3 June 1927: birth of Kit Pedler, who co-wrote The Tenth Planet (First Doctor, 1966), The Moonbase (Second Doctor, 1967) and The Tomb of the Cybermen (also Second Doctor, 1967).
3 June 1946: birth of Penelope Wilton, who played Prime Minister Harriet Jones in several Tenth Doctor stories between 2005 and 2008.
3 June 1949: birth of Ian Gelder, who played MI5 tech guy Dekker in Torchwood: Children of Earth (2009), voiced the Remnants in The Ghost Monument (Thirteenth Doctor, 2018) and played the enigmatic Zellin in Can You Hear Me? (Thirteenth Doctor, 2020).
3 June 2019 (sob): death of Paul Darrow, who played Captain Hawkins in Doctor Who and the Silurians (Third Doctor, 1970) and Tekker in Timelash (Sixth Doctor, 1985). And Avon, of course.
ii) broadcast anniversaries
3 June 1967: broadcast of third episode of Evil of the Daleks. The Doctor agrees to test Jamie in order to isolate the 'human factor'.
3 June 1971: broadcast of third episode of The Time Monster. The Master, having summoned Krasis via the time crystal, launches a series of time-crossing attacks on UNIT.
3 June 2006: broadcast of The Impossible Planet. The Doctor and Rose arrive on a base investigating a mysterious world impossibly in orbit around a black hole, where the human staff are assisted by the enigmatic Ood.
3 June 2017: broadcast of The Lie of the Land. The Monks have ruled the world since humanity took its very first baby steps towards the Sun. One problem… they haven't always been there. And only Bill Potts sees the truth. But where is the Doctor? And how can Bill make the rest of the world see?
Second paragraph of third chapter (which is, not surprisingly, about Victory of the Daleks):
During the 1960s and 1970s, in the classic series of Doctor Who, Dalek stories tended to underplay many of these initial ideas and themes and instead the Daleks were positioned as a generic race of evil aliens bent on galactic dominance. Their appearance in the TV Century 21 comic between 1965-7 echoes Frank Hampson’s Dan Dare strips, and this aesthetic and their role as conquerors of time and space are further expressed on television in The Chase and The Daleks’ Master Plan. The two Dalek films made in 1965 and 1966 also take the pulp form of the comic book as the basis for adapting the first two Terry Nation serials and the Technicolor, widescreen clashes between the Doctor and the Daleks position this relationship firmly within a children’s action-adventure story context. As we will see later, the influence of the two Dalek films is integral to how the Daleks appear in Victory of the Daleks in 2010. With The Power of the Daleks and The Evil of the Daleks in the late 1960s it is David Whittaker’s influence that sees the Daleks elevated from their comic book machinations to make a brief return to the themes of their genetic inheritance, presaging much of the Dalek civil war narratives of the mid to late 1980s. Victory of the Daleks quotes extensively from both serials, with the camouflaged, Union Jack Daleks paraphrasing the claim of “I am your servant” from the former as “I am your soldier” in the reveal on the rooftop of the Cabinet War Rooms and masking their crafty behaviour by serving tea and doing the filing whilst prowling round corridors up to no good. The Doctor, as played by Matt Smith, also reiterates “the final end” as uttered by Patrick Troughton’s Doctor from the latter serial as he too prepares to witness the premature destruction of the Daleks. The Dalek stories of the early to mid 1970s such as Day of the Daleks, Planet of the Daleks and Death to the Daleks are more a reflection of the complex operations and guerrilla style tactics in the theatre of the Vietnam conflict. Aptly, Planet of the Daleks is set on the jungle planet Spiridon and Death to the Daleks plays out much of its chase narrative within the framework of the planet Exxilon’s ancient culture and temple-like city, evoking the ongoing war in Cambodia. In all three serials humans or humanoids are involved in galactic wars and are pitched against the Daleks in a desire to expunge the influence of their dogma and ideology. It is not until Genesis of the Daleks that Terry Nation’s original themes are more blatantly married to Nazi ideology and iconography, and to the use of science as a tool to prop up a xenophobic, racist and totalitarian rule. The serial also plays out as if we are witnessing both the last days of Hitler struggling to ensure the survival of the Aryan legacy of his party and the bitter end of the Vietnam War. This decades-long war, coincidentally concluding in April 1975 just as the six episodes of the serial were being transmitted, is a subtext in the story “microcosmically reflecting upon tendencies in the viewer’s world,” as Jonathan Bignell and Andrew O’Day observe in their book Terry Nation.
