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Hamster Book Club - The Doomsday Weapon by Malcolm Hulke · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:05
  Welcome back to the Hamster Book Club.
• 0:08
  My name is Joe Ford and I'm here today with three distinguished,
• 0:12
  intelligent and very handsome. May I say, gentlemen, we are
• 0:17
  here today to talk about Malcolm Holk's The Doomsday Weapon.
• 0:21
  But before we do that, I'm going to ask them all to introduce
• 0:24
  themselves and to tell us what their very first Doctor Who book
• 0:27
  is that they read. Let's go over to you first,
• 0:30
  Jason. Hi all, I'm Jason Thompson.
• 0:33
  You would have got fed up with hearing me on Hamster by now,
• 0:37
  I'm sure with all the dialect episodes that we've done.
• 0:41
  And of course I'm on Robots in Your Eyes as well.
• 0:43
  Quick plug there. So it's delightful to be back
• 0:47
  with the Hamster family again and doing the Doing the Book
• 0:51
  Club, My first Doctor Who book, that was Doctor Who and the
• 0:55
  Arkin Space by Ian Martin. And this is the book that got me
• 1:01
  into Doctor Who, because I had watched Doctor Who when it was
• 1:06
  on. My earliest memories are of
• 1:08
  Colin Baker and child of the Time Lord and what have you.
• 1:11
  By the time I got to secondary school, it hadn't been on for a
• 1:13
  couple of years, but I found some target nobilizations in the
• 1:16
  library, and the Ark in space was one of them.
• 1:18
  And I love it. It's one of my favorite
• 1:20
  nobilizations, and it got me into being a fan.
• 1:26
  Yeah, so, yeah. So partly it got me into being a
• 1:28
  Doctor Who fan, because it's a great novelization and there
• 1:31
  were a few others in the library.
• 1:32
  And partly because a short while after I'd read it, I was walking
• 1:35
  through the corridor one wet break time and I heard the
• 1:38
  Doctor Who theme coming out of one of the classrooms.
• 1:41
  And it turned out that one of the P/E teachers ran the Doctor
• 1:44
  Who Club at lunch times. And I poked my head around the
• 1:48
  door just in time for the words the Ark in Space Part One to
• 1:50
  appear on the screen. So in a ludicrous coincidence.
• 1:54
  So that right while I'm watching that.
• 1:56
  And I was hooked from from that point onwards.
• 1:58
  So the Arc in Space very special book for me.
• 2:01
  There was sequence in the arc in space where Noah's head
• 2:04
  literally bursts open. And yes, Roth comes.
• 2:08
  Yeah, with a sickening crack. That is the version we should
• 2:13
  have had on TV. I'm going to take this over to
• 2:16
  James next. Hello, James.
• 2:18
  Hello, I'm James Lark and my first Doctor Who book was
• 2:22
  either. Doctor Who in an exciting
• 2:25
  adventure with the Daleks. The hardcover version was in my
• 2:29
  local library and I was introduced to Doctor Who by my
• 2:33
  best friend, who showed me a couple of episodes of
• 2:35
  Remembrance, The Daleks and the Peter the Dalek Invasion, 2150
• 2:40
  AD, The Peter Cushing film and I was an instant convert, but my
• 2:45
  parents were Coronation Street watchers.
• 2:48
  And we didn't have a video recorder, so there was no chance
• 2:50
  of actually watching Doctor Who. And so any Doctor Who was like
• 2:54
  gold dust. So I remember finding this, It
• 2:56
  was the Gray version of the hard, hardcover version of the
• 3:00
  Dalek story. And it was like, oh, those line
• 3:04
  pencil, the the drawings inside, you know, the glimpses of this
• 3:09
  older Doctor Who in the first meeting of the Daleks.
• 3:11
  I remember that being so exciting and and reading about
• 3:14
  this other Doctor. It was either that one, or I was
• 3:17
  another school library browser, although my school didn't have a
• 3:20
  Doctor Who club, something about which I'm now intensely jealous,
• 3:23
  Jason. But I found Nigel Robinson's
• 3:28
  novelization of Doctor Who and the Underwater menace, and I
• 3:32
  remember I have distinct memories of maybe other people
• 3:37
  can empathize with this. I was clearly at Sylvester
• 3:40
  McCoy. Guy.
• 3:42
  That was my Doctor, and I didn't have a clue about Patrick
• 3:46
  Charles and I think the Radio Times have printed a picture of
• 3:49
  him for the kind of 25th anniversary edition, but that
• 3:52
  was all I had. So I am.
• 3:54
  I was imagining Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor when I read it,
• 3:57
  and trying desperately to imagine Polly as ace as I read
• 4:02
  The Underwater Menace and and and for some reason I formed an
• 4:07
  image of Jamie in my head as an old.
• 4:10
  Scottish man with a white moustache, wearing a Tamashanta
• 4:13
  and a kilt, none of which is Nigel Robinson's fault.
• 4:15
  But I remembered drawing pictures of the TARDIS crew like
• 4:18
  Sylvester McCoy, the 7th Doctor Ace and this old man with a
• 4:21
  Tamashanta. Which shows you how much of an
• 4:25
  impact Ben made in that novelization, because he didn't
• 4:27
  feature at all in my in my pictures.
• 4:29
  But it was one of those two books, and I absolutely just
• 4:33
  lapped it up. You know, the one thing I can
• 4:37
  remember about that novelization of the underwater minutes was
• 4:40
  the sequence at the end. And it stuck into my mind
• 4:43
  because it's probably the most sexiest moment in the Doctor Who
• 4:46
  book. Some Jamie slap Polly around the
• 4:49
  face and the process that will shut her up or something like
• 4:53
  that. Absolutely no.
• 4:54
  He's very violent, very misogynist.
• 4:56
  Definitely. Slightly slightly gentler,
• 4:58
  though, if he's an old man with a fluffy mustache.
• 5:04
  And over to you, Ian. Answer to your first question, I
• 5:08
  literally do not know because like lots of Doctor Who people,
• 5:13
  it's just always been there, hasn't it?
• 5:15
  Doctor Who? I'm probably a decade or more
• 5:17
  older than you guys switching by your reference points.
• 5:22
  So I just remember going to my local library and Doctor Who was
• 5:29
  a big thing. It was just because my dad told
• 5:32
  me he he was a film editor so. One of these things was make was
• 5:38
  make the TARDIS disappear. And he doesn't know it was
• 5:40
  something to do with rocks. It was a Patrick Troutan.
• 5:43
  He's not in the credits because it was an assistant thing to
• 5:46
  write a passage. Nearly everybody did.
• 5:48
  But I think I've been watched Dominators recently.
• 5:50
  It might have been the Dominators that's that's what
• 5:53
  I'm going for now. But we'll never know.
• 5:55
  But all he all he ever told me was it was on some cliffs and it
• 5:58
  was the TARDIS and it was black and white.
• 5:59
  It was it was Patrick Troutan. But you know, but he because
• 6:03
  most of his film editing career was in.
• 6:05
  News. But he did do much.
• 6:06
  He did his stuff with. He did a bit of stuff with with
• 6:10
  Ken Russell, his his black and white Elgar and things like
• 6:14
  that. But but because of that or for
• 6:17
  whatever reason, Doctor Who is was part of his anyway.
• 6:20
  So we I was watching it before while I was it was on when I was
• 6:23
  a baby, so and I know I saw the Zigons because I was terrified
• 6:31
  of our downstairs toilet because it had orange curtains.
• 6:34
  So it was like the interior of the Zygon spaceship and I would
• 6:37
  not go into it. So that was 1970, whatever it is
• 6:40
  five. So I was 3.
• 6:43
  And I also remember really clearly horrifying rock.
• 6:47
  I remember sitting there with a cushion in front of me on the
• 6:51
  sofa and the Bruton went at the side of the lighthouse and I
• 6:57
  screamed so much. And then I just remember my dad
• 7:00
  laughing shortly in that bad kind of way.
• 7:02
  Because it's brilliant when kids are screaming at Doctor Who and
• 7:05
  then my mom just going right, that's enough, he's too young
• 7:08
  and turning it off. And then my scream was even
• 7:11
  louder and and I screamed until she put it back on and then I
• 7:14
  carried on watching but horrifying rock.
• 7:18
  I really remember reading that a lot and the whole Flannel Isle
• 7:21
  stuff and that poem. But the main thing to me was
• 7:25
  when I was really quite young, we went to the village library
• 7:29
  in North Yorkshire. And it was just row upon row of
• 7:33
  hardback targets. And so I never got anything else
• 7:37
  out but I just went and got my 4:00.
• 7:41
  So I hardly own anything from those years, hardly own
• 7:45
  anything. But just that.
• 7:47
  I just, I can remember it now. They were massive.
• 7:50
  They were hardback and they and and just I must have read them
• 7:53
  all over and over over and over and they just.
• 7:57
  I was one of. They always say the generation
• 7:59
  that Terence Dix talked to read, and that was us, you know, That
• 8:02
  was when I only got to meet Terence Dix once briefly at a
• 8:06
  con, and my mate was running in Manchester and I was stuck in
• 8:11
  traffic. And I got there just as Terence
• 8:14
  was getting in a taxi and got to say thank you.
• 8:16
  You told me to read or whatever. And then and then he.
• 8:20
  Then he got thank you very much and wished, got whisked away.
• 8:24
  And then he suddenly died. Not too long after that, did he?
• 8:28
  So anyway, that's me. I think we had a like a Dylan's
• 8:33
  at a market stall that had the odd target book.
• 8:36
  But like, I used to beg my mother to take me to other towns
• 8:39
  just so because I just couldn't find towns anywhere at the time.
• 8:42
  It took me ages to build up that collection.
• 8:45
  Well, thank you guys. Thank you for that.
• 8:48
  Can I just say it's off topic, but in that Ken Russell Elgart
• 8:52
  documentary that your dad worked on?
• 8:54
  It's incredible. It's a really good documentary.
• 8:56
  Yeah, yeah. No, you did a few.
• 8:57
  I mean, one of the, this is really off topic.
• 9:00
  But you know, it's interesting. One of my dad's biggest, well,
• 9:04
  not his biggest claims of fame because he worked on Blue Peter
• 9:06
  for years. But he did.
• 9:08
  He did. He did lots of stuff for my dad.
• 9:11
  God bless him. But yeah.
• 9:13
  And he worked on oh God, what's he called?
• 9:17
  Oh God, the the other one that's not Algar.
• 9:21
  There were three of Oliver reading.
• 9:22
  One on Debussy. Oliver Reed One.
• 9:25
  Yes, with Oliver Reed, yeah, yeah.
• 9:27
  Yeah, so Oliver Reed couldn't burp.
• 9:31
  And so afterwards in the edit, Ken Russell's there with my dad
• 9:34
  going, these burps are crap. And so they took my dad down the
• 9:37
  pub and gave him 4 pints in in Soho, gave him 4 pints and sat
• 9:42
  there recording him burping and then the dubbed over his burps
• 9:45
  over Oliver Reed in that movie. I feel that there's an entire
• 9:50
  podcast about this, you know, and it's almost a shame.
• 9:56
  We're now going to talk about the doomsday weapon, but hey,
• 9:58
  hey, that's why we're here. I said to Jason off my before we
• 10:11
  started, when this came up on the randomizer, I remember
• 10:15
  thinking, geez, Colony and Space, like we're going to be
• 10:18
  reading Colony in Space. I'm convinced this is the best
• 10:22
  of the four that I've read so far.
• 10:24
  I think this is a terrific book. I'm going to go around to each
• 10:28
  of you now and just grab like your initial thoughts on the
• 10:32
  book and kind of what do you think about the TV story as well
• 10:37
  and how do the two compare? Let's start with James.
• 10:43
  Well, coincidentally, I had watched Colony in Space not long
• 10:47
  before the randomizer pulled this one out, and I had a
• 10:49
  similar reaction. It's a very powerful piece of
• 10:54
  writing and and clearly kind of a more fully realized version of
• 10:58
  this story. I very much enjoyed it, though.
• 11:01
  It's a it's a pretty tough read for all kinds of reasons that
• 11:05
  I'm sure we'll touch on, but it's a great piece of writing.
• 11:08
  I think it has one pretty massive.
• 11:12
  Floor, which becomes apparent as the book goes on, but I'm sure
• 11:15
  we'll discuss that, Jason. Well, I love Colony in Space.
• 11:22
  Colony in Space is one of those stories that, you know, I grew
• 11:26
  up in the 90s with all the received fan wisdom of how
• 11:28
  stammers, Walker painting, Bentham and all that lot.
• 11:32
  Colony in Space was rubbish, I was told.
• 11:34
  And then it came out on VHS and I watched it and I thought, what
• 11:37
  the hell are they talking about? This is actually probably good.
• 11:40
  I really enjoyed this. And so I had no idea.
• 11:46
  And I I coincidentally, actually, not long before this
• 11:49
  popped up, I'd listened to one of Toby Haydoke's podcast and he
• 11:53
  talked about, well, I think it was one of his AM A's and he
• 11:57
  talked about Malcolm Hulk and his fleshing out of his
• 12:00
  normalization. So when we got this, I thought
• 12:02
  this could be interesting. It was way more interesting than
• 12:05
  I ever anticipated it would be. It's really fleshed everything
• 12:11
  out. To such a degree.
• 12:13
  And it's a shame that some of what's in the book didn't make
• 12:16
  it onto the screen more clearly. So yeah, I was.
• 12:21
  I really enjoyed it. I mean, I think it's the 6th
• 12:23
  target normalization ever in the entire range.
• 12:27
  So it's a very early one before they decided that it had to be
• 12:30
  limited in Page count. So it's quite thick as target
• 12:33
  normalizations go. But yeah, I thought it was
• 12:37
  great. Really enjoyed it.
• 12:39
  How about you, Ian? Yeah, I really enjoyed it.
• 12:42
  I was a bit like everyone else. I was it wasn't because of
• 12:45
  Coloring in space, because I haven't watched Coloring in
• 12:47
  Space apart from today. I haven't watched it for such a
• 12:49
  long time. And I watched and I was going to
• 12:52
  watch more of it, but as I was saying off mic I had to go and
• 12:56
  sitting and pick my son up. So I only got to watch episode
• 12:58
  one in the end, but but I remember not hating it anyway.
• 13:02
  But I was a bit. I wasn't, like disappointed.
• 13:05
  I was really like, I'm actually, because this is, I'm finally on,
• 13:08
  I'm finally on the Hamster episode after probably 2 years
• 13:11
  of trying to get on one, so I'm not complaining.
• 13:13
  But I was a bit like, I quite wanted to be the randomizer to
• 13:17
  pluck out a book that I hadn't read that was from, like,
• 13:21
  there's so much of Doctor Who literature I haven't read.
• 13:23
  I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm like all the 8th Doctor stuff.
• 13:26
  Most of that is mystery to me. So I'd love to get back and read
• 13:30
  that. So it's like, oh, a book I read.
• 13:32
  I've probably read this about 1000 times as a kid.
• 13:35
  But could I remember any of it? Absolutely not.
