- Tue, 12:22: RT @Glasgowin2024: May the fourth be with you! https://t.co/TwI0QiISEt
- Tue, 14:12: RT @UKPoliticalNews: Few people know as much about #NorthernIreland politics as our colleague @nwbrux, here’s his take on Arlene Foster’s d…
- Tue, 16:05: RT @thesweetcheat: @ratherbeapear This is a decent list in reading order of all the novels published before the relaunch, with the original…
- Tue, 17:11: RT @DoctorWhoPN: A review of Peter Davison’s book ‘Is There Life Outside The Box? An Actor Despairs’ “I’ve read a lot of celebrity memoirs…
- Tue, 17:12: RT @MichaelLCrick: @PickardJE And in the 2004 by-election in Hartlepool the Tories came FOURTH (with a stronger candidate than now), beaten…
- Tue, 18:06: Neil Gaiman: Feeders & Eaters & other stories; Sculpture Stories https://t.co/aNGjh63Te7
- Wed, 09:30: Whoniversaries 5 May https://t.co/UVrPSOPuC8
- Wed, 10:45: Tricky. Both are flawed, but at least The Invisible Enemy’s heart is int he right place, so it gets my vote. https://t.co/8DtNhj0gTk
Whoniversaries 5 May
i) births and deaths
5 May 1937: birth of Delia Derbyshire, whose arrangements of Ron Grainer's theme for the title music of Doctor Who were used on TV from 1963 to 1980.
5 May 1939: birth of Terry Walsh, stuntman supreme especially during the Pertwee era.
5 May 1957: birth of Richard E. Grant, who played the 'first' Tenth Doctor in The Curse of Fatal Death (1999), the 'other' Ninth Doctor in Scream of the Shalka (2003) and then Doctor Simeon/The Great Intelligence in The Snowmen (Eleventh Doctor, 2012), The Bells of Saint John (Eleventh Doctor, 2013) and The Name of the Doctor (Eleventh Doctor, 2013).
ii) broadcast anniversaries
5 May 1973: broadcast of fifth episode of Planet of the Daleks. The Doctor and friends infiltrate the Dalek base to prevent the bacteria release.
5 May 2007: broadcast of The Lazarus Experiment. The Doctor and Martha discover that Professor Lazarus' rejuvenation process is not what it seems.
Neil Gaiman: Feeders & Eaters & other stories; Sculpture Stories
Two very short works by Neil Gaiman, one illustrated by Mark Buckingham, the other inspired by scupltures by Lisa Snellings.
Second frame of third story of Feeders & Eaters & other stories (“An Image to Maintain”, in which Buckingham portrays himself on the phone to Gaiman):
The title story is Gaiman’s account of a spooky late-night encounter in a cafe (which has been dramatised); the second is about Alan Moore; and the third is a one-pager by Buckingham. Perhaps a little more refective on the nature of the artist’s work than sometimes. Second paragraph of the third of the Sculpture Stories, “The Sea Change”:
“Now hear us as we cry to Thee
For those in peril on the sea”
inspired by this sculpture, “Aqua Marie”.
Very very short collection of six fiction pieces (on in verse) and an interview, all inspired by Snellings’ work.
Neither of these is available on the market; I got them as part of a Humble Bundle several years ago.
My tweets
- Mon, 12:56: RT @GerardAraud: One of the brightest, most illuminating and deepest articles I have ever read by @b_judah Explaining through Draghi the EU…
- Mon, 16:05: The Czech diplomacy gap https://t.co/HbWiqToPQt Slovak expert and politician @valasekt explains.
- Mon, 17:11: RT @francescabinda: I don’t always have time to read @nwbrux “From the Heart of Europe” blog but when I do, I always learn something … Wo…
- Mon, 18:29: Le dernier Atlas, tome 1, by Fabien Vehlmann, Gwen De Bonneval and Fred Blanchard https://t.co/H2cGY1H8n3
- Tue, 08:40: RT @MichelBarnier: For English speakers, happy to announce that my diary will be published in English at the beginning of October by @polit…
- Tue, 09:30: Whoniversaries 4 May https://t.co/43rWhrZXcq
Whoniversaries 4 May
i) births and deaths
4 May 1912: birth of Peter Bathurst, who played Hensell in The Power of the Daleks (Second Doctor, 1966-67) and the awful Chinn in The Claws of Axos (Third Doctor, 1971).
4 May 1959: birth of Anthony Calf, who played the Squire's son Charles in The Visitation (Fifth Doctor, 1982), his first professional acting role, and Colonel Godsacre in Empress of Mars (Twelfth Doctor, 2017).
ii) broadcast anniversaries
4 May 1968: broadcast of second episode of The Wheel in Space
4 May 1974: broadcast of first episode of Planet of the Spiders. The Doctor investigates a clairvoyant; Mike Yates and Sarah Jane investigate a meditation cult under the control of spiders.
4 May 2013: broadcast of The Crimson Horror. In 1893, Jenny infiltrates Mrs Winifred Gillyflower's community of Sweetville in Yorkshire to find what has happened to the Doctor.
Le dernier Atlas, tome 1, by Fabien Vehlmann, Gwen De Bonneval, Hervé Tanquerelle and Fred Blanchard
Second frame of third chapter:
Momo: Hey, can I talk to you? [literally: are you listening to me?]
Ismaël: Yes.
I'm always trying to broaden my reading of bandes dessinées, and this won the Prix René Goscinny 2020 so I thought I would give it a go. The setting is a really interesting alternate history (uchronie as the French put it), in which France won the Algerian war by developing giant nuclear powered robots to stomp out the resistance; but in the end, Algeria gained independence after all after the 1976 Batna disaster (which everyone mutters about but has not yet been described) and the robots were all dismantled apart from one which is quietly rusting away in India. Our protagonist, a hoodlum from Nantes in roughly the present day (2020 ish, in the alternate timeline), is given the task of retrieving it for his crime boss. Meanwhile in the Algerian desert, something very strange is happening.
This is really good, and you don't need to be an expert in the history of France and Algeria to appreciate it. The characters are all well drawn and well depicted, and the scenes of France, Algeria and India are convincing, with the legacy of colonialism a major subtheme. Giant nuclear-powered robots are a silly idea, of course, but the point is that they and their crew became cult figures for kids in the 1970s like our protagonist, who still has his sticker book. Gloriously, the robot he is sent to India to retrieve is named after George Sand, the embodiment of French culture stomping out the natives. Here's the promotional video for the second volume, which is next on my list of non-English-language comics.
