Those plurals are more accurate because Doctor Who will be a series of serials, and each serial will be a new adventure, but the phrase ‘an adventure in space and time’ is more evocative: today, it reads like a mission statement. The phrase is characteristic of what Brian J. Robb called the ‘emphasis […] on mystery’ in the first Radio Times coverage of the series.⁷ The aforementioned teaser cover line gave Doctor Who less prominence than a front cover photograph; Donald Wilson, the Head of Serials, expressed concern to the Radio Times editor that their decision not to promote Doctor Who in that way despite earlier plans was indicative of a ‘lack of confidence’ in the programme: after all, Radio Times was then an in-house BBC publication. Wilson thought the programme ‘an absolute knock-out’ that ‘will run and run’.⁸ An Adventure in Space and Time does not depict Wilson, but it does depict characters facing a perceived lack of confidence. However, the phrase ‘an adventure in space and time’ would appear regularly in Radio Times listings as Doctor Who indeed ran and ran. ⁷ Robb, Brian J., ‘Those Radio Times’, DWM #167, p16. ⁸ Quoted in Howe, David J., Mark Stammers and Stephen James Walker, Doctor Who: The Handbook – The First Doctor, p231.
This is a book about the 2013 drama-documentary An Adventure in Space and Time, about the origins of Doctor Who. Back when it was first shown, I wrote:
By the way – wasn’t An Adventure in Space and Time really fantastic? One of those bits of Whoviana that you could safely show to a non-fan and expect them to get the appeal of the show. Sure, it’s a shame that David Whitaker got merged with other characters, and that we did not see Hartnell actually acting at the height of his powers, but the story was at least as much about what the show did to Hartnell than what he did to it. I watched it at [Charlie and Feorag’s], and then came home and watched it again with Anne and F on Friday.
I have rewatched it once or twice since, so didn’t go back to it for this writing, though now that I have read David Rolinson’s analysis I think I might give it another whirl.
David Rolinson’s book is one of the great Black Archives, even if it’s not formally in the Black Archive series (which are restricted to TV episodes of Doctor Who). It’s a loving analysis of where the series came from, where An Adventure in Space and Time came from, analysis of the form of drama-documentaries, analysis of the content in terms of what parts are factual, what are invented, what is in-between; there is a lot of reflection on the nature of television, of story-telling, of telling stories about telling stories, of the side references to other parts of the wider Doctor Who story. I was going to write that it’s not quite a shot-by-shot analysis of the play, but actually in places it is exactly that.
But on top of that, the book brings a fannish joy to bear. We can admit that the thing we love has flaws, but we still love it. Rolinson takes glee in each of the small moments of triumph, and in the bigger triumph that the whole thing adds up to. And it’s objectively a good piece of art – if got shortlisted for the BAFTA and Hugo Awards that year. (Beaten for the Hugo by a Game of Thrones episode that also starred David Bradley.) My favourite Black Archives are the ones that look at something I already liked and give me more reasons to like it, and this is definitely in that category (even if not, formally, a Black Archive).
Case in point: today’s activities. Seven days out from Mars on an Earth Forces’ personnel carrier. As transportation went, the Pegasus was better than most. They had a cabin and hot food. Recreational facilities were minimal – it was a military vessel, after all – but there was an observation lounge where you could quietly stargaze.
A Past Doctor Adventure reviving the great Eighth Doctor partnership with Fitz and Anji, in a near future where the Doctor and Fitz are involved with a grand space disaster and Anji settles down and gets married before being sucked once again into adventure. I confess that I did not follow it perfectly; there are two parallel timelines and it took me a while to work out what was happening when (maybe that’s just me). Still, there are some gutsy revelations at the end and I enjoyed the return to the old days. You may be able to get Fear Itself here.
First in a series from Cutaway Comics, who are looking at extended stories of some of the Doctor Who characters who have been neglected by other writers. This is a combination of two (largely) unconnected stories, setting up for a later encounter: “Sutekh: The Heretic” is the tale of how Sutekh tried to conquer and destroy worlds and was brought to heel by his sister-wife and the other Osirans, and “Omega: Eltralla” has interacting with a human colony ship which has somehow got into his black hole, to the detriment of the later. (NB it’s not totally clear what the titles of the stories are, but I have done my best.) The art is good and the stories competent. You can get it here.
When I first started watching The Invasion in 2006, I wrote of the animations:
Episode 1 is one of those for which the original video footage has been lost, and only the soundtrack survives. The DVD, however, includes an animation of the style used by the BBC for the Scream of the Shalka and Shada for it, and while it is not a patch on watching real actors deliver their lines, it is much more satisfactory than either soundtrack alone, or the animations generated by fans, or following along the BBC photonovels while trying to listen to the words. Well done to the animators.
The Invasion, from later in that season, leading up to The War Games, is quite a different matter. I’ve commented already on the brilliant idea of using animations for the two episodes (of the right in total) which are missing. I can bear to listen to an entire series in audio, but to mix audio and video is a different matter. I’ve tried the fan “reconstructions”, but don’t find them satisfactory; likewise watching the BBC photonovel combined with listening to the audio. But this format works, although of course once you get back to the live action episodes you realise what you are missing.
Kevin Stoney, as Tobias Vaughn, is a fantastic villain, and every scene with him is great to watch. He is a totally convincing invulnerable sinister scientist oligarch conspiring with the enemies of mankind, and yet achieves a certain measure of redemption at the end. He was, of course, also great as the super-villain Mavic Chen in The Dalek Master Plan, though Chen is quite a different character. (And he popped up in I CLAVDIVS as Tiberius’ court astrologer, Thrasyllus – who is indeed a historical character.) The story is really about Vaughn’s journey as much as about anything else.
Poor Jamie doesn’t get to do a lot, apart from canoeing and climbing up the liftshaft, but the other main characters are all great – Troughton as ever brilliant, but also Wendy Padbury as Zoe sparking a very very watchable rapport with Sally Faulkner’s Isobel Watkins – and incidentally saving the day and blowing up the Cybermen’s fleet with her Mental Powers of Calculation. And of course this is the first UNIT story, with the return of Lethbridge-Stewart (now a Brigadier) and the first appearance of Benton. Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier in particular gets some really good material to work with, a far cry from the cartoonish character of the Pertwee years. Again, the DVD reveals just how much fun the cast were having, especially thanks to the hospitality provided by the Guinness brewery where a lot of the action scenes were filmed.
Some reviewers have expressed bitter disappointment with the Cybermen, either that they don’t have enough screen time, or that they don’t look good, or (inconsistently) both. I don’t completely share those feelings. The Cybermen aren’t seen until the end of episode 4, but that’s really because we have not been told who is behind the invasion of the story’s title. It is a bit unfortunate that much of the action of blowing up spaceships, etc, happens off screen – but of course mediated through that new-fangled radar stuff. I also have the controversial view that the Cybermen redesign is better than the original version – I think supporting evidence is that the new version has survived through to this year.
The only other thing that really annoyed me was the cheery music accompanying the arrival of the soldiers for the final battle (apparently real soldiers from the real army). But the rest of the music is very good, and the whole thing is a jolly good package.
For my Great Rewatch in 2010, I wrote:
The Cybermen are back (though not reallly for long) in The Invasion, and so are the villain and one of the heroes from The Daleks’ Master Plan, Kevin Stoney appearing as the rich mad industrialist Tobias Vaughn, and Nicholas Courtney making a return as Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart, now promoted to Brigadier. (The first surviving shot of the latter is of his backside as he emerges from a piece of equipment).
Given how little we actually see of the Cybermen here, it feels more like The Avengers, with the Brigadier trying to stop Vaughn’s plan, though eventually relying on Zoe to destroy the approaching fleet (seen only on radar) and on the Doctor to talk Vaughn into renouncing his allies. Taking a longer view, it’s the most New Who-ish story so far, with an alien threat to contemporary Earth (which never happened in the Hartnell era, and only three times out of 21 Troughton stories, though it was a staple storyline of both the Pertwee years and of RTD) combined with recurring characters and family dynamics among the Doctor’s allies.
It’s a very slashtastic story as well, with the strongly sapphic dynamic between Zoe and Isobel Watkins matched by the Doctor and Jamie playing around in canals and tunnels (the Brigadier being the gooseberry) and even the weird powerplay between Vaughn and his increasingly panicky security man, Packer. The music is also particularly good, with the notable exception of the jaunty military theme which destroys the tension of crucial scenes in the last couple of episodes.
