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Hamster Book Club - Imaginary Friends by Jacqueline Rayner (featuring Andrew Batty & Luke Sims-Jenkins) · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:01
  On Jerry's 13th birthday, a parcel arrived at their new
• 0:05
  house in Shoreditch, Dr. Bear, care of Jerry Billing, Esquire.
• 0:11
  It contained a sort of tube device, a supersonic Sonic
• 0:16
  screwdriver for a Super Bear, said a note inside.
• 0:21
  No one knew quite what it meant, but Jerry loved it anyway.
• 0:26
  A few years later, another parcel arrived, addressed in
• 0:29
  just the same way. This time it held a very, very
• 0:33
  long scarf and a floppy hat, exactly the right size for the
• 0:37
  teddy. Encouraged by Mr. Chesterton,
• 0:41
  Jerry stayed at school to sit A levels and then went on to
• 0:44
  university. He gained his degree and having
• 0:48
  never been able to choose between history and science,
• 0:51
  combined them to become an archaeologist.
• 0:55
  A brown paper parcel arrived at his archaeological dig in Mexico
• 0:58
  one day, addressed now to Doctor Bear, care of Doctor Jerry
• 1:04
  Billing. That title showed the doctor had
• 1:07
  indeed been keeping an eye on Jerry, just as he'd said he
• 1:10
  would. This time the package contained
• 1:13
  a bare sized cricketing jumper and, for reasons that none of
• 1:17
  them ever found out, a bare sized stick of celery.
• 1:21
  But that had nothing on their bewilderment a few years later,
• 1:24
  just before Jerry's wedding day, when he received a parcel full
• 1:27
  of the most garish, ridiculous clothing ever seen.
• 1:31
  Jerry said even Doctor Bear would be embarrassed to be seen
• 1:34
  out in it. But there was also a little
• 1:36
  brooch in the shape of a cat in the parcel, and Jerry wore it on
• 1:40
  his wedding suit in place of a buttonhole.
• 1:49
  Hamster Book club, the Doctor Who novel review podcast with
• 1:54
  Joe Ford, Andrew Batty, and Luke Sims Jenkins.
• 2:01
  Imaginary Friends by Jacqueline Rayner.
• 2:08
  Hello, welcome back to the Hamster Book Club.
• 2:12
  I'm Andrew Batty and I'm here with the brilliant Joe and Luke,
• 2:17
  and we're here to talk about another Doctor Who book.
• 2:20
  Well, thank you for not calling us losers.
• 2:24
  I was instructed to call you losers, but I did my own thing.
• 2:29
  Thank you very much. Well, I'll say that's the
• 2:30
  politest opening to any episode of Hamster ever.
• 2:33
  You had a nice. Voice for this.
• 2:37
  Oh, thanks. No, no, come on.
• 2:39
  I'm not taking over now. Come on, you guys.
• 2:40
  Tell us all about the book we're going to talk about and what our
• 2:43
  opening question. Is.
• 2:45
  Right. So today we are talking about
• 2:48
  Imaginary Friends by Jacqueline Rayner, which is part of the
• 2:52
  Decades collection which was issued to celebrate the 60th
• 2:56
  anniversary of Doctor Who late last year.
• 2:59
  And our question to start up the episode as I desperately open my
• 3:05
  Twitter messages to word for word.
• 3:10
  Professionalism. Well, he already knew he was
• 3:12
  going to be doing this. 30 seconds.
• 3:14
  Ago 20 seconds ago, right? So our question is, oh God, we
• 3:20
  chat so much, right? What is your favorite thing
• 3:27
  about Jacqueline Rayner as a Doctor Who writer?
• 3:30
  What does she bring that is unique?
• 3:32
  So let's start off with Luke. All right, so she has a couple
• 3:38
  of things that jump out at me. One was I was trying to think
• 3:42
  of, she did one of the really important early big finishes and
• 3:45
  I've got the laptop right in front of me like I do now, easy
• 3:48
  access to all the information on this information superhighway.
• 3:52
  But no, I just sit there scratching my head going, what
• 3:54
  was that really important early big finish?
• 3:56
  She wrote. Really tell you?
• 3:59
  Oh, you know, OK, good. Yeah, I figured it out without
• 4:03
  using the infamy. Yeah, it was the Marion
• 4:05
  Conspiracy. It's like an early audio that
• 4:07
  still holds up. It introduces Evelyn Smyth,
• 4:10
  who's one of the best companions Doctor Who's had in any medium.
• 4:13
  I would. I would put her up there for
• 4:15
  sure. And to me, she's just a Doctor
• 4:20
  Who writer. She's a Doctor Who producer as
• 4:22
  well, who who has a style that she writes in, but also when she
• 4:28
  produces things higher get riders that are completely
• 4:33
  different from myself, which is what I like.
• 4:35
  But the other thing I wanted to mention was Earth World.
• 4:37
  So modern listeners today who want to get into the Ed as the
• 4:44
  burning, I usually say is the great place, greatest place to
• 4:47
  start, except in this day and age, for some reason, end game
• 4:52
  and the Turing Test are expensive.
• 4:56
  Well, the good thing is everyone, there's another really
• 4:58
  good jumping end point right after escape velocity.
• 5:00
  It's called Earth World and Earth World Vanishing Point.
• 5:05
  And the next four or five books on, they're not that expensive.
• 5:08
  Well, next 10 or so books. So you've got a nice swath there
• 5:11
  with a brilliant intro by Jacqueline Rayner.
• 5:14
  And it's because it's the 8th Doctor's first trip in over 100
• 5:19
  years out in time and space. And then you've got.
• 5:21
  Is that Fitz's existential crisis as well?
• 5:24
  That just horrifies me. So she could make me laugh.
• 5:27
  She made me feel horrifying. I think Fitz's existential
• 5:31
  crisis was just a bit creepy for me.
• 5:34
  And and she made me cry twice because I've read this damn
• 5:39
  thing twice. So I hate you, Mr. Andrew.
• 5:42
  You made me. You made me cry.
• 5:43
  Oh. I love him for making us read
• 5:45
  this. This is the best time I've had
• 5:47
  with the Doctor e-books, so I started the book club.
• 5:49
  So she's a writer that get emotion out of me and paint a
• 5:54
  vivid picture. And I can't really, I don't
• 5:57
  picture things in my brain that well.
• 5:58
  I can't form pictures often. It's really hard for me to do
• 6:01
  that. So a Doctor Who's a shorthand
• 6:05
  for me because I know who what the characters look like and all
• 6:08
  that kind of stuff. Jack Rayner was one of the runs,
• 6:12
  the writers that puts a picture in my head.
• 6:15
  All right, I'm right there. I'm there and I'm good to go.
• 6:19
  That's that's a skill. Right, go your turn.
• 6:25
  Me. Hello.
• 6:26
  Well, I I compiled a small list of things I think she does.
• 6:31
  She does like a lot of writers do these things, but she does
• 6:35
  them all and I think she does them in every book.
• 6:38
  And that's what makes her unique is that she just strikes all
• 6:41
  these notes in every book. I think she is effortlessly
• 6:44
  funny like she there's there's jokes per page in her books that
• 6:49
  really make me laugh. Earth World is a great example.
• 6:52
  All of that dreadful misremembered earth history in
• 6:56
  that theme park is absolutely hilarious.
• 6:58
  I think her books are full of heart and they they always make
• 7:02
  you feel that they're often very moving her stories.
• 7:05
  She has a joy of the endless possibilities of the show, so
• 7:10
  she just takes you off in insane directions all the time, and I
• 7:14
  really love that. Most importantly, I think she
• 7:17
  has a really wonderful understanding of people and
• 7:21
  relationships and drawing conclusions, like taking
• 7:26
  characters on a journey throughout a book and drawing
• 7:28
  conclusions. And I just want to highlight
• 7:30
  three scenes. One is Angie in the butterfly
• 7:35
  room at the end of Earth World, where she's trying to come to
• 7:38
  terms with the death of Dave. And the doctor takes her in
• 7:42
  there, and all these butterflies sort of fly off into this
• 7:45
  Meadow. And he just goes, it's life,
• 7:47
  Angie. And she breaks down in tears and
• 7:50
  he holds her. And it's just a beautiful
• 7:52
  moment. The other is Benny giving birth
• 7:56
  in the glass prison where you'll never feel more afraid for
• 8:00
  Bernice than in that scene where she she cannot comprehend this
• 8:05
  insane thing that is happening to her body in this horrific
• 8:10
  setting. It's it's Benny at her most
• 8:13
  vulnerable. And yeah, I just remember
• 8:16
  feeling really tense. Like I felt like I was.
• 8:18
  Giving birth. That's how good that scene was.
• 8:21
  And the last one is Evelyn in tears at the end of Doctor Who
• 8:25
  and the pirates breaking down over Jim, the cabin boy dying
• 8:29
  and the Doctor finding her and her saying how she she's just
• 8:33
  holding him and he's dead in her arms and how she just felt as if
• 8:36
  she if she tries to do CPR and bring him back to life.
• 8:39
  And it's like listening to your Nan crying.
• 8:42
  It's horrible. But she but she does have a way
• 8:45
  of and like the book we're going to cover today per page for
• 8:51
  fields. I think it's one of her most
• 8:54
  successful books ever, but we'll get to that in a minute.
• 8:56
  So I've that's all the things I think she does well.
• 9:00
  But I suppose there's one other opinion we need to hear.
• 9:03
  Yeah, I think the the thing that sprung to my mind first was
• 9:08
  character. She just does character
• 9:10
  exceptionally well and particularly in kind of
• 9:16
  revisiting characters from the TV series and sort of adding
• 9:21
  extra layers to them that feel completely consistent with what
• 9:24
  we saw on TV. But you know, fill in those gaps
• 9:27
  that are sort of 20th century kids show wasn't always, you
• 9:32
  know, painting with all the colours.
