Latest / A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast / Hamster Book Club - James Lark Top & Bottom Ten Books! (Plus a brilliant short story from James' podcast Neurotic Literature)

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Hamster Book Club - James Lark Top & Bottom Ten Books! (Plus a brilliant short story from James' podcast Neurotic Literature) · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:00
  Welcome back to the Hamster Book Club.
• 0:03
  My name is Joe Ford and it is a deep, deep privilege today to be
• 0:10
  here with. Why are you looking nervous
• 0:12
  right now? You're pulling my face like
• 0:15
  you're looking a bit nervous. No, that's my resting anxious
• 0:18
  face. Oh, anxious.
• 0:20
  Oh, that's a step up from nervous.
• 0:23
  I think I've got, I think the more the older I get, the more
• 0:25
  kind of anxious it just sort of falls into that shape of, of, of
• 0:29
  permanent dread. But it wasn't personal.
• 0:32
  No, I'm looking forward to this very much.
• 0:34
  You can all hear the delirious tones of Mr. James Lark there.
• 0:37
  Hello, James. Hello.
• 0:39
  I mean, you've become a regular voice now on this podcast in the
• 0:43
  past year. Well I mean please, you stop
• 0:45
  having a life so you can become more regular.
• 0:47
  It is difficult. I have been trying to cancel
• 0:49
  friendships left, right and sent to make more room for this.
• 0:51
  Please, please. You know, I need you to put time
• 0:54
  aside in the evening to read these books that we talk about,
• 0:57
  you know? I've got a lot of yeah, I've got
• 0:59
  a big part of books building up, but it's fine, It's fine.
• 1:02
  I'm making time. I mean, today you hear a.
• 1:04
  Year of cancelling the social life and really committing to
• 1:07
  the Doctor Who reading. With little or no reward, may I
• 1:11
  add, apart from friendship and the joy of the hamster
• 1:16
  community. Which is maybe learning the odd
• 1:18
  bit of vocabulary from Pip and Jane.
• 1:21
  We've got that to come. Yes, you haven't read that yet,
• 1:24
  but I can promise you, you will have a delirious couple of days
• 1:27
  with that book. Can't wait.
• 1:30
  James, today you have been tasked with an almost impossible
• 1:35
  an impossible thing to do, and that is to compile a list of
• 1:39
  your top ten and bottom 10 Doctor Who books.
• 1:43
  How difficult was this? It was.
• 1:45
  Well, it was not as impossible as I thought it might be.
• 1:49
  It's a bit like the, the Desert Island Discs exercise, isn't it?
• 1:52
  You know, when you do your 7 discs, and I mean, mine are
• 1:55
  different every single day. So that's, that's you just sort
• 1:59
  of acknowledge that, that it's not a set in stone list.
• 2:03
  And I, I, I had AI realized I had a lot to choose from and
• 2:11
  the, the hardest thing was whittling it down rather than
• 2:14
  coming up with the things in the 1st place.
• 2:16
  But at the end of the day, it's just an exercise.
• 2:18
  And I thought I'd go for kind of archetypes and, and a lot of
• 2:21
  these books I haven't read for ages.
• 2:23
  So to some extent it's also nostalgia.
• 2:25
  It's when I read them, it's what they meant to me at the time.
• 2:28
  It's the memory I have of them. There are books that I've gone
• 2:32
  back to in the Doctor Who range that haven't lived up to that
• 2:34
  memory. So they're not on the list, but.
• 2:37
  That although, you know, we did go back and read, remember sort
• 2:39
  of Daleks and that did lead up to.
• 2:41
  Expectations. So that's the glorious thing.
• 2:42
  I mean, it's one of the things that comes out through your
• 2:46
  podcasts about the the book range is obviously how variable
• 2:50
  the quality is. But how amongst the the the very
• 2:55
  now large and growing world of Doctor Who literature, there are
• 3:00
  proper brilliant novels Like books that worthy of of sitting
• 3:07
  alongside other brilliant novels not about Doctor Who?
• 3:10
  Oh, I would absolutely agree with that.
• 3:12
  I'll tell you sort of that's not the norm, but they're definitely
• 3:15
  are there. The gold Nuggets are there.
• 3:17
  But that's not the norm in a bookshop.
• 3:19
  You know, if you look at what the current range of, you know,
• 3:23
  the books released over the last year, you're going to find a,
• 3:25
  you know, maybe two or three that will have real lasting
• 3:28
  quality. And then and then, you know,
• 3:32
  probably some some pretty darn good ones that will appeal to
• 3:35
  different kinds of people. And then a lot of rust that will
• 3:37
  be forgotten in a couple years time do.
• 3:39
  You know what else taught me? You know that there were some
• 3:41
  extremely variable Doctor Who books.
• 3:44
  That was the Goodreads reviews from 1:00.
• 3:47
  There's a James Lark. I mean, some of them were like
• 3:50
  dissertations. They were very long.
• 3:52
  I'll tell you what, I spent a whole afternoon going from one
• 3:55
  new adventure to another, reading your reviews, drinking
• 3:59
  one. I was having the best time.
• 4:01
  I mean, you're such a witty writer.
• 4:02
  I was. I mean, that review of The Pit.
• 4:04
  I don't think I've ever read a single piece of scathing as that
• 4:09
  in my entire life. Well, I, I felt that, I mean,
• 4:14
  that was AI tasked myself with keeping a written record of what
• 4:17
  I'd read because it was sort of, I set out to read the new
• 4:20
  adventures as I explained in the reviews, I, it was a, a journey
• 4:23
  I'd not made before and which, as you know, I haven't completed
• 4:26
  yet. But I really wanted to kind of
• 4:29
  having committed to it, to have some kind of written record of
• 4:32
  what I think myself. Because certainly at the time I
• 4:34
  started reading them, there wasn't a great deal of writing
• 4:38
  about them or not. There wasn't a great deal of
• 4:41
  very good writing about them. And I guess I mean, going back
• 4:46
  to talking about kind of the, the, the books on the shelves
• 4:51
  that, that are written to be kind of published, consumed and
• 4:54
  then to, to pass on. I, I, I think there's something
• 4:57
  a little bit cruel in a way about being a Doctor Who writer,
• 5:01
  which is that whereas in any other sphere, your first novel
• 5:07
  would not be picked over like this unless, unless you became a
• 5:10
  mega successful writer, it would probably fade into obscurity.
• 5:13
  Whereas because you've written under the Doctor Who label,
• 5:16
  these poor young writers, given their first chance and sometimes
• 5:20
  only chance to write a novel, and arguably not the kind of
• 5:24
  support that you'd get from a bigger publisher, have this
• 5:29
  thing kind of still sitting there 30 years down the line
• 5:32
  that perhaps they don't really want people picking over.
• 5:35
  But it's got Doctor Who got on the cover, so people are going
• 5:37
  to pick over it for the rest of eternity.
• 5:39
  I go on their latest podcast, Catcher of Choice and go, I just
• 5:42
  fancy, you know, listening to a podcast about the old days.
• 5:45
  What about my book? How interesting, you know, in
• 5:48
  the dialect Generation by Nicholas Briggs.
• 5:50
  I'll listen to that. Oh my God, you know.
• 5:53
  He listened to everything. Mom's coming out Sunday.
• 5:56
  Our bloody hope you don't listen to that one, James.
• 6:00
  What was your first ever Doctor Who book you read?
• 6:03
  I can't remember, but it was a target, and it would have been
• 6:06
  either Doctor Who in an exciting adventure with the Daleks,
• 6:09
  because I know that my local library had a copy of that, that
• 6:12
  the hardcover copy of that. It might have been The
• 6:16
  Underwater Menace because I borrowed that from my school
• 6:20
  library. Old.
• 6:22
  Loved it. I loved it at the time as a
• 6:25
  Doctor Who newbie. Loved it.
• 6:28
  I love it now. Yeah, I have gone back to that
• 6:31
  novelization recently and and found it not quite as thrilling
• 6:35
  as I remember it, but it was. 20 bit unproblematic as well,
• 6:41
  wouldn't you say? There's a sequence at the end
• 6:43
  where Jamie slaps Polly and goes there that shut her up.
• 6:47
  I was like, oh, this could only come out of the past.
• 6:52
  Yeah, but I was in the past at the time, I guess.
• 6:54
  So it was. It was fine for for me in the
• 6:57
  1980s. Such a youthful chap, you know.
• 6:59
  I refuse to believe that. It's very kind of you to say I'm
• 7:03
  what? Is your secret.
• 7:06
  Lack of sleep Spectrox. Toxemia.
• 7:09
  Oh no, not toxemia, just spectrox.
• 7:12
  Toxemia is the thing that kills you, isn't it?
• 7:14
  As a measure of my my advanced years, you will notice today
• 7:18
  that unlike previous podcasts, I will not be perching my glasses
• 7:22
  on the end of my nose to read. I am now wearing bifocals.
• 7:28
  Oh, OK. That stage in life.
• 7:32
  But it was so desperately cute when you did, you know?
• 7:35
  Yeah. I was like I'm having a chat
• 7:36
  with a librarian. Sadly too old to be desperately
• 7:39
  cute. And they are.
• 7:41
  They are brilliant. It's changed my life.
• 7:44
  Bifocals. One of those statements I know
• 7:46
  is absolutely true, and one of them is false.
• 7:49
  But let's move on before we're accused of flowing right.
• 7:52
  Who? Targeted.
• 7:53
  It was one of those two. OK.
• 7:56
  And I assume then that you, did you attack the targets, did you
• 8:01
  ask for them for Christmas? Did you build up a huge
• 8:04
  collection of Doctor Who books? They started arriving for
• 8:07
  Christmas when they were publishing the Blue Spine
• 8:10
  versions in the 90s. I haven't.
• 8:13
  Having become a Doctor Who fan and with the sort of meager
• 8:17
  range of of library books already consumed, there was a
• 8:22
  point where the television series was cancelled and, and at
• 8:25
  around that point, relatives, I think, just realized that it was
• 8:28
  an easy buy. You know, when you hit a certain
• 8:30
  age and actually you're too old for toys, or so they thought.
• 8:34
  I wasn't, but I didn't get toys anymore.
• 8:36
  But they think, no, what does James like?
• 8:38
  Oh, Doctor Who? And and suddenly Smith's is
• 8:40
  absolutely crammed full of these new reprinted Target novels.
• 8:43
  So I got loads of those. Yeah.
• 8:45
  So I discovered a lot of Doctor Who stories, like many people,
• 8:48
  for the first time in print. I mean, that's win, win, right?
• 8:51
  They they, they get an easy present for you and you get a
• 8:54
  Doctor Who. Get a Doctor Who.
• 8:55
  Yeah. And I remember enjoying all of
• 8:57
  them completely uncritically. But I also remember, and we have
• 9:01
  discussed this when we talked about Remembrance, I remember
• 9:03
  when those ones came out, Remembrance and Battlefield and
• 9:06
  Fenrik and, and knowing that this was a, a, a higher quality
• 9:11
  of writing and that I was getting something more serious
• 9:16
  and more and more as I was kind of discovering writing for
• 9:21
  adults. I guess I was, I was quite a
• 9:22
  precocious reader. And by that stage I had started
• 9:25
  to discover kind of proper science fiction.
• 9:28
  John Wyndham was a big one that I loved and I was kind of
• 9:31
  working through the the the Penguin Books on my parents
• 9:34
  shelf, having kind of already worked my way through the Puffin
• 9:37
  books on my own shelf. It's suddenly underwhelmed by
• 9:40
  Terence Dix seem a little not lackluster, but thin.
• 9:44
  In comparison, I, I certainly, Terence Dix was the first one
• 9:48
  where I thought, yeah, this is a bit of a children's book for,
• 9:51
  for all the many, you know, I, and I do remember that the, my
• 9:54
  secondary school library had Doctor Who and the Auton
• 9:59
  invasion. And that was very exciting, very
• 10:03
  thrilling. And also kind of weirdly at a
• 10:07
  time when they were starting to be released more affordably on
• 10:11
  video. So I was not quite buying them
• 10:15
  myself, but I knew people who were.
• 10:17
  And so I was experiencing stories in, in the novelized
• 10:22
  forms. And then quite often I, I would
• 10:24
  mention it to someone, they'd say, oh, I've got that on video.
• 10:25
  And I'd end up watching the thing that I just read quite
• 10:29
  soon afterwards. The great archaeology of Doctor
• 10:33
  Who was beginning here. Weapons as well.
• 10:35
  You know, discovering that the kind of thrilling octopus thing
• 10:38
  at the end of Doctor Who and the Autumn Invasion is a bit crap on
• 10:42
  television. And because, well, I mean, I
• 10:45
  don't have a clue what's on your top and bottom 10 list, but I'm
• 10:49
  assuming there will be a new adventure on there or two.
• 10:52
  Now, I remember you said, just to prove I do pay attention, you
• 10:55
  know when you talk to me that you didn't have all the new
• 10:58
  adventures. But you had a friend, didn't
• 11:00
  you, that did have them all, and you were sort of enticed by the
• 11:03
  covers. Well, yeah, I mean, this is
• 11:07
  almost at the end of the almost at the end of the run.
• 11:11
  You know what my first new adventure was?
• 11:13
  Go on. Shakedown.
• 11:16
  Wonderful. And that was a Christmas present
• 11:19
  from my brother and sister who clubbed together and they got me
• 11:22
  shakedown because I had a picture of a Sontaran on the
• 11:24
  front and they knew that I liked Sontarans because.
• 11:26
  The back of a Sontaran, but yeah.
• 11:28
  Back of a Sontaran. So that's the only reason they
• 11:31
  got me shakedown and I read the book before I saw the the the
• 11:35
  film. And that was a funny thing
• 11:39
  because I had really dismissed the new adventures when they
• 11:41
  started coming out, which was what 91 That was too soon for
• 11:46
  me. I was still, I still just wanted
• 11:48
  a new series of Doctor Who. And all I could judge by which
• 11:53
  was the covers and what it said in the back.
• 11:54
  What it said in the back was that they were too broad and
• 11:56
  deep for the small screen. Well, I didn't want that.
• 11:58
  I wanted something identical to the small screen.
• 12:01
  And the covers looked grown up and scary.
• 12:05
  I remember that cover for Revelation of the Doctor dancing
• 12:09
  with a skeleton in a spacesuit. You know, it just looked.
• 12:12
  And also, the Doctor wasn't even on half the covers, which was
• 12:14
  pretty weird, I thought. So I just thought, this is not,
• 12:17
  I'm not interested in this. It doesn't look like Doctor Who
• 12:20
  on television, which is what I wanted.
• 12:22
  I wanted season 27 and it. You said that with a tone then
• 12:25
  is that exactly how you used to talk?
• 12:27
  Then you said, yeah, I do not want that.
• 12:29
  That's. How I talk now.
• 12:32
  Oh sorry, you talk like a precocious 12 year old now do
• 12:36
  you want? Season 27 But the, the thing
• 12:43
  about Shakedown, of course, is so trapped in so many ways.
• 12:47
  It's beautifully structured. It's got the thing where you
• 12:49
  spend 22 chapters with one set of characters 2 and it's Terran
• 12:53
  sticks. It's Terran sticks absolutely in
• 12:56
  full control. I think it's a really good book
• 12:59
  and I thought, well, why what I've, what have I been scared
• 13:02
  about with, with these new adventures?
• 13:03
  But of course, by then I was what, 15 years old because
• 13:06
  Shakedown is quite so I was the right age for them.
• 13:10
  And then I went back and I discovered a few of them.
• 13:13
  And I then I had this friend at school in the sixth form who
• 13:16
  arrived and he had read all of them.
• 13:18
  And he's genuinely kind of spoke in hushed tones about the
• 13:21
  Cartman master plan and Lung Barrow and the other.
• 13:25
  And and at a time when all of this stuff, which now I find a
• 13:30
  bit tedious, just seemed like the most exciting thing.
• 13:33
  And the and the books were kind of gorgeous to look at the the
• 13:37
  covers, I mean the variable, but they are kind of hand drawn and
• 13:41
  a lot of them are really beautiful to look at.
• 13:43
  The white spines with the coloured title, they look so
• 13:47
  classy. I mean, I'll say.
• 13:48
  With the new Avengers, never never judge a new avenger by its
• 13:52
  cover. I mean God engine has a
• 13:53
  beautiful cover. You know, a big pyramid the the
• 13:56
  iswar a thigh in and then you read the book, you know.
• 13:59
  As I have discovered there, yeah, I mean, but we can we can
• 14:02
  extend that to never judge a Doctor Who but by its cover.
• 14:06
  Because as I've also said to you, that the the problem with
• 14:11
  when the BBC range of books was that they had the worst covers,
• 14:17
  particularly kind of when you when you compare them to what
• 14:19
  the new adventures were doing, which was so kind of elegant and
• 14:22
  classy, properly designed are. You talking about the swirly
• 14:24
  Whirlpool covers? They were all swirly.
• 14:26
  Well, do you remember the videos as well?
• 14:28
  For went through a period of just being like a swirly
• 14:31
  Photoshop mess with a kind of colourised picture of some
• 14:35
  doctor? Kind of, but with the smudge
• 14:37
  tool used. Can I say to you right
• 14:39
  yesterday, Yeah, I did a early past Doctor adventure book club,
• 14:43
  right. It's the first person I've
• 14:45
  found. It was a brand new to the book
• 14:47
  club who loved those swirly covers.
• 14:50
  I went, well, I'll have to find someone eventually.
• 14:53
  He just said I like the uniformity of it.
• 14:55
  He goes, I knew that was the Doctor Who book on the shelf.
• 14:58
  And yeah, he goes, I was like, yeah, no, but come on.
• 15:02
  When Black Sheep got going. So cheap and also after coming
• 15:05
  after having kind of grown into the New Adventures only dust, it
• 15:10
  was like they were being taken away now and replaced by
• 15:12
  something that looked kind of more franchise and somehow
• 15:17
  shitter. And because I absolutely judged
• 15:21
  books by their covers, then the the New Adventures held this
• 15:23
  mystique for me and I, I sort of rejected the BBC range purely
• 15:29
  because they look like madness. James, which so which it is
• 15:34
  important to say because they're, because my list has
• 15:37
  been made in the absence of, of your thorough knowledge of the,
• 15:42
  the Edas in particular. And I've very much been enjoying
• 15:47
  your podcasts on them. And it's, it's certainly made me
• 15:50
  hungry to consume some of them. But I I have made this list from
• 15:55
  a position of considerable ignorance and I think it's
• 15:58
  important to me. I mean, I'm not saying there are
• 16:00
  no Ed as on my list, but certainly I've not had a great
• 16:06
  many to choose from. In fact, if you don't mind me
• 16:09
  slightly, kind of subverting the format I.
• 16:13
  Won. So for a long time I only
• 16:15
  collected the new adventures as well because like the the rule
• 16:18
  was don't go online and buy them because that way madness lies,
• 16:22
  you know, next morning you wake up and you've spent £200 on lung
• 16:26
  barrel. I know the feeling.
• 16:28
  But if you see one in a charity shop, whichever one it is, you
• 16:32
  have to buy it. That's.
• 16:32
  That's right, it's definitely got 5 copies of Storm Harvest
• 16:36
  now. Yeah, yeah, we all have.
• 16:41
  They printed so many. Every Doctor Who fan has had
• 16:43
  five couples on their shelf. I'm still waiting to hear how
• 16:45
  you're going to subvert this thing though.
• 16:47
  Well, I'm going to tell you. So there was a point where I
• 16:49
  suddenly thought, oh, hang on, the the BBC books are now no
• 16:53
  longer available. They're the ones that are
• 16:55
  becoming slightly rare and slightly difficult.
• 16:57
  So I'm going to have to start buying them when I see them as
• 16:59
  well. So I do have a a small but
• 17:02
  growing collection of BBC books on my shelf and and and I
• 17:07
  thought I could tell you which Ed as I've got and you can tell
• 17:09
  me which one I should start with.
• 17:12
  Oh please. Oh come on, let's do it.
• 17:14
  So I mean, I've read it, I've read some of these, I've got the
• 17:18
  8 doctors, but I've read that. Don't need to read it again.
• 17:21
  Definitely illegal alien. I've read because that was one
• 17:27
  that I well, I liked to cover and it kind of did what I wanted
• 17:30
  it to. Sort of tried it sort of felt a
• 17:32
  bit season 27 ish The scarless Empress.
• 17:36
  I mean, it's terrific and and such a such a stand alone.
• 17:42
  Yeah, yeah. I mean, that one's, that one's
• 17:44
  been sitting at the top of the pile just from the way that
• 17:47
  people talk about it in hushed tones.
• 17:49
  I think you should read the first chapter of The Scarlet
• 17:51
  Empress and then decide whether you will continue with that
• 17:54
  book. I'm telling you now, you will.
• 17:57
  OK, I've got the Shadows of Avalon.
• 18:00
  Oh, that's very arc heavy. Right in the middle of an arc as
• 18:04
  well. SO11 arc sort of coming to an
• 18:06
  end and the other half of the arcs continuing and this is sort
• 18:09
  of the pivot. Which arc is it the?
• 18:12
  It's the compassion, you know the.
• 18:14
  OK, so the one that ends with interference.
• 18:17
  No, no. It started with interference.
• 18:19
  It ends with ancestor cell. Right.
• 18:23
  OK, so probably not a stand alone one.
• 18:25
  Not a good place to start so. I've got 2 copies of 10 little
• 18:29
  aliens, one with the old cover, one with the new cover.
• 18:32
  I mean, do you like a Christie? Red for I mean, I like them when
• 18:37
  they're on TV. It's it's a good Christie.
• 18:39
  It's it's a Independence Day. Oh, definitely not.
• 18:45
  Absolutely dismal, that one. The space Age.
• 18:50
  Oh, the worst Steve Lawrence book by a mile.
• 18:53
  No, dear, Oh dear. I'm going to have to get looking
• 18:56
  for some bad BBC books for your collection.
• 18:59
  Go on. Mad dogs and Englishmen.
• 19:02
  I mean, absolutely. And and then the Crooked World,
• 19:06
  which I've already read and and done a podcast on, so that
• 19:08
  that's, that's my collection thus far.
• 19:11
  Of that list, I would say start with the Scarlet Empress because
• 19:14
  I'm. Heading, but it's good to have
• 19:16
  it confirmed. It is the best depiction of Sam
• 19:19
  Jones in print. Yeah, and it's the one author
• 19:22
  who went Do you know what? Do you know who's not from the
• 19:25
  Sam Jones? Do you know who's from Izzy?
• 19:28
  So let's just make Sam Jones Izzy, and she's just easy in
• 19:31
  that book. It's just glorious.
• 19:32
  And it's Iris. I assume you know about Iris,
• 19:35
  right? Do you know about Iris?
• 19:36
  Oh, you're. In love is he so?
• 19:38
  Start there. Rand, that's very helpful.
• 19:41
  Thank you, grief. Let's get that collection a bit
• 19:43
  bigger. That's a hideously small
• 19:44
  collection. Get smaller.
• 19:45
  It looks like I've got to get rid of the space.
• 19:47
  Asian independence. Come to a charity shop.
• 19:51
  Okie, dokie. Well, OK, so I've got a sort of
• 19:55
  a good grasp of now listening it what you just said then I'm
• 19:58
  going to take you to task quickly, all right?
• 20:00
  Ignorance is no excuse, OK? The best thing about these lists
• 20:03
  is it's your list that's all that matters.
• 20:06
  OK? Well, I've set out to put a few
• 20:10
  surprising ones on there. There are a few obvious ones on
• 20:12
  there. I feel a bit like the president
• 20:14
  in The Deadly Assassin. There's some names on this list
• 20:17
  that'll what does he say? Surprise them.
• 20:21
  To quote Rachel Jensen. Oh, good.
• 20:23
  I love surprises. Well, would you like to start?
• 20:28
  I mean, I honestly, James, have been waiting to say this to you
• 20:31
  for years now. Would you like to start with a
• 20:33
  top or a bottom? Which would you prefer?
• 20:43
  Just really my my list? The.
• 20:45
  Thing. Is I've made a very thorough
• 20:47
  list, but I've actually mixed up the the top two.
• 20:49
  I was OK, surely that can't be in my bottom 10 list?
• 20:52
  That doesn't make any sense. No, it's just I've swapped the
• 20:54
  top 2 around. Never mind.
• 20:57
  The trouble is right is it depends where you want to end,
• 20:59
  if whether you want to end on a towner or whether you want to
• 21:02
  end on a high. Oh, let's end on a high.
