The Curse of Fenric, by Una McCormack (and Ian Briggs)

Posted on 25 August 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

When I first watched The Curse of Fenric in 2007, I wrote:

The Curse of Fenric had been strongly recommended to me, and I adopted the suggestion that I watch the extended director’s cut version on the DVD rather than the show as originally broadcast (in keeping with the non-sequential traditions of the show, this was actually the last story of the four that I watched, during a three-hour stopover in Ankara airport last Friday).
Well, it is indeed a good story – most memorably, Nicholas Parsons, of all people, playing it straight as the doomed vicar Mr Wainwright; a setting in the second world war that actually looks a bit like it might be the 1940s; vampire villains which now seem an eerie foreshadowing of Buffy; secret codes and ancient evils, and the crucial importance of faith. Indeed, of the four last stories, it is the one which most resembles classic Who at its best.
I was not utterly convinced by the plot; I never like stories which crucially depend on some unbroadcast and untold past adventure of the Doctor’s. And although I did like Tomek Bork’s portrayal of Sorin, I was not totally convinced by the behaviour of the Russian soldiers (and to a lesser extent of the British) – as soldiers, that is. However, in general, this was a good ’un.

When I came back to it for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:

I watched the original version of The Curse of Fenric this time rather than the director’s cut, and noticed only one significant difference – we cannot hear what the Doctor is saying when he makes his profession of faith to ward off the Haemovores, whereas the director’s cut makes it clear that he is reciting the names of all his companions in a litany. It’s another excellent story, with the plot of human conflict being exploited by non-human forces which has a venerable pedigree in Who, and the continuing accumulation of details about what the Doctor may really be up to – and, almost two years after her arrival, more about what Ace is there for – I think only Turlough acquires a comparable amount of back-story in the course of his time in the Tardis, and Ace’s tale works much better. My only quibble about The Curse of Fenric is that I have never been impressed by the Haemovores, whose costumes are a bit cheap-looking to the point that we have to be told to be scared of them by scary music.

Rewatching, I wasn’t quite as impressed as I had been on previous occasions – and I note that both times I had seen it before in the context of the rest of the season; this was the first time I had tried it as effectively a standalone. It feels frankly a bit under-directed; too often the actors are just moving from point A to point B without doing much else, and the cinematography is workmanlike rather than interesting. Also this time around I watched the original TV broadcast, which is not as good as the subsequent edits, and that may have been a mistake. I’m glad that Cartmel was trying to revive the show, but he had not yet got there.

Here’s a weird one for you. Pyramids of Mars, already covered by the Black Archive, and Full Circle, also already covered by the Black Archive, were broadcast on exactly the same calendar dates as The Curse of Fenric: 25 October, 1 November, 8 November and 15 November, in 1975, 1980 and 1989 respectively. The first two were shown on Saturday nights, and The Curse of Fenric on Wednesdays. The day after Episode 3 was shown, the Berlin Wall fell.

When I first read the novelisation in 2008, I wrote:

Ian Briggs, on the other hand, does a masterful job with The Curse of Fenric, perhaps the most adult of any of the Who novelisations (in the sense of talking about sex). The most striking change from the TV original is that the vicar, Mr Wainwright, is explictly young (rather than Nicholas Parsons). Apart from that, the whole narrative feels very soundly rooted both in itself and in Who – particularly with Ace’s introduction in Dragonfire (which of course Briggs also wrote). For once, the Doctor’s-hidden-past motif actually seems to make sense rather than feeling like a bolted-on idea (the only other story that achieves this is The Face of Evil). An excellent read.
Also a comfortable pass for the Bechdel test, what with Phyllis, Jean and their landlady on the one hand, and Katharine, Audrey and the Wrens on the other, with Ace wandering between them.

The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

A thin trickle of villagers, all dressed in their grey Sunday best, were making their way home down the country lane. Only Miss Hardaker, a sharp-faced spinster in her fifties, and two teenage girls lingered on the church porch where the young vicar listened patiently. Miss Hardaker was determined to make her point.

Rereading the novelisation, the same points struck me again; it’s a surprisingly adult book for the range, with the London girls and Ace bantering about sex. And given the timings, it does make more sense for the vicar to be a young man, rather than 66-year-old Nicholas Parsons. There are a couple of good interludes as well, one of which appears to have a drown-up Ace marrying a Russian aristocrat ancestor of Sorin’s. It’s one of the best of the 160+ novelisations.

Both of my Black Archive reads for this month are by writers who I consider friends. Una McCormack is a sparring partner on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/unamccormack/status/1473947186853523459

In this monograph, she has gone for an approach of developing at length four of the interesting themes of The Curse of Fenric, rather than an all-round justification of the story, and as someone who loves the story less than she does, I found it helpful and redemptive. I love most of all the Black Archive books that explain to me why I like some of my favourite Doctor Who stories; but I probably get more out of the ones like this that challenge me to think again about some that are less high up my personal list.

The short introduction sets out her stall, making the link between the timing of first broadcast and the Fall of the Wall, and asserting boldly that “The Curse of Fenric is the best story in what was, at that point, the best season yet of Doctor Who. In other words, I love it.”

The first chapter convincingly positions the story and the entire era in the context of a decade of Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher (who as it turned out would last only another year), and the culture wars waged by government supporters, particularly on and in the BBC. The solution to the chess puzzle of the story is, after all, for the pawns to break ranks and join forces against their common oppressor.

The second chapter points out that this is the first Doctor Who story to explicitly use the Second World War as a setting. (Surprisingly, the Nazis in Silver Nemesis are not named as such.) The war itself is of course a crucial cultural historical experience for the UK, as for other countries. But it’s interesting to look, as McCormack does, at the other later presentations of the war in Who, some of which work and many of which don’t, and to explore the good and bad side of using it as the background for a Who story.

The third chapter looks at Ace as a character, arguing that her arc is the first example of the more modern approach to companions that we have seen in the New Who era, and applying some good feminist analysis to the Doctor and his relations with the women who he tracvels with. The second paragraph of the third chapter, including a quote from Joanna Russ, is:

Russ, in her essay, and in typically acerbic fashion, rapidly sketches and dispenses with the clichés of science fiction: the ‘intergalactic suburbia’ in which the 1950s household remains intact and the woman is wife, mother, and home-maker; the ‘passive and involuntary’ women as prizes or motives for space-faring ‘He-Men’; and the domineering Amazons of matriarchies, waiting to be brought to heel by the arrival of men. Her most illuminating criticism for our purposes, however, is of Ursula K Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. This novel, published in 1969, a Nebula Award winner and generally accepted to be ground-breaking in its treatment of gender, concerns the inhabitants of the planet Gethen, who have no sex or gender, except that every four weeks they pass through a cycle in which they become either male or female, and sexually potent. The story is motored by the arrival on Gethen of a male human observer, who becomes immersed in Gethenian culture and politics. Russ skilfully argues this is a book from which women are absent:

‘It is, I must admit, a deficiency in the English language that these people must be called “he” throughout, but “put that together with the native hero’s personal encounters in the book, the absolute lack of interest in child-raising, the concentration on work, and what you have is a world of men.’⁴

⁴ Russ, ‘Image of Women’, p215.”

The brief short chapter reflects on myth and Doctor Who, and the way in which Cartmel was setting up the Doctor as a mythic figure and using themes from mythology to help tell the story.

I guess my biggest complaint about the book is that it’s a bit short. But you can get it here.

The Lost Skin, by Andy Frankham-Allen; Scary Monsters, by Simon Forward

Posted on 22 August 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Two more in the Candy Jar series of Lethbridge-Stewart stories, a novella by the “showrunner” and a novel by a veteran Who writer.

The Lost Skin, by Andy Frankham-Allen. Second paragraph of third chapter:

He eventually found the Docherty house, but Mr Docherty was of no help.

This is really good, one of the best of the series so far. It takes the Brigadier and friends to John O’Groats in the far north of Scotland, where they are investigating something resembling the selkie myth; at the same time they are pursued by journalist Harold Chorley and his associate Larry Greene. It turns out that Chorley is actually from Monaghan and reinvented himself with posh English accent to become a journalist, making him one of very few Irish characters in the Whoniverse. The whole thing is very well done, playing with identity and fate, and I strongly recommend it even for those who are less familiar with this continuity. Spinoff fiction at its best. You can get it here.

The Laughing Gnome: Scary Monsters, by Simon A. Forward. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Major Grigoriy Bugayev parked the service truck at the base of the steps. In his mirror, the fuel truck veered gently to a stop under the airliner’s wing.

Perhaps my concentration was weak while on holiday, but I found this rather confusing and not all that interesting. The Brigadier and friends jump all along their own timelines, including alternative timelines, and it did not make a lot of sense for me. I may try it again. You can get it here.

Dalek Combat Training Manual, by Richard Atkinson and Mike Tucker

Posted on 19 August 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

First page of Section III:

This is a lovely lovely book about the Daleks, supposedly by the Time Lords, citing all of the Doctor’s televised adventures with them and constructing as much continuity as is possible. Nothing very new for me, but a joy none the less. Well done Richard Atkinson and Mike Tucker for putting it together. You can get it here.

Heaven Sent, by Kara Dennison; Hell Bent, by Alyssa Franke

Posted on 14 August 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

The two next in sequence in the generally wonderful Black Archives series of monographs on particular Doctor Who stories. In general I write one post per Black Archive, but that’s partly because in general I have already written a lot of material on each story; that’s less the case with the more recent stories, and in any case these two stories are quite closely linked, so I’m giving you both of them here.

Heaven Sent is, in my completely objective view, one of the best episodes of New Who and possibly the best of the Capaldi era. It’s the one where the Doctor finds himself imprisoned in a tower, doomed to repeat the same actions over and over again until he achieves freedom; Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor is the only speaking part, though we also see Jenna Coleman as the recently deceased Clara, and the mysteriously threatening Veil (played by Jami Reid-Quarrell). It is directed by Rachel Talalay, who is one of the best directors of Doctor Who ever, and written by Steven Moffat, who sometimes dropped the ball but is fantastic when on form, and this time he is on form. It looks great and was the last Doctor Who episode to do at all well in the Hugos (coming second to Jessica Jones). I mentioned it as my top Twelfth Doctor episode in my list of recommendations for people who want to get into New Who.

Kara Dennison’s excellent monograph starts with an introduction wherein she makes the point that this is a rare, possibly unique, case of a Doctor Who story which is all about the character development of the title character. We have the Doctor grieving and guilty over Clara’s death, imprisoned in a castle which will take billions of years to break out of, learning from repetition. An extraordinary setup.

The first chapter analyses the story in Jungian terms, which after all is a pretty obvious thing to do: the rooms, the dust and skulls, the moat, the ascent and descent. This analysis mainly works because Jung was largely right, and hit on some pretty deep threads of the mind.

The second chapter looks at the only other significant presence in the story the Veil, and how it reflects the Doctor’s own personality and experience. And also Freddy Krueger from Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare.

The very short third chapter looks at how the Doctor’s repetition of the path through the castle changes both him and the path, and how the clues are laid out; is he the king or the shepherd boy? Or both? Its second paragraph is:

It is, of course, the way of the Doctor. Despite the Doctor’s constant talk of ‘fixed points,’ with everything from Jack Harkness¹ to moon dragons², he can’t claim that he’s ever left a site untouched.
¹ Utopia (2007).
² Kill the Moon.

The fourth chapter looks at the Doctor’s personality in itself, and how it has been developing since the last season of Old Who (including in Moffat’s The Curse of Fatal Death); and in particular how Heaven Sent exposes some of the flaws in his character.

The fifth chapter looks at time loops, bringing in the fascinating case of the Endless Eight anime which I was previously unaware of. (Also of course Groundhog Day and The Dark Tower.)

A final brief sixth chapter admits that Moffat may not have been thinking about Jung at all. To be honest that misses the point for me; if Jung was right (and I think he was), we are all subconsciously thinking along Jungian lines, whether we like it or not.

Anyway, a book that gave me new things to consider about a favourite story. You can get it here.

The season finale which immediately followed Heaven Sent was Hell Bent, which I do not rate as highly, though rewatching I realised that it does have a number of excellent aspects. The Doctor, having escaped at the end of the last episode, seizes control on Gallifrey, brings Clara back to life but ends up with no memories of her; meanwhile she ends up romping around the universe with Maisie Williams’ character Ashildr/Me.

On first watching, and on rewatching before writing this, I found the story a bit too convoluted to be completely entertaining. However there are some lovely bits. The regeneration of the Gallifreyan general, previously played by Ken Bones, into Tnia Miller is the first clear onscreen change of a Time Lord between apparent races and genders. It was also my first introduction to Miller, who I have since found captivating in Years and Years and Foundation.

And on the one hand, I slightly regret Moffat’s tendency not to let the dead stay dead, but on the other, I actually prefer this closure to Clara’s story than the one we got in Face the Raven; and Maisie Williams is always a fun element to add to the mix.

When I visited the Doctor Who studio in 2015, the Tardis set was still set up from this story. The books on the shelves include a lot of H.E. Bates.

Alyssa Franke (who in real life works on the staff of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand) has provided what I found a rather redemptive reading of Hell Bent, persuading me that there are indeed hidden depths to it; in particular she brings a feminist analysis to the story, which certainly made me reconsider it (in a good way). And also I have to admit that her fannish enthusiasm for Hell Bent is slightly infectious.

A brief introduction sets out her stall, quoting a glorious line from the script:

‘The Doctor is flying around the classic console, like a distinguished Scottish actor who’s slightly too excited for his own good.’

and concludes,

My hope is that you will read this and not see it as a definitive statement on Hell Bent’s feminist values, but rather as an exploration of how it explores themes of power, privilege, patriarchy, and autonomy. It’s the beginning of the conversation, not the end.

The first full chapter examines the Doctor’s patriarchal flaws, particularly of the Tenth and Twelfth Doctors, and looks at how he often erodes, or attempts to erode, the autonomy of the women who he meets and travels with. Clara’s fate is in stark opposition to Donna’s, and must surely be read as a commentary on it.

The second chapter looks at the Western genre in Doctor Who, given that large chunks of Hell Bent are set in the US desert (in a diner which turns out to be Clara and Ashildr’s Tardis) and also given the dynamic between the Doctor and the Gallifreyans. Franke makes some telling comparisons with Shane.

The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

Clara was always a character who was never content to play second fiddle to the Doctor. When Steven Moffat first wrote the character, he imagined her as a young, contemporary, female version of the Doctor, who would be ‘terribly clever’ but also have ‘a wayward ego’, reflecting both the Doctor’s strengths and flaws. And like the Doctor, she isn’t particularly suited to living an everyday, domestic life. Moffat said that Clara ‘doesn’t feel like she particularly fits in the world that she lives in’ and that ‘she’s not really very good at living a normal life.’ ¹
¹ Anderson, Kyle, ‘Steven Moffat on Clara Becoming the Doctor in Doctor Who Series 8’.