Rewatching it now, a couple of points occurred to me. The eight episodes are distinctly padded (as with the ten episodes of The War Games) by our regular cast running into trouble, getting captured, escaping and then running back into trouble again. But on the flip side, there is a lot of characterization – Robert Sidaway’s Captain Jimmy Turner is an alternative love interest for Isobel (Zoe looks distinctly put out, but which of them is she jealous of?) and the relationship between Vaughn and his sidekick Packer, played by Peter Halliday, is interesting too. But the fact that all the crucial action happens off screen in the final episode is a real letdown.
The novelization is one of those done by Ian Marter, who also played one of Tom Baker’s companions, Harry Sullivan. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
‘I thought we were going in there to find the lassies’, he complained.
Somehow Marter managed to find his creative spark for his last three novelizations, which are all cracking good reads. The Invasion, also from the 1968-69 season, also featured Jamie and Zoe, and concerned Cybermen invading a near-contemporary London; it also brought back the character of Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart as the Brigadier in charge of UNIT. This was an eight-part story when first broadcast, cut down for Marter’s 1985 novel to 160 pages, so a rather extreme compression. But somehow, Marter makes it work as he failed to with his previous Second Doctor stories; he had better material to start with, true, but the plot is somewhat easier to follow in his novel than in Derrick Sherwin and Kit Pedler’s original script. The villainous Tobias Vaughn, briliantly brought to life by Kevin Stoney on screen, is actually better in some ways here, with several hints that he has already become more—or perhaps less—than completely human, and his change of heart at the end of the story, when he turns on his Cyberman former allies, more consistently portrayed as a fanatic changing targets rather than as the human being brought to his senses whom we saw on television. At the same time, no written description can possibly convey Stoney’s sinister drawl, now available to all on a recently released DVD. There is also, unusually, an injection rather than a subtraction of humour by Marter, with a running joke about the awful tea in UNIT headquarters.
Rereading it, I am struck by the efficiency of Marter’s story telling – the eight episodes get 21 pages, then 25, 20, 19, 22, and the last three 17 pages each. Though perhaps this also illustrates that once he had cut out all the padding, there was a fairly lean story left to tell. You can get the novelization here.
Stephen Hatcher’s Black Archive on the story is a solid look at how The Invasion fitted and fits into the history of Doctor Who and pop culture of the day. The first chapter, “The Doctor, the Brigadier and the Swinging Sixties” makes the point that at the time it was written, the decision to exile the Doctor to Earth in Season Seven had been made, but Troughton and Hines had not yet decided to leave, so the story was potentially setting up a Two/Jamie plus UNIT plus Isabel Watkins dynamic for the next set of stories. That didn’t all come off, obviously, but it’s an unusual Who story in that it was written looking ahead to the future of the show; most of them aren’t.
The second chapter, “England Swings Like a Pendulum Do”, looks briefly at the previous Who stories set in the present day, whenever that happened to be, and then at the role of transistor radios and photographers, both crucial story elements of The Invasion, in making the Sixties swing.
The third chapter, “Doctor Who and the Playboys, Spies and Private Eyes”, looks at the crossover between TV spy shows and Doctor Who, notably The Avengers‘ episode “The Cybernauts” which shares significant plot elements with The Invasion. Also Robert Vaughn, lead actor in The Man From U.N.C.L.E., shares a surname with the villainous Tobias. Its second paragraph is:
The 60s was a period when the Cold War between the USA with its allies in NATO² and the Soviet Union and its fellow members of the Warsaw Pact was at its height. This prolonged period of antagonism between the nuclear-armed superpowers lasted from the end of the Second World War in 1945 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Although for most of that period, hostilities were confined to ‘proxy wars’ like the Korean War (1950-53) and the war in Vietnam (1954-75), the Cold War was prone to heating up, in response to events such as the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) and Soviet actions in Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968) and Afghanistan (1979). Throughout the Cold War, the intelligence services of both sides are known to have been very active in keeping their respective governments aware of what the other side were up to. In Britain in particular, the revelation of the activities of the ‘Cambridge Spies’ – Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean – between 1951 and 1963, and the escape from Wormwood Scrubs of the double agent George Blake in 1966, heightened interest in espionage. And, in the same way that popular literature and cinema did before both the First and Second World Wars, film and TV responded to a time of international tension with an upsurge in spy fiction. ² North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.
The fourth chapter, “Doctor Who and the Invaders from Space”, looks at the influence of Quatermass, the character of the Brigadier, and the odd resonance of the long-forgotten TV show Counterstrike.
The fifth chapter, “Doctor Who and the Captains of Industry”, looks briefly at boardroom dramas such as The Troubleshooters and The Power Game, and their real life counterparts.
The sixth chapter, “Doctor Who and the squaddies”, looks at the impact of National Service on Britain and in particular on director Douglas Camfield. This is perhaps the moment to acknowledge that Gareth Roberts was correct a few weeks ago to assert that Camfield was pretty right-wing, though the other members of the cast and crew say that he never let it affect his work.
The seventh chapter, “Absence of the Cybermen”, points out that although the Cybermen are only in the second half of the story, it nonetheless had a big impact on subsequent Cyberman stories.
A conclusion asserts briefly that
The Invasion is the Doctor Who story that brings together so much of what was good about 1960s film and television drama, and in doing so it may be the story from that era that is able to speak the most to twenty-first century audiences.
I don’t know that I’d go that far, but I will say that Hatcher has given me new appreciation for a story that I already liked anyway. You can get his Black Archive here.
I’ll also observe that this volume lifts the Second Doctor a little from his under-representation in the Black Archives. This is the first Black Archive about a Second Doctor story since 2019; it is the 84th in the series and The Underwater Menace was the 40th. 19.0% of his stories and 19.3% of his episodes have been covered in the series so far; this is the lowest of any of the first eight Doctors, and taking all Doctors into account, it’s more stories proportionally than the Tenth Doctor’s 13.5% and more episodes than the Ninth Doctor’s 15.4%, but less than anyone else except the special cases of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Doctors. (If you’re interested, apart from the special cases of the Eighth and Shalka Doctors, the Seventh Doctor is way in the lead.) I am not blaming anyone for this; I was looking forward to last year’s planned volume on The Enemy of the World, but it never appeared.
Doctor
Stories
BA’ed
%age
Episodes
BA’ed
%age
Eighth
2
2
100.0%
2
2
100.0%
Shalka
1
1
100.0%
1
1
100.0%
Seventh
12
8
66.7%
42
30
71.4%
Sixth
11
4
36.4%
31
14
45.2%
Fourth
41
13
31.7%
172
54
31.4%
Thirteenth
24
6
25.0%
26
12
46.2%
First
29
10
34.5%
134
48
35.8%
Third
24
6
25.0%
103
33
32.0%
Fifth
21
6
28.6%
68
20
29.4%
Twelfth
35
8
22.9%
36
10
27.8%
Eleventh
39
8
20.5%
39
10
25.6%
Ninth
10
2
20.0%
13
2
15.4%
Second
21
4
19.0%
119
23
19.3%
Tenth
36
5
13.9%
39
8
20.5%
Fifteenth
16
1
6.3%
18
1
5.6%
Fourteenth
3
0
0.0%
3
0
0.0%
As soon as someone does one of the Fourteenth Doctor episodes, he’ll zoom to halfway up the table.
Aha, she thought to herself. It’s the one with the knees.
I don’t seem to have written up the original TV story here at the time of broadcast, though I did include it in my list of Doctor Who stories for someone who hasn’t seen it yet. I rewatched it in advance of reading the novelisation. It’s the two-episode story (The Time of Angels and Flesh and Stone) where River Song is busted out of jail by the Doctor and Amy, and the three find themselves allied with an army of clerics on a wrecked ship infested with Weeping Angels. It is scary, and well shot, and to be honest the plot doesn’t make a lot of sense when you hold it up the light and look for holes. But the pace is tremendous, particularly the sequence where Amy must find her way to safety while keeping her eyes closed.
It’s also the one with the controversial final scene where Amy tries to seduce the Doctor as a final fling before her wedding. Stephen Moffat has stated in retrospect that he got this scene wrong, and I agree with him. It’s not consistent with Amy’s character, and it makes her and the Doctor look both silly and stupid. Moffat has written some brilliant sex comedy scenes, stories and award-winning TV shows, but this is not one of them.
Jenny Colgan’s novelization sticks to the TV script but adds one very important nuance. This is River Song’s second appearance in the show, after her death in Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead. The following year’s stories had her origin as a major part of the overall series plot arc, as it turns out that she is actually Amy’s daughter with Rory. Colgan’s version of River Song is fully aware of this (as the viewers, and indeed probably the writer, in 2010 were not) and it adds nuance to her reactions and behaviour on being on an adventure with her own unwitting mother. Other than that, it’s a good bit of writing which does its best to cover for the vivid visuals of the original TV story. You can get The Time of Angels here.