• 21:05
  Great, let's start with a bottom then.
• 21:08
  Well, my, my and I have put this sort of in order like it's not
• 21:12
  too specific, but but by the time we get to the the top
• 21:17
  three, I think a fairly, fairly representative of where I'm
• 21:21
  sitting today. That's no excuse.
• 21:24
  You know that tomorrow your list is going to be completely
• 21:27
  different, especially the authors listening to this.
• 21:30
  You know they're going to go to bed weeping tonight.
• 21:33
  So the well, my my my my number 10 on the list.
• 21:38
  In my bottom 10 list is a story called Hunters of Earth by Nigel
• 21:44
  Robinson, which is the first in a series of stories published
• 21:48
  under the title Destiny of the Doctor, which was released only
• 21:53
  in audio form to celebrate the 50th anniversary.
• 21:56
  A series of loosely connected and when I say loosely
• 22:00
  connected, I challenge anyone to listen to them and spot any
• 22:04
  connection at all between them. Loosely connected stories
• 22:07
  featuring each of the then 12 doctors.
• 22:13
  I do remember these. They were.
• 22:15
  They sort of had bluish covers, didn't they?
• 22:17
  All of them with a little with a picture in the middle.
• 22:19
  They're all on Spotify. OK, well I no, you're not
• 22:23
  recommending this so I'm not going to go looking.
• 22:25
  For it you, you might, you might find you might want to listen to
• 22:29
  it to see how horrific it is. I mean, it's not that horrific.
• 22:32
  Well, I mean, I struggle with audio books.
• 22:35
  I, I have to confess, I find it difficult to follow them for
• 22:38
  whatever reason. My brain doesn't focus on them
• 22:40
  very easily. I can listen to hours of your
• 22:43
  podcast, Joe. I can listen to many, many hours
• 22:46
  of Big Finish audio drama and follow that absolutely fine.
• 22:50
  When it comes to stories read aloud, I do think it to some
• 22:55
  extent depends on the quality of the reading.
• 22:57
  More on that in a moment. But I, I, I do just find it
• 23:02
  requires more concentration. And quite often I have them on
• 23:05
  in the background and I realize I've missed an important bit and
• 23:07
  then I'm going backwards and then I miss the important bit
• 23:10
  again because I've got something else in my mind.
• 23:12
  I think I just need a a bloody good dramatization to help me
• 23:16
  through it. But I really think that the
• 23:20
  destiny of the doctor stories are a little bit incoherent in
• 23:23
  places. Then they're not very well
• 23:25
  written for the audio medium. And so the this is kicking the
• 23:29
  whole thing off. It's the first doctor and Susan,
• 23:31
  it's a pre pre unearthly child story.
• 23:37
  It's got a lot of the it's got the feel of remembrance of the
• 23:39
  Daleks. It's obviously it's set in 1963.
• 23:42
  It's got Cole Hill School, and it's got a very kind of
• 23:47
  foregrounded theme of racism. Only think of all the kind of
• 23:51
  things that we were saying were so elegant and subtly nuanced
• 23:55
  about Ben Aronovic's remembrance of the Dalek.
• 23:58
  So imagine it done just really kind of badly.
• 24:01
  And this is what you get. You get a story where there's
• 24:04
  it's it's sort of a German plot to hide racist messages in pop
• 24:11
  music or something like that. And it ends up with scenes of
• 24:16
  leather coated youths chanting alien people out.
• 24:21
  And there's a double meaning there because the Doctor's
• 24:22
  alien, so he feels a bit threatened.
• 24:26
  OK, so I'm getting the picture. In terms of subject matter, it's
• 24:30
  it's already a bit of a non starter and and a bit of a damp
• 24:34
  script to be honest. And in terms of the I mean, I
• 24:36
  can't even remember how the connected story goes, but I'm
• 24:39
  pretty sure that the only kind of connected bit is towards the
• 24:42
  end when someone says, oh, Doctor, but I see storm clouds
• 24:46
  coming. You know, in the way that a
• 24:49
  suddenly, unexpectedly prophetic character sometimes does in
• 24:52
  Doctor Who for no reason at all except you want to set up some
• 24:55
  kind of drama for the next episode.
• 24:57
  He will knock four times. Exactly.
• 25:01
  But the main reason that this is on my list, apart from the fact
• 25:04
  that I think it's, I think it's a as A to set out, you know, the
• 25:10
  stall of a 50th anniversary celebratory series.
• 25:13
  It's it's pretty weak. Is that the only way to
• 25:17
  experience it is in the dulcet tones of Caroline Ford herself.
• 25:23
  Not only not only are you treated to Caroline's ubiquitous
• 25:28
  reading style and her own impersonation of Susan, who she
• 25:33
  plays as a kind of 6 year old Milly Molly Mandy character, but
• 25:37
  you also get her doing other voices, including some of her
• 25:42
  selection of accents. So you get, and I quote Mavis, a
• 25:50
  cockney girl Susan's age and a line such as you know what I
• 25:54
  think they should leave well alone.
• 25:57
  Then in satellites into outer space.
• 26:00
  It's it's messing with nature in it.
• 26:03
  So that you get that you get a a posh and suspicious teacher.
• 26:09
  It's a curious thing than this Forman chatting to the school
• 26:13
  secretary. But and then worst of all, and
• 26:16
  you see it coming because she mentions the character first of
• 26:19
  all, the Jewish lady who's come over from Germany.
• 26:21
  You know, like, no, don't do it. Don't do the.
• 26:23
  Accent no please, please. Can you hear the accent?
• 26:28
  Oh, what? Don't do it.
• 26:29
  Don't do it. I know what it's like being
• 26:35
  alien. Even blamed the bumps on me.
• 26:39
  And you suddenly realise that Neil Patrick Harris was actually
• 26:41
  doing quite a restrained performance.
• 26:45
  Well, congratulations, because I really want to hear that now.
• 26:49
  Have. Yeah, I mean have have a glass
• 26:52
  of whiskey or something handy just to kind.
• 26:55
  Of oh, that's sounds dismal. I mean, just the idea of
• 26:59
  juggling those themes, you know, cack handedly, which I could
• 27:04
  absolutely could imagine Nigel Robinson would do.
• 27:07
  There's this long standing desire to kind of tell the story
• 27:10
  of what happened before on Earthy Child and it very rarely
• 27:14
  comes off. Time and relative.
• 27:16
  I think that's the only time I've read anything where it's
• 27:19
  come off. Oh, you've got a look in your
• 27:21
  eye, you know, as if. I'm just not that.
• 27:24
  I'm always. Oh, OK, I'm sorry, I thought you
• 27:26
  were about to say Ripper song style, you know, spoilers.
• 27:30
  Can I just say one very, very quick thing before we move to
• 27:33
  your top ten list because well done.
• 27:35
  That sounds truly appalling that audio and will absolutely be
• 27:40
  accompanied me to work tomorrow. That's why you're that's why I
• 27:45
  love your podcast because I don't really get on well with
• 27:49
  audiobooks either, especially not these like 10 hour long
• 27:52
  ones. They really like.
• 27:54
  I don't have the patience for a three hour movie.
• 27:56
  So I certainly don't have the patience for a 10 hour book.
• 27:59
  And you do these lovely like, you know, sort of half an hour
• 28:02
  to an hour, absolutely long enough for me to be, to do
• 28:05
  whatever I'm doing and listen to something at the same time, you
• 28:08
  know, perfect. Oh, it's lovely, if you say I
• 28:10
  hadn't even realized the extent which I was shooting.
• 28:13
  Myself in the foot by slacking off.
• 28:17
  Well, you know, that's why and it's called neurotic literature.
• 28:20
  Everybody go and find it. It's Absolutely Fabulous.
• 28:22
  I may mention it a few times throughout the call.
• 28:26
  Well, James, after. Breaking Caravan Ford's heart.
• 28:32
  I'm going to. Say, enticing me because you
• 28:34
  really did. Let's move on to your top ten
• 28:36
  list. Well at #10 I've got the
• 28:39
  Infinity Doctors by Lance Parking.
• 28:41
  A popular choice. Can I?
• 28:43
  Is this an EDA? Can I have it as a sort of EDA?
• 28:47
  I mean, it's deliberately ambiguous, isn't it?
• 28:50
  Absolutely. And I love that.
• 28:51
  But I do picture Paul Mcgahn in the role.
• 28:53
  I know other people picture other doctors, but it's sort of
• 28:56
  written with the breathless, youthful Paul McGann.
• 29:01
  And also, and this is maybe one of the more on this later
• 29:07
  spoilers, but but sometimes Paul McGann is not written terribly
• 29:10
  well. And it's like people have taken
• 29:13
  kind of 50 minutes of screen time and just kind of repeated
• 29:16
  things. So Oh, he says the companion's
• 29:19
  name several times in a row breathlessly.
• 29:21
  You know, that's the kind of thing that that whereas I
• 29:25
  actually think that the refreshing thing about the
• 29:26
  Infinity Doctors and take someone as good as Lance Parkin
• 29:32
  is that it reads like Paul McCann, but it does.
• 29:34
  It doesn't feel kind of like a caricature.
• 29:37
  It doesn't feel mannered at all. It just feels naturally doctor
• 29:39
  ish. But but clearly it's cleverly
• 29:41
  written enough that you can imagine that it's Tom Baker.
• 29:44
  If that if that is how you want to do it, And I love that.
• 29:46
  I mean, why did I buy this one? I I think I was a sucker for
• 29:50
  anything that was the something doctors and Infinity just seemed
• 29:55
  like the most can. Can you get any better than
• 29:59
  Infinity Doctors? I bought it because of the title
• 30:05
  and I'm not I'm not sure it quite delivers on the promise of
• 30:08
  the title in a funny way. I maybe was expecting something
• 30:11
  spy diversey, but nevertheless what I read I found hugely
• 30:16
  entertaining and very sophisticated.
• 30:19
  And I remember Doctor Who magazine reviewed it at the
• 30:21
  time, didn't they? And they, and they said it's
• 30:25
  like the pictures that were made for the Doctor Who movie, which
• 30:29
  was a kind of a young Indiana Jones style doctor running
• 30:32
  around Gallifrey with Raslong and, and, and other characters
• 30:35
  of law. And and the review said that the
• 30:38
  the wonderful thing about the book is Lance Parkin makes it
• 30:40
  all sound like a brilliant idea. Because before we read the
• 30:45
  Infinity Doctors, we all were going no, no.
• 30:48
  You know, don't. Do that it's it's a
• 30:52
  interestingly enough that fellow I told you about earlier, you
• 30:54
  know, that was talking about the swirly whirly covers that was
• 30:56
  his recommend the Infinity doctors and I've seen this.
• 31:00
  Cover though, does it. Nice boy.
• 31:01
  It's sort of got a ring with a swirl in it, though it does have
• 31:04
  a swirl in the ring. That's quite a good swirl, No,
• 31:07
  But the swirl that is. That's quite a.
• 31:09
  They can't go wrong with the white covers.
• 31:11
  Their white covers are great. Father time drift.
• 31:15
  There's something atmospheric about kind of nothing.
• 31:19
  They also, they know it's special because they've slightly
• 31:21
  raised the the it's a slightly relief version of the Doctor Who
• 31:25
  title. It's a touch of beauty cover.
• 31:30
  Hi. Yeah, slightly raised.
• 31:31
  Well, I and I, I just think that is one of the best science
• 31:35
  fiction Doctor Who books. And that's like a ridiculous
• 31:38
  thing to say, but it actually feels like a balls to the wall
• 31:41
  science fiction novel. Huge concepts, loads of
• 31:45
  mythology, you know, Santara and Arun armies being juggled.
• 31:49
  Like it feels epic. And yet he does bring it down to
• 31:53
  a really intimate character level that you can, you know,
• 31:56
  there's, there's some heart in the book as well.
• 31:58
  It's got the romance at the centre of it and that was
• 32:00
  another thing that at the time, I didn't want any of that in
• 32:03
  Doctor Who. And he makes that sound not only
• 32:05
  palatable, but really kind of essential.
• 32:08
  He's a bit of a magician, isn't he?
• 32:09
  Lance Markin. May not be the last time he
• 32:13
  features on this this. I've got all the sort of book
• 32:18
  titles going round in my head, but we'll get there.
• 32:21
  OK, well look, let's go back to the bottom 10 list to #9.
• 32:25
  Well, I slightly hate to do this but #9 is the 1994 yearbook.
• 32:31
  The 1993 yearbook has been on two people's lists.
• 32:34
  I'm loving all the yearbook. Love the 92 one.
• 32:38
  Is the the one with the the list of programs, isn't it?
• 32:42
  Oh is that 92? I thought it was. 92 It doesn't
• 32:45
  actually have the year in the cover, but it's slightly
• 32:46
  confusing. With the sea devil on the cover.
• 32:49
  Yeah. Is it that one?
• 32:50
  Yeah. Oh God, that's the best one.
• 32:52
  It actually came out in 91. OK, well what's wrong with 94?
• 32:58
  Well, what's wrong with 94 is it's not 92 or 93.
• 33:01
  I mean, I loved 92. That was a wonderful Christmas
• 33:07
  present. And I poured over that list like
• 33:09
  you did just everything and that Sea Devil's cartoon and the
• 33:14
  short stories and, and and the articles, it were just like, it
• 33:18
  was still the time when I didn't know a huge amount about the
• 33:20
  program and it was like a primate in Doctor Who from my
• 33:23
  money. 1993 was even more exciting.
• 33:25
  The one with the the Remembrance Dalek coming out of the shuttle
• 33:29
  craft. Oh yes.
• 33:31
  And it's got a Dalek comic strip in it with Ace and the 7th
• 33:35
  Doctor. And it's, oh, it's got monster
• 33:39
  files and it's got a cross section of a Dalek.
• 33:42
  Those yearbooks were so exciting.
• 33:45
  And so of course I asked for the next one with a feeling of
• 33:48
  excitement. And I've just just opened it
• 33:53
  onto the kind of just the, the flyleaf.
• 33:58
  And it's just a, it's just a picture of that and that kind
• 34:02
  of, so it's a picture of an empty TARDIS set and not, you
• 34:06
  know, not. As directed by Peter Moffett.
• 34:09
  A long shot. Exactly.
• 34:10
  Yeah, and the and the book kind of does that.
• 34:13
  It's just there's a couple of essays in there, but they're not
• 34:17
  like, what's the first one? What's the Oh, Marcus Hearn has
• 34:23
  written AI mean. I'm sure it's very worthy.
• 34:27
  There's an article called The Unknown Forest, which is
• 34:30
  exploring the various ways in which the program has been
• 34:33
  perceived by its more highbrow viewers.
• 34:37
  I'll say highbrow viewers of Doctor Who must read.
• 34:40
  That there's some facts that but I remember like, so Andrew Pixie
• 34:43
  has put some who facts in there, but they're a bit kind of
• 34:46
  random. It's a bit like, oh, do a list,
• 34:49
  do a list for Doctor Who. There are two comic strips
• 34:52
  rather than one, but I feel like there's a, rather than the
• 34:56
  breathing space afforded to kind of filling the yearbook with a
• 35:00
  single strip that that they're kind of idea strips rather than
• 35:04
  proper stories. A 30 years of fiction, a year by
• 35:08
  year by year guide on events in the doctor's life.
• 35:11
  It's just it's beginning to look a little bit like a kind of a
• 35:14
  dull textbook. When did they stop doing them?
• 35:17
  Was this the last one? There were two more and I'm glad
• 35:19
  to say that the quality increased, though the final one,
• 35:24
  the 1996 yearbook got me through my GCSE revision because I would
• 35:29
  allow myself a page of that yearbook every time I'd done
• 35:33
  half an hour of revision. It got me through it and it was
• 35:37
  almost like a, an acknowledgement.
• 35:40
  They slightly run out of things to put in the yearbooks because
• 35:43
  it was just a year, a series, a series by series guide.
• 35:47
  So each double spread was and a very nicely written guide to
• 35:52
  each year of the series, but but nothing more than that.
• 35:55
  It was like, what more can we do with this yearbook for a program
• 35:58
  that clearly isn't being made anymore?
• 36:02
  So I sort of feel like it started strong and it ended a
• 36:06
  little bit, kind of not really knowing what it was for.
• 36:09
  But I think 1994 is the nadir, and it's on my list really,
• 36:13
  because of what it's not, because of what it failed to be,
• 36:15
  rather than any particular fault of its own.
• 36:19
  I can shut my eyes, right? And I bet you can as well.
• 36:22
  I can shut my eyes and I can take myself back to the
• 36:25
  excitement of flicking through those pages the first time.
• 36:29
  And I can even tell you I was sitting on my tummy.
• 36:32
  Yeah, with my feet on the vents because we had vents that blew
• 36:36
  out hot air in my very old house just so excitingly reading that
• 36:41
  92 one with the and just pouring over the data, you know, like a
• 36:45
  lunatic. Like these tiny photos of of
• 36:48
  stories you've never seen as well and they we're.
• 36:50
  Never going to see them, but look, there's a little window
• 36:53
  into it right there. Well, 94, I'm sorry you're a
• 36:58
  bitter disappointment to anyone that was born that year.
• 37:02
  However, it was a wonderful year.
• 37:04
  Wonderful year, wonderful year. The 94 yearbook came out in 93,
• 37:08
  so I you know. I mean, if you were born in 94,
• 37:10
  that means you're 14 years younger than me, so bugger off.
• 37:13
  OK, well, let's go back to the top.
• 37:16
  Not wearing my focals, probably. No, although I can't really
• 37:20
  tell. You know your classes don't look
• 37:21
  too different now. That's the wonderful thing about
• 37:24
  bifocals. No, they're very, very focals.
• 37:26
  Sorry, Bifocals would would be very old fashioned.
• 37:28
  No, they're very, very focals. You look as stylish as ever, but
• 37:34
  your your classes are not on the end of your nose.
• 37:36
  It's true. It's true.
• 37:38
  So tell me about another book that you love then.
• 37:41
  So #9 on the top ten list is a book called The Harp Classics by
• 37:48
  Adrian Rigglesford. It looks like classic who It
• 37:52
  looks like there should be loads of these books, and I think
• 37:55
  there were only two. There was one about Philip
• 37:57
  Hinchclair, which I think is a bit of a dry read.
• 38:02
  This one, however, which is, I mean, it's a bit of a funny 1,
• 38:06
  isn't it? The the Harper Classics.
• 38:08
  I remember when I met Graham Harper, I I had just been
• 38:10
  reading this book and I and I mentioned it excitedly and he
• 38:13
  said yes. I thought it was a bit of an odd
• 38:15
  title, the Harper Classics. I only made 2.
• 38:19
  Well, they were both classics. But of course, he had quite a
• 38:21
  long association with the series and you know his experience
• 38:26
  through working with Douglas Hamfield, first of all, But but
• 38:30
  even more excitingly, this all the warriors gate stuff.
• 38:33
  And he and Rigglesford clearly had a massive long chat with
• 38:37
  Graham Harper because he his words he's quoted throughout
• 38:40
  this book and he's very candid about Warriors gate, more so
• 38:44
  than the Doctor Who the DVD comp documentary.
• 38:51
  It's it's a very frank account of Graham Harper's experience
• 38:57
  basically kind of rescuing that story.
• 39:01
  And at a time when I had little, you know, as time and there were
• 39:05
  very few of these documentaries available and I knew very little
• 39:08
  about the experience of directing Doctor Who.
• 39:10
  Graham Harper gives such a thorough and interesting insight
• 39:16
  into what it was like making Doctor Who at the time that he
• 39:18
  was making it. It's the kind of book that I
• 39:21
  don't, I don't know there's an equivalent these days.
• 39:24
  I don't know that we get books kind of dedicated in this kind
• 39:27
  of way, just sitting down and chatting to a director about how
• 39:30
  they went about directing a series of.
• 39:33
  Not even in Doctor Who Magazine. I think they're, they're very
• 39:36
  careful in Doctor Who magazine now not to publish anything
• 39:38
  that's too critical or too honest.
• 39:42
  Even the JNT memoirs, you know, were very, I mean, I was
• 39:46
  expecting salacious details and got, you know, we built.
• 39:49
  They're not salacious at all. They're very and, and, and it's
• 39:54
  not that Graham Harper is bitchy at all.
• 39:56
  He's just, he's so clearly knows what he's talking about.
• 39:58
  He's so clearly an absolute pro. And if you've got your name on
• 40:01
  the case of Andrazani in Revelation of the Dialects, I
• 40:05
  guess you know, your work speaks for you as well.
• 40:08
  So part of you is going, well, what are the secrets?
• 40:11
  How did you approach this? And he points things out.
• 40:13
  You know, again, I was young when I read this and.
• 40:16
  The little tricks that he uses, the little kind of snake rattle
• 40:18
  sound effect that is in both those stories, that he, that is
• 40:21
  a directorial flourish. The insistence that he was going
• 40:25
  to have that musical dirge from Roger Lim, that infected
• 40:29
  terminus and and all that. You know, I want atmospheric
• 40:33
  music. You, you suddenly you realize
• 40:35
  how much influence a director has on things like that.
• 40:37
  So yeah, it was maybe, maybe going back to it, I would find
• 40:42
  it a little bit kind of superficial in places.
• 40:45
  It might that it's not as in depth as some of the writing
• 40:47
  that we're used to now, but it's, I'm just flicking through
• 40:50
  it just now. It's got a lot of detail and
• 40:54
  it's got some incredible photos about beautiful, beautiful
• 40:57
  photographs, many of us. I just saw Kraut him in there
• 41:01
  with her legs up on the table. Yeah, there's loads of, I mean
• 41:04
  some photos here that I think must be from private collections
• 41:07
  because, because I've and you know, I mean, you've got.
• 41:10
  To pad it out right, that's if that's about two stories and
• 41:13
  it's, you know, it's about 3 times the length of an annual.
• 41:16
  Yeah, but that's what I mean. It's that it's, I mean, they're
• 41:20
  big full colour photos as we would want them to be, but but
• 41:22
  there is a lot of detail as well, which is what I want from
• 41:24
  Graham Harper. I want to know.
• 41:27
  I want to know what Graham Harper thinks about.
• 41:30
  Look at the picture of the TARDIS there and the snowy
• 41:32
  landscape with the mist. Oh, beautiful Graham Harper, you
• 41:35
  genius. I mean, I went to a phantom
• 41:38
  convention, right? And Philip Hinchcliffe and
• 41:40
  Graham Harper were both there, and it comes as no surprise to
• 41:43
  me at all. Will you say the Philip
• 41:44
  Hinchcliffe 1 was a bit dry as dust yet?
• 41:47
  The Graham Harper one was, you know, absolutely thrilling
• 41:49
  because they came on the stage 1 after the other, and I nearly
• 41:52
  fell asleep when Philip Hinchcliffe was talking.
• 41:54
  But Graham Harper was there and a Weldergy and detail and
• 41:57
  craziness and I just think he's got something, isn't he, at that
• 42:01
  magic spark? There's a foreword by.
• 42:11
  Is there a forward? Have I misremembered this?
• 42:15
  There's certainly a quote from Peter Davison where he describes
• 42:19
  this. You know, his experience of
• 42:21
  Doctor Who was very kind of pedestrian.
• 42:23
  And then he goes into Kosani and there's this crazy man running
• 42:27
  around the studio floor and waving his hands and directing
• 42:30
  things and getting involved and how it was just an absolute
• 42:33
  epiphany to see a director working in this way.
• 42:37
  I remember Davidson saying that we have started there.
• 42:41
  I may have done the fourth year, you know, like I may have kept
• 42:44
  going. Oh, magic.
• 42:46
  Well, we got that downstairs, you know, but I haven't read it,
• 42:48
  so I might pick that one up as well.
• 42:50
  Thank you. I'm just sort of making a little
• 42:51
  list of books to read here as we go, you know, and certainly
• 42:55
  audios to listen to. Well, talking of terrible
• 42:58
  audios, let's go back to your bottom 10 list to #8.
• 43:02
  Oh, I'm going to. I'm going to make you very happy
• 43:04
  now. You always make me happy.
• 43:10
  It's time Worm Revelation. Finally, finally someone sees
• 43:16
  it. OK, tell me why.
• 43:17
  So I set out to read the new adventures from the beginning
• 43:22
  with this mystique that had been built up through my not having
• 43:26
  really read many of them and the way my old school friend used to
• 43:29
  talk about them in hushed tones. And the first one you pick up is
• 43:33
  obviously Genesis. And it's and it's crap.
• 43:35
  I mean, it's, it's not the worst book John Peel has written, but
• 43:39
  it's it's not very good. And it has.