• 13:37
  And this was totally not what I was expecting.
• 13:40
  It's like, what was I reading as a kid?
• 13:42
  Because all this I remember, I remember the cover.
• 13:44
  It's seared in my brain. So I've watched, I've read this
• 13:47
  over and over again, probably over over like 10 years and
• 13:51
  probably not quite. But anyway, I've read it a lot
• 13:53
  and I don't remember anything more than the stuff I would have
• 13:56
  got off the TV show. And so, yeah, it's, it's, it's,
• 14:00
  it's, it's, I mean, it's a brilliant artifact as well.
• 14:04
  I've been having to do some stuff on the first ever book,
• 14:07
  The Whitaker Dalek book, which I've just been told I can't talk
• 14:11
  about too much at the moment, but it will become apparent to
• 14:14
  you while I've been having to do stuff to do with that.
• 14:17
  But like, the Whitaker book is gorgeous, but it's very
• 14:22
  oldfashioned and this is very oldfashioned, but I still love
• 14:25
  it. But it's really it's almost
• 14:28
  1950s kind of scifi, isn't it in some ways.
• 14:33
  But yeah, but obviously that's that's then we can talk at
• 14:37
  depth. There's a lot of JG Ballard type
• 14:41
  stuff in there as well, which isn't cozy 50s scifi.
• 14:44
  I was astonished to how violent this was.
• 14:48
  You know the sequence, Jane Leeson and her husband are
• 14:51
  killed. And one of the line just says
• 14:54
  there was blood everywhere, which I do not at all on the
• 14:57
  television show, correct me if I'm wrong.
• 15:00
  And sort of the sequences of violence, it doesn't hold back.
• 15:03
  There's Spears going into people.
• 15:04
  People, Yeah. I can't imagine when the
• 15:07
  teachers are saying, right, kids read your books now that they
• 15:11
  kids were reading this sort of material.
• 15:13
  Yeah, yeah, there was, yeah. I mean, I made so many notes
• 15:16
  going through it way more than I thought.
• 15:18
  And one of them, just near the end is like, battered his head
• 15:21
  in with a knife. Sharp rock, yeah.
• 15:25
  The explicit violence, that's also genuine sadism.
• 15:30
  These the the you know dead and especially just does some
• 15:33
  horrible things just for the sake of being really nasty and
• 15:37
  and he doesn't shy away from showing that absolute kind of
• 15:40
  the joy he takes in torturing people.
• 15:43
  Yeah. Dent is really fleshed out in
• 15:46
  this novelization. We get a lot of his, a lot of
• 15:49
  his inner monologue. We get an awful lot of and he
• 15:53
  there was there was a bit in it which made me sort of.
• 15:58
  To think I can't picture that somehow, because there's a
• 16:00
  couple of times when the the pro says Dent smiled.
• 16:05
  I'm thinking back over it. Morris Perry in Colony on the
• 16:08
  screen never smiled smiling at all.
• 16:13
  But yeah, he's really sadistic. I mean, there's the there's the
• 16:17
  sequence where Morgan fails to kill the Doctor and it on the
• 16:23
  screen we get Dent going. Ah, you failed you.
• 16:26
  City sold and all that kind of thing.
• 16:28
  In the book, he beats the crap out of Morgan and says I'm doing
• 16:31
  this instead of killing you because you messed up.
• 16:34
  And when you know, Caldwell walks in and finds Morgan on his
• 16:36
  knees in front of Dent. Yeah, that bit, that bit stood
• 16:40
  out to me as well. It's really, I mean, yeah, the
• 16:42
  the psychology of the book is very grown up.
• 16:45
  Well, that relationship between Dent and Morgan is is
• 16:48
  fascinating. And the that's the bit where
• 16:49
  Morgan stops. Calling him Sir makes this kind
• 16:52
  of calculated decision to slightly come back away from
• 16:55
  the. Obsequiousness that he's shown.
• 16:58
  You know, tactically he's maneuvering himself all the
• 17:00
  time. But that is a thing that Malcolm
• 17:03
  Holt does really well always. It's the thing that people
• 17:06
  remember about his stories. It's how he fleshes out these
• 17:08
  often quite minor characters and give some back story and
• 17:12
  motivation and really kind of explains that point of view.
• 17:15
  You think this is the best example, That this book is the
• 17:17
  best example of that? I think it's one of the most
• 17:21
  interesting because although what is clear from the text is
• 17:25
  he absolutely despises capitalism and and capitalists,
• 17:30
  he is able to write Dent as a realistic character and explain
• 17:35
  why he thinks how he thinks and he explains it.
• 17:38
  You know it doesn't. It doesn't show him in a
• 17:40
  favorable light, but it also rationalizes his behavior, which
• 17:44
  is a very impressive thing for someone who clearly kind of
• 17:47
  thinks that his behavior is is absolutely abysmal.
• 17:50
  It makes. Him very much a product of his
• 17:53
  own time. Cuz what Hulk also does in the
• 17:56
  nobilization is flesh out the description of what life is like
• 17:59
  on earth where the boy does it. Well, and that's fundamental to
• 18:04
  the character, isn't it? Because if what you're shown is
• 18:06
  if your only choice in life is to get a slightly bigger kind of
• 18:10
  Gray room to live in. Than it is every man for himself
• 18:13
  and you are going to behave in the worst way possible and get
• 18:17
  other people out of the way in order to rise to the top.
• 18:20
  And what is the you get better marital prospects as well with
• 18:26
  your slightly bigger house? Yeah, yeah.
• 18:29
  I mean it's weird. Did anyone else think, keep
• 18:32
  thinking of the good life like cuz he's born from the same
• 18:36
  society. So, so this was Jerry.
• 18:39
  This was Jerry and Margo. And you know they sort of made
• 18:43
  fascist by capitalism and and then the colonists were like
• 18:48
  scruffy and smelt of sweat and with a dropouts from society.
• 18:52
  So it's completely from that 70s as as the 60s became the 70s
• 18:58
  with a lot of our favorite Doctor Who sort of lives and we
• 19:01
  have this and the Doctor straddles those two worlds
• 19:05
  helping the military but being a hippie you know there's a
• 19:08
  there's a brilliant line in the book where.
• 19:10
  Where he's, you know, they're talking about, well, aren't you
• 19:12
  going to talk them out of revolution?
• 19:14
  Well, how can I, Joe, when I agree with them?
• 19:17
  That was an excellent line, but. When did Doctor Who get so woke?
• 19:20
  I mean, they're nice, mate. The bit that shocked me was the
• 19:27
  sequence. I think it's from Jane Leeson's
• 19:29
  point of view again, where they were talking about being able to
• 19:31
  go outside into a small square of concrete and stare up at the
• 19:36
  like at the sunlight hour a week.
• 19:39
  And that's a street on this planet.
• 19:41
  And there's a sort of you. Have to go for a walk.
• 19:47
  You can go for a walk on a on a scrolling screen behind.
• 19:51
  The scrolling screen. Which has videos of.
• 19:54
  Plants and animals which no longer exist on earth and wafts
• 19:57
  smells that apparently are how these flowers and plants and
• 20:00
  animals actually smell. Because it says, I think at one
• 20:04
  point it says all the animals on earth have been systematically
• 20:06
  exterminated by 2500. That's an interesting point.
• 20:12
  He jumps the sorry, go ahead. No, you finish.
• 20:19
  He adds 500 years to the time because on the screen it's.
• 20:24
  Mary Ash says she left in 22,471, and in the book it's
• 20:29
  2971, so he's gone 1000 years instead of 500 years ahead.
• 20:34
  And on my copy it might be the 3rd edition from 1983, but they
• 20:38
  still haven't bothered. Change in the back that has
• 20:43
  2004, 2471, and inside it's the 30th century.
• 20:47
  But but you know one thing I One thing about these books is
• 20:51
  fascinating. Just like just like the TV
• 20:54
  program they didn't they can't have imagined people would be
• 20:56
  6050 sixty years later still examining them.
• 21:01
  This could have done with a bloody good edit it hasn't had
• 21:04
  an editor there were there were you know it's God bless Malcolm
• 21:08
  Hope but you can feel him typing it and and I'm I'm there with my
• 21:12
  pencil going no, no. You use that word like one
• 21:15
  sentence ago. Why is it in this next sentence?
• 21:17
  There's so many bits like that in it, and there is with a lot
• 21:19
  of. These pulp books, cuz they are
• 21:21
  Pope, they're very well written Pulp Fiction of a show that we
• 21:27
  all love with amazing ideas. But they, you know, could have
• 21:29
  done with an editor. Yeah, I.
• 21:32
  Guess if they'd Yeah. I think that's kind of just such
• 21:35
  a rich scene of invention. He's obviously really invested
• 21:38
  in this view of the future and it's very well thought through.
• 21:41
  It's very consistent all the way through the book and he fills in
• 21:44
  gaps as you go on. So quite early on you get that
• 21:47
  vision of the world they live in, you get the news that
• 21:50
  mankind has wiped out and it's an environment.
• 21:55
  But then you get the back story of the colonists and you start
• 21:58
  to feeling kind of actually what a complex world this is.
• 22:02
  And it's not just a kind of A2 dimensional critique of
• 22:07
  capitalism or or or a doomy kind of prophecy of ecological
• 22:12
  disaster. It's it's more complex than
• 22:14
  that, I think. And and and it does have that
• 22:17
  kind of, as you say, it's got the colonists on one side who
• 22:19
  are far from a perfect group and the miners on the other side and
• 22:24
  and there there, you know, there are plenty of morally ambiguous
• 22:27
  moments with them too. So as you said, healthy bit of
• 22:33
  fiction, it's yeah, it's a remarkably well thought through
• 22:37
  one. Yeah, I mean the cold.
• 22:39
  I think the Coldwell character is sort of integral because he
• 22:44
  isn't a full blown fascist like Dent, who is like a corporate
• 22:49
  fascist. And the and the rest of them are
• 22:52
  all very, I mean obviously they're very much lots of Nazi
• 22:56
  allegories as a whole. What's wrong with following
• 22:58
  orders? Kind of a kind of thing going
• 23:01
  on. I love when Caldwell saves
• 23:05
  Winton and he saves life. And I really didn't see that
• 23:10
  coming, he says. I've just saved your life, young
• 23:12
  man. So that gives me the right to
• 23:14
  give you a little fatherly advice.
• 23:17
  Adjudicators can be fixed, understand?
• 23:19
  He rubbed his fingers against his thumb.
• 23:21
  Money, he said. That's all that really matters.
• 23:24
  I don't like it and you don't like it, but that's how things
• 23:27
  work. He's he's a sort of defeatist.
• 23:30
  He doesn't like it, but that's the system, he acknowledged.
• 23:33
  He's a realist, and this is all about how kind of the whole
• 23:36
  their worldview is informed by money.
• 23:40
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 23:40
  No. So I I wrote that quite as well
• 23:43
  because it's really is like the heart of the book and Coldwell
• 23:45
  straddles is in is in between and and I think that's that's
• 23:50
  what saves the book from being being you know didactic is is
• 23:56
  he's not. He's not saying capitalism bad
• 23:59
  the alternative good. He's sort of going this this is
• 24:02
  humans because when the when the when the revolution happens
• 24:05
  those colonists become horrible and that that took me back as
• 24:09
  well. They're properly just killing
• 24:11
  people. And it's it's like it's weird
• 24:14
  like that that the way people are just getting executed and
• 24:17
  people's heads like shot in the head and fell through the floor
• 24:20
  and fell through the door. And and it really is like you're
• 24:24
  seeing a very small little brutal moment.
• 24:27
  Absolutely like, you know, it's like 2 cities and gone.
• 24:30
  That's how it works, you know? It gets evil, and that's what
• 24:34
  you know. It's one of the things, I mean
• 24:35
  it works in the on the TV serial as well and it's one of the
• 24:38
  things that you need in some of these things you don't just have
• 24:44
  the good guys and the bad guys. You have the guys on the bad
• 24:47
  side who are like, actually I don't like this very much and
• 24:50
  you get to see that yes, this, you know, the IMC are.
• 24:56
  Basically, they run everything, They'll turn up, they'll do what
• 24:58
  they want to do because they know that if they go through the
• 25:00
  system, it will take so long for that to happen that by the time
• 25:03
  the decisions come back from Earth, they've got what they
• 25:04
  wanted anyway. They don't care about killing
• 25:07
  the colonists and so on. But not everyone on the I MC
• 25:10
  ship is happy with that. They're kind of like, well, this
• 25:14
  is the situation, and I think there's a moment in which again
• 25:17
  doesn't. If if some of this stuff had
• 25:19
  made it onto the screen, I think we'd consider Colony and Space A
• 25:22
  classic, because it's missing. On the screen, you don't get
• 25:27
  half this stuff, but there's a you know, there is the argument
• 25:30
  between Caldwell and Dent. And Dent tries to say to
• 25:34
  Caldwell, you know you'll commit professional suicide.
• 25:37
  You won't get your living quarters, your wife will desote,
• 25:40
  you'll leave you and everything else.
• 25:41
  And he says, well, my wife left me anyway, so you can't hang
• 25:44
  that over my head. So at which point Dent is pretty
• 25:48
  much oh crap, okay, lost me leverage there, so.
• 25:54
  Yeah, and it's so interesting because he starts so cold,
• 25:57
  doesn't it? And as the book goes on, he gets
• 25:58
  more frustrated and more violent as it goes along.
• 26:02
  I wanted to ask you guys about the sequence where the Doctor
• 26:06
  has to essentially guide the colonists to having a funeral
• 26:12
  for the people that died. Yeah, that bit.
• 26:15
  That's the main thing. I wanted to check that.
• 26:17
  I don't remember that from the TV version.
• 26:18
  It's not there at all. No, no, I assumed it wasn't, but
• 26:21
  that was what I was going to check if I hadn't been
• 26:23
  curtailed. Today, but yeah, but that that
• 26:27
  bit really, that felt like amazing.
• 26:29
  Amazing. It's it's almost like they he
• 26:32
  captured pertly better in that section than any, you know.
• 26:35
  Not to say he doesn't in the rest of the book, but that
• 26:37
  seemed like perfect pertly to me.
• 26:40
  I really love that sequence and, you know, partly also flashes
• 26:47
  out. The worldview at the time is
• 26:48
  death has become sanitized. When you die, you die in a
• 26:51
  hospital and then your body is. Incinerated.
• 26:54
  And that's it. Don't happen.
• 26:57
  It's horrible. The Earth's population has
• 27:01
  become so dense that the only thing you can do with the dead
• 27:06
  people is get rid of them as quickly as possible.
• 27:10
  And but I really like the you need to say something nice
• 27:16
  because they need it. They don't know they need it.
• 27:19
  But they do. And then to explain that, yeah,
• 27:22
  you then have a celebration afterwards because you're
• 27:24
  celebrating their life, you're mourning their death and
• 27:26
  celebrating their life. And I think that's, you know,
• 27:29
  brilliant. Stuff you say.
• 27:31
  Make sure the tea's ready for when we get back, you know?