It looks in more detail at Clara and the extent to which she was always set up as a contrast to the Doctor – I had not noticed that Jenna Coleman is credited ahead of Peter Capaldi in Death in Heaven – and compares her arc and departure with the other New Who companions, again notably Donna, but also Rose and Amy. (Martha, who leaves completely of her own volition, is the exception.)

The fourth chapter looks briefly at Clara’s leitmotif – I like that fact that the Black Archives often do include a look at the incidental music for the show. It’s really neat that the Doctor plays it diegetically on his guitar when he meets Clara in the desert without knowing who she is.

The long, final fifth chapter mentions Hell Bent only incidentally as part of a sustained campaign by Moffat to normalise the possibility that the Doctor could be a woman, undoing the harm of his jokey introduction of Joanna Lumley in The Curse of Fatal Death. I mentioned above that my own most vivid memory of the episode is the General’s regeneration into Tnia Miller, and I’m sure that I’m not alone. But Franke goes in depth into public statements and other sources to show how the ground was prepared for Jodie Whittaker by Moffat.

So, this is the Black Archive at its best: I like it when (as with Heaven Sent) they produce good and thought-provoking analysis of a story that I already like; but I love it when they produce good and thought-provoking analysis of a story that I did not particularly care for, and prod me into reassessing the experience. You can get the Hell Bent monograph here.

Next up: The Curse of Fenric.

Ninth Doctor Adventures: Old Friends

Posted on 4 August 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Trailer:

As previously noted, I’ve been increasingly enjoying the Big Finish audio adventures with Christopher Eccleston reprising his role as the Ninth Doctor, and this was another good set installment. Unusually the three stories are a singleton and a two-parter, so you’ll need to plan your listening accordingly.

The first story, Fond Farewell, is set in an intergalactic funeral parlour where the decedents are resurrected in replica to preside over their own memorial ceremonies. Roger Zelazny had a similar idea in his short story “Walpurgisnacht” (collected in the original and better Unicorn Variations). All is not what is seems, as the deceased archæologist who the Doctor wishes to honour has left a complex situation of romance and memory.

Heavy star power in the form of Juliet Stevenson as the grieving widow, though Emily Taaffe (a rare Irish voice) is more dominant as one-off companion Sasha. It’s by David K. Barnes, who also wrote the First Doctor/Second Doctor mashup Daughter of the Gods and one of the episodes of Doctor Who: Redacted. Good enough.

The two-parter Way of the Burrymen / The Forth Generation brings together Eccleston, Cybermen and the Brigadier (this is not a spoiler as they all feature on the cover). It is by Roy Gill who wrote the first of the Class spinoff audios and a Tenth Doctor story. The Tardis lands in Edinburgh in the present day where there is anthropology, the Forth bridge, and tragic doomed romance.

Jon Culshaw does a very good and respectful job of evoking Nicholas Courtney in his later years (and of course the very first UNIT adventure also featured the Cybermen). But there is a lovely dynamic between the two lovers at the centre of the story, played by Warren Brown and Elinor Lawless. A good cap to the first dozen Eccleston audios.

You can get the set here.

The New Unusual, by Adrian Sherlock and Andy Frankham-Allen

Posted on 2 August 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

‘Better late than never, Miss Travers,’ he said, glancing at the wall-mounted clock. It was almost 6pm.

Another in the series of Lethbridge-Stewart novels from Candy Jar books, this takes the Brigadier and crew, including Anne Travers, to Australia to investigate mysterious alien eggs which exert a peculiar influence on the minds of those who touch them. There are aliens behind it all of course. As is normally the case for this series, it’s well done and will keep me reading more of them. You can get it here.

The Unofficial Master Annual 2074, ed. Mark Worgan

Posted on 25 July 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

A student at the London School of Economics, Delgado did not complete his degree. He only lasted 18 months working in the business sector before pursuing his dream of being air actor at the age of 20. Starting out in repertory, through sheer determination, hard work and natural talent, he became a familiar figure on film, television and radio. The list of names he worked with is a who’s who of film stars, including Alex Guinness, John Mills, Christopher Lee, Charlton Heston, Laurence Olivier, Diana Dors, Rex Harrison, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. The diversity of that list shows that, whilst often typecast as the villain, Delgado was far from being a one-trick pony. He could lend his talents to a variety of genres, from the swashbuckling adventure and Hammer horror, to pantomime and comedy.

Another of the unofficial annuals, following the unofficial Doctor Who annuals for 1965, 1972 and 1987, this takes the Delgado!Master as the central character and has him endure various adventures of his own. One or two of them could have benefitted from a firmer smack of the editor’s hand, but in general it’s an entertaining exploration of one of the most important secondary characters of the show. There’s a particularly good early one with the Monk.

My copy is in the Omnibus edition with the unofficial 1965 and 1972 Doctor Who annuals, and also includes a few Seventh Doctor/Ace stories in case the series had been continued.

Out of print, sorry!

Ninth Doctor and Thirteenth Doctor audios

Posted on 15 July 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

The end of a week of Doctor Who audio-blogging – book-blogging will return shortly, but I also will try and keep more up to date with the other media I have been consuming here.

Lost Warriors is the third volume of plays featuring Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor, following from the welcome first set and the excellent second set. Two are OK and one that is excellent.

The first of these is The Hunting Season by James Kettle, a new writer for me, bringing the Ninth Doctor to a posh country house in the early twentieth century, which he naturally dislikes, with aliens infesting the estate. Not all is as it seems of course. Annette Badland is great as the cook, but it doesn’t quite seem to find its soul. One reviewer comments that it is the only one of these three not rooted in historical events, which may be part of it.

We’re on an upward curve with the next one, The Curse of Lady Macbeth by Lizzie Hopley. This is largely a two-hander between Eccleston and the lovely Neve McIntosh as Gruach, the historical Lady Macbeth, with an optimistic reading of her role in Scottish history which surely nods to Dorothy Dunnett’s King Hereafter, bothered by aliens again of course but also fulfilling a progressive government role.

And it peaks with Monsters in Metropolis by John Dorney, where a lone Cyberman gets involved with Fritz Lang’s movie-making in 1920s Berlin. It has a similar plot to the TV story Dalek, with Nicholas Briggs playing the monster which is changed by its survival in a human world, but the historical setting and intersection with early sf make it very different. Helen Goldwyn, a Big Finish veteran actor, director and writer, shines here as one-off companion Anna Dreyfus, Fritz Lang’s assistant.

You can get them here.

Dorney throws in a lovely and not completely gratuitous reference to Norman Hartnell, the fashion designer whose career was just getting started at the time that Lang was making Metropolis. His cousin William, seven years younger, is also known to Doctor Who fans.

And finally, I finish this write-up of recent Doctor Who audios with one that didn’t come from Big Finish.

Doctor Who: Redacted is a ten-part audio story featuring Jodie Whittaker’s Thirteenth Doctor, released by the BBC between April and June 2022, mostly by Juno Dawson. Although Whittaker makes frequent appearances, along with Anjli Mohindra as Rani, Jemma Redgrave and Ingrid Oliver as Kate Stewart and Osgood, and a recast Doon McKichan as Madam Vastra, the protagonist is Charlie Craggs starring as Cleo Proctor, supported by Lois Chimimba as Abby and Holly Quin-Ankrah as Shawna, three podcasters who are trying to get to the bottom of the mystery of the Doctor and her blue box – especially when people associated with the mysterious traveller start to disappear. It’s all very well done.

The whole thing is very different from a Big Finish production – much more podcasty, much less TV-on-the-radio. It’s something of a hymn to fandom, but given Dawson’s authorship and Craggs’ leading role, it’s not surprising that it’s also a salute to Who as a safe space for inclusivity. And it’s the BBC showing the way yet again: it’s difficult to imagine Big Finish running a story with a trans lead and the two most important supporting roles played by actors of colour, or at least it was until the BBC showed it could be done.

Even outside the UK I was able to download all 10 episodes (none longer than half an hour) for free from here.

Back to books. Soon.

Jenny and Susan: The Doctor’s daughter and the Doctor’s granddaughter

Posted on 14 July 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Two more Big Finish audios to report on in my week of BF write-ups: these concern the only canonical descendants of the Doctor in TV Who (though there is an adopted daughter as well in spinoff fiction). Carole Ann Ford returns after fifty-something years to play Susan in the aftermath of the Daleks’ Invasion of Earth, and Georgia Tennant comes back for a second series of adventures as Jenny, the Doctor’s daughter. In both cases they are backed up by Sean Biggerstaff as the male lead.

I hugely enjoyed the first series of audios featuring Georgia Tennant as Jenny, and hugely enjoyed the second, Jenny: Still Running, as well. (In the meantime we’ve also had an excellent double header-with Peter Davison and another with Michelle Ryan as Christina de Souza.) In all cases she is backed up by Sean Biggerstaff as the naive but enigmatic Noah, who does not know his own origins.

The first of these, Inside the Moldovarium by Adrian Poynton, brings back Simon Fisher-Becker as Dorium Maldovar from the TV stories A Good Man Goes to War and The Wedding of River Song. Jenny and Noah discover that he is trying to sell a TARDIS to the highest bidder, and attempt to intervene; but the situation turns out to be more complex than they thought. Everyone is clearly enjoying themselves.

In the second, Altered Status by Christian Brassington and Matt Fitton, a closed society is gradually being taken over by Suits who strongly resemble the Mondasian Cybermen of The Tenth Planet and Spare Parts; I have always found the Cybermen the least interesting of the classic Who monsters, but a good effort is made here.

The highlight of the set is the third play, Calamity Jenny by John Dorney. As you will surmise from the title, it’s a Western story with narration by Michael Brandon (Mr Glynis Barber) and only two other named actors, Jana Carpenter (killed by the Dalek in Dalek) and veteran voice actor James Goode. There are a couple of lovely key concepts here – an unlucky crystal that causes the owner to achieve the opposite of what they want, and a neatly done time paradox. Dorney is one of Big Finish’s best writers, and that is high praise.

But I also really liked the final installment, Her Own Worst Enemy by Lisa McMullin. The first Jenny series featured Jenny and Noah being pursued by a killer cyborg played by Siân Phillips, who you may remember from I CLAVDIVS and who turns 90 next year. In this story Jenny and Noah go back along the cyborg’s timeline to try and prevent it from becoming a killer, making interesting discoveries about the future society from which it came. A core plot element, of social engineering and weeding out the unfit, is reprised from Altered Status but I think done a bit better, and there is a brutal twist ending setting up the next Jenny series. Anyway, recommended and you can get it here.

I think Siân Phillips is not quite the oldest actor to appear in a Big Finish audio; that honour must belong to William Russell, who was born in 1924 and reprised Ian Chesterton in a 2020 story starring Carole Ann Ford as Susan. I listened to that and enjoyed it during the pandemic, but failed to write it up at the time (I may get back to it).

In After the Daleks, Roland Moore (who I think is a new writer for me) tells the story of Susan and her boyfriend David (played by Sean Biggerstaff, as noted above, rather than Peter Fraser who has not been seen since 1981) in the immediate aftermath of the repulsion of the Daleks and the departure of the TARDIS without Susan on it. We have another character called Jenny, retained from the original 1964-5 story but this time played by Lucy Briers, daughter of Ann Davies who originated the role (but sadly died earlier this year) and also of Richard Briers. It’s a good complex drama suggesting that the worst monsters sometimes come in human form. You can get it here.

Dodo rebooted (with @LCornelius_): new First Doctor audios

Posted on 13 July 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Back in February at Gallifrey One, Big Finish of course did their best to encourage us to take an interest in their latest output; I had a couple of encounters during the convention with Lauren Cornelius, who has been hired as the new Dodo. She was born after Old Who ended, a generation after Jackie Lane appeared as the first incarnation of Dodo on the screen, but conveyed immense enthusiasm for the role and successfully charmed me into buying her first two audios.

The Secrets of Det-Sen, released two months after the death of Jackie Lane last year, features Peter Purves playing both Stephen and the First Doctor, and is the prequel to The Abominable Snowmen, where if you remember the Second Doctor has somehow ended up with the holy ghanta, a sacred bell from Det-Sen monastery, which he brings back after 300 years. It’s by Andy Frankham-Allen, whose Lethbridge-Stewart spinoff books feature a lot of Yeti. To be honest, while I loved the performances, especially Cornelius throwing herself into Dodo, I felt the plot was a bit thin, but I enjoyed it anyway. You can get it here.

The two-story boxed set The Outlaws is better in a lot of respects. Both stories are by women – Lizbeth Myles and Lizzie Hopley; the first is set around the historical siege of Lincoln in 1216, though has a strong flavour of Robin Hood and reminded me a bit of the excellent Jonathan Morris story, “The Thief of Sherwood“, not least because both feature the Meddling Monk. Myles puts in some excellent twists and gives Cornelius as Dodo some good lines, with Glynis Barber as the (entirely historical) chatelaine of Lincoln Castle and Rufus Hound as the Monk.

The second story, The Miniaturist, is a really interesting experiment – I don’t recall another First Doctor story set in or near our present day, in this case 2019. Here we have scientific investigations in a salt mine that intersect with the titular alien entity (who is played by Annette Badland), and cause both the Doctor and Dodo to take a long look into themselves as well as trying to save the day. A thoughtful piece. You can get both stories here.

I’m sorry to say that I am not yet convinced by Stephen Noonan’s First Doctor. I have perhaps been spoiled by the different interpretations of Peter Purves and David Bradley, both of whom came to it via William Hartnell (Purves knew him personally of course, Bradley played him before playing the First Doctor). Noonan felt to me a bit unmoored, giggling and chortling more than necessary. You can judge for yourself from the behind-the-scenes video:

Face the Raven, by Sarah Groenewegen

Posted on 5 July 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Latest in the Black Archive sequence of monographs on Doctor Who stories, the first of a trilogy with the next two. I don’t seem to have written much about Face the Raven before, though I included it in my starters’ list of New Who five years ago. I actually saw the set for the story when I visited the Cardiff studio in 2015, and though I did not take pictures, I very much liked it. The producers did too, and kept it around for a bit longer than had been planned. This of course was many months before the episode was broadcast, and one of the marvels of TV is that what is actually quite a small and constrained space can be made to look much more expansive on screen, as if, to coin a phrase, it is bigger on the inside than the outside.

Rewatching it now, I felt that it somewhat pulls its punches. I had completely forgotten who Rigsy is, which slightly blunts the drama. For the high stakes of the story, I didn’t really think that Capaldi and Coleman quite rose to the emotions of the occasion. Stephen Moffat has a habit of killing off his main characters and then resurrecting them again, and that expectation also slightly deterred me from investing much in the drama (and indeed Clara comes back again two episodes later).