• 9:33
  So for things like wolfsbane where you've got the the doctor
• 9:39
  and Sarah kind of reacting to what they think is is Harry's
• 9:42
  death and string, you know, pulling out all of those threads
• 9:46
  from from those relationships. And similarly with Ian and
• 9:49
  Barbara in the transit of Vedas and looking at their
• 9:52
  relationship. But from from having said that,
• 9:56
  actually, you know, looking at the classic series, she actually
• 9:59
  does a very similar thing with a story called Blood and Ice,
• 10:04
  which was a comic, a Doctor Who magazine comic strip, which is a
• 10:08
  12th Doctor and Clara story. Oh Christ.
• 10:12
  Oh really? Go on, keep.
• 10:13
  Going it's really it's so good and it's it does that thing of
• 10:18
  like doing a story that should have been done on the TV and
• 10:22
  Stephen Moffat just clearly got bored of his own ideas by that
• 10:25
  point and went went off and did something else.
• 10:27
  But it addresses the whole there about Clara being split into
• 10:32
  multiple people in series 7. This is the series eight story
• 10:40
  kind of looking back at that. So the Doctor and Clara meet
• 10:43
  another Clara Splinter after all of that has happened.
• 10:48
  And it's this Clara Splinter then kind of comes to understand
• 10:51
  that she's meant to die in order to teach the Doctor about
• 10:53
  something. And it's like the horror of that
• 10:56
  and the kind of trauma of Clara of being split into different
• 10:59
  people, meeting a version of herself.
• 11:01
  And it's like, yes, this should have been the story.
• 11:03
  We had to kind of wrap up all of that season seven stuff and
• 11:08
  angst. But no, we just kind of went off
• 11:09
  into something completely different.
• 11:11
  So I love her for kind of pulling up, pulling those
• 11:13
  threads, which are kind of left dangling a particularly kind of
• 11:18
  emotional threads and, you know, filling in the picture and
• 11:22
  making the characters feel like more complete people.
• 11:25
  I'm absolutely certain, you know, in those Eighth Doctor
• 11:28
  books and we all read them, you know, you, the three of us all
• 11:32
  sort of read those monthly adventures as they were coming
• 11:35
  out where there were character payouts that really worked.
• 11:40
  Like that one I said about before with Angie ringing home
• 11:42
  and crying over Fitz and not Dave to her mother and things
• 11:45
  like that. I swear.
• 11:47
  Because she was one of the range editors, wasn't she at the time?
• 11:50
  Or producer or whatever you got. I swear.
• 11:52
  That's her saying no, come on, we Justin Richards is going.
• 11:55
  Come on. Plot, plot, plot.
• 11:57
  Jack Rayner's going no. Character Character character.
• 12:00
  There's one other thing she does, you know, I didn't mention
• 12:03
  there. And that is something that does
• 12:05
  elude a lot of Big Finish and novel writers.
• 12:10
  And that is how books are books and audios are consistently
• 12:15
  entertaining. Like they're just great fun to
• 12:17
  read and listen to and, you know, like Jesus Christ.
• 12:21
  Will you sit down? I'll, I'll list some names, Nick
• 12:23
  Briggs, Matt Fitton and a few others.
• 12:26
  Will you please sit these people down with a whiteboard and show
• 12:29
  them how to do it, please, Because she makes it look so
• 12:30
  easy. Yeah.
• 12:32
  I think that's the thing of like, even if it's kind of a
• 12:34
  sort of generic sounding story, like something like The Stone
• 12:38
  Rose, if you were reading a blurb of that and it was a
• 12:41
  writer who wasn't Jack Gray and you'd think sounds like another.
• 12:45
  1. Yeah.
• 12:47
  But then you'd see it's by Jack Gray, and you're OK, This is
• 12:49
  going to be good. This is going to be taking that
• 12:51
  idea, doing something really interesting in it with it, and
• 12:54
  the characters are going to feel really authentic.
• 12:55
  So, yeah, even even if it's a kind of standard Doctor Who
• 12:59
  story, you know, if it's a Jack Grayner story, it's going to be
• 13:01
  good. She wrote a couple of the short
• 13:04
  stories I did in a recent anthology, and they were the
• 13:07
  best of the budget by far. And, you know, by their very
• 13:09
  nature of being short stories, they couldn't really impact much
• 13:12
  because they were 20 pages long. How bloody brilliant.
• 13:16
  They were so fun to read. I, I, I just think she's, Yeah,
• 13:21
  I've weirdly overlooked actually, guys, she's written a
• 13:25
  lot. And I think her books and her
• 13:27
  audios are popular. I don't think it's a name that's
• 13:31
  spoken about like the Lance Parkinson, Paul Connells and
• 13:34
  Kate Orman's. And I think she's every bit as
• 13:37
  good. Yeah, I think it's maybe because
• 13:39
  she doesn't do those kind of big arc stories often.
• 13:43
  It's often kind of the just a a stand alone great story, but I
• 13:48
  can't apart from maybe Earthworld, but even that was
• 13:50
  kind of a, you know, kicking off a new era and trying to do a
• 13:53
  semi stand alone story. So yeah, maybe that's why, yeah,
• 13:59
  we she kind of doesn't get kind of wrapped in with those kind
• 14:01
  of. I mean, there's no small
• 14:05
  compliment to say she's really reliable writer.
• 14:09
  Because even the best of what I just mentioned there, the best
• 14:12
  writers you know, alongside her can deliver duds.
• 14:15
  You know, we got we got a no future.
• 14:17
  Did Lance Parkin deliver a dud? I don't think he did, actually.
• 14:21
  But you know, people can. Claire was a grandma now.
• 14:27
  Anne was married to a lovely young man who worked in a bank
• 14:31
  and had three children, Peter, Paul and Tony.
• 14:34
  Jerry and his wife Wendy had Susan first, then Vicki.
• 14:39
  Frankie didn't have children. He lived with a wonderful man
• 14:43
  called Derry, which had bothered Ray for a while until Claire
• 14:46
  talked to him about living happily ever after and how they
• 14:49
  must try not to impede the happiness flowing through other
• 14:52
  people's lives. Then he understood and was OK
• 14:55
  with it. He still occasionally said the
• 14:58
  wrong thing, but his children understood that he was doing his
• 15:01
  best. On the day of Vicky's
• 15:04
  christening, Dr. Baer joined them, carried by Susan, wearing
• 15:08
  a most remarkable jumper decorated with question marks.
• 15:12
  The years passed, but the parcels never stopped.
• 15:16
  A velvet coat arrived just before Jerry's 40th birthday.
• 15:20
  A leather jacket came on the day he was receiving an award for
• 15:23
  his pioneering work on the Aztec civilization.
• 15:27
  At Jerry's 50th birthday party, Doctor Bear came along in a
• 15:30
  smart suit with tiny baseball boots on his feet.
• 15:35
  Peter's daughter, Daisy Claire was a great grandmother now,
• 15:39
  proudly carried him around, although he had to be scrubbed
• 15:42
  later where she tried to feed him some birthday cake.
• 15:46
  Sometimes there was a report in the newspapers or on the
• 15:48
  Internet or in TV news, and any family members who were in the
• 15:52
  room at the same time would turn to each other and say, I bet
• 15:56
  that's got something to do with the doctor.
• 15:59
  When the next parcel came, along with a tweed coat and fez hat,
• 16:03
  Claire was alone. She'd lost Ray the year before,
• 16:07
  and most of her happiness had gone with him.
• 16:09
  They'd grown even closer as the decades went by, and she'd loved
• 16:14
  him to the end. But the love she felt for her
• 16:17
  children, grandchildren and great grandchildren made her do
• 16:21
  everything she could to keep the happiness flowing through their
• 16:23
  lives. Claire was confined to bed now.
• 16:28
  Jerry, always the most observant of her children as well as the
• 16:31
  most empathic, had realized that although she'd agreed to go into
• 16:35
  a nursing home, it wasn't what she really wanted.
• 16:39
  As she had done an all those shopping trips so long ago, he
• 16:42
  worked out what she would prefer and arranged that instead.
• 16:47
  She had wonderfully kind carers to look after her in her
• 16:50
  Shoreditch home and her children, grandchildren and
• 16:54
  great grandchildren were in and out all the time.
• 16:58
  Even Ian Chesterton popped in occasionally.
• 17:01
  He was in his 90s now too, although he was still
• 17:04
  wonderfully active and told us so many tales of his life with
• 17:07
  the doctor that she almost felt she'd been there with them.
• 17:11
  It was only then that she really began to understand how it had
• 17:14
  been for Jerry all those decades before.
• 17:18
  Claire didn't have long, she knew that, but she held on.
• 17:23
  Doctor Bear lived in her room now, keeping an eye on her.
• 17:26
  Jerry said, although from what she knew of the doctor, she
• 17:29
  thought he usually needed someone keeping an eye on him.
• 17:33
  It was comforting, though, knowing that something that was
• 17:36
  so close to Jerry, almost part of him, was close to her too.
• 17:46
  Well, OK, let's, let's move on to the book we're here to talk
• 17:51
  about today. Can someone please and does
• 17:54
  anybody know what this particular series books was
• 17:56
  about because I'm in the dark. Well, they weren't.
• 18:01
  So they're all kind of stand alone.
• 18:02
  They're not like there's no kind of Arc that that runs through
• 18:07
  them. So it was just a sort of part of
• 18:11
  the 60th anniversary stuff, I suppose.
• 18:14
  There was this sort of shorts series of books which all kind
• 18:18
  of published at once. Taking, taking some of the
• 18:22
  doctors I I think most of the writers apart from Jack Rayner,
• 18:29
  I'm not sure if they've written for Doctor Who before.
• 18:32
  I. Mean that's quite refreshing.
• 18:33
  Maybe it was quite, maybe it was a testing ground.
• 18:35
  I might be wrong but the the names aren't aren't kind of
• 18:40
  spring to mind as as people who've written massive amounts
• 18:42
  of stuff before, but this is the only one that I've read.
• 18:45
  Right, can I start with a criticism and it's probably the
• 18:49
  only criticism I will fire of this book because I thought it
• 18:52
  was absolutely beautiful and that is the price.