As a bit of trivia, this is the first New Who story to have been adapted for print twice. Trevor Baxendale authored a photo-novel version for younger readers back in 2012, along with three other stories from that season – The Eleventh Hour (also by Baxendale), and Victory of the Daleks and The Lodger (by Peter Gutierrez). I have never seen any of these books in the wild – I saw a note somewhere that they were only sold in Australia. Six Twelfth Doctor stories have also had the photo-novel treatment.
One of the Telos novellas, which I had read years ago but not got around to blogging. By a particularly prominent author, with a foreword by Neil Gaiman that got a lot of attention at the time (before we knew, of course). There are a lot of ideas here – a chap from colonial India who is slowly turning into a tiger, a generation starship, a lion-woman princess, uploaded and downloaded intelligences; too much really for the given length, and perhaps not fully under control. You can get The Eye of the Tyger here (at a considerable price).
This was the first of the Thirteenth Doctor series of comics from Titan, the rest of which I had read and enjoyed, so coming back to the beginning now. This also exhausts the massive store of Doctor Who comics that I got from a Humble Bundle purchase in 2022, and it was certainly worth the rather minimal amount I paid for the lot.
This was an excellent note to finish on, as well. It’s a Christmas story, so reading it in the sunmmer wasn’t ideal; but Houser, who is one of the great Who comics writers, catches the Thirteenth Doctor’s voice absolutely perfectly. There is a fun plot as well to do with memory loss and a fake Santa Claus, but really you’re enjoying the ride. You can get Time out of Mind here.
This brings to an end my shelf of books that I acquired in 2022.
Last book acquired in 2022, read in July 2026 (Time Out of Mind)
Last book acquired in 2021, read in October 2025 (Het lijkt Washington wel)
I have got the gap down from 8 years for the 2010 books to two and a half years now.
My pile of unread books from 2023 is not as big as the 2022 pile was, only 25 of them – 14 non-fiction, 10 sf, and one poetry collection. Starting off the list are:
Bridging Worlds, ed. Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki – the shortest book of those that I acquired in 2023 and have not yet read
Brian W. Aldiss, by Paul Kincaid – the non-fiction book that has lingered longest unread on my shelves
Twenty-first Century Blues, by Steve Walker – the sf book that has lingered longest unread on my shelves
Last Exit, by Max Gladstone – the top unread book of those I acquired in 2023.
A nice little collection of 3-4 page stories about each of the Doctors from Hartnell to Capaldi, including also Hurt, structured as the Doctor’s memories flashing through their mind as they change from Capaldi to Whitaker. Not terribly deep, but quite joyous. You can get The Many Lives of Doctor Who here.
Second paragraph of third section (of the first of two chapters):
‘That’s all the sixes,’ his companion said, joining us.
Another of the recent Who novelisations, by the writer of the original TV story. I don’t seem to have made a note about this story when it was first broadcast. When I first rewatched it in 2013, I wrote:
I fear this is becoming a boring refrain, but I had forgotten how good The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit actually is. I think it is our first proper base-under-siege story in New Who (perhaps arguments can be made for The End of the World or Dalek, but I won’t) and perhaps it’s a return to that comfort zone of Old Who, with the difference of a more diverse base crew than Old Who would have had (the black guy would never have been in command in the old days, and the smart woman would never have been chief scientist). The scarily different bit is not so much the monster – though it is well done, both the descent to the pit and the technical realisation of a superhuman incarnation of evil – but the Ood, who are very creepy indeed. Having a slave race never works out well in Who, but here the message is that by exploiting the Ood, humanity has opened a potential route for its own destruction. Terrific stuff.
In 2022, coming back to it for Simon Bucher Jones’ Black Archive, I wrote:
Rewatching it now, I was again pleasantly surprised. David Tennant is always watchable, but here the chemistry between him and Billie Piper is at its peak. It also struck me that the plot element of the TARDIS being lost on a world where a more cosmic battle is playing out had been done before, and worse, in Frontios.
I didn’t rewatch it again before reading the novelisation, as my memory was still pretty fresh.
This is another one of the good ones. It is presented as a set of testimonials, and other incidents, from the enquiry that the Krop Tor base crew faced when they finally got back. This neatly solves a story-telling problem: you don’t need an omniscient narrator when you have a bunch of different viewpoints, and each admits from the start that each has only a partial view of the events.
Doing the story that way means that you end up with quite a different experience of the plot from watching the original TV version, but a good one. It also centres the guest characters, and the impact that the Doctor and Rose make on the rest of their lives, which doesn’t often feature in what we see once the TARDIS departs. There is one chunk of narrative told from the Doctor’s own point of view about three quarters of the way through, and it’s not clear how that gets into the book, but I think most readers will swallow it anyway. The original story is good, and the novelisation is good too.
I don’t think I had realised that Jones was the author of one of my favourite Bernice Sumnmerfield novels, Beyond the Sun, and of the New Adventures novel Bad Therapy which I also enjoyed. He also wrote the “Dead Man Walking” episode of Torchwood. One to keep an eye on.
The Scent of Blood, by Andrew Lane and read by Dan Starkey, is the better of the two. It’s a vampire story set in 19th century Edinburgh; vampires of course have their own Doctor Who continuity, and Lane (whose strong point is crossovers between Who and other continuities) takes all of that on without going too far down fannish rabbit-holes, and bringing in some memorable characters. Starkey is also a very impressive and versatile voice performer. You can get The Scent of Blood here.
The Winged Coven, by Paul Magrs and read by Susan Jameson, is another in the sequence of stories about Mrs Wibbsey, the housekeeper of Nest Cottage, the Fourth Doctor’s home from home in rural England, with also an appearance from Mike Yates. There is some fun with mind swaps, but really the witches are just stupid, the Wibbsey situation is a one-joke plot device and I’m getting a bit bored with it. You can get The Winged Coven here.
This is the last in the series of Eighth Doctor Adventures that I didn’t get around to writing up when I first read them in 2014-15. Most of them were in the Sabbath arc which didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but the previous volume, Halflife, and this one both seem a bit more coherent and interesting, as perhaps the impending end of the series of books was concentrating the creativity of the authors (and editors).
The Tomorrow Windows is a picaresque novel which includes an exploding Ken Livingstone, windows which give you visions of potential futures, and lots of Douglas Adams-esque planets with humorously depicted aliens. I felt it worked well; I have complained about previous books in the sequence that the character of new-ish companion Trix is underdeveloped, but here she gets a fair bit of first-person narrative and I felt I knew her much better. None of this series is Great Literature, but this one at least is satisfactory. You can get The Tomorrow Windows here.
That finished the unblogged EDA’s, but I find I still have some Who books on the shelves acquired years ago that I have not yet written up, so I’m going to go through them in more or less continuity order. First up will be Paul McAuley’s Eye of the Tyger.
Another of the BBC’s Doctor Who audiobooks, read by Fraser Hines, with the Second Doctor, Jamie and Victoria landing on a strange planet where memories and sensual perceptions are up for barter. It takes Victoria in particular to some surprising places, and the central concept is well developed; also Hines is a very good reader of the three main characters. You can get The Elysian Blade here.
Three stories of the Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors separately, laying the way for the Thirteenth Doctor series of comics from Titan. To be honest I didn’t find any of them particularly memorable, though the art is pleasing. You can get The Road to the Thirteenth Doctor here.
When I first started to watch The Web Planet in 2007, the DVD was unfortunately still in my laptop when it was stolen by a sneak thief at the Gare du Nord in Brussels. I got another copy eventually and wrote:
I got the DVD of The Web Planet, a First Doctor story from 1965 with Ian, Barbara and Vicki, back in January; and then, after I had read Wood and Miles‘ excoriating description of it, the disc was in my laptop when it got stolen. But I caught up with this one over the weekend as well.
Oh dear.
It’s very brave to try and produce an entire six-part story with no humanoid characters other than the regular cast, and the production teeters on the edge of greatness but, ultimately, falls off and hurtles to its doom. I mean, the Zarbi, with their unearthly whistling, are actually pretty good, so good that you can nearly forget that they are blokes in giant ant costumes. And the disembodied Animus is pretty sinister. But the Venom Grubs are, frankly, pathetic. And the Menoptra, with their bizarre dance movements, and their pitiful Optera relatives, are just ludicrous. I can’t quite believe that this is the only story from the original Season Two (apart from the glorious Dalek Invasion of Earth) available on DVD. Almost any other would make more sense and be a better advertisement for Who as a whole. (I have reservations about The Chase, though it does at least have Daleks and a variety of settings, and I’ve only seen the first episode of The Space Museum so can’t speak to the whole of it, though I must say it really grabbed me.)