• 27:34
  So yeah. Yeah, and I like the fact he
• 27:36
  likes the cake of the sequence, isn't it?
• 27:38
  That he teaches them surf, funeral and then to put the
• 27:41
  kettle on that's so perfect. You're right.
• 27:44
  Yeah, yeah. I like that.
• 27:46
  Bookends it as well, because at the end they have the mass
• 27:48
  burial of everybody who's died. And Winton has to give a speech.
• 27:53
  And again, he's like, the doctor should say, no, no, it has to
• 27:55
  come from you. And Winton sort of doesn't quite
• 28:01
  extend an olive branch because he says, you know, your people,
• 28:03
  sometimes you have to fight and die for things and your people.
• 28:06
  He says to the IMC guys died for the wrong things, but I'm still
• 28:10
  sorry they were killed. And there's kind of a little bit
• 28:14
  of. Not quite reconciliation, but no
• 28:18
  recognizing that this is not the time for the hostility to
• 28:21
  continue. Yeah, I like the whole returns.
• 28:23
  It's a sort of return to Eden and you know, trying to go back
• 28:27
  to the soil, which again is very good life.
• 28:30
  Like they're going back to like, you know, they're doing the
• 28:32
  space equivalent of getting around chickens and get going to
• 28:36
  an alien planet and and not being very good at it.
• 28:41
  To start with, because they've lost their way so and the fact
• 28:45
  that they don't even know how to have a funeral anymore.
• 28:48
  So this is it's like a traumatized human race, isn't
• 28:51
  it? On a similar theme, there's an
• 28:53
  extraordinary theme where Ash reads the Bible.
• 28:56
  Yeah, and. Well, I was gonna say about the
• 28:58
  religion, he doesn't understand the concept of self sacrifice.
• 29:02
  Yeah, yeah, What was, what was The thing is reading this book
• 29:05
  that was written thousand thousands of years ago about
• 29:07
  somebody called God, and there's no belief.
• 29:11
  System at all in the future. Well that yeah that that's
• 29:14
  that's really interesting thing because religion and Doctor
• 29:18
  Who's always been a very strange thing other than partner wishing
• 29:23
  people happy Christmas. It's very much the Doctor
• 29:26
  doesn't have a religion and and and and he's very much.
• 29:33
  I I guess seen as a sort of atheist figure that borrows
• 29:36
  heavily from Christianity all the time.
• 29:39
  How many times has he been Christ like?
• 29:42
  Or she even I thought it was a lovely thing to pop that in the
• 29:47
  the idea that actually humanity has lost something quite
• 29:50
  important. Yeah, yeah.
• 29:51
  And that's what I was going to say.
• 29:52
  So I was going to say it's interesting like, like like what
• 29:55
  religion was he, what do you mean?
• 29:57
  And it's almost like that's like that.
• 30:01
  Like the humans have got to remember to be human in those
• 30:03
  ways, and that includes things like religion, which in a weird
• 30:07
  way goes maybe against the grain of what you might think, a sort
• 30:12
  of progressive hippie like Malcolm.
• 30:15
  But again, I think it's but I don't know what.
• 30:16
  Religion was or anything or it's in this book you see another
• 30:23
  side of religion because you see our culture refueling a nuclear
• 30:26
  weapon ritualistically. So I actually think this is
• 30:29
  another example of Malcolm Holt giving a really fully rounded
• 30:32
  perspective and and he's not just going in and saying you
• 30:35
  know, religion is primitive and and danger.
• 30:39
  Yeah. Well again that's a sign of a
• 30:40
  good writer is when you when you live in the Gray and we don't
• 30:44
  and and you know there were goodies.
• 30:47
  There aren't goodies and baddies, and the fact that you
• 30:49
  do this, I mean the people who. Aren't Doctor Who funds will
• 30:53
  won't realize how sophisticated Doctor Who is.
• 30:56
  Just like you know just like most things are a lot more
• 30:59
  sophisticated than people that don't watch it.
• 31:02
  You know Doctor Who's always had this has always had really at
• 31:06
  least best has always had sophisticated storytelling with
• 31:08
  really good characters that aren't just villains and aren't
• 31:13
  just goodies and and this this book is a is a prime example of
• 31:20
  of. How?
• 31:21
  How? Everyone's believable.
• 31:24
  Reminds me a bit of the way Alan Moore writes the fascists and V
• 31:28
  for Vendetta, you know, And he got a lot of stick for that, for
• 31:32
  empathizing with people that work for those systems.
• 31:35
  And this is a bit, almost a bit like that.
• 31:37
  It's like these are just people who are just getting on with the
• 31:41
  day job and the system's too big.
• 31:43
  So what are you going to do? You know, mortgage.
• 31:48
  Unusual amount of substance in this, isn't it?
• 31:50
  For a target novel at the time because obviously a lot of the
• 31:54
  Tarrant Sticks ones, they were literally, you know script pros.
• 31:59
  So yeah, this is and I think Hulks, how many did Hulk do?
• 32:02
  Five. Was it Silent Sea Devils?
• 32:06
  Dinosaurs. Front.
• 32:08
  I think I want green death. Because you have green death as
• 32:11
  well. Dinosaurs is one of my apps at
• 32:14
  all time favorites because I I didn't watch the TV version till
• 32:19
  God knows, probably not that long ago, like a few years ago,
• 32:23
  but I just knew the story so well from the book.
• 32:26
  The book again, I'd like to go back and reread that, but the
• 32:29
  book again is so dense and that's about wellmeaning
• 32:32
  progressives and and lives in that, you know, plays of other
• 32:36
  plays of the dichotomy between progress and the old ways.
• 32:41
  Of the Of all the characters in this book, then which character
• 32:48
  pops most for you guys? Which one do you think benefited
• 32:52
  most for being written for in prose rather than on the TV,
• 32:56
  James? Well, can I sort of answer in a
• 33:00
  slightly lateral way and say one of the characters that doesn't
• 33:03
  benefit is Joe Grant? I was about to say, yeah, yeah,
• 33:06
  there's a very interesting thing going on here where even it
• 33:09
  looks to me as though Terror of the Autumns was in, you know,
• 33:13
  being written at the same time. So they knew that Joe's
• 33:16
  introductory story was coming out soon.
• 33:19
  And yet Hulk does the same as Whitaker in the in the first
• 33:22
  Dalek book, he writes a whole new introduction for Joe and the
• 33:26
  first chapter or to a scene from her perspective, you know she's
• 33:31
  the stranger walking into the TARDIS and it and it completely
• 33:34
  changes the dynamic because rather than having had three
• 33:37
  adventures with the Doctor, by the time she goes to a different
• 33:39
  planet at a different time, this is her first adventure.
• 33:43
  And she barely knows the Doctor to the extent that he doesn't
• 33:46
  even remember her name when they arrive.
• 33:48
  So it's a very straight. I mean, the Doctor, he doesn't
• 33:51
  really offer her much comfort either.
• 33:53
  He just sort of says off you go and make friends with some
• 33:56
  colonists and and I'm sure it'll be fine.
• 34:00
  He's very office with her and then she disappears from the
• 34:03
  story almost completely, except just to be a kind of a
• 34:06
  bargaining chip for the miners, which obviously it doesn't do
• 34:12
  Grant's character any favors, but it makes the doctors
• 34:15
  determination to get her back much more.
• 34:18
  Kind of sacrificial in a way. I sort of got caves of Andrazani
• 34:22
  vibes with just his determination, his commitment to
• 34:25
  rescuing this person who he barely, you know, barely knew
• 34:29
  and had no reason really to kind of value that much more above
• 34:32
  the colonists he'd only just messed as well.
• 34:34
  I didn't think she came across very likely at all in this.
• 34:38
  She was a bit. Slowing a lot and.
• 34:39
  Yeah, whinging a lot. There's certainly none of that
• 34:42
  kind of charisma that that we get when she arrives on
• 34:45
  television, no. What Perry and six Doctor?
• 34:51
  What about you then? Which goes to work best for you?
• 34:56
  For me it was Captain Dent. The way he we got so much
• 35:01
  insight into his thoughts, like this is odd.
• 35:04
  Captain Dent tried to remember his training and oh, this comes
• 35:07
  from page 43 of the IMC training manual and you know how to
• 35:11
  appease people and get them to do what we want.
• 35:13
  And there's the bit where they first meet the adjudicator, who
• 35:18
  is actually the master, although the pros doesn't tell us that
• 35:21
  until. The doctor encounters him.
• 35:24
  Yeah. Unfortunately, it does lead to a
• 35:27
  very clumsy piece of dialogue. When the Doctor says the Master
• 35:32
  doing on this planet, it's like, yeah, come on Malcolm, you're a
• 35:37
  great writer. You could have done better than
• 35:38
  that. But okay I.
• 35:39
  Was about to say Trump saying that out loud.
• 35:41
  You just did. It sounded very awkward.
• 35:44
  Yeah, but there's that sequence where they just met the
• 35:47
  Adjudicator and he's walked off and.
• 35:52
  And they say, Ash says to Dent, almost forgetting that they're
• 35:54
  on opposite sides. You know, I don't think that
• 35:56
  Adjudicator likes experiment. And he says Dent didn't reply to
• 36:00
  Ash because he never spoke to colonists unless absolutely
• 36:03
  necessary. But he agreed with him.
• 36:05
  There was something very odd. So it's kind of you get an awful
• 36:08
  lot of Captain Dent. The other benefit of the book is
• 36:11
  that Captain Dent sticks around until the end.
• 36:14
  Because in the story on the screen, he disappears because
• 36:17
  they didn't take Morris Perry out onto location where
• 36:20
  everything gets wrapped up between the colonists and the
• 36:22
  miners. He never got onto location.
• 36:25
  So he disappears in a studio scene and he's never seen again
• 36:28
  when the rest of the conflict is wrapped up.
• 36:30
  So we don't know what happened to him on the screen, whereas
• 36:34
  he's actually present at the the final moments in the book.
• 36:40
  So yeah. How about you?
• 36:41
  The name well I. Was going to say dense, but.
• 36:44
  But I mean I think Ash is the sort of he's he also is the sort
• 36:53
  of slightly broken slightly broken idealist.
• 36:59
  He's he he sort of he he's yeah he has some interesting moments
• 37:05
  and then he just sort of the way he's everything just sort of
• 37:07
  unravels and he's just like he just wants somebody else to be
• 37:10
  in charge and and. And then by the way a bit we
• 37:14
  were talking about where I was reading the the Bible and he's
• 37:18
  called God and obviously he stopped short to say Jesus even
• 37:21
  though that name might have come up quite a lot in that book he
• 37:24
  was reading. But then he because then he says
• 37:25
  he doesn't understand why somebody would sacrifice
• 37:28
  themselves for for other people and then goes and does that so
• 37:35
  that that Hulk you know he literally does a he does a big
• 37:39
  redemption and. Sacrifices himself and strange.
• 37:43
  But Winton as well really comes out again.
• 37:47
  I can't really compare it to the TV show because it's been it's
• 37:50
  lost in the midst of time. But Winton really, I love the
• 37:53
  way I really thought he was going to get shot.
• 37:56
  And I thought, and I was just about to write.
• 37:57
  That was brilliantly brutal. And then and then I read on.
• 38:01
  I was being saved. Oh, that's brilliant as well.
• 38:04
  I did wonder why Coldwell was killing him.
• 38:07
  So I was. I was like I was in the moment
• 38:09
  being fooled by A and an honorable mention for Norton.
• 38:14
  That's. Who I was going to suggest,
• 38:16
  Yeah, who wants to be an actor? Yeah, great chapter.
• 38:21
  Wasn't it? The one where he commits the
• 38:23
  murder but sees it all just plays it as a scene that he's
• 38:26
  acting? It's.
• 38:30
  He's got an audience of 1. The man's kill.
• 38:32
  Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's it's, it's grimly tragic, isn't it?
• 38:37
  But it's but also but but on a sort of.
• 38:40
  Downside of it, his character just sort of fade a bit from the
• 38:44
  narrative and doesn't quite. He just gets sort of killed in
• 38:47
  an aside in a way, doesn't he? They bit they you get kind of
• 38:52
  that one chapter with him and then yeah, we don't see that
• 38:54
  much. Yeah, and it and not a lot
• 38:56
  happens with like plot wise, with him being a double agent a
• 39:00
  little bit and then the doctor. The Doctor sort of guesses who
• 39:03
  it is, but then it sort of gets dropped as a thread.
• 39:06
  But that's such a lovely way of writing what could have been a
• 39:09
  very perfunctory chapter. To come, yeah, yeah.
• 39:12
  From his perspective and give him this, talking about acting
• 39:15
  it through and how pleased this performance.
• 39:19
  Yeah, well, POV is always really interesting when you're writing
• 39:22
  these sort of books, isn't it? It's, it's and and like you sort
• 39:27
  of highlighted earlier, there's there's a slight flaw in that.
• 39:29
  It doesn't. It's like you can't be asked to
• 39:31
  do Joe's POV. Like he's just like, I just
• 39:36
  really enjoy writing the Fascist.
• 39:38
  It's like fascist, fascist. He's going to split to Joe in a
• 39:42
  minute. No, no, We're just going to see
• 39:43
  Joe sneaking in from the point of view of the fascist and it's
• 39:47
  like, so it becomes dense book for about a third, doesn't it?
• 39:50
  And it just the only bit about the with Norton stuff that made
• 39:54
  me. It did make me roll my eyes a
• 39:56
  bit. I was waiting, oh, Norton needed
• 39:59
  to get rid of Winton or whatever.
• 40:00
  And he made. He gestured with his eyes
• 40:03
  towards Mary. Ash and Winter understood
• 40:05
  because Norton hadn't seen a girl for months.
• 40:08
  Well, we haven't even touched on the sexism yet, have we?
• 40:12
  Did you have to go there Especially?
• 40:14
  As you know, I've still got a very young Helen Worth on the
• 40:18
  screen in my head for Mary Ash. Mary Ash in my head is far too
• 40:22
  young for anyone to be casually going.
• 40:25
  Oh, yes, he hasn't seen the girl for a while.
• 40:27
  Let's let him lust after her for a bit.
• 40:30
  So yeah. I mean, the sexism in general is
• 40:33
  it's it still takes you back, doesn't it?
• 40:36
  It's like it's less, it's less apparent on the screen because.
• 40:41
  Because we're not inside that. We're not inside the heads of
• 40:43
  the they're aligned at the beginning, where they talk about
• 40:45
  when they first encountered the primitives, they were naked,
• 40:47
  which shocked some of the lady columnists.
• 40:50
  Just. Called them ladies as well, Lady
• 40:52
  Column. Yeah, And it's yeah.
• 40:54
  So it seems when you see the screen you see.
• 41:00
  You know, you see men and women and the women seem kind of
• 41:03
  fairly tough. There's a little bit of the
• 41:05
  women are making the tea, but it's.
• 41:07
  But it's really, really like, like I said about the sort of
• 41:10
  1950s vibe, it really is. Women go off, You go off, Joe.