• 18:56
  So I went into there was a copy of this in Waterstones and I
• 19:00
  bought the Kindle copy because this very short book sat in the
• 19:04
  shelf at 1099. And I spoke to Paul Miles
• 19:09
  recently on Desert Planet Picks, and he said he thinks it's so
• 19:12
  appalling because even his book Suffer this, that kids are being
• 19:16
  priced out of the market. They can't afford to buy these
• 19:20
  books for their pocket money because they get a couple of
• 19:21
  quids and this is 1099. And so it has to be a Christmas
• 19:25
  present or something like that. It's weird, isn't it, because
• 19:27
  these are published under the Puffin imprint.
• 19:31
  So they are. It's a kids book series, but
• 19:33
  yeah, they're yeah, My back of my copy says 1299, so.
• 19:37
  You oh 12/9. That must have been OK, sorry.
• 19:40
  That you saw. Maybe my eyes wouldn't have let
• 19:42
  me believe that. Because yeah, they're like 100
• 19:45
  pages, but yeah, £13, which, yeah, seems crazy to think that
• 19:50
  they were putting out like those hardbacks that were like 599
• 19:53
  when when the series first came back.
• 19:56
  It's all about the money, money, money.
• 19:59
  Well, look, I'm going to ask you guys to.
• 20:03
  Give me your opening. Thoughts on this book?
• 20:06
  And let's just see where this conversation goes.
• 20:08
  I'm going to throw it to Luke first because I've not heard
• 20:10
  from him in about 5 minutes. Luke, what did you think about
• 20:14
  this? And can you tell the listeners
• 20:17
  sort of roughly what this is about?
• 20:19
  So they get chased. So the book is about mostly
• 20:25
  about two people were named Jerry and Claire.
• 20:29
  It's about Jerry's family. You've got his brother, his
• 20:32
  sister, his dad and his mum. We see most of the stories from
• 20:37
  a perspective of Jerry, who's the middle child, and Claire,
• 20:42
  who's the mum. And because of an incident that
• 20:47
  Jerry has when he's like seven, we find out what causes it
• 20:51
  later. Doesn't matter, but for some
• 20:54
  reason, every night when he goes to sleep, he dreams about the
• 20:58
  adventures that that Doctor Who's having, the doctor is
• 21:03
  having, but right from An Unearthly Child and onwards.
• 21:08
  So each night when he goes to sleep, it's like, Oh my God,
• 21:12
  now, now we're on the dead planet.
• 21:15
  Oh, shit. Now there's giant insects, like
• 21:17
  all this kind of stuff. So yeah, that's that's pretty
• 21:21
  much the premise. It's it's it's a very Doctor
• 21:25
  Light story, if you want to call it that.
• 21:27
  It's not really about that. To me.
• 21:29
  It was like this amazing snapshot of 60s families and
• 21:37
  what dynamics were like then. Like what the man of the house
• 21:39
  was supposed to be like, what who the mum was supposed to be
• 21:42
  like, how how raising kids was and all this kind of stuff.
• 21:47
  The, it's like, it's this, it's got the old, oldish kind of
• 21:50
  values there, but it's not criticizing them.
• 21:53
  It's just like, this is what it was like.
• 21:54
  Then there's good, there's bad, and there's just people just
• 21:58
  getting on with it and things like that.
• 21:59
  So, and then as the book progresses, the things that
• 22:04
  Jerry's dreaming about, we'll get him into a little bit of
• 22:09
  trouble, especially like things like the edge of destruction in
• 22:12
  the Planet of Giants specifically get him into a lot
• 22:16
  of trouble. Do you know what right, For the
• 22:18
  first sort of 15% of the book, I thought he was just watching
• 22:25
  Doctor Who on the TV and getting all the.
• 22:27
  Ideas from watching this the show, It wasn't until I thought,
• 22:31
  it's like, Oh no, this is taking part of place in the Doctor's
• 22:34
  universe. I was like, what the hell is
• 22:37
  going on then? I hear a name early on and
• 22:40
  something triggers and I'm like, I didn't get that reference, but
• 22:43
  I know it's referencing something.
• 22:45
  And I I didn't do or marry in conspiracy this time.
• 22:49
  I looked it up. I was like, what?
• 22:50
  Plenty of giants. OK, so these aren't just dreams
• 22:53
  and a kid in our world's having. Oh, this this kids in the Doctor
• 22:57
  Who universe? Yeah.
• 22:58
  So if you was looking up every continuity reference in this
• 23:01
  book, you must have spent a lot of time on Doctor Who Wiki this
• 23:04
  week. It's amazing too, because if you
• 23:06
  don't know much about Doctor Who, I don't think it's going to
• 23:08
  matter. But if you do, and I'd say we do
• 23:12
  you, it's it's it's it's a simple descriptive language in
• 23:16
  this book. It's it's not to say that it's a
• 23:19
  simple book, but it does everything in a clear, precise,
• 23:22
  easy to follow away. Mind you, some of the some of
• 23:25
  the time you want me this later on, I was like, wait a minute, I
• 23:28
  got to reread that like, but other than that, it was it
• 23:32
  flowed wonderfully. You got a sense of who all the
• 23:34
  characters were. I felt like in 100 pages I knew
• 23:38
  this kid, I knew the mom, I knew the whole family like it was.
• 23:42
  It was amazing. When you literally go on the
• 23:45
  journey of their entire lives by the last page, don't you?
• 23:49
  I realise sort of maybe in the second to last chapter we skip
• 23:54
  to the rest of their lives, but Even so.
• 23:57
  Well, Andrew, what did you think?
• 24:00
  Yeah, I I loved it. I was really not sure what to
• 24:04
  expect from this book because I'd I'd read the blurb and I
• 24:07
  think when I looked at this series, when it was come when it
• 24:11
  first came out, this was the one which kind of grabbed my
• 24:13
  attention because it just sounded really unusual.
• 24:17
  And it was like that kind of sense of where is this story
• 24:20
  going to go? You've got this kid who's sort
• 24:21
  of a 60s viewer of Doctor Who kind of, but in the Doctor Who
• 24:27
  universe and how is that going to work?
• 24:29
  Why is he seeing this stuff? So as well as being like a
• 24:33
  really heartfelt story about a family, there's also this this
• 24:38
  mystery intertwined with it of like, what is happening?
• 24:42
  How is it happening? There's a mysterious event
• 24:44
  that's happened in Jerry's past, which has kind of triggered
• 24:47
  this. We know that he kind of went
• 24:49
  missing for an afternoon in London and.
• 24:51
  So subtly dropped, yeah, isn't it?
• 24:54
  Yeah. And also for for a book which is
• 24:57
  like a a puffin book, there is some quite adult implications in
• 25:05
  the book. There's nothing explicit, but
• 25:06
  there's particularly when you get things from the mother's
• 25:09
  perspective, there's, there's kind of some dark implications
• 25:13
  of what she thinks might have happened to Jerry during that
• 25:16
  time, particularly when he starts saying, oh, I met this
• 25:18
  old man and then I see him in my room every night, of which she
• 25:21
  kind of, you know, has a bit of a double flag.
• 25:24
  Suit. Before realising that he's
• 25:25
  talking about his dreams. So yeah, there's it's, it's,
• 25:31
  yeah, it's just a really good children's book that kind of
• 25:34
  works on different levels and has lots in it.
• 25:37
  And it's just a beautiful story and has, there's a lots of very
• 25:41
  kind of moving stuff and I think lots of things which for Doctor
• 25:45
  Who fans will resonate with childhoods and things like that.
• 25:52
  And as, as Luke said, there's there's a lot in it about kind
• 25:55
  of parenting styles of different eras.
• 26:00
  And what I like about it is there isn't necessarily a
• 26:03
  judgement on the character. There's there isn't.
• 26:05
  I feel like if if you did a similar story to this on the TV
• 26:09
  show, there would probably be a thing where the father gets
• 26:12
  taught a lesson for being a. Needless Lantern.
• 26:15
  Yeah, there there'd be a kind of comeuppance to it.
• 26:19
  And you know, he is a bit of a shit dad.
• 26:21
  Like he does some not great stuff.
• 26:23
  But you know, as Luke said, that that that was that was the style
• 26:29
  of time. And, you know, there isn't kind
• 26:32
  of a kind of comeuppance for him.
• 26:34
  And you just see this family kind of grow with time and kind
• 26:38
  of navigate that situation. And there isn't.
• 26:41
  Yeah, it's nice that there's kind of a there's a deeply moral
• 26:44
  sense of the the story, but it isn't, it isn't kind of trying
• 26:50
  to be a very kind of simplistic story with good and bad people.
• 26:55
  There's there's, there's levels to it and it's, yeah, it's very
• 26:59
  clever and sophisticated. There was parts of the book
• 27:02
  where they were showing the family working so beautifully
• 27:04
  and the kids having their tea and playing games and all that
• 27:07
  stuff I remember doing when I was a kid and the part of me
• 27:10
  was, God, I long for that again. And then there was parts of the
• 27:14
  book where the family's sort of falling apart a bit when the dad
• 27:17
  falls ill and there's passages and I've got some quotes which
• 27:20
  I'll read later where you know that Jack Rainer so beautifully
• 27:25
  describes a family falling apart or things just not being quite
• 27:30
  the same. Now I went through that when I
• 27:32
  was younger. So again, I was getting all the
• 27:34
  feels of that. For me, this sort of works on 2
• 27:39
  levels. One, I thought it was a
• 27:41
  brilliant, a brilliant way of looking at 60s Doctor Who
• 27:45
  through the eyes of a child who would have experienced it at the
• 27:50
  time on TV. And and those passages the diary
• 27:54
  extracts. Retelling those stories from a
• 27:58
  child's. Point of View was just so
• 28:00
  gorgeous, like I mean I found myself choking up back tears
• 28:03
  reading that let alone the ending of the book where I was
• 28:06
  in floods. But the the 2nd way this worked
• 28:10
  for me as well was the way it shows you.