• 43:41
  Appeared on our top ten list. You know James.
• 43:44
  Yeah, each to their own. I like the idea of it more than
• 43:48
  the execution. It's a it's structurally, it's a
• 43:50
  mess and and it's, and it's weird and slightly pervy and,
• 43:56
  and the characterization of the doctrine Ace is all over the
• 43:58
  place and and it's and it is the kind of the fan wank thing.
• 44:04
  I mean, with the new adventures straight, it's just how not to
• 44:09
  launch a series of books straight away.
• 44:11
  You've got cameo appearances from past doctors like the the
• 44:16
  writers can't stop themselves. And I mean, I think Exodus is
• 44:20
  also not a very good Terrence Dicks book.
• 44:22
  It's competent because it's Terrence Dicks, but it's still
• 44:25
  all over the place. It's Terrence Dick's kind of
• 44:27
  been told you can write anything and writing anything.
• 44:30
  And maybe, you know, no editorial oversight and it's not
• 44:35
  a very disciplined text. And then you get Nigel
• 44:39
  Robinson's book The Apocalypse, and again you've got past docs,
• 44:42
  you've got these cameos and the fun.
• 44:44
  The weird thing is, if I had read these when I was meant to
• 44:50
  be reading them in the 90s, I think this stuff would have
• 44:53
  really appealed to me. I think the cameo appearances
• 44:54
  from previous Doctors would have had me punching the air.
• 44:56
  But I'm reading them as an adult, wanting kind of proper
• 44:59
  fiction, excited about reading this brave new world of Doctor
• 45:03
  Who. Too broad and deep for the small
• 45:05
  screen, and instead I'm getting kind of Patrick Trout and his
• 45:08
  popping up and playing his record.
• 45:09
  I'm like, what? What the hell is this?
• 45:11
  But then I got to Revelation as well, at last, because
• 45:14
  Revelation has a a reputation. Paul Cornell, of course, went on
• 45:18
  to write many of the the the most top rated new adventures
• 45:21
  and beyond. So here's the debut novel of the
• 45:26
  celebrated Paul Cornell. What could possibly go wrong?
• 45:28
  And you start out and it's very well written and you think of
• 45:33
  last. We're in a safe pair of hands.
• 45:34
  And then and then the doctor ends up in the land of fan wank.
• 45:41
  I mean, literally like he's suddenly walking around this
• 45:45
  dream landscape. I mean, there is a twist,
• 45:47
  spoiler alert, where about 2/3 of the way through the book it's
• 45:50
  revealed that he's inside his own head.
• 45:52
  Like we didn't see that coming because he's wandering around.
• 45:55
  Like he's wandering around a a, a, a thing littered with kind of
• 45:59
  fan references. Like every corner he turns,
• 46:02
  there's a a crystal of Kronos or a rod of Rasalon or Panther of
• 46:10
  Omega. I don't just like the whole the
• 46:11
  whole thing is stuffed full of Doctor Who imagery.
• 46:15
  And would you believe another past Doctor Pop?
• 46:17
  I think it's Pertwee in this one is who cares?
• 46:20
  Another past Doctor Gums and Silver and nothing is happening
• 46:23
  of any kind of relevant because it's this self indulgent parade
• 46:27
  of fan knowledge, like a fan who can write being given one
• 46:31
  opportunity to write a novel. It's like, well, how many Doctor
• 46:34
  Who references can I get into this one?
• 46:37
  And it's so disappointing because it's incoherent, it's
• 46:41
  boring, it's so boring. I mean, it starts off so well.
• 46:46
  And they're like, this is rubbish.
• 46:49
  It's like a kind of stick. It's it's like a a parlour game.
• 46:53
  If you put kind of 30 Doctor Who objects into a tin and made
• 46:57
  someone tell a story and every 5 seconds take out another Doctor
• 47:00
  Who object and say, oh, I've got a Dalek.
• 47:02
  Well, and then the Dalek meant and it's met Cassandra.
• 47:07
  Yeah. So that's my problem with
• 47:09
  Revelation. James, you've never seen more
• 47:11
  incandescent to me. You know, honestly, this is what
• 47:15
  you're like at age. Jesus, where are we heading?
• 47:18
  Yeah. I mean, I can't disagree with a
• 47:20
  word of that. The thing I really hated in that
• 47:21
  book, and I read it quite young, was the skull bashing.
• 47:25
  And I just, it was just viscerally violent in places.
• 47:29
  Yeah, it's pretty nasty, isn't it?
• 47:30
  And it's like, and there's no comfort.
• 47:32
  And the thing that that you want at least, at least in a Doctor
• 47:37
  Who book, you feel like the Doctor should be a figure of
• 47:40
  comfort, a figure who would hold your hand through this awful.
• 47:44
  So like, I really feel like Doctor Who can go to the
• 47:46
  bleakest places. I love the massacre.
• 47:48
  I, I, I think Doctor Who, who is sometimes at its most exciting
• 47:53
  when it's being dark. But you've always got the figure
• 47:55
  of the Doctor there. Not in the new adventures.
• 47:58
  They make him. They make him, I mean, a twat.
• 48:00
  Let's be honest. They make him such an unlikable,
• 48:03
  difficult, horrible character. They take, they take what was
• 48:09
  flirted with on screen, but they just take all the wrong things
• 48:14
  because at the same time he's cute as hell and he's touching
• 48:18
  her nose and he's holding her hand and he's cuddling up to her
• 48:21
  and he is a comforting presence and all of that's just
• 48:24
  jettisoned completely. I don't know why they stick with
• 48:27
  him. Why?
• 48:29
  Why? And they clearly hate him.
• 48:31
  That's the other thing. He's got companions who just
• 48:33
  spend their whole time going. I really, really, really,
• 48:36
  really, really hate doing this. I hate travelling through time
• 48:39
  and space with you. Well, how can I get rid of the
• 48:40
  dot leave the? Trouble is, so go.
• 48:43
  Away. The trouble is, is obviously
• 48:46
  they're aiming this at those sort of angsty mid teenagers,
• 48:50
  aren't they? And they hate themselves and
• 48:52
  their lives and their parents and everything as well.
• 48:54
  I mean, I'm not speaking for everybody, but I'm just
• 48:56
  generalizing. What?
• 48:57
  What are they saying? Look grown woman life is shit.
• 49:02
  Grown woman like aces by like 3 books in can't stop being the 16
• 49:07
  year old teenager that she was. Kind of like increasing years
• 49:10
  ago. She can't stop talking like some
• 49:12
  80s throwback and and and Rayleigh against the world.
• 49:17
  That may be my favoritest choice of anyone's book club to date.
• 49:22
  Their top ten. Oh, sorry.
• 49:23
  Bottom 10, even. Lovely.
• 49:25
  Wonderful. That's got a great cover.
• 49:27
  Yeah, yeah, Yeah. Well, I'm covering that with a
• 49:29
  book club, so I can't wait. Because I think that, you know,
• 49:31
  they're all mad New Adventures fans, so.
• 49:33
  Well, I'll take them all on. Don't you worry.
• 49:35
  Look at me. I can.
• 49:36
  I can take them. Well, look, OK, let's stop being
• 49:39
  mean about Paul Cornell, and let's be nice about an author.
• 49:44
  Well, that's a kind of corollary to time worm revelation, but
• 49:48
  I'll give you battlefield, which is kind of the perfect new
• 49:53
  adventure that wasn't a new adventure gets the doctor right.
• 49:58
  It's got it's steeped in mythology without being up its
• 50:02
  own ass. It's It takes what I think is a
• 50:06
  an underrated and clearly not perfectly produced television
• 50:10
  script and it finds the gold in it and it paces it better and it
• 50:17
  realizes it as lovingly as only a writer who is as skilled as
• 50:22
  Mark Platt and clearly in love with Ben Ronanich's writing can
• 50:26
  do. It's a it's a top read.
• 50:28
  And actually I loved Remembrance.
• 50:30
  I loved revisiting that. But I think Battlefield, for my
• 50:32
  money is an even better book. And is this or not?
• 50:36
  Is this a list? Is this?
• 50:38
  Oh, this is coming to a book club near you.
• 50:40
  You, me and Michael Bills will be reading Battlefield.
• 50:44
  So I don't want to say too much now because I don't want to
• 50:46
  spoil it for myself because. I've never read it, James.
• 50:49
  I've never read that book. This is past off time.
• 50:53
  Battlefield has turned up on the top ten list.
• 50:56
  It's a great book. That's I think, and I, I did
• 51:01
  when I read the Sylvester McCoy novelizations again and again
• 51:06
  and again. And this is the one that I
• 51:08
  eventually concluded was the best cursor Fenrick is is, is
• 51:11
  high up on my list as well. But I think it's just there's
• 51:14
  something about the poetry of the writing and the the elegant
• 51:21
  and subtle characterization. And it does little tricks.
• 51:25
  Like there's a moment where I'm going to read you a bit where
• 51:29
  the Brigadier, you know, where the destroyer throws the
• 51:31
  Brigadier out of the out of the out of the Priory.
• 51:34
  And he and he, he's lying in the grass and there's a bit where he
• 51:38
  just kind of glimpses Doris. It says the Brigadier laying the
• 51:41
  long grass outside the Priory wall where he'd been thrown.
• 51:44
  His head was awash with disparate thoughts and memories.
• 51:47
  Or where they just his fancy. Doris was passing down the soil
• 51:51
  around the apple tree on Radio 4.
• 51:53
  The news reader was saying. The general secretary of the
• 51:55
  United Nations Intelligence Task Force has again denied reports
• 51:59
  of casualties amongst unit personnel operating in the
• 52:01
  southwest of England. Doris was reaching for the
• 52:04
  portable phone. I want to speak to Brigadier
• 52:06
  Alistair Lester Stewart. Her hair caught the sunlight
• 52:09
  through the French windows and glistened.
• 52:11
  Well, where is he? That's just a little still
• 52:15
  moment of and it's and it's not overdone.
• 52:17
  It's not overplayed. That could be really mawkish and
• 52:21
  really badly written, but it's not and it's just this little
• 52:23
  glimpse he has or, or is it reality?
• 52:25
  Are we, are we flitting? Are we seeing something real?
• 52:27
  Is it just in his head? Then he's yanked back into
• 52:29
  reality by Mordred. It's full of writing like that
• 52:33
  and it's got this prologue that's all set in Arthurian
• 52:35
  times. It it does the mythology thing
• 52:37
  really well. Platt does remember this.
• 52:39
  I mean, I've said this every single time someone has brought
• 52:42
  this up in their top ten list. He does remember this at the end
• 52:45
  of Lungbarrow because the very last thing that he says at the
• 52:48
  end of Lungbarrow is oh God, I've not been Merlin yet.
• 52:52
  And he goes off to be in the TV movie, which is a wonderful
• 52:56
  Platt's such AI think he's such a special writer, right?
• 52:59
  He he he writes with real poetry.
• 53:02
  He he does fantastic imagery, but sometimes and I sometimes
• 53:08
  when he's let off the leash and he's not rained in a bit, you
• 53:11
  get time. Worm.
• 53:13
  What is it called? Cat's Cradle, Times, Crucible.
• 53:16
  You know which is fucking impenetrable?
• 53:18
  Book I. I mean, I think when I came to
• 53:26
  that, obviously I'd read the four time Worm books and
• 53:31
  concluded that not there's not a decent one amongst those four
• 53:34
  really. And and had and had been
• 53:37
  fishingly disappointed by Revelation.
• 53:39
  Cat's cradle is impenetrable. It's it's it's far too dense,
• 53:45
  but it does make sense. And it and it kind of the
• 53:49
  difference between Cat's Cradle and Revelation.
• 53:52
  I mean, they're both doing a similar thing in a way.
• 53:54
  They're both are kind of trudged through a surreal Gallifrey and
• 53:56
  landscape. But there's momentum in Cat's
• 54:01
  cradle. And even though you need to be a
• 54:05
  kind of professor in Doctor Who folklore to understand what the
• 54:09
  Hell's going on, I found that I was actually kind of gripped by
• 54:13
  it because although it was surreal and impenetrable, it was
• 54:17
  very beautifully written and very, and it, and it made a kind
• 54:20
  of sense. The, the internal logic all
• 54:22
  worked as a revelation. It's just a kind of anything can
• 54:25
  happen that, you know, any past doctor can pop up because there,
• 54:28
  there are no rules. Katz Cradle is clearly playing
• 54:30
  on rules and it's clearly playing on rules that are
• 54:32
  eventually kind of realized in lung bar.
• 54:34
  And I sort of feel like Katz Cradle, maybe people ought to
• 54:37
  read Lung Borough and then go back to Cat's Cradle.
• 54:39
  You know, Cat's Cradle is the is the Finnegan's wake to the
• 54:43
  Ulysses of Lung Borough. They're both quite dense books.
• 54:47
  But I struggle a bit with lung borough as well so.
• 54:50
  I struggle a bit with Finnegan's Wake, but you know, I, I, I, I
• 54:53
  sort of admire the ambition of it and I think it's a, it's a
• 54:56
  much better crafted book than it's maybe given credit for.
• 54:59
  It's just really hard work which.
• 55:00
  But I just he's always got something to say and he always
• 55:04
  just, he puts a lot of heart into his books.
• 55:06
  But I, I just think he's, he's a great ideas man, you know, and
• 55:10
  there's a couple of ideas per page.
• 55:13
  I mean I can't wait to read Battlefield cause yeah by all
• 55:17
  accounts it is the most elevated target book in terms of what was
• 55:22
  on the screen and what hits the page.
• 55:25
  I mean, that's certainly true. Unlike Remembrance, which has a
• 55:27
  pretty decent realization on television, Battlefield is
• 55:31
  wanting and the book, which I read before I saw it on
• 55:34
  television, gives you the, you know, the the the version
• 55:40
  unconstrained by budget. I mean, the bar is high with
• 55:43
  remembrance, so we'll see. Well, OK.
• 55:47
  I mean, there's there's there's more enticement.
• 55:49
  But back to the bottom 10 then. Where are we now?
• 55:52
  Seven. Yeah, seven.
• 55:54
  I was loose count somewhere in the middle.
• 55:57
  Damaged goods. Hang on, is this the bottom?
• 56:02
  Yes. Wow, OK, I'm genuinely flawed.
• 56:10
  Well. I mean no, no, please tell me
• 56:13
  why I. Mean, I so OK, look, damaged
• 56:16
  goods is a very well written book.
• 56:18
  Yeah, debate that. I'm a bit kind of, I'm a bit fed
• 56:22
  up of people hating on transit. If I'm on this, which as we
• 56:26
  know, having discussed it, like is a very flawed book.
• 56:29
  I'm not going to, you know, I'm not going to suggest that
• 56:31
  transit is a perfect piece of writing by any stretch or, or
• 56:34
  anything, but a kind of an inexperienced writer being very
• 56:37
  ambitious and kind of aiming high and and and failing a bit,
• 56:42
  but still coming up with something which I think has got,
• 56:45
  I think it's got heart. And this was one of the things
• 56:47
  that when we discussed transit, I was like, I know it's grim and
• 56:51
  it's got gross things in it that we really don't want to read in
• 56:54
  Doctor Who. But there is a warmth there.
• 56:57
  There's a humanity. And it's like he, at the end of
• 56:59
  the day, Ironovich really kind of cares about his characters.
• 57:03
  He does remember to make the doctor likable, doesn't.
• 57:06
  He absolutely. The Doctor's very well written
• 57:08
  in this. One, unlike damaged goods.
• 57:10
  Damaged goods is like the Doctor Who equivalent of a will self
• 57:15
  book. It's so bleak and in this world
• 57:20
  of drugs, prostitution, dogging, self harm, you know, all subject
• 57:26
  matter which I think actually shouldn't really be in Doctor
• 57:29
  Who. I agree.
• 57:30
  Absolute not you know, maybe you can do drugs but but do it like
• 57:35
  nightmare. Call it Raxowin, yeah.
• 57:37
  Right. This is this is so gritty and
• 57:40
  this is Russell D Davis writing in very much in his Cucumber
• 57:45
  vein. If you saw Cucumber on
• 57:46
  television, I watched every episode was sort of.
• 57:49
  Miserable, wasn't it? Fooled by it and yet utterly
• 57:52
  hated every second of it because it was.
• 57:54
  And yet there's some brilliant television there.
• 57:57
  But it's bleak. And the thing I kept asking
• 57:59
  myself is why does he hate his character so much?
• 58:02
  I'm not sure that he knows he does.
• 58:04
  I think he thinks he loves his characters and he'd certainly he
• 58:07
  bestows them with whole lives, but then he gives them such
• 58:12
  bleak outlooks and such kind of nihilistic points of view.
• 58:16
  And damaged goods is that, but writ large, the damaged goods is
• 58:19
  that, but a young Rustley Davis with something to prove.
• 58:22
  And he's going to basically prove that you can do the most
• 58:25
  adult Doctor Who ever. And I just feel dirty after I've
• 58:30
  read it basically. Not in a good way, not.
• 58:33
  In a good way? No, I mean, I don't.
• 58:36
  I really want to feel dirty in any kind of way, including a
• 58:38
  Doctor Who. Don't read The Stranger by
• 58:40
  Porsche d'acostale, all right. I know I'm fascinated by that,
• 58:43
  but no, but it's it's doing something that I don't think
• 58:46
  Doctor Who should do. I don't think it does.
• 58:50
  I don't think it works as a Doctor Who story.
• 58:52
  I think it's so it's so depressing to see the 7th doctor
• 58:57
  in that scenario, particularly when you know it's a council
• 59:00
  estate. We know that Doctor Who can be
• 59:02
  session a council estate and and work and and the Doctor Who
• 59:08
  doesn't have to suggest that everyone who lives in a council
• 59:11
  estate is miserable all the time because what do you?
• 59:14
  Remember the ending? Do you remember that?
• 59:16
  Yeah. That, that absolutely terrifying
• 59:17
  character of Eva Jericho. Yeah.
• 59:20
  The, the the mother that's lost her child.
• 59:21
  She's been given a damaged child and is absolutely twisted by the
• 59:27
  hand that life's given us. And then at the climax of the
• 59:30
  book, the Doctor convinces her to to kill herself in a
• 59:33
  spectacular way. It's just horrible.
• 59:37
  Horrible. It's like the end of talks with
• 59:40
  Children of Earth. There are things so I, I, I
• 59:44
  mean, I love most art in any form and if I don't understand
• 59:51
  it, I want to know more about it.
• 59:53
  I love cinema, I love television, I love reading, I
• 59:56
  love pictures, I love music and it is very rare that I see
• 1:00:01
  something. I think that what whatever went
• 1:00:04
  into making that. Somehow it there's something
• 1:00:08
  ugly about it, there's something diseased about it.
• 1:00:11
  It's like it wants to make the world a less nice place.
• 1:00:14
  This is not written with any desire to kind of make you
• 1:00:17
  empathize with people on council estates or with drug problems or
• 1:00:21
  who self harm. It's not written with any spark
• 1:00:23
  of empathy or human warmth. It's written to shock and to
• 1:00:27
  make you feel gross. And congratulations, it does.
• 1:00:31
  And I read it again. I I agree wholeheartedly with
• 1:00:36
  you and I think we are the outliers here because it's a
• 1:00:38
  very popular book. But I, I actually, when I first
• 1:00:40
  read this for my Doctor Who reviews, I gave it as a as a
• 1:00:44
  book, Yeah, beautifully written. 10 out of 10 as a Doctor Who
• 1:00:48
  book. It's just ugly and fetid and
• 1:00:51
  hollow. 0 out of 10. You know, so I sort of levelled
• 1:00:55
  it out of five. But yeah, I mean the damaged
• 1:00:59
  good audio that came out. Interestingly, Johnny Morris, he
• 1:01:03
  he. Fixes a lot.
• 1:01:05
  Down all of that. You know, I've heard like my
• 1:01:08
  lovely friend Dylan. Rick really didn't like the
• 1:01:09
  audio because he loved the book and he just said it was a
• 1:01:11
  watered down version. I said no, it was a Doctor Who
• 1:01:14
  version of that story. I absolutely agree.
• 1:01:17
  And a brilliant audio at that. Gosh, Oh my, that's the second
• 1:01:20
  time you've floored me yet. Well, let's see where we end up
• 1:01:22
  next. Let's go to happier, happier
• 1:01:25
  ground #7 on the top ten list is Cold Fusion.
• 1:01:30
  Oh, another last park in Hurrah. This when I was at primary
• 1:01:38
  school and I just got into Doctor Who and I've told you the
• 1:01:42
  story my my best friend had shown me episodes 2-3 and four
• 1:01:46
  of Remember to the Daleks. Doctor Who fan for life.
• 1:01:48
  And of course, Sylvester McCoy was my favorite Doctor.
• 1:01:50
  That friend has got a lot to answer for.
• 1:01:52
  Frank Howe. Yeah, his favorite doctor was
• 1:01:54
  Peter Davison because that's the age, you know, he'd been
• 1:01:57
  watching it. He probably had seen Tom Baker's
• 1:01:59
  last season. So when we played Doctor Who in
• 1:02:02
  the playground, he was, he was the 7th Doctor basically the
• 1:02:07
  kind of I think the most exciting coming together of two
• 1:02:11
  worlds. When I was at Primus was when
• 1:02:15
  Band-Aid 2 was recorded and Jason Donovan recorded at the
• 1:02:20
  same time as Brass and even had a duet with Matt Goss.
• 1:02:23
  And what Lance Parkin has done is is an equivalently exciting
• 1:02:27
  pairing up of the 7th Doctor and the 5th Doctor.
• 1:02:33
  No, a comparison you hear every day.
• 1:02:37
  Yeah, I'm not sure which one. Well, Jason Donovan in that
• 1:02:40
  analogy, isn't he? Sylvester McCoy certainly isn't.
• 1:02:44
  No, Sylvester McCoy is boss. Move us on quick.
• 1:02:49
  Yeah, I'm not going to go any further with with that, but it's
• 1:02:51
  look, I bought it purely because it had the 5th Doctor and 7th
• 1:02:58
  Doctor on the cover, not realizing that one day I'd be
• 1:03:01
  holding a book that's probably worth about £60 now.
• 1:03:05
  But sixty, you reckon? 600 provide.
• 1:03:08
  Yeah, that's a small pension you got in your hands there.
• 1:03:11
  Conditions it's it's pretty well read.
• 1:03:13
  I mean, it's, it's not in bad condition because I look after
• 1:03:15
  my books, but I have read this many times and it's just really
• 1:03:20
  fun and funny. And it's got, it captures the
• 1:03:23
  kind of in a funny way that that they are not 2 doctors you would
• 1:03:27
  think to put together because stylistically their eras are so,
• 1:03:31
  so different. And you've got the kind of
• 1:03:34
  mercurial Sylvester McCoy vibe with, you know, where it's
• 1:03:39
  slapsticky and it's, and it's anarchic.
• 1:03:43
  And then you've got the very kind of almost cozy, safe Peter
• 1:03:49
  Davidson world of, you know, 3 companions and it moves a
• 1:03:54
  certain speed. And of course McCoy has got 2
• 1:03:58
  companions in this but. I've never read it.
• 1:04:01
  Who takes the domino? Who gets the bulk of the book?
• 1:04:04
  So it starts off and McCoy has the prologue and then it is
• 1:04:07
  written as a as as the cover suggests because you remember
• 1:04:11
  that the the missing adventures always had the feature dot.
• 1:04:14
  Hi, it's beautiful picture of Peter Davison Adric.
• 1:04:17
  Alastair Pearson. But Peter Davison is holding the
• 1:04:20
  question mark umbrella and then the picture.
• 1:04:23
  The little inset picture has got Sylvester McCoy in it.
• 1:04:27
  I mean, Adric's in an adjudicator's costume.
• 1:04:29
  You know, that's quite. Interesting.
• 1:04:30
  Also kind of saying something because there's a that that's a
• 1:04:33
  thing. He acts he he ends up paired up
• 1:04:35
  with Roz, a really interesting combination.
• 1:04:39
  Adric and Roz, I must read this now.
• 1:04:42
  He. Can do anything, yeah.
• 1:04:45
  And the thing that he does so well, he gets the he he always
• 1:04:50
  writes fun prose and there are things like.
• 1:04:52
  I was looking flicking through it.
• 1:04:54
  He's we've done stuff with the text.
• 1:04:56
  There's a bit where the in, in the, in the, the 1st chapter
• 1:04:59
  where the 7th Doctor has this encounter with a robot.
