However bothersome Nanny’s antics were, they were easy to rationalise. Explaining why a blue box had suddenly appeared from the ether was beyond his patience.
Bali Rai is new to the Whoniverse, but an established YA writer from Leicester. This book is one of a sequence bringing the Doctor into classic children’s novels and seeing what heppens, in this case the Eleventh Doctor and Clara dropping into the world of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, where they are joined by River Song and the Paternoster Gang. There’s some admirable unpacking of the slave economy behind the Caribbean trade of the eighteenth century, and we get Jim gender-flipped to Janey, and escaped slaves setting up a free community on the island, but the story is a bit lacking in actual plot (and poor Clara is sidelined for much of it). The Paternoster Gang get some good lines though. You can get Rebellion on Treasure Island here.
This was my top unread book by a writer of colour. Next on that pile is The Order of the New Moon Reflected in Water, by Zen Cho.
I’ve been re-reading my copy of Doctor Who and the Daleks, the very first Doctor Who novelization, and was struck by the stark line drawings of the original cover (not my edition, which has the familiar Chris Achilleos art) and the internal illustrations. They are pretty vivid, and as someone elsewhere commented, not really what you’d expect for a children’s book.
I dug a little deeper and found that they are part of the early work of Arnold Schwartzman, born in 1936 and still living, whose CV is simply extraordinary. In 1963, the year before he did his Doctor Who art, he was photographing the Beatles.
Schwartzman’s photo of Paul McCartney being interviewed.
The photographer visible in the previous photo took this one, in which Arnold Schwartzman himself, with thick-rimmed glasses, is visible behind the interviewer and Paul McCartney.
As well as building up his own portfolio of photography and design, he has written several books about art, with Art Deco being a particular interest. He moved to Los Angeles in 1978 and among other assignments was the head of design for the 1988 Olympics in that city.
This cycling poster is also one of his.
At the turn of the century he designed the posters for the Oscar ceremonies in 1997, 1998, 1999 and 2000.
But that is not all. As well as states design and writing books, Schwartzman has directed a few films, including the 1981 documentary, Genocide, which won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.
So yeah. The guy who did those line drawings for David Whitaker’s children’s book ended up winning an Oscar for a documentary about the Holocaust that he made seventeen years later. It’s difficult to think of a visual contributor to the Whoniverse who has had such a massive cultural impact.
Another in the series of BBC original audiobooks, this has the original TARDIS crew arriving on a space liner in what we are told are the early days of interstellar space flight, and at the same time there is also an alien presence and an ancient mystery, treacherous crew members and terrified passengers. It’s reminiscent of Terror of the Vervoids, but done much better (and I am one of those who actually rate Terror of the Vervoids higher than the consensus). Paul Hayes is a radio producer who write two non-fiction books about Doctor Who for the 60th anniversary in 2023; this seems to be his first fiction for the Whoniverse, but I think he has an assured touch. You can get Star Flight here.
Like a lot of you I was tremendously excited and pleased to hear last month that two of the missing episodes of The Daleks’ Master Plan had been found, and what’s more that they would be released on iPlayer at Easter weekend. I have been a huge fan of The Daleks’ Master Plan since I first listened to it in 2007, and also enjoyed the Big Finish sort-of follow-up stories (there’s a great First Doctor / Second Doctor crossover called Daughter of the Gods). And over Eastercon I sneaked aside for an hour to watch the new discoveries.
The first episode, “The Nightmare Begins”, pleased me beyond my expectations. Hartnell has taken on the mantle of being the action hero of the story in a way that would have been unthinkable when he first started the show two years earlier. There is lots of Sixties angst about world government, peace, and combat in jungles (this is not Vietnam, but Malaysia, possibly Kenya, and going back a bit further Burma and Nagaland). The most important human being is visibly not a white man (though played, shamefully, by a blacked-up white actor). Women give men orders. And the Daleks are back. The BBC are very lucky that the first of the two recovered episodes is really one of the good ones. (Though it’s difficult to think of a lost Hartnell episode which is likely to have been a complete dud.)
The third episode, “Devil’s Planet”, isn’t quite as good, but it’s still attractive, with some great lines, as the Doctor shows his technological snobbery about the stolen ‘Spar’ spaceship. One wonders a bit about the prison planet Desperus. Are there any, er, women there? And where do raw materials and food come from? But it’s far from the least plausible planet ever seen on Doctor Who, or even in this story. And the ending of the episode, with Katarina held prisoner at knifepoint, is genuinely tense – especially when you know what happens next.
One of the more bizarre reactions to the recovery of the two episodes was a piece in The Spectator by Gareth Roberts. Roberts, in case you missed the memo, wrote or co-wrote six episodes of New Who, nine stories of The Sarah Jane Adventures and ten Doctor Who novels, but was basically booted out of the Whoniverse in 2019 for his offensive tweets about trans women. (He was also pretty offensive about Muslims.)
Since then he has gone full-on culture warrior for the Right, and has been a regular writer in The Spectator since 2022. This week’s piece on “The surprising conservatism of the old Doctor Who” (I won’t link, but you can evade the paywall easily enough), asserts but fails to prove that Terry Nation, the writer of the story, and Douglas Camfield, the director, were “unusually politically conservative”.
Of course, what you get from art is often what you bring to it, but most people would agree that Doctor Who leans left – see, for instance, Alex Wilcock’s classic essay “How Doctor Who Made Me A Liberal”. Malcolm Hulke, one of the classic series’ more prolific writers, was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. Roberts’ evidence to the contrary is slim to the point of invisibility.
Roberts starts by pointing out (entirely correctly) that Nation’s writing “is often of the two-fisted war story kind, often featuring – as here – desperate commando missions in jungle terrain.” There’s nothing particularly right-wing about war stories in the context of mid-twentieth-century Britain. Bear in mind that the 1945 election was swung to Labour by the mailed-in votes of soldiers in the field. Roberts also points out that the (fascinating) scene set in the space command centre is implicitly critical of the complacent and affluent society of Earth in the year 4000. Again, nothing very right-wing about that.