• 28:12
  So Jerry is basically us. Our lives have been touched by
• 28:17
  the doctor exactly the same way his life has been touched.
• 28:19
  And and the moral? Of the story, if there is one,
• 28:22
  is is your life is better when it is touched by the doctor and
• 28:27
  as he goes through his life, you know it, it educates him.
• 28:30
  He wants to be into science and history.
• 28:33
  You know, it teaches him moral values and all his he's a
• 28:38
  problem solver and he just takes great lessons along with his in
• 28:42
  his life as well. So as a as a book about Doctor
• 28:46
  Who fans and and the journey of your life with Doctor Who in it,
• 28:51
  I just thought that was absolutely beautiful.
• 28:54
  It's even like Jerry getting teased at school because he
• 28:58
  likes Doctor Who or, you know. Could you relate?
• 29:02
  Yeah, definitely. You know, hey, I got into Doctor
• 29:06
  Who in well, after the show it stopped airing.
• 29:09
  So like 90. No, I got into Doctor Who when
• 29:13
  it was not a show. So like the uncoolest time to be
• 29:16
  a fan of it. So yeah, I think, I think good.
• 29:19
  I think the three of us are wilderness.
• 29:21
  We are was yeah 89. Battlefield was my first story.
• 29:26
  Yeah, I, I think that's the aspect of the book that kind of
• 29:29
  moved me the most, that kind of exploration of shame, really.
• 29:37
  And the way that the mother kind of in with the best intentions
• 29:44
  is kind of forcing Jerry to not be his true self, which I think
• 29:49
  for lots of people will have resonances, particularly for for
• 29:53
  queer people. But there's a bit where he's
• 29:57
  he's been very vocal about the fact that he has these rings
• 30:00
  about the doctor. He's been talking about them at
• 30:01
  school. And she has this conversation
• 30:04
  with him where she says, well, you know, that's, that's
• 30:06
  something for home. That's something that you don't
• 30:08
  talk to other people about. Or if you talk to other people
• 30:10
  about it, you say, this is just a story in my head that I'm
• 30:13
  making up and I know that it's not real.
• 30:16
  And, you know, like when I was a kid, like I was when I was
• 30:20
  little, like pre Doctor Who obsession, like I loved all the
• 30:24
  Disney princesses, I loved my little ponies.
• 30:27
  I had all the all of those toys. And that's kind of things.
• 30:30
  And, you know, I went through a similar thing with my mum and
• 30:31
  dad when it was like purely out of the best intentions from
• 30:34
  them. And you know, me not they're not
• 30:36
  wanting me to put myself in danger basically by being
• 30:41
  outwardly who I was at home. And it's like, well, you know,
• 30:43
  maybe maybe you don't want to take that aerial doll to that
• 30:47
  birthday party. Maybe maybe you want to take
• 30:50
  this instead, or maybe you want to, you know, explore other
• 30:52
  things and, you know, have other interests.
• 30:54
  And, you know, that that was so well depicted in the book and
• 30:59
  kind of so subtle. And I think it's, although this
• 31:04
  is a book about Doctor Who, like I think that is something that
• 31:06
  will speak to so many people. And yeah, just I found it very,
• 31:11
  very moving. I I love you just a little bit
• 31:14
  more, Andrew, for you admitting that, you know, I feel like we
• 31:16
  would have been the best of friends when we were five.
• 31:19
  Years old playing. With all my little Ponies.
• 31:20
  Together. There's also the.
• 31:24
  Come on, Luke, hang on. Wait.
• 31:25
  We've both confessed something. Now it's your turn.
• 31:28
  What did you do as a child that you was home not to do?
• 31:33
  You was into wrestling, weren't you?
• 31:34
  You was beating people up. Wrestling was a teenager thing
• 31:39
  when I was a kid. I used to have a little kids
• 31:42
  couch and my parents for a long time were like wow, he really
• 31:46
  eats his veggies and then they cleaned the couch and they found
• 31:49
  them. So I'm sorry that's I was a
• 31:52
  human kid. So we were hiding vegetables
• 31:56
  too, but for different reasons. No?
• 31:58
  OK, move us on quickly. But you've even got the Jerry
• 32:01
  getting in trouble at school for showing an imagination, and he's
• 32:04
  and his teachers be going like, hey, there's a time and place
• 32:07
  for that, but not in the classroom.
• 32:08
  I'm like, fuck off like that. You would like kids to do like
• 32:14
  this is like the we can't have too much imagination.
• 32:18
  It disrupts the class, makes people think differently.
• 32:20
  I don't know, man. It's like my, my brain was just
• 32:22
  like, I don't like his teachers at all.
• 32:27
  It's the like the stifling kind rather than the nurturing kind.
• 32:31
  You know what I mean? And I think I also didn't like
• 32:35
  the villain of the book. Oh, you could say the villain of
• 32:37
  the book is the dudes threatening Jerry and all that.
• 32:40
  That's all well and good. Yes, they're evil.
• 32:42
  I. It was Marco Ledbetter next
• 32:45
  door. Lillian next door.
• 32:50
  Oh, she was able to drop. This.
• 32:52
  On this podcast, but Oh my God. I've known people like this, you
• 32:57
  know, that they throw a party every year and it's just to show
• 33:00
  off everything they've got. I've.
• 33:03
  Also heard people like Jerry's dad, like the youngest kid, it
• 33:08
  turns out to be gay and he's the last one to kind of like accept
• 33:12
  that and he does he he kind of embraces it as he gets older.
• 33:16
  Even that's not judged though, is it?
• 33:17
  Even that, even the fact that it took him a while and and that's
• 33:22
  told through Jerry's language too, isn't it?
• 33:24
  I can't remember being. That quote, he's still the dad
• 33:26
  that might, might say the old wrong thing, but it's he's
• 33:30
  trying and he's trying to be a supportive dad even though.
• 33:35
  That's every dad, and that's not just about being gay.
• 33:37
  Yeah, I feel like I feel like a like that was it wasn't
• 33:41
  relatable because it's like every everyone's dad has said
• 33:44
  something and just like, come on, man, it's what year is this?
• 33:46
  Like what are you doing? But yeah, no, it is so many like
• 33:51
  just rich characters in this city sport.
• 33:53
  Can I, can I quote something for the book?
• 33:56
  I mean, I've got a couple, but I just want to give everybody an
• 34:00
  example of these wonderful passages of this sort of dream
• 34:04
  journal that Jerry's forced to write.
• 34:07
  So this is about the Aztecs? He says, this is this is my
• 34:10
  writing about my dreams. This, this is this happened in
• 34:15
  my dreams. We went to Mexico, but no one
• 34:18
  wore big hats like in the cartoons.
• 34:20
  So it might not have been Mexico.
• 34:22
  And as well, they cut out people's hearts, which they do
• 34:25
  not do in the cartoons. And Miss Riot, who is Barbara,
• 34:29
  was called your Taxa, too, which is a funny name, Ian, for a
• 34:33
  Mexican man who wore a hat made out of a Jaguar.
• 34:38
  I know it was a Jaguar because leopards are in Africa.
• 34:40
  And I have a book. My book has leopards and Jaguars
• 34:44
  and lions and tigers and Cougars and cheetahs.
• 34:49
  Cheetahs are my favorite because they're the fastest animals in
• 34:52
  the whole world. The doctor nearly married a lady
• 34:55
  because they had cocoa. I said this to Miss Bertrand at
• 34:58
  school. And she said she she would
• 35:00
  remember that if she had to make drinks for the staff room, just
• 35:03
  in case you got married to Mr. Hall by accident.
• 35:06
  And they're all just told like that.
• 35:08
  Just so so with spelling mistakes and everything.
• 35:13
  Like perfectly done from an 8 year old's point of view.
• 35:16
  Is he eight? I'll keep saying he's 8.
• 35:18
  He starts off being 7. But yeah, you've also, there's
• 35:22
  this really funny line. I didn't write it verbatim, but
• 35:25
  the doctor's playing the silent liar, you know, from the Romans
• 35:30
  and Jerry's. Like I wish Annie would play
• 35:32
  silent when she does piano practice.
• 35:37
  The Doctor says the destiny's written in the stars.
• 35:39
  Oh, he must have found his destiny while it wasn't looking
• 35:43
  because I never saw him watching it.
• 35:45
  And it's all like all those sequences, they're full of
• 35:48
  diversions as well. Like he is there with the
• 35:50
  cheetahs and the lions and things like that.
• 35:51
  The way kids sort of imagination goes flying.
• 35:54
  I I've just wondered if Jacqueline.
• 35:56
  Rayner had help from her kids. Source on me Because it's just
• 35:58
  so if I pulled out an exercise book from when I was seven or
• 36:02
  eight years old, this is exactly how it would read.
• 36:05
  I actually did that the other day when the repeat of of
• 36:10
  Pyramids of Mars was on. I had like a school diary where
• 36:15
  we had to write what we did on the weekend.
• 36:17
  Please tell me you've got it here right now.
• 36:19
  I don't have it on me right now. I should have, should have got
• 36:21
  it. Like I I tweeted some of the
• 36:23
  photos so you can have a look. But yeah, it's where I'd like
• 36:26
  drawn little, little drawings of the cliffhangers from each of
• 36:30
  the episodes of Pyramids of Mars when they repeated it in the
• 36:33
  90s, which was probably like the second or third Doctor Who story
• 36:38
  I'd ever seen. And it just yeah, you can
• 36:41
  absolutely, you can see in the course of this, this school
• 36:44
  diary, like as less pictures of rabbits and more pictures of
• 36:48
  like Daleks and and Sue Tech and mummies.
• 36:53
  So yeah, I think lots of Doctor Who bands probably have a
• 36:56
  similar experience. It.
• 36:57
  Happens to our own experiences. Yeah, I I bet Jack Rayner was
• 37:02
  was writing a little journal like this about all the stories
• 37:05
  she saw as a kid. Bet they were the best exercise
• 37:08
  books you're ever going to read given the stories that came
• 37:11
  later. Jerry's much better at spelling
• 37:13
  than I was, though. Even if this book had all been
• 37:16
  told from that point of view, just the diary extracts, I think
• 37:18
  I would have been in love with this.