That’s a fair sample of the book’s content. It’s a very dense and scholarly examination of Matt Smith’s first thirteen episodes as the Eleventh Doctor, with a lot of references to studies of pop culture which I haven’t read and to some which I have. I think the balance is about 20% “I already knew that” to 70% “Hmmm, that’s interesting” and 10% “Oh come on, no way”, which is reasonable for a book of this kind.
(I must say I think that Vietnam was not the only war ever fought in a jungle, and Cambodia was not the only war ever fought around ancient places of worship, and some of those other wars actually involved British soldiers, unlike either Vietnam or Cambodia.)
I actually got this last year by mistake – I had intended to order Andy Priestner’s book about Secret Army from the same publisher, and somehow clicked on the wrong button. When it arrived I was a bit dismayed but decided to keep it in the hope that I would enjoy it, and I did. You can get it here.
Tue, 16:51: A Belgian lawyer: “I’m fed up with people saying that the Moniteur Belge is useless. It’s got everything: laws, decrees, recipes, whatever you want. Honestly, I’ve rarely seen anything this funny in my career as a lawyer.” (An asparagus recipe got pasted into the legal database) https://t.co/ICZtqBL8RM
Wed, 10:45: RT @bnhwalker: What struck me about this year’s locals was the Green’s success in winning areas that once voted >60% Leave. Symbolic of the…
Wed, 10:46: RT @DrRadchenko: Came across some curious documents on the nuclear arms race in the early 1980s that I just have to share. Quite a mini-sto…
Wed, 10:50: Hi @buffer – I am finding it impossible to log in to the app from my desktop. I have put my email address into the “reset password” box several times but no reset email from you in my inbox (or spam, I’ve checked). Can you help? Still OK using the app on iOs devices.
2 June 1922: birth of Carmen Silvera, who played several parts in The Celestial Toymaker (First Doctor, 1966) and also Ruth in Invasion of the Dinosaurs (Fourth Doctor, 1974), better known in later years as René Artois's long-suffering wife Edith in 'Allo! 'Allo!
2 June 1931: birth of June Bland, who played Berger in Earthshock (Fifth Doctor, 1981) and Elizabeth Rowlinson in Battlefield (Seventh Doctor, 1989).
ii) broadcast anniversaries
2 June 1973: broadcast of third episode of The Green Death. The Doctor and Jo escape from the mine, but the egg they bring back hatches and a maggot threatens Jo.
2 June 1997: publication of The Eight Doctors, by Terrance Dicks, and The Devil Goblins from Neptune, by Martin Day and Keith Topping, launching the Eighth Doctor and Past Doctor adventures respectively.
2 June 2007: broadcast of The Family of Blood. The Doctor sheds his human self and tricks the Family into submission.
iii) date specified in canon
2 June 1866: setting of the Victorian parts of Evil of the Daleks (1967).
2 June 1953: Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, as seen in The Idiot's Lantern (2006).
Non-fiction 2 (YTD 16) Doctor Who: The Pandorica Opens: Exploring the Worlds of the Eleventh Doctor, by Frank Collins Statement and Correspondence Consequent on the Ill-Treatment of Lady de la Beche by Colonel Henry Wyndham, edited by Ann Auriol
Non-genre 3 (YTD 10) Schindler’s List, by Thomas Keneally The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant Forrest Gump, by Winston Groom
SF 7 (YTD 54) The Evidence, by Christopher Priest In the Days of the Comet, by H. G. Wells Cloud on Silver by John Christopher All the Fabulous Beasts, by Priya Sharma Jurassic Park, by Michael Crichton Finna, by Nino Cipri City of Blades, by Robert Jackson Bennett
Comics 4 (YTD 14) DIE, Volume 2: Split the Party, by Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans and Clayton Cowles The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, by Adrian Tomine Ghost-Spider vol. 1: Dog Days Are Over, by Seanan McGuire, Takeshi Miyazawa and Rosie Kämpe Invisible Kingdom, vol 2: Edge of Everything, by G. Willow Wilson and Christian Ward
4,600 pages (YTD 25,900)
6/16 (YTD 39/98) by non-male writers (de la Beche/Auriol, Sharma, Cipri, Hans, McGuire/Kämpe, Wilson)
3/16 (YTD 18/98) by PoC (Sharma, Tomine, Miyazawa)
1/16 rereads (YTD 9/98) – Jurassic Park.