In any case, the idea that the creator of Blake’s 7, which is about rebels against a militaristic regime led by a woman, was “unusually politically conservative” is ridiculous. Terry Nation often wrote about politics; but his strength was satire, coming as he did from comedy, and he applied his satire liberally to all. In “The Secret Invasion”, a Dalek novella published in 1979 but set in 1974, we read:
Now two more men were hurrying toward the conference room. One wore spectacles and a worried expression. The other had a fawn raincoat and was smoking a pipe. He reminded David of Mike Yarwood.
Emilie nudged her brother excitedly and whispered, ‘That’s Roy Jenkins, the Home Secretary. And that’s the Prime Minister.’
David stared. ‘That’s not Mr Heath,’ he said derisively.
‘Of course it’s not,’ Emilie said impatiently. ‘It’s Mr Wilson’s turn this month.’ Emilie knew about politics.
As for Camfield, Roberts presents little evidence about his political views, other than that he had wanted a military career (but was ruled out on health grounds), and was friends with a right-wing writer. (A number of people in Doctor Who fandom used to be friends with a right-wing writer, before Roberts pushed them away.)
And Roberts presents literally no evidence that Camfield’s political views, whatever they may have been, had any influence on his work. True, he “conducted his TV work with incredibly precise and indeed military levels of planning”, but this is hardly an ideological quality. Looking in the other direction, it will not take you long to think of several examples of utterly incompetent and disorganised right-wing leaders.
I strongly recommend Michael Seely’s biography of Camfield, which goes deeply into his work but has little to say about his politics. There is a case to be made about his political views – apparently he opposed the closed shop, though as far as I recall this was a pretty centrist position in the 1970s – but you won’t find it in Roberts’ article, which is an intellectually lazy attempt to project the culture wars of today onto a TV show made before either of us was born (and I turn 59 in two weeks), written to confirm Spectator readers in their somewhat uncomfortable prejudices.
But do go and watch The Daleks’ Master Plan. It’s brilliant (what there is of it).
Slogging through the Eighth Doctor Adventures, I am coming to the realisation that some of them are, well, not very good. Here we have what could have been a masterpiece of overlaid narratives, timelines and tension, with some interesting guest characters and some vivid individual scenes. but it all feels too chaotic and disorganised to be interesting. You can get The Last Resort here (for a price).
Two more Doctor Who audiobooks to write up, and they are both good ‘uns.
Firefall is a Fifteenth Doctor / Belinda story set in Canada during and after the great Leonid meteor shower of 1833. Needless to say, one of the things that falls is not yer standard meteor, and the small community where the story is set becomes disrupted by the alien presence and also by the threat of change. The story itself is about as you would expect, but it is lifted by some great technical points – there are some very well-crafted passages, and Michelle Asante as the reader does all the accents well. I’m adding Beth Axford to my list of writers to look out for – she also ghost-wrote Carole Ann Ford’s contribution to The Adventures After. You can get Firefall here.
John Peel was already on my list of Who writers to keep an eye out for, and with The Mind Trap he is back in his comfort zone of the Second Doctor era, with the story read by David Troughton. So we are in good hands. It’s a pretty minimalist story set in a deserted space jail; Jamie is removed from the scene for plot simplicity and we end up with the Doctor and Zoe crossing wits with mysterious prisoner Markan and his robot. Peel uses the short allocated time economically and throws in some interesting twists which are also totally consistent with the feeling of the era. If you like the Second Doctor at all, you’ll enjoy this. You can get The Mind Trap here.
Next of my run of Titan Doctor Who comics acquired in 2022 (and I’m actually getting near the end, I expect that I will finish them this year). Ghost Stories is, unusually for this content stream, a direct sequel to a broadcast Doctor Who episode, The Return of Doctor Mysterio, visiting the new family of Grant the ex-superhero, Lucy the journalist and Lucy’s daughter Jennifer several years after the Christmas 2016 episode. This had a promising beginning with the dynamic between superhero and Doctor nicely portrayed, but petered out into a standard quest story with guest characters in the second half; also the art notably fails to make the Doctor look much like Peter Capaldi, never mind the other established characters. For completists. You can get Ghost Stories here.
A couple of recent Big Finish audios set in a slightly divergent First Doctor continuity, with the initial TARDIS team from the TV drama An Adventure in Space and Time – David Bradley as the Doctor, Claudia Grant as Susan Foreman, Jamie Glover as Ian Chesterton and Jemma Powell as Barbara Wright. They have already done several audios from 2017 to 2021, but I had not heard them. These two are very recent, released last September and in January this year, but are being marketed as “Doctor Who Unbound”, as an alternative timeline not constrained by TV continuity (though I didn’t really spot anything in either that would have been constrained).
David Warner is as ever great at channeling William Hartnell as the First Doctor. Jemma Powell and Jamie Glover are OK as Ian and Barbara. I find Claudia Grant a bit squeaky.
Knights of the Round TARDIS sets us up in Oxfrod just before the Battle of Evesham, with Simon de Montfort pitted against the forces of King Henry III for the sake of the future governance of England, and the famous friar, Roger Bacon, offering technological innovation. It won’t take the informed Who fan very long to work out who ‘Bacon’ really is. The cast are all having a good time, but it didn’t really work for me; historical stories run the risk of just doing the events as they happened, by the numbers, and at the end Simon de Montfort is given a very Whiggish briefing on the future constitutional history of England by the Doctor and team. You can get Knights of the Round TARDIS here.
Return to Marinus is a different matter. You can enjoy it without having previously listened to Knights of the Round TARDIS (in fact, that’s what I did myself), but I think you’ll be mystified by it unless you have at least a passing familiarity with the 1964 TV story The Keys of Marinus. I happen to love The Keys of Marinus, and stories of Team TARDIS coming back to societies that they have already irrevocably altered on a previous visit are often fun (witness The Ark). I’m really impressed that Morris has found new riffs on each of the sub-plots within the main story; it ends up being a bit episodic, but that’s not always such a bad thing if that’s what the material requires. The ending puts a truly impressive twist on several of the established plot elements. You can get Return to Marinus here.