• 1:05:02
  And there's a bit where the doctor's yanked off his feet by
• 1:05:05
  this robot. And he's done it by writing the
• 1:05:06
  words down a slope. So you see the kind of Doctor
• 1:05:12
  and, and yeah, he kind of shows Peter Davison's world as as it
• 1:05:17
  was on television, as a little bit more sedate, a little bit
• 1:05:20
  more considered, and then thrown into absolute chaos by the
• 1:05:25
  arrival of the 7th Doctor. And unlike the kind of slightly
• 1:05:28
  tired thing where the Doctors don't get on, it's like the
• 1:05:31
  Doctors just don't get each other.
• 1:05:33
  And that's wonderful because they're working.
• 1:05:35
  They're sort of working on the same thing, but in their own
• 1:05:37
  different ways. So they end up slightly fucking
• 1:05:40
  up each other's plans by just being completely different
• 1:05:44
  characters, which is so much fun.
• 1:05:46
  And yeah, he writes, he takes the character seriously.
• 1:05:48
  So he writes Adric as a serious teenage character.
• 1:05:51
  There's nothing snarky about it. There's no kind of little
• 1:05:54
  Snickers behind his sleeve at Howell.
• 1:05:55
  Adric, he was a bit of a nerd, really.
• 1:05:58
  And and he has McCoy at one point watching Adric, and Roz
• 1:06:04
  notices that he's watching him sadly and wonders what's going
• 1:06:08
  on there. And it's this little kind of
• 1:06:10
  moving snapshot of the 7th Doctor gets to meet Adric again,
• 1:06:16
  but knows exactly what's coming next.
• 1:06:18
  So what have I never read this book?
• 1:06:21
  It's a, it's a, it's a, it's, it does everything you would you
• 1:06:24
  would want from those two doctors together and a Lance
• 1:06:28
  Parkin book. And it's a, it's a rattling good
• 1:06:30
  adventure. It's a lot of fun.
• 1:06:32
  The stakes are high and yeah, great fun.
• 1:06:34
  I'm pleased to say that there's a double bill coming up soon
• 1:06:38
  where I've got to read that and listen to the audio.
• 1:06:41
  I was sort of covering both, so that that'll be yeah.
• 1:06:45
  Oh, that sounds. Great.
• 1:06:46
  The audio is pretty good, but it's not as good as the as the
• 1:06:48
  book. Well, OK, well, you've been far
• 1:06:51
  too positive now for the last 2 1/2 minutes, so let's go back to
• 1:06:56
  your bottom 10 list. So #6 is a book called Doctor
• 1:07:03
  Who. I love how you've got the pile
• 1:07:05
  there. You've got the pile of books
• 1:07:08
  there. Oh, sorry, I've talked all over
• 1:07:11
  you then. Could you please repeat that?
• 1:07:12
  Called Doctor Who, the television companion A.
• 1:07:15
  Bit of a breeze block of a book, isn't it?
• 1:07:18
  Block. Of a book written by David J
• 1:07:19
  Howe and Stephen James Walker it came out on the back of the TV
• 1:07:23
  movie this was a Christmas present and first glance I
• 1:07:28
  thought great it's like an in depth look at all of the Doctor
• 1:07:32
  Who stories and it's got the it's got what you anticipate
• 1:07:39
  it's got the title it's got the credits episodes, transmission
• 1:07:44
  dates it's got a plot so far so good it's got the episode
• 1:07:50
  endings so you've. Got details you could get
• 1:07:53
  anywhere that? Not at the time, though.
• 1:07:56
  At the time we had the discontinuity guide.
• 1:07:58
  This is in in more depth than the discontinuity guide.
• 1:08:02
  And then it's it's got a section called Popular Myths that might
• 1:08:08
  make interesting reading now, because I'm not sure they are
• 1:08:10
  all popular myths anymore. It's got things to watch out
• 1:08:12
  for. Again, they're not terribly
• 1:08:13
  accurate. I've just turned to The
• 1:08:15
  Underwater Menace and it says that Zaraf has a pest octopus
• 1:08:18
  exclamation. Mark Oh, is that the insight?
• 1:08:21
  Yeah. Oh wow.
• 1:08:23
  Things you probably never knew In Alma's original draft
• 1:08:29
  scripts, Zaraf's motivation was explained as being a sort of
• 1:08:32
  warped revenge for the deaths of his wife and children in a car
• 1:08:35
  crash. Is that right?
• 1:08:37
  That's. What it says is it the thing
• 1:08:42
  where this book had me absolutely kind of screaming in
• 1:08:46
  my bedroom was it's got an analysis and it takes itself so
• 1:08:52
  darn seriously. You see a lot of quotes.
• 1:08:55
  I remember it just being a lot of quotes.
• 1:08:57
  Quote a lot of feedback and it sort of goes to the audience
• 1:09:01
  reception of the time, but that that tells you about how this is
• 1:09:05
  written as well because it's written with a kind of almost
• 1:09:08
  sort of I was writing a review at the time I was doing a level
• 1:09:11
  drama and I was reading going this this like if I handed these
• 1:09:14
  in they come back covered in red ink because I.
• 1:09:18
  Dry as dust. Why exactly over relied on
• 1:09:21
  quotes and and it's but the it's the style the most nauseating
• 1:09:25
  thing apart from the fact that it takes itself so seriously and
• 1:09:28
  you will be unsurprised to learn that it's it's final sentence on
• 1:09:31
  the underwater menaces. All in all, The Underwater
• 1:09:34
  Menace is reminiscent of Nothing So Much the poorly scripted,
• 1:09:37
  uninspired and low budget B movie So.
• 1:09:42
  Well, thank you. It's.
• 1:09:43
  Not got a? It's.
• 1:09:43
  Called The Underwater Menace. We know it's AB movie all right.
• 1:09:46
  There's no kind of You might enjoy this one because it's
• 1:09:50
  completely mad, but. Hilarious.
• 1:09:53
  But it's the the the pro style that that's kind of everything
• 1:09:57
  is qualified. And and it's like they've been
• 1:10:01
  told that they have to find 22 adjectives to describe.
• 1:10:05
  I'll just read you some. So you see, please.
• 1:10:07
  The Underwater Menace has a number of points in its favor.
• 1:10:10
  Jeffrey Orm gives his characters some reasonable and often
• 1:10:13
  amusing, if generally rather hackneyed dialogue, a few
• 1:10:18
  charming and well executed location scenes, Dudley
• 1:10:21
  Simpson's incidental music is quite pleasant, and Jack
• 1:10:24
  Robinson's studio sets are also effective, in some cases
• 1:10:27
  appearing surprisingly large scale.
• 1:10:29
  Just shut up. Do you see what I mean?
• 1:10:32
  It's just. That's a very long sentence.
• 1:10:33
  Long. Sentence because it's got all
• 1:10:35
  these unnecessary words like somewhat and reasonable and
• 1:10:38
  rather and, and a few and, and quite, quite pleasant.
• 1:10:44
  Quite pleasant. Douglas Simpson music is quite
• 1:10:46
  pleasant. If there's one thing you can't
• 1:10:48
  say about the music in The Underwater Menace is that the
• 1:10:50
  music is quite pleasant. The music is absolutely but
• 1:10:53
  ugly. It's some of the stupidest
• 1:10:55
  music. Everything's never wrote, but
• 1:10:56
  it's hilarious. Where's your sense of humor and
• 1:11:00
  why are you writing this like some kind of 15 year old trying
• 1:11:03
  to impress the teacher with your vocabulary?
• 1:11:05
  These books, I mean, I've talked about it as nauseam.
• 1:11:08
  These books is how Stammers Walker books.
• 1:11:10
  Yeah, it's how Stammers Walker is it?
• 1:11:13
  No, it's not. Was it?
• 1:11:14
  Stephen. Stammers had nothing to do with.
• 1:11:16
  It oh, just how a Walker Well, maybe stammers brought all the
• 1:11:20
  weight then, because I'll tell you what these the myths that
• 1:11:25
  those those guys, because those were the only books.
• 1:11:28
  So everyone just took it all as read that.
• 1:11:30
  That's how things were. The underwater menace was
• 1:11:32
  terrible. Invasion of dinosaurs was
• 1:11:33
  terrible. The gunfires was terrible.
• 1:11:37
  They did a lot of damage. I mean, they gave us a lot of
• 1:11:39
  information to be. Fair, they say.
• 1:11:40
  To be fair, it should be noted that the fish peoples in
• 1:11:43
  inverted commas. Ballet, if somewhat pointless,
• 1:11:47
  is at least well staged. If somewhat pointless if.
• 1:11:52
  Somewhat pointless, like. Ray, I mean, I'm now scared
• 1:11:56
  about you reading Tom and Milani.
• 1:11:59
  Now you've read out some of those sentences.
• 1:12:01
  Does. It take yourself too seriously,
• 1:12:03
  Joe. I think so, yeah.
• 1:12:04
  Before I need to get you some drugs, we better move across,
• 1:12:07
  you know, just to relax you a bit after the apoplexy.
• 1:12:10
  Let's move back to your top ten list then, and be, you know,
• 1:12:14
  calm and positive. Number six, I couldn't choose
• 1:12:17
  between them. They've both been chosen
• 1:12:19
  already. I I I'm going to settle on time
• 1:12:22
  frame. Oh yes.
• 1:12:25
  Though I could have I could have gone for Peter Haining's A
• 1:12:29
  Celebration, which had a similar kind of impact on me when it
• 1:12:32
  when I obtained a copy. But time I think time frame for
• 1:12:36
  the colour pictures, full spread pictures of the the the covers
• 1:12:41
  of the targets and the new and the then few published new
• 1:12:44
  adventures. Which one gets me every time,
• 1:12:47
  right? It's the Myth Makers 1 The Myth
• 1:12:49
  Makers cover just as a full page it is.
• 1:12:52
  Beautiful page prints and without the title on.
• 1:12:54
  So you just get to marvel at the, the beauty of this artwork
• 1:12:57
  and then the strips down the side that have got the, the off
• 1:13:01
  the, the, you know, the photos literally taken off ATV screen,
• 1:13:04
  but you know, so they're slightly blurry and you can't
• 1:13:06
  quite tell what's going on, but they're called magic moments.
• 1:13:08
  And there's a little bit from the Target book, accompanied by
• 1:13:12
  pictures of of the of the TV version.
• 1:13:16
  And so close, you said. Don't tell us that it's so close
• 1:13:18
  you can almost see it. And I hadn't seen most of these
• 1:13:23
  stories. It was the IT was the closest I
• 1:13:25
  could get them to actually seeing some Doctor Who on the
• 1:13:28
  telly. So yeah, what what a book to
• 1:13:31
  absolutely immerse yourself in. That one kicks right through to
• 1:13:35
  the early New Adventures as well.
• 1:13:38
  There's why there's a full page Birthright cover, and that is
• 1:13:41
  that cover. Beautiful cover, isn't it?
• 1:13:44
  And and and birthright, is that what you just said?
• 1:13:47
  Yeah, Yeah, yeah. That's.
• 1:13:48
  Right. What's the one I'm thinking of?
• 1:13:49
  Cats Cradle? The one with the Unicorn.
• 1:13:52
  Oh gosh. Which Mark?
• 1:13:54
  Yeah, Yeah, yeah. The best fantasy Doctor Who
• 1:13:57
  cover. I think we have a shame about
• 1:13:58
  the book, but you know, the cover's gorgeous and it's a big
• 1:14:01
  four page beauty in that. Absolutely beautiful.
• 1:14:05
  OK, wow, so across to your bottom 10 list again, Madam, Why
• 1:14:10
  do I get so confused in the middle?
• 1:14:12
  You're going to help me out here, you know.
• 1:14:14
  So what? What number are we at now?
• 1:14:15
  #5. Oh gosh, we're rattling for him
• 1:14:18
  now. Come on.
• 1:14:19
  OK #5 on my bottom 10 list is Doctor Who paper dolls.
• 1:14:26
  What on earth is that? It's a book of paper dolls.
• 1:14:32
  Well, yes. I mean, I've never seen it.
• 1:14:36
  New new series I assume? When Rods did his top ten, he
• 1:14:40
  had one of the John Nathan Turner cash in books, didn't he?
• 1:14:45
  Was it? Yeah, Yeah.
• 1:14:46
  Yeah. He was appalled at just how
• 1:14:48
  underwritten and what a kind of obvious.
• 1:14:51
  Let's make a quick buck by and knocking out some crap and then
• 1:14:55
  selling it to Doctor Who fans. I think that Doctor Who paper
• 1:14:58
  dolls might be the nearest modern equivalent.
• 1:15:02
  I mean, I've got you, James. You've got a copy.
• 1:15:04
  They didn't. Get me they got my sister.
• 1:15:06
  They. Bought me.
• 1:15:08
  For Christmas and you've got it it must have been published
• 1:15:12
  around the time of the 12th doctor because he's the most
• 1:15:14
  recent thing you've got a you've got a paper cut out bill pot.
• 1:15:17
  So actually it's barely. Kind of.
• 1:15:19
  Oh my God, you could poke a hole right through her stomach and
• 1:15:22
  relive well enough of time. You could, yes, you can do all
• 1:15:28
  of those things. I mean, the illustrations by Ben
• 1:15:32
  Morris, there's nothing against him, but, but I mean, for a
• 1:15:36
  start, do you want to see how much blank space there is on
• 1:15:38
  this page, this book? Yes, a whole page the.
• 1:15:41
  Whole page with nothing on it. No, there's a little bit of Ryan
• 1:15:43
  in the corner there. What does that say?
• 1:15:45
  Tiny paragraph that says day of the Oh, I see why it's blank.
• 1:15:48
  It's because you're meant to cut out what's on the other side of
• 1:15:51
  it. So yeah, you paid a lot of money
• 1:15:53
  for kind of. A lot.
• 1:15:54
  Half a book. Half a book.
• 1:15:57
  The pictures are not they bear look.
• 1:15:59
  Here's Joe Grant. Are you sure?
• 1:16:03
  Oh yeah, the one in the middle. The Day of the Daleks 1.
• 1:16:05
  'S not too bad. The fur coat.
• 1:16:07
  From I think I could see her red knickers as well from Day of the
• 1:16:09
  Daleks. You can see the red knickers,
• 1:16:11
  but her face doesn't look much like it's a barely an
• 1:16:15
  approximation of Katie Manning's face.
• 1:16:17
  I mean, when you can buy those figures, you know, those
• 1:16:20
  gorgeous figures, Yeah, Lifelike figure.
• 1:16:23
  Why on earth would you wonder? Why do that when you can cut one
• 1:16:25
  out and a couple of costumes and, and hook them precariously
• 1:16:28
  onto the paper cutter? As you can see, I've I've not
• 1:16:32
  used a lot of this book myself, but I did have a bright idea one
• 1:16:35
  day when I at school, I used to have a tutor group and we'd have
• 1:16:39
  half an hour to fill every Thursday.
• 1:16:42
  And I thought, oh, they love these, that they can cut out
• 1:16:45
  some Doctor Who paper dolls. And a boy in my tutor group cut
• 1:16:50
  out the paper doll of Patrick Troughton and then inverted one
• 1:16:54
  of the costumes, drew some pecks and a six pack on it, and hung
• 1:17:00
  it on Patrick Troughton. So because of this book, I've
• 1:17:04
  been now haunted by this nightmarish figure of Patrick, A
• 1:17:08
  naked, muscled Patrick Trouten wearing only his checked baggy
• 1:17:13
  trousers. I mean, full marks for that
• 1:17:15
  child's ingenuity. A plus I would say for
• 1:17:18
  creativity. Either an A+ or a possible
• 1:17:21
  safeguarding concern. Either way, the only thing to
• 1:17:24
  come out of this book is is a nightmarish image of of Patrick
• 1:17:28
  Trouten. It is the most kind of what?
• 1:17:31
  What can we not? I mean, there's another one,
• 1:17:33
  James. But in a a a An introduction by
• 1:17:37
  Crystal, it says Crystal. I imagine that's is it Crystal,
• 1:17:41
  Crystal, Crystal D Who is it? Who does the cosplay?
• 1:17:46
  Oh yeah, Crystal D Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:17:49
  Well, like she's written how to do cosplay, but how?
• 1:17:52
  Are we supposed to know who that is?
• 1:17:55
  An introduction to cosplay, I mean.
• 1:17:58
  It was also Doctor Who origami, you know, you know, so at least,
• 1:18:02
  but at least with the origami one, it wasn't just cut it out,
• 1:18:04
  you know, you sort of have to fold it up and and be a bit arty
• 1:18:07
  with it. Yeah, I mean, I have to say,
• 1:18:10
  having having tried them out with the tutor group, these,
• 1:18:12
  these paper dolls don't even really properly stand up so.
• 1:18:16
  It's. Not.
• 1:18:18
  I mean, would you say they're sort of above or below the
• 1:18:20
  Doctor Who fruits that were out at the time?
• 1:18:23
  Oh, it's kind of like same demographic, same.
• 1:18:26
  And same level of sort of lack of.
• 1:18:28
  Not really caring what you're making.
• 1:18:30
  Do you know what it is? Money off those fans.
• 1:18:32
  Have you heard the fabulous Rob Shearman Audio Jubilee?
• 1:18:36
  Yes, of course. You know, you know, the bit
• 1:18:38
  where they go bit of that and we gave you Dalek aid or Dalek
• 1:18:42
  juice. I go, oh, what's that?
• 1:18:43
  Well, it's just lemonade or orange juice.
• 1:18:45
  It's got a picture of a Dalek slapped on it.
• 1:18:47
  That's basically that book. Have you seen the Doctor Who
• 1:18:51
  watched that? They're selling?
• 1:18:52
  Oh. No.
• 1:18:53
  What's that? Casio Watch, Do you know what
• 1:18:57
  makes it a Doctor Who Watch has got Doctor Who written on it.
• 1:19:01
  Do you see packaging? I've got a Doctor Who watch, you
• 1:19:04
  know, and it's got a TARDIS on it.
• 1:19:06
  That straps are TARDIS blue and they've got the TARDIS things on
• 1:19:10
  them. And then it's in inside the
• 1:19:12
  actual watch itself. It's all cogs and what?
• 1:19:14
  It's fabulous. But that was, that was like
• 1:19:16
  £100, you know? I bought a Doctor Who watch.
• 1:19:18
  I would expect nothing less than an entire Time Lord character
• 1:19:23
  hidden inside it so that when I opened it, I became the Master.
• 1:19:27
  I want to buy you a present for Christmas.
• 1:19:29
  Your expectations are huge. Well, since the 1994 yearbook,
• 1:19:33
  I've had to raise my expectations.
• 1:19:35
  Or lower them somewhat. Well, fabulous choice there.
• 1:19:40
  Another thing I've never heard of.
• 1:19:42
  The paper dolls with the Christmas present as well.
• 1:19:43
  I hope my family are not listening to this because.
• 1:19:45
  Do you know what? Any presents?
• 1:19:47
  Change is just so you better up your game this year, all right?
• 1:19:51
  Honestly, I mean, that was that period though where people were
• 1:19:53
  just buying any a bit of Doctor Who gobbins that was coming out
• 1:19:56
  because there was so much of it. You were a safe bet for a
• 1:19:59
  president for a couple of years. Quite a lot of.
• 1:20:02
  Doctors. I got the figures.
• 1:20:03
  I don't collect bloody figures. I'm surrounded by the things
• 1:20:06
  now. Did anyone get that the first
• 1:20:08
  board game that came out? The Eccleston era board game.
• 1:20:12
  Tedious, wasn't it? Or it's like Snakes and Ladders
• 1:20:15
  but with a TARDIS that makes a noise every now and then.
• 1:20:17
  I'd. Rather, play that one.
• 1:20:18
  You know that race against the old 80s?
• 1:20:21
  One where none of the people battles of the uniform, No one.
• 1:20:24
  Looks at all one resembles the right game.
• 1:20:28
  The radi looks like an ogron or something, you know?
• 1:20:30
  Absolutely. Tegan looks like a public
• 1:20:33
  schoolboy. Oh, OK.
• 1:20:35
  We've got some similar memories here.
• 1:20:36
  You know, it's quite disturbing. Well, OK, let's be kind.
• 1:20:41
  And we're now in your top five top ten list.
• 1:20:46
  I'm going to put in script Doctor, The Inside Story of
• 1:20:51
  Doctor Who, 86 to 89 by Andrew Carmel.
• 1:20:54
  Before you say a word right, I've got to say Andrew Cartmel
• 1:20:58
  books feature on top and bottom 10 lists with such alarming
• 1:21:03
  frequency. He is a divisive character in
• 1:21:07
  terms of writing books. And arguably you have to be, I
• 1:21:15
  think you have to be quite arrogant to be a successful
• 1:21:17
  Doctor Who script editor. I mean, that's certainly AI mean
• 1:21:20
  or producer. You know, you get that with
• 1:21:22
  certainly JNT, you get it with Hinchcliffe, you get it with
• 1:21:25
  RTD, don't you? I mean you have to have kind of
• 1:21:29
  nominal self belief. RTT I'd say he's quite humble
• 1:21:32
  really. I I'm bit.
• 1:21:34
  I'm joking. I am reading the writer sale for
• 1:21:37
  a few. You are.
• 1:21:39
  You are. The thing about Script Doctor is
• 1:21:42
  that it wasn't written as a kind of it wasn't written after the
• 1:21:44
  event. It's his Diaries.
• 1:21:47
  He obviously ran out of time in his third season.
• 1:21:50
  And so the third season section is slightly disappointingly more
• 1:21:55
  journaling after the event. But the account of what was
• 1:21:59
  actually going on, the Diaries he he kept during those first
• 1:22:02
  two seasons are really fascinating and also, I think
• 1:22:07
  unique. I can't think of an an
• 1:22:09
  equivalent. I mean, I know we're seeing kind
• 1:22:11
  of bits of early stuff cropping up now we're seeing the
• 1:22:14
  production Diaries. But to have such a personal
• 1:22:17
  document to have something that was that was kept purely as, you
• 1:22:20
  know, he wasn't writing it for an audience at the time.
• 1:22:22
  He was keeping a diary of his experiences, you know, his first
• 1:22:25
  experience as a script editor on television.
• 1:22:27
  And it gives you so many insights into what he was doing,
• 1:22:31
  why he did stuff, what he wasn't liking about it, how well he
• 1:22:35
  didn't enjoy dealing with Pip and Jane Baker, what he thought
• 1:22:38
  was going well, how that didn't always come out well, How
• 1:22:40
  disappointing he found it that, you know, the distance between
• 1:22:43
  his ideas and ambitions and what ended up coming out on screen
• 1:22:48
  because of frankly, lack of time.
• 1:22:51
  And whatever you think of the man, he's clearly an Intel.
• 1:22:55
  I mean, he's clearly a very, very intelligent man and a very
• 1:22:58
  thoughtful man. And there's plenty of self
• 1:23:00
  reflection. And actually, you might think it
• 1:23:01
  would be all kind of blowing his own trumpet.
• 1:23:04
  And wasn't the karma wonder plan, master plan a wonderful
• 1:23:07
  idea? It's it's it's actually much
• 1:23:09
  more effective than that. He's very self critical.
• 1:23:11
  He's very critical of what made it to the screen.
• 1:23:14
  At the same time, clearly proud of it and able to celebrate it.
• 1:23:17
  And I think just as a as a record, as a document from
• 1:23:20
  someone who is not kind of sensationalizing anything that's
• 1:23:24
  going on, but just giving a kind of blow by blow account of the
• 1:23:27
  experience of working on it. It's it's it's, it's one of its
• 1:23:31
  kind. You know, in 26 come 26, you
• 1:23:35
  know, have you seen what he put on the screen?
• 1:23:37
  Like, I'm pleased he wasn't right in his diary and he was
• 1:23:40
  making the show. But yeah, I don't think there's
• 1:23:45
  a comparable thing. A lot, a lot of these books and
• 1:23:48
  the Barry Letts one who are me and all of that and they're
• 1:23:50
  really interesting, but they are skewered memories later.
• 1:23:55
  Whereas this is absolutely JNT has been a right prick today.
• 1:24:00
  You know, I'm leaving the location of Delta and
• 1:24:03
  abandonment and going back to London.
• 1:24:04
  I'm not working with this bastard anymore.
• 1:24:07
  Oh, he's called me back. All right, fine.
• 1:24:08
  He's got his tail between his legs.
• 1:24:10
  Yeah, it's absolutely. I mean, in terms of first hand
• 1:24:12
  gossip, it's wonderful. But it just, it really shows he
• 1:24:17
  really, he really wanted to make his mark and he really wanted
• 1:24:21
  the show to be good. Absolutely that.