It hasn't been translated into English yet (surely some smart publisher will pick it up?) but you can get it here.
Edited to add: Turns out that individual parts are being translatedm, here.
My tweets
- Sun, 12:22: After Arlene https://t.co/Q2NLlAZRci
- Sun, 14:48: RT @Mij_Europe: Big manoeuvres in French politics before regional elections in June, according to the article below, with a potential spin-…
- Sun, 15:29: After Arlene https://t.co/5POaQiaXY4
- Sun, 18:31: The Fourth Doctor adventures, fourth series https://t.co/RzdkmW39mL
- Sun, 20:48: How stalled concessions on hunger strike prolonged Troubles for years https://t.co/ZI4NaeacxL Inside information from the early 1980s.
- Mon, 09:30: Whoniversaries 3 May https://t.co/YTQzHAyPX8
- Mon, 10:45: RT @christinebelled: Good blog. https://t.co/hVBEfUZKEI
- Mon, 10:49: RT @five_books: “As the Philip K Dick once put it: ‘The sci fi writer sees not just possibilities but wild possibilities’” —@nwbrux. From s…
Whoniversaries 3 May
i) births and deaths
3 May 1944: birth of Carl Forgione, who played the meditator Land in Planet of the Spiders (Thord Doctor, 1974) and the Neanderthal butler Nimrod in Ghost Light (Seventh Doctor, 1989).
3 May 1988: death of David Garth, who played Solicitor Grey in The Highlanders (Second Doctor, 1967-68) and a Time Lord messenger in Terror of the Autons (Third Doctor, 1971)
3 May 2004: death of Anthony Ainley, who played the Master from the last scene of The Keeper of Traken (Fourth Doctor, 1981) till the final Old Who story, Survival (Seventh Doctor, 1989)
ii) broadcast anniversaries
3 May 1969: broadcast of third episode of The War Games. The travellers take refuge in a barn in the American Civil War zone, and the Doctor and Zoe vanish in a transport container.
![d02-2z-c0440[1].jpg](https://i0.wp.com/fromtheheartofeurope.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/2506135_600.jpg?w=584&ssl=1 "d02-2z-c0440[1].jpg")
3 May 1975: broadcast of third episode of Revenge of the Cybermen. The Doctor is sent on a suicide mission to destroy Voga.
![d02-2z-c0440[1].jpg](https://i0.wp.com/fromtheheartofeurope.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/2506384_600.jpg?w=584&ssl=1 "d02-2z-c0440[1].jpg")
3 May 2003: webcast of thirteenth and last episode of Death Comes to Time.
3 May 2008: broadcast of The Poison Sky. The Sontarans are defeated, and Martha joins the Doctor and Donna on the Tardis.
![d02-2z-c0440[1].jpg](https://i0.wp.com/fromtheheartofeurope.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/2506531_600.jpg?w=584&ssl=1 "d02-2z-c0440[1].jpg")
3 May 2010: broadcast of Lost Library of Ukko, seventeenth episode of the Australian K9 series. Starkey is whisked away to a far off planet. The desolate world is contained within an alien library card. The Librarian arrives to reclaim the card. One of the best episodes of this series, though it should be added the the library has no in fact been lost.
![d02-2z-c0440[1].jpg](https://i0.wp.com/fromtheheartofeurope.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/2506843_600.jpg?w=584&ssl=1 "d02-2z-c0440[1].jpg")
The Fourth Doctor adventures, fourth series
There was a time when I faithfully tracked each of Big Finish's Doctor Who releases as they came out, and reported them here. I fell out of the habit some time around 2014, and indeed stopped listening to Big Finish all that much until the lockdown really started to hit a year ago. Now there is far too much material to hope that I will ever catch up with it all, so I've been selecting particular characters to follow and made a new commitment to myself to write the stories up here as I get through them.
My most recent run has been the fourth series of Fourth Doctor Adventures, released in 2015. (I previously wrote up the first series here, here and herehere and here.) These are eight stories (well, seven and a half) featuring Louise Jameson as Leela and usually John Leeson as K9, with some good scripts and excellent guest performances.
The first of these is The Exxilons, by Nicholas Briggs, bringing back the race only previously seen in the Third Doctor story Death to the Daleks – and very cleverly not revealing their actual connection to the plot until quite a long way in. It's an inrteresting set-up of a primitive race interacting with more developed visitors (with some echoes therefore of The Face of Evilhere or here.
The Darkness of Glass, by Justin Richards, is set on a fogbound island off the English coast in 1907, clearly evoking the spirit of Horror of Fang Rock and to a lesser extent The Talons of Weng Chiang. For an audio play, the solution to the story is surprisingly visual. The lovely Sinead Keenan and her brother Rory both appear, sadly dropping their native Irish accents. Nicely done nostalgia. Available here or here.
Requiem for the Rocket Men, by John Dorney, brings back the jet-pack wearing space pirates who have appeared in a couple of BF's First Doctor stories (written up here and here, and they also pop up in the second of these stories). To be honest, I wasn't wowed by the concept on their previous outings, but this is a very good tale, bringing in Geoffrey Beevers' Master and Mark Frost as a tremendously villanous King of the Rocket Men, allowing John Leeson to be Evil K9 for a change, and also giving Leela a bit of romance, rather more credibly than she was allowed on TV, with a junior Rocket Man played by Damien Lynch. Available here or here.
Death Match, by Matt Fitton, worked least well of these for me, though that's still not bad as I enjoyed them all. Making Leela a gladiator is one of those rather obvious ideas, and was done, if imperfectly, by Chris Boucher in his novel Match of the Day in 2006. Geoffrey Beevers' Master is here as well, and Susan Brown (recently Septa Mordane in Game of Thrones). But it's fairly obvious from the start what's going to happen, and it duly does. Available here or here.
Suburban Hell, by Alan Barnes, on the other hand is a brilliant evocation of, first, the Doctor and Leela intruding into the 1970s suburban environment where their TV adventures were being enjoyed, and second,and second, the awful horror lurking behind what appears to be suburban normality. Annette Badland and Katy Wix knock it out of the park as the two apparently normal women to whom abnormal things are happening. Great stuff. Available here or here.
