal list of Greatest Ever old Who stories, despite its lack of gender balance.

If you think that it is childish and culturally insensitive to find it funny when people happen to have names that are peculiarly appropriate to their professional function, then I urge you not to read this article

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