• 1:24:24
  And, and, and you get his response, his kind of unfiltered
• 1:24:28
  response to watching what had come before as well.
• 1:24:31
  And just thinking this is written by people who have not a
• 1:24:34
  clue what they're doing, you know?
• 1:24:36
  There's such a huge difference, isn't it, between like Cartmel
• 1:24:40
  going? You know what, That was a great
• 1:24:42
  script. Like what hit the screen and
• 1:24:45
  Eric Saywood just sitting again. Yeah, it wasn't very good, was
• 1:24:49
  it? You know what I mean?
• 1:24:51
  Like I don't think Saywood really cares, whereas there's
• 1:24:54
  just passion with Cartmel the. Difference between Saywood going
• 1:24:57
  Oh well, I just couldn't really find any writers so I have to
• 1:24:59
  keep going back to Robert Holmes.
• 1:25:01
  Tart Bell's going. There's banging down the door.
• 1:25:04
  I'm going to go to and meet people.
• 1:25:06
  I'm going to go to to find, I'm going to go out and find them.
• 1:25:10
  And then and to have the vision to say, read Halo Jones, you
• 1:25:14
  know, read this really exciting graphic novel because that's
• 1:25:18
  what I think I wanted to be to, you know, to have the vision to
• 1:25:21
  say, I think this is the tone we should be aiming for.
• 1:25:24
  It's why you've got at least two coherent series there with a
• 1:25:28
  really clear vision for what the show ought to be doing.
• 1:25:32
  Really. How dare you?
• 1:25:35
  It's it's the man who basically said to, you know, a writer who
• 1:25:38
  came to him with a pitch. You know what?
• 1:25:39
  I really want to write a book. Doctor Who wins a holiday and
• 1:25:42
  he's going to go to Disneyland, but instead he's going to smack
• 1:25:45
  into a satellite and end up in Wales and then fight against
• 1:25:49
  this genocidal force. And they're going to be defeated
• 1:25:52
  by bees and a sound system. And they'll be a whole group of
• 1:25:56
  lovely friends along the way. And the whole gang will come
• 1:25:59
  together to defeat the villains. And Carmel just goes, yeah,
• 1:26:02
  we'll make it, you know, like about I just think there's,
• 1:26:06
  there's there was no, there wasn't another script.
• 1:26:08
  I just like it. And yeah, it's just huge insight
• 1:26:11
  into into that period. It's a fascinating period and I
• 1:26:14
  could have, I could just have easily have put in the the the
• 1:26:17
  Life and Times, the life and scandalous times book, the GNT
• 1:26:20
  book, which is, which is a very, it's a little bit scurrilous,
• 1:26:24
  but not as much as you think it's going to be.
• 1:26:26
  And actually it's a, it's a wonderful snapshot of it was not
• 1:26:30
  just the the Doctor Who production office, but the BBC
• 1:26:33
  as it was then the just the end of an era when some of the best
• 1:26:38
  program making happened in the pub down the road in a way that
• 1:26:41
  you sort of read and go, well, that that sort of on paper it's
• 1:26:45
  not sustainable. But so much brilliant television
• 1:26:48
  came out of it in a way that didn't in the decade that
• 1:26:51
  followed, because they were sitting in offices and not in a
• 1:26:54
  creative environment and not knocking these ideas off each
• 1:26:57
  other. Riveting that book, but I it
• 1:27:00
  breaks my heart every time I read it.
• 1:27:02
  So I, you know, I have to be in a particular mood to read that
• 1:27:05
  JNT book. Whereas, you know, the sad thing
• 1:27:07
  about the end of the Cartmel book is but Doctor Who came to
• 1:27:11
  an end, you know, and he had to go and work on Casualty instead.
• 1:27:14
  What a waste. I think he blew up the hospital
• 1:27:17
  a few times. So, you know, and I had some
• 1:27:19
  fun. Well, OK, let's Oh my God, we're
• 1:27:23
  in the top four now. Oh, it's going to get juicy.
• 1:27:26
  Well, I mean, it's been pretty juicy so far already.
• 1:27:30
  Well, what's your 4th bottom 10 book, Ben?
• 1:27:32
  James tedious predictability. I mean, I thought, I can't be
• 1:27:35
  that obvious, can I? And then I was like, yeah, but I
• 1:27:38
  can because it, it, it is as bad.
• 1:27:42
  I have a copy because I saw it in a charity shop rule.
• 1:27:46
  If you see a new adventure, you have to buy it.
• 1:27:49
  What did you see in every charity shop?
• 1:27:51
  Though you have to buy it. So what you even if you can
• 1:27:54
  wallpaper your house with copies of Neil Penn, switch to pit.
• 1:27:58
  It's probably the best use for it.
• 1:28:00
  I don't think your partner will be very happy about that, you
• 1:28:02
  know? It's not even a good cover, is
• 1:28:05
  it? Terrible.
• 1:28:06
  Terrible cover. No, what?
• 1:28:10
  One of your top 10 guests, and I can't remember who it was, said
• 1:28:14
  that there'd been an interview with Neil Penswick in which he
• 1:28:17
  explained that the problem with the pit was that he had to kind
• 1:28:21
  of cut it short, shorter. At the last minute.
• 1:28:23
  He was kind of told it was too long and he had to make these
• 1:28:25
  cuts. I'd like to respond to that by
• 1:28:27
  saying the problem with the pit is not that it is too.
• 1:28:30
  Short, you bitch. That's not what's wrong with
• 1:28:35
  this. What's the problem?
• 1:28:36
  With it, then James. Not enough has been cut out of
• 1:28:39
  it. What should have been cut is
• 1:28:43
  page one, page 2, page hang on, Page 3.
• 1:28:47
  All the They should have cut all of it.
• 1:28:49
  They should have cut the lot of it and not published it because
• 1:28:54
  it's not a competent piece of writing.
• 1:28:56
  And the reason I decided that I had to choose The Pit, apart
• 1:29:01
  from the fact that it is the worst new adventure I've ever
• 1:29:03
  read, is that it epitomises so many of the things that were
• 1:29:07
  wrong with the new adventures. It has a really sketchily badly
• 1:29:12
  characterized Dr. doing stuff that the Doctor that you can't
• 1:29:15
  even imagine, like anyone, least of all Sylvester McCoy,
• 1:29:18
  attempting, like whistling the sound of the TARDIS or
• 1:29:22
  levitating slightly or collecting pins.
• 1:29:24
  They may not. Levitating.
• 1:29:26
  Slightly. Those are all kind of things.
• 1:29:27
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Those are all things that happen
• 1:29:29
  in early New adventures. And you're like, no, he doesn't.
• 1:29:33
  He doesn't. He doesn't collect.
• 1:29:34
  He doesn't whistle the sound of the TARD.
• 1:29:36
  Can you whistle the sound of the TARDIS?
• 1:29:40
  If you're a pretentious writer, yes.
• 1:29:43
  It's got the kind of grown up writing that that kind of hangs
• 1:29:48
  around the the neck of this ear of New adventures.
• 1:29:51
  It's got kind of drugs with sexy names and it's got kind of
• 1:29:55
  made-up swear words and it's got aggressive people and angry
• 1:29:59
  people and some people are really, really angry and
• 1:30:01
  aggressive and, and the universe is a terrible place.
• 1:30:04
  It's got a kind of badly built, nebulous future dystopian world,
• 1:30:12
  like kind of a bit of Blade Runner here and a bit of the
• 1:30:19
  Happiness Patrol there. I don't know.
• 1:30:21
  It's to say it's, it doesn't feel like a very well informed
• 1:30:23
  book. And then it's just got too many
• 1:30:25
  other ideas. It's got too many ideas, many of
• 1:30:28
  them Gallifrey this, Gallifrey that, Omega Vasalon, you know.
• 1:30:34
  Just pamper of Omega I remember. And, and then UNIT, Why?
• 1:30:40
  Because of course we've got to have UNIT and William Blake
• 1:30:43
  because, you know, why can't William Blake be the Doctor's
• 1:30:45
  companion? Well, why not?
• 1:30:47
  Because it's a stupid idea. That's why not.
• 1:30:49
  OK, no, we're going to run with that and oh, we're going to then
• 1:30:53
  go back in time to the did they go to the second one?
• 1:30:56
  No, the Victorian era or Jack the Ripper's in it.
• 1:30:58
  Suddenly we're just like, what the what the hell is going on?
• 1:31:01
  Like, And the idea, the idea that this could have been longer
• 1:31:05
  and made sense is, is absolute nonsense.
• 1:31:08
  There is this book doesn't work at any length at all.
• 1:31:11
  It just doesn't work. It's a poorly written, poorly
• 1:31:15
  conceived. And I am, and I just sort of
• 1:31:18
  feel like I, I, I don't want to, I don't really want to get it.
• 1:31:22
  Neil Pendrick because I feel like he's one of the authors
• 1:31:25
  with no experience at all. He's been handed this
• 1:31:27
  opportunity and been given no help at all.
• 1:31:29
  Writing your first novel is tough.
• 1:31:32
  And the reason you have editors and editorial teams is to guide
• 1:31:37
  you through this and say no, don't do that.
• 1:31:41
  And have you tried it like that? And if there is a deadline that
• 1:31:44
  the writer is not going to meet, they are there to go.
• 1:31:46
  OK, actually, this isn't going to work in time.
• 1:31:49
  What can we do to either give you more time or do we actually
• 1:31:51
  just need to tell this writer, I'm really sorry, it doesn't
• 1:31:54
  appear to be working here with some money for your effort.
• 1:31:57
  So it's not that's. What terroristics would have
• 1:31:59
  done? I'll write it myself.
• 1:32:02
  It's the failure of of an inexperienced team handling an
• 1:32:07
  inexperienced writer. So I don't want to be kind of, I
• 1:32:09
  don't want to hammer the point home too much, but it is it,
• 1:32:13
  it's sort of symbolic of everything that is wrong with
• 1:32:17
  most of the new adventures to, to in a in a kind of diluted
• 1:32:22
  form normally, but in the pit, it just all seems to go wrong.
• 1:32:26
  Do you know right with the I've always, I keep saying with these
• 1:32:29
  first time writers, and they're all, most of them are all first
• 1:32:32
  time writers in the new adventures.
• 1:32:33
  It kind of does go 1 two ways, isn't it?
• 1:32:35
  It's a terrible car crash or there's promise and then they go
• 1:32:41
  on to improve. And I think you absolutely can
• 1:32:43
  see when Rebecca Levine joins the range.
• 1:32:47
  Yeah, you go from first time writers producing the pit in pit
• 1:32:52
  level, this time two first time writers delivering Just War.
• 1:32:56
  Yeah, in Rebecca Levine's time. And there's just this huge shift
• 1:33:00
  that they figured it out. They figured out what they're
• 1:33:02
  doing, the direction they want to take it in, and just how to
• 1:33:06
  craft these books. Absolutely.
• 1:33:09
  They they get there in the end and and I do think kind of the
• 1:33:11
  hit rate gets better. To go for these teething
• 1:33:15
  problems first. The first tranche, don't you?
• 1:33:19
  Please do everybody go and check out James's Goodreads review of
• 1:33:23
  The Pit. It is the most delirious thing
• 1:33:25
  you'll read today. Well, at a top 4.
• 1:33:31
  Well, to to give you a a, a positive counterpart to that,
• 1:33:37
  I'm going to pop in White Darkness by David Mckinty.
• 1:33:43
  OK, you floored me again. Because I, I mean, I think
• 1:33:46
  people consider that a competent book, but I don't know if anyone
• 1:33:51
  thinks it's top four material. Maybe it's just context, but
• 1:33:58
  having slogged through the 1st load of new adventures so you've
• 1:34:03
  got the Time Worm books which I think are kind of four car
• 1:34:07
  crashes in different ways. Cats Cradle not so much much
• 1:34:11
  more enjoyable actually, as a trilogy for all that you've
• 1:34:14
  you've you've got to make it through Cat's Cradle.
• 1:34:18
  You've got to make it through the the Mark Platt one.
• 1:34:20
  First of all, what's it called? Times Crucible.
• 1:34:23
  Times Crucible. Can't remember the title.
• 1:34:25
  Good. Title.
• 1:34:26
  Though then you've got Nightshade, which people rate,
• 1:34:30
  but I think only because it's sort of nostalgic in in feel,
• 1:34:33
  I'm afraid. I think it's a book that doesn't
• 1:34:35
  do very much and and certainly feels at odds with what the
• 1:34:39
  series is trying to do. Love and more perfectly fine
• 1:34:42
  transit. We've discussed a very
• 1:34:43
  problematic book and not an easy read.
• 1:34:46
  The highest science, very enjoyable in context.
• 1:34:50
  Not maybe as great as I thought it was when I first read it, but
• 1:34:55
  but but fine. Then you've got the pit.
• 1:34:57
  Then you've got, so you've got the the Pit, which is in this,
• 1:34:59
  like I said, dystopian, just kind of mishmash of ideas.
• 1:35:05
  Do they call it the future cycle or something like that or?
• 1:35:08
  Yeah, I think so. Something like that, purely
• 1:35:12
  because all of the books have this sort of slightly badly
• 1:35:15
  defined dystopian, nihilistic future backdrop.
• 1:35:21
  So then you have Deceit, which is Peter, Darwin, Levens, you
• 1:35:23
  know, showing what he's made of, which isn't yet.
• 1:35:25
  More of that when you have Lucifer rising, which is, you
• 1:35:28
  know, again, more of that. Well done, I think, But more of
• 1:35:33
  that, yeah. At the time I just thought,
• 1:35:35
  well, this is this is really boring, you know, Doctor Who,
• 1:35:41
  I'd set out reading new adventures, thinking this is so
• 1:35:45
  exciting, the new adventures. I'm going to finally kind of go
• 1:35:47
  into these, you know, too broad and too deep.
• 1:35:49
  And it's going to go into places that Doctor Who couldn't go
• 1:35:52
  with. And it just seemed to be going
• 1:35:53
  to the same place every time, which was badly written sci-fi.
• 1:35:57
  And then you get to white darkness and it's a historical
• 1:36:05
  now it's a historical with a strong fantasy element.
• 1:36:09
  It's sort of AI mean what the thing that first of all, the
• 1:36:13
  reason that I it's it's top four material for me is that it seems
• 1:36:17
  to me unlike any of the other new adventures at the time is
• 1:36:20
  doing a very Doctor Who mixture of different genres that you
• 1:36:25
  wouldn't necessarily normally think of putting together
• 1:36:27
  because it's historical political story, but also it's a
• 1:36:32
  horror. And then it becomes this sort of
• 1:36:34
  Lovecraftian science fiction by the end.
• 1:36:37
  And that's a really Doctor Who combination.
• 1:36:40
  You could that's the kind of combination you could see in a
• 1:36:42
  in a John Perdue story to, to put those things together.
• 1:36:45
  The the history. It's it's set during the the
• 1:36:48
  United States occupation of Haiti and it feels so
• 1:36:52
  beautifully researched. And certainly at the time of
• 1:36:55
  reading it, I thought I'd have been perfectly content to read a
• 1:36:58
  pure historical with this level of detail.
• 1:37:00
  The characters feel authentic, the setting feels authentic.
• 1:37:03
  It and it's and it's not just a backdrop, The politics of it is
• 1:37:10
  an integral part of the plotting for all that it, it becomes
• 1:37:13
  something more than just a historical story.
• 1:37:16
  It's not just used as as window dressing and it's really
• 1:37:21
  compellingly written and and I and I love that the new
• 1:37:25
  adventure suddenly kind of pulled that out of nowhere when
• 1:37:29
  I was what I was expecting was another another boring, dreary
• 1:37:33
  future that made no kind of sense.
• 1:37:34
  And instead I've got this detail slightly too complicated.
• 1:37:37
  It's again too many ideas but but more than competently
• 1:37:43
  written, really well researched and a really compelling mixture
• 1:37:48
  that just works and feels very Doctor Who and A and a well
• 1:37:51
  written Doctor. A well written companion.
• 1:37:54
  It's a really enjoyable read, I think.
• 1:37:57
  Lousy cover though. Somewhere near the bottom of my
• 1:38:01
  to do on the book club pile and you have single handedly just
• 1:38:05
  managed to. What did you describe Sylvester
• 1:38:08
  McCoy is doing in that book? Levitate it up to the upper
• 1:38:13
  echelons. OK yeah, that's that is
• 1:38:15
  intriguing. Do you know what you said there
• 1:38:19
  about the, you know, those sort of dystopian futures that the
• 1:38:23
  that is you sort of summarise there beautifully why I prefer
• 1:38:27
  the BBC books. And trust me, they're just as
• 1:38:29
  flawed, but they experiment with tone far more and genre and.
• 1:38:35
  And you never quite know what you're going to get from book to
• 1:38:37
  book. But yeah, certainly in those
• 1:38:39
  opening salvos, boy, those those new adventures, it was one
• 1:38:43
  miserable future history after another.
• 1:38:48
  I think that's right. And that's, that's what I've
• 1:38:50
  come to appreciate from your, your, your reviews particularly
• 1:38:54
  have, have kind of shown that the BBC books are more varied
• 1:38:57
  than than I think they were giving credit for at the time.
• 1:38:59
  But but again, maybe they evolved and, and there are so
• 1:39:02
  many of them that maybe looking at them with a bird's eye view,
• 1:39:06
  you, you get the sense that there's a lot of breath that
• 1:39:09
  maybe you don't get just kind of.
• 1:39:10
  Doing it at the time. Why?
• 1:39:14
  Darkness. Yeah.
• 1:39:15
  I mean, that's about the 5th time you've shocked me on this
• 1:39:18
  list. I think we're in top three now,
• 1:39:20
  aren't we? We.
• 1:39:21
  Are. OK.
• 1:39:23
  These are the biggies. Are they sort of
• 1:39:24
  interchangeable? Top three or bottom?
• 1:39:27
  No, we're in bottom. Oh no, yeah, it's bottom three.
• 1:39:29
  Sorry, but I mean, we're in the threes now.
• 1:39:33
  This is where you know the strictly come hamster music will
• 1:39:35
  start cutting in as things get tense.
• 1:39:37
  As to what could he possibly pull out of his ass, well, let's
• 1:39:40
  find out. I'd struggled to pull anything
• 1:39:45
  out of my ass As strange and disappointing as this go on, I'm
• 1:39:51
  sorry to wish I hadn't said that.
• 1:39:53
  Now the nightmare. Oh boy.
• 1:39:57
  Paul Graham Williams. Paul Graham Williams and the
• 1:40:00
  Question. Most of all that you ask when
• 1:40:03
  you're reading this book is like, why?
• 1:40:06
  Why was he, why was he even asked to write a Doctor Who
• 1:40:10
  story? Why did anyone think any of the
• 1:40:14
  things in it were a good idea? And it reads like a shopping
• 1:40:16
  list book. I mean, if you haven't read the
• 1:40:19
  nightmare fare. And it is disappointing partly
• 1:40:22
  because it's it comes from a series that wasn't made.
• 1:40:25
  So we've all imagined that it would be really brilliant and it
• 1:40:27
  would have been kind of Colin Baker, but, you know, into his
• 1:40:30
  stride and without the restraints of just 14 episodes
• 1:40:34
  and then the trial stuff. But a lot of the evidence
• 1:40:39
  doesn't back up those ideas. And the nightmare fare is
• 1:40:44
  profoundly wrong headed. It reads like John Nathan Turner
• 1:40:50
  was keen to do some promotion of the Doctor Who exhibition in
• 1:40:54
  Blackpool, or had some mates in Blackpool, or had promised
• 1:40:57
  something to someone in Blackpool, or had met someone
• 1:41:00
  who owned a roller coaster in Blackpool.
• 1:41:02
  And so the first thing it starts on a roller coaster.
• 1:41:06
  The Doctor and Perry ride a roller coaster, which imagine
• 1:41:09
  that televised it wouldn't have been well filmed because they
• 1:41:12
  didn't have the ability to film roller coasters.
• 1:41:15
  Well, it would have been like that.
• 1:41:18
  Was it a late, late breakfast show where Cub Scouts rode the
• 1:41:22
  roller coaster? And, and it would have been
• 1:41:24
  looked like that. It would have looked like an, a,
• 1:41:26
  a thing from a magazine show of, you know, Colin Baker, Nicola
• 1:41:29
  Brand on a roller coaster and totally pointless, narratively
• 1:41:32
  pointless, very expensive. And, and, and, and Graham
• 1:41:37
  Williams dutifully writes all of this up like this is thrilling
• 1:41:40
  prose, which of course it isn't. It it then, I mean, nothing
• 1:41:45
  happens in this book. It ends with the Doctor playing
• 1:41:49
  a computer game. That's the big idea.
• 1:41:51
  Like, they're at Blackpool. So how is the Doctor going to
• 1:41:53
  defeat the toy maker this time? Graham Williams says that he sat
• 1:41:56
  down to watch the existing episode of The Celestial Toy Toy
• 1:41:58
  Maker and couldn't believe the audience of 1966 tolerated
• 1:42:03
  anything that dull as watching So Paula again.
• 1:42:06
  Dangerous. Yeah.
• 1:42:08
  He's equivalent. He's done the Doctor on a roller
• 1:42:10
  coaster and then the Doctor playing a Space Invaders game on
• 1:42:13
  the computer. It would have been televisual
• 1:42:18
  nothing. To be fair, you know to JNT, he
• 1:42:20
  could market both the Doctor Who exhibition in Blackpool and the
• 1:42:24
  latest Doctor Who computer game in one story.
• 1:42:27
  You know you can make a bit of wander out of this.
• 1:42:29
  Imagine Michael Grade sitting down to watch the Nightmare
• 1:42:32
  Fair. Starts with Colin Baker on a
• 1:42:34
  roller coaster and ends with him playing Space Invasion.
• 1:42:36
  It it. The only thing, the only thing
• 1:42:40
  I'm sad about the nightmare fair not existing because you know,
• 1:42:45
  the Big Finish audio is deathly dull as well, is that Matthew
• 1:42:49
  Robinson was booked to direct this one.
• 1:42:51
  And I think Robinson is a great director and he would have put
• 1:42:55
  something interesting on the screen.
• 1:42:57
  It wouldn't have been the script.
• 1:42:59
  I mean image wise and. The problem is, I mean it does
• 1:43:03
  it. It would have depended on making
• 1:43:05
  a guy playing a computer game an exciting climax, which I just
• 1:43:09
  don't think in the mid 80s anyone has any way of doing.
• 1:43:14
  You know, that that bit in the terror of her voice where the
• 1:43:16
  two Megarians, it would have been a bit like that, you know?
• 1:43:19
  And, and there's a lot of stuff that wouldn't have worked.
• 1:43:25
  Like there's the kind of there's, there were various
• 1:43:26
  rides. I think that the plan is
• 1:43:28
  obviously to to film in a load of rides to cut the budget by by
• 1:43:33
  filming on pre-existing rides. So it would have looked naff.
• 1:43:36
  And then you've got these kind of, is it some kind of dwarf
• 1:43:41
  mining? People I usually chip out by the
• 1:43:45
  time they turn up. There's an alien race in there
• 1:43:48
  that would have been, you know, not well realized.
• 1:43:50
  And, and there's a long section where the Doctor's just in a
• 1:43:53
  cell, which you can totally see, can't you?
• 1:43:56
  Like, that's when they're in the studio.
• 1:43:57
  Someone's built a very bland cell.
• 1:43:59
  Is it episode 3 by the chance? Well, I think they're still on
• 1:44:03
  45 minute episodes here. It's most of episode 1 and
• 1:44:09
  Graham Williams kind of puts this on the page with I it's
• 1:44:18
  it's hard. It's hard to imagine kind of
• 1:44:19
  what frame of mind he must have been it like what an unlucky
• 1:44:22
  man. He's at a horrible time.
• 1:44:23
  Kind of he he basically kind of almost had a nervous breakdown
• 1:44:27
  on Doctor Who and and left because of it.
• 1:44:31
  He's been offered the chance to write for it again.
• 1:44:33
  The series gets cancelled, so he's doing the best he can with
• 1:44:37
  it and, and, and he throws himself into it.
• 1:44:39
  And the saddest thing is that he sort of throws himself into it
• 1:44:43
  like it's a Pip and Jane Baker tribute act.
• 1:44:46
  But all you can think of when you're reading it is this is
• 1:44:49
  very wordy and Pip and Jane would have done it better the
• 1:44:56
  the theory. Words rarely spoken.