The Cloisters of Terror, by Jonathan Morris, brings back Rowena Cooper to a previous Big Finish role as Dame Emily Shaw, mother of Liz Shaw and Dean of St Matilda's College, Oxford. She was great in The Last Post, and she's great in this too. Having myself attended a convent school and then a Cambridge college, you always wonder what historical horrors might be lurking in the cellar. Available here or here.
But it really annoyed me that the characters inconsistently call Rowena Cooper's character both "Dame Emily" and "Dame Shaw". Correct usage is "Dame Emily". "Dame Shaw" is wrong; and you can bet that if she was Dean of the college she'd have made sure everyone knew it. (A friend of mine, who I will call Sam Spade, got a knighthood in the recent New Years Honours. When I congratulated him on getting his gong, he said, "Yes, but my wife was made a Dame a year ago, so I've been Lady Spade for the last twelve months.")
Finally, a double story, The Fate of Krelos / Return to Telos by Nicholas Briggs, brings the Doctor and Leela to a planet where the Vingean singularity is at hand, and then to Telos where they become part of a time paradox in the wings of Tomb of the Cybermen, with Frazer Hines returning as Jamie and also Bernard Holley as crewman Haydon. But the star turn is Michael Cochrane, who was Charles Cranleigh in Black Orchid and then Redvers Fenn-Cooper in Ghost Light, and also brilliant as Colonel Spindleton in the two-parter that ended the second series of audio Fourth Doctor Adventures (Trail of the White Worm / The Oseidon Adventure). Here he is both the elderly chap who is uploading his consciousness, and the robot to whom it is being uploaded. It's quite an intricate plot but it is worked out very nicely. Available here/here or here/here.
So basically, I'm several years late but very glad to be catching up with these.
After Arlene
This is the post I had mostly written last night before it was eaten by a glitch in the system. (Always save your drafts, folks.)
The defenestration of Arlene Foster as leader of the DUP and First Minister of Northern Ireland was both overdue and unfair
Overdue, because the real crisis of her leadership was only a year into it, with the renewable heating scandal of 2016-17. If she had done then as Peter Robinson did, and stepped back for a few weeks pending an investigation which would probably have given her enough of a figleaf to resume work with dignity, the Assembly would not have collapsed in 2017 and she would not have made the ill-chosen remarks during that election campaign which destroyed any perception that she was willing to look beyond her own electoral silo. Those were both very bad choices that she made, which should have meant the end to her leadership four years ago.
But instead, the DUP pushed her out last week over an important but frankly niche issue: she was not prepared to follow her fellow Assembly members and vote against a resolution condemning gay conversion therapy. Not that she was exactly on the right side of that particular argument, but she was closer to it than her party, who should have abstained with her rather than rise to the bait. (I cannot find Martyn Turner's cartoon of a new exciting children's toy, the Orange Action Man, who is easy to wind up.) Retreating to the citadel is a tactic, not a strategy, and unless you have reinforcements lurking over the hill or across the water, it's a losers' tactic.
The DUP rank and file also blamed her for the hugely unsatisfactory outcome of the Brexit process, but that is not particularly her fault; the entire party supported the destruction of Theresa May's premiership over a proposed deal with the EU that was actually better from the DUP's point of view than the one they actually got with Boris Johnson. The DUP are neither the first nor the last people to be betrayed by Boris Johnson, who has broken faith with everyone he has ever worked with or slept with, and while Arlene Foster and Nigel Dodds can be fairly criticised for falling into that trap, it's not fair for the rest of the party, which was equally seduced by Boris, to make that criticism.
Arlene has always been friendly and pleasant to me personally, even though she has not always liked what I say. The last time I saw her, at the May 2019 European election count in Magherafelt, she was chatty and cheerful to me while pointedly ignoring the person I was with, who had annoyed her somehow (I never got the full story). I am not hugely surprised that she intends to leave politics completely now. Her vision is a little larger than her party's, and at present that doesn't fit the direction they want to go, which is to appeal ever more strongly to a diminishing pool of voters.
I am going to break the mould of popular commentary and not dump on Edwin Poots. He has said and done a lot of very stupid, wrong and inflammatory things, and his judgement has often been questionable. But there was one moment when he really did rise to the occasion. Back in January 2018, after a brutal few days starting with an ill-advised tweet by one of Sinn Féin's MPs (who later resigned, the first member of parliament to be brought down by his own social media), he put in a very statesmanlike TV performance which helped to draw a line under it, responding to an even better performance from John O'Dowd (who I hope will follow Poots to the top spot in his own party in due course). This is worth a watch.
Speaking of Sinn Féin, I was invited onto BBC Radio Ulster on Thursday (here, about 55 minutes in) to comment on the extraordinary developments in Derry, where the entire local leadership of the party has been fired by the party centrally. As a former central campaign organiser for a Northern Irish party myself, this seems to me a very drastic move. Even in a party with as centralised a structure as SF, local operations depend on volunteer support and goodwill, and local leaders tend to have a strong local support base among members and sympathisers (that's how they become local leaders). SF must have felt centrally that the incumbent Derry leadership's level of support from local members was so low that destroying their credibility in public, rather than quietly mobilising additional resources in private, was the right way to go.
Not that there was not a very serious problem for the party in the city. Having narrowly won the Westminster seat in 2017, SF's vote in December 2019 sliiped back to the levels of the early 1990s, pre-peace process, and the SDLP got what I think was their best vote share ever in a Westminster election. In the 2019 local elections, SF lost five out of their sixteen seats on the Derry and Strabane district council, three of them in the three electoral areas west of the Foyle which include the historic city centre. While in all the other parliamentary constituencies west of the Bann, SF have comfortably eclipsed the SDLP as the leading Nationalist party, Derry remained competitive, and Martin McGuiness's death removed their strongest local asset.
But what a lot of commentators have missed is that there is quite a large chunk of uncommitted voters in Derry. In Westminster elections they historically tended to vote for John Hume and then Mark Durkan, and in 2017, as a tribute to McGuinness, SF were able to temporarily capture more of that vote than usual. But in Assembly and local elections, these voters have supported independent candidates, and recently to a certain extent Eamonn McCann's People Before Politics, if they voted at all. Given the demographics, most of these voters are were brought up as Catholics, but they do not necessarily vote for Nationalist parties.