Having said that, I’m definitely not one of the Clara-haters who were so prevalent in the fandom at one point. I really like Jenna Coleman as an actress, the character was intriguing and had more of a real arc than most Who companions old or new, and the way that she is brought down by her own hubris, in a small alley off the real world, does work for me. And I’m also a fan of Maisie Williams, whose character Ashildr gets a good outing here. (But I’ve never had my picture taken with her.)

S.J. Groenewegen is a friend of mine anyway, and I’ve enjoyed her Who fiction. Here she brings a close analytical lens to the story, pulling up all kinds of things that I had not really thought of; the Black Archive at its best produces books that you like more than their subject episodes. This has a short introduction and four long chapters.

The first chapter looks in depth at the character of Clara. Groenewegen starts by pointing out that Clara was basically invented to satisfy the needs of the 50th anniversary in 2013, and Coleman actually appeared and got killed off twice before becoming established as Clara Oswald, twenty-first century schoolteacher. She looks at the role of companions and how this worked out in this particular case. Sometimes fans invest more in the emotional dynamics of a show than is really there, but I was convinced by the argument here.

The second chapter looks at Ashildr and Rigsy as returning characters, and reflects on how the show interrogates time and change, and the Doctor being held accountable for his actions. There’s a brief but fascinating exploration of the Ashildr/Clara relationship.

The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

Vivian Sobchack observed that contemporary American science fiction and horror movies also rely on making the familiar unusual¹. The motif of Earth as home being ruptured by the alien is a common one in Doctor Who, especially during the late 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, one of the most effective Doctor Who scenes is the sight of dummies coming to life and bursting from their shop windows to terrorise the passers-by during Spearhead from Space (1970). As Jon Arnold observes, ‘They are the most logical choice from a gallery of Doctor Who’s gallery of monsters’ to bring back in Rose (2005) because they are ‘a place of domesticity suddenly rendered shockingly alien’².
¹ Sobchack, Vivian, ‘Child/Alien/Father: Patriarchal Crisis and Generic Exchange’ in Penley, Constance, Elizabeth Lyon, Lynn Spigel and Janet Bergstrom, eds, Close Encounters: Film, Feminism and Science Fiction. p16.
² Arnold, Jon, The Black Archive #1: Rose, p30.

The chapter looks at geography, London and refuge, and the way in which Doctor Who interacts with the real universe (there is a real London; there was a real refugee crisis at the time the story was made). Lots of other writers are invoked, in particular Paul Cornell and Ben Aaronovitch.

The final chapter looks briefly at the symbolism of ravens, reminding us that they actually have something of a history in Doctor Who, and in more depth at the subject of death, which I think Face the Raven handles rather better than Dark Water / Death in Heaven.

It’s a rare case where I wished I had read the book first before rewatching the story; I would have got a bit more out of the latter. You can get it here.

The Eleventh Hour, by Jon Arnold

Posted on 2 July 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Next in the sequence of Black Archive books about individual Doctor Who stories, this time it’s the first Eleventh Doctor story and the first of Steven Moffat’s era as show-runner.

When The Eleventh Hour was first broadcast in 2010, I wrote:

I think Doctor Who is in good hands. This is one of the stronger debut stories for a new Doctor – up there with Rose and An Unearthly Child. We enjoyed every minute of the hour.
Matt Smith does it with humour and total conviction, and Karen Gillan shows promise too (though hopefully will get a bit more to do in future episodes). You can understand that each of them clicked with Moffat and Wenger as rapidly as we are told they did. Amy’s character starts with reason to be annoyed as well as fascinated by the Doctor, but is herself keeping some secrets from him and presumably from us too.
The actual plot did have a lot of elements from Moffat’s previous Who stories – but these were good stories first time round, and we went in a slightly new direction here: for instance, the Doctor’s visitation of Madame de Pompadour was him dipping into her story, whereas his visit to Amy got her into therapy (which, and this may have been a subtle point, may not be such a bad thing for a child who has lost her parents). Though I hope Moffat’s future stories are a bit more experimental.
Lots of little pleasing points. The montage of the previous Doctors – a great way of establishing 46 years of continuity for new viewers. The Tardis swimming pool (for the first time in New Who, it’s more than just the control room) and new interior (which is nicely syncretic, though children will need to be told what a typewriter is). The final shot of Amy’s fannish drawings of the Doctor and the Tardis, and her wedding dress.
I’m not blown away by the new version of the theme music, but I will get used to it.

I have rewatched it a couple of times since – on a transatlantic flight, I found it in the entertainment system and turned to it as familiar and comforting fare; and also of course it was one of Emily Cook’s lockdown rewatches (a phenomenon that I have not yet seen written up properly).

Going back to it for this review, yet again I thought it was very good, and definitely up there with the 1963 and 2005 debut episodes as one of the strongest starts for a new Doctor and production team. It’s funny and scary, and renewed my affection for Eleven, Amy and Rory as characters. (I recently rewatched The God Complex, in which the Doctor kicks them off the Tardis; they are better served in their debut.) Those who wonder if the Eleventh Doctor or indeed the Moffat era is for them would be well served by starting here (as we did in real life).

This is Jon Arnold’s third book for the Black Archive series, the other two also being reboots, one successful (Rose) and one unsuccessful (Scream of the Shalka). This is another good one; he goes well beyond the story to look at its importance in the overall sequence of Who as a show. The chapters are:

a prologue about the problem of relaunching Who in 2010
the casting and characterisation of the Eleventh Doctor
Moffat’s approach to romance and the characterisation of Amy
Moffat’s approach to drama more generally, especially comedy; the second paragraph of this third chapter, with the quote it refences, are as follows:

His career is one of the more remarkable of any British television writer: bar one episode of Stay Lucky (1989-93), three of Dawn French vehicle Murder Most Horrid and Doctor Who, Moffat’s work has entirely been on shows he has created or fully authored. Moffat’s initial break was the result of an exceptional stroke of luck. His father, Bill Moffat, was the headmaster of Thorn Primary School. When it was used for the production of an episode of Highway (1983-93), he mentioned to the producers that he had an idea for a series about a school newspaper. He had no interest in a career as a scriptwriter and sold the idea on condition that his son write a sample script. It is worth noting at this point that this was not in any way nepotistic: if the scripts had not been good enough then the production team could have declined them. If they were good then they would have a writer on board at a relatively low cost:
‘She (Sandra C Hastie, Press Gang’s producer) sort of sighed and said “Oh god I’ll read it once, I’m not paying for it obviously but I’ll read one script from him and then I’ll get a proper writer.” So, I sent in a script and she loved it. And with that kind of incredible sort of madness-cum-genius of the woman, says I immodestly, she just decided that I’d write the whole series. Out of nowhere[…]

the fairytale aspects of Who under Moffat, referencing also the roots of the “fish fingers and custard” scene from Tigger in The House at Pooh Corner
the crack in the wall and “Silence Will Fall” as respectively successful and unsuccessful foreshadowings of the season arc
a brief conclusion reflecting on the successful post-Who careers of Moffat, Smith and Gillan
an appendix looking briefly at the “Meanwhile in the Tardis” extra scene, a bonus on the DVD/Bluray.

Another decent addition to the sequence. You can get it here.

The HAVOC Files, Volume 4, ed. Shaun Russell

Posted on 27 June 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third story (“United in Blood”, by Mark Jones):

Lethbridge-Stewart approached the bar and held out a hand to his old friend. ‘Bill Cunningham! It’s good to see you too,’ he said, as he grasped the other’s hand in a firm handshake. ‘It’s been too many years. One of your finest malts would go down a treat on a night like this.’

I’m consistently impressed by the quality of the Candy Jar Books series of stories featuring Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart, mostly in the narrative window between his first encounter with the Doctor in The Web of Fear and their reunion in The Invasion, though this anthology has a couple from the later TV continuity. These are all good; I guess the standouts for me were “All the King’s Men” by Alyson Leeds and “The Two Brigadiers” by Jonathan Macho, two authors who were both new to me (at least under those names). If you’re not already invested in the Brigadier continuity this won’t mean much to you, but if you are it’s a good addition. You can get it here.

Directed by Douglas Camfield, by Michael Seely

Posted on 22 June 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

They worked on the seventh floor of Lime Grove, assigned to different film editors. This was the same building where Alfred Hitchcock made The Thirty Nine Steps twenty years before when it was the Gaumont British Picture studios. Perhaps it was a portent for the future of the film industry when the BBC had bought tip and converted the studios in 1949. Situated in Shepherd’s bush, the building was on a cramped and enclosed site and the only way to expand was up. Lime Grove Studios became a multi-levelled rabbit warren of a building, easy to get lost in and was not much loved by those inside. Try as they might, the people who worked here in the 1950s find it very hard to describe the place as magical. Further down the road at Wood Lane, something magical had been postponed.

A couple of years ago, I read a biography of Robert Holmes, the greatest of Old Who’s writers; this book looks at the life of Douglas Camfield, one of the greatest of the Old Who directors (the top three must be him, David Maloney and Christopher Barry – and Camfield directed more episodes than either of the other two).

I found it a really fascinating read. Seely has hunted down as much information as he can about every single TV episode that Camfield ever directed. He knows his audience, so he has concentrated particularly on Doctor Who – the stories we now know as An Unearthly Child, Marco Polo, The Crusade, The Time Meddler, and most of all The Daleks’ Master Plan; and also The Web of Fear, The Invasion, Inferno, Terror of the Zygons and The Seeds of Doom. Those alone would be a fantastic legacy.

But Seely is very good at taking us into the world of the director, to the point that you can almost smell the static electricity in the studio gallery and the manure on location. Not every BBC director was as meticulous or professional as him; at the same time, he seems to have been genuinely charming, always bringing his guitar to finish the evening singing with those of the cast and crew that wanted to. (Though he also had his musical blind spots, and repeatedly refused to hire Dudley Simpson for incidental music.)

Camfield had a loyalty to a certain group of guest actors who tended to pop up in many of his productions, but in general they were good. This included his wife, Sheila Dunn, who got a small part in the Dalek’s Master Plan and a larger part in Inferno; though I remember her best as the daughter of Kessler, in the sequel to Secret Army, which had nothing to do with Camfield. Incidentally Bernard Hepton, the star of Secret Army, started his career as a director before turning to acting and was a peer of Camfield’s on the BBC training courses.

He did his best to move away from being typecast as a police and science fiction serial specialist, but did not quite success. He directed Duel, one of the great Blake’s 7 episodes, and the first episode of Shoestring and two others. His only close co-operation with the great Robert Holmes was not Doctor Who but the 1981 series The Nightmare Man, based on the novel Child of Vodyanoi by David Wiltshire; I have fond if scary memories of it forty years on, and would love to get hold of a copy.

Camfield’s health was always a problem, and he had to be taken off the Doctor Who story Inferno after a couple of episodes when he suffered a heart attack. Another heart attack killed him at the age of 52 in 1984. Unlike Robert Holmes, who had sadly run out of steam when he died a couple of years later, one feels that Camfield was still innovating and finding new things to do, though he would have refused to return to Doctor Who. We must be grateful for what we have. This is a good book, with occasional rough edges. You can get it here.

Marco Polo, by Dene October (and John Lucarotti)

Posted on 10 June 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Next in the sequence of Black Archive books about Doctor Who. In this case I had actually listened to the audio reconstruction again quite recently, so I didn’t repeat that for this blog post, just reading the novelisation again as well as the Black Archive analysis.

When I first listened to it in 2007, I wrote:

This is the fourth ever Doctor Who story, broadcast in 1964, and the earliest one to be lost conpletely from the archives. It was also the first purely historical Doctor Who story, telling simply of an encounter between the time travellers and Marco Polo (and eventually Kublai Khan) in the late thirteenth century.
I bought the soundtrack with linking narration from William Russell, who played Ian Chesterton in the original series. It’s generally pretty good though the fifth episode sound quality is rather lousy. I was also misled by one of the hidden extras – the first of the three CDs includes also all seven episodes as MP3s without narration, and since this is nowhere stated I ended up loading them by mistake.
Took me a while – first started this the week before last, and took a break from it while I was travelling. But it is in fact very good. Seven episodes is about right for a leisurely plot, with Susan bonding with the maiden Ping-Cho, and the others dealing with the treacherous warlord Tegana and with Marco Polo himself, who decides to seize the Tardis and offer it to the Khan as his ticket home to Venice. (Or, as Croatian lore would have it, Korcula.)
It builds to a satisfying conclusion with the Doctor playing the Great Khan at backgammon, with the Tardis as the stake. Marco Polo himself, weighing in the balance his honour, his liking and respect for Ian and the others, and his desire to get home, is an interesting character study.
A shame, but I guess understandable, that they stopped making stories like this one after a while.

When I returned to it for my Great Rewatch in 2009, I wrote:

Marco Polo is the only lost story in this run, but I was able to get hold of the reconstruction which tops and tails the original story with filmed pieces featuring Mark Eden as a much older Marco Polo reminiscing. The colour snaps illustrating the soundtrack make it look fantastic, and the visual cues give it a real sense of place as well, as the narrative shifts from the mountain passes to the court via the desert and staging towns. And it is rather bleak in places – the Doctor’s illness is not funny, the murderous plans of Tegana even less so. Susan gets a welcome bit of character development through her relationship with Ping-Cho. (Marco Polo, Tegana and the Great Khan are reunited in 1967 for an episode of The Prisoner, “It’s Your Funeral”, which gives another flavour of how this must have looked.) This is the first story that doesn’t lead directly into the next at the end of the last episode.

Coming back to the audio in 2020, I wrote:

Listening to it again – the 25-minute episodes are just right for timing a lunchtime walk under lockdown – I still found it enjoyable. The dynamic between Polo and the Tardis crew is a little odd – I thought that they gave in to Polo a bit too quickly, and also for someone who has not actually looked inside the Tardis he seems pretty sure that it will transform his relationship with the Khan. But that aside, it’s well written and well executed. And as I’ve said tbefore, the recons make it look gorgeous.
I did wonder, however, if anyone seriously thought that this was educational. The original remit for the show was supposedly that the historical stories would get kids interested in history. Well, I fear you’ll scan the history books in vain to find out any more about Ping-Cho, the warlord Tegana, or the very camp innkeeper at Sheng-Ting. But maybe it’s better to scan the history books for something that’s not there, than not to look into them at all.

You can easily google the Loose Cannon reconstruction of the story, and you can get the audio here.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of the novelisation is:

The journey to Lop, through the undulating farmland, was pleasant. Marco, Ian, Barbara and Tegana were on horseback which meant that the two wagons for the travellers had, in the first, the Doctor muttering irascibly to himself and, in the second, Susan with Ping-Cho giggling, gossiping and playing games. The tent, now without the furs to line it, was pitched in the evenings and Ping-Cho, with both Barbara and Susan helping, would prepare them a ‘proper’ meal as the Doctor described it. But, as they approached Lop, the landscape changed: the earth became dry and dusty, the outcrops of green fewer and farther between for Lop was built on the edge of the vast Gobi desert and, whereas Yarkand had been a town, Lop was little more than an oasis, a natural spring, surrounded by tents and wooden shacks. But the main building, the way-station or hotel, was well-appointed. The manager, Yeng, a dignified Chinese who never took his hands out of his jacket sleeves, greeted Marco courteously and gave orders for the horses to be stabled. The baggage train was put into a compound, but the Doctor insisted that the wagon with the TARDIS be placed in the main courtyard where he could keep an eye on it. Smiling, Marco agreed with him.