Current Wonder Woman: The Golden Age, Vol. 2 by William Moulton Marston Bridget Jones's Diary, by Helen Fielding The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women, ed. Alex Dally MacFarlane Monstress, vol. 5: Warchild, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda
Coming soon (perhaps) Don't Be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech, by Rana Foroohar Comic Inferno, by Brian W. Aldiss Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins Boys in Zinc, by Svetlana Alexievich Roger Zelazny's The Dawn of Amber: Book 1, by John Gregory Betancourt
"Stories For Men", by John Kessel The Monster's Wife, by Kate Horsley Riding the Unicorn, by Paul Kearney Empire Games, by Charles Stross The Kingdom of Copper, by S. A Chakraborty
"Grotto of the Dancing Deer", by Clifford D Simak Le dernier Atlas, tome 2, by Fabien Vehlmann, Gwen De Bonneval and Fred Blanchard The Place of the Lion, by Charles Williams The History of Mr Polly, by H.G. Wells Thirteen, by Steve Cavanagh Cryptozoic, by Brian Aldiss Middlemarch, by George Eliot Fish Tails, by Sheri S. Tepper Eurofiles: A Cartoonist's View of Europe and the Wider World, by Peter Schrank
Mon, 12:56: RT @DoctorWhoHome1: I find the troubles absolutely fascinating and tragic as a history student in Ireland. It’s lovely to see Baker taking…
Tue, 10:45: Three ‘lost’ Charles Schulz strips have been rediscovered. Do they show the adult Lucy Van Pelt? https://t.co/vWkMfBI81Q Probably not, and they are not a huge success, but interesting all the same.
1 June 1947: birth of Jonathan Pryce, who played the Master in The Curse of Fatal Death (1999).
1 June 1965: birth of Bharat Nairulli, director and executive producer of The New World, the opening episode of Torchwood: Miracle Day (2011).
1 June 1991: death of Milton Subotsky, who produced and wrote Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965) and Daleks – Invasion Earth 2150 AD (1966), the two cinema films starring Peter Cushing as Doctor Who.
1 June 2005: death of Geoffrey Toone, who played Temmosus in Doctor Who and the Daleks (Cushing Doctor, 1965) and Hepesh in The Curse of Peladon (Third Doctor, 1972).
ii) broadcast anniversaries
1 June 1968: broadcast of sixth episode of The Wheel In Space, ending Season 4 of Old Who. The Doctor manages to destroy the Cybermen with the X-ray laser; and Zoe stows away on the Tardis.
1 June 1974: broadcast of fifth part of Planet of the Spiders. The Doctor confronts the Great One, and escapes to Earth with Sarah; but she is under the spiders' control.
iii) date specified in-universe
1 June 1977: Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee, as celebrated in Mawdryn Undead (1983).
I was in the office again today, entirely on my own, which gave me the freedom to play loud music and yell at the top of my voice; but that gets old fairly quickly as it turns out. Who knew?
Both the Belgian numbers and the weather have been improving, which greatly lifts the spirits. As I predicted lsat time, the number of COVID patients in hospital is now well below where it had since before the October lockdown, and the number of new infections seems likely to drop below that benchmark in the next week or ten days (and the number of ICU patients, currently the slowest moving indicator, will not be far behind). We actually got out to our favourite restaurant for dinner last night, for the first time since last summer.
I walked back with U, who had firm views about the route that we needed to take, deviating twice from my preferred shortcuts (in orange).