I’m looking forward to the third of this trilogy, Battle of the Acid Sea by Simon Guerrier, but it looks like I will have to wait until next year.
My resolution for 2026 is to be a bit more consistent about recording the non-book entertainment that I consume. I have been listening to the Big Finish series of audios with Billie Piper and Christopher Eccleston, but not always remembered to blog about them. This is the fourth in the series; I enjoyed the previous three as well. This is the trailer for Cloud Eight:
Fan reaction to this story seems to have been a bit meh, but I really liked it. The Doctor and Rose find themselves in High High Wycombe, a city in the sky in the 47th century; and it rapidly becomes apparent that something weird is going on, with the steadily decreasing number of inhabitants doomed to repeat their every waking hour a la Groundhog Day. There’s a single excellent concept behind it all, with extra chrome and detail, the small cast (four guest actors, one of whom is written out early and another half way through) portraying an entire metropolis of unwitting residents. The Doctor and Rose are also affected by The Thing That Is Really Going On, and the Eccleston/Piper chemistry remains strong. I think it’s one of the good ones. You can get Cloud Eight here.
Second paragraph of third chapter (director Kevin Davies’ retrospective on the making of 30 Years in the TARDIS):
I had been entranced by Dr. Who and the Daleks since I was very young. I can remember cowering behind my father as a big red Dalek glided through Selfridges when we went to see the movie exhibition in 1965. The opening scene of the documentary shows the young boy looking up at one in awe, just as I did all those years ago. I was a skinny little lad, and as she watched it my mother spotted the reference immediately, assuming that I must have cast Josh Maguire because he looked so much like the younger me. Maybe I did, subconsciously. The whole project had been very dear to my heart right from the start…
I hadn’t been aware of the existence of this annual-sized publication to mark the thirtieth anniversary of Doctor Who (which then came out a bit late). But it’s a nice piece of work, with very short stories featuring all of the first seven Doctors by Mark Gatiss, Justin Richards, Gareth Roberts (yeah, I know, but this was 1994), Daniel Blythe, Steve Lyons, Simon Messingham and Andy Lane, with comic strips by Paul Cornell and Warwick Gray (now Scott Gray), when all of them were at or near the beginning of their Whovian writing careers. There are also personal reflections from Nicholas Courtney, Sophie Aldred and director Kevin Davies. It’s a great little package, and better than some of the more recent annuals. You can get the 1995 Doctor Who Yearbook here.
The BBC released a series of short audiobooks in 2021-22, each taking a companion or companions from the classic series and imagining what happened after their time with the Doctor ended. The first of these is The Kairos Ring, by Stephen Gallagher, bringing Romana and the Tharils to the American Civil War, and I had read it as part of the expanded Warrior’s Gate novelisation, though you can get it separately here. The next four are a connected set of stories by Paul Magrs, and I listened to them several weeks ago with the intention of writing them up in time for Gallifrey (but did not have time).
We start with Bessie Come Home, narrated by Stephanie Cole as Bessie. She is best known (by me anyway) as co-star with Graham Crowden in the sit-com Waiting for God. (Playing a pensioner, she turned 50 while that series was being made.) It’s a nice idea to give a voice to Bessie, the yellow Edwardian car acquired by the Third Doctor and driven also by the Fourth and Seventh Doctors, and the story is an amusing recapitulation of the adventures that Bessie participated in, a real nostalgia fest. The ending has a twist that I was not really sure about; the majority of reviewers felt that it capped the story nicely, but I found it a bit contrived. (I know, I know, an odd complaint to make of a story about a sentient car…)
I felt the sequence getting a little more into its stride with London, 1965, which tells the story of Ian and Barbara returning to London after two years away. It is read by Jamie Glover, who has been playing Ian Chesterton in recent Big Finish plays (and played William Russell in An Adventure in Space and Time). Rather than floating into a fairytale ending, the two former time travellers find it very difficult to readjust to life in London and become distant from each other; Ian is sucked into writing a science fiction show by the mysterious Mr Harman, while Barbara becomes a subject of the psychic researches of the enigmatic Angela Leaman. There are lots of knowing nods to Who continuity and to Sixties culture. I felt that this was the best of the four, and the story is sufficiently independent that you could enjoy it on its own.
Sleeper Agents takes us to and beyond the other end of the First Doctor’s era, with Ben and Polly returning to London on the day that they left. This time the narrator is Anneke Wills, the only one of the four to have actually been on TV Who, reprising her role as Polly. Again we have Mr Harman and Miss Leaman, and a good role for Polly’s pet cat, and a mysterious Arctic Island; but it’s a bit of a middle story in the arc, with the ending leaving some plot strands to be resolved.
Finally, The Penumbra Affair brings back Susan Jameson as Mrs Wibbsey, the Fourth Doctor’s housekeeper in the Nest Cottage series of BBC audios written a decade earlier by Paul Magrs, featuring Tom Baker before he decided to work with Big Finish. Mrs Wibbsey receives a letter warning that all of the Doctor’s former companions are in danger, and falls into correspondence with Polly Wright, now retired, who ends up on her doorstep for Christmas. The Nest Cottage setting is beautifully realised, and there’s a good twist on exactly how Angela Leamann fits into the story. It wouldn’t make much sense to listeners who are not familiar with both the previous three stories, and the Nest Cottage series, but in that context it works perfectly well. It’s a shame that Susan Jameson has never been in TV Who.
Second clue from third puzzle (“The War Machines”):
Dodo believes that the attack will come at sunset, while Ben thinks it will be six hours later, give or take.
I didn’t finish reading this yet, but I think it will be a nice distraction in idle hours (such as they are): a set of 61 logic puzzles, of the type that I loved when I was eleven or twelve, each based around a classic or modern Doctor Who story. I did the first two and found that they had pleasing subtleties. Here’s the grid from “The War Machines” to give you an idea of what it’s about:
So, originally I had planned to pump out a bunch of Doctor Who reviews at the start of the month, including writing up several at Gallifrey One. But, you know what? I have been having far too much fun at Gally to do the writing I had planned. Still, catching a few minutes between panels and other social events, I’ve been able to finalise this after reading the books on the flight over. It’s about a story that I feel strangely affectionate towards.