This is part of the wider phenomenon that I have been pointing to for a long time. While demographic determinists get all excited about this year's census and the possibility that it will show more Catholics than Protestants in Northern Ireland, the fact is that the biggest growth will certainly be in the section of the population that does not feel comfortable being labelled as either, and whose vote cannot be taken for granted by any party, or by supporters of either the Union or a United Ireland. At his height, Peter Robinson was able to corral a significant part of that support for a mature DUP that offered continuity and stability in partnership government, and successfully rode out his own personal scandals. (Some commentators – indeed some leading DUP members – in the last few days have forgotten that there was a time when the DUP was able to make a credible pitch for centrist votes, but it's really not very long ago.)
I wrote two years ago (scanned here) that these voters are the convinceable middle who historically have conditionally supported the Union, but can foreseeably be persuaded to join a united Ireland, if three things happen:
- Brexit turns out badly (✔️)
- Unionism continues to be worse than Nationalism at appealing to its own core vote and not engaging with the centre (✔️)
- There is a better offer on the table from Nationalists (currently quite far from being achieved, and in particular the need for Nationalists to find a convincing narrative on health services is even more acute after the last year).
Nothing is certain in politics, but the current direction of travel is clear.
My tweets
- Sat, 12:56: RT @DecLawn: The future of the union lies in a cohort of “persuadables” in NI. Most polls suggest they are socially liberal, open-mined, no…
- Sat, 14:48: Anton Jäger, Rebel Regions, NLR 128, March–April 2021 https://t.co/tzTrxN7soy Very interesting left-wing comparison of UK and Belgium, or rather Northern England and Wallonia.
- Sat, 22:52: 410 days of plague https://t.co/WSkdA5v3jN
- Sun, 09:30: Whoniversaries 2 May https://t.co/MxM8UKC0R8
Whoniversaries 2 May
i) births and deaths
2 May 1941: birth 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, publishing and webcast anniversaries
2 May 1964: broadcast of "The Snows of Terror", fourth episode of the story we now call The Keys of Marinus. Ian, Barbara and Susan retrieve the Key despite the efforts of Vasor and the Ice Soldiers. Then Ian finds the last key at their last destination.
2 May 1970: broadcast of seventh episode of The Ambassadors of Death. The Doctor and the Brigadier intercept Carrington before he is able to implement his plan, and the alien Ambassadors are freed.
2 May 1973: Target Books re-publish the three 1960s Doctor Who novelisations.
2 May 2003: webcast of first episode of Shada. The Eighth Doctor visits Gallifrey to persuade President Romana to come with him to Cambridge.
2 May 2013: webcast of Commander Strax's Q&A.
410 days of plague
Glad to see Belgian numbers finally heading firmly in the right direction, and looking forward to a gradual reopening over the next few weeks.
I wrote quite a long entry including reflections on recent celebrity deaths and Northern Ireland politics, and unfortunately it vanished into the void before I could post it. It’s too late to reconstruct it now, so I’ll just leave this here and try to address some of those topics in future updates.
My tweets
- Fri, 12:56: Analysis: Kosovo and the terror of the night (or of the non-paper) https://t.co/ssgVZHtAzg Excellent from Marc Weller.
- Fri, 13:54: RT @peterdonaghy: @BartLad69 @Choyaa13 No, if Alliance are the largest party then there’ll be an Alliance First Minister and the largest pa…
- Fri, 16:31: RT @APCOBXLInsider: April marked another busy month for @2021PortugalEU. Find out why and read more about the upcoming #Porto Social Summit…
- Fri, 17:11: ‘I’d Never Been Involved in Anything as Secret as This’ https://t.co/J28K2eTxRL Fascinating protagonists’ account of the Bin Laden raid.
- Fri, 17:59: Never change, @ansiblemag! https://t.co/qQKINOmq9v https://t.co/prEaV7QOAM
- Fri, 18:38: April 2020 books and Friday reading https://t.co/7WlzVtYiSj
- Fri, 19:43: RT @worldcon2021: Membership rates will increase on May 1st, 2021 Our current rates are: Adult $200 Young Adult $100 Child $80 Kid in to…
- Fri, 20:48: RT @WindrushLives: In a written reply to @Stuart_McDonald yesterday, @pritipatel made a number of startling revelations, documented here by…
- Sat, 08:36: RT @tconnellyRTE: Dead End: Arlene Foster, the NI Protocol and Europe via @RTENews https://t.co/ZXdO9crQxI
- Sat, 09:30: Whoniversaries 1 May https://t.co/Cl7k3wuydo
- Sat, 10:45: RT @paperhaus: If you are wondering, should I take a bath while on a Zoom staff meeting? This article provides the answer. https://t.co/EJk…
Whoniversaries 1 May
i) births and deaths
1 May 1946: birth of Joanna Lumley, who played the Thirteenth Doctor in The Curse of Fatal Death (1999).
1 May 1984: birth of Sacha Dhawan, who played Waris Hussein in An Adventure in Space and Time (docudrama, 2013) and the Master in 2020.
1 May 1985: death of George Pravda, who played Denes in The Enemy of the World (Second Doctor, 1967-68), Jaeger in The Mutants (Third Doctor, 1972) and Castellan Spandrell in The Deadly Assassin (Fourth Doctor, 1976).
1 May 2002: death of John Nathan Turner, producer of Old Who from 1980 to 1989 (and of Dimensions in Time in 1993); controversial and colourful, like him or loathe him, nobody can dispute the depth of his influence on the show.
1 May 2008: death of Bernard Archard, who played Bragen in The Power of the Daleks (Second Doctor, 1966) and Marcus Scarman in The Pyramids of Mars (Fourth Doctor, 1975).
ii) broadcast and production anniversaries
1 May 1965: broadcast of "Dimensions of Time", second episode of the story we now call The Space Museum. Lobos, leader of the Moroks, starts to hunt down the Tardis crew.
1 May 1971: broadcast of fourth episode of Colony in Space. The Doctor and Jo confront first the Guardian of the primitives and then the Adjudicator, who turns out to be the Master.
1 May 1974: Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker film the Third to Fourth Doctor regeneration sequence. Frankly the broadcast version was a bit disappointing; here's one of many fannish improvements.