• 41:14
  You go off and for most of the book and hang out with the women
• 41:17
  and and and the and the, you know, the women, Some of the
• 41:21
  women were scared and women screamed and they were shocked
• 41:24
  by the nudity and you know, just stuff like that.
• 41:27
  It's just. I mean it's this is the same era
• 41:30
  though that you know, terminations, writing survivors
• 41:33
  and stuff. So it's not the 1950s.
• 41:36
  It really is like an oldfashioned for for the time it
• 41:40
  was written, it was quite oldfashioned in that kind of
• 41:43
  way. Jane Leeson came off the best of
• 41:45
  of the three women in the book. She gets bumped off in chapter
• 41:49
  four or something like that. So that's that.
• 41:51
  Then it's then it's sort of boy after that.
• 41:55
  What did you guys think about the first chapter?
• 41:59
  Or the prologue. Oh, I've got so much to say
• 42:01
  about. That explains entire premise of
• 42:04
  Doctor Who, The Doctor, The Master, the TARDIS, is
• 42:08
  everything. Like what's?
• 42:08
  Going on there, I also think this this first chapter.
• 42:11
  Which the assassin. Between the Time Lords, right?
• 42:15
  I think this blows fan law out of the water.
• 42:18
  It is understood Robert Holmes invented the corrupt, degenerate
• 42:23
  Time Lords that you know. The Time Lord says useless is
• 42:26
  slightly kind of, you know. Parochial fuddy duddies.
• 42:33
  This chapter is is like a kind of a dry run for the the deadly
• 42:37
  assassin. And in fact this conversation is
• 42:39
  between a young type, a sort of naive young Time Lord and an
• 42:43
  ancient Time Lord who is, you know, a prototype engen from the
• 42:47
  deadly assassin. And they're and they're not only
• 42:50
  useless, I mean this is how useless they are.
• 42:53
  They've kept the instructions for the doomsday weapon in a
• 42:56
  file marked. Top secret exact whereabouts of
• 43:00
  the doomsday weapon and instructions for use.
• 43:04
  And having discovered that they've lost this file, they
• 43:07
  have to report to three senior Time Lords who are apparently
• 43:11
  known simply as First, second, and Third Time Lords.
• 43:14
  They're that self important that they don't even have names.
• 43:18
  And they they talk about how the master has stolen instructions
• 43:24
  for using a weapon that could finish everything.
• 43:26
  One of them says, well, at least the master has a sense of humor
• 43:30
  about this cataclysmic event. And they end the chapter with a
• 43:34
  little joke about the end of everything.
• 43:36
  So I feel like Robert Holmes has been unfairly besmirched with
• 43:41
  the, you know, taking the Time Lords down a peg or two because
• 43:45
  it's all here. That they were reading this,
• 43:48
  taking notes, going, ah, this would be good.
• 43:50
  I'll use this. Well, I don't think.
• 43:52
  I don't think it's being besmirched.
• 43:53
  I think, I think it kind of suits that, you know, the Doctor
• 43:58
  runs away from society. I agree in but he has been
• 44:01
  besmirched by a certain type of fan.
• 44:05
  I mean, if if the time loads hadn't been awful, then what's
• 44:09
  he's looking away from so that they are ossified bureaucratic
• 44:13
  fuddy duddies and that's what the Doctor fights against.
• 44:16
  Everywhere he goes and then he gets home and he goes, oh, this
• 44:20
  is the sort of people he's trying to get away from all his
• 44:23
  life. So it makes sense, but it kind
• 44:26
  of comes out of what we see in the war games because there are
• 44:30
  a bunch of arses in that very humorless, punishing people and
• 44:34
  then the natural. But yeah, I definitely agree
• 44:37
  this is, I mean, if they weren't in discussions or or or or.
• 44:44
  You know, Homes hadn't wasn't aware of this.
• 44:46
  I'd be very surprised, because it seems almost like an early
• 44:50
  draft of deadly assassin scenes. It was such because it felt like
• 44:56
  Hulk felt this was the 1st Doctor Who book anyone would
• 44:58
  have ever read and it was a potted history of the entire
• 45:01
  show introducing us to ingredient.
• 45:05
  And it was and it was well characterized.
• 45:07
  But I just yeah. In the TV show it just.
• 45:11
  You know the master stolen this file.
• 45:13
  Oops. And then we go straight into the
• 45:14
  story. It's really weird.
• 45:15
  It's like, why did they even bother filming it?
• 45:18
  We could maybe have found that out later on through without
• 45:22
  using three actors. Well, should we turn our
• 45:25
  attention to Cuz I feel there's a bit of false advertising going
• 45:28
  on in the Doomsday weapon with the master on the front all over
• 45:32
  the back cover and the Doomsday weapon all over the back cover.
• 45:35
  And essentially that's the last third of the book.
• 45:38
  It might have been better being called the Colony in Space.
• 45:40
  It's the. Same it might have been, yeah.
• 45:42
  It's the same thing on the screen though, because it's, you
• 45:44
  know, it's colony in space. They mentioned the doomsday
• 45:47
  weapon. They mentioned the masters
• 45:49
  stolen the file of the doomsday weapon in the first minute of
• 45:52
  episode one. And then we don't actually hear
• 45:56
  anything about the doomsday weapon itself until I think it's
• 46:01
  actually episode 6. The Master doesn't turn up until
• 46:03
  episode 4, and then they go to the Primitive city.
• 46:08
  We are, at least with the book. At least we are spared the
• 46:11
  ludicrous cliffhanger of the Master, slowly descending his
• 46:14
  finger towards a cherry Bakewell.
• 46:17
  You know, we don't get that. That's that's a dramatic action
• 46:20
  sequence in the book. The red button, But yeah, it's
• 46:23
  right at the end. And he said the doomsday weapon.
• 46:25
  Yes. And this is what it does.
• 46:27
  It's a shame, actually, that they cut out the reference.
• 46:29
  I think it's a shame, because I'm a bit of an astronomer, that
• 46:32
  they cut out the reference to the Crab Nebula that we get on
• 46:35
  the screen. Partly because it's nice to tie
• 46:39
  something into an actual event, an actual thing that we know.
• 46:43
  Partly because with with my full Astronomy and Doctor Who Nerd
• 46:49
  Hat on, that actually allows us to date when the doomsday weapon
• 46:53
  was built. Because the what?
• 46:55
  Happens with the Crab Nebula. Yeah, because the Crab Nebula is
• 47:01
  one of the very few supernova remnants that we can see that we
• 47:06
  can actually tie to an event that is documented.
• 47:10
  So it it is connected to a supernova that was observed in
• 47:15
  1054. So the Crab Nebula is an
• 47:19
  expanding cloud of gas and dust from that supernova that was
• 47:22
  seen in 1054. The Crab Nebula is somewhere
• 47:25
  between, I think 6 and 10,000 light years away.
• 47:28
  So that would have happened 6 and 8000 light years away.
• 47:33
  So that would have happened 8000 years previously.
• 47:35
  So that was when the Doomsday weapon was turned on and tested.
• 47:41
  This is fast becoming the smartest I have ever pushed out,
• 47:45
  you know? But that.
• 47:46
  But that means that means that that means that it wouldn't be
• 47:49
  from Earth in the 20 in the 30th century.
• 47:53
  They'd be from, they'd be from 8000 years ago if they traveled
• 47:57
  instantaneously. Well, yeah, that was the point.
• 48:00
  That was the point, the whole point of this, The Doomsday
• 48:02
  weapon was built millennia ago and tested, and on the story and
• 48:08
  on screen it says the Crab Nebula was the result of them
• 48:11
  testing it. I see.
• 48:12
  Well, that just makes sense then, yeah.
• 48:14
  I think The thing is. I mean, this is obviously they
• 48:16
  used the weapon to show you the Crab Nebula, and we know we can
• 48:20
  date that because of the distance we know it is.
• 48:22
  So yeah. Oh, I do like that.
• 48:24
  Yeah, that's good. Or James, sorry.
• 48:25
  Sorry, no. If you've got more to say about
• 48:27
  the Crab Nebula. Well, I was hoping, as you'd
• 48:31
  say, maybe it'd be a bit like that.
• 48:34
  Obviously, Clark, one about the Christmas star, that that it
• 48:38
  would turn out was the whole religious stuff.
• 48:40
  It turned out that the them testing the doomsday weapon was
• 48:43
  the star of Bethlehem. Wow and.
• 48:45
  Then to tie it back to the Bible.
• 48:47
  Scene. Yeah.
• 48:48
  Then then, then. It would be, you know, they went
• 48:51
  with the Crab Nebula. An astonishing plot twist.
• 48:55
  I mean do you know the, do you know the the officer Clark Kwon?
• 48:59
  I'm I haven't read it, but I am. A million years ago, it's a
• 49:02
  Christmas star. And then you find out it's
• 49:04
  basically a civilization being wiped out because their son's
• 49:08
  going over. And then it's kind of Christmas,
• 49:12
  like millions 10s of thousands of years later when it hops up
• 49:16
  over our planet I. Think the thing that becomes
• 49:19
  clear as you read this book is that.
• 49:22
  Malcolm Hawk is not that interested in the doomsday
• 49:25
  weapon. All the masters plan and this is
• 49:29
  a problem that's present on television.
• 49:32
  But ironically the book that is being rebranded, The Doomsday
• 49:36
  Weapon, it's it becomes even clearer.
• 49:38
  I think on television it absolutely makes sense to write
• 49:41
  in The Master of Hearing for Cliffhanger, you know, towards
• 49:43
  the middle of a six part run, because what elgado comes into
• 49:47
  it and gives this kind of long. Episodic adventure, a new lease
• 49:51
  of life. It doesn't make any sense at all
• 49:54
  in in a book that is clearly all about the the colony in space
• 49:58
  and a book that's so crowned with ideas that it doesn't
• 50:00
  really have room to develop even the idea of this primitive city.
• 50:05
  I think that the initial exploration of the city is
• 50:07
  interesting and it's sinister, and that this mysterious
• 50:10
  Guardian figure is interesting, but it doesn't deliver.
• 50:14
  And everything the master does, it feels totally going to
• 50:18
  Superfus, to the things that have been carefully built up
• 50:20
  through the 1st. Half yeah, it doesn't.
• 50:22
  It doesn't match with the theme at all, does it?
• 50:24
  It's And yet you the climax is all about the Domesday weapons,
• 50:27
  so it kind of robs us of a proper ending to the colonists
• 50:30
  story as well. The ending we get with the
• 50:32
  colonists. Although it, as you say, it
• 50:34
  neatly ties back to that funeral scene, it's very perfunctory.
• 50:37
  And the actual climax the story is them escaping the primitive
• 50:40
  city. So structurally it's it's a real
• 50:44
  problem for certainly the last third of the book.
• 50:47
  And also thematically, I think. I think the primitives feel like
• 50:52
  an awkward addition, you know, It feels like a part of the plot
• 50:56
  that thematically ought to be about.
• 51:00
  You know the in an indigenous culture being taken over, you
• 51:05
  know, colonization having an impact on on the people who live
• 51:09
  on the planet. Instead they really are painted
• 51:11
  as very two-dimensional. You know, they're even called
• 51:13
  primitives throughout and they're treated very badly and
• 51:16
  no one really says. And there's one scene where the
• 51:18
  Doctor stops the NASA from killing them, but.
• 51:22
  Apart from that, it's they, you know, they are used as cannon
• 51:25
  fodder and they are, you know, it's it's like an old kind of
• 51:29
  black and white film where you know, someone points and says
• 51:32
  cannibals and you're meant to kind of just take that at face
• 51:35
  value. And it's really weird as well,
• 51:38
  because they stated, but is heavily implied in both the TV
• 51:42
  show and the book, that they are all wiped out when the Guardian
• 51:45
  destroys the Doomsday weapon, just leaving the planet
• 51:50
  available for to carry on with without worrying about the
• 51:54
  primitives and everything. So it's but I did enjoy the
• 51:59
  Guardian being a bit more fleshed out than the little
• 52:01
  puppet that we got on screen. A much more fascinating idea of
• 52:08
  the character of creature that can live in the nuclear reactor.
• 52:13
  And I I enjoyed the argument he had with the doctor about logic
• 52:16
  because in on screen it's very perfunctory just oh, you're
• 52:20
  clearly very intelligent. Yeah, you can go.
• 52:22
  Whereas there's a bit of an argument about logic.
• 52:25
  And I did enjoy, you know, but you you, you eat, so you kill
• 52:29
  people to survive. So what's the difference there?
• 52:31
  But you know that's continuing life and etcetera.
• 52:35
  But I was a bit shocked when I read the the end of the book
• 52:39
  where the Doctor basically point blank says to the Guardian,
• 52:42
  Nope, the Master will use this to destroy other people.
• 52:45
  So therefore you have to die to stop him.
• 52:50
  And the Guardian is essentially, yeah, all right.
• 52:55
  Although in that that sequence, say you were talking about where
• 52:57
  the doctor's talking to the Guardian, it's another insult to
• 52:59
  Joe because he's like, well, you're clearly very intelligent,
• 53:02
  you can go. She's stupid, yeah.
• 53:05
  What's this? I felt like the the last third
• 53:10
  of the book, where will that focus on the Doomsday weapon?
• 53:13
  Suddenly the end of the Colonists storyline, the action
• 53:16
  that was taking place, where all of that was sort of nicely paced
• 53:21
  throughout the 1st 2/3. It wasn't just dashed off in
• 53:24
  about 4 paragraphs. I'd love to know where the why
• 53:28
  when the Doomsday weapon got because it feels like it had the
• 53:32
  coloring space idea, which is basically America because.
• 53:36
  I've read somewhere years ago that his impetus was, you know,
• 53:41
  the plot of the Native Americans.
• 53:43
  And then, but like you were saying the whole primitive
• 53:45
  thing, the colonists never ever get brought up on the fact that
• 53:50
  they're on someone else's land in in that in much the way, you
• 53:55
  know, it's 1776 and they're busy fighting for their freedom on
• 53:59
  someone else's land. That's that irony is never,
• 54:02
  they're never brought up on it. And like you said, the
• 54:05
  primitives just sit there being primitives and then get blown up
• 54:09
  and we never. And it's also weird as well,
• 54:11
  because he does have the fact that they've regressed and that
• 54:15
  they are primitive, and that's not.
• 54:17
  There's an allegory for the Native Americans.
• 54:20
  No, it doesn't. But I mean, I think it's, as you
• 54:23
  say, it's quite first drafty. It's frustrating.
• 54:26
  It's actually this idea of the existing culture being kind of
• 54:31
  overridden by the colonists is entirely consistent with the
• 54:33
  themes that he's set up and. Totally, yeah.
• 54:36
  Mentioned and the idea of this destruction being kind of.
• 54:41
  The logical end point of the civilization that he's
• 54:44
  described, he's describing kind of civilization gone horribly
• 54:47
  wrong, so it all ought to tie together, and it's just a shame
• 54:51
  that it doesn't. No no it's yeah if it just if it
• 54:56
  just been had that little bit of that little last whistle.