• 1:44:58
  I'm just going to give you like a bit of random The prose is
• 1:45:04
  leaden. The theory was absolutely sound,
• 1:45:07
  and the resulting washing of impurities from his several
• 1:45:09
  subconscious levels should have done wonders for his powers of
• 1:45:12
  concentration. But it wasn't working out that
• 1:45:14
  way, and the present state of sublimity he had achieved was
• 1:45:17
  driving him potty. Well, all things are relative,
• 1:45:19
  he was forced to concede. What does that mean?
• 1:45:23
  Right. But it's not kind of fun.
• 1:45:25
  What does it mean? Like Pip and Jane using lots of
• 1:45:28
  long words. It's just like he's, he's
• 1:45:30
  writing. He's he's writing like a
• 1:45:34
  politician, frankly, which I mean, if, if you think about
• 1:45:38
  where he was in his career, then that's kind of probably what he
• 1:45:41
  was. When you read, you know, when
• 1:45:44
  you read the nightmare fair mission to Magnus and the
• 1:45:47
  ultimate evil back-to-back. Yeah, Michael Grade was right, I
• 1:45:51
  think. Goodness, this was not a good
• 1:45:55
  use of the taxpayers money. And I guess with that one, like,
• 1:45:59
  it's not it's it's not the worst target book ever, but it it's
• 1:46:03
  maybe the most disappointing. It's only weirdly lauded by
• 1:46:07
  people. Isn't it?
• 1:46:08
  It's a story that you've never seen on television.
• 1:46:10
  How exciting. But it's not.
• 1:46:13
  OK, well what's your #3 in the top ten?
• 1:46:16
  This. Then we get to the really good
• 1:46:19
  stuff now. I've gone thematically, I've
• 1:46:20
  paired them off, so I'm giving you a bad target and he guesses
• 1:46:25
  as to. I'm going to say, oh, now how
• 1:46:30
  well do I know James Locke? I'm going to say, oh, I'm going
• 1:46:35
  to say a Donald Cotton, yes. You, you win the knowing James
• 1:46:40
  Lark very well prized. I've chosen the gunfighters.
• 1:46:44
  You must have said something in the past, you know.
• 1:46:46
  Well, I. I mean, I could absolutely have
• 1:46:48
  chosen the Myth Makers, which I've read again and again and
• 1:46:52
  again. I've read it out loud to
• 1:46:53
  children. I think it's a beautifully
• 1:46:55
  written book. I could have chosen the Romans,
• 1:46:57
  which I think is so much fun and and kind of a Tour de force Don
• 1:47:02
  Don Cotton just really going for it, but he's using the same
• 1:47:05
  skills each time, which is that he does voice very well and he
• 1:47:08
  does first person narrative very well.
• 1:47:10
  And the and the gimmick of the gunfighters is that the whole
• 1:47:12
  thing is narrated by the carrier.
• 1:47:14
  It's called Ned Buntline and it's written as a kind of COD
• 1:47:17
  Western with this COD American. I mean, it's written to be read
• 1:47:21
  in a bad American accent, and Ned Buntline has met up with
• 1:47:25
  Wyatt up and basically kind of tells the story as told him by
• 1:47:32
  Wyatt, and it's a joy. And the language of it is a joy.
• 1:47:37
  I mean, just by way of example, when the Doctor's still in the
• 1:47:42
  TARDIS, the description you get is.
• 1:47:45
  In any case, the Doctor was already clutching it, and
• 1:47:47
  apparently a haphazard selection of levers with the air of a
• 1:47:50
  demented xylophonist who finds he's brought along the wine list
• 1:47:54
  instead of the score. I mean, that lie is written for
• 1:47:58
  you, right? His use of language.
• 1:48:03
  And you know, when I read The Myth Makers and it was a story I
• 1:48:06
  knew so little about and it just blew my mind, But his use of
• 1:48:10
  language is so sophisticated. These are proper books, right?
• 1:48:15
  They're target books. They're for kids.
• 1:48:16
  But boy, he uses good words. And clearly it's from a time
• 1:48:21
  when JNT had stopped proofreading the novel, checked
• 1:48:25
  out so anyone could write anything.
• 1:48:27
  And Don Cotton says, OK, well, so I'm, this is my playground.
• 1:48:31
  I've done this story in one form.
• 1:48:33
  I'm, I'm just going to tell it in a different way.
• 1:48:36
  And it's going to be a first person.
• 1:48:37
  It's going to be a crazy kind of, you know, full of these
• 1:48:40
  archaic Americanisms and and it's it's every bit as riotous
• 1:48:46
  as the gunfight as I believe the gunfighters is.
• 1:48:48
  I know views do differ but I love that he.
• 1:48:51
  Should have sucked around. He was five stories away from
• 1:48:54
  writing a trout and and Donald Cotton would have given us an
• 1:48:56
  incredible trout story. But thank goodness he got kind
• 1:49:00
  of called in at this late stage to novelize his own stuff.
• 1:49:03
  And then and and and and another.
• 1:49:05
  We're so lucky to have these. They are.
• 1:49:07
  They are books to go back to again and again.
• 1:49:10
  There's so much in them. I just remember with the
• 1:49:12
  gunfires as well, it being sort of mucky with, you know, and a
• 1:49:16
  bit, a little bit dirty and, and alcohol fueled and it was just
• 1:49:21
  the Wild West, you know, down in the dirt, which they couldn't
• 1:49:25
  really do on the TV. Yeah, I'd love that.
• 1:49:27
  But the dirt and and and it's got this slightly ironic.
• 1:49:31
  It's taking the story seriously, but he gets to have his cake and
• 1:49:36
  eat it because he's using a narrator who's not taking the
• 1:49:41
  story quite so seriously. So you've got a bit where you
• 1:49:44
  know, the, you know, after one death, you have the, you know,
• 1:49:49
  you follow it from the point of view of a vulture.
• 1:49:51
  And the chapter ends. the Vulture followed along.
• 1:49:53
  After all, you never knew. And it's, it's just he's having
• 1:49:58
  fun with it, but he's not taking the piss out.
• 1:50:00
  So that's it's, it's a difficult tone to strike and he does it so
• 1:50:05
  well. Wonder what superb choice.
• 1:50:08
  And that's the one of the three I haven't read recently, so I'll
• 1:50:11
  pick up that one soon. I like a little, weirdly enough,
• 1:50:14
  between, you know, reading Doctor Who books for the book
• 1:50:17
  club, I'll do a little pallet cleanser and reading a Doctor
• 1:50:20
  Who book. But a target, you know, that you
• 1:50:22
  can read in half a day. Maybe it'd be that one.
• 1:50:25
  OK, right. The What is the second worst
• 1:50:29
  Doctor Who book of all time? I've I've sort of felt I had to
• 1:50:34
  go obvious again because of the ramifications and it's a double
• 1:50:39
  bill of Legacy of the Daleks and War of the Daleks.
• 1:50:43
  OK, a popular choice. Yeah, of course.
• 1:50:47
  And and and and they're popular for for the bottom 10I presume.
• 1:50:51
  Only for the bottom 10. Yes, exclusively.
• 1:50:55
  They're badly written books and but also so the reason I red
• 1:51:01
  legacy in one of the Daleks was because although I wasn't
• 1:51:04
  interested in these new BBC books with their swirly covers.
• 1:51:07
  Whirlpools. I had a friend at church who was
• 1:51:11
  more of a Trekkie, but he was a little bit into Doctor Who.
• 1:51:14
  Now you may know this. How well did these books sell?
• 1:51:18
  What? Back in the day, yeah,
• 1:51:21
  reasonably it was. It was in the latter half of the
• 1:51:24
  8th October with it where they were just bleeding readers.
• 1:51:27
  And, and and how well did these two Dalek books sell kind of
• 1:51:32
  compared to the rest of the range?
• 1:51:33
  I'm sure very well indeed just because they were Dalek books.
• 1:51:37
  They, they had covers with Daleks on.
• 1:51:39
  So I had this friend who was slightly into Doctor Who picked
• 1:51:42
  them up because they were the Dalek books and lent them to me
• 1:51:46
  and I read them. I was, I was kind of appalled.
• 1:51:50
  I was certainly old enough, you know, to, I was reading a lot
• 1:51:53
  of, I was doing anal English for my sake.
• 1:51:55
  I, I was reading a lot of literature literature at the
• 1:51:58
  time, so I could recognize kind of the sadly written Bros, but
• 1:52:01
  also I was, I'd matured enough as a fan to recognize sort of
• 1:52:05
  pointless plot beats. Now I've not read it since they
• 1:52:10
  were lent to me, but I mean, let's see how much I can
• 1:52:13
  remember Spider Daleks. Yeah.
• 1:52:18
  Sam Jones loves the doctor, can think about nothing else.
• 1:52:23
  Every thought she has is always so dishy.
• 1:52:26
  He's looking at some other girl throughout the book.
• 1:52:29
  He's. Very.
• 1:52:30
  She's very jealous. And hates him, yeah.
• 1:52:33
  Yeah, she hates him. Scaro wasn't destroyed after
• 1:52:37
  all, for reasons that are plausible but take a long time
• 1:52:40
  to describe. Yeah.
• 1:52:43
  Of the Gaelic stories, particularly Genesis, Destiny
• 1:52:48
  are referenced ad nauseam and every time slightly cheap in the
• 1:52:53
  memory of those stories. So rewritten James that writes
• 1:52:58
  we we learned that in fact it was not Scaro in Destiny of the
• 1:53:02
  Daleks, but Antarlin because the Daleks knew that the Doctor was
• 1:53:06
  going to destroy Scaro, so they had to convince Davros that he
• 1:53:09
  was on Scaro. The whole thing was a ploy so
• 1:53:12
  that when he sent off the hand of Omega, remember for the
• 1:53:15
  Daleks, he sent it off to what he thought was the position of
• 1:53:18
  Scar, but was in fact the planet and Tarlin.
• 1:53:23
  Sorry. I can understand why.
• 1:53:28
  So I mean, I like the Spider Dalek thing is, is weird, isn't
• 1:53:34
  it? I I mean, I remember when when
• 1:53:37
  it was announced with great excitement that CGI could do
• 1:53:39
  Spider Daleks. And I mean, we've all seen that
• 1:53:42
  it couldn't, but even at the time, I was like, what?
• 1:53:45
  But why would you do that? Why would you take a design as
• 1:53:47
  iconic and perfect as a Dalek and and make it into something
• 1:53:50
  it's not? So he he litters the books with
• 1:53:53
  oh, and special, special weapons Daleks on there.
• 1:53:56
  I mean just. Every sort of Dalek you can fit
• 1:53:59
  a straight A Daleks. Enormous tall Daleks with big
• 1:54:02
  legs. And it was just like kind of
• 1:54:06
  Dalek porn, but no heart. No, like a Doctor I didn't care
• 1:54:12
  about or recognize a companion who was frankly irritating the
• 1:54:16
  the So the the actual legacy of the Daleks is not whatever is
• 1:54:19
  described in that book. The legacy of legacy of the
• 1:54:22
  Daleks is. I thought, well, not going to
• 1:54:25
  read any more of these then and didn't pick up another EDA for.
• 1:54:32
  Yeah, that's so sad. And they are probably the
• 1:54:35
  absolute nadir of that range. They are appallingly written and
• 1:54:40
  they do do so much damage to Sam Jones because I think people
• 1:54:44
  remember those that that book War of the Daleks, which is the
• 1:54:47
  nadir of Sam Jones, and it's never as bad as that again ever.
• 1:54:53
  Yeah, the damage he did just so much.
• 1:54:55
  It's like a bomb going off in in Doctor Who history and spreading
• 1:54:59
  out picked. Up those two books because they
• 1:55:01
  had Daleks on the cover. How many people formed their
• 1:55:04
  judgement of. Do you know?
• 1:55:06
  Range based on reading those books.
• 1:55:09
  I'm going to tell you something now that's going to irritate
• 1:55:11
  you, right? Because John Peel, you know, one
• 1:55:12
  of those inept writers ever to contribute to Doctor Who, got to
• 1:55:16
  write those two Dalek stories just because he got a chat with
• 1:55:19
  Terra Nation one day. And Terra Nation went, do you
• 1:55:21
  know, I didn't like the end of that TV Doctor Who story where
• 1:55:24
  they destroyed Skyro. I'd rather like to bring it back
• 1:55:26
  again. Yeah.
• 1:55:27
  He got to write those books later on in the 8th Doctor
• 1:55:31
  range. They were building up.
• 1:55:33
  They they do all of these references to a great eye in the
• 1:55:36
  sky, right, The villains. And you don't know what it is.
• 1:55:39
  And it's all leading up to this massive climax that is going to
• 1:55:43
  be the Daleks back in the latter half of the 8th Doctor books.
• 1:55:46
  Yeah. It was going to be written by
• 1:55:48
  Lance Parkin. And at the 11th hour, the nation
• 1:55:52
  of state said, Nah, you ain't doing it, Sorry.
• 1:55:55
  And and and Parkin didn't get to write his Dalek book.
• 1:55:59
  It's obscene, isn't it? Yeah, well, so you know, I know
• 1:56:08
  they've been on lots of lists, but for the damage they've done
• 1:56:10
  to me personally and to the range, they can go in the bin.
• 1:56:16
  I'm considering yourself an endorsement of my sheer passion
• 1:56:19
  of these books, you know, and discussing these BBC books that
• 1:56:22
  you're finally giving them another go.
• 1:56:24
  Oh. I really am.
• 1:56:25
  No, I'm really very excited. I mean, the stuff you've been
• 1:56:27
  talking about is, is, is thrilling to listen to you.
• 1:56:30
  Well, what is the second the second best Doctor Who book?
• 1:56:36
  Ever Well, we've done a we've done a bad 8th Doctor book, so
• 1:56:39
  let's let's do a good one. The Glorious Dead.
• 1:56:42
  Well, I mean our book club episode all about this one.
• 1:56:47
  It's a not a surprise, but I, I said it at the time when we when
• 1:56:50
  we did the podcast, I'll say it again.
• 1:56:52
  I think that the 8th Doctor, Doctor Who magazine strips, the
• 1:56:57
  graphic novels from that era are the most consistently great
• 1:57:04
  Doctor Who in any form ever. They just hit there.
• 1:57:10
  There are four graphic novels worth of perfect Doctor Who and
• 1:57:15
  for me, the glorious dead, which is the most kind of ambitious of
• 1:57:19
  the story arcs, the things that are seeded kind of two years in
• 1:57:24
  advance and, and and unfold at such a beautiful place and
• 1:57:28
  deliver gut punch after gut punch and cliffhanger.
• 1:57:33
  I mean, the, the cliffhangers in these books, the full page
• 1:57:36
  cliffhangers, they they just live in the memory with artwork
• 1:57:40
  to match. I mean, the Martin Garrity art
• 1:57:43
  is stunning to look at and we've also got a couple of bits by
• 1:57:47
  Roger Language and we've we've gushed over the autonomy bug and
• 1:57:50
  what a gorgeous story that is. I just think it's a team firing
• 1:57:54
  on all cylinders and producing the most exciting Doctor Who.
• 1:57:58
  And I know that kind of after this collection, it goes into
• 1:58:01
  color and that's very exciting and they are very beautiful to
• 1:58:04
  look at. You lose some detail when you go
• 1:58:06
  into color and I there is part of me that looks at this black
• 1:58:09
  and white stuff and goes, I'm not sure Doctor Who ever look
• 1:58:13
  this beautiful again because of the the sheer amount of detail
• 1:58:17
  crammed into these beautiful black and white drawings.
• 1:58:21
  Love it just like an alchemy with that team, isn't there they
• 1:58:26
  and and you said something earlier about sort of once it's
• 1:58:30
  all over, step back and look at the the whole body of work.
• 1:58:36
  Yeah, those four graphic novels, it is almost without fault.
• 1:58:41
  You know, if there's a lesser story, it's still great.
• 1:58:46
  Absolutely, Yeah, Yeah. I mean, there's, there's nothing
• 1:58:48
  in there that's weak, is there? Not at all.
• 1:58:51
  Not. And in that that particular one,
• 1:58:53
  we did the fabulous one in Japan.
• 1:58:55
  Do you remember? Oh my gosh.
• 1:58:59
  Characterization, the the amount of the information that is
• 1:59:04
  packed into these these few pages.
• 1:59:06
  They had a month. It's such a skill and Scott Gray
• 1:59:09
  didn't mode the Lion show the writing at the time.
• 1:59:11
  I think he wrote all all of them in this collection and just an
• 1:59:17
  an absolute master. And Joe, he's a ridiculously
• 1:59:19
  humble man. That's great.
• 1:59:21
  You know, I think there's a lot of times where he doubts
• 1:59:24
  himself. Like, can you go back and read
• 1:59:26
  those graphic novels and, you know how they were willing to
• 1:59:30
  play the long game, James? I mean, I love that so much.
• 1:59:33
  You know, in the one before where they regenerated Paul
• 1:59:36
  McGann into Nicholas Briggs and it made you wait six months
• 1:59:39
  riding off the letters pages of people mad, you know, apoplectic
• 1:59:44
  going, how dare you take Paul McGann?
• 1:59:47
  They're sort of they're rubbing their hands going, oh, we'll get
• 1:59:49
  them in six months time. I just think, yeah.
• 1:59:53
  And then Doctor Who magazine sort of saying, well, we're not
• 1:59:55
  doing any story arcs like that again.
• 1:59:57
  We're we're more about stuff. And Scott great, just sort of
• 2:00:00
  sneaking one in. They didn't even know.
• 2:00:02
  They didn't even know he was doing it.
• 2:00:03
  He was layered. He kind of laying these.
• 2:00:05
  How long was the glorious dead again?
• 2:00:07
  10 parts. 1010 episodes not. Doing story arcs my arse.
• 2:00:12
  Honestly killing off is he and then having what 2 two months
• 2:00:18
  before you see her again? So you genuinely think she's
• 2:00:20
  dead? Breaking that heartbreaking
• 2:00:23
  episode, which is all from her point of view as well and ends
• 2:00:27
  with her, ends with not only her dying, but but the revelation
• 2:00:30
  that it's the Master standing over.
• 2:00:32
  Oh, oh, it's so good. The the I had so much fun
• 2:00:37
  talking with you about that particular graphic novel.
• 2:00:40
  There is another one I really want to do with you, and that is
• 2:00:43
  where the 10th Doctor had his own original companion.
• 2:00:46
  And it's the only other time where I think they're comics
• 2:00:50
  after the new series came back, went off and did their own thing
• 2:00:53
  and they had Carte Blanche. It's Dan Mcdade's period and
• 2:00:57
  it's Magenta Price as the companion.
• 2:00:59
  And I'm somehow going to get that for you, even though it's
• 2:01:02
  expensive. And we will do that one because
• 2:01:04
  I think you'll be really impressed with that as well.
• 2:01:06
  But what an amazing choice for number 2.
• 2:01:11
  Wow, have. We reached #1 the worst, the
• 2:01:13
  worst Doctor Who book of all time.
• 2:01:14
  Yes, and you know, I usually declare that with some drama.
• 2:01:19
  But tell me, what turgid prose are you about to befall on us
• 2:01:25
  all? It's you're not going to like
• 2:01:30
  it. It's Doctor Who in the Daleks,
• 2:01:34
  the official story of the film by John Walsh, which was
• 2:01:39
  published. Was it a year or so ago?
• 2:01:42
  I preordered this. I saw that this was coming out.
• 2:01:46
  It was well in advance advertised and it said the
• 2:01:49
  official story of the film and it promised big pages and detail
• 2:01:55
  like never before. And I was so excited because as
• 2:01:58
  you know, I love those films, particularly Invasion Earth 2150
• 2:02:02
  AD. And I thought it's about time,
• 2:02:04
  you know, the last thing of any substance that was done about
• 2:02:07
  them was the Kevin Davis documentary Dalek Mania, which,
• 2:02:11
  you know, was released on VHS in the mid 90s.
• 2:02:16
  So it's about time someone seriously kind of took these
• 2:02:19
  films apart and gave us a full detailed history of them now.
• 2:02:23
  And what you've got is a book absolutely full of the most
• 2:02:30
  beautiful pictures and it's got a lot of pictures that have been
• 2:02:34
  colourized by Clayton Hickman. And it is kind of worth the
• 2:02:38
  cover price for those alone. I have, I, I actually, I do have
• 2:02:44
  slight reservations about the pictures, even that there were
• 2:02:46
  some pictures taken directly from the films and whatever the
• 2:02:51
  process has been used to take them from the films.
• 2:02:52
  They, they look kind of washed out.
• 2:02:54
  And these films have been recently restored and they look
• 2:02:58
  absolutely gorgeous now. And, and what, you know, the,
• 2:03:02
  the versions we saw on television once had slightly
• 2:03:05
  washed out colours and it looked like the palette was just kind
• 2:03:07
  of like, but that's because it was old film stock that they,
• 2:03:10
  they really ping now. They're so beautiful.
• 2:03:12
  And yet the pictures taken from the films in this book don't
• 2:03:15
  ping. They, they look washed out.
• 2:03:17
  They look kind of grainy. Something's been done wrong
• 2:03:19
  however, and if you want some love, beautiful pictures from
• 2:03:22
  the film. If you want some lovely
• 2:03:23
  colourless colourizations, I. I sort of feel like they're
• 2:03:26
  worthy of a book on their own. I would part with lots of my own
• 2:03:31
  money for. Sell it as that.
• 2:03:32
  Yeah, sell it as a picture book. Yeah, they're selling it as a as
• 2:03:37
  a deed, as a the official story of the films and well, let me go
• 2:03:44
  through the problems. The 1st is that it's, it's,
• 2:03:47
  it's, it's so slim. And when you actually look at
• 2:03:50
  kind of how much writing there isn't in there, it's, it's a,
• 2:03:55
  it's a, it's, it's not a very substantial book at all.
• 2:04:02
  And these are films that haven't been properly, I mean, they,
• 2:04:04
  there are articles that we know, there's lots of information
• 2:04:06
  about these films because we know that Matthew Sweet wrote a
• 2:04:08
  fascinating article in Doctor Who magazine a year or so ago, a
• 2:04:13
  really interesting article about the third film that wasn't made.
• 2:04:16
  You know, there's a whole chapter in that.
• 2:04:19
  And I sort of feel like as Doctor Who fans, we have rightly
• 2:04:24
  grown accustomed to a quality of writing.
• 2:04:29
  Many Doctor Who fans are genuine academics.
• 2:04:32
  The, the, the articles that have been printed in the, the
• 2:04:34
  official magazine over the years are, you know, include some
• 2:04:38
  really serious and, and thoroughly researched writing
• 2:04:43
  on, on the series, The, the, the, the likes of Andrew Pixley
• 2:04:46
  and the, the stuff he's dug up. But all.
• 2:04:48
  But then you look at the, the unofficial publications and the
• 2:04:52
  stuff that Doctor Who fans make is really phenomenally good.
• 2:04:58
  Speaking of someone who reads occasionally academic tomes,
• 2:05:02
  they're comparable and sometimes better and often more
• 2:05:05
  accessible. The writing about Doctor Who
• 2:05:07
  that we have grown to expect is really excellent.
• 2:05:10
  And I think that's the bar. And I had expected to have
• 2:05:13
  something that at least showed a bit of effort.
• 2:05:16
  But what we have here and as I was reading, it was like, well,
• 2:05:18
  I recognize that quote and I recognize this.
• 2:05:21
  It's all from the Bloody Dalek, mainly a documentary like, and
• 2:05:24
  when you get to the end, there's a bibliography.
• 2:05:26
  It's got about six sources on it.
• 2:05:28
  It's not a properly researched text.
• 2:05:31
  There are primary sources that haven't been dug up that, you
• 2:05:34
  know, the whole, all of the paperwork surrounding these
• 2:05:37
  films that that exist is still there for the for the
• 2:05:40
  plundering, for the writing about.
• 2:05:41
  And instead we've got this lazily cobbled together book
• 2:05:44
  from different sources. So fundamentally it's a failure
• 2:05:47
  to to write anything interesting on you about those films.
• 2:05:51
  It's also really badly written. I mean, it looks like not not an
• 2:05:55
  editorial decision has been made here.
• 2:05:57
  It reads like a stream of consciousness.
• 2:05:59
  Like it's bonkers how like Barry Ingham's biography is suddenly
• 2:06:03
  interrupted by a a paragraph about missing episodes, as if it
• 2:06:08
  just occurred to him to write about missing episodes of Doctor
• 2:06:11
  Who and oh, I better get this in.