And if you’re encountering this blog for the first time, I write mainly about books here, and often about Doctor Who. For a sample of the more usual content, these were my top blog posts based on last year’s viewership.
To the matter in hand. When I first watched The Ark in 2006, I wrote:
Fan lore generally is pretty negative about this story; perhaps this shows that I wasn’t concentrating sufficiently, but I really rather enjoyed it.
In particular, I very much enjoyed the one thing that those who dislike this story universally single out for criticism, Jackie Lane’s acting as the newly arrived companion Dodo Chaplet (who walked into the TARDIS at the end of the previous story). I thought it was great to have an assertive young companion – the first really since Barbara’s departure (apart from the brief appearance of Sara Kingdom) – and for my money she rose to the challenge. Hartnell is on top form, and even his fluffs seem much more in character with the Doctor than with the actor. Peter Purves as Stephen has some great lines and even a mild love interest.
The other feature of this story universally mocked by the critics, the Monoids, actually seemed not too bad to me, for 1966 anyway. Certainly far far better than the forest creatures at the end of The Chase. They reminded me a bit of the Ood from The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit. Their transformation from silent servitors to sinister overlords is creepy but compelling. And they supply the great punchline to episode two, when the TARDIS crew discover that the statue the Ark’s human crews were building has been complete, but with a Monoid head.
I even liked the look of it. The gradual revelation that the forest has (as we are warned in the title of the first episode) a steel sky is well done. The Roman-style costumes of the human Guardians deliberately make us think of the Monoids as slaves. The surface of the planet Refusis, and its invisible inhabitants, are well done. The scenes of planets and suns in space are, at least, not too embarrassing.
The Ark is one of those stories which I did not like as much as before, watching in sequence this time. I don’t think it’s just because we can actually see it for a change (of the 21 previous episodes, only three from The Daleks’ Master Plan survive). The fundamental idea is sound and even a bit daring, but the script is very oddly paced and yet also cliched. (A security kitchen?) It is not surprising that neither the writer nor the director did another Who story, and I wonder how much morale was affected by John Wiles’ imminent departure as producer. One thing which always tells me that the director didn’t quite Get It is that the crowd scenes are lacking in dynamism – it’s interesting to see children in Who, but it’s odd to see them and their parents all standing around with their hands by their sides. Imison does better with the Monoids, in the first half at least (and I see that the lore claims they were his idea), but the script doen’t help. Both halves of the story suffer from over-long exposition and rushed climax. Poor Jackie Lane starts quite well but seems to gradually have the enthusiasm sucked out of her.
I realised to my delight that I had not yet opened, let alone watched, a DVD of The Ark bought some time ago, and spent some time over the weekend remedying the situation. As the First Doctor space opera stories go, this is one of the few successful ones without Daleks; and I’ve always appreciated it as Dodo’s first proper appearance. The DVD is solid rather than brilliant, though the story behind the insanely complex camera work is told very well, and I had not appreciated just how short the time between filming and broadcast was; though the claim that Dodo’s miniskirt seen at the end was the first ever shown on the BBC seems rather bold. The extras include a lovely reminiscence of the Riverside studio where the story was made, with Peter Purves and the director Michael Imison (who was told he was to be sacked literally as he went into the gallery to supervise filming of the final episode), and a rather silly piece on why the Monoids never took off (which at least gets Jacqueline Rayner a moment as a talking head).
And there’s also a short documentary on the influence of H.G. Wells on Doctor Who, which seems at first an odd inclusion, though the argument is in the end very convincingly made that The Ark is one of the most Wellsian stories in the Whovian canon. This features a lot of Matthew Sweet, who has written some of the more literary Big Finish audios, and also Kim Newman, Graham Sleight and a mysterious figure credited as Dr A Keen, who looks like someone I vaguely remember from the Belfast arts faculty computer facilities in the early 1990s; I wonder what he is doing now?
(I should clarify that of course I meant academic, fan and friend Tony Keen in that last remark; also, since then I have become friendly with Matthew Sweet through Gallifrey One, which is where I am writing this up.)
Watching it again, I became impressed by the scope and ambition of the story: a generation starship! An artificial forest! And also the daring out-of-sequence filming of the last episode. Today’s viewer has to make allowances for what was possible at the time, but I think it holds up well.
The second paragraph of the third sentence of Paul Erickson’s novelisation is:
‘I’m not sure, my dear boy,’ the Doctor replied. ‘We’ll just have to wait and see.’
Like Lucarotti [in his novelisation of The Massacre], Paul Erickson added some extra chrome into the book version of The Ark which was, I suppose, not realisable on screen, notably the numerous different habitats on the Guardian/Monoid spaceships, and a second invisible Refusian. Also the motivation for the Monoids’ peculiar decision to send the Doctor and Dodo on an exploratory mission is (just about) rationalised. I had forgotten just how bloodthirsty the climax is, as the Monoids wipe each other out in a firefight (and here Erickson gives in to Ian Marter-style temptation to make the fighting even more vicious on the page). I felt, however, that the characterisation of the first Doctor was a bit shaky, with a bit too much use of “old chap” which is not really one of his catchphrases.
Rereading it now, I was again impressed by the ambition and scope of the story – there is a sequence where the Doctor chases all over the varied climatic regions of the Ark to cure the plague, and later on, the Refusians play chess as well as tennis. You can get it here (though at a price).
Before I get to the Black Archive, I am frankly fascinated by Dodo as a companion. Long ago I wrote a piece about her, linking also to the very small amount of fan fiction then available about her.
There’s also a lovely video of Jackie Lane, played Dodo, taking a day-trip to Paris in November 2010:
Philip Purser-Hallard’s Black Archive on the story doesn’t disappoint. It’s a good example of unpacking the ideas and context of the story and raising questions about the received wisdom of fandom.
The introduction reflects on how the story has dated, its roots in Wells and Stapledon, and what is known about the process of writing it.