When I first read it in 2008, I wrote:

Doctor Who – Marco Polo is certainly the best of John Lucarotti’s three Who books (the other two being Doctor Who – The Aztecs and Doctor Who – The Massacre). Possibly the need to be fairly concise – cutting down from a seven episode story, rather than writing up from four – made a difference. It’s a cracking good story anyway, and the fact that we have only sound rather than video records of it makes Lucarotti’s presentation all the more valuable. He has a rather peculiar fascination with detailing the various different Chinese prawn dishes that the Tardis crew consume en route, but this of course just adds to the depth of the setting. Really rather a good one.

On re-reading, I still like it a lot; but I was a little unfair about the prawn dishes. For the record, these are the meals and drinks mentioned in the book:

Chapter 2: “Bean sprout and chicken broth”
Chapter 3: “two small Tan Chiao omelettes stuffed with minced fresh water shrimps and […] a bowl of tea”
Chapter 4: “a bowl of tea and two Tan Chiao omelettes stuffed with chopped water-chestnuts and pork”
Chapter 6: “sesame seed pings followed by soochow chiang, a delicious mixture of pork,
mushrooms and bamboo shoots served with a succulent sauce and rice wine”
Chapter 11: “‘Chicken-fat braised carp”
Chapter 12: “a mellow white wine”
Chapter 15 (banquet scene): “There was a choice of, at least, fifteen soups, including one called a ‘water-melon pond’, and egg dishes in profusion followed by fresh-water as well as sea-water fishes and crustaceans. Then, of course, came the poultry dishes which reminded the Doctor of the old adage that the Chinese eat everything bar the feathers. Next on the menu were the meat and vegetable bowls served with a multitude of rices, after which the meal was rounded out with a variety of desserts. The wines were of every hue and taste and to the Doctor’s astonishment there were Italian and French ones as well as champagne. / ‘My father imports them,’ Marco said modestly.”
Chapter 15 (later): “a succulent slice of pineapple roast duck” … “a dried shrimp wanton” … “a Lan-Chow steamed dumpling” … “chicken chessmen”
Chapter 16: “Yang-Chow shrimp balls”

I think that is more discussion of food than you will find in any six other Doctor Who books, combined. And shrimps (not prawns) are in only about half of them. You can get the novelisation here.

Dene October’s Black Archive on Marco Polo is one of the longer ones in this series. He makes a very strong argument that this story, which most fans like without necessarily loving, should be considered as one of the peaks of Old Who. Sadly, those of us who did not see it will need to rely on his word. It is enhanced by the fact that October actually saw Marco Polo twice – when originally broadcast by the BBC, and then again a year after in Australia where his family had meantime moved. He therefore has a huge advantage over most of the rest of us who will probably never see any of the seven lost episodes; if they were findable, they would surely have been found by now.

(As I said in a previous entry, I used to have fantasies of some day opening a long-shut cupboard in the Green Zone in Cyprus to find a bunch of Doctor Who tapes that had been abandoned by some luckless TV technician in 1974, but in fact now that I’ve established that the Green Zone in Nicosia is still basically where it was when established in 1963, I accept that this is never going to happen, especially not to me.)

Like the original story, October’s book is divided into seven chapters. In a really interesting first chapter, October insists that the story should in fact be seen as educational, as a dramatisation of the original Travels of Marco Polo with a didactic agenda. My instinct is that this is over-analysis; the purpose of the drama is the drama. If this had not been Hugo season, I’d have read the Travels too to make up my own mind. In any case I have acquired it and will get to it sooner or later. October goes further into detail on both the Reithian missionof the BBC and the extent to which the original Travels can be regarded as fictional anyway. It’s one of the most interesting sections I have read of any of the books in this series.

The second chapter looks at the soundscape of the episode, the low visibility of the Doctor and the voice of Marco Polo as the central character and audience identification figure – very unusual for Old Who, rarely done in New Who.

The third chapter looks at the visuals of the story, especially the camerawork. The second paragraph is:

3.1 ‘Pray Attend Me While I Tell My Tale’: Staging History
Ping-Cho’s carefully planned dance makes for an unusual history lesson, something Ian picks up on immediately in quizzing Susan about the English derivation of the word ‘Hashashins’. Ian’s teacherly prompt is in many ways a remediation of the Chinese girl’s poem, one he perhaps feels remedies her version, and uses a more appropriate medium. In a sense, Ping-Cho and Ian are both educators using different media and reflecting the programme’s challenges in delivering historical content to a mixed family audience.

October insists that the lost visuals impact of the series was particularly good. This is frustratingly difficult to prove, as all we have are a few still shots and people’s memories, but it’s good to hear.

The fourth chapter has October reflecting on the fallibility of his own memory of having seen the show twice, and on the way in which viewers experience television. He then veers off into a fascinating sidetrack on the memory abilities of the historical Marco Polo, based on the identifiable mistakes in the Travels – he does not mention the Great Wall, for instance.

The fifth chapter looks at travel as a narrative device, and again invokes the Travels as a point of comparison for how we experience the Doctor Who story.

The sixth chapter looks at the character of the Khan, and the portrayal of rulership and of the Orient in the story.

The seventh chapter combines three important themes: Marco Polo‘s portrayal of gender, the reliability of the narrator, and how fans have worked to retain and reconstruct the lost story.

It’s one of the good ones in this series, and made me think a lot more about the story than I had expected. You can get it here.

The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit, by Simon Bucher-Jones (and Matt Jones)

Posted on 6 June 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Next in the excellent Black Archive line of short books about individual Doctor Who stories, this looks at a two-parter from Series 2 of New Who, a story where the Tenth Doctor and Rose are stranded on a planet orbiting a black hole which imprisons, well, the Devil. The author, Simon Bucher-Jones, has written several Who novels, and also did the Black Archive book on Image of the Fendahl (and a more recent one on The Hand of Fear). He does not mention if he is related to the author of the TV story, Matt Jones, but their surname is the fourth most common in England and the most common surname in Wales, so chances are that they are not.

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.

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.

This is not one of the small (but growing) number of New Who stories to have been novelised, so I’ll jump straight into the Black Archive book, which is short and punchy.

The first chapter reflects on just how few New Who episodes are set on other planets, compared to most of Old Who (apart from the Pertwee era), the reasons for this, and how this shapes the sort of programme it becomes.

The second chapter, the longest in the book, goes in depth into the physics of black holes and how they are portrayed in fiction, notably in The Three Doctors in Old Who as well as the Disney film. I had not realised, or had forgotten, that the term “black hole” was coined as late as 1967, only a few years before The Three Doctors was shown.

The third chapter, almost as long, looks at the Devil as portrayed in Christianity, and satanic creatures as portrayed in science fiction (rather than fantasy) in general and Who in particular. Its second paragraph is (with footnotes):

As Sherlock Holmes – with whom the third Doctor has often been compared (as the Master has with Moriarty)¹¹⁹ – remarked, ‘The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply.’¹²⁰ The Doctor might well have said in The Daemons, and almost will say in The Satan Pit, ‘The universe is big enough for us. No Devils from before it need apply.’
¹¹⁹ While the fourth Doctor dresses like him in The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977), the third arguably does so all the time: while he doesn’t affect a deerstalker like the theatrical or televisual Holmes, he does have an inverness travelling cape.
¹²⁰ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of The Sussex Vampire’, The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes p73.

The fourth chapter looks much more briefly at the Ood and the problematics of slavery.

The fifth and final chapter looks even more briefly at the Doctor’s fear of domestication, ie of settling down with Rose, even though he obviously loves her.

A first appendix apparently has a graph in the paper version, absent from the electronic publication, listing all of the alien planets to date in Doctor Who.

A second and final appendix very briefly goes back to the Beast, making the connection with Sutekh and with Abaddon in Torchwood, points that I felt could actually have been folded into the third chapter.

As usual with these books, recommended, even though there’s very little about the production process of the TV show in this case. You can get it here.

I am the Master, by Peter Anghelides et al

Posted on 3 June 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third story (“Missy’s Magical Mystery Mission”, by Jacqueline Rayner):

And so Daphne (‘Mrs N’ to her clients, although she wasn’t married), scrubbed Tivone of Enfis’s bathroom, steam-cleaned his oubliette and de-crumbed his toaster, hoping all the while her cheerful chat, homemade oat and raisin cookies and occasional casual mentions of how every person was worthy of rights and respect would make his heart shine, just a little bit. In return, Tivone of Enfis gave Mrs N a Festival of Snowtide bonus and a personalised bolo-card, included her in Team Tivone awaydays, and had refrained from having any of her relatives killed (although admittedly she didn’t have many relatives and if they’d shown any signs of seditious behaviour they’d have been for the chop, however well their sister / aunt / second-cousin-once-removed dusted his ornaments).

Six short stories about different incarnations of the Master, by Peter Anghelides (Delgado!Master), Mark Wright (Pratt/Beevors!Master), Jac Rayner (Missy), Mike Tucker (Ainley!Master), Beverley Sanford (Simm!Master) and Matthew Sweet (Dhawan!Master). I thought they were all pretty good; I expect that Matthew Sweet’s Soviet-era riff on a well-known novel, “The Master and Margarita”, will sail over some people’s heads but I enjoyed it too. Recommended. You can get it here.

The Eighth of March 2: Protectors of Time

Posted on 22 May 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

A set of three plays from Big Finish all starring women from the Whoniverse – in fact, all bringing women characters together from the TV shows who did not meet on screen, or only met once – produced for International Women’s Day this year (they did the same in 2020, but I don’t seem to have reviewed that box set, though I enjoyed it too).

The first of these, Stolen Futures by Lizbeth Myles, is a sequel to the enigmatic Fourth Doctor story Warrior’s Gate, directed by Louise Jameson, following Lalla Ward’s Romana and John Leeson’s K9 as they start to liberate the Tharils from oppression, with Big Finish stalwart John Dorney and Louise Jameson’s ex David Warwick in the cast. It may not make much sense to you if you don’t remember Warrior’s Gate, but I do remember Warrior’s Gate and I really loved it; a strong concept and a strong script.

I’m apparently in a minority in not loving the middle play, Prism by Abigail Burdess. It brings together Georgia Tennant as Jenny, the Doctor’s Daughter, and Michelle Ryan as Lady Christina de Souza, in an adventure with a large, possibly very large diamond. I had some difficulty following the plot and the two leads are very similar to each other in character and voice.

But I felt we were cooking on gas again with the last of the three, The Turn of the Tides by Nina Millns (like Abigail Burdess a new writer for the Whoniverse). Here we have Katy Manning’s Jo Jones (nee Grant) and Anjli Mohindra’s Rani Chandra reunited, in the Amazon, with a UNIT character who I confess I had forgotten about, facing global catastrophe. It’s very much in tune with the times and also a nice nostalgia moment for Jo and (vicariously) Sarah Jane Smith.

Anwyay, all three are recommended, and you can get them here.

Full Circle, by John Toon (and Andrew Smith)

Posted on 22 May 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Gradually working through the excellent Black Archive series of short monographs on Doctor Who stories, I have reached another Old Who story which I watched on first broadcast. When I rewatched Full Circle in 2008, I wrote:

Imagine if you were a 19-year-old fan and submitted your script idea to Doctor Who and it actually got accepted… again, I was surprised by how good Full Circle actually is, bar Matthew Waterhouse. Quite a sophisticated plot, both in terms of rebels vs establishment and in terms of the scientific hand-waving; and lots of nasty tension involving threats to Romana and the Tardis. The Gallifrey stuff at the beginning does seem a bit bolted on, and it’s one of the drawbacks of this season that it is dealt with a bit inconsistently.

When I came back to it in 2011 for my great Old Who rewatch, I wrote:

I think this may be a recurring theme in this post, but Full Circle was also much better than I remembered. This month’s DWM ran an interview with author Andrew Smith, who was only 18 at the time the story was made, and thus a cause of immense envy to all Who-watching teenagers such as myself (both then and also now, though I am no longer a teenager). Smith admits that the story underwent considerable massage by script editor Christopher Bidmead, but of course that actually helps to give it a certain unity of style with the rest of the season.

Rewatching it this time, I was not quite as satisfied in some ways – the science behind the plot doesn’t really make a lot of sense even in its own terms, and for a supposedly hard science script it draws on horror movie tropes to an extent that I found uncomfortable. However I particularly enjoyed Paddy Kingsland’s incidental music, and it was also interesting to see James Bree, recently escaped from Secret Army, in one of his three Doctor Who roles, as well as George Baker, who was Tiberius in I CLAVDIVS.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of the novelisation is:

Amid all the relieved, frightened, and numbed faces, Nefred and Garif, overseeing the boarding operation, perceived Halrin Login, Keara’s father. Login was a respected man, a wise man destined perhaps one day to be a Decider.

When I first reread it in 2008, I wrote:

Hmm. Smith is of course determined to give his own script a fair wind, but the end result is not very special; it is one of those rare occasions when the book doesn’t quite do justice to the special effects of the original series. Of course he gives us a bit more background to the Alzarians and their origin – or not – on Terradon, but if anything it rather confuses the picture.

Coming back to it now, I think this was a bit harsh of me. Smith does the descriptive bits perfectly adequately, and does his best to add colour to the background, without spoiling it by trying to add realism to the pseudoscience. You can get it here (for a price).

John Toon’s Black Archive essay on Full Circle is largely about the intellectual ideas behind the story. I’m coming to realise that while this is a perfectly valid approach, I find the Black Archive volumes giving the inside scoop on the creative choices made in the production of the story much more interesting. This is partly because I have previously dealt with the history of ideas in my own career, and moved on, and partly because often (as in this case) Doctor Who slightly muffs the landing for big philosophical debates.

Anyway, it’s a perfectly decent book as this very good series goes, and it won the Sir Julius Vogel Award for Professional Production/Publication in 2019.

The first chapter makes the intriguing argument that rather than thinking of the Nathan-Turner era of Old Who, we should think of the Bidmead, Saward and Cartmel eras, the script editors being much more important than the producer in terms of content; and that Full Circle is the point where the Bidmead era really begins, after two stories at the start of the season which were leftovers from the previous regime.

The second chapter takes us through theories of evolution, which as previously mentioned is something I have done before; my Ph D supervisor was Peter Bowler. So I did not learn much from it.