Maureen O’Brien is good as Vicki though, perhaps the best I remember her in any of her stories. The others are fine too, especially (as ever) Hartnell.
Coming back to it two years later for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:
When I first watchedThe Web Planet two years ago I really didn’t rate it. In my current rewatch, it is the first story where I have revised my opinion significantly upwards. Unlike the other non-Dalek sfnal stories so far it looks weird rather than crap. I think I appreciate it much more now that I have got my watching brain acclimatised to the mid 1960s, as it were; and perhaps it is easier to take it an episode at a time rather than sitting down to watch all six. The Menoptra and Zarbi (and the Animus) are much more convincing aliens than the Voord or the Sensorites, the sets are excellent and the vaseline on the camera lenses adds to the air of alienness. It is no wonder that this was one of the very first novelisations, or that the first Doctor Who annual had not one but two stories set on Vortis. (The Optera and Venom Grubs are still a bit less convincing, but I was able to rise above that somehow.) We also see a lot more of the inside of the Tardis than ever before. Lots of good character moments for all four regulars, with Barbara saving the day.
Coming back to it, I attempted to binge the whole story in an evening, and I think this was a mistake; I found myself confused and actually a little bored. Yes, the makers of the show achieved miracles on a shoestring, but it’s difficult for today’s viewer to grasp. People who saw it the first time around were generally more impressed, most notably Peter Capaldi:
…those old shows were only made to be watched once, on a flickering monochrome telly that smelled of valves and furniture polish. In that context, they succeeded immeasurably. They were triumphs of imagination. It may surprise you now, but something like The Web Planet lived powerfully and expansively in my head for decades… until the DVDs came along and spoiled the party. But I’m glad to say that the Menoptra eventually flitted back into my dreams, where they belong.
The novel, Doctor Who and the Zarbi, by Bill Strutton, the Australian writer of the original story, was the second Doctor Who novel ever published (after Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure with the Daleks). The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
“Chesterton, get back! Back!”
I (obviously) read it as a child, and was fascinated. Coming back to it in 2008, I wrote:
Doctor Who and the Zarbi was based on the story now generally called The Web Planet, which crashes and burns spectacularly awfully on screen because today’s viewers cannot take the production values seriously. The book is a bit better, because the printed page and the reader’s imagination, rather than the unforgiving camera, supplies the details of the various non-human races in conflict on the planet Vortis. In principle it makes a good sf story, perhaps the best sf story, in terms of the norms of the genre, from the whole Hartnell era.
The book does suffer from a couple of weaknesses. Most bizarrely, and uniquely, the central character is referred to as “Doctor Who” rather than “the Doctor” throughout, and the Tardis loses the definite article, as if Tardis was just the name of the vessel. Also, in places the book feels uncomfortably like what it is, a TV script cast in different format, and one feels that Strutton is just writing what appeared to the viewer on the screen. Having said that, though, the book is still better than the original TV story.
To call it “the best sf story, in terms of the norms of the genre, from the whole Hartnell era” is a strong statement, and to be honest I think three of the four Hartnell Dalek stories are better contenders. But as a story, it’s at the upper end and the novelisation pulls that out. You can get Doctor Who and the Zarbi here.
The illustrations in the book are really striking.
They are credited to one John Wood, which is also the name of the BBC designer who worked on the TV story. Fannish lore, however, insists that these are two different people, and further that the illustrator John Wood is a mistake for John Woods, one of the illustrators who also worked on the three 1960s Dalek books (The Dalek Book, The Dalek World and The Dalek Outer Space Book). Unfortunately the three or four different artists who worked on the Dalek books are not credited individually, so it is difficult to compare.
I am not convinced by fannish lore. I think Occam’s Razor shaves closer to the possibility that the same artist designed the TV show and illustrated the book. Also, the Vicki in the illustrations is a brunette, whereas Maureen O’Brien at that age was blonde. Surely this indicates that the illustrations could have been based on the original production design, which might have dated from before Maureen O’Brien’s start on the show? The Web Planet was only her third story, and its first episode was her seventh. Also, if John Wood’s name was spelled incorrectly when the book was first published, surely he would have had a chance to correct it before a different publisher brought it out again ten years later?
Anyway. Brigid Cherry, a retired media studies academic who like Peter Capaldi is old enough to have seen the story when it was first broadcast in 1965, has written a redemptive Black Archive monograph on it. I must say that while my favourite Black Archives are those that tell me all the reasons why my favourite stories are so fantastic, I do also like the ones like this where the writer challenges my less positive views and finds reasons that I had not considered to appreciate a story. There are only three chapters, but they are long and it is a chunky read.
A substantial introduction, with the title “So the Legends Say: Receptions of The Web Planet“, looks at views of The Web Planet, contrasting the rather harsh take of modern fans such as me with the much more positive memories of those who saw it at the time, including the author herself, Stephen James Walker and contributors to an online forum. She doesn’t quote Peter Capaldi here, but his comments are fully aligned with her argument.
I’m going to lazily use the author’s summaries of her own chapters. “Chapter one [whose title is “Every Corner of Vortis: Televisuality”] explores the aesthetics of the story in relation to how television was made at the time, and the ways in which the mise-en-scène, art design, camerawork and other stylistic elements were determined by these production processes. In terms of The Web Planet being considered an ambitious, if not over-ambitious, experiment, this chapter also frames early Doctor Who, and this story specifically, as an example of the experimental television being produced at the time.”
“Chapter two [whose title is: “Flying Above thought: Performance”] extends this approach by further considering the performativity of the story, considering it in relation to art or media forms such as puppetry, mime, and avant-garde theatre. These two chapters are necessarily historiography (writing about the past) not in order to definitively answer the question of whether The Web Planet is great children’s TV or a failed experiment – it might be both, of course. Rather, it is an analysis intended to re-examine it from the perspective of TV production history and the history of the wider arts and popular culture of the time. Such historiography… can be both an account of industrial circumstances (in this instance, aspects of production and performance at the BBC in the 1960s) and a social history where the text reflects the national (or global) zeitgeist.”
The second paragraph of the third and final chapter (whose title is: “The Light is Good: Themes”) is:
There are several technological forms contrasted in The Web Planet: the organic technology of the Carsinome; the inorganic crystalline technology used by the Menoptra (the prime example of which is the communication device that Vrestin uses to contact the invasion force in ‘The Zarbi’); the metallic gold collars (again inorganic) used by the Zarbi to ‘morphotise’ victims; and the mysterious energy that powers the TARDIS itself and is shown to repel the Animus and Zarbi (potentially both organic and inorganic since the Doctor’s ship often seems ‘alive’). These various forms of technology are indicative of technological, and thus cultural, development in each of the character groupings in the narrative.
The author’s summary is: “chapter 3 turns to the textual meanings that underpin the story, revealing the ideological meanings and discourses in relation to the 1960s zeitgeist. This also draws on yet another element of historiography discussed by Hilmes, that is consideration of the conditions under which the popular culture text is consumed or experienced.”
The short conclusion, “The Silence of Time: Reappraising The Web Planet”, sums up what has been said, and ends:
Bear in mind that when the Doctor stops Ian from plunging his hand into the acid pool in the opening episode, the lesson to be learnt is to be more cautious before rushing in and take more time to better understand what we are seeing. It is past time to re-appraise The Web Planetin contexts other than an established fan canon born of naiveté or ignorance of television history. It is, then, time to come back to Vortis. As this book has argued, The Web Planet’s innovative approaches demand it is given its deserved status in the canon of British experimental television.
As I hope is clear by now, I found this an entertaining and thought-provoking read, and maybe the next time I pop the DVD in the player I’ll approach the story in a more redemptive frame of mind. You can get the Black Archive here.
Adelaide, symmetrical as ever, dressed in her simple, perfect pastels, sat down in the chair opposite Janet, pushed a tin of biscuits across the table and smiled. ‘Would you like a biscuit? I’ve got these delightful, simply delightful ginger creams from a local baker. I do like to support local small businesses, don’t you? And I do so like that blouse you’re wearing. So many colours! So daring! You must tell me where you got it from.’ Adelaide adjusted her Alice band. ‘Oh, and, now before I forget, how long have you been having an affair with my husband?’