• 55:00
  T Davis, I was talking about just a little turn, but if you
• 55:04
  if you have enough time on drafts, a little turn.
• 55:07
  But do you think it needs, I mean, not just a time on drafts,
• 55:09
  but it needs another. It sort of feels structurally it
• 55:13
  needs another kind of. Yeah, totally.
• 55:15
  Off the book to to properly explore that civilization, yeah,
• 55:19
  it'll make a great kind of, you know, new adventure because
• 55:23
  you'd have the space to kind of do that into like probably part
• 55:25
  one and Part 2, but it's quite at the start.
• 55:29
  Region where there's a counterpoint to that.
• 55:31
  It also still has to function as a novelization of what got to
• 55:35
  the screen and none of that made it to the screen.
• 55:38
  So, you know, fleshing out the characters the the plot matches
• 55:42
  what we see on screen pretty nicely, apart from the
• 55:44
  introduction of Joe Grant and the yeah change relationship
• 55:48
  that they have. Obviously with Joe Grant, it's.
• 55:51
  Her first. It's her first alien planet on
• 55:53
  screen, isn't it? So she's kind of new to really
• 55:57
  knowing what the child is but but yeah, it's it's very odd,
• 56:02
  but the the POV is very weird. And again, the Master being the
• 56:08
  Adjudicator. But when we first meet him, I'm
• 56:12
  sure if an editor had gone around and there was time, he
• 56:15
  did go, yeah. But when we first meet the
• 56:17
  Master, we need the Doctor to see him.
• 56:20
  So he sees it's the Master. Because we're not watching
• 56:22
  telly, are we? We're not watching telly,
• 56:24
  Malcolm. So you're.
• 56:26
  They're describing somebody. That way we can maybe guess it's
• 56:29
  the Master. But the Master, the Doctor needs
• 56:32
  to be there the first time you meet him.
• 56:34
  Yeah, whereas in the book I don't think we even see the
• 56:36
  doctors. He walked into the room and the
• 56:38
  masters. Yeah, and they and they and it's
• 56:40
  very weird because they're almost like mates.
• 56:42
  They're like, oh, what you doing here?
• 56:45
  I'm just busy dealing with some columnists.
• 56:46
  I mean, you've been in four stories at this point.
• 56:48
  It was kind of going that way, wasn't.
• 56:50
  It, yeah, yeah. I think, I think the one thing I
• 56:52
  really took from the master being this was just how much
• 56:55
  Roger Delgado brought to the role.
• 56:57
  That was an age he was. Very one note and not very
• 57:01
  interesting. Whereas in the story, like you
• 57:03
  said, James, he comes along, he's almost single handedly
• 57:06
  lifting up the interest in the last two episodes.
• 57:09
  Yeah, yeah, Roger Delgado just made The Master much more than
• 57:14
  the 2 dimensional villain. I mean he's he's very, as you
• 57:18
  say, a very one note villain here.
• 57:20
  He's just, you know, he's got the, he's got the vocal
• 57:22
  mannerisms in some places about, you know, my dear Doctor and all
• 57:25
  that. And another thing that didn't
• 57:27
  make it to that sequence with the Doctor and the Master in
• 57:32
  that was on the screen, which I thought was actually really
• 57:35
  nice, is the bit where the Master offers him a half share
• 57:38
  in the Galaxy and says, well, you know, you could look up, you
• 57:40
  could rule benevolently and and all that.
• 57:42
  And the Doctor says you'll never understand.
• 57:44
  I want to see the universe not rule it.
• 57:47
  And I think that's for all the extra fleshing out that happens
• 57:50
  in the book. I think some of those bits that
• 57:53
  didn't make it in are unfortunate because they're some
• 57:55
  of the the best bits of the actual televised story, I think.
• 57:58
  I think it in pros we could finally get some motivation for
• 58:02
  the master in the in the TV story, I think he just goes
• 58:05
  you're obsessed and paranoid and that's it.
• 58:08
  That's that's his entire work. I'm just a bit more honest than
• 58:11
  most, as he says. With the Master, even even
• 58:14
  though I had this wonderful Chris Achilios like painting on
• 58:18
  the front when I was reading it, reading it today because he was
• 58:22
  like. Farting around in corridors and
• 58:24
  stuff this, this master in the book.
• 58:26
  And it wasn't Delgado. I kept just seeing the Jonathan
• 58:28
  Price version, from Curse of Fatal Death to not taking it
• 58:32
  very seriously. Just farting around.
• 58:35
  Probably not held by this illustration.
• 58:38
  Yeah, not a lot like Roger Delgado.
• 58:40
  However, a quick note about the illustration, because this is
• 58:43
  one of the early target books it's illustrated.
• 58:45
  I love them. They're brilliant.
• 58:48
  I mean they he really captures John Perkley, I think in
• 58:50
  several. Very evocative, aren't they?
• 58:52
  Although you're right. That picture of Roger Delgado
• 58:54
  looks like he's got a rehearsal shot of Roger stand up in his
• 58:57
  kind of jumper and. Yeah, but I I particularly
• 59:01
  remember that that illustration and I I giggled a bit when I saw
• 59:06
  it. Because, of course, for the
• 59:08
  benefit of the of the listeners who aren't actually being able
• 59:11
  to see this illustration, It's the one of the doctor and the
• 59:14
  master are standing by a control unit, and the master is reaching
• 59:17
  towards 2 knobs on a on a panel in front of it.
• 59:21
  Joe stopped because I said the word knob.
• 59:24
  Knob. We're.
• 59:26
  Going to make this hamster somehow controls, but I remember
• 59:32
  this appearing and I think I don't know whether it was an
• 59:34
  issue of Doctor Who magazine or whatever where someone had
• 59:37
  captioned it. The Doctor was extremely jealous
• 59:40
  that the Master's TARDIS was fitted with hot and cold running
• 59:42
  water. It's the only person that was
• 59:47
  worthy of a full page spread was Jane Leason.
• 59:50
  Jane Leason screaming. That is the stuff of nightmares,
• 59:53
  isn't it? That's a.
• 59:54
  Great picture as well. But it did.
• 59:56
  It was. A scary one as well.
• 1:00:00
  Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. But what she saw was beyond her
• 1:00:02
  wildest nightmares, the. I NC Robot and it gets a bit of
• 1:00:09
  a renaissance in this as described as well.
• 1:00:12
  Yeah, it's much scarier than on the page.
• 1:00:14
  Isn't it? And we are.
• 1:00:16
  And Malcolm Hulk took out something that I highlighted in
• 1:00:20
  my recent Cliffhangers thread as being utterly, utterly ludicrous
• 1:00:24
  because he says the robot was fitted with metal claws.
• 1:00:28
  And those are what made the claw marks, whereas on screen it's
• 1:00:31
  fitted with giant monster claws that just look ridiculous.
• 1:00:35
  It's like, you know, there is no need for fake reptile claws for
• 1:00:39
  this robot to do the whole bit. Of a giveaway as well as to what
• 1:00:43
  you're trying. So yeah, well, let's, let's
• 1:00:49
  bring the discussion of the doing so weapons to an end.
• 1:00:52
  I want to ask each of you if there's anything we haven't
• 1:00:54
  discussed that you like to discuss and sort of what your
• 1:00:58
  take away from the book was. Let's start with Ian.
• 1:01:02
  Well, the only bit was there's just a really good line on page
• 1:01:08
  68, which I got ready, and I think Morgan was ambitious and
• 1:01:14
  totally unscrupulous. Dent felt you could always trust
• 1:01:17
  people like that, and I just thought that stuck out, stuck
• 1:01:20
  out as a really good way of sort of way of the way Dent sees the
• 1:01:25
  world. Just.
• 1:01:27
  And I think the main triumph of this book, I think we probably
• 1:01:29
  all agree is how brilliant Dent is like it's almost, it's almost
• 1:01:34
  like it's almost from dense points of view.
• 1:01:37
  Like most, most of the book feels like it's from dense point
• 1:01:40
  of view, which is. And you know, seeing a Doctor
• 1:01:44
  Who story from the POV of a of a corporate fascist is was pretty
• 1:01:49
  interesting. The villas were most interesting
• 1:01:52
  characters. Yeah.
• 1:01:54
  But we don't. But we don't often see inside
• 1:01:56
  their heads as much as clearly. And he doesn't just want to take
• 1:01:59
  over the universe. He's a he's a normal person who
• 1:02:03
  just wants to retire to a slightly bigger unit.
• 1:02:08
  How about you, James? Two points, I noted.
• 1:02:13
  One is that Hulk has painted. This is a dystopian future for
• 1:02:19
  all parts of the political spectrum.
• 1:02:21
  Because mankind has systematically exterminated all
• 1:02:23
  animal life and converted to metric.
• 1:02:27
  Yeah, you go. Yes.
• 1:02:29
  That was hilarious, wasn't it? The other thing.
• 1:02:32
  What do you mean, feet? The other thing I noticed is
• 1:02:36
  that in that rambling discussion the the the keep, the old Time
• 1:02:40
  Lord and the young Time Lord reveal that Doctor Who's name is
• 1:02:44
  indeed Doctor Who. Oh God, yes, that was my.
• 1:02:47
  They are discussing the TARDIS and the old keeper says still,
• 1:02:51
  even if he cannot control it, others sometimes can.
• 1:02:54
  I don't understand, said the young Time Lord.
• 1:02:56
  What others? Who?
• 1:02:58
  Who? No.
• 1:03:00
  Who can't control it? Not always a joke.
• 1:03:03
  Which only makes sense if his name is who.
• 1:03:05
  So that's that debate ended. No, no, that that made me go,
• 1:03:11
  and I actually meant to say the the the tech was another thing
• 1:03:16
  that I love it, But it's just hilarious just how how clunky
• 1:03:21
  the technology is, even though it's in the 30th century.
• 1:03:25
  When we've got what we got, we've got you know he's
• 1:03:28
  basically just from light years away somehow somehow radioed
• 1:03:32
  earth and found something out. But then the teleprinter prints
• 1:03:36
  out the the the the telephoto line by line and it's and just
• 1:03:43
  having like little walkie talkies, little radios and and
• 1:03:47
  and and a tiny television just just.
• 1:03:50
  I just love the, just love the way they see the.
• 1:03:53
  See the future? Nothing that works on
• 1:03:55
  technology. I've just literally heard you on
• 1:03:57
  a podcast, the with Steven Gallagher saying that very line
• 1:04:00
  about bugs. Yeah, yeah yeah but yeah.
• 1:04:03
  But just this this is another thing that makes it seem very
• 1:04:06
  50s. You can imagine Dan Dare turning
• 1:04:08
  up in this episode because it is like let's drink some Astro beer
• 1:04:11
  and talk talk on our little two way radio and and and God does
• 1:04:17
  he have to call it a little two way radio every time he
• 1:04:20
  references. Radio, telephones and an audio
• 1:04:23
  book and so many things like that.
• 1:04:28
  But it is all part of its charm and why it's an artifact of of
• 1:04:32
  early 70s. Astro Beer and synthetic
• 1:04:35
  champagne. Yeah.
• 1:04:37
  It is a dystopian nightmare. Yeah, it's not even a brand
• 1:04:41
  name. It's just called Astro Beer for
• 1:04:42
  some reason. It's like space medicine.
• 1:04:45
  Like Astro Turf, but how about you, Jason?
• 1:04:50
  Oh, just a couple of things that I like about the normalizations
• 1:04:55
  in general. You know, as Doctor Who fans, we
• 1:04:57
  all love it when we get references in stories to other
• 1:05:00
  stories that have happened before.
• 1:05:04
  And Malcolm Hulk calls out a couple of previous stories
• 1:05:08
  specifically, notably both his He references the events of the
• 1:05:13
  War games and he talks about a race of reptile men.
• 1:05:17
  See Doctor Who in The Cave Monsters.
• 1:05:20
  But the other one was that made me giggle was, you know, they
• 1:05:24
  they they There's no hostile life forms on this planet.
• 1:05:27
  Incidentally, Also, a slight tangent planet doesn't get named
• 1:05:31
  in this book and the Doctor doesn't know it.
• 1:05:33
  So on the screen he identifies it as the planet Xarius, but
• 1:05:38
  here it's an unnamed planet nobody knows but it talks about.
• 1:05:42
  There's no hostile life forms. Jane had heard of some of the
• 1:05:45
  terrifying creatures space travelers had found over the
• 1:05:48
  centuries. Monoids, Driveins.
• 1:05:52
  Some small metallic creatures called Daleks.
• 1:05:56
  It's just like monoids and dravens, really.
• 1:06:00
  The top three, Isn't it basically saying there's other
• 1:06:03
  target books coming, folks seek them out.
• 1:06:06
  And yeah, so that was. I'm sure they wouldn't have met
• 1:06:10
  monoids yet, because didn't they?
• 1:06:11
  They didn't turn up till nearly the end of everything because
• 1:06:13
  they're on the Ark, but yeah. So that was just something that
• 1:06:19
  made me giggle a bit. If you're gonna call out other
• 1:06:21
  stories, those ones were interesting choices, I think,
• 1:06:26
  yeah. And also the description the
• 1:06:29
  making the Daleks little metal creatures called Daleks.
• 1:06:32
  Little metal creatures. And then I must reference the
• 1:06:33
  Daleks again at the end, when he says even the Daleks will
• 1:06:36
  tremble when I've got control of this doomed.
• 1:06:39
  And oh God, watching him grovel at the Guardian and said no,
• 1:06:42
  please don't blow it up, please, please come back, let me talk to
• 1:06:45
  you. And I wasn't really going to
• 1:06:47
  kill any time when it stopped, Weren't you?
• 1:06:49
  It's just I thought, I thought the scariest line in this whole
• 1:06:53
  book was after depicting the Earth in such a cynical way.
• 1:06:57
  It was when Jane Leeson turned around to her husband and said,
• 1:06:59
  I want to go back to Earth. This must be the the most
• 1:07:05
  miserable platform. You've you've seen the TV show,
• 1:07:07
  right? That Clay Pitt is.
• 1:07:09
  Yeah, horrible. OK, well then I'm going to ask
• 1:07:12
  you guys one last question then. Would you recommend this book to
• 1:07:17
  another Doctor Who fan, Jason? Oh, absolutely.
• 1:07:22
  I haven't read it before, and I think it's one of the it's it's
• 1:07:26
  up among the best of the target nobilizations being by Malcolm
• 1:07:29
  Hulk, who always fleshes out his characters and stories nicely,
• 1:07:33
  as far as I understand it. I haven't read any of others,
• 1:07:34
  but I've heard similar things about them.
• 1:07:37
  And being early in the run before Target imposed the sort
• 1:07:40
  of 126 page limit, which I think stifled some of the other Target
• 1:07:48
  normalizations, plus their release rate meant that poor old
• 1:07:51
  Terry was just bashing them out and they became very flat
• 1:07:55
  adaptations in many cases. This is one of the early ones,
• 1:07:58
  Jason, I sneezed, and my robots of death nobilization flew away.