The third chapter explains the Gaia hypothesis at some length, and reflects on its impact – or lack thereof – on the story line. I had forgotten that Lovelock’s book came out only the previous year, 1979. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

Lovelock used the name ‘Gaia’⁴⁷ to refer to this system of chemical feedback loops, partly because it had all of the convenience and none of the ugliness of an acronym, and partly to make the idea more relatable for his readers. The downside of this is that the reader might too easily suppose Lovelock was depicting the Earth itself as an intelligent being, personifying it by naming it in this way. In his preface to the 2000 edition of the book, Lovelock insists that he was simply exercising poetic licence for the benefit of his non-scientist readers, but not all of his readers drew a distinction between the poetry and the science. In the decades that followed its publication, Gaia was scorned by the orthodox scientific community and hailed as a visionary text by the New Age contingent of the environmental movement.
⁴⁷ The name of an ancient Greek goddess personifying the Earth; as Lovelock admits in his opening chapter, the name was suggested to him by his neighbour William Golding (Lovelock, James, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth p10).

The fourth chapter points out that most of the “science” in Full Circle is pretty magical.

The fifth chapter tries (largely unsuccessfully) to find a social critique in the story’s presentation of progress, both evolutionary and scientific.

The sixth chapter looks at the importance of Adric being a teenager, and the presentation of teens and kids in Who at the time, while omitting any assessment of Waterhouse’s performance in the role.

The seventh chapter, one of the best, looks at the Marshmen in the context of cinematic monsters and finds much inspiration from the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

An appendix makes the slight point that it’s interesting when fans start to get involved with the production of the show.

Full Circle will never be one of my favourite stories, and I’m afraid this isn’t one of my favourite Black Archives either; I wanted more info on how the story was actually made, and way certain things were done or not done in the course of production. But John Toon is entitled to write the book he wants, which may not be the book I want. You can get it here.

Carnival of Monsters, by Ian Potter (and Robert Holmes, and Terrance Dicks)

Posted on 16 May 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Next in the series of Black Archive monographs on Doctor Who is the second story from Season 10, where the Doctor has been liberated by the Time Lords from his exile on Earth and is once again able to travel the Universe. I missed it on original broadcast, but devoured the Target novelisation as a kid, and also enjoyed the re-showing of the TV story in 1981. When I came back to it in 2007, I wrote:

I’ve tended to rather rush through writing up the Pertwee stories I have been watching, as they are much of a muchness, but this is different. I remember back in 1981 when it was re-broadcast, we really wondered why – surely there were other, better Pertwee four-parters out there? The Terrance Dicks novelisation is only average. It seemed as if Carnival of Monsters had been chosen mainly because it followed on in continuity directly after The Three Doctors. Spoiled as we were by the Hinchcliffe and Williams years, Carnival of Monsters did not seem all that special.

I must say that now it does. The 1973 season was probably Pertwee’s second best (after his first, the 1970 season) and Carnival of Monsters is surely the best story in it – followed by Frontier in Space and Planet of the Daleks, which are both OK but not spectacular, and ending with The Green Death which is also a good one, particularly because it gets rid of Jo. The one thing that lets it down is the visual effects, rather a lot of dodgy CSO being used. But if you can shut your eyes and pretend you are still six during those bits, the rest is fantastic – Robert Holmes at his very best in the script, Michael Wisher in pre-Davros days as the main villain, Ian Marter in pre-Harry Sullivan days as a minor character, a real feeling of several different completely alien cultures (the two classes on Inter Minor and the Lurmans), and an absence of the blatant padding that mars so many Pertwee stories. A special shout to Cheryl Hall, later the girlfriend of Citizen Smith, as showgirl Shirna.

And there’s a couple of serious reflections in there too – the MiniScope itself is a futuristic development of the zoo, and gives rise to a rather caricatured discussion of conservation versus entertainment’ more seriously, Inter Minor is clearly a communist totalitarian state, threatened to its very foundations by any influence from the outside. [2022: I would not describe it as “communist” now.] Michael Wisher’s character Kalik is the conservative brother of the unseen president Zarb. It’s nicely observed, although not all conservative backlashes end with the leader of the hardliners being eaten alive by a Drashig. Shame.

When I came back to it again for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:

And Carnival of Monsters takes us to an alien planet, with one of the great Robert Holmes scripts: he specialised in having a couple of characters whose dialogue informs us all about their world, and here he does it twice over, with Kalik and Orum (and to an extent Pletrac) revealing Inter Minor to us, and Vorg and Shirna representing the outside world. The idea of a closed and bureaucratic society dealing with the decadent entertainment possibilities of its neighbours is a rather good one. The first episode is especially good with no apparent connection between Inter Minor and the SS Bernice, until Vorg’s hand removes the Tardis.

Michael Wisher is excellent as the villainous Kalik. Maybe they should bring him back to, I dunno, play a mad scientist who invents the Daleks. I love Cheryl Hall as Shirna as well, though admittedly more for her costume than her acting. The Drashigs rather let it down though. And I noticed a continuity goof: as Jo flees from being thigh-deep in the marsh, her trousers dry instantly (and her close-fitting pockets don’t seem to contain the bulky set of skeleton keys).

Rewatching it now, I was impressed by the theatricality (in a good way) of the story. The scenes on Inter Minor all take place around the MiniScope. Cheryl Hall, only 22, is really impressive in a generally good cast. I did twitch at the racism of the S.S. Bernice sections, but it’s reasonable to say that this is counterpointed by the Inter Minor setting, which is not a communist state but an authoritarian racist apartheid society. I loved the line, “Give them a hygiene chamber and they store fossil fuel in it”!

The second paragraph of the third chapter of the novelisation is:

‘My dear fellow, do you really think that’s necessary?’

When I reread it in 2007, I wrote:

A good Robert Holmes script, turned into an average Terrance Dicks novel. I remember seeing this one in 1981 during the “Five Faces of Doctor Who” repeat season; wonder how well it would stand up to re-watching now?

In Dicks’ defence, I would say that he adds some extra bits of background colour to make Inter Minor more fully realised than it was on screen. I enjoyed returning to both the story and the book. You can get the book here.

I’ve greatly enjoyed Ian Potter’s Who-related fiction – several audio plays and a couple of short stories – and was curious as to how he would approach the task of writing up this story. He’s done a great job. I will quote the body of the first chapter in full, because it’s a good statement of how writing about Who can work at its best.

One of the great things about Doctor Who is that it is constructed by many hands for many audiences. It was built to entertain viewers of different ages and consequently has to work on several levels at once to engage them all. That gives us a lot to latch on to.

Carnival of Monsters (1973) is a story all about levels, but it’s not the vision of an auteur with a single story or underlying message to relay. It’s a show full of episodic set pieces having fun with us and with itself that also happens to be a story full of messages.

Once we get into critical analysis of any work of art, we inevitably open ourselves up to the accusation that we’re seeing things in the work that ‘aren’t there’. Our own expectations, prejudices, historical perspectives and personal contexts will always colour our responses and interpretations. I happen to think that’s fine. That’s viewing for you – you bring yourself to the show. I also make no apology for the fact that the discussion of the programme you’re now reading will end up longer than either the programme’s script or its novelisation, and will probably take longer to read than the programme takes to view. There’s always more in a script than is on the page, more in a production than ends up on screen, and more than one way to reinterpret it in print.

Some of the things I hope to explore in this brief look at Carnival of Monsters will be ideas that were quite deliberately placed there by one or more of the show’s many creators. Some will be things that may have slipped in without the creators’ knowledge. Some will have arisen simply through the circumstances of the production, or the climate of the time. Others are perhaps more visible now than they were then. I hope you’ll forgive me missing out or under-emphasising any aspects that interest you.

The second chapter records the extensive source material available about how the show was made. Part of the script was used for Malcolm Hulke’s book on TV writing, including the classic stage direction “‘A STREAM OF INCOMPREHENSIBLE BUT OBVIOUSLY REVOLUTIONARY GOBBLEDEYGOOK.”

The third chapter looks briefly at the soundtrack. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

The great triumph of the soundtrack is [Brian Hodgson’s] unearthly Drashig roars which combined treated versions of Hodgson’s own voice, his corgi bitch, an Australian butcherbird and, as Barry Letts recalled it, a squeal of car brakes. Whether deliberately, to help blend the elements, or just as result of slowing down tapes, the roar also has a curious long reverb, suggestive of a large echoing space. Perhaps the one weakness of the Drashig sound effects is that this reverb remains constant whether the Drashigs are in open country, within the SS Bernice hold, or roaming the Inter Minorian city.

The fourth chapter looks at the logistical considerations that led to the S.S. Bernice sections being on film and the Inter Minor scenes on video.

The fifth chapter looks in depth at the theatricality point I made earlier, for good and ill (mostly good), and how the editing process contributed to the final effect (more than usually so).

The sixth chapter looks at how the editing process affected the plot, with a few loose ends left dangling (most of which I must admit I did not notice on any of the four times I watched it).

The seventh chapter looks at Robert Holmes’ potential inspiration for the story. The one taproot text that is (plausibly) identified is Frederik Pohl’s “The Tunnel Under the World”. Potter also makes the interesting observation that Holmes saw military service in Burma in the second world war, and therefore would have had first-hand experience both of the Raj and of the bubbling marshes that feature in so many of his stories – a really interesting point that I had not thought of before.

The eighth chapter looks at the extent to which the story is commentary on TV, on Doctor Who and on itself.

The populations of Inter Minor and the SS Bernice are not massively dissimilar: both locations feature a pair of male and female travellers, a handful of authority figures, and about six non-speaking characters who do all the work for them and mostly end up as disposable foot soldiers for the elite. The extent to which this is the writer drawing a deliberate parallel or devising drama for each recording block with similar available resources is up for debate, but Holmes definitely seems to repeatedly invite us to draw connections between the worlds.

The ninth chapter looks briefly at the political satire in the script, with reference to Britain’s relations with the EU and to pandemics.

The tenth chapter looks at the story’s approach to racism, both on Inter Minor and the Raj, and packs a lot of things to think about into a few pages.

The eleventh chapter looks at the story’s unusual use of vertical perspectives in filming. (Actually this did not completely convince me.)

The twelfth chapter looks at language, specifically the language of the chickens, and Polari.

The thirteenth chapter looks at the extent to which the story resets the narrative of Doctor Who as a whole.

The fourteenth chapter looks at the story’s longevity and popularity, especially the Drashigs.

The fifteenth chapter tries to establish the dates on which the story is set, at length.

An appendix, as long as the main text, compares the early and final versions of the script. Unfortunately in the electronic version of the book we can’t see the struck through text which indicates deletions.

This is generally very good, breezy and enlightening, and you can get it here.

The Man from Yesterday, by Nick Walters

Posted on 4 May 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

‘Stir your stumps, breakfast’s up.’ Bill grinned down at her.

Another very good installment in the series of Doctor Who spinoff stories featuring the earlier career of Brigadier Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart – in this case re-introducing his father, who falls out of a timewarp into 1970 having been missing since the second world war. I think this is tremendously effective as a gimmick – certainly I still have dreams of long-dead relatives turning up out of nowhere with no particularly good explanation of what they have been doing for the last few decades. There’s bad humans and not-as-bad aliens involved, and quite a decent sense of place for the desolate farmlands and coastline of East Anglia. Another good ‘un. You can get it here.

Legends of Camelot, by Jacqueline Rayner

Posted on 2 May 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

It was a relic of growing up with Sylvia. Donna’s mother had never been particularly understanding over incidents such as spilled drinks or broken plates, and Donna found it a lot easier to deflect blame than to deal with several weeks of passive-aggressive comments. That instinct still kicked in sometimes.

As usual from Jacqueline Rayner, a very solid Doctor Who novel, this time taking the Tenth Doctor and Donna – who I think are a New Who writer’s dream team – to what appears to be the legend of King Arthur and the knights of the Round table, with resonances of Malory, White, Bradley and the stage musical Camelot. There is of course an explanation for it all involving vast non-human intelligences from beyond time (this becomes clear fairly early), but it’s all nicely done and supplies a couple of good twists and challenges to the Doctor’s own authority. Recommended. You can get it here.

The Ultimate Foe, by James Cooray Smith (and Robert Holmes, Eric Saward and Pip and Jane Baker)

Posted on 15 April 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

The fourteenth in the Black Archive sequence of analyses of Doctor Who, this takes the sensitive topic of the two-part story that ended Colin Baker’s time as the Sixth Doctor – billed on TV at the time as “Trial of a Time Lord” episodes 13 and 14, but generally known now as The Ultimate Foe. When I first watched it in 2006, I was not forgiving.

Sadly, there is nothing to be said in favour of the last segment of the Trial of a Time Lord, two episodes credited to three writers [Robert Holmes for the first – though it turns out that Eric Saward, then the script editor, rewrote a large chunk of it – and Pip and Jane Baker for the second], a botched farrago of half-baked Time Lord lore, where we find out that the Valeyard is a projection of the Doctor’s future self, and he and the Master take it in turns to do the evil cackle. The Time Lords have forgotten who the Master is, despite what happened in The Deadly Assassin and their summoning of his aid in The Five Doctors. The means available to the Master and the Valeyard are conveniently immense and yet just not quite immense enough to destroy the Doctor. I am even a bit dubious about Peri’s survival, which rather critically undermines the drama of her death (and the chemistry between her and King Yrcanos was as absent as that between Leela and Andred – at least Susan, Vicki and Jo got decent parting romances.) It’s a shame that after delivering so many classics Robert Holmes’ final contribution is such a dud, and the Sixth Doctor, having won his trial, then gets regenerated anyway. The miracle is that the show was allowed another three years after this awful closure to an over-ambitious season.

Rewatching it in 2011, I had not mellowed:

And then The Ultimate Foe is a poor farewell to a misused Doctor. There is little good to be said of it – Eric Saward’s original script for the second episode makes more sense than Pip and Jane Baker’s version as broadcast, but that is not saying much. The Valeyard’s role does become clear, and actually interesting, but the back-story of Time Lord politics simply becomes confusing and the means and motivation of the Master, crucial to what passes for a plot, are even less comprehensible than usual. (And we have the cop-out of Peri’s faked death, which kills the drama of the only interesting development of the entire season.)

Rewatching it again, I felt exactly the same. The first episode is not bad, but it is let down by the second episode. As my brother put it, “this story is not just boring and not just stupid: it is boring AND stupid.”

There are of course good reasons why the whole thing ended up in such a mess, and James Cooray Smith takes us through them; but before we get there, let’s briefly look at the novelisation by Pip and Jane Baker. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

His [the Master’s] brooding eyes surveyed the scene below him. ‘By me, Madam,’ he repeated, enjoying the consternation his intrusion had caused.

When I read it in 2008, I wrote:

Alas, it doesn’t matter how many exclamation marks you add, this remains an incoherent story; and while the Bakers valiantly attempt to fill it out with extra detail, it is basically beyond salvation from the start.

What I did not know was that the “extra detail” was all in the original script that the Bakers had submitted to the BBC, and excised because at 38 minutes it was far too long for a 25-minute slot.