1 May 2010: broadcast of Flesh and Stone. The clerics start to disappear, but the Doctor manages to tumble the aliens into the mysterious crack, and then has a narrow escape from Amy.
iii) dates specified in-universe
1 May some time in the 1970s: setting of the last scenes of The Dæmons (Third Doctor, 1971).
1 May 1643 and 1984: setting of The Awakening (Fifth Doctor, 1984).
April 2021 books and Friday reading
Books finished in the last week:
Legendborn, by Tracy Deonn (did not finish)
The Relentless Moon, by Mary Robinette Kowal
The Serpent Sea, by Martha Wells
The Orphans of Raspay, by Lois McMaster Bujold
Two Truths and a Lie, by Sarah Pinsker
The Consuming Fire, by John Scalzi
April Books
Non-fiction 1 (YTD 14)
Kathedralen uit de steentijd, by Herman Clerinx
Non-genre 2 (YTD 7)
The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris
Foucault’s Pendulum, by Umberto Eco
SF 12 (YTD 47)
Worlds Apart, by Richard Cowper
Network Effect, by Martha Wells
Kaleidoscope: diverse YA science fiction and fantasy stories, eds Alisa Krasnostein and Julia Rios
Riot Baby, by Tochi Onyebuchi
The Empress of Salt and Fortune, by Nghi Vo
The Gameshouse, by Claire North
Legendborn, by Tracy Deonn (did not finish)
The Relentless Moon, by Mary Robinette Kowal
The Serpent Sea, by Martha Wells
The Orphans of Raspay, by Lois McMaster Bujold
Two Truths and a Lie, by Sarah Pinsker
The Consuming Fire, by John Scalzi
Doctor Who 1 (YTD 2, 4 inc comics)
Adventures in Lockdown, ed. Steve Cole
Comics 5 (YTD 10)
Muse vol 1: Celia, by Terry Dodson & Denis-Pierre Filippi
Muse vol 2: Coraline, by Terry Dodson & Denis-Pierre Filippi
Le dernier Atlas, tome 1, by Fabien Vehlmann, Gwen De Bonneval and Fred Blanchard
Feeders & Eaters & other stories, by Neil Gaiman, art by Mark Buckingham
Sculpture Stories, by Neil Gaiman with Lisa Snellings
4,800 pages (YTD 21,300)
9/21 (YTD 33/82) by women (Wells x2, Krasnostein/Rios, Vo, North, Deonn, Kowal, Bujold, Pinsker)
3/21 (YTD 15/82) by PoC (Onyebuchi, Vo, Deonn)
1/21 rereads (YTD 8/82) – Foucault’s Pendulum.
Current
The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant
In the Days of the Comet, by H. G. Wells
The Evidence, by Christopher Priest
Coming soon (perhaps)
Cloud on Silver by John Christopher
City of Blades, by Robert Jackson Bennett
Wonder Woman: The Golden Age, Vol. 2 by William Moulton Marston
The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women, ed. Alex Dally MacFarlane
Bridget Jones’s Diary, by Helen Fielding
Don’t Be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech, by Rana Foroohar
Comic Inferno, by Brian W. Aldiss
Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins
Roger Zelazny’s The Dawn of Amber: Book 1, by John Gregory Betancourt
“Stories For Men”, by John Kessel
Empire Games, by Charles Stross
“Grotto of the Dancing Deer”, by Clifford D Simak
Le dernier Atlas, tome 2, by Fabien Vehlmann, Gwen De Bonneval and Fred Blanchard
Thirteen, by Steve Cavanagh
The Place of the Lion, by Charles Williams
Kipps, by H.G. Wells
My tweets
- Thu, 12:56: RT @themindrobber: Three things are astonishing about this photo. 1) It shows the surface of a comet, 67P Churyumov–Gerasimenko. 2) It…
- Thu, 13:02: RT @bbcdoctorwho: “You’re gonna love this!” Happy birthday to the Doctor, @therealjomartin https://t.co/e7gHLctb02
- Thu, 13:40: I’ll be on @BBCTalkback shortly to discuss this with @aoifegracemoore. https://t.co/2yvmq0I5z1 https://t.co/6sUCWT1dQB
- Thu, 16:05: #DisneyMustPay: authors form task force to fight for missing payments https://t.co/Rre8sYny0Z A shocking story.
- Thu, 17:11: An Artist Sketches the Giant Gender Gap on the Moon https://t.co/aDlM4DMClO Challenging the historical legacy of patriarchy through art.
- Thu, 18:27: March 2011 books https://t.co/et35xyRa0w
- Thu, 20:48: A year ago! https://t.co/T7hRZQ4HXi
- Thu, 22:13: RT @DrWhoCastCrew: RIP Arthur Cox (1934-2021), who played Cully in The Dominators (1968) and Mr Henderson in The Eleventh Hour (2010). He h…
- Thu, 22:42: RT @thedalstonyears: For the last month, @Lucy_Osborne and I have been looking into sexual misconduct allegations against the actor Noel Cl…
- Fri, 08:59: RT @BBCMarkSimpson: Arlene Foster set to leave DUP. https://t.co/iVOUWfXMFe
- Fri, 09:30: Whoniversaries 30 April https://t.co/UrRQl2p3vp
- Fri, 10:42: RT @problem_chimp: @NotAdric @nwbrux Female prime minister + BBC 3 exists = all UNIT stories took place in about six weeks during 2016.
- Fri, 10:45: RT @faisalislam: NEW: Defra Committee cross party MPs release bruising report on “considerable trade friction” & “substantial” new red ta…
- Fri, 11:51: RT @SophieintVeld: Deeply saddened to learn of the passing of @hansvanbaalen. For almost three decades we worked together in the European l…
Whoniversaries 30 April
i) births and deaths
30 April 1983: death of Gabor Baraker, who played Wang-Lo, the rather camp tavern-keeper, in the story we now call Marco Polo and Luigi Ferrigo, a dodgy Genoese merchant, in the story we now call The Crusade
30 April 2004: death of Richard Steele, who played Commandant Gorton in The War Games (Second Doctor, 1969), Sergeant Hart in Doctor Who and the Silurians (Third Doctor, 1970) and a guard in Mark of the Rani (Sixth Doctor, 1985).