The first chapter, “The Spaceship”, looks at the use of screens in the story, the conception of the ship itself, and the history of the idea of generation starships (including Ken MacLeod’s Learning the World).
The second chapter, “The Guardians”, looks at the concept of the far future, Olaf Stapledon on the future of humanity, the plague, and the connotations of the fact that the Guardians are all white.
The second paragraph of the third chapter, “The Reptiles”, is:
Many of the most enduring and iconic Doctor Who monsters have been similarly reptilian. The decade following The Ark produced the Ice Warriors, the Silurians and their relatives the Sea Devils, and the Draconians, all of whom have proved their lasting appeal⁶. At the time of the story’s broadcast, a few less prominent (and not necessarily hostile) creatures had been portrayed with some reptile characteristics, like the Slyther and the Sand Beast⁷. The Monoids represent the first time in the series that a primary antagonist is identified this way. ⁶ Introduced respectively in The Ice Warriors (1967), The Silurians (1970), The Sea Devils (1972) and Frontier in Space(1973), and in the first three cases appearing in many TV stories thereafter (while the Draconians have often appeared in tie-in and spinoff media). ⁷ In The Dalek Invasion of Earth and The Rescue respectively.
The chapter looks at the reptilian nature of the Monoids and their relationship to the Cyclops and to Wells, at the question of what colour they are both literally and in racial terms, and at the colonial implications of the script.
The fourth chapter, “The Landing”, looks at the depiction of Refusis and the invisible Refusians, at the story’s Biblical parallels, and at the dubious nature of the agreement between humans and Monoids brokered by the Doctor and Refusians at the end (“The Covenant of The Ark” is the last of many witty sub-heading titles).
The conclusion looks at the differences between the two halves of the story, and makes the bold proposal that fan lore may be wrong about the authorship; he sets out a good case that the second half was mainly written by the mysterious Lesley Scott.
(However, he repeats the incorrect but widely believed statement the Malorie Blackman, co-author of the 2018 story Rosa, was the first known writer of colour for Doctor Who. In fact it was probably Glen McCoy, who wrote the 1983 story Timelash.)
I think that this Black Archive is particularly accessible for readers who may not be familiar with the original story, and I hope it will encourage people to watch it. You can get Philip Purser-Hallard’s The Ark here.
I’m having a great time at Gallifrey One, and if you are here, I hope you are too.
This is pretty good fun. The Angels of the Heavenly Host come up against the Weeping Angels; the Judoon and Margaret Slitheen get involved; some nice character moments for the Doctor and Missy, and to a lesser extent Bill and Nardole. Does what it needs to do. You can get A Confusion of Angels here.
I arrived just in time to attend a royal wedding. My royal wedding, I was betrothed to the Great A.l. Generator, a giant machine that wanted to unite queen and machine to rule over everyone and stop the war. It had a copy of my certificate, which it called the Binding Contract of the Star, and it ordered the robots to come and get me ‘so metal and skin may weld within Miss Belinda Chandra’,
The Doctor Who annuals of the Chibnall/Whitaker years were notably thin. This is a bit thicker, if not quite at the glory days of the 1960s and 1970s. There’s a lot of recapitulation of the 2025 episodes, including a couple of extracts in photonovel format which I think is a first. There’s a small amount of reflection on previous Doctor Who lore, and a foreword from Varada Sethu. The most original material is a short story by Pete McTighe, “Night of the Shreek”, a prequel to Lucky Day, which is very nice. I’d say it’s worth the cover price. You can get the 2026 Doctor Who Annual here.
‘These trees don’t look all that healthy’, she observed.
A Ninth Doctor and Rose story which exports the Frankenstein narrative to 1880s Wales, throwing in some Unquiet Dead-style aliens as well. I thought it was very confidently written, and in particular captured the Series One Rose very well, with in general a good sense of the human landscape – with exceptions; Heath, an Australian with a solid writing record of his own, doesn’t seem to realise that Wales doesn’t have lochs.
This was the sixth of the eight Puffin Doctor Who Classic Crossover novels, of which I had already read the first two (both by Jac Rayner). I’ll keep an eye out for the other five, four of which are by Paul Magrs.
Anji shuddered. Whatever those buildings had once been, they were now unrecognisable, hulking ghosts being teased apart by ivy It was amazing how quiet everything was. No traffic, no birdsong, none of the hurly-burly of the city as it should be. Only the sound of their own footsteps and conversation, and the wind sighing through the trees.
Next in the sequence of Eighth Doctor novels that I read but did not review a decade ago, this has the Doctor, Fitz and Anji arriving in a parallel universe – Bristol, to be specific – where a chronological disaster has wiped out most animals and devastated humanity. There is some good action between the macro plot of trying to fix things and the micro plot of the local politics of the (doomed) inhabitants of the parallel timestream. Despite the fact that this Bristol is depopulated and desolate, there is a real sense of place and space in this book and good characterisation of the main characters, including more than one parallel version of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. I liked it more than some in this sequence. You can get Reckless Engineering here.
The physicians thought it was unlikely she would live much longer.
I’m not wild in general about the sequence of Eighth Doctor books that I am currently reading, but this one hit the spot for me. The Doctor, Fitz and Anji land in Edinburgh in 2003, but in a timeline where computers were never invented and Britain is ruled by a fascist, racist regime. Inevitably they are accused of terrorism, fall in with the real terrorists, and then end up in the Tower of London trying to unravel the sleeve of history without setting off a domino effect of time destruction. There’s some graphic violence, and some very twisty plot twists at the end (and inevitably Sabbath turns up, does nothing very much and then leaves again), but I liked it more than some of these. You can get The Domino Effect here.
Next in this sequence: Reckless Engineering, by Nick Walters.
A First Doctor audio original story, read by Maureen O’Brien and featuring Steven Taylor and Vicki as companions, with Nick Briggs making a couple of interjections as the voice of the Daleks. The TARDIS team land on an isolated space station facing attack from the Daleks, and Steven is arrested as a spy, collaborator and agent. The truth is rather more complex, and involves some of the Dalek technology seen in The Chase, and the sorts of time paradox that New Who has also played with – so it’s a bit deeper than it might first appear to be. Good stuff. You can get Agent of the Daleks here.