Rereading, I actually felt that the writing was OK at first, but by the end I still got annoyed by the incoherent plot. Completists will want it anyway, and you can get it here.

From this pig’s ear of source material, James Cooray Smith has produced a surprisingly silky purse. The history of how the TV story was made (or not made) is much more interesting than the TV story itself, and that is what Cooray Smith has chosen to tell.

The account begins with the early 1986 attempt by Michael Grade to cancel Old Who (for which he has been called to account on the floor of the House of Lords) and the consequent disruption to production schedules and procedures. Cooray Smith is not charitable to either Grade or his Director of Programmes, Jonathan Powell.
He then looks at the writing of the original Robert Holmes script of the first episode, about half of which ended up on screen. The half that did not survive is very dark indeed. The fact is that Holmes was dying at the time, and indeed died before starting on the second episode, and Cooray Smith convincingly argues that this is subconsciously present in the script.
The third chapter looks at the uncredited revisions to Robert Holmes’ script carried out by Eric Saward, again including about half of what appeared on screen. Per my usual procedure, here is the second paragraph of the third chapter, along with the quote which it introduces:

Saward revised Part 13 in his capacity as Doctor Who’s Script Editor, and therefore there are no records of exactly when he began or completed his work on it, or when he moved onto writing his version of Part 14. His work on Part 13, though, must have been completed before he resigned from the BBC on 13 April 1986. Saward had been under pressure for at least a year, the production team had literally written off as many scripts as they’d accepted for the 1986 series of Doctor Who, and Holmes’ illness had taken a huge emotional toll on the younger writer:
‘I said ultimately to John [Nathan-Turner]… “I feel I can’t serve this any more, I’ve given so much to it already.” John was sort of understanding, I think he was also terrified that he might be left to finish the series on his own, which he ultimately was.”

A brief “intermission” asks who the Valeyard actually is.
The fourth full chapter looks at the unproduced script for the second episode by Eric Saward, whose rejection by John Nathan-Turner provoked his resignation from the show, taking the script with him. The killer point of dispute with Nathan-Turner was the question of how it should end. Saward insisted on a literal cliff-hanger; Nathan-Turner vetoed the idea; Saward could not take any more, and left. (This was only a few days after Holmes’ death, which had deeply upset both of them.)
The fifth and last full chapter tells the story of how Pip and Jane Baker were commissioned to write the new second episode with a three-day deadline, forbidden to use any of the ideas from Saward’s script which he had taken with him.
The sixth and last chapter pulls all the threads together and finds some degree of sympathy for all involved (except Grade and Powell). Certainly I have to admit that I still don’t like what Pip and Jane Baker wrote, but I am much more sympathetic to their travails now that I have read about them in detail.
A really intriguing footnote here tells a story that I did not know. Michael Grade asked Sydney Newman, the original creator of Doctor Who, what he would do with the show; and Newman responded that he would bring back Patrick Troughton for two years, and then regenerate the Doctor into a woman. He also had some rather odd thoughts about child companions, and wanted his own name in the credits as creator of the series. Troughton of course died only a few months later; but it’s fascinating to think what might have been. The source given is Newman’s 2017 memoirs, though I find it in the Daily Telegraph in 2010 and have been told that it was first published in 1996.
An appendix looks briefly at the question of what the title of the story actually is. Cooray Smith hints that he would actually have preferred to call the book “Trial of a Time Lord, episodes 13 and 14” but that he “bows to convention” “in deference to [the] DVD release”.
A second appendix asks how you can resolve the question of Melanie Bush’s first meeting with the Doctor. Cooray Smith doesn’t seem to be aware of the 2013 Big Finish play The Wrong Doctors, which addresses this issue rather amusingly.
A third and final appendix gives the scene breakdowns for the Holmes and Saward scripts of the first episode.

Cooray Smith’s previous Black Archive contribution was on the lost First Doctor story The Massacre, where he similarly converted a complex production history into a compelling narrative. But this is really superb, and it’s the first Black Archive volume that I have liked much more than the story it is covering. You can get it here.

Human Nature/The Family of Blood, by Naomi Jacobs and Philip Purser-Hallard (and Paul Cornell)

Posted on 14 April 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

So, the 13th in the Black Archive series of analyses of Doctor Who stories reaches a particular favourite, the 2006 Tenth Doctor two-parter Human Nature / The Family of Blood. It was in fact the first and only Who story so far to be based on a novel, Paul Cornell’s 1995 Seventh Doctor novel Human Nature. So I’m going to take the novel first, even though (as is my usual practice) this time round I watched the TV episodes and then re-read the novel.

Just in parenthesis – the first Doctor Who TV story based on a previously published book was actually the first Seventh Doctor story in 1987, Time and the Rani, which is draws heavily on the Sixth Doctor “Make Your Own Adventure With Doctor Who”/”Find Your Fate” game book Race Against Time, also by Pip and Jane Baker, published the previous year (and handy when they needed to write a story in a hurry, as we’ll see with my next entry). However, that is not a novel. There are other cases as well, of course, with Blink based on a short story and Dalek to a certain extent on a Big Finish Play; and Gareth Roberts plundered two of his own comics for The Shakespeare Code and The Lodger.

Back to the original Human Nature novel. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

The Captains sat at the back, and the boys at the front, and all of them stood to attention as he entered. He caught a paper dart happily, glanced at it, tweaked the wing a notch and threw it back, straight into the hands of the boy who threw it.

When I first read it in 2005 – before the TV story was transmitted – I wrote:

This Seventh Doctor plus Bernice Summerfield New Adventure is really rather good. Paul Cornell here asks the unaskable: what if the Doctor were to try being human for a while, to live and love like the rest of us? He has managed to get to the heart of the Doctor’s mythos. I found it very satisfying, and raced to finish it, to the point of waking up early this morning to do so. It’s the first of the Doctor Who books I have downloaded that I would really like to spend money on for a dead trees version.

Bits I particularly liked: I thought the character of Verity resonated particularly effectively. “Verity” of course means Truth, and she holds the key to the truth about the Doctor’s character; the name of course also recalls the real-life origins of Doctor Who; and the character herself is of course a very close reflection of Neil Gaiman’s Death.

I also very much liked the human relationships of the book. I caught on to the true nature of Shuttleworth’s liaisons pretty early on; the John Smith and Joan Redfern relationship was neatly done; and the Epilogue, which the author admits he had doubts about putting in, was very effective.

Great lines, too:

“You may know me as mild-mannered John Smith, history teacher, but secretly I’m the Doctor, universal righter of wrongs and protector of cats.”

“So what did you say to him,” the Doctor asked.
“That he believes in good and fights evil. That, with violence all around him, he’s a man of peace. That he’s never cruel, or cowardly. That he is a hero.”

Sure, the book has its flaws, as mercilessly pointed out by some of the Doctor Who Ratings Guide reviewers (though most of them loved it). I’m with the Discontinuity Guide folks, though. I don’t think I’ve read a better Doctor Who novel.

When I reread it in 2011, I wrote:

This is still the only Who novel to have been adapted for television rather than the other way round. I first read it, gulp, seven years ago – the first Seventh Doctor novel I ever read – and would have been rereading it anyway as I shall be rewatching the TV episode soon.

Now that I have read the previous 37 New Adventures, I still think this is one of the best in the series. It is better than most Who novels as a standalone (though Niall Harrison found the continuity heavy going), the major reference to previous novels being to Benny’s loss of her lover in the Albigensian crusade. The Doctor is absent from most of the book and needs to be explained to his own alter ego, John Smith, whose final sacrifice is very effective.

An easy Bechdel pass with Benny bantering with a group of women at a bar in the prologue.

Coming back to it now, I still think it is very effective, and I still think it is one of the best Doctor Who novels ever (and I’ve read a lot more of them since 2011). It is amusing that one of the baddies tries to convince Benny that he is the Tenth Doctor, of all incarnations to choose. The schoolboys are really horrible, with the brutality against Timothy particularly awful. I had also forgotten that one of the boys turns out to be n Gvzr Ybeq va qvfthvfr. But the other thing about the BBC online version (downloaded by me years ago and retained ever since) is the rather lovely artwork by Daryl Joyce. Sadly that’s been dropped from the newly edited version, which you can get here.

The other thing I should say probably at this point is that between reading the book and watching the TV story, I met Paul Cornell at a convention in Dublin, and we have been friends ever since, last seeing each other in Los Angeles in February, and hopefully again this coming weekend at Eastercon (where I am a Guest of Honour this year, and he was a Guest of Honour ten years ago).

So, finally to the TV story. My comment on the first episode when first broadcast was:

Crumbs

There is much more to be said than this, but I will save it until next week.

I didn’t in fact get around to commenting further the next week, but when I got around to the rewatch in 2013 I wrote:

It was good to come back to Human Nature / The Family of Blood so soon after rereading the book, though inevitably it meant doing a bit of compare and contrast; I won’t do this in detail, since Niall Harrison did it back n 2007, but the things that jumped out at me were the following:

Positive points

* On the screen, the appearance of David Tennant playing a different character who happens to look like the Doctor is far more effective than the gradually revealed Mr Smith of the book

* Likewise, Jessica Hynes’ performance as Joan brings far more to the concept of the Doctor’s human self’s lover than did the book, though age of course means she is a very different character

* Similarly, the watch rather than the cricket ball, and the Book of Impossible Things, exploit the TV format beautifully

* The Family of Blood are gloriously sinister, far more so than the Aubertides

* And basically the fact of the Doctor being human because of the threat from the Family makes much more sense than the original idea of the Aubertides just happening to home along just after the Doctor has arbitrarily decided to try the single-heart club.

Less positive points

* The fate of the Family of Blood still bugs me. The Aubertides in the book are defeated in a fair fight; the Doctor’s meting out of judgement on the Family seems cruel – who made him the judge?

* The battle scene doesn’t work for me. The tragedy of real life war, especially the First World War, is that the other side is human, and the linkage between fighting scarecrows in 1913 and fighting Germans in 1915 seems to me both leaden and mistaken. Frankly turning the entire school to glass would have been a better solution (though technically more difficult).

* The fantasy life-with-Joan-and-kids section is too obvious a borrowing from The Last Temptation of Christ.

* Poor Martha gets much less of a look-in here than Bernice in the book; apart from Blink it’s probably her least visible episode.

It should be added that during the 2020 lockdown, two short story sequels to the TV story taking forward the Daughter-of-Mine plotline were written by Paul Cornell and released on Youtube, later published as part of the Adventures in Lockdown anthology. In case you missed them, here they are, both really short:

Coming back to the 2007 two-parter, I still like it a lot. Tennant’s characterisation of Smith is the heart and soul of it, and reminds us what a versatile actor he actually is. The battle scene grated less for me this time, I guess because having read a lot more about the First World War in the meantime, I’m now more tolerant of different takes on it. One also appreciates knowing that it is setting up one of the most spectacular reveals in the whole history of Who in a couple of episodes’ time.

One interesting aspect is that before this, there had been very few Doctor Who stories set in schools (I listed them here). Now there have been loads, including an entire spinoff series, thanks in part to having a companion who was explicitly a schoolteacher. Of course, for most kids, the boarding school is a fantasy environment anyway.

Paul Cornell is the first New Who writer to get two write-ups in the Black Archive series (from Old Who, David Whitaker has already got there); it should also be said that he’s been a fantastic advocate for the show over the years, even though he is concentrating on other things at the moment, and is probably the most visible writer in broader SF fandom who has emerged from Doctor Who. This is possibly the most extended analysis of his work that I have seen (though saying that may expose my ignorance); the earlier Black Archive volume on Scream of the Shalka concentrated much more on the production than the story.

There is lots to write about here, and Naomi Jacobs and Philip Purser-Hallard give themselves an extra burden by opting (correctly) to write about both the TV story and the book; it would have been weird to try analysing the former without the latter. I think even if you don’t love both stories you would find it a pretty satisfactory analysis.

The chapters cover:

A straightforward comparison of book and TV story, looking at the different plot elements and the way in which they were changed from page to screen and from Seventh to Tenth Doctor (and from Benny to Martha).
An examination of war, peace, cowardice and trauma in both versions of the story and in the Whoniverse more broadly.
A brief survey of schools in the Whoniverse and a briefer examination of the concept of family in this story (in both versions). The second paragraph of this chapter is:

Interestingly, though, both these absences [stories about school and/or family] have been filled during the 21st century, by successive showrunners. Russell T Davies embraced family relationships within the series’ drama, bringing relatives particularly to the fore in his companions’ backstories and present conflicts, while Steven Moffat would make more extensive use of school settings in 2013-16 than all of his predecessors, as well as increasing the prevalence of child characters.

A really meaty chapter looking at the story in the context of Christianity, given Cornell’s well known interest in religion; themes touched on include self-sacrifice, the nature of divinity, justice, resurrection/regeneration and temptation. This chapter alone is almost worth the cover price.
Another very meaty chapter matching the plot of both book and TV story to the Hero’s Journey of Joseph Campbell.
A brief conclusion, followed by four brief appendices.
A brief table of correspondences between characters in the book and TV story.
Speculation on the life-cycle of the Family (which would no doubt have been expanded if the authors had known about the two 2020 stories).
A thought on the Doctor as Merlin.
A brief attempt to force both versions of the story into the same continuity.

As I hope will be clear from the above, I think this is one of the better Black Archive books looking at one of the better New Who TV stories and also at one of the best spinoff novels. Recommended. You can get it here.

A Very Private Haunting, by Sharon Bidwell

Posted on 29 March 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Silence stood sentinel between them for a few minutes. Bishop broke first. ‘I read the report about the last encounter. That kid was lucky.’

Another good entry in the sequence of short novels about Brigadier Alexander Lethbridge-Stewart in the earlier part of his career. Here he and Anne Travers go to Scotland (again) and get caught up in a missing persons mystery combined with a sinister doll. Well executed, and recommended. You can get it here.

The Unofficial Doctor Who Annual 1972, ed. Mark Worgan

Posted on 22 March 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter (“Phantoms of the Mind”, by Paul Vought):

In Elm House, a recently built concrete tower block, in a very contemporarily furnished apartment an author sits at tier desk tapping away at the keys of her typewriter, totally absorbed in tier work. Now and then site takes a break by sipping a tepid coffee front a brown mug with an orange floral pattern on it. She has completely lost track of the time.

One of several unofficial annuals produced recently by Terraqueous, edited by Mark Worgan, filling the gap between the official 1971 Annual and the official 1973 Annual. In fact it has more pages (180) than the two of them combined, featuring comment from Katy Manning, Mike Tucker, John Levene and Richard Franklin, and twenty stories in prose and comic strip format, almost all of which also feature the Master, as well as the usual rather pointless games. It’s a little variable but its heart is in the right place. It seems to no longer be obtainable, so you’ll have to take my word for it.