• 2:06:12
  You're supposed to be writing about Barry Ingham.
• 2:06:14
  What's it doing here to have a box out, have a different
• 2:06:17
  chapter? It's missing.
• 2:06:23
  It's it's missing sense in places.
• 2:06:28
  It's like he's he's gathered sources but not properly
• 2:06:31
  understood. Here's an here's an example.
• 2:06:34
  What does this mean? OK, so he's writing about the
• 2:06:36
  the cereal packet campaign where one boy got to win a Dalek.
• 2:06:41
  OK. And it says ABC magazine
• 2:06:44
  revealed the winner, 10 year old John Streeter quote, who was
• 2:06:48
  presented with his formidable prize at AB CS Astoria Cinema,
• 2:06:51
  Brighton. But as John lived 25 miles away,
• 2:06:54
  the journey was accomplished by Van.
• 2:06:57
  Right. What?
• 2:06:58
  What journey? What are you?
• 2:07:00
  What are you talking about? But as John lives 25 miles away,
• 2:07:04
  his his journey he had to travel by why would he have to travel
• 2:07:07
  by Van the bright? It doesn't make any sense.
• 2:07:11
  By Van Oh, bless him, dismal. Over the page, you see a
• 2:07:18
  clipping, the actual picture of the clipping.
• 2:07:20
  And it turns out it's missed out a vital clause in the middle
• 2:07:24
  because it's a jokey caption to a picture that shows him pushing
• 2:07:28
  a Dalek. And it says, here is John
• 2:07:31
  pushing his Dalek home. But actually, as he lives 25
• 2:07:34
  miles away, the journey had to be accomplished by Van.
• 2:07:37
  That's why it had to be taken by Van.
• 2:07:40
  You've. Quoted this thing, but you've
• 2:07:43
  cut out the thing that makes this sentence make sense.
• 2:07:46
  It's also full of mistakes. The book actually wrong in
• 2:07:50
  places. He credits Bill Constable, the
• 2:07:52
  designer of the first film with the white interior doors and
• 2:07:55
  says, well they carried over to the Matt Smith era, but the
• 2:07:58
  first one doesn't have white interior doors.
• 2:08:00
  That's the second film which was designed by George Evans, I
• 2:08:04
  think. And and he then credits Bill
• 2:08:06
  comfortable with the St. John's Ambulance Insignia on the
• 2:08:09
  TARDIS, which as we know is in the original TARDIS prop from
• 2:08:12
  the series. So he he's not even done his
• 2:08:15
  basic research. There's a there's a bonkers bit
• 2:08:18
  where I was like, hasn't even seen the film.
• 2:08:20
  He's describing the comic adaptation of the first film,
• 2:08:23
  and he says the comic has some anomalies.
• 2:08:26
  For example, Doctor Who has a mustache in this version.
• 2:08:31
  Wow. He's got a mustache in What have
• 2:08:33
  you been watching? Have you have you watched the
• 2:08:36
  wrong Peter Cushing film? Because he's definitely got a
• 2:08:40
  mustache in the it's sort. Of there a Hammer horror with
• 2:08:43
  Daleks in it I'm not aware of. So look, I just think this, I
• 2:08:48
  think we deserve a really, really good book about the Dalek
• 2:08:53
  films. I'm, I am, I'm so aware of the
• 2:08:58
  labour of love that so many Doctor Who publications, I'm, I
• 2:09:01
  mean, awe of the stuff that is coming out, the unofficial
• 2:09:04
  publications, some of the official ones, the, you know,
• 2:09:08
  the, the, I mean, I'm sure I'm not the only person just
• 2:09:12
  desperately waiting for Toby Haydock's Equator Mass books to
• 2:09:16
  be published, but taking an age because he is going into the
• 2:09:20
  level of detail that I expect from that.
• 2:09:21
  And I know that when that book comes out, it is going to be so
• 2:09:24
  thrillingly detailed. He wants to get it so right,
• 2:09:28
  doesn't he? What I mean, I was going to say
• 2:09:30
  to you, Haydock should write this book and he'd take years to
• 2:09:34
  do it, but it would be worth it. It would be worth it.
• 2:09:38
  That's the that's the book I want.
• 2:09:39
  And who knows, maybe I shall write it myself one day.
• 2:09:42
  But this is not it. And it's a shoddy, haphazard,
• 2:09:46
  poorly edited excuse for a book. And, and the the thing that made
• 2:09:51
  me most apoplectic was when I went on to Goodreads to leave my
• 2:09:55
  review, I noticed that this I just had a row of five star
• 2:09:59
  reviews. It had a five star review from
• 2:10:01
  the author himself. No.
• 2:10:04
  Five star reviews by people who only appear to review John
• 2:10:09
  Walsh's other books. Now I think that's either these
• 2:10:13
  people are slightly disturbed because nobody should be reading
• 2:10:16
  only books by one person, or all these people don't really exist.
• 2:10:19
  I don't know which is all their friends and family.
• 2:10:21
  I don't care which it is. There's something, there's
• 2:10:24
  something dishonest about a book that has been knocked out so
• 2:10:28
  carelessly and yet is garnering all these five star reviews.
• 2:10:31
  So that's that for the moment. That's my number one worst
• 2:10:35
  Doctor Who book of all time. You know, I'd hate to commit a
• 2:10:38
  crime with you around, you know, the level of forensic detail you
• 2:10:42
  go into. You know, I, I did love the
• 2:10:45
  pictures. I did.
• 2:10:46
  And I remember I, I got it as a gift and I was reading it on the
• 2:10:49
  train on the way home. And I think I was even sending
• 2:10:51
  you some pictures from some of the colourised ones, some of the
• 2:10:54
  full page ones. I couldn't read the thing.
• 2:10:56
  I couldn't read it. Like I, I just gave up reading
• 2:10:59
  the text because I was like, I know this.
• 2:11:04
  Yeah. Madness.
• 2:11:05
  Well, well done. That was that was the angriest
• 2:11:10
  number one I have yet heard. But let's end on a positive
• 2:11:16
  note. That was your choice to end on a
• 2:11:18
  positive note. I'm so happy to be positive
• 2:11:21
  about this and it's a bit of a cheat really.
• 2:11:24
  The best Doctor Who book of all time, as voted by Mr. James
• 2:11:31
  Locke. Off you go.
• 2:11:33
  It's the Dalek Chronicles, which so this is the original Daleks.
• 2:11:40
  This is why it's a cheat, because the Doctor doesn't even
• 2:11:42
  really feature in this. But it's Doctor, isn't it?
• 2:11:46
  And this was originally published in whatever was it?
• 2:11:53
  It was the Thunderbirds, it was the Jerry Anderson publication.
• 2:11:58
  Was it TV Century 21? That's it.
• 2:12:00
  And they were single, single page Dalek stories, which Doctor
• 2:12:05
  Who Magazine show it out as a special.
• 2:12:09
  I'm trying to remember what year it was.
• 2:12:12
  Does it say in here 1994? I got this.
• 2:12:16
  I mean, as you can see, it's falling apart now.
• 2:12:18
  Yeah. Well, I mean it looks older than
• 2:12:20
  that. Well, the, so the the picture
• 2:12:22
  has the picture on the cover is by Ron Turner, I think who was
• 2:12:29
  The Who was one of the Yeah, Ron Turner has who It was the artist
• 2:12:34
  who wrote the kind of the the final batch of comic strips was
• 2:12:38
  commissioned to do a cover. There's I mean, this has been
• 2:12:40
  recently reprinted again by Doctor Who Magazine and
• 2:12:43
  instantly sold out. I don't know why they don't do a
• 2:12:45
  reprint of it because everyone ought to own this.
• 2:12:48
  Mechanoids on the cover there. It is mechanoids.
• 2:12:51
  Oh wow. And, and what they've done with
• 2:12:55
  the recent reprinting of it as they've gone back to the
• 2:12:58
  original artwork whenever possible.
• 2:12:59
  And they've, and it's just, I mean, it's like the whole thing
• 2:13:02
  is being restored to such a high quality and it's so beautiful to
• 2:13:07
  look at. But even in this form, when I
• 2:13:09
  got this, I remember reading this again and again.
• 2:13:12
  And it's very like the storytelling is very old
• 2:13:14
  fashioned. There's a lot of kind of
• 2:13:16
  narration. So it's, it's a, a description
• 2:13:20
  with a picture showing what's going on.
• 2:13:22
  And particularly the first, the first few comics are very kind
• 2:13:25
  of old fashioned. No one quite knows who wrote
• 2:13:27
  them. I think it's, it's, I think
• 2:13:31
  thought that David Whitaker wrote them for the most part.
• 2:13:36
  Oh, David Whitaker and Alan Fennell accredited.
• 2:13:39
  Maybe, maybe that maybe that is something that is known.
• 2:13:44
  I think there's some kind of mystery over who wrote some of
• 2:13:47
  the dialect material from the time.
• 2:13:48
  But what you can see here is, I mean, it's the first, that's the
• 2:13:51
  first one. That's the making of the Daleks.
• 2:13:54
  Oh, look at the colours, it's beautiful.
• 2:13:57
  And it's quite an old fashioned artistic style.
• 2:13:59
  Look at the look at the style of the Daleks on this as well.
• 2:14:02
  They, they kind of look slightly like they've been thrown
• 2:14:05
  together in a, in a, you know, out of junk.
• 2:14:08
  They look like that Dalek from Resolution.
• 2:14:11
  Very much like that Dalek, actually.
• 2:14:12
  They and this it fits with this idea of these prototype Daleks.
• 2:14:17
  And the first page has the story of the neutron bomb and, and
• 2:14:22
  then as, as it develops, you've got the story of some survivors
• 2:14:26
  from the neutron bomb. And, and then the the stories, I
• 2:14:31
  mean, they were just a single page at the back of TV Century
• 2:14:33
  21. But they are, they are broken up
• 2:14:34
  into stories and they encounter people from different planets.
• 2:14:39
  And there, there are various, but the Daleks are the heroes of
• 2:14:41
  this. That's the weird thing is you're
• 2:14:43
  reading in this kind of, in the way that kids wanted to be
• 2:14:45
  Daleks in the playground. You're rooting for the Daleks to
• 2:14:48
  win. How?
• 2:14:48
  Does that work? It kind of really doesn't look
• 2:14:52
  they've got characters because you've got the famously the
• 2:14:54
  Emperor Dalek with the the big golden blow for a head.
• 2:15:00
  Oh yes, he's gorgeous, isn't he? Absolutely.
• 2:15:03
  Has he got the ring of lights around the top of his head?
• 2:15:06
  Yes, yeah. And he's kind of like the the
• 2:15:10
  boss. He's the the and there.
• 2:15:11
  But then there are bad Daleks and there are stories where
• 2:15:13
  where there's there's a battle between a Dalek upstart and and
• 2:15:20
  and the Dalek Emperor. It's that what he's called a
• 2:15:22
  Dalek upstart. It's.
• 2:15:24
  Not. Called the Dalek upstart.
• 2:15:26
  Oh, shame. See, they're flying around on
• 2:15:28
  the on their hot. Solo discs, yeah.
• 2:15:32
  So this this, these early comics are drawn by Richard Jennings
• 2:15:39
  and they're beautifully kind of old fashioned.
• 2:15:41
  Then you get a story which is drawn and it's and it's drawn in
• 2:15:45
  the style of the Dalek films. It's the Daleks from the first
• 2:15:48
  Dalek film and that's drawn by Eric Eden and this stuff.
• 2:15:54
  I mean, it's sort of a combination of Dalek films and
• 2:15:57
  Thunderbirds artistry. Look at the art on that.
• 2:16:01
  Oh. My God, you could.
• 2:16:02
  You could put that on your wall. Couldn't.
• 2:16:04
  You totally. Yeah, absolutely beautiful.
• 2:16:07
  Oh, look at that black Dalek down the bottom with his death,
• 2:16:09
  right? Oh my word.
• 2:16:12
  I mean, this is no good for you people listening, but I mean,
• 2:16:15
  I'm seeing, aside from James himself, incandescent beauty on
• 2:16:19
  the page. And then Ron Turner takes over,
• 2:16:22
  and what we get is like pop art. Oh.
• 2:16:24
  Show me, Show me it's. Like Art Deco darling, the whole
• 2:16:29
  thing. Oh my God.
• 2:16:30
  The page explodes because he no longer is constricted to the
• 2:16:34
  frames, but he's throwing pictures into into other frames.
• 2:16:38
  He's telling the story through multiple kind of points of a
• 2:16:42
  single frame and and the whole page is like a piece of art and.
• 2:16:46
  Is that a spaceship or an enormous weapon?
• 2:16:48
  I think. It's a it's a telescope.
• 2:16:54
  Oh my God. Because it got because the 1st
• 2:16:57
  frame. Because the first bit of that
• 2:16:58
  frame is the Daleks underneath the telescope, and then the next
• 2:17:01
  bit of the frame is the telescope actually poking out
• 2:17:03
  into the next part of the story. Of course it's a it's a 1960s
• 2:17:06
  telescope. Sorry, it's the size of a
• 2:17:09
  warehouse, you know. And it's slightly less literal,
• 2:17:13
  a lot less literal. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's
• 2:17:17
  more kind of just. You don't need the words.
• 2:17:21
  Look at those pictures. Oh my gorgeous, the legacy of
• 2:17:25
  these comics. I mean, I just, I devour these.
• 2:17:28
  I read them again and again and again, and the the impact they
• 2:17:32
  had on me. It was represented here by a
• 2:17:35
  series of comics that nobody else has in their collection.
• 2:17:38
  Because these are the continuation of the Dalek strips
• 2:17:42
  that I did myself. The finals, the final episode.
• 2:17:47
  Oh my. God show, please show me that
• 2:17:50
  picture there with the all the Daleks with the yellow
• 2:17:53
  background. Oh, that's.
• 2:17:56
  I couldn't draw it. Gorgeous.
• 2:18:00
  Oh, please take a picture of that to go out with the episode.
• 2:18:02
  Come on, I'll. Happily send you some votes and
• 2:18:05
  and I've got mechanoids in mind as well.
• 2:18:06
  I mean, I've got some quite bloody things going on in mind,
• 2:18:09
  some some horrible deaths. I've got I've got a nasty
• 2:18:12
  extermination on this page. Look.
• 2:18:15
  Oh, you sadist. Oh, you've got that Emperor
• 2:18:19
  Dalek perfect as well. Look at him.
• 2:18:21
  It's just like I've got mechanoids blowing stuff up
• 2:18:24
  here. I've got, you know, Macanoys
• 2:18:26
  fighting dialects. Oh my God.
• 2:18:28
  Mechanizing enormous flame throwers blowing in?
• 2:18:31
  Oh my God, you were inspired. I I mean, how many pages are
• 2:18:37
  there here? It's like kind of 2025 pages
• 2:18:41
  worth. I just carried on.
• 2:18:42
  Where they, where they. How long ago?
• 2:18:46
  Because those look like mean. They look so new.
• 2:18:49
  Well, I've kept, I've kept them very carefully because they took
• 2:18:55
  ages. I simply, I wanted you to say
• 2:18:57
  last year then do you know? That's right, every evening
• 2:19:02
  they've slowed down since I started podcasting with you.
• 2:19:05
  No, I was 15 years old when I did those.
• 2:19:08
  And an absolute labour of love. But clearly I was so inspired
• 2:19:12
  and I've, I've copied the kind of the storytelling style as
• 2:19:15
  well. Like the first one begins, the
• 2:19:17
  Daleks are invading Earth and you've got a box out there with
• 2:19:20
  the Emperor giving an instruction.
• 2:19:22
  Scouting cameras are sent to Earth.
• 2:19:23
  Dalek warriors are prepared. This is all in the style of
• 2:19:26
  these comics, because they were very much like this is what
• 2:19:28
  happens. It present tense.
• 2:19:30
  Here's a picture of it happening.
• 2:19:31
  How? Your panels are laid out as
• 2:19:33
  well, in exactly the same way I mean.
• 2:19:35
  It's, it's funny, I must, I, I think I learned by doing it
• 2:19:39
  because the, the later, the later pages are, are much more
• 2:19:44
  accomplished than the early ones.
• 2:19:47
  And then I do a mechanoid story and they and they stop because
• 2:19:49
  clearly I had to do GCCS at some point.
• 2:19:51
  But yeah. James I I don't say this
• 2:19:53
  lightly. Yeah, you are a staggeringly
• 2:19:56
  creative man, aren't you? Well, I, I had like, I wasn't
• 2:20:00
  really allowed to to have friends or television when I was
• 2:20:03
  younger, so I used to just. You had Daleks and comics.
• 2:20:06
  You didn't need friends. Anyway, you got some friends.
• 2:20:10
  Now you know to talk about Doctor Who with Boy Boy man.
• 2:20:15
  The more I get to know you, the more talents I realize you have.
• 2:20:18
  Well, I didn't become an artist for I mean, I think they're,
• 2:20:21
  they're very amateurish, but they're sort of charmingly
• 2:20:23
  amateurish. And they're clearly, I mean,
• 2:20:25
  here's where where the, the, the Ron Turner artwork comes in.
• 2:20:28
  They're clearly the work of someone who has devoured that
• 2:20:32
  kind of artwork and gone. I wanna do some of that do.
• 2:20:36
  You know what I'm gonna do for you?
• 2:20:37
  Yeah. I'm gonna dig out my old story
• 2:20:40
  that got me an A minus The Prison in Space by Joe Ford.
• 2:20:45
  Loosely as in slavishly based on vengeance and Varos, which I've
• 2:20:51
  mentioned a few times. And I'm going to take you a
• 2:20:53
  picture of the cover of that that I drew and send it across
• 2:20:56
  to you. And maybe you might redefine
• 2:20:59
  considering your artwork amateurish, all right.
• 2:21:04
  OK. Wow.
• 2:21:05
  Oh please. Can we cover those strips one
• 2:21:07
  day, please? Oh yeah.
• 2:21:08
  Definitely. I mean, I love, I think they're
• 2:21:12
  some, some of the most just sort of aesthetically beautiful
• 2:21:15
  Doctor Who products that has ever been put out there.
• 2:21:18
  But I also imagine some of the plots are just absolutely mad as
• 2:21:22
  well. Yeah, yeah.
• 2:21:25
  And the dialects have so much character.
• 2:21:26
  You know, they're, they're the 60s dialects with with names.
• 2:21:29
  I think one of them is called Zag or something.
• 2:21:31
  And that might be the upstart dialect who's called Zag.
• 2:21:35
  His his best mates, his pen power is Crail the Cyberman from
• 2:21:39
  the from the 10th planet. Oh, James Barrowman, that was a
• 2:21:46
  brilliant top and bottom 10 list.
• 2:21:48
  Absolutely. I knew you was going to give me
• 2:21:50
  something good, but that was. Promise that you'll have me back
• 2:21:54
  in in in 70 years time when I've finally finished all of the new
• 2:21:57
  adventures and the Ed as and we can we can redo the list with
• 2:22:01
  with some extra ones. 70 years. How long do you think I'm going
• 2:22:04
  to live? For well, just keep moisturizing
• 2:22:08
  and. Oh, try now look before we go,
• 2:22:13
  yeah, Now I don't realize. And you just say at the start I
• 2:22:16
  disagree with you. Just say you were talking from a
• 2:22:19
  position of ignorance on certain ranges, but you know, just from
• 2:22:24
  the knowledge you have now, will we, you know, once you have to
• 2:22:27
  explore more BBC books, we'll we'll do this again.
• 2:22:30
  But could you please just sort of rank the ranges for me?
• 2:22:33
  I. Knew this was coming.
• 2:22:34
  Yeah, you did, didn't you? It's ready.
• 2:22:37
  So it's the targets, yeah, the new adventures, the missing
• 2:22:42
  adventures, the 8th Doctor adventures, the past Doctor
• 2:22:48
  adventures. I think we need to skip both
• 2:22:51
  Telos and the new series adventures because I don't think
• 2:22:54
  you apart from one or. 2 Not from them really.
• 2:22:57
  I mean, I think yeah, new series adventures strike me as written
• 2:23:01
  for a different audience to to me, which has been said before.
• 2:23:06
  Are we not including the graphic novels in that?
• 2:23:08
  Oh, please put the graphic novels in.
• 2:23:11
  I know what you're number one's going to be now.
• 2:23:16
  It's hard, isn't it? I mean, I'm so bottom of my list
• 2:23:19
  then is the, the the the PDAs. It just feels to me like no one
• 2:23:23
  really cared about them very much.
• 2:23:27
  I may be back. Though I'm sure there are good
• 2:23:30
  ones that are scattered amongst them.
• 2:23:32
  But it really felt like they were leaning heavily into kind
• 2:23:34
  of, they've got a new Doctor now, what are they going to do
• 2:23:37
  with that? And I was, I was very aware like
• 2:23:39
  particularly kind of from the burning onwards that they were
• 2:23:42
  taking, I think, I think probably by the time the burning
• 2:23:45
  came out, I would have been much more minded to explore those
• 2:23:48
  books. Except I think I had no time.
• 2:23:51
  It was around the time when I was at university and I just
• 2:23:53
  wasn't reading very much at all if it wasn't kind of in a stuffy
• 2:23:57
  library somewhere, you know, from my dissertation.
• 2:24:00
  So yeah, the PD as never had that.
• 2:24:03
  No one ever talked about them in that way.
• 2:24:05
  They never, there was never that excitement about it.
• 2:24:06
  So they're bottom of my list. What I would like to do is to
• 2:24:09
  find just a couple of particularly good past doctor
• 2:24:14
  adventures for you to sample so that that'll be my mission going
• 2:24:18
  forwards. OK, I'm going to I'm I'm purely
• 2:24:26
  because I just haven't read many of them.
• 2:24:30
  The Edas come next on my lists. You've got to bear in mind that
• 2:24:36
  the weight of the weight of the two Job Meal Dalek books is
• 2:24:40
  informing most of my response. It sort of makes up about 50% of
• 2:24:44
  how many you've read as well. You know, if we're including the
• 2:24:48
  Infinity Doctors on, we're not sure whether that is an EDI.
• 2:24:51
  We'll revisit this this conversation maybe after I've
• 2:24:54
  read The Scarlet Empress next See, Once Upon a time I'd have
• 2:25:03
  put the new adventures quite near the top, but there's
• 2:25:08
  possibly that is starting to wonder whether the missing
• 2:25:11
  adventures for all that they felt like kind of the the
• 2:25:15
  secondary range at the time. They're very sexy, aren't they?
• 2:25:18
  The design of the the the, the missing adventures, those black
• 2:25:23
  spines, and and. I think they're older as well.
• 2:25:27
  A lot of. The time, right, and also in a
• 2:25:31
  way that I think was probably quite countercultural at the
• 2:25:34
  time. They're not afraid to recreate
• 2:25:38
  the feel of an era which at a time when everyone was trying to
• 2:25:43
  do something kind of new and trendy and and Doctor, you know,
• 2:25:50
  it was sort of a time of doctor to who being, you know, that's
• 2:25:52
  what that's why the new adventures were treated with
• 2:25:54
  much more reverence because they were going where Doctor would
• 2:25:57
  never gone before. I think there's something kind
• 2:25:59
  of subtly, much more radical about doing, you know, three
• 2:26:06
  stories in the style of season 17.
• 2:26:11
  So I'm going to say the new adventures next and followed by
• 2:26:17
  the missing adventures. OK.
• 2:26:21
  And then top 2, I think the graphic novels come next because
• 2:26:32
  for all that, I think the 8th Doctor ones are absolutely
• 2:26:37
  stunning and as good as it gets. I've read some of the others
• 2:26:41
  too, and they're not all as good as that.
• 2:26:44
  They're they're pretty honey. I'm going to talk about the ones
• 2:26:46
  Princeton, Doctor Who magazine. It's so exciting.
• 2:26:48
  It's so exciting that we had artists and writers with the,
• 2:26:55
  you know, with the, the careers ahead of them, they turned out
• 2:26:58
  to have as well. You know, those early Tom Baker
• 2:27:00
  ones are fabulous, but they don't all land.
• 2:27:03
  They don't all make sense. There's some, there's some weak,
• 2:27:05
  there's some really weak stuff as well.
• 2:27:06
  There are points where they just run out of time or money or
• 2:27:09
  artists and and it feels a bit kind of desperate.
• 2:27:13
  Some of those early 7th Doctor ones are very bizarre.