Another good novelisation of an early New Who story – I doubt that we will ever get the full sequence in novel form, but I appreciate what we have. Lidster has taken the sequence of events in the script and given us a book whose two halves correspond to the two episodes; but he has added a lot of background on the various characters, including the skeevy Oliver Charles (married to Adelaide and flinging with Janet) and also Toshiko Sato, who appears in the very first scene filmed for New Who, in the lab with the dead alien pig. Solid, enjoyable and convincing. You can get Aliens of London here.
I wrote this piece two weeks ago, on Sunday 28 June, and later learned to my deep sorrow and dismay that Justin Richards, probably the most prolific Doctor Who writer of all time, had died that very day, aged 64. I never met him or corresponded with him, but his writing was usually reliable and sometimes brilliant. I am sure that I still have some of his work to write up here, but, sadly, no more will be produced.
After opening with The Thing from the Sea, the BBC audiobooks range commissioned three stories from Justin Richards to commemorate the end of the First World War. This is a tricky subject for Who, though not as tricky as Irish history or Hitler’s Germany, especially since (SPOILER) the villain is a well-enough intentioned chap who just wants to stop the killing from happening by the means of time travel.
The first story, Men of War, has Peter Purves telling a story of the First Doctor, Steven Taylor and Sara Kingdom materialising in 1916 to find that the Battle of the Somme has not started on schedule and that Time is trying to reclaim those who should have died. It’s bleak and creepy. Purves tells the story not as Steven but as a British officer trying to make sense of the madness around him. You can get Men of War here.
Horrors of War had come to my notice before as one of the couple of dozen Who stories set in Belgium. This time it’s Katy Manning telling the story of the Third Doctor and Jo Grant arriving at a field hospital near Ypres, where they meet Annie Grantham (who is the narrating character, so as with Peter Purves, Katy Manning does her own Who persona in the third person). This was of particular interest to me because they all go back to Sarajevo to observe the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and his wife, which has gone askew in this timeline. I twitched a bit at some of the details which don’t match the Bosnian geography, but I can’t blame Richards for doing less research on Sarajevo than I have (see here and here). Apart from that, I appreciated what Richards was doing. You can get Horrors of War here.
Fortunes of War concludes the trilogy by bringing the Sixth Doctor together with the captain from the first story and the nurse from the second, Colin Baker narrating it in character. They end up investigating the origin of the mystery in a remote forest in northwestern Germany (oddly enough, I too was in a remote forest in northwestern Germany shortly after listening to this) and trying to close the wobbling time loops. I found it very satisfactory. You can get Fortunes of War here.
As I said up front, this is a difficult subject for Who to tackle, but I think it was done well by Richards and the performers, with some great soundscaping as well. Recommended, even now that we are some years past the anniversary.
Having discovered the BBC Original Audiobook line, and started in the middle and worked to the end, I’ve gone back to the beginning for this story set in the Nest Cottage continuity, where Susan Jameson plays the Fourth Doctor’s housekeeper, Mrs Wibbsey, some time around the 2010s. This is the story of their whisking off to the Italian coast in the 18th century, where villagers are being mean to the local non-humans, and Count Cagliostro and the local magnate are also entangled. It’s solid enough, and quite fun, though I sometimes feel that Paul Magrs camps it up a bit too much, and his / Jameson’s portrayal of the Fourth Doctor isn’t really the chap we saw on television. You can get The Thing From the Sea here.
This brings together the Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors to fight Cybermen across numerous timelines, with some of the artists better than others, and a fairly inevitable storyline (or sets of storylines) which the length of the comic struggles to hold. Fun, but you know what you’re getting. You can get Supremacy of the Cybermen here.
Big Finish have not yet got Matt Smith or Peter Capaldi (or Ncuti Gatwa) to reprise their incarnations of the Doctor on audio, but they got a significant score with Jody Whittaker and Mandeep Gill reprising their roles as the Doctor and Yasmin Khan, and launched their Thirteenth Doctor range with this set of three stories, released late last year. Spoiler: I liked all three of them, and have a special reason for loving the third.
Vampire Weekend by safe pair of hands Tim Foley (see here, here and here) kicks off with the Doctor tagging along with Yaz to a hen weekend in the Peak District, where unfortunately (as you might expect from the title) one of the other guests is a vampire. The plot is straightforward but the chemistry between the two leads is palpable, and makes the whole thing a lot of fun. You can get Vampire Weekend here.
The Return of the Doctor, by newcomer Rory Thomas-Howes, is perhaps the least surefooted of the three. Yasmin asks the Doctor to look at what has happened to a planet where they have already saved the day. The cover illustration is a bit misleading because it shows a character who looks like Sutekh, but is actually one of the armadillo-like inhabitants of the planet, where of course the Doctor’s benevolent intervention turns out to have completely misfired. The script takes Yaz to a place of questioning what the Doctor is actually for, and what indeed companions like her are for, which is slightly tricky territory, questioning the entire format of the Whoniverse, and I thought the script didn’t navigate that territory with full confidence. You can get The Return of the Doctor here.
I cheered when I realised that Lionesses in Winter, by Lisa McMullen, another safe pair of hands especially in historical territory, is in fact a riff on The Lion in Winter, the play famously filmed with Peter O’Toole and Katherine Hepburn in 1968, and less famously with Patrick Stewart and Glenn Close in 2003. Like the original, it is set at Christmas 1183, a brief moment of reconciliation between Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II. But we start to diverge from recorded history, and the cause of the divergence and What Is Really Going On is well done in sfnal terms and rooted in the historical facts. But basically I will always lap up anything about Eleanor of Aquitaine. Debra Baker, playing Eleanor here, is probably the biggest name of the guest actors for any of these three.
The extra track of commentary by cast and crew has some thoughtful reflection by Mandip Gill and the producer of this series, Noga Flaishon, about the meaning of Christmas and the Christmas holidays for non-Christians operating in a traditionally Christian country. (Although Mandip Gill portrays a Muslim character in Doctor Who, she is actually Sikh by background. Noga Flaishon is Israeli.)
Having discovered the BBC audiobook series, I’m steadily going through them, here with the last two from the Capaldi era and the most recently released.
Death Among the Stars, by Steve Lyons – nicely read by Nicola Bryant, who however has trouble with Peter Capaldi’s accent. Base under siege shenanigans on Europa, involving aliens and duplicates, riffing off a number of New Who stories (Waters of Mars and Under the Lake/Before the Flood). Not particularly special to be honest. You can get Death Among the Stars here.
Rhythm of Destruction, by Darren Jones, is a step up, riffing off the Capaldi Doctor’s love of music with some brilliant sound design, and with Dan Starkey catching Capaldi’s voice very well indeed. It’s aliens playing interstellar rock music, so you know how it’s going to work out, but the ride is fun. You can get Rhythm of Destruction here.
Circle of Memory, by Bob Ayres, is the most recent of these audiobooks to have been released, but it goes back to an earlier period ion the TARDIS with Eleven / Amy / Rory, and a rather good plot of memory theft and loss, and trying to work out your own identity. Dan Starkey is the reader again, and he is really very good at capturing the characters’ voices. The plot too seems to have hidden depths. Ayres has written only a couple of other Who stories for Big Finish, but I’ll look out for him in the future.
As Patrick Troughton bowed out as the Doctor, times were hard for the series.
Another of the Obverse Books Doctor Who non-fiction catalogue, this is a compilation of writer Eddie McGuigan’s interviews over the years with various cast and some crew members of Old Who. McGuigan seems to have disappeared in recent years, but he was at one time one of the prime movers behind the Outpost Skaro fan website / blog / podcast. To be honest, there’s nothing very new here for anyone who has been paying much attention to DVD extras and Doctor Who magazine over the years, but there’s no harm in it either. You can get Face to Face: the Classic Years here.
Second paragraph of chapter on The Unquiet Dead, the third Ninth Doctor story:
What I particularly appreciated, though, is ‘The Unquiet Dead’’s characters. I remember loonies at the time attacking the new series for being “character-based”, perhaps with a subtext that it was distressing to have new stories that hadn’t simply been regurgitated from old ones. Personally, if anything, I’d make the opposite complaint. 45-minute episodes if handled badly can end up flatter and simpler than an old-school four-parter, especially when the Doctor’s in almost every scene.
Since I’m now up to date with Obverse Books’ Black Archive series, I thought I should start catching up on their other Doctor Who non-fiction, since I have been generally impressed with their output. Though numbered volume 9, this is the first in an envisaged series of volumes looking at Doctor Who and the wider Whoniverse and related shows, restricting itself to TV, books and comics, but not audio plays (understandable on grounds of length, but a bit of a shame).