• 1:08:02
  I mean, isn't it? Some of them are like, yeah,
• 1:08:05
  they like pamphlets, but this is a, it's quite a chunky book.
• 1:08:07
  It's been like 170 pages. And yeah, it's a really, really
• 1:08:12
  good one. And if even if you don't enjoy
• 1:08:15
  Colony in Space, because I know it's not one of the most popular
• 1:08:17
  stories, I think you'll find a lot in this book to enjoy
• 1:08:21
  because of the way it fleshes out the characters and the
• 1:08:23
  situations. And I think if some of that had
• 1:08:25
  made it to the screen. And we'd had more descriptions
• 1:08:29
  of what life was like on Earth and what the characters were
• 1:08:31
  thinking and everything like that.
• 1:08:32
  I think Colony in Space would be better regarded than it
• 1:08:36
  currently is, James. Absolutely.
• 1:08:41
  I would recommend it, yeah. It's a fascinating read and I
• 1:08:43
  think. Really kind of exposes you know
• 1:08:48
  how Malcolm Holt felt about a lot of things and shows his
• 1:08:51
  commitment to writing what was at the end of the day, you know
• 1:08:54
  he could have done a a pamphlet and and no one would have
• 1:08:57
  complained. So you know, although it's maybe
• 1:08:59
  1 rewrite short of being quite as neatly tied up as it could
• 1:09:04
  have been, it it's a, it's a it shows, you know, real
• 1:09:08
  professionalism from him as a writer.
• 1:09:10
  What I was wondering was whether I would recommend it to a
• 1:09:13
  younger reader. I am a teacher and I have
• 1:09:17
  recommended Doctor Who books to young fans in the past and I'm
• 1:09:21
  I'm not sure how. I'm not sure how a 10 year old
• 1:09:26
  say would would get on with this.
• 1:09:27
  I think it's. I think it's quite hard read for
• 1:09:30
  partly because of the the the content, but but actually I
• 1:09:34
  think the pros is quite, it's quite wordy, it's quite meaty
• 1:09:38
  pros. Maybe a very advanced reader,
• 1:09:40
  but but I'm not so sure whether it would appeal as much to A to
• 1:09:44
  a young reader. What have you?
• 1:09:46
  What have you recommended to? The day first David Whitaker
• 1:09:51
  Dalek book has gone down well and yeah the some of the new, I
• 1:09:56
  mean Jacqueline Rayner. Some of the some of the gore in
• 1:10:00
  the gory beginning of the the Whitaker Dalek book is.
• 1:10:04
  Yeah, but it's sort of. It's a great.
• 1:10:07
  It's a ground running though it's it's, it's, it's a
• 1:10:09
  thrilling opening. Whereas this begins with a work
• 1:10:12
  experience. Girl having a bad week, you know
• 1:10:14
  it's an. Experience.
• 1:10:16
  Although we get the whole but it reminded me maybe just sort of
• 1:10:20
  Red and Grace to give her but Joe's in a monologue reminded me
• 1:10:23
  of Ian Chester talking about the bad week it had and ripping his
• 1:10:27
  jacket and and applied for a job and somebody else bloody got it
• 1:10:30
  because they knew somebody. Same.
• 1:10:32
  Sort of. Same sort of.
• 1:10:34
  Similar kind of. Of the nepotism.
• 1:10:38
  The favoritism. Same sort of thing that's going
• 1:10:40
  on with the sort of moaning, Moaning about the rat race.
• 1:10:43
  You can't get on with that opening to the Daleks at all,
• 1:10:46
  you know. I just don't see ingested in
• 1:10:48
  that. You're right, he's all right.
• 1:10:49
  Wingy git, isn't he? Yeah, yeah, no, it's really
• 1:10:52
  weird. But.
• 1:10:53
  But yeah, you're saying about Jacqueline Rayner James.
• 1:10:56
  Her prose goes down like vanilla ice cream.
• 1:10:58
  Like she's such a smooth writer for kids and the issue.
• 1:11:02
  And knows exactly how to pace. It paints pictures very
• 1:11:08
  economically, really. It's, you know, it's really
• 1:11:10
  good. Yeah, I mean, I I think it's
• 1:11:17
  very old fashioned. So I think unless a kid was like
• 1:11:20
  already a Who fan, I think they might struggle.
• 1:11:23
  I think so, yeah. You make me read this old book,
• 1:11:26
  but I totally recommend it to if you if you like Doctor Who.
• 1:11:31
  It's it's it's a rattling read anyway.
• 1:11:33
  It's also really interesting just you know to see when they
• 1:11:38
  hadn't quite set the law down they hadn't quite set the wrong
• 1:11:40
  and they've never set the cannon down anywhere they but but when
• 1:11:43
  they're, you know when we've got alternative takes and we've got
• 1:11:47
  how much they could sort of mess around with stuff and and you
• 1:11:50
  know he was trying to sort of make it make sense but just for
• 1:11:53
  one book. Well, and that's you've
• 1:11:55
  intimated it reads like proper science fiction as well.
• 1:11:58
  You know, it's, yeah, it's. For for a science fiction fan, I
• 1:12:02
  think this would would be, you know, not necessarily Doctor Who
• 1:12:05
  fan, but. Yeah.
• 1:12:07
  The gateway to Arthur C Clarke and.
• 1:12:09
  Yeah, well, for some reason I had Ballard in my head, Yeah.
• 1:12:13
  But because it's, you know, that sort of grim, yeah, the the line
• 1:12:17
  that goes from Ballard to Mega City One and everything in
• 1:12:22
  between and after it's, you know, we've got, we've got all
• 1:12:26
  that grimness, the being. The earth just being nothing but
• 1:12:30
  buildings and no and all the food comes out of the sea.
• 1:12:35
  Because although I watched that thing on BBC1 the other day and
• 1:12:38
  it actually shocked me, made me feel a bit.
• 1:12:40
  I'm quite green anyway, but the Chris was his face, you know
• 1:12:47
  the. The one he used to have, the
• 1:12:49
  really wild show. What's his name?
• 1:12:52
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. God, my brain.
• 1:12:54
  Yeah. But his his show.
• 1:12:55
  I'd really recommend it. This is maybe slightly off
• 1:12:57
  topic, but the statistics at the end of that he sort of does the
• 1:13:00
  whole history of the Earth and then he sort of does from the
• 1:13:05
  asteroid in 65 minutes, 66,000,000 years ago to now.
• 1:13:09
  And it just puts the the devastation we have wrought into
• 1:13:15
  context like. 4% of all animals are wild. 96% of animals arrive
• 1:13:23
  at pets or farm animals and you know that's now in 2023, so.
• 1:13:30
  I think that's off topic at all, because you know.
• 1:13:32
  Yeah, and that's exactly what was worrying people in the 70s.
• 1:13:34
  This is the book that was written in 1974 and it paints a
• 1:13:37
  picture of mankind that's wiped out all all nature.
• 1:13:41
  But but also, I mean the other thing.
• 1:13:43
  I was reading this book, kind of reading these, this quite
• 1:13:45
  detailed depiction of where. Greed gets you and where or
• 1:13:48
  where just it's kind of surviving where a lifestyle
• 1:13:51
  built on kind of you getting your next slightly bigger Gray
• 1:13:56
  room comes from and and and we see that as well you know the
• 1:13:59
  the attitudes that that dent exemplifies in this.
• 1:14:02
  You know, you don't actually have to look very far in the
• 1:14:04
  news to find people who talk in that way.
• 1:14:07
  No, no, no. Yeah.
• 1:14:09
  And I think Doctor Who, for all people moan about it being woke
• 1:14:13
  has always been on that side. Of the argument he's He's never
• 1:14:18
  been. Oh, I mean, that's why people
• 1:14:20
  moan about Kablan, isn't it? Because he seems to be giving
• 1:14:25
  capitalism of the past and he never does.
• 1:14:29
  He does the Doctor of Oxygen. And he.
• 1:14:31
  Explained Dr. Is this. He certainly corrected that in
• 1:14:36
  the novel. I know we're not covering that
• 1:14:37
  one, but a lot of those lines came out in the paper inside
• 1:14:40
  novelization of that. I did they some debate in my
• 1:14:44
  head as to whether the target should be a depiction of what
• 1:14:48
  was on screen, which a lot of them were, or, you know, a a new
• 1:14:53
  version giving more depth to the characters and the story.
• 1:14:56
  And after reading this, I think my opinion is firmly in the
• 1:15:00
  latter because this is a real book.
• 1:15:04
  It's. I totally think.
• 1:15:05
  I totally think now. Especially now.
• 1:15:07
  Like, especially when J&T was really, really.
• 1:15:11
  Because obviously I've worked with Steven Gallagher myself and
• 1:15:14
  I know that sort of warriors gate things in and out because
• 1:15:18
  my friend was sort of part of putting me getting Steven to put
• 1:15:21
  the his old version together, which J&T just went, no, it's
• 1:15:26
  got to be what was on the screen or nothing, but hey, that's
• 1:15:30
  really reductive. But now everyone can go and
• 1:15:33
  watch the TV episodes anytime you want.
• 1:15:37
  Why wouldn't you want a slightly deeper version?
• 1:15:40
  You know, that was what was great about reading Alan Dean
• 1:15:43
  Foster, Aliens and the Star Wars novelizations and all the rest
• 1:15:46
  of it, if they had a bit more going on than just watching the
• 1:15:49
  VHS. When I first started spending my
• 1:15:53
  my pocket money on on target. Books before I went back and
• 1:15:56
  kind of read the the, the what I saw as the past Doctor stories.
• 1:15:59
  This was just after Doctor had been cancelled and there weren't
• 1:16:02
  videos or you know, I said anyway, I was buying the the,
• 1:16:05
  the 7th Doctor stories. So I'm quite used to the idea
• 1:16:08
  that these books should flesh out what have been seen.
• 1:16:11
  And actually, weirdly kind of I know those books so well because
• 1:16:14
  I read them again and again and again when I finally did get
• 1:16:17
  them on on video and then on on DVD.
• 1:16:20
  They never quite lived up to the the, the really kind of detailed
• 1:16:25
  picture that have been painted by, you know, Ben Aronovich and
• 1:16:28
  Mark Platt and Riggs. By the time we got around to
• 1:16:32
  remembers that the Daleks and the Curse of Federick, I don't
• 1:16:34
  think J&T gave a shit anymore what was going in those books.
• 1:16:47
  Guys, thank you very much. That was a wonderful discussion.
• 1:16:51
  But we're going to go on to my favorite part of any episode
• 1:16:54
  now, and that is to ask each of you what book you would like to
• 1:16:59
  recommend. And let's start with James.
• 1:17:06
  Okay. Well, I'm going to give you a
• 1:17:07
  book which I have read to children and it went down a
• 1:17:10
  storm, and rightly so. I think it's one of the best
• 1:17:14
  written target books. And I also think it's maybe
• 1:17:17
  about the funniest Doctor Who book ever put out there, and it
• 1:17:21
  is Donald Cossin's The Myth Man, yes.
• 1:17:26
  Which is just a I mean, all of Cossin's 3 novelizations are
• 1:17:32
  just an absolute joy to read and.
• 1:17:36
  A consumer exploration of verbal wit and beautiful prose, the
• 1:17:44
  Romans is an absolute kind of hoot, isn't it?
• 1:17:47
  It's a hoot. And he does all the different
• 1:17:49
  voices and different, you know, he's got letters and Diaries and
• 1:17:52
  different characters talking. It's a joy.
• 1:17:55
  And funnier than the version that was on television, in my
• 1:17:59
  opinion, The Gunfighters is a glorious novelization.
• 1:18:03
  It's all written in this sort of hokey Western, you know, hokey
• 1:18:07
  American dialect. Lovely.
• 1:18:09
  But this one for me is the is my the absolute cream of the crop.
• 1:18:14
  It's written in the voice of Homer, the joke being that Homer
• 1:18:17
  witnessed all of the stuff that happens in the myth makers, and
• 1:18:20
  it's what gave him the idea for the Iliad.
• 1:18:23
  And it's partly I reread this recently because I knew that I
• 1:18:28
  was gonna talk about it. And the two things that I found
• 1:18:34
  so kind of astounding is first of all just the constant wit.
• 1:18:41
  And some of it is quite cheap humor.
• 1:18:44
  But it's written for. It's written with a kind of an
• 1:18:46
  adult understanding of humor. So he knows when he can go
• 1:18:49
  slightly lowbrow, but then he picks it up with the most kind
• 1:18:52
  of literate jokes, historical jokes, descriptions to die for.
• 1:18:57
  So just to kind of give you his description of the world.
• 1:19:02
  The world then was not as it is known now.
• 1:19:05
  A rather small flat disc it was considered to be, and the latest
• 1:19:08
  geographical thinking was that it balanced rather precariously
• 1:19:11
  on the back of an elephant, which for some reason was
• 1:19:13
  standing on a tortoise or nonsense.
• 1:19:16
  Of course, we now know that the disc is very much larger and
• 1:19:19
  floats on some kind of metaphysical river, although I
• 1:19:21
  must say I don't quite follow the argument myself.
• 1:19:25
  It's full of pros like that which is kind of simultaneously
• 1:19:28
  laugh out loud, funny and and beautifully written.
• 1:19:30
  And there is a moment where famously this story kind of
• 1:19:34
  takes a darker turn and he manages that transition so
• 1:19:37
  delicately. And you you, you realize that
• 1:19:40
  you're reading something where you've you have grown in spite
• 1:19:43
  of the kind of constant tirade of jokes.
• 1:19:46
  You've grown to to like these characters and you start to feel
• 1:19:50
  for the the doom that is heading their way.
• 1:19:54
  I can't recommend it highly enough.
• 1:19:55
  I read it to a group when they were really into their myths and
• 1:20:00
  there were a couple of Doctor Who founds in the group and I
• 1:20:02
  said, well look, I'm gonna read this story and you've just gotta
• 1:20:06
  know that this is an old Doctor Who story and Doctor Who is an
• 1:20:09
  old man and they sort of nodded in him.
• 1:20:11
  Yet we know about regeneration because.
• 1:20:14
  We've got the Internet, so we know everything these days.
• 1:20:17
  But they laughed it up. They laughed and they were
• 1:20:20
  engrossed as well. The storytelling is exemplary as
• 1:20:23
  well. It's a great version of a great
• 1:20:25
  story. You know, I've got other books
• 1:20:27
  to read for about. I want to read that now.
• 1:20:32
  It's a fantastic read, that one. How about you, Jason?
• 1:20:37
  I'm going to go wildly off in a different direction and do
• 1:20:40
  something non fictional. And it's a book that I got a
• 1:20:45
  while ago because I thought I was.
• 1:20:47
  I was intrigued by it, and it turned out to be one of the
• 1:20:51
  densest, most informative pieces of work on Doctor Who that I
• 1:20:55
  have read in a long time. It is Wiped.
• 1:20:59
  Doctor Who is Missing Episodes by Richard Molesworth.
• 1:21:04
  And you know, everybody knows they're missing episodes.