Sun, 12:56: RT @Scott_Wortley: I recommend reading the full Foster v Jessen judgment. The analysis of Jessen’s utter lack of credibility and reliabilit…
Sun, 14:48: Strange Confection: The Commitments and the Battle for Dublin’s Soul https://t.co/ah0qYyuHbx Looking back, thirty (!) years on.
31 May 1940: birth of Peter Mayock who played Ibrahim Namin in Pyramids of Mars (Fourth Doctor, 1975) and Solis in The Deadly Assassin (Fourth Doctor, 1976)
31 May 1948: birth of Lynda Bellingham, who played the Inquisitor in the Sixth Doctor’s Season 23 (1986), and returned to the role for some excellent Big Finish plays.
31 May 1983: birth of Reggie Yates who played Martha’s brother Leo in the 2007 series of Doctor Who.
ii) broadcast anniversaries
31 May 1969: broadcast of seventh episode of The War Games. The Doctor and friends start a rebellion, capturing the 1917 chateau from General Smythe.
31 May 2008: broadcast of Silence in the Library
31 May 2010: broadcast of Robot Gladiators, twenty-first episode of the Australian K9 series. K9 and the crew take on and shut down an illegal, underground robot fight club.
One more month to go in this project. It’s been interesting to come back to this ten years on – there’s actually been much less Who since 2011 than there was in the 2005-10 period, when you also had Torchwood and Sarah Jane in the mix, so the updates have generally not needed to be substantial.
I had a new DNA detective case last week. I connected via Reddit with a young woman in Las Vegas, who I’ll call Maria. She had done the 23andMe test, and was surprised to find that her ancestry was more or less exactly 25% African. Her mother’s family are of European descent, and her mother had always told Maria that her father was Mexican or Central American, but also that she could not remember any more details. (Her mother is, to put it delicately, not a reliable reporter. Maria and her half-brothers have been brought up by their mother’s parents.)
By the time I connected with her, Maria had already put most of the pieces together herself, and in particular had found someone on 23andMe whose DNA overlap with her is 16%, within the range that you’d expect for a first cousin (or a half-aunt/uncle or half-niece/nephew, or a great-aunt/uncle or great-niece/nephew or a great-grandparent, but we can eliminate those possibilities for various reasons). The cousin recalled a long-lost uncle, Jamie Jr, named after her equally long-lost grandfather, Jamie Sr. The cousin also provided a recent photo of Jamie Jr and Rose, his mother, and Maria and her other grandmother felt confident that there was a resemblance between her and Jamie Jr around the nose and eye shapes. Rose is of European descent, and Jamie Sr is African-American, so that tied up neatly with Maria’s genetic results.
It took a couple of days for Maria and me to untangle the various possibilities, including dead ends and false trails in Louisiana and Pennsylvania. I was eventually able to track down both Jamie Sr in Portland, Oregon, and Jamie Jr in Los Angeles. To make matters more complex, both are known by their (shared) middle name, which has an unusual spelling that the cousin did not know about. Putting together the DNA tests, family history and public records, Jamie Jr is almost certainly Maria’s biological father, unless he has a brother somewhere who has been forgotten both by his family and by California bureaucracy.
I found no record of Jamie Jr having married or having had other children, but the closer you get to the present day, the less reliable it is to argue that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. However, he has a substantial criminal record, which is partly why it was relatively easy to find a trail for him online. Maria is familiar with her mother’s taste in men, and was not surprised by this at all. Given her mother’s general vagueness (to put it delicately again), Jamie Jr is almost certainly unaware of Maria’s existence.
Maria has decided to keep it that way. She has a name and a photo, and an explanation of why she looks quite so different from her half-brothers. But, as she put it in one of her emails, “I don’t need another disappointment and false hope in my life after what my mother has put me through. I think having my answer is satisfying enough .” She is still at high school, but she has a good head on her shoulders.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging which will fall in 2023. Every six-ish days, I've been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I've found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
I started August by inspecting the sculpture too scandalous to see in Brussels. We spent the second half of the month in Northern Ireland, where we did a particularly lovely trip to County Tyrone:
While in Northern Ireland I completed my rewatch of twentieth century Doctor Who.