I have been familiar with Finn Clark’s critical writing since before New Who started, and these essays seem for the most part to have been written at the time without seeing any need to update them. They cover the Ninth Doctor stories, all of Torchwood, and the various iterations of Quatermass (not Whoniverse but a close relation), along with the 1960s sf series A for Andromeda and Russell T. Davies’ other shows Bob & Rose, Casanova, Queer as Folk and The Second Coming.
The most passionate of these pieces are about the Ninth Doctor TV stories and the first two Torchwood seasons. Clark was not impressed by Torchwood and is not afraid to say so. He is pretty merciless and detailed about the faults of all of the TV shows, but Torchwood seems to summon his energy in a way that few others do.
In general I find that my judgement is aligned with his, at least as to which the best and worst episodes and books are, so I shall try and find the time to watch some Quatermass and some of RTD’s other work, which he recommends. (Quatermass has also been thoroughly analysed by Paul Cornell and Liz Myles in their podcast.) Refreshing, but one for completists I think. You can get Time’s Mosaic 9 here.
No one else seemed to notice it. No one mentioned it, at any rate. He supposed they wouldn’t dare. And he didn’t like to ask. It would be absurd to draw deliberate attention to such a weakness in his own body. But sometimes he looked at it in the mirror and he’d prod at it with his finger and it felt spongy and weird, and if he clenched his teeth hard he could even make it throb.
This is another novelisation of a classic Big Finish audio by its author. Jubilee dates from 2003, starring Colin Baker as the Doctor, the late Maggie Stables as companion Evelyn Smythe, and husband and wife team Martin Jarvis and Rosalind Ayres as the dictator of England and his wife. I’ve written the original audio up twice here, once in 2007:
Jubilee was of course the basis for the superb Ninth Doctor story Dalek. I was surprised, though, by how different it was. There are similarities – the first confrontation between Doctor and imprisoned Dalek, the relationship between Dalek and companion (done more convincingly on TV), the Dalek’s quest for orders (done more convincingly here); but there is a huge difference in setting, the audio play taking place in an alternate 2003 where the world is ruled from London by the villainous Mr and Mrs Martin Jarvis, thanks to the Doctor’s intervention a hundred years earlier. And yet this doesn’t fall into the category of Doctor-returns-to-the-scene-of-a-previous-adventure stories, because the earlier Sixth Doctor is still there. It’s a good one, but the TV version is I think better (not always the case; see Spare Parts).
I confess that on this listening I didn’t feel that it worked as well. The two core moments – when first the Doctor and then his companion meet the imprisoned Dalek – are both very good and ended up much less changed for the TV story. The first half is fine, as we get dug into the horror of an parallel timeline where the UK’s dictatorship maintains its position by whipping up fear of the Daleks; but I felt it lost the run of itself at the end, with too many cases of characters revealing that their real motivations are completely different to what we had been told; and I did not feel that all the plot strings were tied up. There is some great humour – especially the opening sequence which parodies the whole concept of Doctor Who – but some dark shifts of tone which seemed to me dissonant rather than masterful. It’s probably fair to say that fannish expectations were different back in 2003, when it looked like the Wilderness Years would last for ever.
I didn’t listen to it again before reading the new novelisation, as it was still pretty fresh in my mind from last time round. And I should say perhaps that although the story is the basis for the superb Ninth Doctor story Dalek, it is a very different thing, with just a couple of key scenes in common – though even then, the beats of Baker / Stables are very different from Eccleston / Piper.
Jubilee is a good Doctor Who book, firmly recasting the story into novel form rather than just being an adaptation of the script. A lot of the rough edges are smoothed off here, and in particular I felt that the unfolding of narrative revelations was more under control than the original script had been; but also the feeling of the fascist, hi-tech but nostalgic British regime came across even more viscerally on the page. Shearman has always been clear that the story was written in reaction to the rise of the hard right, and unfortunately the last two decades have given him plenty more material to draw from.
Perhaps more so than The Chimes of Midnight, it might be a handy gateway book for Who fans who aren’t yet sure about Big Finish – this is a good book based on one of the best of the plays.
“That’s your considered scientific opinion, is it Fitz?’ the Doctor asked.
I had actually read this one twice before, in 2008 and again in 2015, but I came back to it again to round off the ongoing multiple-worlds narrative of the Eighth Doctor Adventures that I have been slogging through. In my first attempt, in 2008, I wrote:
Well, if I’m going to read more of the 8th Doctor novels at all, I’m going to have to start doing it in sequential order. Dipping into the series – in this case because I was interested to see a different treatment of the Princes in the Tower than we got in The Kingmaker – tends to confront me with characters (in this case Miranda and Sabbath) who clearly have deep significance for the author and for followers of the series but who are unknown to me. There are some vivid bits of description, and a twist at the end which I would have appreciated more if the whole book had not felt rather like fan-fiction in a canon I don’t know much about.
This time round, I felt that there was a decent bit of closure for the narrative, but in the end I still don’t have a strong sense of who and why Trix and Sabbath are in the series at all, and the twist at the end is a nice touch but doesn’t actually tie in with the rest of the story. But you can get Sometime Never… here.
Next in this sequence: Halflife, by Mark Michalowski.
A bit of a romp featuring mainly the first four Doctors of New Who, but also vignettes of Old Who (including a fair crack of Fourth Doctor), with the comics-only companions being given a fresh lease of life as well. Inevitably a bit episodic, but the writers and artists have made very good efforts to portray the characters of the various Doctors as they appeared on screen. Worth hunting down. You can get Book One here and Book Two here.
Four more of the BBC Twelfth Doctor audios, released in 2017. To be honest they are not especially memorable. The four stories feature the Doctor and New Yorker brother-and-sister companions Alex and Brandon Yow investigating Weeping Angels. The first, The Lost Angel, read by Kerry Shale, is set in contemporary New York; the second, The Lost Planet, read very well by Nicola Bryant (who oddly does not get cover billing), has alien plants infesting the TARDIS; the third, The Lost Magic, read exceptionally well by Dan Starkey, has the team visiting the Spanish Main and John Dee (probably the best of the four); and the final story, The Lost Flame, read by Claire Higgins, takes us back to Karn. Completists will probably enjoy these but I can’t really make a stronger recommendation. You can get them here, here, here and here.
I had already seen four of the finalists here, and so it did not take lonmg to get through the other two – especially since I gave up on one of them 15 minutes in. Many thanks to the studios for including the shooting scripts for most of the episodes in the Hugo Packet, which is helpful for following the plot, but also for illustrating how much more a dramatic presentation is than just the words.
Two of these six are the climax of a season-line storyline, another is the first in a series and another is the second last (and perhaps winds up the main storyline for that show, the last episode being more of a coda). I have said it before: I do wonder if we would be better served by a Hugo for episodic fiction, and a Hugo for one-shot stories, regardless of length. Only one or two of these finalists actually works well as a standalone piece, and almost everyone who watched and nominated one of them will have watched and appreciated the entire series.
Anyway.
1) The Story and the Engine (Doctor Who) – of course, I must vote for Doctor Who anyway, but this is a very good episode (my second favourite of the season) and also takes the show to a place it had not been before, the largest city of Africa’s largest country, with a spider-god and a cameo from Jo Martin. Good stuff.
2) We is Us (Plur1bus) – a great setup for the season ahead, and probably the best single episode of a generally excellent show. Later episodes built on the premise, but this is very good scene-setting of our imperfect world being turned upside down.
3) All Systems Red (Murderbot) – I was one of the three people in fandom who bounced off the original Murderbot stories, but I really enjoyed the TV series, and the final episode of the main story arc (ninth of the ten) really combined tension, action and humour to take us where we needed to get to.
4) The Perimeter (Murderbot) – This didn’t work as well for me, dancing very close to Murderbot-as-cute-robot, which is a trope I hate. The show-runners were given the choice of two out of three episodes to have on the ballot, and decided to drop the first episode, Free Commerce; I would have preferred it to this one.
And just as a parenthesis, this is only the second time that the Nominee Diversity provision has been applied to a TV series since it was enacted into Section 3.8.6 of the Constitution. Would it really have been so awful to have three episodes of Murderbot on the ballot, which is what voters actually voted for? (Knowing full well that Doctor Who would probably have lost out.)
5) Cold Harbor (Severance) – not having watched a single episode of this show before, and being only vaguely familiar with the premise (the main cast find that they have been psychologically severed between different personalities for their work and non-work lives), I really enjoyed this although I did not understand everything that was going on (having the script to hand helped a bit, but not much). Fantastically well shot and directed; though I did wonder if Adam Scott is capable of wearing more than one expression on his face.