• 1:21:08
  This tells you when they went missing.
• 1:21:11
  And what efforts have been made to recover them and what has
• 1:21:13
  been recovered and what is currently held.
• 1:21:16
  And it goes into so much depth about the the minutiae of
• 1:21:22
  creating Doctor Who. So I now know far more than I
• 1:21:24
  ever wanted to about two inch videotape, 35 millimeter film,
• 1:21:29
  16 millimeter viewing prints, stored field versus suppressed
• 1:21:32
  field telly recordings and things like that.
• 1:21:37
  And it's a fascinating book just to see.
• 1:21:40
  What was made, how it was made, How it was reproduced for sale
• 1:21:44
  around the world, How it then was junked?
• 1:21:48
  Why, for example, we don't have a single videotape episode from
• 1:21:52
  pre 1969 Because all the black and white videotape episodes
• 1:21:58
  were wiped because they needed to reuse the tape and it.
• 1:22:02
  But you know, it's got such trivia in it.
• 1:22:04
  I mean, one of my favorite bits of trivia that popped out of
• 1:22:06
  this is the. The appendix, Appendix 2 at the
• 1:22:09
  end summarizes all the existing material and this paragraph
• 1:22:15
  jumped out at me, which I'll just read.
• 1:22:18
  Dalek Invasion of Earth Episode 5 exists as a 35 millimeter
• 1:22:24
  black and white film negative with optical soundtrack held by
• 1:22:27
  the BB C / 3 separate reels of film.
• 1:22:29
  Runs to 2393 feet. Optical soundtrack isn't the
• 1:22:33
  final transmitted sound, but the raw unmixed sound as recorded in
• 1:22:35
  the studio. This is the film negative that
• 1:22:38
  was used to make the transmission print of the
• 1:22:40
  episode in 1964. So when we talk about missing
• 1:22:45
  episodes, you you, you often hear things like, you know, oh
• 1:22:48
  the very the earliest story to exist in its original format was
• 1:22:53
  Spearhead from Space because that was recorded on film and we
• 1:22:55
  still got it and you have to go to. 1972 for Day of the Daleks
• 1:23:00
  for the first complete serial on its original Things and
• 1:23:03
  Everything. Episode five of The Dalek
• 1:23:05
  Invasion of Earth was recorded onto 35 millimeter film, and
• 1:23:08
  that is still held. So this is actually the earliest
• 1:23:11
  Doctor Who episode that exists on its original recorded format,
• 1:23:15
  even though it's not the one that was transmitted because
• 1:23:18
  it's not the transmission print. I mean that's the kind of trivia
• 1:23:21
  that you find in this in this. Is there a?
• 1:23:24
  Chunky book as well. Where they found them.
• 1:23:27
  Yeah, it goes into where they were found, who buy what, what
• 1:23:31
  site, you know, all the different types copies that we
• 1:23:34
  have. Because some episodes exist in
• 1:23:36
  multiple formats. Which, you know, is why some of
• 1:23:40
  the DHS is look absolutely shocking because they grabbed
• 1:23:43
  the closest format that they had to hand and didn't clean it up
• 1:23:46
  and it turned out there was a better one somewhere else, but
• 1:23:48
  no one went and looked for it. It's a brilliant book.
• 1:23:52
  It's weird, weird to bring bring it back to my dad again.
• 1:23:55
  But I was read. I had that book on the go.
• 1:23:57
  I must say I didn't read all of it.
• 1:23:59
  It's one to dip into and dip it out.
• 1:24:01
  But I was I. Read it cover to cover.
• 1:24:03
  It's cover to cover. I could barely put it down.
• 1:24:05
  But but yeah, I happened to be reading and my dad came in and
• 1:24:09
  he's not a Doctor Who fan. He's, you know, at all.
• 1:24:12
  But because of TV and he went, what's this?
• 1:24:14
  And he started reading, and he was just like.
• 1:24:17
  Because he knows all the jargon and he knows the places and he
• 1:24:19
  worked in the places, right. This man really knows his stuff.
• 1:24:22
  And then every so often you go, why, why has he written a book
• 1:24:26
  about it? And then you go, but I'm glad
• 1:24:28
  somebody is, in fact, it's good. And then he sort of fascinate
• 1:24:32
  between the obsession that is represented and he didn't get
• 1:24:35
  it. And also being glad that
• 1:24:37
  somebody had written it down and and just so somebody was.
• 1:24:41
  Yeah. But just seeing someone who
• 1:24:42
  worked in the business look dipping into that book and
• 1:24:45
  going. Well, that's right.
• 1:24:47
  Oh yes, all those. I remember those.
• 1:24:49
  All this terminology that meant something to him and it's just
• 1:24:53
  like like archaic towards isn't. It I'm going to pass your
• 1:24:58
  details on to the Missing Episodes podcast Okay, because
• 1:25:01
  you've clearly done your research.
• 1:25:03
  I think they're just they're just seeing out William Hartnell
• 1:25:05
  right now. You listen to that, right?
• 1:25:06
  You must do if you if that's your recommend.
• 1:25:09
  I I haven't listened to it. I it's one of those ones.
• 1:25:12
  They're. Chastened.
• 1:25:15
  There are so many podcasts that I see popping up on my Twitter
• 1:25:17
  for, you know, I must give that a listen.
• 1:25:20
  I'm just trying to find the time to squeeze it all in.
• 1:25:24
  So I must give a listen to the Missing Episodes podcast because
• 1:25:27
  I hear good things about it. Yeah.
• 1:25:30
  You read the book. It's a fascinating subject.
• 1:25:33
  And yeah, I know far more about how Doctor Who was recorded and
• 1:25:36
  copied, and why some episodes look the way they do.
• 1:25:42
  Than I ever needed to, really, to be honest.
• 1:25:44
  But but it's fascinating to to to read.
• 1:25:48
  So yeah. And how much what you what you
• 1:25:51
  don't often hear about is just how much was lost from the 70s
• 1:25:54
  as well. Yeah, yeah, we're lucky.
• 1:25:58
  I'm very lucky. So yeah.
• 1:26:00
  Is that the demons in black and white for ages?
• 1:26:03
  Yeah, it was black and black and white and the Pearl years,
• 1:26:06
  wasn't it? The demons.
• 1:26:08
  Episode. That's what I mean.
• 1:26:08
  Yeah, for ages. So.
• 1:26:11
  Something happened. That leaves you here and I'm
• 1:26:14
  desperate to know what you're going to recommend.
• 1:26:17
  Well like I said I've not read as many Doctor Who books as a
• 1:26:21
  lot of people on your podcast, but I've but the one I'm going
• 1:26:25
  to recommend is one that always jumps out because it's by A L
• 1:26:29
  Kennedy and I always loved her novels.
• 1:26:32
  She's like a she's like a literary figure who from Dundee
• 1:26:36
  based, but. And she's lovely when you hear
• 1:26:39
  her on Radio Phone Place, so that she's just a lovely
• 1:26:42
  personality. And she's been a novelist like,
• 1:26:46
  and I say a proper novelist, but she is like a literary figure
• 1:26:49
  who, you know, who wins awards and is on the Booker list and
• 1:26:53
  that sort of stuff. But she turns out to be a mad
• 1:26:56
  Doctor Who fan. So she's written a couple of
• 1:26:58
  Doctor Who books and the one I really love.
• 1:27:02
  Is called and I've got it on my Kindle app somewhere is called
• 1:27:08
  the Doctor Who the Drosten's Curse.
• 1:27:11
  And it's weird because because it was a L Kennedy, they let her
• 1:27:15
  in 2015. They let her even though that.
• 1:27:17
  I don't think at that time they weren't really doing anything.
• 1:27:20
  That wasn't the Doctor that was on TV, but because it was a L
• 1:27:23
  Kennedy, they let her do the 4th Doctor.
• 1:27:26
  And it it's just it's it's the alchemy of how.
• 1:27:31
  She's such an amazing writer. And then turning those talents
• 1:27:34
  to doing a Doctor Who book is insane in a way, because she
• 1:27:40
  just captures it so perfectly. And I just wanted to read the
• 1:27:44
  first time. The character Bryony, you see a
• 1:27:47
  lot of the book from. It's the first time she meets
• 1:27:50
  who we know is the 4th Doctor, and a lot of it's set on a golf
• 1:27:54
  course and it's very much about horrible people that work on
• 1:27:56
  golf courses involved with. Alien menaces and stuff.
• 1:28:00
  And it feels very much like Sharder.
• 1:28:02
  Kind of. It's got that kind of atmosphere
• 1:28:04
  to it. It's just a magical captures the
• 1:28:06
  4th, that era of the 4th, the Williams era of the 4th Doctor
• 1:28:11
  so well, but do I only glanced up to see a very tall man
• 1:28:16
  studying her from the doorway. He grinned with rather motif
• 1:28:19
  than one person should have. He appeared to have been dressed
• 1:28:22
  by committee, possibly a drunk committee, wind collar and
• 1:28:25
  something that might once have been a cravat.
• 1:28:27
  Laggy oatmeal trousers, brown checked waistcoat, plum colored
• 1:28:31
  velvet jacket with bulging pockets, rattled shoes and an
• 1:28:35
  immense and disreputable scarf with a life of its own.
• 1:28:39
  And it's just it's just writing of that caliber in throughout
• 1:28:43
  the book. And it's just it's really funny
• 1:28:45
  as well and it just feels like I just saw a review of Paul in Dr.
• 1:28:51
  E magazine of Paul Mars's latest one where they said his pertly.
• 1:28:55
  I've not read it yet, but his pertly.
• 1:28:57
  Feels like a 1973 adventure and I think Ale Kennedy sort of does
• 1:29:03
  the same thing. It's feels like a Fourth Doctor
• 1:29:07
  adventure that never was and the novelization of it, it's
• 1:29:11
  absolutely brilliant. But just yeah, I'd recommend I'd
• 1:29:14
  recommend Ale Kennedy as a novelist if you want to get
• 1:29:16
  outside of Doctor Who as well. But but yeah, but I heard Doctor
• 1:29:20
  Who books are brilliant. What was the other one that she?
• 1:29:23
  Write I've just got a page open. It was.
• 1:29:26
  Death comes to something. Where's she gone?
• 1:29:33
  Justin's Curse and the Death Pit.
• 1:29:39
  Yeah, that's that's weird, though.
• 1:29:45
  I know they're both set in the golf spa.
• 1:29:47
  That's right. That's what confused me.
• 1:29:48
  Yeah. They both have Brian and they're
• 1:29:50
  both in the Golf. They're both in the golf.
• 1:29:53
  A golf thing, which is. Somebody you never thought
• 1:29:56
  Doctor Who would be, but it makes perfect sense.
• 1:29:58
  The horror and the familiar and all that kind of thing.
• 1:30:03
  But but I was also going to say obviously, because I write the
• 1:30:07
  cutaway comics and I don't want to be so uncouthous to recommend
• 1:30:11
  cutaway comics and obviously they're comics not books.
• 1:30:14
  But go and check out our website.
• 1:30:16
  But also one of our writers has got a Doctor Who book coming.
• 1:30:20
  Mark Griffiths he's got. A selfmade man, an 8, a 1980s
• 1:30:25
  story is coming out and I've already read it and it's
• 1:30:27
  absolutely brilliant. So I think you can go preorder
• 1:30:30
  it on Amazon now because I'm looking at the page, but that's
• 1:30:33
  out in 26th of October 2023. So yeah, so I'd recommend that
• 1:30:40
  because Mark's a wonderful writer and he's written, he's
• 1:30:42
  written our our own maker stuff for the comics and he's a
• 1:30:46
  brilliant children's author and all around good egg and massive
• 1:30:51
  Doctor Who fan. Feel like we're about to have a
• 1:30:53
  bit of a renaissance with Doctor Who Burks.
• 1:30:56
  It's been a bit quiet hasn't it, for our sort of Matt Smith and
• 1:30:59
  Jodie Whitsker's time. But I feel, I feel like we're
• 1:31:03
  going to have quite a few coming up.
• 1:31:05
  I feel like we're going to have quite a lot of everything coming
• 1:31:08
  up. I'm sure it's part of Russell's
• 1:31:09
  master plan. Russell Rusell genuinely likes
• 1:31:12
  all this stuff, and he likes the dollies as well.
• 1:31:16
  So there's going to be, I mean, there's going to be tons of
• 1:31:19
  toys. And tons of books and tons of
• 1:31:21
  comics and and Doctor Who's going to take over the world
• 1:31:25
  again. If I don't have a beat the MEAP
• 1:31:27
  under my Christmas tree this year.
• 1:31:31
  Well, that's one of my biggest regrets.
• 1:31:32
  A miserable. Day One.
• 1:31:33
  Of my biggest regrets about beating the MEAP is it's
• 1:31:36
  brilliant to see him back, but I couldn't remember the story very
• 1:31:39
  well. And then everyone just assuming
• 1:31:41
  everyone knows all the twists and turns.
• 1:31:43
  I won't say them here, but really annoying.
• 1:31:45
  It's like spoilers. I know, I know, you can remember
• 1:31:48
  what happens in that story. So you're going to watch it on
• 1:31:51
  your Christmas tree? Yeah, no, I'm definitely going
• 1:31:55
  to get my boy a beat. The meat.
• 1:31:57
  In fact, that was announced today.
• 1:31:58
  That's hot off the press, that news, isn't it?
• 1:32:01
  Oh, Margot, what's the name? Yeah, and I hope her beat the
• 1:32:05
  meat toys. Does other Meridian Mugley's
• 1:32:09
  phrases as well. The one where she tells the Tory
• 1:32:14
  minister to F off on live on the radio that that like a bonus.
• 1:32:18
  Back on Madrid did Margulies did maybe Margulies do the do the
• 1:32:24
  Caramel Bunny. Did she?
• 1:32:27
  Back in the midst of time? Or is that one of those myths
• 1:32:30
  I've never I've held in my head for 40 years?
• 1:32:35
  Let's say that she was, because that's a great story.
• 1:32:38
  I just remember every interview she goes on.
• 1:32:40
  She's. Always talking about her vagina,
• 1:32:43
  like on Graham Nolan. And every time I've ever seen
• 1:32:45
  her, I know more about that part of her than any part of her
• 1:32:49
  career. I'm hoping the toy doesn't
• 1:32:51
  mention that, imagining a sort of Santa Claus, the movie style
• 1:32:57
  scandal where the beep the meats come out on Christmas Day and
• 1:33:00
  ruin every child's Christmas with just Margly's discussing.
• 1:33:04
  Her I can confirm. I've done some live Googling.
• 1:33:10
  The Caramel Bunny was voiced voiced by British actress Miriam
• 1:33:14
  Margolis with a West Country accent, so I hadn't made it up
• 1:33:18
  in my head. So yeah, beat the meat and the
• 1:33:19
  Caramel Bunny. There's there's some book with
• 1:33:22
  trivia. The meat is always made in white
• 1:33:25
  adder in that Black Adder episode.
• 1:33:27
  Yeah, come on, sounds almost exactly.
• 1:33:31
  Like Beep the meep. Is the big.