30 April 2020: I missed the sad news a year ago of the death of Wally K. Daly, who wrote The Ultimate Evil for the Sixth Doctor but never saw it produced; he did write the novelisation and eventually authorised Big Finish to produce an audio version. I've heard some of his other radio plays, which are great.
ii) broadcast anniversaries
30 April 1966: broadcast of "A Holiday for the Doctor", first episode of the story we now call The Gunfighters. The Doctor, Steven and Dodo arrive in Tombstone, Arizona in 1881 in search of a dentist.
30 April 2005: broadcast of Dalek. The Doctor and Rose encounter a captive Dalek in 2012 America.
30 April 2011: broadcast of Day of the Moon. Against the backdrop of the first moon landing, the Doctor and his companions must solve the mystery of the aliens and the little girl.
30 April 2020: webcast of Sven's Scarf, a prequel to Dalek.
iii) date almost specified in canon
30 April, some time in the 1970s: most of the events of The Dæmons (1971).
Two more months to go of this project. It's been a fun distraction in strange times.
March 2011 books
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 had three really nice trips in March 2011: to Geneva for one of my regular lecturing gigs at the start of the month, to Belfast for an internal BBC event in the middle, and to London for day-jub purposes at the end. The BBC event in Belfast was held at Stormont, in what had been the main dining room in the old days; despite the crapness of my camera, I got this great picture of the view down the drive while waiting for my turn to speak. (By weird coincidence, I was on the BBC talking about elections again today.)
I managed to read 31 books in the 31 days of March 2011.
Non-fiction 5 (YTD 15)
International Law and the Question of Western Sahara, edited by Karin Arts and Pedro Pinto Leite
The History of the Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Vols III & IV, by Edward Gibbon
The Essential Rumi
Contested Will, by James Shapiro
Fiction (non-sf) 8 (YTD 15)
The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Valley of Fear, by Arthur Conan Doyle
His Last Bow, by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Boy Who Kicked Pigs, by Tom Baker
Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel García Márquez
The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer
SF (non-Who) 7 (YTD 17)
The Fall of the House of Usher and other stories, by Edgar Allan Poe
The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson
Fantasy: the Best of the Year, 2007, edited by Rich Horton
The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Ladies of Grace Adieu, by Susanna Clarke
Miracle Visitors, by Ian Watson
The Lays of Beleriand, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Doctor Who 10 (YTD 20)
The Janus Conjunction, by Trevor Baxendale
Matrix, by Robert Perry and Mike Tucker
Doctor Who Annual 1981
The Gemini Contagion, by Jason Arnopp
Night of the Humans, by David Llewellyn
Iceberg, by David Banks
Doctor Who Annual 1982
Ghost Train, by James Goss
Beltempest, by Jim Mortimore
Deep Blue, by Mark Morris
Comics 1 (YTD 3)
Ōoku: The Inner Chambers, Volume 3, by Fumi Yoshinaga
~9,400 pages (YTD 20,300)
3/31 (YTD 9/70) by women (Arts, Clarke, Yoshinaga)
2/31 (YTD 5/70) by PoC (Rumi, Yoshinaga)
The two best were volume 2 of the Penguin Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (original vols III and IV), which you can get here, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which I had not previously read in full; you can get it here. Also nice to return to The Little Prince, which you can get here. However I thoroughly bounced off Ian Watson's Miracle Visitorsyou can get it here.
My tweets
- Wed, 12:08: RT @Petrit: Nick Whyte went all forensic on the latest non-paper and found out the author was …. – Estonian! https://t.co/Tkn4K0gHRN
- Wed, 12:24: RT @bancroftian: Non-papers and the definite/indefinite article, by @nwbrux. https://t.co/ZiWYlU0dLK
- Wed, 13:02: Very wise on DUP situation from @stephenkb: https://t.co/VwcaLeItvG
- Wed, 13:08: RT @christinebelled: Yes mostly: did not help that Brexit came on top of a lot of other Foster leadership failures: RHI scandal; lack of pr…
- Wed, 18:10: Muse: Coraline and Celia, by Terry Dodson & Denis-Pierre Filippi https://t.co/Bgp8iwiFtD
- Wed, 18:27: RT @AstroMCollins: Family Statement on Passing of Astronaut Michael Collins https://t.co/6OAw7CzFaz
- Wed, 18:27: RT @duponline: Statement by Rt. Hon. Arlene Foster MLA https://t.co/bHCP1IySz7 via @duponline
- Wed, 18:27: RT @AlexofBrown: Confused about what Arlene Foster’s resignation means for Northern Ireland? Let me, a British journalist who watched one c…
- Thu, 09:30: Whoniversaries 29 April https://t.co/8twDXU4fHE
- Thu, 10:45: RT @BobScheurle: @TheWinterMen @NASA @AstroMCollins Michael Collins, the astronaut who took this photo, is the only human, alive or dead th…
Whoniversaries 29 April
broadcast anniversaries
29 April 1967: broadcast of fourth episode of The Faceless Ones. Jamie gets on a Chameleon plane, which is duly captured by the aliens
29 April 1972: broadcast of fourth episode of The Mutants. The Marshal plans to bombard Solos with ionising rockets; Varan and his men prevent him but the Skybase is damaged.
29 April 2006: broadcast of School Reunion. The Tenth Doctor unexpectedly meets Sarah Jane Smith, thirty years on. (Sob!)
29 April 2017: broadcast of Thin Ice. The Doctor accidentally lands himself and Bill in the past, at the final frost fair in 1814. However, something sinister is lurking below the frozen Thames.
Muse: Coraline and Celia, by Terry Dodson & Denis-Pierre Filippi
Biggest frame of vol 1, page 3:
Biggest frame of vol 2, page 3:
I saw this recommended somewhere: two albums written by French author Filippi, best known for his writing for young adults, and illustrated by Dodson, better known for his Marvel and DC work on superheroes.
I'm not sure that I'd repeat the recommendation. Our heroine, Coraline, takes a job as governess to a teenage boy who invents lots of machines in his spare time. At night she has strange dreams which always seem to end with her clothes falling off. The end of the second volume reveals What Is Really Going On, and I have to say that it makes no sense at all in terms of what we have been told of the story. Also notable that the titles of the volumes are the wrong way around – vol 1's title is "Celia", but she is the sister of Coraline, the main character, and not otherwise mentioned until halfway through vol 2. The art is lush and gorgeous, but basically it's two short books about boobs. You can get them here and here.