• 37:20
  But there's just so much more to this than that, isn't it?
• 37:23
  Sorry, Luke, you were saying about the villain of the people,
• 37:25
  Margot Ledbetter next door. Oh, Lillian, she's she's.
• 37:31
  A piece of work. She's if I have to hear another
• 37:37
  bloody person if I had to read her say the sentence.
• 37:41
  Oh, but it's not like he's in management one more time.
• 37:45
  Oh my goodness. Violence is wrong everyone.
• 37:48
  But sometimes you read a character, you're just like, Oh
• 37:51
  my. And you read Doctor Who books,
• 37:53
  You read about some of the most vile characters, like bad as you
• 37:56
  can. But this one was like.
• 37:59
  Yeah, 'cause it's relations to this.
• 38:01
  Thin Walls listens to everything that happens next door, reports
• 38:05
  that everyone knows everything 'cause she and she actively
• 38:09
  tries to keep this family down. Yeah.
• 38:13
  Well, she gets her. Comeuppance as well, though,
• 38:15
  doesn't she at the end of the book?
• 38:16
  Oh, she. Really does and just becomes
• 38:17
  this bitter old lady who just sits in that house and just
• 38:19
  never leaves. She should have been doused with
• 38:22
  pesticide though. Yeah.
• 38:24
  Oh. My God, do.
• 38:26
  You know, what I found really poignant was the fact that
• 38:28
  Claire so looked forward to going to that party that, you
• 38:32
  know, she spends her whole life looking after the kids, looking
• 38:35
  after her husband, doing the washing up, doing the washing,
• 38:37
  making dinner. And one time of the year she
• 38:41
  gets to go to this party where they should serve this lousy
• 38:44
  Sherry. And she's just so excited to be
• 38:46
  around adults, even though she's patronizing, demean the whole
• 38:49
  night. Yeah, she's she's a really well
• 38:54
  written character as well. And I think it's the whole book
• 39:00
  is unusual. And you know, you've got that
• 39:02
  perspective of a child, but also having the perspective of the
• 39:04
  mother I think was quite an original.
• 39:06
  Like if you were if you were thinking of how this book would
• 39:09
  play out, you probably would do that idea of it just being the
• 39:13
  child's journal and seeing them them grow.
• 39:15
  But then making the mother such an intrinsic part of the story.
• 39:18
  It kind of changes the dynamic of it.
• 39:20
  And it means that you know, you get you get two really
• 39:24
  sympathetic characters and see how they're both changed by this
• 39:28
  interaction with the doctor. Even even though Claire's is is
• 39:31
  kind of a step removed and she's just such a great mum.
• 39:35
  She's so lovely. I.
• 39:37
  Kept wondering as the book went on because he so believed in
• 39:41
  everything he was seeing. And she, you know, was she
• 39:46
  didn't believe it at all and she wanted to sort of pull him away
• 39:48
  from it. And I was like, throughout the
• 39:50
  book, either she's going to come around or heartbreakingly, he's
• 39:55
  going to abandon the doctor. And I'm very.
• 39:57
  Pleased with the direction the book took.
• 39:59
  Because in the end, his strength of like this is real.
• 40:03
  You know, she's like, well, I, I've got to take him to Gatwick
• 40:06
  Airport. I've got to take him to the post
• 40:09
  Office tower to meet the, and wasn't that great when he's
• 40:13
  like, you know, when the way we, we follow all the adventures of
• 40:16
  the 1st Doctor. And then obviously he, he only
• 40:18
  comes back to contemporary London in the war machines.
• 40:21
  He's like, my God, you know, oh, here's the quote, Mummy, it came
• 40:24
  true. The doctor's here, here in
• 40:26
  England. He's in London.
• 40:28
  We're Dodo. He's at the post post office
• 40:31
  tower. We've got to find him.
• 40:33
  Oh man, it's great. He doesn't realise at the time
• 40:36
  though. Like, doesn't it come back later
• 40:39
  that that these weren't happening quite at the same
• 40:43
  time? Yes, because it's really clever.
• 40:46
  It's just a very clever use of continuity because, you know,
• 40:50
  lots of writers would just do it on quite a superficial level
• 40:54
  where it's just like shoving as many references as possible.
• 40:57
  But she kind of takes that arc of the 60s Doctor Who adventures
• 41:01
  and makes them really important to the plot.
• 41:05
  And that that thing of because I thought, oh, is there going to
• 41:09
  be a continuity era when? Because from Jerry's point of
• 41:14
  view, the, the war machines and the faceless ones happen a year
• 41:19
  apart because he's following the Doctor.
• 41:22
  So then he goes to Gatwick Airport the year after he's had
• 41:25
  the thing with the war machines and I was like, oh, but actually
• 41:27
  that happened on, that all happened on the same day.
• 41:30
  And I shouldn't have doubted. Jacqueline Rayner, original
• 41:34
  member of the Time Team. She knows more about dogs.
• 41:40
  She's written more dogs. She knows it's 60s Doctor Who
• 41:45
  inside out, and that actually becomes a really important plot
• 41:48
  point, this kind of the disconnect between the way he's
• 41:52
  experiencing the story to how the stories, what happened on
• 41:55
  Earth, that kind of that, that gap of time.
• 42:00
  So, yeah, it's, it's, it's so clever the way that she weaves
• 42:05
  that that narrative of the of the 60s Doctor Who stories
• 42:08
  together to make it feel really intentional and like this story
• 42:13
  kind of is intrinsically linked to all of that in a way that
• 42:16
  kind of, yeah. Feels like it's been, we've
• 42:21
  deliberately done that way to link him with this story.
• 42:24
  It's just very, very smart writing and doing it in a way
• 42:27
  that doesn't feel just like hollow bandservice.
• 42:30
  It means it makes perfect sense when John Perk was Third Doctor
• 42:34
  sends him a note saying come to UNIT headquarters, even though
• 42:37
  he's only halfway through the 2nd Doctor's adventures at this
• 42:39
  point. And he's like, well, who's this
• 42:41
  man, you know? And then they go and meet him,
• 42:43
  and then he does the thing we all want desperately when we
• 42:46
  were a kid, and that's it. To have all the adventures in
• 42:48
  one go. He's like contact.
• 42:50
  And suddenly it's like, my God, the wheel in space, the
• 42:52
  dominators, the mine robber. It's so exciting.
• 42:56
  It's like I was leafing our way through the program guide,
• 42:59
  reading all the synopsis, you know?
• 43:05
  Well, yeah, they're spoiled for choice now.
• 43:09
  And you just blew my mind with the revelation, Andrew, that law
• 43:12
  machines and the faceless ones take place on the same day.
• 43:16
  And Evil of the Daleks are. You for real.
• 43:19
  That's why I bet my. Point is like this is the day we
• 43:21
  left. Yeah, yeah.
• 43:23
  Yeah. In in a pre filmed insert.
• 43:25
  This is the day we left. Oh great, our contracts are
• 43:27
  over. Let's go.
• 43:30
  OK, that. Will somebody then explain to
• 43:32
  me, please, all of this espionage and conspiracy around
• 43:37
  Planet of the Giants, please? All right, well, little Jerry,
• 43:44
  he's doing Doctor Who's adventures every night.
• 43:47
  Well, eventually he gets the planet of giants.
• 43:49
  And the planet of giants takes place in the same town that
• 43:54
  Jerry and his family lives in. In fact, the plant, all the
• 43:57
  insects, the plant and all that, wherever Jerry's dad works is
• 44:02
  the same one where this insecticides being made or used
• 44:06
  and all this kind of stuff. So so.
• 44:08
  They think like Jerry. Might have overheard his dad say
• 44:11
  some things and maybe something like that.
• 44:14
  It's no, that's not the case at all.
• 44:16
  He bloody watched Planet of Giants, he knows what the fuck
• 44:19
  happened, and he's even got the bloody formula for the
• 44:22
  insecticide and shit. You know, he, he, he.
• 44:26
  Talks. And because he maybe he talks to
• 44:29
  his mom and maybe because Lillian's really fucking knows
• 44:33
  it, the word gets around and you find out that Lillian's
• 44:38
  informing them like as well, not not in an evil way, like she's a
• 44:42
  bad person, but she's not inherently an evil human being.
• 44:47
  You know, like, like I feel like she might be keeping other
• 44:49
  humans down, but I don't feel like if she knew.
• 44:53
  People were going to die and stuff.
• 44:54
  I feel like that's a different matter, but at least I hope so.
• 44:57
  Maybe. Maybe I'm wrong, but they.
• 45:01
  Find out that little. Jerry knows some things about
• 45:04
  what happened, so someone breaks.
• 45:07
  Face into his house. And the only thing that's really
• 45:09
  stolen is poor Jerry's little Doctor Who dream diary horrors.
• 45:16
  So, yeah, and. Of course, when the little kids
• 45:19
  like my book is stolen, my diary book, everyone's just like,
• 45:22
  yeah, sure, they they took your dream journal.
• 45:25
  That's exactly what happened. Wasn't there a?
• 45:30
  Reference to that, to that nosy old telephone operator from
• 45:33
  Planet of the Gyres. I love, bloody love that
• 45:35
  character, she goes. Something seems very wrong up at
• 45:40
  that house. You know, I'm going to go
• 45:41
  through to the police. That busy Bobby and I, I love.
• 45:46
  That. Of like all the 60 stories you
• 45:48
  could have chosen for the 60th anniversary book, the one that
• 45:53
  she hangs it all off of is Planet of Giants.
• 45:55
  It's amazing. It's, it's just, again, it's
• 45:58
  something really unexpected, but also really clever because that
• 46:02
  is the first time they return to 1960s England.
• 46:07
  So it makes complete sense that that's the kind of the you take
• 46:12
  that as kind of the, the cornerstone that you then kind
• 46:14
  of create all the drama out of. Because otherwise you'd have had
• 46:19
  to be, yeah, sticking around until Votan and then, yeah,
• 46:24
  Jerry would have been a little bit older.