Pyramids of Mars, by Kate Orman (and Robert Holmes and Terrance Dicks)

Posted on 20 February 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

I’m not sure if I saw Pyramids of Mars when it was first broadcast in 1975; I know I did catch the edited rebroadcast in November 1976, which got a larger TV audience than any previous episode of Doctor Who, and I also remember devouring the novelisation by Terrance Dicks at a young age. Once New Who had rekindled my fervour, it was one of the first DVDs I got. When I watched in 2006, I wrote:

Pyramids of Mars (1975) – from Tom Baker’s second year as the Doctor, which also included The Seeds of Doom and The Brain of Morbius, surely near the top of any fan’s listing of best stories. This is the one with the mummies and ancient Egyptian gods. It survives pretty well, and the DVD commentaries give it extra value – in fact it’s particularly touching that Michael Sheard, who of course died last August, obviously really enjoyed reliving his Who days via fandom and especially cons. The one serious problem is the special effects towards the end… but more than compensated for by the mini-documentary about Philip Hinchcliffe’s influence on the show.

When I returned to it for my great rewatch, I wrote:

This is a strong season of Who in any case, but it would have been even stronger if as originally planned Pyramids of Mars had been the first story of the season. It starts with the Doctor declaring his independence from UNIT, proclaiming a break with the past, and ends with UNIT HQ being destroyed (well, the building on the site anyway). The Doctor restates his fundamental purposes several times in the first episode, reminding us that this is a show about an alien Time Lord, not UNIT’s eccentric Scientific Adviser.

In other news, it is a particularly good story: Holmes as so often comes up with a good script, where pace and wit disguise the occasional hole in the plot, and stellar performances from Bernard Archard, Michael Sheard and Gabriel Woolf, as well as Baker and Sladen, combined with Paddy Russell’s inspired directing and some excellent design – note particularly how seamlessly we move from studio to location shots – make this one of the most effective stories of one of the better seasons. As it happened I was able to watch most of it with 11-year-old F and so can confirm that it remains good family viewing after 35 years.

Lewis Greifer, who wrote the first version of this script, also wrote an episode of The Prisoner (The General, the one with the teaching computer). He would qualify as the only person to have written for both great cult shows, had Robert Holmes not preformed such radical surgery on Greifer’s original text as to leave it unrecognisable (and, one suspects, much better).

Rewatching this time, I found the story mesmerising and fascinating, and I frequently found myself just replaying particular scenes to enjoy them still further. In my two previous write-ups I failed to pay adequate tribute to Elisabeth Sladen’s performance as Sarah Jane Smith. She really crackles in a way that few previous companions did (with the possible exception of Barbara, right at the beginning). It’s her third season in the role, but the first where she is mainly travelling on her own with Tom Baker’s Doctor, so the relationship has in a sense been rebooted.

I happened to see Sadie Miller, Elisabeth Sladen’s daughter, on a panel at Gallifrey One on Friday, and she commented that Tom Baker’s deep love for her mother, who died eleven years ago, still comes through in every interaction she has with him. That love is almost half a century old now, and I think it’s here where we really see it starting to take hold. We take the format of the Doctor with one lead female companion as being standard now, with the Peter Davison and Jodie Whittaker eras as exceptions, but this is actually where it starts. You can get it here.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of the novelisation is:

The Doctor listened, puzzled, as the sound of Namin’s movements suddenly moved away from him. The second pursuer, the larger one, was moving too. The sound came closer, then died away, as it moved past him somewhere just out of sight.

When I first re-read it in 2008, I wrote:

A good novelisation of one of the great stories. Dicks has topped and tailed the narrative with an explanation of the Osirians, and a nice vignette of Sarah going back to see what the local newspapers said about it all at the time. Again, some of the effects work better on the page than on the screen. (Though the written word can never give us the excellent performances of the guest cast here.)

I devoured the novelisation again on my flight to Los Angeles on Thursday. It’s still a good read. Terrance Dicks’ crisp and simple prose pulls the screen onto the page, with Sarah (who he had of course introduced when he was script editor) as the viewpoint character. You can get it here.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of Kate Orman’s book on the story is:

While the chinoiserie of Talons draws on the single source of Fu Manchu fiction and films, Pyramids of Mars is the inheritor of a longer tradition of ‘Egyptomania’ which started in the early 19th century with the deciphering of hieroglyphs and the publication of the multi-volume, richly-illustrated, and wildly successful Description de l’Égypte¹¹⁵. France and Britain, rivals for control of Egypt, shipped home obelisks from the city of Luxor to stand in Paris and London. In Victorian Britain, Egypt was everywhere: at exhibitions, public mummy unwrappings, and the opera (Verdi’s AidaPyramids.
¹¹⁵ Lupton, Carter, ‘“Mummymania”’ for the Masses’: Is Egyptology Cursed by the Mummy’s Curse?’. MacDonald, Sally, and Michael Rice, eds, Consuming Ancient Egypt, p23.

I commented in yesterday’s write-up of Simon Guerrier’s The Evil of the Daleks that these books have varied quite a lot in the attention they give to the script vs the performance. This one is unusual in that there is very little discussion of the actual TV programme. A quick search reveals that the main text does not mention director Paddy Russell, or of the stars Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen, or most of their acting colleagues, at all. (Three of the guest cast are mentioned briefly, once each.) Orman has concentrated almost entirely on the script and its sources, with a few references to casting, design and effects, but none at all to acting or cinematography. Everyone must write the book they want to write, of course, but this is the least complete guide to any story that I have yet read in the Black Archive series.

On the plus side, it’s a very deep dive into the roots of the script, which as noted above was originally written by Lewis Greifer and then heavily revised by script editor Robert Holmes. I love the story, as repeatedly stated above, but it invites and deserves critique of its treatment of race and gender (Sarah is the only woman seen, all the other characters, including non-speaking extras, are men).

The chapters cover:

Briefly, the question of why the story is set in 1911
At length, Egpytian mythology and its depiction of Set, rather different from what we are told about Sutekh in the script.
At length, mummy fiction.
Briefly, Mars in science fiction.
At length, the links between pyramids and the occult.
a conclusion which finishes with a personal reflection:

Growing up with the ABC’s constant repeats of Doctor Who, I was never troubled by the frequent failure of the special effects to look realistic. It didn’t matter that, when Sutekh sends the TARDIS key through the time tunnel and into Scarman’s hands, it’s obviously dangling from strings; what mattered was that Sutekh had control over the Doctor and the TARDIS. When I was a little older, I remember thinking the show could be seen as a dramatisation of real events. Obviously, the strings weren’t there when Sutekh really sent the key through. It was a useful way to excuse internal contradictions, errors of science and history, and other blemishes: the TV show was only an attempt to approach the truth of the original – so that multiple, seemingly incompatible attempts were all valid. Later still I could see how this could be applied to Doctor Who beyond the small screen. Novels, comics, audios, and so on, are all efforts to reach some basic truth – most importantly, I think, about the nature of the Doctor himself – which none of them can ever precisely define. Perhaps the Egyptians’ ‘multiplicity of approaches’ could be a useful alternative approach for a fandom obsessed with continuity and canonicity.

You can get it here.

The Evil of the Daleks, by Simon Guerrier (and John Peel)

Posted on 19 February 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

The eleventh of the generally excellent Black Archive series of short books on individual Doctor Who stories addresses The Evil of the Daleks, the last story of the fourth season of the show, first broadcast soon after I was born in 1967, written by David Whitaker and directed by Derek Martinus, both big names in the history of Who. It had seven episodes, but only the second of the seven survives in video. When I first listened to the audio tape of the story, narrated by Fraser Hines from a script by Sue Cowley, I was taking B out of the way so that F could enjoy his seventh birthday in 2006. I wrote:

Spent most of this afternoon driving to the Ardennes and back, so finished listening to The Evil of the Daleks, the last story of Patrick Troughton’s first season as the Doctor, and the one voted the Best Ever Doctor Who Story by readers of Dreamwatch in 1993. Only one episode out of seven survives on video, and I haven’t seen it (yet).

I have to say that I was very unsatisfied with the plot of this classic story. The Daleks’ plan to manipulate the Doctor, and the Doctor’s attempts to manipulate Jamie, are both unrealistically convoluted as well as being very out of character. We never find out how the Daleks got photographs of the Second Doctor, whom they otherwise met only on the planet Vulcan, and of Jamie, whom they did not otherwise meet at all (unless you believe the Season 6B theory). (We also know that the first two episodes of Evil of the Daleks are contemporaneous with The War Machines, so the Daleks would have been better off trying to grab the First Doctor who was elsewhere in London at the same time.) When we hit the nineteenth century, Arthur Terrall’s presence is not very satisfactorily explained, and the fact that he is a robot is just left hanging (or rather, Ruth is told to take him as far away as possible, as if this will somehow cure him of being mechanical). And it seems difficult to imagine that the Daleks are so bad at keeping track of individual units, however de-personalised they may be, that they simply lose track of the first three humanised Daleks. (The Discontinuity Guide further asks, “Why not just kidnap the Doctor and Jamie? Why does Terrall get Toby to kidnap Jamie? Since Jamie is so essential to Dalek plans, why are the traps set for him so lethal?”)

Having said that, the acting is great, and it’s clear from the BBC photosnaps that the series looked fantastic (Maxtible’s beard!!!!!). It’s also a really great idea to return to the Dalek City on Skaro (apparently the first time the Doctor had ever been seen to return to any planet except Earth) [other than a return within the same story, eg Kembel]. And I loved the Victoriana; I especially liked Waterfield’s horror-filled explanation, “We had opened the way for them with our experiments. They forced me into the horror of time travel, Doctor” – sounded very HP Lovecraft! And the references to Poe were clear (and even at one point explicit). And Troughton is great, dominating every scene (and this partly accounts for the flagging pace of episode 4 when he was on holiday).

So anyway, more good than bad, but I’m very sorry not to have actually seen any of it.

In retrospect, that was really a bit grumpy of me, and I guess I was put out by spending a nice summer day entirely in a car. In 2010 I watched the reconstruction of still photographs combined with narrated audio, and wrote:

Well, I have revised my opinion of Evil of the Daleks upwards thanks to watching the reconstruction. I still rate it below Troughton’s debut story, The Power of the Daleks, because the plot has some large holes (why go to the bother of the elaborate entrapment via the cafe in 1966? how is the Doctor supposed to spread the Dalek Factor through history? what’s up with Terrall anyway?) and also I just don’t like Victoria (though again, maybe I will change my mind after doing her stories in sequence).

There are a couple of things about Evil of the Daleks, however, that really appealed to me this time. First, Marius Goring as the deranged Maxtible is a compelling vilain, especially as backed up by John Bailey as Waterfield – together they are the two sides of the scientist character portrayed by Lesterson in the previous story. Second, Dudley Simpson is on top of things as composer – the Daleks have a “diggerdy-dum” leitmotif, Victoria has a more wistful theme. Third, while I’m not a huge fan of turning the Daleks into something else by giving them humanity, Whitaker handles it better here than Helen Raynor did in Daleks of Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks. Fourth, it’s a nice early example (or perhaps foreshadowing) of the steampunk subgenre.

Finally, the two episodes on Skaro are an excellent climax to not just this story but the five Dalek stories of the black-and-white era; the return to their home planet somehow gives the Daleks more cultural depth than they previously had, with the thrilling appearance of the Emperor and the excitement of the civil war. So more of a thumbs up than I expected.

I took advantage of family travel earlier this month to experience Evil of the Daleks in two different ways – the Fraser Hines/Sue Cowley audio that I had first listened to in 2006, and the brand new animation released last year by the BBC, which I watched in colour rather than black and white, though I made an exception for the surviving episode 2. As it happens, I met Rob Ritchie who did much of the work on the animations on Thursday evening in the bar at Gallifrey One. He was interesting and disarming about the challenges of the process, and the flaws of the final result, none of which I spotted when watching. I have to say that I still feel that the telesnaps reconstruction, with Fraser Hines narration, which I watched in 2010 is the version that works best for me. But the animation does take us to places where the recon cannot go.

Somewhat sheepishly, I will admit that I liked the story as a whole even more this time than previously. Troughton is on top form; the varied settings keep you guessing as to what will happen next; Maxtible and the Emperor are suitably deranged; the essence of what makes us human and the Daleks monsters is core to the plot; we move from a stolen blue box in Gatwick to planetary destruction. And Victoria is given a new home by the Doctor and Jamie. I am amused at myself for liking this story more every time I experience it.

You can get the audio here, and the DVD including both animation and telesnaps reconstructions here.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of John Peel’s novelisation is:

‘Bit of a bad area, know what I mean?’ the driver observed. ‘You want me to hang around?’ He was obviously hoping for another fare, since he’d overcharged the Doctor outrageously for their trip here.

When I first read it in 2008, I wrote:

This was the last official Target/Virgin adaptatation (a few remaining stories were produced in book form by fans subsequently) and therefore also the last Second Doctor novelisation and the last in the impressive series of five Dalek novelisations by John Peel. I have to say that I am among that heretical minority who regard the original story here as of less than top quality: the plot is absurdly convoluted, requiring both the Doctor and the Daleks to behave out of character, and Victoria as a new companion is awfully wet. But having said that, Peel improves on the original in a number of ways, giving the characters more comprehensible motivations, and embedding the narrative in the Dalek continuity he has been developing. I still preferred his others, but this is a good effort.

Oddly enough I also met John Peel the night before last, in the bar at the Marriott; he chortled with delight when I told him I had just been reading this – it had been great fun to write, he said. It shows.

I would add to the points made above that Peel resolves a number of points left hanging by the original TV plot – in particular, the situation of Arthur Terrell, who is not semi-robotic as I had thought, but a victim of Dalek experiments on mind control. You can get the novelisation here (for a price).

The second paragraph of the third chapter of Simon Guerrier’s monograph is:

The Daleks were – and remain – a key part of Doctor Who. Their first appearance, in the second Doctor Who story, helped establish the series, and their subsequent stories saw peaks in the numbers of people watching. When the production team took the risky step of recasting Doctor Who’s lead actor in 1966, they cushioned the blow by having this new incarnation immediately face The Power of the Daleks. Viewers stuck with the programme.

This really is one of the best Black Archive volumes that I have read so far, and also I think the longest. Some earlier ones went rather far into the literary origins of particular Who stories, perhaps because there wasn’t all that much to say about the actual stories in question. Guerrier looks at that a little, but doesn’t waste too much time on it, and is much more interested in telling the story of Evil of the Daleks – both production and reception – as a social process, carried out in real time by real people. As I’ve done before, I’ll list out the (few and long) chapters in summary:

London, 20 July 1966: Looks at the difficulties of analysing a story that is mostly lost, and at the production background and influences on the fist episode and a half (no woman appears in the 1966 scenes; originally Ben and Polly would have been in the first two episodes, and the Samantha Briggs character from The Faceless Ones would have been the new companion);
Outside Canterbury, 2 to 3 June 1866: looks at the Victorian setting of the middle episodes and Victoriana in general, but also at the character of Maxtible (Marius Goring, the lead guest star, had a fixation with Henry Irving and his play The Bells, which is one of the artistic source for Evil) and what we learn about the Doctor;
Skaro: Date Unknown: goes into great detail on the Daleks and on what Terry Nation and David Whitaker might have argued about, given that Whitaker arguably had an equal share in their creation; and
Earth, 1967-2017: looking at the reception and preservation of the story over fifty years – lot of deep research into how and where the scripts were preserved, featuring in places my old friend Rebecca Levene; the Beatles’ song Paperback Writer was played during the original cafe scene in the first episode, but has been dropped from releases of the sound track for copyright reasons; new photographs and off-air recordings keep coming to light.