6) The Road to the Spear (Wheel of Time) – I watched the first ten minutes and realised that I did not have a clue what was going on, and was curiously distracted by the utterly wooden acting of Josha Stradowski as protagonist Rand al’Thor. So then I read the script, and I still didn’t understand what was going on. Better uses for an hour of my life than to finish watching it.
Man on left: “No thank you Mr Kin. / Who’s the little girl? Your granddaughter?” Man behind desk: “Chiyoko. And no, my wife and I were never blessed with children. / Chiyoko acts as my … marketing consultant on the Goruda project.”
This is a compilation of comic strip stories from Doctor Who Magazine during the Eleventh Doctor era, all by Jonathan Morris; I had not appreciated it at the time, but they actually have a cleverly worked out arc (about, er, the Child of Time) which culminates at the end, shortly after we meet the killer Brontë sisters.
Charlotte: “Doctor, how delightful to finally make your acquaintance!” Emily: “If I may introduce myself – I am Emily, these are my sisters Charlotte and Anne.” Anne: “Together, we are the Brontës!”
Having been working through the IDW Doctor Who comics dating to the same era, it’s interesting to feel a very different dynamic to the DWM strips, which have much shorter episodes and also had to respond to the TV show in real time – there are some very informative endnotes from Morris and the artists about the creative process.
Also I particularly like the story with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.
C.S. Lewis: “‘…And that was the very end of the adventure of the bookshop.’ / So, what does everyone think?” J.R.R. Tolkien: “Well, I thought it was a bit juvenile… a jumble of unrelated mythologies… all rather derivative, I’m afraid… / And I wasn’t convinced by the allegorical element at all!”
Apologies for length, but this is an important monograph about an important Doctor Who story.
I first watched the original version of The Daleks back in 2007, from the DVD set of the first three Who stories. I wrote then:
Great fun. I had of course read David Whitaker’s novelisation, roughtly 25 years ago. A few things that sprang to mind:
1) the settings were very convincing – the Dalek city (OK, we know with the eye of hindsight that it was a model shot), the sense that this was a big landscape with forest, swamp and caves.
2) Barbara’s romance with Ganatus – there is surely some fanfic dealing with that somewhere?
3) The devious Doctor, sabotaging the TARDIS deliberately to get a chance to explore the city.
4) The time travellers, despite Barbara’s relations with Ganatus, are all set to just bugger off and leave the Thals to their doom at the end of episode 4.
5) The end of episode 6 is indeed a literal cliff-hanger – with a brutal resolution
6) Terry Nation’s attack on pacifism. A lot more ideological than I remembered from the book.
7) The Daleks at the end talking about the total extermination of the Thals practically raise their plungers in Nazi salutes – sounds silly when I describe it but actually very effective.
8) the one bit that really didn’t work – the fight at the end; the time-travellers and Thals win too easily.
Anyhow, well worth it. I watched with the closed caption commentary, which to be honest was more annoying than helpful on the whole. Though it was interesting that the very day of the filming of the Doctor’s first encounter with the Daleks was 22 November 1963, the day before the first Doctor Who (recorded over a month before) was to be broadcast, and also the day of John F Kennedy’s assassination. (And of the deaths of C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley; but who remembers that?)
When I came back to it in 2009 early in my Great Rewatch, I wrote:
The Daleks really is where Doctor Who gets going. There is a case to be made that the pepperpots never get so interesting again. Certainly they are incomprehensible, blankly hostile, psychopathically destructive, and strangely watchable. The conversion of the Thals from pacifists to fighters has some moral ambiguity – the Tardis crew are motivated by their own need to get away, and there is a certain air of tragedy even in the final victory. (Shame that the actual final fight scene is a bit crap.) And Barbara gets the first Who romance with Ganatus (comprehensively rewritten to Barbara/Ian by David Whitaker for the book).
Coming back to it again, I felt that it holds up really well, especially if you are sensitive to the cramped sets and other constraints of the production. The four main cast are very good, clearly getting into their stride. And I should have previously mentioned the superb incidental music of Tristram Cary. You can get it in this box set.
The colorised and abbreviated version of the story released a few years back (you can get it here) foolishly dumps Cary’s music, misses some of the plot and loses out a bit on pacing, but ends with this lovely montage of the rest of the Hartnell era.
I know the novelisation well, and re-read it for this post. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
I ran towards the sound, the branches of trees cracking and powdering in clouds around me as I forced my way through. I found Barbara with her back pressed up against a tree, the knuckles of one hand pushed hard against her teeth. She was staring away from me into some bushes. I caught the glint of the eyes of some animal or other and stopped dead still.
There was a time when this was literally the only Doctor Who book in existence (under its excellent original 1964 title of Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks); indeed it was the only commercially available representation of any Doctor Who story, in those days long before video-recorders (let alone DVDs). So we have Whitaker taking much greater liberty with Terry Nation’s TV script than almost any other novelisation (John Lucarotti’s treatment of The Massacre differs even more from the story as broadcast, but he was reverting back to his own original script).
And the result is quite possibly the best of the novelisations, judged as a novel. The opening of the story is comprehensively rewritten, Ian being an unemployed research scientist who accidentally encounters Barbara, who has been tutoring the mysterious Susan, and gets involved with the Doctor and his Tardis. So much time is invested – wisely – in setting the scene that we are a third of the way through the book before we reach the equivalent point to the end of the TV story’s first episode (out of seven).
The biggest novelty, for those of us who have read almost any of the subsequent hundreds of Who books, is that the whole story is told in the first person, from Ian’s point of view. (It’s not unknown in later Who literature, but it is very unusual.) This does require a certain amount of narrative juggling, but Whitaker gets away with it better than I remembered from when I first read this, three decades ago.
Today’s generation of fans will squee at the pronounced sexual tension in the Ian/Barbara relationship here – the TV story has Barbara close to flirting with Ganatus, one of the Thals, but he barely gets to look at her on the printed page. Poor Susan rather fades into the background as well after she has done her mercy run to the forest. The characterisation of the Doctor is much more harsh and edgy than Hartnell’s depiction; since Whitaker was the story editor, perhaps this was what he had originally in mind? (A possibility supported by the surviving first cut of the first ever episode.)
And the Daleks themselves are pretty memorable here, though Whitaker seems a bit confused about their size – three feet high at one point, four foot six at another, though the illustrations are of our “normal” sized pepperpots. However, this confusion is compensated for by the glorious description of the mutants within the metal casings, and their glass-enclosed leader. The TV show has never managed such memorable presentations of the creatures inside, though it has occasionally tried. (The versions encountered by the Ninth Doctor come closest.)
Anyway, this is an excellent read, well worth hunting down.
In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought, so I went and also rewatched the Peter Cushing film Dr Who and the Daleks. Last time I saw it, in 2010, I wrote:
As a Doctor Who fan, it is impossible not to judge this film in comparison with the original seven-part Dalek story, so I won’t really try. The positives: it is in colour, which is a huge difference. It looks better (except, oddly enough, the interior of Dr. Who’s Tardis, which just looks like a film set with some machines dotted around it). The plot is tighter – it’s difficult (with one exception, which I’ll get to) to remember what has been cut from the original story to produce a film half its length, and some of the best bits are still there. The music is decent – not as unearthly as in the TV version, but not offensive either.
The huge difference, however, is in the performances and portrayals. Peter Cushing plays elderly slightly comical scientist Dr. Who, who keeps a time machine called ‘Tardis’ in his back garden, shaped like a police box for some reason. He doesn’t have the grumpy gravitas of William Hartnell, but I detect some homage to his portrayal in the approach taken by Sylvester McCoy. Roberta Tovey as his nine-year-old granddaughter Susie is actually rather good, and recasts Carole Anne Ford with perhaps a bit more grit.
When I first saw this on a Saturday morning repeat aged about 11, the surprise was that Ian is played by Roy Castle, who of course I knew as the presenter of the BBC children’s programme Record Breakers. This was actually his second film role – he had also appeared with Peter Cushing in another Max Subotsky film with a doctor in the title (Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors) earlier in 1965. Castle’s Ian starts as a clown but more or less settles into the heroic sidekick to Cushing’s Who by the end, probably the closest of the four main characters to the TV version (though William Russell’s Ian is much brainier).
The most serious cut in the film as compared to the TV original is Barbara, Dr. Who’s other grand-daughter, played by Jennie Linden. She gets almost nothing to do, except that her over-vigorous embrace of Ian sets Tardis going in the first place. (And even that is portrayed as Ian’s clumsiness.) She is practically background scenery, especially when compared to Jacqueline Hill’s history teacher.