• 46:26
  So, yeah, it makes total sense that it's a planet of giants.
• 46:28
  And it's such a kind of, it's one of like.
• 46:33
  We're going to get to a point where every single.
• 46:34
  Classic Doctor Who story has a sequel at some point, so it kind
• 46:39
  of makes sense to kind of take something no one else is going
• 46:42
  to be pulling off of the shelf and kind of do something.
• 46:45
  This is less than a sequel, isn't it?
• 46:46
  It's. More sort of alongside of wall,
• 46:49
  yeah. Yeah.
• 46:53
  And yeah, it's, it's one. That fans aren't going to be.
• 46:57
  That familiar with like, nobody is watching Planet of Giants
• 47:00
  every week. So like, I definitely had to
• 47:03
  kind of, yeah, read the TARDIS Wiki article.
• 47:06
  I went back and watched Planet of the Giants today.
• 47:11
  So yeah, it's, it's a smart choice and kind of unexpected
• 47:14
  and kind of funny, but then also becomes touching and, and really
• 47:18
  sweet. Andrew, I have news for you.
• 47:21
  You, Luke and I, we have been reduced to the size of one inch.
• 47:30
  Can I? I really love that show.
• 47:31
  That's it's a good story. Can I?
• 47:34
  Just my my I think the scariest part of the good Doctor Who
• 47:37
  story should have at least one scare in it.
• 47:40
  Except this scare in. This book isn't too real for.
• 47:42
  Me, that's when Jerry does is at the Christmas party and he sits
• 47:46
  on Santa's knee and Santa Claus is the same guy who took Jerry
• 47:51
  on a car ride and said keep your fucking mouth.
• 47:54
  Shut your family's, dude. I I had ADF word.
• 47:57
  Everyone is. No naughty words in this book,
• 47:59
  but that was the so you sit in there, that was that was
• 48:05
  terrifying. And then just like, see, they
• 48:08
  think Jerry is going to talk or anything like that.
• 48:10
  No, he's good boy. He's going to keep his mouth
• 48:12
  shut. But because he wants to go to
• 48:15
  Gatwick and his parents and his mum's like, yeah, let's go to
• 48:18
  Gatwick. Let's do it.
• 48:20
  All right, now meet me, meet me over at the at the factory and
• 48:25
  stuff so we can. But then, now they think.
• 48:29
  Jerry's gone there to go have a tattletale to his dad.
• 48:34
  And spill the beans so they. Pretty they pinch the kid.
• 48:37
  And because he's watched all these Doctor Who adventures and
• 48:40
  seen even by whatever Doctor Who story he was up to at the at
• 48:45
  that point, he's seen the Doctor and his companions escape a
• 48:48
  billion times already. So I think the three of us.
• 48:53
  Would be all right, you know, if we were kidnapped by people
• 48:55
  after watching all these, Doctor.
• 48:56
  Who's that's all right, There'd be a ventilation shaft.
• 48:59
  Somewhere. You remember you.
• 49:04
  Said earlier Luke about. How you can visualize Jack
• 49:08
  Rayner's stories really well. Like I could see this filmed
• 49:12
  like like an adventure inspiration time style story.
• 49:17
  You know, the, the I could see the living room of where they
• 49:20
  were and the pokey kitchen and the Christmas time.
• 49:24
  I could see that scene on Santa's D and how that would be
• 49:26
  filmed with the, the, the beard coming away going, oh, you know.
• 49:31
  Like I just think she captures. It all beautifully like but with
• 49:34
  with surprisingly little visual prose just by getting the
• 49:41
  feeling of it all yeah, it's. She's really good at at creating
• 49:48
  that period setting as well in quite subtle but authentic
• 49:53
  feeling ways, like when they have to kind of when they turn
• 49:56
  the TV on, they have to wait for it to warm up and that kind of
• 49:59
  stuff. It's not just, you know, let's
• 50:01
  put on a pair of go go boots and like struck down Abbey Road and
• 50:05
  then we're going to have some Austrian powers people in the
• 50:07
  background because it's the 60s like this feels like somebody
• 50:10
  who's authentically kind of invoking that period in a way
• 50:14
  that isn't the shade and obvious because Christmas presents were
• 50:20
  really kind of. Shitty by today's standards.
• 50:23
  But they were everything they could afford, you know, And the
• 50:25
  kids were really grateful. Yeah.
• 50:28
  And the toy? Shop and an important character.
• 50:32
  We haven't mentioned. Go on, go for it.
• 50:35
  Best character in the book. I'm sorry I spoke out for you.
• 50:38
  Say it again, Doctor. Bear.
• 50:41
  Who is a teddy bear who Claire buys for Jerry when he spots it
• 50:47
  in a in a toy shop window. And then Dr. Bear kind of
• 50:51
  becomes his sort of best friend and comfort on.
• 50:54
  And he's like the doctor when the doctor's not there.
• 50:57
  So when Jerry's not asleep, he kind of treats the bear as if
• 51:00
  he's the doctor. And yeah, it's just, it's just
• 51:05
  so sweet and heart warming. And there's the lovely bit where
• 51:10
  where he sort of leaves Doctor Baer on the landing at night.
• 51:13
  And I think Claire trips over it and it's just like, what's
• 51:16
  what's Doctor Baer doing out here?
• 51:17
  And he's like, I've left it outside Daddy's room because
• 51:20
  he's poorly. And I want Doctor Baer to look
• 51:22
  after him if anything bad happens in the night.
• 51:24
  And you know, just another one of those break your heart
• 51:29
  movements in this very short book that manages to do that
• 51:32
  about five or six times. Genuinely thinks that.
• 51:36
  If Doctor Bear's confiscated that his dad's going to die
• 51:39
  because his dad's got the insecticide poisoning and he's
• 51:42
  getting sicker and sicker and sicker and the, the, you know,
• 51:45
  the, the bear's taking off him and he's just screaming, you
• 51:48
  know, Daddy's going to die. Oh man, oh man, it's so moving
• 51:52
  and and how there's a passage. Where he's bereft because the
• 51:58
  10th planet's here and William Hartner was turned into Patrick
• 52:02
  Trout and he's like, I don't even know if he's the Doctor
• 52:06
  anymore. It is.
• 52:07
  And then they change him, doesn't he, to like a mop top
• 52:10
  and Patrick Trouten's clothes. And then that thread runs for
• 52:14
  the books. Every time he regenerates, they
• 52:16
  change the clothes. So it's jump out right up to
• 52:19
  Jodie. Right up to Shootie.
• 52:22
  Yeah, yeah, that that was. The only the only bit like the
• 52:28
  ending did get AI think I can I can think of it because it's an
• 52:32
  anniversary and it's such a lovely book.
• 52:34
  The ending got a little bit too saccharine for me.
• 52:38
  Oh, no, really, that that was the.
• 52:40
  I would think the I think. The the, the reason it didn't
• 52:46
  quite land for me, I think is because I just can't picture the
• 52:49
  doctor doing that because they kind of like established in the
• 52:53
  new series. Like that obviously is just a
• 52:56
  bit of a shit to his good friends.
• 52:57
  Never really goes back. So it's like, could I see the,
• 53:02
  the new series doctor sending a set of lovely clothes for teddy
• 53:08
  bear to this kid that he met once for 5 minutes?
• 53:11
  Oh, come on, Andrew, come. On yes, it's beautiful.
• 53:15
  It's I. Think, I think if, if the new
• 53:17
  series hadn't happened and this was just like a a continuation
• 53:22
  of the classic series and where the Doctor's character is a bit
• 53:24
  more kind of less defined, yeah, I could have.
• 53:30
  They don't do it until we got to Capaldi.
• 53:32
  But for fuck's sake, that kid, he's there doing all the cutting
• 53:36
  out of the clothes. Yeah, or, or maybe maybe it was
• 53:40
  Ian and Barbara who kept kept. Oh, now that would have been a.
• 53:44
  Nicer if we'd have learnt yeah, they were keeping up with who he
• 53:47
  was. Yeah, I just.
• 53:50
  Speaking of nice little continuity nods and the Doctor
• 53:53
  being a bit of a shit, Ian is right after Jerry meets the
• 53:59
  Doctor. The Doctor's like, all right,
• 54:00
  well, that's that sorted by 5. Minutes later, Ian comes into.
• 54:05
  The room and Ian, well, the doctor that doesn't bother
• 54:11
  going. Oh, by the way, Ian, Vicky's all
• 54:12
  right. And, you know, so he's like, you
• 54:17
  heard all these stories. He's like, yeah, Oh my God, this
• 54:20
  bit. Just broke my heart.
• 54:22
  Lovely, because like all this time.
• 54:26
  Since they got back to London, they had no idea whether Vicki
• 54:29
  lived or died or anything like that.
• 54:31
  And at the really funny moment of like Ian telling Jerry, hey,
• 54:36
  be careful with that toy, don't, don't get too attached.
• 54:40
  Because I had a guy who went running through his panda toy
• 54:42
  and he burned a lot. Huh.
• 54:45
  Oh, no, that was Stephen. No, he hid in the TARDIS.
• 54:47
  He's fine. He's the king of a planet now he
• 54:50
  goes. That's wonderful.
• 54:51
  That's. Wonderful.
• 54:52
  Barbara will be so pleased. But then he goes about Vicky,
• 54:56
  doesn't he? And he goes, She changed her
• 54:59
  name for Cressida. And Ian's laughing instead of
• 55:02
  going, I don't believe it, Troilus and Cressida.
• 55:06
  Shakespeare wrote a play about Vicky.
• 55:08
  And then he goes, oh, bugger, it didn't have a happy ending.
• 55:11
  And Jerry goes, no, no, it's not all accurate.
• 55:13
  Don't worry, the doctor said, So they're absolutely fine.
• 55:18
  Oh, it's that all of that stuff. I know it's fat, it's total
• 55:21
  wank. It is, but it's the sort of.