Guerrier ends by appealing for the animation of the missing episodes which has since been accomplished, but also (as usual for these books) has a decent bibliography. It’s a really solid piece of work.

My one complaint is that yet again the footnotes have been botched on the epub version. Clicking on any of the hundreds of footnote links in the text takes you to the start of the footnote section rather than to the relevant footnote itself. When you have found your footnote and ty to click back to where you were in the main text, you are taken instead to the start of the relevant chapter – and these are long chapters. No blame attaches to the author for this, but really, publisher, this is not rocket science and you got it right in several of the others.

You can get it here.

Scream of the Shalka, by Jon Arnold (and Paul Cornell)

Posted on 11 February 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Next in the sequence of Black Archive monographs about individual Doctor Who stories, this time it’s the 2003 webcast which briefly promised to be a new start for the show, and was then blown out of the water by BBC Wales. I rewatched the actual story again, having been underwhelmed on first watching in 2012 when I wrote:

Scream of the Shalka is the reboot that didn’t come off. It is a shame in some ways because it has its strengths – notably the animation, which is far ahead of the other three in quality, Paul Cornell’s story-line of alien beings breaking into our world from an unexpected direction, and Sophie Okonedo’s performance as one-off companion Alison, and Derek Jacobi, not for the last time, as the Master. (Also keep an ear out for a brief appearance by David Tennant as a minor character.) But the biggest problem is Richard E. Grant’s Doctor, a pale and vampire-like presence whose arrogant character lies somewhere between the low point of Pertwee’s Doctor and the mid-point of Colin Baker’s for likeability. (Which is to say, not very high.) In the last episode we are told – by the Master, no less – that the Doctor is dealing with the scars of some dreadful conflict too awful to describe, an idea brought into NewWho also; and he gradually mellows throughout the story. In the end it feels a bit like The Movie, a false start, which relies a bit too much on continuity and does not do enough to make this about a character you would want to watch another seven, or twenty-six, or fifty years of. (For instance, Old Who fans will be baffled that the Master is now n sevraqyl ebobg; those new to Who will wonder why they are meant to care.) And there is an awful lot of screaming, though of course the clue is in the title.

This time around, I took it at an episode every evening, mostly glancing at the iPad while cooking, and it works maybe a little better at that pace, with the tension of the narrative tightly linked to the episodic structure (Cornell after all knew his stuff, as a reasonably experienced screenwriter). It’s also worth noting that the Shalka!Doctor is dealing with the recent loss of a dear companion, and presumably if this continuity had been prolonged we’d have learned more about that. You can (still) watch it here.

I also revisited Cornell’s novelisation. Second paragraph of third chapter:

The figure was green, its features smooth, like a polished marble statue. Its mouth was flexible and muscular, the only part of it that spoke of function over form. It was androgynous, and had no need for clothes. It was a representation of a human-being as seen from a distance, as seen from a superior culture.

When I first read it, also in 2012, I wrote:

I was really surprised and pleased by how much I enjoyed this book, the novelisation of the webcast story starring Richard E. Grant as the other Ninth Doctor. Perhaps it is partly that, at least in the opening pages, it so consciously draws on the style of the Dicks and Hulke novelisations of the Third and Fourth Doctor stories which meant so much to fans of the same sort of age as the author and me. But also a lot of the sequencing that didn’t quite work for me in the webcast seemed to me to be much better here: the Master’s new situation, the reasons for the Doctor’s emotional coldness, the back story to Alison’s relationship. We do miss out on Conor Moloney’s performance as Greaves, though. Perhaps the last week of work before the Christmas hols was a bad time to watch the webcast; I am certain that if I had read the book before watching it, I would have enjoyed both more.

Some of the similarities between Shalka continuity and New Who are even more noticeable here: that the Ninth Doctor is suffering PTSD after an awful war in which many people he cared about were killed, and that the new companion chooses to travel with the Doctor rather than remain in a (dull) interracial relationship. (As in Rose, there is also a monster leader underground controlling its minions who burst into the normal world to terrify humans, and the Doctor must descend to their lair to do battle, but those are fairly standard plot elements.)

The book also comes with a long afterword – a quarter of its total length – including the original story proposal and the author’s account of how the story came to be made, told with Cornell’s typical enthusiasm, but with first-hand accounts patched in from the production team as well. This may have turned out to be just a sidetrack in Who history but we are lucky that it is so well chronicled, including the story of how Cornell, on honeymoon in New Zealand, had to get a friend to break into his house to transmit the script to the BBC after an email went astray. It certainly adds to what is already a good book for fans to track down.

Not much to add this time. I really enjoyed the return to both the novelised story and the lengthy afterword. You can get it here.

Second paragraph of third chapter of Jon Arnold’s monograph, with footnotes (the third chapter is about the Master):

The role played by the Master was originally intended to be played by a holographic representation of a former Doctor. Cornell suggested that this should be the fifth Doctor, as ‘his kind and open personality would provide a nice contrast with our rather more harsh and edgy Doctor.’¹¹² This was a contrast he’d used before, in his New Adventures novel Timewyrm: Revelation (1991), where the fifth Doctor was portrayed as an almost saintly presence in contrast to the seventh Doctor, who carried the weight of the universe on his shoulders. This would have given Shalka a very different flavour; the fifth Doctor was established as an unambiguously heroic figure, and whilst he often demonstrated a dry sense of humour, any edge to the relationship would have had to come from Grant’s Doctor, rendering him even less sympathetic than he initially appears to be. Cornell changed this setup for two reasons: firstly because he felt that holograms had been overdone in telefantasy shows¹¹³, and secondly so that this assistant could have a ‘complicated, somewhat dangerous relationship’ with the Doctor and be ‘programmed to do the nastier things that our emotionally wounded and defensive Doctor couldn’t bring himself to do’¹¹⁴. Essentially then, this version of the Master would retain the amoral methodology he had often demonstrated in his prior television appearances but, with apparently less selfish aims, he was now redefined as a hero.
¹¹² Cornell, Scream of the Shalka, p202.
¹¹³ The obvious telefantasy antecedents Cornell is referring to which feature holograms able to assist but not interfere would have included Quantum Leap (1989-93), whose main character Sam was assisted by Al, a hologram of a person from Sam’s original time; the Emergency Medical Hologram called ‘the Doctor’ in Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001); and possibly even the command hologram from Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (1993-95). He may have also been referring to Red Dwarf (1988-99 and since revived) and Stargate SG:1 (1997-2007); however, the holographic characters in these series serve very different roles. Holography was relatively uncommon in the series to this point, only appearing under that name in The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977), The Leisure Hive (1980), Time and the Rani (1987) and Dragonfire (1987). The series’ use of holograms has become more common since 2005.
¹¹⁴ Cornell, Scream of the Shalka, p202.

Arnold actually wrote the very first of the Black Archive series, on Rose which came out the year after Scream of the Shalka and thoroughly stole its thunder. The actual analytical content of the book is the shortest of any of the Black Archives I have seen so far. Given that Scream of the Shalka turned out to be a dead end in continuity, there is not a lot to say, and most of it had already been said by Paul Cornell.

However there’s one particularly interesting point covered off by Arnold in the first chapter, which is on the nature of the Doctor; namely, why is it that the average viewer (Arnold quotes Russell T. Davies and Elizabeth Sandifer, but I would agree with them) finds Grant’s performance rather lacking in vigour, while those who were present at the actual shoot (Paul Cornell and James Goss, both of whom I would normally regard as reliable witnesses) describe him as thoroughly and energetically engaged in the recording? Arnold’s answer is that the medium itself is the issue:

The problem is that each line is delivered clearly and in full before the next line begins; everyone politely waits for the other person to fully finish speaking before they begin their line. As Who’s Next‘s verdict on Shalka notes, this feeling of the ‘in-the-room intimacy of a radio drama […] sits oddly when you’re watching pictures on a screen at the same time.’⁸² Conversations therefore rarely develop the energy of genuine interaction between two people, and instead feel like two people speaking in the same place and same time but not actually communicating. Whilst animation ameliorates this to a degree by the simple use of close-ups and characters facing each other, it drains the energy and emotion from performances; we don’t get proper reactions to build a scene.
⁸² Clapham, Mark, Eddie Robson and Jim Smith, Who’s Next: An Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who (2005), P390.

This is one of the most interesting production-related insights I’ve gleaned from the Black Archive series so far.

Just for completeness, the (few) chapters of Arnold’s monograph cover:

the nature of the Shalka!Doctor, as already discussed, and his roots in Dracula, Sherlock Holmes and Cornell’s other work;
Alison as a companion;
The Master, as noted;
Scream of the Shalka as a reboot story;
a conclusion to the main narrative: “It’s a brave, flawed attempt to find a future for Doctor Who when no-one thought it had one.”
an appendix debating the extent to which Scream of the Shalka is canon;
another appendix looking at “The Feast of the Stone”, the only other published story in Shalka!Doctor continuity;
a final, very long appendix presenting the sequel which came closest to being made, Simon Clark’s “Blood of the Robots” (other script proposals by Paul Cornell and Jonathan Clements were recycled elsewhere in the Whoniverse; the one by Stephen Baxter has not resurfaced).

If you’re intrigued by the possibilities of the Shalka!Doctor continuity, this book will tick your boxes. You can get it here.

The God Complex, by Paul Driscoll

Posted on 7 February 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

One of the more plausible interpretations of The Shining covered in the documentary movie, Room 237 (2012), is that the movie is a reworking of the Theseus and the Minotaur myth. At the end of the film Jack dies inside a hedge maze, a location that Kubrick added to King’s novel. The association of Jack with the Minotaur is foreshadowed elsewhere in the movie: there are moments when Jack appears taurine-like – as if he’s a bull about to charge; there is a poster of a skier who looks like the Minotaur beside another of a cowboy riding a bull; and in another scene, Jack’s wife, Wendy, makes a comment about leaving a trail of breadcrumbs, reminiscent of Ariadne’s thread. The God Complex is far more explicit in its mining of the Minotaur myth, but its association with The Shining extends far beyond this shared mythical inspiration.

Next in the sequence of Black Archive monographs on individual Doctor Who stories, which I am reading at the rate of two a month in an attempt to catch up. (Both this and the next one in sequence are numbered #10 on the cover, but it seems that this is really #9.)

The God Complex is one of my less favourite episodes in one of my less favourite series of New Who, and I didn’t write it up at the time, nor did I recommended it in my epic “Which New Who to Watch” post. In case you need your memory refreshed, here’s the “Next Time” trailer:

It’s the one where the Doctor, Amy and Rory are stuck in a hotel with a few other characters, of whom the best developed is Rita, played by Amara Karan; but it turns out that the hotel is a prison for a Minotaur. Personally I didn’t feel that the plot held together at all, and the scene at the end, where the Doctor basically kicks Amy and Rory out of the Tardis to start their lives without him, was disappointingly underdeveloped. But others differ; here, for instance, is Matt Smith reflecting on what the story might have told us about the Doctor:

In a panel at Dragon Con 2017, Matt Smith revealed his own theory for what was in the mysterious Room 11 in The God Complex and it’s much darker than you’d expect. #DoctorWho #MattSmith pic.twitter.com/It95XFR3PJ

— Tom Bowen (@ThetaSigma2017) January 27, 2022

Driscoll is clearly also a fan of the story, finding a lot more depth to it than I had imagined was there. The chapters are as follows:

The symbolism of the Minotaur, and modern treatments of the story in and beyond Doctor Who;
The roots of the story in Orwell’s 1984 (surveillance in particular);
The roots of the story in The Shining, film rather than book (hotel horror, obviously, though he also blames it for the weakness of the closing scene);
The roots of the story in previous Who stories about bases under siege and about religion (though I think he misses a couple of interesting examples on religion);
A rather good chapter on fear and terror as storytelling devices;
A more confused chapter trying to work out what the story is trying to tell us about faith and religion;
A long chapter on the Doctor’s fallibility as a hero;
A chapter on the role of the companions in Doctor Who;
a concluding short chapter wondering what the hell the symbolism of the fishbowl is meant to be?

Driscoll likes the story more than I did, but is not unaware of its flaws. I went back myself and watched it again to prepare for this post, but I think it will be a while before I repeat the effort. You can get Driscoll’s book here.

From the Heart of Europe

Books, politics, languages and life

Tag Archives: doctor who

The Curse of Fenric, by Una McCormack (and Ian Briggs)

The Lost Skin, by Andy Frankham-Allen; Scary Monsters, by Simon Forward

Dalek Combat Training Manual, by Richard Atkinson and Mike Tucker

Heaven Sent, by Kara Dennison; Hell Bent, by Alyssa Franke

Ninth Doctor Adventures: Old Friends

The New Unusual, by Adrian Sherlock and Andy Frankham-Allen

The Unofficial Master Annual 2074, ed. Mark Worgan

Ninth Doctor and Thirteenth Doctor audios

Jenny and Susan: The Doctor’s daughter and the Doctor’s granddaughter

Dodo rebooted (with @LCornelius_): new First Doctor audios

Face the Raven, by Sarah Groenewegen

The Eleventh Hour, by Jon Arnold

The HAVOC Files, Volume 4, ed. Shaun Russell

Directed by Douglas Camfield, by Michael Seely

Marco Polo, by Dene October (and John Lucarotti)

The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit, by Simon Bucher-Jones (and Matt Jones)

I am the Master, by Peter Anghelides et al

The Eighth of March 2: Protectors of Time

Full Circle, by John Toon (and Andrew Smith)

Carnival of Monsters, by Ian Potter (and Robert Holmes, and Terrance Dicks)

The Man from Yesterday, by Nick Walters

Legends of Camelot, by Jacqueline Rayner

The Ultimate Foe, by James Cooray Smith (and Robert Holmes, Eric Saward and Pip and Jane Baker)

Human Nature/The Family of Blood, by Naomi Jacobs and Philip Purser-Hallard (and Paul Cornell)

A Very Private Haunting, by Sharon Bidwell

The Unofficial Doctor Who Annual 1972, ed. Mark Worgan

Pyramids of Mars, by Kate Orman (and Robert Holmes and Terrance Dicks)

The Evil of the Daleks, by Simon Guerrier (and John Peel)

Scream of the Shalka, by Jon Arnold (and Paul Cornell)

The God Complex, by Paul Driscoll