• 2:27:16
  Absolutely. Like no idea what they're doing
• 2:27:19
  or where they're going. And then that kind of bland
• 2:27:21
  period where they're sort of thinking, well, they're not
• 2:27:24
  making any new Doctor Who, so we might as well do all the
• 2:27:27
  Doctors, which was probably kind of a sensible idea in some ways.
• 2:27:33
  Like it's, you know, you've got fans from all eras, but it
• 2:27:37
  straight away robs the strip of any kind of sense of moving
• 2:27:41
  forward. Immediately, yeah.
• 2:27:44
  Yeah. So there are some weak areas,
• 2:27:48
  but some brilliant ones as well. I'm putting the target looks at
• 2:27:52
  the top of my list. They are of generally such a
• 2:27:58
  high quality. They taught so many people to
• 2:28:02
  read. They were the way that I
• 2:28:03
  experienced most Doctor Who for the first time.
• 2:28:07
  They were certainly the way that I experienced most Doctors for
• 2:28:10
  the first time from the classic era.
• 2:28:13
  They fired my imagination from a very early age in a way that I
• 2:28:20
  feel that inspired me to write stories then.
• 2:28:23
  And the legacy of that, it's to this day that I still write
• 2:28:27
  stories. And as we've discussed, the
• 2:28:32
  target books also as a range became quite ambitious and did
• 2:28:37
  some stuff that you wouldn't expect from a range which could
• 2:28:43
  absolutely have rested on its laurels had it wanted to.
• 2:28:46
  So for all that there are some slightly lazy Darren Sticks
• 2:28:51
  where he was kind of just kind of writing his 128 pages and
• 2:28:55
  taking the money, I think most of the target books hit a really
• 2:29:01
  high quality for the the demographic for which they are
• 2:29:05
  written. Much like the TV series, there's
• 2:29:09
  such a breadth of what? There's such a diverse pool of
• 2:29:15
  writers in there with very different stuff.
• 2:29:17
  You know, Malcolm Hulk, who's adding layers of depth to
• 2:29:20
  characters or, you know, allowing to be himself to be
• 2:29:25
  angrier than they perhaps portrayed his stories on screen.
• 2:29:30
  David Whitaker. That's a real mastery of
• 2:29:32
  language, beautifully written stories that he did for the
• 2:29:36
  targets. Pip and Jane Baker, who we're
• 2:29:39
  soon about to discover have a very idiosyncratic turn of
• 2:29:44
  phrase, but delightful. Yeah.
• 2:29:46
  And then those, I mean, coming straight after them, you know,
• 2:29:49
  the Ian Briggs, the Ben Eronovich's, the Mark Platts.
• 2:29:55
  It is a. There's lots to explore there,
• 2:29:58
  isn't there? And isn't it thrilling that a
• 2:30:01
  range that's meeting that market can have that amount of
• 2:30:09
  diversity? Because there would have been
• 2:30:12
  kids who only bought Doctor Who books.
• 2:30:14
  And if all you had on your shelf, how exciting the on your
• 2:30:20
  shelf, you're not just getting the same thing.
• 2:30:22
  You're actually experiencing a whole range of writing styles
• 2:30:25
  and you're going to have some books on there that are too
• 2:30:28
  difficult for you. If you like the Terrance Dixons,
• 2:30:30
  you might find the Malcolm Hulk's too difficult, but
• 2:30:32
  they're books that you can grow up and read.
• 2:30:34
  I think that's I think that is really fulfilling its mission as
• 2:30:38
  a range that has got real value. And if you're a child who only
• 2:30:41
  had Doctor books on your shelf, you didn't mean that you had a
• 2:30:45
  limited bookshelf. As opposed to say, I don't know,
• 2:30:49
  imagine your parents just bought you Christies or just bought you
• 2:30:52
  Flemings, you know, Bond books or something like that.
• 2:30:55
  You know, you're kind of getting the same thing time after time
• 2:30:58
  after time in different places. But yeah, do you know what?
• 2:31:02
  It's so interesting with the Targets because I'm not saying
• 2:31:06
  it's an age thing because there's been a massive variety
• 2:31:10
  of age groups doing their top and bottom 10 list.
• 2:31:13
  But it does seem to be the people that rate them at the top
• 2:31:18
  are the ones that got them young.
• 2:31:22
  And people that that first came into the books via the 8th
• 2:31:27
  Doctor books or the New Adventures or something like
• 2:31:29
  that. They really because they came in
• 2:31:32
  with really sort of dense, complicated books that they
• 2:31:36
  consider the targets are bit basic and.
• 2:31:40
  Of course it's and of course it's to do when with with when
• 2:31:44
  you first encounter and, and have I been a plus a few years
• 2:31:47
  younger, there would have been a whole load more Doctor Who
• 2:31:49
  available on video. And that's probably how I would
• 2:31:53
  have experienced it first. It it is to do with the fact
• 2:31:56
  that I I grew up in this what now turned out to be a golden
• 2:32:02
  time when Doctor Who wasn't on the telly, but it was all over
• 2:32:06
  the bookshelves. James, I've got to say it was an
• 2:32:10
  absolute pleasure to hear that list and a load of surprises,
• 2:32:15
  but frankly one of my favourite moments in podcasting ever when
• 2:32:19
  you brandished your Dalek scripts from when you were.
• 2:32:23
  But was it 15? Absolutely gorgeous.
• 2:32:27
  You saved the best till last, didn't you?
• 2:32:30
  Well, that's the That is very much in the nature of a top 10,
• 2:32:32
  isn't it? Well.
• 2:32:33
  I think you were sort of dramatist, you know, a musician,
• 2:32:35
  somebody that wants to end on a on a dramatic note.
• 2:32:40
  We've alluded to it a couple of times in the episode, but where
• 2:32:43
  exactly are we heading next? We've got two books to talk
• 2:32:46
  about, one one-on-one and one with our other book clubbers.
• 2:32:50
  Yeah, so with the other book clubbers, we are going to be
• 2:32:53
  looking at the writer's tale, which is a very thick tome,
• 2:32:58
  isn't? It it is.
• 2:33:00
  Although I always read it fast, I always read it pretty.
• 2:33:03
  Fast, it's very readable. It is very it's very
• 2:33:05
  entertaining as well. But before before that solo, I
• 2:33:11
  shall be tackling Pip and Jane's magnum opus from what I've
• 2:33:17
  heard, which is their novelization of Time and the
• 2:33:22
  Rani. You know, you've been so kind to
• 2:33:25
  me, you know, reading out excerpts of the best and worst
• 2:33:29
  Doctor Who books. I feel like I need to give you a
• 2:33:32
  sneak preview into the delight of what you're going to be
• 2:33:37
  reading going ahead. Is that OK?
• 2:33:40
  I can't wait. OK, yeah, let me just find
• 2:33:43
  something really, really juicy in the steamy, feted funk an
• 2:33:48
  occasional Russell added to the macabre atmosphere.
• 2:33:52
  Oh, no, that's not good enough. Hang on, wait.
• 2:33:54
  Steamy feted bug. Though Oh, this is my favorite.
• 2:33:57
  Really. I mean, what the hell does this
• 2:33:59
  mean? Pell Mell comma running a scree
• 2:34:04
  comma he plunged into the lake. Pell Mell, What does that mean?
• 2:34:11
  I think of it just means kind of slightly slightly haphazardly,
• 2:34:16
  but a lesser writer would think twice before using the phrase
• 2:34:21
  Pell Mell with a character called Mel but not Pip and Jane
• 2:34:28
  Baker. They are going for it.
• 2:34:32
  Well, the last four I will leave you with.
• 2:34:35
  Yeah. And this truly, you know,
• 2:34:37
  because there is a romantic angle to time in the Rani,
• 2:34:40
  obviously, and this sentence may give you a small indication of
• 2:34:45
  what you're about to enjoy with the tenderness of an obscene
• 2:34:49
  lover. Urac's lips drew closer to Mel's
• 2:34:54
  face. What do you think?
• 2:34:58
  Pornography and Doctor Who again, aren't we?
• 2:34:59
  Yeah, I know. And there's honestly, there's
• 2:35:02
  bulging organs. And honestly, what I said about
• 2:35:05
  Michael Dorani, all right, about just read it with an eye for the
• 2:35:08
  double entendre, OK, until then. I can't wait.
• 2:35:14
  Thank you so much for one, one for reading these books, being a
• 2:35:18
  part of this book club, for putting the time and effort into
• 2:35:21
  making this brilliant list. Thank you very much.
• 2:35:25
  Thank you as always for having me, it's been great fun.
• 2:35:29
  And I will. Hello everybody.
• 2:35:31
  As this is James's top 10 and bottom 10 books episode, he has
• 2:35:37
  very, very kindly agreed to allow me to add on one of his
• 2:35:42
  short stories from his own podcast, Neurotic Literature,
• 2:35:46
  one that I absolutely adore. James is a very creative man and
• 2:35:51
  a writer of short stories that have A and edged them.
• 2:35:57
  You know, they're funny and they're quirky and they're quite
• 2:36:01
  dark sometimes as well. This is one of my absolute
• 2:36:04
  favourites from his podcast. But they're all fantastic.
• 2:36:08
  So please head on over to Neurotic Literature and see what
• 2:36:12
  Jones is doing over there. You will love it.
• 2:36:16
  Anyway, here is an exclusive for the Hamster edition Rectangles.
• 2:36:27
  Neurotic Literature by James Lark This story, Rectangles
• 2:36:41
  folklore, tells of a town where everyone was a mathematician.
• 2:36:47
  Each person was an expert, whether in arithmetic, algebra,
• 2:36:51
  geometry, or topology, because for centuries these skills have
• 2:36:55
  been passed from generation to generation, and every child was
• 2:36:58
  brought up an expert as a matter of course.
• 2:37:02
  Being mathematicians, they were careful to allot different
• 2:37:05
  skills from birth according to what was needed.
• 2:37:08
  It wouldn't do, they agreed, for everyone to be able to solve
• 2:37:11
  quadratic equations if nobody knew how to put up shelves at
• 2:37:14
  the correct angle. So each area of maths was
• 2:37:18
  represented by an equal percentage of mathematicians as
• 2:37:21
  decreed by the statisticians. That is the kind of rigorous
• 2:37:26
  approach they took to everything.
• 2:37:28
  Measurements were very precisely measured, definitions very
• 2:37:31
  precisely defined, and costs very precisely calculated.
• 2:37:35
  The layout of the streets and buildings had an elegant
• 2:37:38
  geometrical form. Nobody was ever even half a
• 2:37:41
  minute late for a meeting, and because they were also good at
• 2:37:44
  accounting, they were always comfortably wealthy.
• 2:37:47
  And yes, the shelves were invariably at a perfect angle,
• 2:37:51
  though being mathematicians, they understood that perfection
• 2:37:54
  itself was subject to a tiny and acceptable level of
• 2:37:58
  inconsistency. If that all sounds rather dull
• 2:38:02
  and clinical to you, then you must understand that to them it
• 2:38:05
  was a way of life, a birthright. Even.
• 2:38:09
  As soon as the statisticians had decided the branch of
• 2:38:12
  mathematics in which a child was to become an expert, that child
• 2:38:15
  would be given educational toys to encourage and develop their
• 2:38:19
  understanding of the topic. You know, the sort of thing an
• 2:38:22
  Abacus, building blocks carved with symbols for constructing
• 2:38:26
  imaginary numbers, or that game where wooden shapes have to be
• 2:38:30
  pushed through the correct hole in a box.
• 2:38:34
  This story is about a child called Simplex who was going to
• 2:38:38
  grow up to be an expert in topology and was therefore the
• 2:38:41
  happy recipient of the Wooden Shape game.
• 2:38:45
  One day, when he was still very young, Simplex was pushing
• 2:38:48
  shapes through the little holes and managed, quite by accident,
• 2:38:51
  to fit the square brick through the rectangular hole.
• 2:38:56
  His parents, who were watching when it happened, were alarmed.
• 2:39:00
  They knew that pushing squares through the rectangle hole was
• 2:39:03
  the kind of thing that could lead to sloppy thinking, the
• 2:39:05
  kind of imprecision that could threaten the principles their
• 2:39:08
  town was quite literally built on.
• 2:39:11
  So they removed the square brick from the box and gave it back to
• 2:39:14
  Simplex, telling him to try again.
• 2:39:17
  A square is not a rectangle, they said.
• 2:39:21
  Poor Simplex was too young to understand this, and I'm afraid
• 2:39:25
  his parents were forced to punish him on more than one
• 2:39:27
  occasion when they caught him putting the square brick through
• 2:39:30
  the rectangle hole. He soon learned an important
• 2:39:34
  lesson, which was to put the square brick through the
• 2:39:36
  rectangular hole only when his parents weren't looking.
• 2:39:41
  The years wore on, and Simplex grew up to be a fine
• 2:39:45
  mathematician, one who specialized in the study of.
• 2:39:48
  Quadrilaterals. He was fascinated by squares and
• 2:39:53
  rectangles and continued to explore them in the light of his
• 2:39:56
  expert understanding of low dimensional manifolds and
• 2:39:59
  uniformisation theorems. The attitude of his parents had
• 2:40:03
  taught him to be cautious when it came to challenging the
• 2:40:06
  town's ancient mathematical knowledge.
• 2:40:08
  But one day, after years of complex analysis and elementary
• 2:40:12
  proofs, after checking and double checking, one day when he
• 2:40:16
  was absolutely certain, he made an announcement.
• 2:40:21
  A square, he said, is a rectangle.
• 2:40:26
  The townspeople were outraged. We've had a perfect
• 2:40:29
  understanding of rectangles since mathematics was first
• 2:40:32
  invented, they angrily told him. What right do you have to
• 2:40:35
  challenge it? I have spent my entire life
• 2:40:38
  working with quadrilaterals, Simplex pointed out.
• 2:40:41
  That does not entitle you to turn the world of topology on
• 2:40:44
  its head, they cried. I'm not exactly turning it on
• 2:40:47
  its head, Simplex explained, getting out a blackboard so that
• 2:40:51
  he could show them. You see, a rectangle is a four
• 2:40:55
  sided shape in which all the angles are 90°.
• 2:40:58
  Now a square. He drew a square.
• 2:41:01
  A square is also a four sided shape with 490° angles.
• 2:41:06
  The equality of its sides doesn't stop it from being a
• 2:41:09
  rectangle. This demonstration caused great
• 2:41:13
  consternation amongst the crowd, many of whom was so offended by
• 2:41:16
  the logical proof in front of them that they had to turn their
• 2:41:18
  back on it. Abstract nonsense, shouted 1
• 2:41:22
  mathematician and the crowd took up the cry, declaring Simplex's
• 2:41:25
  hypothesis to be unnatural and. Irregular.
• 2:41:30
  It fell to Generic, one of the elders of the town, to restore
• 2:41:34
  order. Now then, young Simplex, he said
• 2:41:37
  with a beneficent smile. Simplex found this rather
• 2:41:40
  patronizing, because he wasn't even that young by then,
• 2:41:42
  certainly not relative to the mean, which Generic ought to
• 2:41:45
  have known, being a mathematician.
• 2:41:47
  It's a fine conjecture and a compelling argument, he
• 2:41:51
  continued. But it won't do at all.
• 2:41:55
  You see, if we begin defining squares as rectangles and
• 2:41:59
  rectangles as squares, Simplex coughed politely.
• 2:42:02
  Actually, he explained, rectangles aren't squares on
• 2:42:06
  account of the variable length of their sides.
• 2:42:08
  Oh, so a square gets to be a rectangle, but a rectangle can't
• 2:42:12
  be a square, shouted someone in the crowd.
• 2:42:14
  So much for equality. It's not about equality,
• 2:42:17
  explained Simplex. It is about mathematical sense.
• 2:42:20
  Now, now, generics, said reprovingly.
• 2:42:23
  That's enough arguing. He gave Simplex an encouraging
• 2:42:26
  smile. I know that you're only arguing
• 2:42:29
  for squares to be considered rectangles, but don't you see
• 2:42:34
  that before long, other people will start saying rectangles are
• 2:42:39
  squares as well? Then we'll have to say that
• 2:42:42
  triangles are rectangles will start including circles and
• 2:42:46
  trapezoids and polygons under the same heading.
• 2:42:49
  There's no knowing where it will end.
• 2:42:52
  He patted Simplex on the shoulder.
• 2:42:55
  It might sound like the right thing to do, but we'd be
• 2:42:59
  changing the acceptable level of inconsistency in our definition
• 2:43:03
  of perfection, and that will cause problems when it comes to
• 2:43:07
  putting shelves. Up at the correct.
• 2:43:09
  Angle Generic asked the crowd to applaud the hard work Simplex
• 2:43:14
  had put in, saying that mathematics was worthless
• 2:43:17
  without the occasional discussion.
• 2:43:19
  Then he told them to disperse, happy in the knowledge that
• 2:43:22
  their wisdom had been challenged and upheld and was all the
• 2:43:26
  stronger for it. And with that, he believed he
• 2:43:29
  had put the whole matter to rest.
• 2:43:32
  In fact, he was put to rest himself.
• 2:43:33
  A week later, so was never any the wiser.
• 2:43:37
  But the seeds of doubt had been sown.
• 2:43:41
  Plenty of people had been listening carefully, looking at
• 2:43:43
  the blackboard and making back of the envelope calculations of
• 2:43:46
  their own. Some of them already felt doubts
• 2:43:49
  about squares and rectangles, and were quite relieved that
• 2:43:51
  somebody had finally been brave enough to say something.
• 2:43:55
  So for every 10 mathematicians who walked away shaking their
• 2:43:59
  heads and muttering about the arrogance of people nowadays,
• 2:44:01
  there was at least one, some thought as many as 1 1/2, who
• 2:44:05
  went away determined to subject rectangles to their own
• 2:44:09
  analysis. Simplex, by the way, had not
• 2:44:12
  expected any of this fuss. He had, remember, spent his
• 2:44:16
  whole life seeing squares differently to everyone else, so
• 2:44:19
  perhaps he was unable to appreciate what a difficult
• 2:44:22
  concept it was for people to take in.
• 2:44:24
  At the end of the day, he had no desire to inspire a revolution
• 2:44:29
  in the insurgent. Rather than the mathematical
• 2:44:32
  sense of the word, he wants to get on with quietly being an
• 2:44:34
  expert, and if nobody else had his understanding then it was no
• 2:44:37
  skin off his nose. But he felt a certain
• 2:44:40
  indignation stirring within him when he discovered that his
• 2:44:43
  parents were refusing to talk to him because of his announcement.
• 2:44:47
  And when a group of mathematicians approached him
• 2:44:49
  and said they were wholeheartedly behind his new
• 2:44:52
  theorem and asked if he would do them the honour of presenting a
• 2:44:55
  series of lectures and debates on the issue, he decided he
• 2:44:58
  would relish the chance to explain his views properly.
• 2:45:02
  After all, nobody could explain them better.
• 2:45:06
  At first, those in favour of the inclusion of squareness into
• 2:45:10
  rectangularity were brushed off with terse disapproval or
• 2:45:13
  mocking laughter. But as the discussion gathered
• 2:45:17
  momentum, others opposed to their views grew alarmed and
• 2:45:20
  became more vocal. They warned the townspeople what
• 2:45:24
  would happen if the definition of rectangularity was changed.
• 2:45:28
  It wasn't, they explained, with dwindling patients, simply a
• 2:45:31
  matter of shelves being put up at irregular angles.
• 2:45:34
  Though everyone owned plenty of books and could surely imagine
• 2:45:36
  the chaos that would 'cause it was important that people
• 2:45:40
  considered the long term effects of adopting this decadent
• 2:45:43
  liberal approach. 4 The critics reminded everyone their entire
• 2:45:48
  outlook depended on rigor and precision.
• 2:45:52
  Without it, people would arrive late for meetings, and the
• 2:45:55
  calculations that ensured their wealth would give way to
• 2:45:57
  guesswork and risk taking. The elegant geometrical
• 2:46:02
  construction of the streets would be eroded, and sooner or
• 2:46:05
  later the buildings would collapse.
• 2:46:07
  They would be left in poverty and chaos, ending centuries of
• 2:46:11
  mathematical expertise. This theorem, this devaluation
• 2:46:16
  of definition, would herald the end for their entire.
• 2:46:19
  Culture. Simplex and his supporters
• 2:46:24
  continue to discuss their views, working late into the night with
• 2:46:27
  protractors and though it was a slow and difficult process,
• 2:46:30
  gradually winning over the townspeople.
• 2:46:33
  Eventually, and by this time you must understand, Simplex was an
• 2:46:36
  old man, barely able to hold a protractor for himself.
• 2:46:40
  But Even so, eventually it was agreed by referendum that a
• 2:46:45
  square was indeed a rectangle and ought to be defined as such.
• 2:46:50
  There were protests, there were petitions, there were letters of
• 2:46:54
  complaint and there were banners painted saying squares do not
• 2:46:57
  fit into the rectangle hole. It was an insult to mathematical
• 2:47:02
  expertise, said the critics. It was an insult to common
• 2:47:05
  sense. It was an insult to the work on
• 2:47:07
  rectangles that their parents and their parents parents had
• 2:47:10
  done. Everyone else accepted the new
• 2:47:13
  definition with ease, and they were delighted to discover that
• 2:47:17
  it enriched both their understanding of mathematics and
• 2:47:20
  their lives. Simplex died a respected
• 2:47:24
  mathematician, loved by many and surrounded by a large family of
• 2:47:28
  expert mathematicians who felt honored to continue his work.
• 2:47:33
  But before he died, he was able to witness buildings that
• 2:47:37
  embraced the rectangularity of squares springing up, giving a
• 2:47:40
  new architectural lease of life to the streets.
• 2:47:44
  There were still those who would not accept it.
• 2:47:47
  They weren't interested in trying to understand why a
• 2:47:50
  square might be considered a rectangle.
• 2:47:52
  Historically speaking, they felt that a square was a square, a
• 2:47:56
  rectangle was a rectangle, and since the two had never been
• 2:48:00
  mixed up in the past, it was quite wrong that they were
• 2:48:02
  getting mixed up. Now.
• 2:48:04
  You wait, they would grumble to anyone who would listen, usually
• 2:48:08
  each other. It's only a matter of time
• 2:48:10
  before somebody stops bothering to ensure their bijections are
• 2:48:13
  surjective. And then where will we be?
• 2:48:16
  They wrote long, vitriolic articles about the hedonism and
• 2:48:20
  egotism that had ruined mathematics forever, until one
• 2:48:24
  by one, they died, grumbling to the last.
• 2:48:29
  So it was that life in the town went on.
• 2:48:32
  Rigorous, precise, punctual and comfortably wealthy shelves
• 2:48:38
  continue to be put up at the correct angle, and the buildings
• 2:48:41
  did not fall down, if all very long.
• 2:48:46
  Everyone had forgotten that squares had ever been treated
• 2:48:49
  differently. Neurotic.
• 2:48:57
  Literature stories about people who are almost certainly worse
• 2:49:02
  off than you are. Hear about the dreadful event
• 2:49:12
  that threatened the fortunes of the people of Houseignet We.
• 2:49:15
  Can't parade her through the streets looking like that, the
• 2:49:18
  Prime whip jibbered. When people come from around the
• 2:49:20
  world to gaze upon her, it will. It will destroy the very essence
• 2:49:24
  of the legend that holds our Kingdom together, cried the
• 2:49:26
  Prince. Think of the misery it will
• 2:49:28
  cause, said the philosopher in chief, shaking his head.
• 2:49:31
  Just looking at her is like being told off really, really
• 2:49:34
  badly. Discover how a dinner engagement
• 2:49:38
  caused Lord Trivet's world to fall apart.
• 2:49:40
  Lord Trivet was aware of some embarrassed rearranging of
• 2:49:43
  napkins by his hosts and a sharp glance from Lady Trivet.
• 2:49:46
  Then of an intermittent high pitched noise which he suddenly
• 2:49:49
  realized was coming from his own mouth, and learned about the
• 2:49:52
  single fateful phrase that destroyed little Mary's entire
• 2:49:56
  life. At this point, Auntie Joyce
• 2:50:00
  became visible. She put down her gin bottle with
• 2:50:04
  a thump and strode towards Mary. She stood with her hands on her
• 2:50:08
  hips and looked down on the child.
• 2:50:11
  Then, with a voice full of fury, she spoke the fatal words.
• 2:50:16
  You're overwrought, Mary. These stories and many others
• 2:50:20
  will be told in neurotic literature.
• 2:50:23
  Have a good chuckle at somebody else's expense, or at the very
• 2:50:26
  least, reassure yourself that things are not as bad as you
• 2:50:30
  thought they were.