• 55:24
  Thing I want. To read is Ian finding out the
• 55:26
  happy endings of Stephen and Vicky?
• 55:30
  It was. Especially since the book made
• 55:33
  my brain go so many different ways, Like the dad's divorcing
• 55:37
  his family, isn't he? He's going to die or something.
• 55:40
  This family is going to. But I'm reading 1/6.
• 55:42
  This is what I'm thinking reading a 60th anniversary
• 55:45
  celebration of Doctor Who. You know, I've totally
• 55:48
  forgotten. It's a 60th anniversary
• 55:49
  celebration of Doctor Who and it's probably going to end up
• 55:52
  being celebratory and sacrament. No, my brain is just going like,
• 55:56
  Oh my God, this family's in trouble, what's going to happen
• 55:58
  to them? And I'm wondering if that's
• 56:01
  because it is through. The eyes of a child, a lot of
• 56:03
  those scenes, you know, it's so convincing, A family falling
• 56:07
  apart through the eyes of a kid it didn't like, I think.
• 56:11
  The ending works for me because it reminds me of the end of Six
• 56:15
  Feet Under. With that montage at the end, I
• 56:17
  went what it. Is if you haven't seen it.
• 56:21
  But if you have seen that montage and you like that,
• 56:24
  you'll you'll never forget it, right.
• 56:26
  So it reminded me of that just with a bear.
• 56:29
  But there was just another really cool moment of Ian, who's
• 56:34
  in his 90s now, just catching up with Claire and being like, oh,
• 56:40
  you'll never you'll never guess. I went to this bloody meeting
• 56:43
  and the doctor's a female now. So it referenced like him being
• 56:47
  at that, that companions anonymous.
• 56:50
  I don't know what to call it meeting meanwhile.
• 56:53
  Cut to Dodo sitting alone in her kitchen for another Christmas
• 56:57
  with no family. No bears for Dodo?
• 57:01
  Yes. No, she's dead of syphilis by
• 57:04
  now, don't worry. Don't you get shocked?
• 57:07
  So no, no bears. What?
• 57:08
  You know all these things. When they were here in.
• 57:10
  One after another, I didn't find out barbicious season him
• 57:12
  telling Claire about Jodie's doctor.
• 57:15
  I was like, there a petition going Jack Rayner, what are you
• 57:18
  doing to me? Like always in peace, isn't it?
• 57:21
  And I'd had a shitty week. So I was praising you to the
• 57:24
  high. Heavens, Andrew, because I felt
• 57:25
  wonderful after reading this. Yeah, it's a very.
• 57:29
  Feel good. Doctor Who book they should they
• 57:32
  should prescribe this. Can I?
• 57:34
  Can I? Swing this round to the
• 57:37
  explanation as to why Jerry is seeing, because I thought that
• 57:43
  was really clever as well, the fact that he was there on the
• 57:48
  day. So he went missing and that like
• 57:51
  we said, that was reference. And then he ended up at the
• 57:55
  junkyard on Tata's Lane. He heard the voices inside.
• 57:57
  Obviously he thought, oh God, adults, right?
• 57:59
  I can tell though, I'm lost. They're already in the TARDIS at
• 58:02
  this point. He touches the TARDIS.
• 58:04
  The Doctor's been tinkering with the telepathic circuits and then
• 58:09
  a quick blast of TARDIS energy or whatever it's called.
• 58:12
  And then he's, I just thought all of that was really loved as
• 58:14
  well because it it gives us a chance to go right back to the
• 58:17
  star and for Jacqueline Rayner to tell some of the most pivotal
• 58:21
  scenes in Doctor Who from Jerry's point of view.
• 58:26
  If I was. If I was.
• 58:28
  In Yeah. Well, we also like.
• 58:33
  I didn't notice until the second time that a when Jerry and
• 58:37
  Claire see the bear, there's two of them.
• 58:41
  Yeah, and one of them's not there.
• 58:43
  Anymore. When, When someone says to
• 58:46
  Claire, oh, that's a splendid bear, isn't it?
• 58:49
  Yeah, that's John Pertwee. That's the 3rd Doctor saying
• 58:52
  that to Claire. Well, I was reading the wiki.
• 58:55
  Article. And apparently in Jacob Dudman's
• 58:58
  reading of this, which I would quite like to hear actually,
• 59:01
  because he's a good reader, the implication that it's Hartnell.
• 59:05
  Yeah, that doesn't make sense. Did you read?
• 59:08
  Out on the wiki page as well. I did read it doesn't make
• 59:11
  sense. For it to be heartened or
• 59:12
  because the doctor, but I didn't know about it until, yeah, like
• 59:15
  I thought it was heartened or Pertwee.
• 59:17
  Because it feels like Pertwee after he's gotten his after he's
• 59:21
  gotten control of his TARDIS back.
• 59:22
  Imagine him saying it as well. Because he's gone blended back
• 59:27
  nine. Yeah, because.
• 59:29
  He's he's gone back to. 1968 to sort things out with Jerry and
• 59:35
  he Perry does the 3rd doctor I don't think joins in 1968 so I
• 59:39
  was just that was going to be one of my little things I'm like
• 59:41
  really that doesn't work Then I read it again I was like Oh no,
• 59:44
  he's gone back in time after he's got his guitar just back up
• 59:46
  and running and going oh I've heard these reports I'll sort
• 59:50
  out a little Jerry right now so kind of kind of worked some of
• 59:54
  it I was just like over my head but if you.
• 59:58
  Pay attention like. Have any of you guys listened
• 1:00:01
  to? The frankly brilliant Paul Mars
• 1:00:04
  Companion Chronicle find and replace so that.
• 1:00:07
  Ends. With a scene of him telling the
• 1:00:10
  older Joe Grant I'm going to take all memories of you from my
• 1:00:16
  head and her breaking down and saying no, don't.
• 1:00:20
  And this ends kind of in the same way, doesn't it?
• 1:00:23
  The. Quote here is.
• 1:00:24
  Finally, the doctor smiled down at Jerry and said it's time to
• 1:00:27
  say goodbye now. Please no, said Jerry.
• 1:00:30
  I'll miss you too much. It taps into exactly the same
• 1:00:33
  sort of emotions and I was as moved here as I was listening to
• 1:00:38
  that. Poor kid doesn't get to watch
• 1:00:42
  Pyramids of. Mars and I'd like come on Doctor
• 1:00:44
  couldn't wait at a regeneration like get out, but don't you love
• 1:00:48
  the conclusion that. It draws though that.
• 1:00:50
  Actually, he is a very. Capable young man and he doesn't
• 1:00:54
  need this stuff to live a good life and then we find out he
• 1:00:58
  does live a good life and has kids and you know, it's a very
• 1:01:01
  fruitful life. Wins an award for some kind of.
• 1:01:05
  Aztec archaeological dig in all this sweet kind of stuff in that
• 1:01:09
  kind of six feet under esque montage at the end, which is
• 1:01:14
  absolutely lovely because that montage at the end is all about
• 1:01:16
  I think the mum in bed as she sees time go by and that and
• 1:01:22
  that. That was pretty much the end of
• 1:01:24
  this book with Claire in the in the bed as time went by.
• 1:01:28
  And Andrew, do you think you could handle?
• 1:01:31
  It if I just read the quote, I know you said it's very.
• 1:01:34
  Saccharine, but it's so gorgeous.
• 1:01:37
  I just want to that's. Only my like, cynicism coming
• 1:01:41
  through. It's, it's still lovely.
• 1:01:43
  It's yeah, do it. I felt like we're having a
• 1:01:46
  massive group hug while reading. This book, you know, it's like
• 1:01:49
  therapy, No? Well, the quote is at the end of
• 1:01:52
  the book. Claire couldn't take her eyes
• 1:01:54
  off Doctor. Bear sitting once more at the
• 1:01:56
  end of the bed. The doctor had watched over
• 1:01:58
  Jerry from when he was a boy all the way through to today with
• 1:02:01
  that boy, now wonderful father and grandfather of almost 67
• 1:02:06
  years. The day when Jerry had been lost
• 1:02:08
  in London had been the worst day of her life.
• 1:02:10
  Or it had been, or it had been that far.
• 1:02:14
  Yet it brought them all so much happiness in the end.
• 1:02:17
  Happy ever after. Not quite, not for her, but for
• 1:02:20
  poor humans stuck in one place, living through one time.
• 1:02:23
  It hadn't been so bad. She'd had a lot of a lot of oh,
• 1:02:28
  so much happiness along the way. Thank you, Doctor Bear, she
• 1:02:31
  whispered and closed her eyes for the last time.
• 1:02:34
  Thank you, Doctor Bear, I say, and thank you Doctor, for
• 1:02:38
  everything. And I'd, you know what?
• 1:02:40
  It's a celebration. So saying thank you to the
• 1:02:43
  doctor. Why not just on this one
• 1:02:45
  occasion. Yeah, I kind.
• 1:02:49
  Of wish that. That this book.
• 1:02:52
  Had more of a spotlight. On it because, you know, it was
• 1:02:55
  part of this big batch, like you guys haven't even heard of it
• 1:02:58
  and it's just it's such a lovely story.
• 1:03:00
  It feels like it should should have had a bigger audience.
• 1:03:04
  Maybe it's because, yeah, they they did it in a big batch of
• 1:03:07
  them and just, they just sort of dropped and nobody really paid
• 1:03:09
  attention. But in a kind of era where we're
• 1:03:11
  kind of saturated with Doctor Who stuff and like so much of it
• 1:03:15
  is just kind of OK or not very good, this just like stands out
• 1:03:21
  as just a really beautiful, unusual piece that that
• 1:03:25
  deserves, yeah, more accolades, I think.
• 1:03:29
  I'm not suggesting that we're reaching the entire.
• 1:03:31
  World but I think we are doing a bit of work for exposure for
• 1:03:35
  some of these books on the book club.
• 1:03:38
  So let's hope that some people go and get this on the back.
• 1:03:41
  Imagine they don't need to now we just told them the whole
• 1:03:43
  story. I don't think it matters.