My tweets
- Tue, 18:18: Birthday: Colin Baker, megaliths and erotica https://t.co/jKQw1XOPjq
- Wed, 09:30: Whoniversaries 28 April https://t.co/hCxRAHgGxT
- Wed, 10:37: I see it’s non-paper time again – so soon after the last one? This is obviously a set up to destabilise negotiations. (I remember a similar leak in the Northern Ireland peace process in February 1995, the so-called “Framework Documents”.) The best response is not to respond. https://t.co/jzMlvxG5Dv
- Wed, 10:45: RT @moylato: Belgian man parks in garage 6cm wider than his car https://t.co/uqy1J7JdA7
Whoniversaries 28 April
i) births and deaths
28 April 1928: birth of Raymond Cusick, who designed the Daleks.
28 April 1977: death of Anthony Coburn, who wrote An Unearthly Child (1963) and the never-produced story The Masters of Luxor.
i) broadcast anniversaries
28 April 1973: broadcast of fourth episode of Planet of the Daleks. The Doctor and Jo are reunited, and the Thals disagree about how to tackle the Daleks.
28 April 2007: broadcast of Evolution of the Daleks. The Daleks' experiments are destroyed by the Doctor and Dalek Caan escapes.
Birthday: Colin Baker, megaliths and erotica
Thank you all for your kind wishes for my birthday yesterday. One of the great things about the interconnected age is that we can easily reach out and let someone know that we are grateful for their continued existence. It did and does cheer me up, hearing from old and dear friends, and also from people where I was not terribly sure if they liked me or even remembered me
Before I go into how exactly I celebrated, I need to thank my brother William for arranging this very special birthday greeting:
Though somehow he didn’t spot this picture when doing his research:
Anyway. My birthday trip was out to the ancient East of Belgium, to look at the biggest concentration of megalithic monuments in the country around Wéris. I had been once before, but this time I intended to do a comprehensive sweep of all of the menhirs, dolmens and passage graves in the vicinity.
We stayed overnight Sunday in Durbuy, in a lovely five star hotel which had found a way of complying with health regulations; you went down and collected your gourmet dinner on a tray, watching it being made in front of you while you waited, and then took it up to your room to enjoy. Same with a very large breakfast yesterday morning. It is not the same as non-pandemic times, but it was a very pleasant break anyway.
Our first menhir was on the way out on Sunday, at Haillot, a sub-commune of Ohey, southwest of Huy and directly east of Namur. It’s at the end of a short lane in a small village. Anne coquettishly peeked out from behind it. (A friend on Facebook commented: “It’s just over one Anne in height.”)
Yesterday we took the sequence of megaliths in Wéris from south to north, in order. Actually I don’t recommend this. I think you would be better to start at the rather nice museum first thing in the morning, and then go on their self-guided walk around the monuments. Apart from the very last one I describe here, they are all within easy reach of the village centre on foot, and if the weather is good you will have had a great day out. (And then, if there is time, take in the Pierre du Diable at Haillot on the way home if like us you were coming from and returning to the west.)
We knew we were onto a good thing with the very first set of stones, the Menhirs d’Oppagne, 2 km out of Wéris. (50.3174 N, 5.50876 E)
These are nicely set off from the road, framed by a tree. The received wisdom is that they were brought here from elsewhere in the 19th century and re-erected; I’m not sure that I believe that, my instinct would be that there has been a line of stones here for a long time.
The next is one of the two big Wéris sites, 500m from the first set of menhirs, known as the Dolmen d’Oppagne, the Dolmen du Sud or Wéris II.
It has two components – the range of stones, which again have supposedly been assembled from finds elsewhere; and an excavated passage grave, one of three known examples in Belgium – and one of the other two is also in Wéris, while the third was reburied by archaeologists after excavation so there is nothing to see.
Very close by is a solitary roadside menhir, the Menhir Danthine – from behind it you can see the Wéris complex, 350m away.
It’s then just over a kilometre to the other big passage grave, know as Wéris I or the Dolmen du Nord, another passage grave framed by a corridor of stones.
We had been before with much smaller U and F, twelve years ago.
400m to the west as the crow flies, though the walk is more like 600m, is a supposed group of megaliths in a wood. They are not very impressive.
750m to the north is another supposed megalith, even less impressive. The road to it is barred for non-local traffic, so it’s a decent walk.
However, the last two menhirs are much more serious. The Menhir d’Heyd is down a terrible road for driving, about 4 km from Wéris I, and we were too busy concentrating on the potholes to spot it as we passed. Which was unfortunate, as it’s actually rather striking.
And finally, the Menhir d’Ozo, another 2.5 km along the alignment that most of these monuments share, stands proudly in a field (that we did not go into for the sake of the crops).
The alignment is really striking on the map. (The outlier is the unimpressive stone grouping in the wood near Wéris I.)
But that is not all that we saw. Durbuy (the commune of which Wéris is part) is held a sculpture festival in 2019 with odd stoneworks dotted around the countryside, mostly still there. Here’s one by Taiwanese sculptor Dwan Yu:
And another by Belgian sculptor Henry Hardy. (This is number 42, apparently, suggesting that there are at least 40 others that we did not find.)
The keen art hiker could probably spend a day or two wandering in the hills between Durbuy and Wéris finding them all.
And finally (though first in the sequence that we actually saw them) we visited Namur on Sunday to look at the Félicien Rops Museum. (It’s interesting that there are a lot of single-artist museums in Belgium; I cannot think of any in the UK or Ireland, and only one – van Gogh – in the Netherlands.) Rops was a nineteenth century chap with a dubious personal life, but a real eye for detail and character. His erotic ethings and sketchings are particularly memorable. The museum is not expensive (and also not large). My eye was particularly caught by his “The Fourth Glass of Cognac” (1878), and I’ll leave you with that.
My tweets
- Mon, 12:56: Peelian Principles and American Policing https://t.co/LuY5lCl5XZ …and why it would be nice to introduce them to each other. (by @czedwards.)