~8,400 pages (YTD ~58,100)
13/31 (YTD 41/203) by women (Fitzpatrick, Nikohl K, Adelman/Agnew, Chambers, White, Foreman/Pollard, Dunnett, Lamb, Head, Stowe, McKenna, Roberts, Atwood)
2/31 (YTD 11/203) by PoC (Shah, Head)
The best of these were The Handmaid's Tale (a reread of course), which you can get here, and the Reader's Companion to A Civil Campaign by Lois McMaster Bujold, which you can get here, but I'm also going to give a shout to Paul Cornell's Doctor Who novel No Future, with its references to 1970s pop culture, which you can get here. I totally bounced off Jewels of the Sun, by Nora Roberts, which you can get here.
Sat, 17:07: I see also that Thursday 9 June was followed by Saturday 10 June that year; I knew that I grew up in a twisted part of the universe… @senrab_nalahttps://t.co/T15HlRVUd1
30 May 1938: birth of Christopher Robbie, who played the Karkus in The Mind Robber (1969) and the Cyber-Leader in Revenge of the Cybermen (1975)
ii) broadcast anniversaries
30 May 1964: broadcast of "The Warriors of Death", second episode of the story we now call The Aztecs. In his efforts to regain entrance to the tomb, the Doctor is inadvertently responsible for poisoning Ian.
30 May 1970: broadcast of fourth episode of Inferno. The Doctor is imprisoned, but escapes, trying to stop the drilling of the planet "screaming out its rage".
30 May 2003: webcast of fifth episode of Shada. The Doctor and friends evade the Krargs and return to Cambridge, and then go to Shada where Professor Chronotis reveals his true identity as Salyavin.
30 May 2020: webcast of The Secret of Novice Hame.
Forrest Gump won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1994, and five others: Best Actor (Tom Hanks), Best Director (Robert Zemeckis), Best Visual Effects, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Film Editing. It lost in seven categories, two each to Ed Wood and Speed. The Hugo that year went to the final episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
For once – I think uniquely – I have seen all of the other nominees for Best Picture. They were Four Weddings and a Funeral, Pulp Fiction, Quiz Show and The Shawshank Redemption. I have also seen Star Trek: Generations, Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult, The Madness of King George, the great Macedonian film Before the Rain, Kate Beckinsale’s gorgeous debut Uncovered, and Peter Capaldi’s Oscar-winning Franz Kafka’s It’s A Wonderful Life. I liked all of these much more than I liked Forrest Gump. IMDB users show a rare unity between the two ranking systems, with bothlists putting Forrest Gump third after The Shawshank Redemption in first place and Pulp Fiction in second, followed by Léon: The Professional in fourth and The Lion King in fifth (they diverge after that). Here’s a trailer.
A huge cast, but I spotted only no actors who had been in Doctor Who or previous Oscar winners, and a couple from Hugo winner, one a pretty big one: Robin Wright is the female lead, Jenny Curran, here, and seven years ago had the title role in The Princess Bride.
The other was Brett Rice, here the college football coach, four years ago a reporter in Edward Scissorhands.
I’ll be brief. The film is about Alabama-born Forrest Gump, who has a learning disability but gets into hilarious scrapes including encounters with three American presidents and much of the counter-culture of the 1960s, before getting back together with the girl he has always loved, who promptly dies. The end. Perhaps because of my family situation, I don’t find learning disabilities particularly funny, and perhaps because I am Irish, I don’t like people’s accents being used as markers of their stupidity, as Gump’s deep Southern drawl is here.
The film is not as sound on race as it thinks it is. Sure, Gump’s best friend Bubba is black, and Gump himself plays a sympathetic role in the integration of the University of Alabama. I noticed however that the population of his home town of Greenboro seemed to be entirely white, and Bubba’s family are in another part of the state. I also felt that a false equivalence was being drawn between the excesses of the Left and Right during the 1960s, where my heart is firmly with the former. I also thought the sequence of Gump running across America near the end was pointless and frankly not very good cinema, apart from the excuse to have some nice landscape shots.