Another of the BBC Original audio Doctor Who stories which I have been getting into, one that I particularly selected because I like Una McCormack, both as a person and as a writer, and Clare Corbett has delivered some of the best audio readings that I have heard.
I wasn’t disappointed. This is set in the middle of the recent Fifteen / Belinda series, with the two landing on a planet where two robot bases appear to be at war with each other; meanwhile the bases’ distant human commanders try to work out what is going on before it is two late. At heart it’s a classic story of computers-don’t-argue, but the Doctor and Belinda are captured very nicely by both author and reader, and it’s good to have a bit more time with this sadly short-lived pairing. You can get Counterstrike here.
This is one of the BBC’s original audio Doctor Who stories, which I only recently discovered and am gradually working through. In this one, released last year, the Seventh Doctor and Ace investigate the mysterious appearance of a plastic processing centre which turns out to be a front for the next Auton invasion. The story is very nicely set up with the viewpoint character a retiree from the local senior citizens’ home, and the concept that the Autons would want to take advantage of the microplastics is a neat update of Auton lore. Terry Molloy is a good reader, with the rather grievous exception that his Scottish accent for the Seventh Doctor is poor. Nothing extraordinary, but solid. You can get House of Plastic here.
[I] found that now I had seen so many more Brigadier stories, and indeed listened to numerous audios featuring him, I enjoyed his resurrection in Mawdryn Undead much more than first time round when he was a vague childhood memory and a figure from the Target books. There are essentially two plots here, the Mawdryn plot which is good sf stuff, teleports, spaceships, time shifts and all, and the Turlough/Black Guardian stuff which seems to me as superfluous as Turlough himself. Really, if the Black Guardian wanted to kill the Doctor off, there might be better ways to do it than hiring an unreliable alien posing as a schoolboy! Nyssa and Tegan are good here though, and I really loved the Brigadier flashback which actually incorporates a clip of Hartnell as well as the other three.
In fact, before we go any further, let’s just revisit that superb flashback, and re-experience how it made us feel moored in 19 years of tradition.
I got back to this story in my Great Rewatch in 2011, shortly after the death of Nicholas Courtney, and wrote:
Watching Mawdryn Undead is a slightly wistful experience so soon after the loss of Nicholas Courtney; but it is a real delight to see him back again, playing two slightly different Brigadiers, and again we have the flashbacks which always gratify the heart of us old school fans. The other returning character is the Black Guardian, who for some reason is unable to manifest physically, even to equip his chosen agent with anything other than a prop crystal, but again it is nice to feel a re-connection with the Tom Baker era.
I was a little startled on rewatching it to realise that the plot only starts towards the end of the second episode, but until then we have had quite a lot of decent groundwork, and the actual explanation for what is going on is one of the better sfnal ideas in the whole of Who. Presumably the Doctor is exaggerating when he says that a millisecond either way would have been critical. And perhaps he has some comprehensible but private reason, never explained, for inviting Turlough along as a companion rather than just behaving like an idiot who opens the Tardis up to all comers. (I know that there are fanfic writers who have an answer to that.) Apart from that, it’s another reasonably satisfying tale.
Watching it again now, I appreciated slightly more the performance of David Collings, unrecognisable as Mawdryn, after his previous appearances as the anguished Poul and the treacherous Vorus. He also pops up in the final episode of Blake’s Seven as Blake’s new collaborator on Gauda Prime. On the other hand, the Black Guardian’s constraints feel even more handwavium than on my previous three watches. And speaking of hands, there are a couple too many scenes where the actors’ arms hang limply by their sides, showing a lack of rehearsal or direction or both.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Peter Grimwade’s novelisation of his own story is:
Tegan didn’t trust Turlough an inch. As if anyone from Earth would just walk into a transmat capsule! Though Nyssa was quick to point out that that was exactly what she had done when she walked into the Doctor’s police box on the Barnet By-pass.
I was bracing myself for another terrible book after the awfulness of Doctor Who – Time Flight. But in fact I was pleasantly surprised; I think it is a better story in the first place, but Grimwade is able to bring in a bit more characterisation to new companion Turlough and the Brigadier, and a bit more background to the public school. Not bad at all.
Nothing much to add to that, on re-reading; it does take me back to the days when the novelisation was the only way you could reliably expect to re-experience the story. I would also say that the cover is probably the least imaginative cover of any Doctor Who book of any era, simply a photograph of the Fifth Doctor in the TARDIS. You can get it here.
Kara Dennison’s monograph on Mawdryn Undead is quite a short Black Archive, at only 93 pages, but it’s good and meaty.
It starts with a personal introduction by Dennison, reflecting on becoming a editor of the series as well as a contributor.
I hope this Archive, like the ones before and the ones to come, helps you find new ways to love this show we all adore.
The first chapter, “The Turlough Dilemma”, looks at the problematic concept of Turlough as a companion, from beginning to end, which certanily tickedsome of my oxes about the story.
The second chapter, “‘Some Shocking Experience'”, looks at the Brigadier’s experience of PTSD, referencing also the 1980-81 BBC series To Serve Them All My Days and the Twelfth Doctor story In The Forest of the Night.
The third chapter, “Regeneration Crisis”, looks at the difficulties that regeneration brings for the faithful viewer. Its second paragraph is:
In an interaction that quickly went viral, Capaldi met with the young fan (who was wearing a Dalek costume at the time) to reassure her that, while his Doctor would be different, things would be all right. ‘[Matt Smith and Jenna Coleman] say it’s okay for me to be the Doctor. I hope you think it would be okay for me to be the Doctor, too.’2 2 McCarthy, Tyler, ‘Peter Capaldi Comforts Young Doctor Who Fan With Autism’.
The fourth chapter, “‘Our Endless Voyage'”, compares the travels of Mawdryn with The Flying Dutchman (which Grimwade himself cites as inspiration, quoting it at the start of the novelisation), and also the Marie Celeste and Prometheus.