- Mon, 15:27: SF Magazines of April 1967 https://t.co/7fu1T5FGWU
- Mon, 21:41: Thank you!!!! https://t.co/F09MXXe24d
- Tue, 09:30: Whoniversaries 27 April https://t.co/UWraa5S2FQ
- Tue, 10:45: Hooray! https://t.co/pLvh7OLCvn
Whoniversaries 27 April
i) births and deaths
27 April 1928: birth of Hubert Rees who played the Chief Engineer in Fury from the Deep (Second Doctor, 1968), Captain Ransom in The War Games (Second Doctor, 1969), and Stevenson in The Seeds of Doom (Fourth Doctor, 1976).
27 April 1931: birth of Glyn Jones, one of the few people who not only wrote a TV Who story – the story we now call The Space Museum (First Doctor, 1965) – but also appeared on the show as an actor, playing stranded astronaut Krans in The Sontaran Experiment (Fourth Doctor, 1975). See his autobiography.
27 April 1963: birth of Russell T. Davies, head writer and executive producer of the first five years of New Who (2005-10) and author of Virgin New Adventure Damaged Goods (1996). Without him, there would be no New Who.
27 April 1974: birth of Joseph Millson, who played Maria's father Alan Jackson in the first two series of the Sarah Jane Adventures.
27 April 1982: birth of Samuel Anderson, who played Clara's boyfriend Daniel Pink in the eighth series of New Who (2014)
Speaking of whom, 27 April 1986: birth of Jenna Coleman, who played Clara herself in the seventh, eighth and ninth series of New Who, as well as appearances before and after between 2012 and 2017.
|
ii) broadcast anniversaries
27 April 1968: broadcast of first episode of The Wheel in Space. The Tardis lands on a deserted spaceship; the controller of the nearby Wheel prepares to destroy it.
27 April 1974: broadcast of sixth episode of The Monster of Peladon. The Ice Warriors are defeated and the miners are reconciled with the Queen.
27 April 2013: broadcast of Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS. The Doctor's TARDIS is captured by space salvager brothers and Clara gets lost inside it. The Doctor promises the brothers they can have the TARDIS if they'll help search for her. They agree, only to find that what lies at the centre of the TARDIS can kill them all.
SF Magazines of April 1967
I saw this meme going around a few months ago – what were the covers of the major science fiction magazines for the month you were born? They are a nice collection.
The best is the cover of Analog, by John Schoenherr.
I confess I don't recall any of the stories. The only one that has had much attention since then is "Ambassador to Verdammt" by Colin Kapp; I'm afraid I don't think I've heard of him let alone the story.
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction had almost as good a cover, by Gray Morrow, and much better content:
The cover refers to "Dawn", the second part of Roger Zelazny's classic novel Lord of Light. Other content includes "Randy's Syndrome" by Brian Aldiss, about an unborn baby who goes on strike by refusing to be born, and "Problems of Creativeness" by Thomas M. Disch, later retitled "The Death of Socrates" as the first part of his novel 334.
The cover of Galaxy Science Fiction by [Douglas] Chafee is not bad either.
The two most-reprinted stories are "Thunderhead" by Keith Laumer, and "You Men of Violence" by Harry Harrison. You can read the whole thing here.
New Worlds and SF Impulse unwisely crowds out what looks like a rather nice image (by Keith Roberts, also author of Pavane and Gráinne) with text about the contents.
This had the first magazine publication of "Daughters of Earth" by Judith Merrill (first published in an anthology in 1952), and three more stories by Thomas M. Disch.
Finally, for completeness, Australia's Future Science Fiction has an cover by Keith Chatto:
As the cover hints, it's back to the past; the magazine contained three stories from the 1950s and one from 1935!
My tweets
- Sun, 12:48: Miss Congeniality – Describe your perfect date? https://t.co/INf2LEIeW9 via @YouTube
- Sun, 12:56: Animate Europe: Animate Europe – Animated Short Films https://t.co/f8Rmt0KVzc The winners of the biennial competition for EU-themed comics, animated.
- Sun, 14:25: La Pierre du Diable, Haillot. https://t.co/cCHQbjHDOE
- Sun, 14:48: RT @hilltopkatie: Here’s to Liz @greensideknits . The final posts she wrote for the Tour de Fleece… I re-read them yesterday and they seem…
- Sun, 15:32: The Bordleys of Baltimore in art https://t.co/5AyC99xKCJ
- Sun, 16:05: Asteroid’s 22m-year journey from source to Earth mapped in historic first https://t.co/dhfSIPZS82 Wow.
- Sun, 20:48: RT @cristianafarias: I think I’ve found my favorite picture ever taken inside the Supreme Court, and it’s of building support staff setting…
- Mon, 09:30: Whoniversaries 26 April https://t.co/dJhnroZyxA
- Mon, 09:50: @SawbonesHex Very many thanks for your lovely message! Anne giggling as we watched. But my collection is more complete than you realised!!!! Thanks also to @wwhyte for setting that up! https://t.co/k2sLC4vx0x
- Mon, 10:45: There’s no such thing as flawless facial recognition technology. https://t.co/2tyo3pxaJW Even if we can make this technology work nearly perfectly, should we want to? In the case of facial recognition technology, the answer is a definite no.
Whoniversaries 26 April
i) births and deaths
26 April 1928: birth of Donald Cotton, who wrote The Myth Makers (1965) and The Gunfighters (1966) as well as the novelisations of both stories and of The Romans (1965), three of the best Who novelisations in the range.
26 April 1975: death of Kevin Lindsay, who played Linx in The Time Warrior (1973-74), Cho Je in Planet of the Spiders (1974), and Styre/The Marshal in The Sontaran Experiment (1975).
ii) broadcast anniversaries
26 April 1969: broadcast of second episode of The War Games. The Doctor and friends, including Carstairs and Lady Jennifer, escape in an ambulance but are confronted by Roman soldiers.
26 April 1975: broadcast of second episode of Revenge of the Cybermen. Harry and Sarah are on Voga; the Doctor tries to repair the transmat; and the Cybermen arrive.
26 April 2002: webcast of "Death Comes to Time Part 2", twelfth episode of Death Comes to Time.
26 April 2008: broadcast of The Sontaran Stratagem.
26 April 2010: broadcast of The Cambridge Spy, the sixteenth and in my own view much the worst episode of the Australian K9 series. A freak accident takes Jorjie back to 23 November 1963 (geddit?). K9 and Starkey follow to rescue her and become embroiled in a spy-ring and a race against time to save Darius from never having existed (which would have been such a shame).