Tom Hanks is OK as the lead, but as noted above I did not really appreciate the character. I thought Gary Sinise was very good as his friend Lieutenant Dan Taylor. (The following year, both were in Apollo 13, Hanks the lead again, Sinise as Ken Mattingly who gets bumped off the flight at the last moment.)
Now that I’ve got to Sinise, the one thing about the film which I thought superb: the special effects. Sinise’s character’s legs are amputated; the actor’s legs were not, but were removed from every frame in post-production. 1500 extras were filmed several times over to provide a crowd stretching along the National Mall. Forrest Gump meets three presidents, and John Lennon. I thought this was audacious and successful.
But it did not salvage the rest of the film for me. I’m putting it way down at the bottom of my list, 60th out of the 67 Oscar-winners I have seen so far, just below Patton and just above All The King’s Men.
As usual, I read the original novel as well. It is mercifully short. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
All this was durin the month of August, which in the state of Alabama is somewhat hotter than it is elsewhere. That is to say, that if you put a egg on top of your football helmet it would be fried sunnyside up in about ten seconds. Of course nobody ever try that on account of it might get Coach Bryant angry. That was the one thing nobody wish to do, because life was almost intolerable as it was.
I thought the book even worse than the film (with the exception that the ending is a bit better, Forrest and Jenny don’t actually get back together and he makes his peace with that). A particularly offensive section involves him being recruited for NASA for a space mission with a woman astronaut and an orang-utan; they crash on a tropical island where they are nearly eaten by cannibals. The film made some odd choices but leaving this out is understandable.
29 May 1928: birth of Frederick Jaeger, who played Jano in The Savages (First Doctor, 1966), Sorenson in Planet of Evil (Fourth Doctor, 1975), and Prof. Marius in The Invisible Enemy (Fourth Doctor, 1977).
29 May 1987: birth of Pearl Mackie, who played Bill Potts in Series 10 of New Who (2017).
ii) broadcast anniversaries
29 May 1965: broadcast of "The Death of Time", second episode of the story we now call The Chase. The Aridians capture the Doctor, Vicki and Barbara, and are about to hand them over to the Daleks when a Mire Beast attacks and they are able to escape.
29 May 1971: broadcast of second episode of The Dæmons. Giant footprints and a heat barrier beset Devil's End; the Doctor and Jo discover a miniaturised spaceship inside the abandoned dig.
29 May 2010: broadcast of Cold Blood. The Doctor manages to negotiate an accommodation between Silurians and humans, but the situation breaks down again, the Silurians return to sleep for another thousand years – and Rory is killed and then erased from history!
Current Wonder Woman: The Golden Age, Vol. 2 by William Moulton Marston Bridget Jones's Diary, by Helen Fielding The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women, ed. Alex Dally MacFarlane Invisible Kingdom, vol 2: Edge of Everything, by G. Willow Wilson and Christian Ward
Last books finished The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, by Adrian Tomine The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant Ghost-Spider vol. 1: Dog Days Are Over, by Seanan McGuire, Takeshi Miyazawa and Rosie Kämpe City of Blades, by Robert Jackson Bennett Forrest Gump, by Winston Groom
Next books Don't Be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech, by Rana Foroohar Comic Inferno, by Brian W. Aldiss
Thu, 15:31: RT @BCommNI: We have published our Guide to the 2023 Review of Parliamentary Constituencies in NI. It includes information about the review…
Thu, 17:19: RT @worldcon2021: Who’s ready to vote for @TheHugoAwards? The Hugo Award ballot is now open until November 19, 2021 DisCon III member…
Thu, 21:51: Today’s issue of @DWMtweets Doctor Who Magazine has expert commentary on Tom Baker’s visit to Belfast in June 1978. (I did not realise that @naomi_long actually met him when he came to her school in Mersey St!) https://t.co/lNfKxg0Pe0
28 May 1935: birth of Anne Reid, who played Nurse Crane in The Curse of Fenric (1989) and Florence Finnegan in Smith and Jones (2007)
28 May 1940: birth of Frank Cox, who directed part 2 of the story we now call The Edge of Destruction (First Doctor, 1964) and parts 5 and 6 of the story we now call The Sensorites (also First Doctor, 1964).