• 1:33:38
  You mentioned. I said, didn't you?
• 1:33:40
  Because she keeps swearing. Whoa again.
• 1:33:44
  We can have you just mentioned Paul Mars and Ian, and that's
• 1:33:48
  the next book club that I'm doing.
• 1:33:51
  I don't have any. You guys have read Mad Dogs and
• 1:33:53
  Englishmen, which is the same 8th Doctor book with the pink
• 1:33:57
  cover with the poodle. I was about to say that with the
• 1:33:59
  yeah, I mean, I I don't know Paul very well, but I know lots
• 1:34:02
  of people that know him really well.
• 1:34:03
  So I know him a few times and and I'm writing.
• 1:34:06
  Paris wild time with his permission for the comics so
• 1:34:11
  yeah but yeah that I remember him saying that cover he just
• 1:34:14
  said I think he's he's just said make it the most non Doctor Who
• 1:34:17
  cover you possibly can and it's like a pink poodle like it looks
• 1:34:21
  like something off and I a weird I'd be for sort of.
• 1:34:26
  Compilation. Just before that you have the
• 1:34:30
  adventurous on Henrietta St. which is this huge sort of
• 1:34:33
  literate Doctor Who novel, all done from the point of view of
• 1:34:36
  an academic, and yet they slap the 100th Doctor Who novel on
• 1:34:40
  the one with the pink poodle with a smoking gum.
• 1:34:43
  Because. Nothing screams Doctor Who more
• 1:34:46
  than that. It makes me think of River Song
• 1:34:50
  when I see that picture. If River Song was a pink poodle.
• 1:34:55
  It's a frank book as well. It's so funny.
• 1:34:57
  But that is for another day. That just leaves me to say thank
• 1:35:02
  you so much for your time today. I'm perfectly convinced this was
• 1:35:05
  the smartest episode of House for Blood pen knife I have ever
• 1:35:08
  put out. I've heard Robert, I've heard
• 1:35:11
  Robert Valentine talking about. Do you know he's he's recorded
• 1:35:15
  the gun fighters recently and a hell of a listen, I basically
• 1:35:19
  don't say anything. I'll just let him.
• 1:35:22
  What do you recommend, Joe? Oh, yes, sorry.
• 1:35:26
  He's. This is This is my bloody
• 1:35:29
  podcast and I forgot I'm supposed to recommend something.
• 1:35:31
  I would like to recommend Discontinuity Guide by If I Can
• 1:35:35
  get this right, Martin Day, Paul Connell and Keith Topping.
• 1:35:40
  The right names in the. Wildly variable writers in
• 1:35:43
  different ways, but this is yeah, I think this is the most
• 1:35:48
  fun. Reference and I'm going to put
• 1:35:51
  that in inverted commas because it's very loose book that there
• 1:35:55
  is. I love these books.
• 1:35:57
  I love them because I just spend most of the book arguing with
• 1:36:00
  the authors about their opinions in the summaries of the stories.
• 1:36:05
  There's a lot of them about, but I feel like this was this was
• 1:36:08
  like the most accessible because it's all cut up into little bite
• 1:36:12
  sized chunks. There's like a root section
• 1:36:15
  where you can go and explore what could have influenced the
• 1:36:18
  story. There's a double entendre
• 1:36:20
  section which has effectively been the influence for this
• 1:36:24
  podcast. It's just it's really, really
• 1:36:28
  fun. My one's falling apart so I
• 1:36:30
  don't I dare touch it anymore because the pages are going
• 1:36:34
  everywhere. But it's just a very fun
• 1:36:37
  reference books, which is pushing away from the house down
• 1:36:42
  as Walker, and I don't want to criticize those because they
• 1:36:46
  were like the Bible. Of their time, for those Who
• 1:36:50
  fans. But it's just that, a fun,
• 1:36:53
  quirky, accessible way of exploring Doctor Who.
• 1:36:57
  And it's probably the first time I read a book that really got me
• 1:37:00
  thinking about the nuts and bolts of a piece of television.
• 1:37:05
  I'm pulling it apart. And via my blog.
• 1:37:07
  Via my podcast. I've been doing that ever since,
• 1:37:09
  so I've got a lot to thank those authors for.
• 1:37:12
  I couldn't remember when that came out.
• 1:37:15
  I absolutely loved it. And again, this was in the early
• 1:37:18
  90s when when most of these stories were, the idea that I'd
• 1:37:21
  ever be able to watch them was was just the most distant thing.
• 1:37:26
  So it was it was a sort of corrective also to the very
• 1:37:31
  earnest style of the descriptions you got in the
• 1:37:33
  Peter Haining 20 years of celebration book, which was my
• 1:37:36
  the first I read through these stories and got a sense of kind
• 1:37:38
  of what there was. You know this actually gave a
• 1:37:41
  much kind of clearer glimpse of what they might look like and
• 1:37:45
  what might be the highlights and the low lights.
• 1:37:47
  And although exactly as you say Joe, you you can argue with that
• 1:37:51
  book a great deal, it's sort of made arguing with it part of its
• 1:37:57
  part of its mission. I think you know from from a
• 1:38:00
  very kind of an 80s that was very earnest and saying, no,
• 1:38:02
  this is what this story is like and the gunfighters are the
• 1:38:04
  worst story of all time. You know, suddenly you got a
• 1:38:06
  book with writers with diverging appearance, opinions, and
• 1:38:10
  slightly controversial opinions, and suggesting things that you
• 1:38:13
  could disagree with. Almost as if you know that was
• 1:38:16
  allowed. Which shouldn't have been the
• 1:38:19
  revelation it was, but it certainly was at the time.
• 1:38:22
  It was more celebratory and absolutely.
• 1:38:25
  This this wonderful show that was brought all four of us
• 1:38:29
  together tonight. It's stupid, isn't it?
• 1:38:32
  It's silly and brilliant. But in fact the one but.
• 1:38:36
  It's not. Never forget is the Android
• 1:38:38
  invasion, which they call stupid, tiresome and very
• 1:38:43
  irritating. That's the whole review of the
• 1:38:45
  Android invasion. What I what I love about the
• 1:38:48
  discontinuity guide is a big chunk of the discontinuity guide
• 1:38:52
  is taken up with goofs and fluffs.
• 1:38:54
  You know it's where the boom mic appears on camera and.
• 1:38:59
  Set, fall off and people fluff their lines.
• 1:39:01
  And there's plenty of them and I've heard, I've heard it come
• 1:39:04
  in for some criticism for like, you know, why, why do you?
• 1:39:07
  Why are you tearing apart this story?
• 1:39:08
  But but it's done from such a place of affection.
• 1:39:12
  Yeah, yeah. It's always it's never less than
• 1:39:14
  fun and entertaining to read this content.
• 1:39:17
  No, I remember at the. Time it was.
• 1:39:20
  It was, it was a different generation of fans.
• 1:39:22
  There was the gatekeeper generation who were very serious
• 1:39:27
  and everything. In fact, are you watching the
• 1:39:29
  same show as us? And then remember the Capedian.
• 1:39:32
  Encyclopedia that came out that was just completely that was
• 1:39:36
  like a comedy, but wasn't it? It was a humor.
• 1:39:39
  Oh, that one. Yeah, I.
• 1:39:44
  Was stuck in my head for some reason.
• 1:39:47
  You say about I can remember a sassy afternoon with my friend
• 1:39:52
  Hazel, and I think there's a paragraph that's almost a page
• 1:39:56
  of the goose from the chase. And we watched through the
• 1:39:59
  entirety of the chase, just ticking off every single goof.
• 1:40:03
  So we're looking for the problems, but you know it is.
• 1:40:07
  All part loads of them. Loads of them.
• 1:40:09
  Some of them actually. It's interesting this is now a
• 1:40:12
  historical text because some of the goofs have been fixed on the
• 1:40:15
  DVD and Blu-ray releases. Should you choose to watch those
• 1:40:19
  versions. So you don't get a choice on the
• 1:40:22
  DVD of the Chase, you don't get the version with the uncorrected
• 1:40:27
  bits on. I know they've fixed a lot of
• 1:40:29
  the goofs, the secret which I noticed on the VHS immediately
• 1:40:33
  when the Dalek moves across in front of the countdown and the
• 1:40:35
  countdown is superimposed over the Dalek.
• 1:40:38
  The end of the Famously Furious. The funny thing is, that used to
• 1:40:43
  drive me mad as a teenager. I'd watch that and be like, why
• 1:40:46
  can't someone fix that thing with the timer?
• 1:40:48
  Now I watch the DVD and I want my goof back put it back in the
• 1:40:51
  DVD. One of my favorite moments in
• 1:40:54
  the whole of the Five Doctors is that side man that walks up and
• 1:40:56
  goes, goes, you know, what's that special edition?
• 1:41:00
  I'm like, what's this? What is going on?
• 1:41:04
  And now it was weird seeing when I went to see Talons at BFI and
• 1:41:11
  the and I just wasn't ready for the CGI rat.
• 1:41:14
  And I was like, I'm looking forward to that shit rat.
• 1:41:17
  That shit rat. I love it.
• 1:41:19
  That's dated worse than the costume.
• 1:41:21
  Now go and watch it again. Oh yeah, it's awful, but it's
• 1:41:24
  hilarious. I mean, I watched, I watched
• 1:41:27
  Dinosaur Invasion with my son the other day, and I hadn't
• 1:41:32
  watched it for years. And it's my my son hadn't ever
• 1:41:36
  watched any old Doctor Who. And it was honestly probably the
• 1:41:41
  most glorious afternoon I've ever spent with him.
• 1:41:44
  And we've had a, you know, we've had lots of good time together.
• 1:41:47
  But honestly? Watching that and him going, oh,
• 1:41:50
  this is all right actually. And then the dinosaurs coming in
• 1:41:53
  being so unutterably shit that we were on the floor laughing
• 1:41:57
  because I I thought it was going to have an asthma attack.
• 1:42:00
  But the bit where the dinosaurs are fighting and the next
• 1:42:04
  wobbling and T rex's teeth go in and T rex's teeth start bending
• 1:42:08
  because they're made of phone rubber as well and.
• 1:42:11
  So. Much.
• 1:42:12
  My son's 14 and you just went. This is no shit.
• 1:42:15
  I love it. I just love it.
• 1:42:17
  And we were just crying with laughter.
• 1:42:19
  It was so amazing. And this?
• 1:42:21
  Is one of those happiest moments of my life.
• 1:42:24
  For the Blu-ray, though, it's that you know that those they
• 1:42:26
  won't have the budget of Jurassic Park.
• 1:42:30
  The CGI dinosaurs will be just as embarrassing.
• 1:42:33
  But Andrew Orton, who I don't know in real life but I know
• 1:42:37
  because he's a colorist on, cuts away.
• 1:42:40
  He has done really good CGI, which is on Twitter, so you're
• 1:42:43
  gonna look for Andrew Waters. I have seen those, actually they
• 1:42:45
  are good. Yeah, they actually look pretty
• 1:42:46
  good. And that's just him at home,
• 1:42:49
  yeah. Doing it as a hobby so but yeah
• 1:42:52
  but I think half the funniest watching them as they were cuz
• 1:42:57
  they are half the time your. Son is watching the invasion of
• 1:43:00
  the dinosaurs and loving it. And your students are listening
• 1:43:04
  to you read out the Myth Makers and loving it.
• 1:43:08
  And that there was ever a Doctor Who Video Club playing the Ark
• 1:43:11
  in space when you were it fills my heart with joy.
• 1:43:15
  It was it was a wonderful. Time for me that that Doctor Who
• 1:43:19
  club. I saw so many stories for the
• 1:43:21
  first time. Two of the Cybermen had just
• 1:43:24
  been recovered when I became a fan.
• 1:43:28
  And yeah, I first saw that in that classroom on a Monday,
• 1:43:33
  Wednesday and Friday lunchtime over the over that week.
• 1:43:36
  And that was my my first seeing should be done at all.
• 1:43:40
  Also that that Doctor Who club is how I found out how Trial of
• 1:43:43
  the Time Lord finished. Actually you can explain it to
• 1:43:46
  me one day, you. Know I've never rewatched that
• 1:43:51
  since Transmission. It's heavy.
• 1:43:54
  I love it. It sends into a bird and.
• 1:43:57
  Jason, I've talked about that before.
• 1:43:59
  Haven't we yet? Yeah, yeah, but no.
• 1:44:01
  My, my. Yeah, I know I say this a lot
• 1:44:04
  and people get sick of hearing it, but when I was seven years
• 1:44:06
  old, the cliffhanger on Part 13 terrified me so much I didn't
• 1:44:09
  watch Part 14, not realizing it was the final episode.
• 1:44:13
  So it wasn't until that Doctor Who club that I saw Part 14 of
• 1:44:16
  Trial of the Time Lord for. Me.
• 1:44:20
  It was the Cliffhanger 2 Battlefield Episode 2 with that
• 1:44:23
  dreadful special effect flying around.
• 1:44:25
  That was my first episode of Doctor Who, and I wasn't allowed
• 1:44:27
  to watch the rest of the season. My mom was like, yeah, you can
• 1:44:30
  come back next year. There you go.
• 1:44:33
  We don't know how that ended, but this has been an absolute
• 1:44:37
  delight. I'm hoping I'm not going to do
• 1:44:40
  this on my, but I'm hoping I can entice you all back for another
• 1:44:44
  read and another discussion. Absolutely.
• 1:44:47
  Okay. Well, there you go.
• 1:44:48
  That's decided then, isn't it? I.
• 1:44:49
  Want to come and do a commentary as well?
• 1:44:51
  I love, I love your podcaster. It's great.
• 1:44:54
  Very kind and you're always welcome.
• 1:44:57
  Then I'll just say to all three of you until next time.
• 1:45:02
  Sorry to butt in. Jason and Ian have secretly and
• 1:45:05
  subtly plied their wares during the course of the podcast.
• 1:45:09
  If I can just just drop in, there is another podcast that
• 1:45:13
  Jason can add to his lengthening list of podcasts he's never
• 1:45:17
  going to find the time to listen to called Neurotic Literature,
• 1:45:21
  which is. Short stories that I struggled
• 1:45:25
  to describe until an American friend came over and said it's
• 1:45:30
  like if PG Woodhouse had written horror stories.
• 1:45:33
  And I thought, yeah, I love that.
• 1:45:35
  So neurotic literature. It's on the podcast sphere.
• 1:45:37
  Should you Should you want to add another podcast to your
• 1:45:40
  listening? Fellas, this is your assignment.
• 1:45:43
  Between now and the next time we talk, we all go and listen to
• 1:45:47
  neurotic literature and we talk about one of the stories that's
• 1:45:50
  on there. That's gonna be my opening
• 1:45:53
  question next time, because I could ask you what your first
• 1:45:56
  Doctor Hooper was again. Okay.
• 1:45:58
  Okay, cool. Nice to do.
• 1:46:00
  It, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much.
• 1:46:02
  Thanks. For having us, it's been great.
• 1:46:03
  Thanks.