Rewatching it in close proximity to the original TV story brought home to me how much better the latter is. Just compare the almost wordless acting of Hartnell and Russell here:
versus Cushing, Castle and Tovey playing the same scene for weak laughs here:
Obverse Books have published a novelisation of the film, ostensibly by “Alan Smithee” but I believe actually by Iain McLaughlin. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
Ian considered himself to be fit and healthy. He had been drilled into good shape during his National Service and he was still active now, playing football twice a week and turning out for the local cricket side during the summer. He also went dancing – hopefully from now on with Barbara – every weekend, but even he was feeling the effects of the journey. He was out of breath and perspiring heavily. His shirt was soaked with sweat and his muscles ached.
It made me realise that the visual comedy of the film is one of its key elements, very difficult to transfer to the printed page! Anyway, you can get it here.
So, on to the latest of the Black Archives, Oliver Wake’s monograph on The Daleks, concentrating on the original TV series but also referring to the Whitaker novelisation and the Cushing film, and to later Dalek and Terry Nation stories. There is a real break of format with previous Black Archives, with no less than eighteen short chapters each addressing a different aspect of the story, and building the overall case (which is surely unassailable anyway) that The Daleks can be seen as the crucial founding text of the show as a whole. A short introduction explains the book’s agenda:
I aim, firstly, to explore the influences and inspirations Nation called upon in devising the story; secondly, to analyse the story’s mixed authorship and the ways in which varied contributors gave it meaning; and thirdly, to examine The Daleks’ world-building as a piece of televisual fantasy fiction.
The first chapter, “Commissioning The Daleks”, recapitulates what we know about how the story came into being – it was written very quickly, which meant that it was ready for production when an early gap needed to be filled.
The second chapter, “The Bomb”, looks at how the story portrays radiation sickness and the neutron bomb.
The third chapter, “A Climate of Fear”, looks at other portrayals of the aftermath of nuclear war in fiction up to the mid-1960s. Its second paragraph is:
Stories of nuclear weapons had been science fiction and consequently were hidden away in niche publications. After the Second World War they began to emerge into the mainstream, in Britain at least; in the more conservative USA they tended to remain hived off in the sci-fi niche¹. Every conceivable scenario of nuclear devastation was played out in literature, much of it ill-informed and scientifically illiterate. ¹ Brians, Paul, Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, unpaginated online edition, Chapter 1.
The fourth chapter, “The Survivors”, queries the extent to which the story is meant to show the future of Planet Earth humanity.
The fifth chapter, “The Dead Planet”, looks at the Petrified Jungle and also in some detail at the Magnadon (the dead metallic lizard).
The sixth chapter, “Alien Sound”, looks at the brilliant soundscape of the story created by Tristram Cary’s music and Brian Hodgson’s effects. As I noted earlier, this is one point where the Cushing film is seriously deficient.
The seventh chapter, “The Time Machine”, looks at the influence of Wells’ novel and George Pal’s film adaptation on The Daleks.
The eighth chapter, “The Mutants”, looks at what we are told about both Thals and Daleks as mutations, and points out the inconsistencies. (I must say I prefer this approach to desperately trying to retcon everything.)
The ninth chapter, “The Aryan Thals”, points out the problematic of the perfect Thal race being tall and blond, leaning again on The Time Machine.
The tenth chapter, “Pacifism, the Thals and Terry Nation”, goes into Nation’s well-documented political views, which he expressed as pacifist and sometimes socialist. (So Gareth Roberts is completely wrong on this, not surprisingly.) Ian’s argument with the Thals is Nation’s argument with himself.
The eleventh chapter, “Gender and Authority”, looks at the story’s problematic treatment of gender roles among the Thals and the character of Dyoni, and queries how both Thal and Dalek societies are actually governed.
The twelfth chapter, “Martians and Ants”, looks at the influence of The War of the Worlds (both the Wells novel and the 1953 film) and the early John Wyndham story “Wanderers of Time” on The Daleks.
The thirteenth chapter, “The Power (and Irradiation) of the Daleks”, looks at the Daleks’ dependence on static electricity, their life support systems, and their vulnerability to radiation, and then asks, what do they eat?
The fourteenth chapter, “Outer Space Robot People”, makes some interesting points about who the Daleks are shown to be, as opposed to later portrayals.
In their first appearance, the Daleks are scared isolationists. They are survivalists trapped in their fallout shelter, unable to go outside but possessive of the world beyond their city. This jealousy manifests as paranoia and xenophobia when the Doctor’s party and then the Thals come calling.
The sixteenth chapter, “The Direction of the Daleks”, calls attention to the work of Christopher Barry and Richard Martin in bringing the story (and the Daleks) alive.
The seventeenth chapter, “Extermination, Then?” looks at how the Daleks’ catchphrase slipped subtly into the script.
The eighteenth chapter, “Dal to Lek”, looks at the sources for the name Dalek. These include Wyndham’s “Wanderers of Time” and Nation’s general fondness for cycling through similar names. Wake considers and discounts the relevance of the fact that “dalek”/“daleko” means “far away” in the languages once known collectively as Serbo-Croat.
If I may divert for a moment, I am not quite so sure. My relationship with Balkan nationalisms is ambivalent, but there is a haunting Serbian First World War song, “Tamo daleko”, about the exiled remnants of the Serbian army sheltering on Corfu. (As a Serbian military friend once said to me, it’s not so much like Dire Straits’ “So Far Away From Me”, which would be a literal translation of the title, as “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary”, only less jolly.) I do not know if Nation was ever exposed to, say, a Serbian restaurant playing live or recorded folk music, or some other aspect of Serbian culture, but I can imagine him hearing this song somewhere, somehow, and “daleko” sticking in his subconscious memory. It is the heavily emphasised second word of each of the first three verses; even if you don’t speak any Serbian, it is difficult to miss.
A brief conclusion pulls all this together and looks at questions of authorship.
An even briefer note looks at one of the story’s many variant titles, “Beyond the Sun”, and how this might have come to be.
I was a bit worried at first that I wasn’t going to like this Black Archive; Wake’s style starts out a little jerky. But he settles down fairly quickly and delivers a must-read analysis of one of the most important Doctor Who stories. You can get it here.
I am enjoying working my way through the BBC Doctor Who audiobooks starting from a decade ago. This is a series of four loosely linked stories, two by one of my favourite Who writers (James Goss) and two by one of my least favourite (George Mann). The linking theme is a family called Winter who possess a card that summons the Doctor and the TARDIS, and is passed through the centuries. I may have missed something, but I didn’t think that the overarching theme was actually resolved, which subtracts from the narrative oomph. Also unfortunately the sequence is not related to Goss’ excellent Eleventh Doctor novel The Dead of Winter.
The Gods of Winter by James Goss, read by Claire Higgins (Ohila of Karn), starts with a little girl who has lost her cat and summons the Doctor to find it. We then gradually discover that there is more going on in the human space colony in conflict with the mysterious Golhearn. I don’t think it is a big spoiler to say that the second half of the story takes us several decades forward to a moment when the little girl is now one of her community’s leaders, in dire straits, and the Doctor exerts diplomatic skills to sort it all out. You can get The Gods of Winter here.
The House of Winter, by George Mann, read by David Schofield (Odin) surprised me in that I actually enjoyed it. Th premise is that the Doctor and Clara are stuck in a house with its creepy owner and two creepy servants, and a bunch of vampire moths. There is one classically awful Mann-ish bit of description: “His expression was serene, save for his eyes which were open and staring, peering up at her as if pleading for help” – so, not actually very serene at all. But apart from that it hung together very well. You can get The House of Winter here.
The Sins of Winter, by James Goss, read by Robin Soans (Luvic in The Keeper of Traken and the Chronolock guy in Face the Raven), is the best of these (and the fact that the linking between the four is weak means that you can get this without having to worry about the other three). Shadrak Winter, the High Cardinal of the Cult of the Prime Self, summons the TARDIS to his space cathedral which is infested by the sluglike Sinful, who love feasting on people’s past sins. The Doctor has plenty of these to go on, leaving Clara to save the day. It’s a theme that has been used before and since i Doctor Who, but executed very well here. I see that fan opinion is divided on this one, but I’m on the positive side. You can get The Sins of Winter here.
The Memory of Winter, by George Mann, read by Jemma Redgrave (who is the best reader of all of these) takes the Doctor and Clara to fifteenth-century France for an adventure with Joan of Arc. There is Time Lord knowledge turning up in the wrong place and giving poor Joan the impression of hearing voices. I thought the story was well enough done, but it doesn’t really tie into the historical events around Joan at all and doesn’t resolve the linking mystery of the series. You can get The Memory of Winter here.