28 May 1966: birth of Sharon D. Clarke, who played Graham’s wife and Ryan’s grandmother Grace in Series 11 and 12 of New Who (2018, 2020).
28 May 1968: birth of Kylie Minogue, who played Astrid in Voyage of the Damned (Tenth Doctor, 2007).
(Births also of Patricia Quinn and Faith Brown in 1944, Michelle Collins in 1963 and Carey Mulligan in 1985; much as I enjoyed their appearances in Who, they don't fit my criteria for a full mention.)
ii) broadcast anniversaries
28 May 1966: broadcast of first episode of The Savages, the first episode not to have an individual title. The Doctor, Steven and Dodo are welcomed by the Elders, but something very sinister is going on with their savage neighbours…
28 May 2005: broadcast of The Doctor Dances. The Doctor realises that the gas mask zombies are being created by escaped medical nanocytes, and set matters aright.
28 May 2011: broadcast of The Almost People. The Doctor and the Gangers, and a major plot twist involving Amy at the end.
Second paragraph of third story ("The Anatomist's Mnemonic"):
Why don't we ask Sam to the party? I've invited Judith. We should introduce them.
I was blown away by Sharma's novella, Ormeshadow, which I read at the end of last year; this is a collection of her short stories, almost all of them with some genre elements (though one of the best, "Small Town Stories", seemed to me to be a straightforward psychological tale). I thought they were tremendously good, combining fantasy, horror and human elements, each one of them a real jewel. Strongly recommended. You can get it here.
Thu, 00:39: RT @dmcbfs: Looked back through the some other leadership contests in NI history. I still cannot find one where the outgoing leader didn’t…
27 May 1926: birth of Peter Ling, who wrote The Mind Robber (Second Doctor, 1968)
27 May 1981: death of Kit Pedler, who co-wrote The Tenth Planet (First Doctor, 1966), The Moonbase (Second Doctor, 1967) and The Tomb of the Cybermen (Fourth Doctor, 1967).
27 May 1983: death of George Cormack, who played King Dalios in The Time Monster (Third Doctor, 1972) and abbot K'anpo Rimpoche in Planet of the Spiders (Third Doctor, 1974).
ii) broadcast anniversaries
27 May 1967: broadcast of second episode of Evil of the Daleks
27 May 1972: broadcast of second episode of The Time Monster. Stu has been aged by the effects of TOMTIT; the Master evades Benton by tricking him.
27 May 1996: broadcast of Doctor Who: The Movie on BBC (it had already been shown in the USA and Canada).
27 May 2007: broadcast of The Idiot's Lantern. The Doctor prevents The Wire from feeding on the energy of TV owners watching the 1953 coronation. Includes a reference to Belgium.
27 May 2017: broadcast of The Pyramid at the End of the World. An 'ancient' pyramid appears overnight. Every clock in the world begins counting down to the Earth's destruction. Three opposing armies lie ready to annihilate each other. An alien race stands ready to offer humanity a deal that could save them, but enslave them. It is a terrifying race against time to save the world. Will the Doctor be forced to accept their help?
Smells came over the still waters of the harbour, unidentifiable, disturbing in a way that she was not sure if she liked or disliked. And distant cries, in a language she did not know. A large catamaran, with twin red sails, was cutting across the bows of a motor-launch which was chugging out on one revved-down engine. Across the harbour the town glittered white under blue skies lightly strewn with cirrus. She thought suddenly of London, and so of John. He would be leaving the office about this time, joining the crowd that surged towards Holborn Viaduct station. Or perhaps calling in at the Printer's Devil for a drink. She smiled; that was, on the whole, more likely. Standing with one elbow on the bar, a pint of light ale in front of him, talking boisterously, laughing from time to time that deep reverberating laugh which, she so well remembered, drew people's attention to him from the furthest corner of the most crowded bar. He would not think of her until later — in the compartment crowded with strangers, walking alone along the road from the station to the neat detached house with the garden he was so proud of, and the three boys he was so proud of, and the wife with whom he spent his evenings and week-ends bickering.