The fifth chapter, “‘Life Without End or Form'”, looks at immortality in Doctor Who, Swift, Tolkien and manga.
The sixth chapter, “‘Very Much in the Present'”, looks at time paradoxes in Doctor Who with a reflection also on Robert A. Heinlein.
The brief conclusion, “The First Question”, asks “why does this serial feel so much more ‘modern’ than others of its time?” and gives a few answers arising from the topics of the previous chapters.
As I said, it’s a short Black Archive but it’s full of quality thought-provoking analysis. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third story (“Demons in Levenshulme”, by Paul Magrs):
Yaz was used to this kind of sudden call-to-arms while with her time-travelling friend. ‘What is it?’
An anthology of sequels to broadcast Doctor Who stories. Some real jewels here, including the first one, “The Verge of Death”, a sequel to The Edge of Destruction credited to Carole Ann Ford, Rob Craine, and Beth Axford; “Demons in Levenshulme”, by Paul Magrs, which is a Thirteenth Doctor sequel to The Dæmons; “Take Our Breath Away”, credited to Katy Manning, a breathless what-happened-to-Jo-Grant story; “Harry Sullivan and the Chalice of Vengeance”, by Mark Griffiths, which is a Fourth Doctor sequel (sorta) to The Christmas Invasion; and “Afterlife”, by Alfie Shaw, expanding on the moving webcast P.S. by Chris Chibnall, about Rory’s father and son awkwardly bonding after the events of The Angels Take Manhattan. The fact that I’ve mentioned more than half of the eight stories as particularly good speaks for itself. You can get The Adventures After here.
I normally like to credit the editors of anthologies, but no editing credit is given here. BBC, please do let your talented editors emerge blinking into the light!
The Doctor made a few half-hearted attempts to outmanoeuvre the complex restructuring the saboteur had made to the control units but he knew it would be to no avail. He shone the torch over the sealed magnetic systems box welded to the engine relays. The noise in here was incredible; the power stacks were primed well over maximum. Heat stole the oxygen from the depths of the ship.
Next in the sequence of Eighth Doctor books which I read years ago and failed to write up at the time. The Doctor, Fitz and Anji have slipped into a parallel universe where they encounter the mysterious Sabbath, once again, and get involved with a race that is more than it seems. I’m not a fan of the Sabbath arc, and the racing story has been done better elseWho; also Messingham uses first-person narration from both Fitz and Anji, and doesn’t really get convincing voices for either. Not very memorable, for me anyway. You can get The Infinity Race here (at a price).
Second frame of third issue of first story (“Beneath the Waves”):
Compilation of two Titan Twelfth Doctor stories, a four-parter and a one-shot. “Beneath the Waves” by George Mann was an unexpected hit for me, in that I normally bounce off Mann’s writing, but this is a competently done tale of creepy alien seaweed monsters in an English town, with Hattie the future rock star pulled back into the Doctor’s adventures from the previous volume. “The Boy With The Displaced Smile”, by James Peaty, has an alien incursion into a Western American town, another standard enough story, competently done.
Second frame of third issue of “Terror of the Cabinet Noir”:
The Doctor: Woo-hoo-ha-ha-ha! / “We are the Darkness! You would do well to fear us!” / Well, sorry to burst that delusional bubble, but we don’t. Julie: We don’t?
Two rather well developed Twelfth Doctor stories here. The first, “Terror of the Cabinet Noir”, is a nicely set up adventure mainly in an alternative history 17th century France, with the historical opera singer and adventuress Julie d’Aubigny as a one-off companion. It’s true to the spirit of The Girl in the Fireplace, though obviously with different characters and a completely different alien threat. An affirming read.
The other story, “Invasion of the Mindmorphs”, has the Doctor going to confront the creators of a comic strip called Time Surgeon with an eerie resemblance to his own adventures. A bit more could have been done with this concept, but it’s a funny enough idea and executed very much as a Capaldi era story.
I first watched The Mysterious Planet in 2007. I wrote then:
The Mysterious Planet was Robert Holmes’ swan-song, from 1986. He wrote some of the best stories of the original Doctor Who run; this is not one of them. It’s the first segment of the infamous Trial of a Time Lord season, with the action of the main narrative (the Doctor and Peri land on a mysterious planet and must prevent the local bad guys from taking over the universe; also confusingly it may or may not be a far future Earth) frequently interrupted by flashforwards to a courtroom where the Doctor is on trial, the main story being presented as evidence for the prosecution.
The trial sub-plot simply does not work. There appears to be no due procedure that makes any sense; the evidence presented by the Valeyard (at least as far as this story goes) doesn’t do much to prove the case (as even the Inquisitor admits). If you simply tune out these deeply embarrassing bits, you are left with a fairly standard story: a couple of decent performances from guest actors, and a couple of very cardboard-looking robots.
When I came back to it in 2011, for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:
I started watching the Trial of a Time Lord season in a rather foul mood. But in fact, rather to my surprise, I found myself warming to The Mysterious Planet – in relative terms, of course; it’s definitely in the lower third of Robert Holmes’ stories, and has a number of plot elements recycled from his previous scripts when he did them better. But there is a sense that the show might be finding its feet again: back to the 25-minute format, and also embedding the season in a narrative arc (which was successful last time it was tried) in which the Time Lords are up to no good; the basics are actually there, and I think it is the production values that let it down as much as anything. (Though I should admit that the plot is also a bit confusing and over-filled.) The Mysterious Planet is a little dull but it’s not actively bad, unlike most of the previous season.
Rewatching it again, I remain more negative than positive, though I liked some of the Holmesian characterisation. The ridiculous trial set-up remains very poor.