Also known as Sweeny's Island, this is one of the less well-known works by John Christopher, author of the Tripods trilogy, the Sword of the Spirts trilogy and The Death of Grass. A bunch of unpleasant middle-class Londoners get marooned on a desert island in the Pacific Ocean, and come to realise that apart from their own mating rituals there is something more sinister going on – Lord of the Flies, but with grownups, some of whom are women. Some people rate this as an undiscovered gem, but I felt that the social commentary was not as interesting as the author obviously thinks it is, and that the sfnal elements were neither particularly original nor particularly memorably executed. His other books are better. You can get this one here.
This was both the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves, and the shortest unread book acquired in 2014. Next on those piles respectively are Riding the Unicorn, by Paul Kearney, and The Monster's Wife, by Kate Horsley.
Tue, 18:43: RT @MaxCRoser: Gallup asks people around the world whether they have someone to count on for help in times of trouble. – The map shows the…
26 May 1913: birth of Peter Cushing, who played Doctor Who in the 1965 and 1966 films.
26 May 1927: birth of Julia Smith, who directed The Smugglers (First Doctor, 1966) and The Underwater Menace (Second Doctor, 1967).
26 May 1990: death of Anthony Steven, who wrote The Twin Dilemma (Sixth Doctor, 1984). Earlier this year a friend in Spain Facebooked me to say "Thinking of you, as I search on youtube for what was voted the worst Dr. Who story ever in the company of the son of the author who happens to live in our village, and wanted to show us an episode…" Yep, Anthony Steven's son is one of her neighbours.
26 May 2019: death of Stephen Thorne, who played Azal in The Dæmons (Third Doctor, 1971), Omega in The Three Doctors (Third Doctor plus First and Second, 1972-73), the First Ogron in Frontier in Space (Third Doctor, 1973) and the male version of Eldrad in The Hand of Fear (Fourth Doctor, 1976). Heavily disguised in all of them, so no photos here.
ii) broadcast anniversaries
26 May 1973: broadcast of second episode of The Green Death. The Doctor investigates the mine and the green slime in order to rescue Jo, despite obstruction from Global Chemicals.
26 May 2007: broadcast of Human Nature. To avoid The Family, the Doctor becomes a human, teaching in an English boarding school in November 1913; but they track him down.
July 2011 started with a visit to Ireland to celebrate my mother's 70th birthday (which actually fell at the end of June; she turns 80 next month). My photos from the party are, frankly, embarrassingly poor. Here's the two best ones I got, my great aunt (who had just turned 95, and will turn 105 next month) with my mother and six of my mother's eight siblings; and 11-year-old F with my great aunt who unfortunately had her eyes closed at the moment I took the shot.
Back at home, I found a new place to take B, the Paterskerk at Tienen. And we had an outing to a windmill.
Apart from all that, I read 23 books in July 2011.
25 May 1968: broadcast of fifth episode of The Wheel in Space. The Doctor fights back against the Cybermen, and sends Jamie and Zoe on a dangerous spacewalk.
25 May 1974: broadcast of fourth episode of Planet of the Spiders. Tommy is healed by the crystal, but Sarah and then the Doctor are captured by the spiders.
ii) date specified in-universe
25 May 1972: birth of Joseph Serf, the titular Man Who Never Was in the very last story of the Sarah Jane Adventures (2011).
Beautiful Merovingian metalwork from a very nice exhibition, “The World of Clovis“, in the Royal Museum at Mariemont, of which I was previously unaware. There’s lots of other lovely material there, but it was the metalwork that really caught my eye – here are two fibluæ, a reliquary and some rings and things. These last are from a grave known as The Lady of Grez-Doiceau, which is just down the road from us here.
Here’s a teaser for the whole exhibition. (In French, sorry.)
I went with two work colleagues, one of whom decided to order a five-cheese pizza for lunch, and the other went one better by ordering a pizza with chips/fries on it. (I had pasta with sea food.)