Holmes’ life ended sadly early. He died aged only 60 in 1986, half-way through writing the final story of that year’s Doctor Who season. This was the much contested Trial of a Time Lord arc, for which Holmes had contributed the first four episodes and was due to write the final two (but died before starting the last one). A higher-up at the BBC had sent round a brutal deconstruction of the flaws of the first four episodes (generally now referred to as The Mysterious Planet), which clearly deeply wounded Holmes and possibly even contributed to his illness and death. In a career of a quarter of a century, nobody before had been quite so brutal about his writing. It’s painful reading, and the one positive thing I will say is that the account here raises Eric Saward’s reputation in my view, as he attempted (but failed) to shield Holmes and also keep the show on the road. But between the lines it’s clear that Holmes no longer had what he had once had had. Between 1982 and his death in 1986, literally the only non-Who scripts he sold were three episodes of Bergerac and five for a short-lived drama series set in a Citizens Advice Bureau. Brutal though it is, the BBC higher-up’s criticism of The Mysterious Planet is mostly pretty well-founded.
Molesworth is defensive of The Mysterious Planet‘s virtues, but I’m afraid I am with the BBC hierarchy; it’s a turkey.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Terrance Dicks’ novelisation is:
This is, however, not one of Dicks’ greatest efforts. I’ve noted before how the Dicks/Holmes combination is only rarely successful on the printed page, and this, the last of the sequence, is fairly typical, a faithful recounting of what the viewer sees on the screen without much added. There are some mystifying slips, Peri’s full name being given as “Perpegillian”, for instance. It also fails (as did the original TV version) to establish the Time Lord trial setting convincingly (let alone fit it into continuity).
Nothing to add to that, on re-reading.
So I turned with interest to the latest Black Archive, released last month, by Jez Strickley. Sometimes the Black Archives about Doctor Who stories I did not like much achieve a bit of redemption for me by calling attention to aspects that I had not considered before, and sometimes they at least woo me with the author’s enthusiasm. Which would it be?
I’m sorry to say that of the 79 Black Archives that I have read so far, this was the least penetrable. Strickley has written it as an exploration of his pet concepts, topophilia and topophobia, through the lens of the story, but using many other sources as well. I found it dense and uninteresting, and I gave up after the first chapter. The second paragraph of the third chapter will give you some idea, though I did not get that far.
The life of daleswoman Hannah Hauxwell may be a rare example of Heidegger’s concept of dwelling in practice. Born in 1926, Hauxwell lived most of her life at Low Birk Hatt, a farm in Baldersdale in the North Pennines. In the early 1970s, her life became the subject of a television documentary. Until then, and for a time thereafter, Hauxwell lived frugally on the produce of her farming, managing without electricity and running water. Yet, despite these privations, her love of her home and the nearby Hunder Beck, whose ‘waters sing a song to me’, was unwavering. Reflecting on her life in that remote and, in winter at least, unforgiving setting, she once observed that ‘I know this place will always be loyal to me […] It’s mine […] and always will be […] even when I’m no longer here.’⁴ Hauxwell’s turn of phrase, described by one critic as ‘Wordsworthian’, acknowledges a conception of place which goes beyond the purely material and approaches a bond that may be Heideggerian in nature⁵. ⁴ Hauxwell, Hannah, and Cockcroft, Barry, Seasons of My Life: The Story of a Solitary Daleswoman, p10. ⁵ Hauxwell and Cockcroft, Seasons of My Life, p186.
You see what I mean? Heideggerian, eh?
An unprecedented miss for me in this generally hugely enjoyable series. I believe that the next will be on The Enemy of the World, by Robert Fairclough, who has previously written about The Prisoner; I have higher expectations.
Even while screaming, part of the Doctor’s mind analysed the problem. They were falling towards something, which most likely meant they were dropping towards a planetary surface. Based on the rate of their descent, he made a guess at the strength of the planet’s mavity. Then he ran that information through a complicated calculation involving the number of seconds they had been in freefall and came up with an estimate that they had so far fallen 30,000 feet.
The Well was my favourite of this year’s Doctor Who stories. I wrote of it:
Midnight is (still) my favourite Russell T. Davis episode, and I must admit I was delighted when The Well turned out to be a sequel, with a real base-under-siege plot and a really scary monster. We had more mind-blowing stuff to come this season, but this was the scariest episode by far.
I was a bit surprised by the news that Gareth Powell had been assigned the job of writing the novelisation – I don’t think he has published any other tie-in literature, instead developing his own complex universes. But it makes perfect sense – Powell’s writing is definitely on the more advanced side of military SF, and The Well is the most military Doctor Who story for years; the Doctor and Belinda even change into military uniform, before the horror part of the story gets going.
And of course it’s a good piece of work. A lot of the appeal of the episode was visual, which can be difficult to translate onto the printed page, but Powell actually uses this for freedom to explore the rather small world of the Well and its visitors a bit more. The story is broken up by brief bios of the military characters, fleshing them out a bit more than we got on screen. The tension of the plot is effectively maintained. I felt pretty satisfied. You can get Doctor Who: The Well here.
General Favalan: Viv-2 is infected by that most deadly disease… curiosity. She wrongly believes there is more than Paradise Towers has to offer. / But there is nothing that Paradise does not provide.
Another of Cutaway Comics’ Doctor Who-related slipstream graphic stories, these four issues (which I bought as a collection) include, first, a full four part story, “Paradise Found” set a few years after the events of the Seventh Doctor TV series Paradise Towers, but also an eight page prequel, “Paradise Before” explaining (a little) how Paradise Towers ended up that way, and yet more: a spinoff from The Happiness Patrol, “Terra Alpha Blues”. It comes with several DVDs, combining extra stories and commentary both on the comics and about the original series, and I felt it brilliantly captured the spirit of the original story, which I always liked more than was fashionable anyway. You can get Paradise Found here.
The city, and indeed the planet, have a strange history and an oddly mixed economy.
A very solid and enjoyable Bernice Summerfield novel by Terrance Dicks, bringing her and Chris Cwej to a large city called, er, Megacity, where a huge corporate crime scheme called The Project is bubbling under the surface, and parts of the story are told in the first person by an intellectually enhanced Ogron who is a private eye. It’s not trying to be deep, it’s just trying to be fun, and it succeeds. You can get Mean Streets here (at a price).
That takes me to the end of the Bernice Summerfield novels that I read ten years ago and failed to blog at the time. I’ll jump now to the unblogged Eighth Doctor novels, starting with Time Zero by Justin Richards.