• 1:03:45
  I don't think it. Matters.
• 1:03:47
  It's rich characterisation. Nice.
• 1:03:49
  Continuity. Nods if if you want the audio
• 1:03:53
  book everyone. Actually, that's kind of how I
• 1:03:55
  read it the second time and it was my first time properly
• 1:04:00
  hearing Jacob Dudman do a long thing.
• 1:04:02
  It's it's a 2 1/2 hour audio book boom.
• 1:04:05
  You know, like it's not a huge investment of time either
• 1:04:09
  reading it or going for some a walk or two on your headphones.
• 1:04:13
  It's if you know the sound of Jacob Dudman as well, you know,
• 1:04:16
  check. Out his Instagram page because
• 1:04:17
  he looks great with his shirt off too.
• 1:04:21
  That might. Not be good for you, you know,
• 1:04:23
  but the bulk of the audience listening, I'm sure it will be,
• 1:04:27
  was was there anything we haven't covered?
• 1:04:30
  Or anything, because we've been very positive.
• 1:04:32
  Was there anything you didn't like about this book?
• 1:04:35
  I always content to ask that question.
• 1:04:37
  For me, I don't think there was a note.
• 1:04:40
  That didn't hit the target. And and it's sort of like it was
• 1:04:45
  a sort of. Accumulated amount of
• 1:04:47
  sentimental moments that, you know, I was sort of resistant at
• 1:04:51
  in the first half of the book. And then just all my defenses
• 1:04:55
  were down by the end. What about you guys?
• 1:04:59
  There's a. One one of the years is shorter
• 1:05:01
  than a lot of the others and it's like the year where you
• 1:05:04
  feel like all hope is kind of lost and you're just like, but I
• 1:05:07
  love this family. I've been reading them forever.
• 1:05:10
  What, 60 pages? Shut up, it feels.
• 1:05:14
  Like it though, doesn't it? Yeah, when you see all their.
• 1:05:18
  Triumphs and all, you know all. Their terrible days.
• 1:05:20
  It really feels like you get to know these people in a way that,
• 1:05:23
  you know, we just read The Doctor Trap.
• 1:05:24
  Which was three times the length of this and I don't.
• 1:05:27
  Know any of those fucking characters at all?
• 1:05:30
  No, I think the. The only thing for me, I mean,
• 1:05:34
  it's not really a criticism. It's just, I suppose I wasn't
• 1:05:38
  expecting it to go beyond the Hartnell era.
• 1:05:41
  I was expecting it to be kind of completely rooted in that,
• 1:05:44
  particularly as he's the Doctor on the cover.
• 1:05:46
  And so I suppose the fact that the kind of resolution comes
• 1:05:50
  from the 3rd Doctor, I guess I just wanted Jerry to reconnect
• 1:05:57
  with the 1st Doctor a little bit.
• 1:05:59
  But I suppose kind of being tied to that Doctor Who continuity
• 1:06:03
  and then doing that, that later 60s stuff that really worked
• 1:06:05
  with the trout and stories, there isn't really a way that
• 1:06:08
  you could have done that. So, yeah, I think I, yeah, I
• 1:06:13
  just wanted, I wanted a little bit more heart and all, I think.
• 1:06:16
  And I, I think I was just like a little bit bereft when we left
• 1:06:19
  the Hartnell era. I was like, oh God, we're, we're
• 1:06:21
  doing, we're doing 10th Planet. But, and we're, we're not, we've
• 1:06:24
  still got quite a bit to go, you see, about the 3rd Doctor there,
• 1:06:29
  you remember. How we said we didn't get a
• 1:06:30
  sense of David Tennant's 10th Doctor atoll when the Doctor
• 1:06:34
  trap. Listen to this.
• 1:06:35
  Yeah, because this is like two sentences.
• 1:06:37
  And straight away I was like, yeah, it's John Berwick.
• 1:06:39
  What was it they went? Inside found the green.
• 1:06:43
  Corridor and opened the third. Door on the right, a tall man
• 1:06:46
  with. Curly white hair was perched on
• 1:06:47
  the workbench, examining a piece of machinery for a jeweler's
• 1:06:50
  loop. He was old, he was young.
• 1:06:53
  He was ageless. Claire couldn't work it out, but
• 1:06:56
  he looked kind. That to me is probably.
• 1:07:00
  And that that's just. A sign of such a brilliant.
• 1:07:02
  Writer, because she's got such a reduced word count in this book
• 1:07:06
  and just being able to capture the character like that and not
• 1:07:10
  resorting to the kind of Terence Dix cliches, which would be the
• 1:07:14
  easy way to do it, particularly in an anniversary ones.
• 1:07:16
  You just reach for those kind of, you know, the bouffant hair
• 1:07:20
  and the the young old face or whatever, whatever.
• 1:07:24
  It's for the pert for the pert we want.
• 1:07:26
  It was rubbing his neck quite dramatically.
• 1:07:29
  But she does her own version of that and just.
• 1:07:31
  Captures the character within, you know, a couple of sentences
• 1:07:35
  and yeah, she, yeah, she's brilliant.
• 1:07:38
  Luke Any. Complaints.
• 1:07:42
  It's only a. 100 pages. Yeah, I know.
• 1:07:44
  It's annoying, isn't it? I do think it's the perfect
• 1:07:48
  length, though I'm not sure it could sustain.
• 1:07:50
  A full length novel I agree, but when you read something really.
• 1:07:54
  Good. You want to live in it a little
• 1:07:55
  longer, you know, you just wish it was maybe.
• 1:07:59
  You know, it's like that feeling of you don't want to read a 5000
• 1:08:02
  page book. No one does.
• 1:08:04
  But sometimes you read something that's so good, you just like,
• 1:08:07
  what if this was 5000 pages? You know, you just get that
• 1:08:11
  fleeting feeling of I want more. Yeah, yeah, I feel like this
• 1:08:17
  would be a. Really good.
• 1:08:18
  Companion piece to time and relative.
• 1:08:21
  Definitely you could put them in like a nice.
• 1:08:23
  Little slip case. Box set together of these two
• 1:08:26
  short books told through 1 character going back to the 60s.
• 1:08:31
  One that's really fucking dark and miserable and one that's
• 1:08:34
  just like sweetness and light. And you'd get kind of, yeah,
• 1:08:37
  those two, two different sides of things, that's 60s who
• 1:08:41
  encapsulated really both. Sides of the coin.
• 1:08:45
  Well, OK, what about? Final thoughts overall then we
• 1:08:48
  can't have covered it all but Luke, your final thoughts on
• 1:08:52
  Imaginary Friends? Great title as well, it's
• 1:08:56
  another book. That I don't think I would have
• 1:08:59
  read if it wasn't for this book club.
• 1:09:01
  So when Joe's like I'm, I'm can't believe you keep going.
• 1:09:05
  Just keep doing these. I'm like, really, I just, I just
• 1:09:09
  read this. I'm like, I never would have
• 1:09:10
  read this. It's I thought it was all
• 1:09:13
  magnetic. Personalities.
• 1:09:15
  It's just a bookshop I like. Andrew, me too, but yeah.
• 1:09:28
  It was so nice I. Read it twice and I even read it
• 1:09:32
  with the lovely Jacob Dublin in my ear holes.
• 1:09:35
  So just to get a get the same mix.
• 1:09:39
  Yeah, in my ear holes. I'm sorry, phrasing everyone,
• 1:09:43
  you're filthy. You are.
• 1:09:45
  Filthy Andrew was getting sick. You said to get the other one.
• 1:09:54
  Yeah, nothing in my ear holes, but.
• 1:09:57
  This. Yeah.
• 1:09:58
  It's just such a lovely book. And even though, you know, I've
• 1:10:00
  been a little bit critical, as you know, I want to be, it's a
• 1:10:05
  10 out of 10 book. It's brilliant.
• 1:10:07
  And yeah, everyone put it on your Christmas lists.
• 1:10:13
  Hopefully they'll reprint it as a paperback and it'll be not
• 1:10:17
  ludicrously expensive because yeah, it's one of those ones
• 1:10:21
  which I think should just be on everyone's reading list.
• 1:10:24
  And hopefully, if they do a Doctor Who magazine poll this
• 1:10:27
  year, this one is, if not on top, near the top.
• 1:10:33
  I'll sum up this book as. Jacqueline Rayner, you still
• 1:10:37
  haven't let me down, and in fact, you seem to be impressing
• 1:10:40
  me more as each year passes. And on this book club, you know.
• 1:10:45
  I've reread books that I loved and now think very little of
• 1:10:50
  Hello, The Doctor Trap. I've.
• 1:10:53
  Approached books that I wasn't very sure about initially and
• 1:10:56
  enjoyed thoroughly. Hello Blood Harvest, and I've
• 1:11:00
  read books that I've always loved and I still love.
• 1:11:03
  Hello Alien Bodies. Oh, we did all of those, didn't
• 1:11:05
  we? Yeah, this is.
• 1:11:08
  One I never would have heard of so.
• 1:11:10
  This has been the biggest surprise for me.
• 1:11:12
  Well, because I didn't know it existed until Andrew said let's
• 1:11:15
  do it. And two, because I don't think I
• 1:11:17
  ever would have got this because I've seen them.
• 1:11:20
  I have seen these books on shelves in like, weird enough,
• 1:11:24
  every Waterstone seems to have one or two, but no one has all
• 1:11:26
  of them. But I wouldn't.
• 1:11:29
  Have bought them because it's just like.
• 1:11:31
  I bought the fairy tale set. Do you remember that?
• 1:11:33
  The box fairy tales? And I read a couple and I was
• 1:11:36
  like, so I probably thought this would have been more of the
• 1:11:39
  same. So to read this on quite a dark
• 1:11:43
  week I was having. And for it to, like, put his
• 1:11:47
  arms around me the way it did and made me feel so good and so
• 1:11:51
  in love with Doctor Who in a really sort of lovely way.
• 1:11:58
  Yeah. This this has probably been, I'm
• 1:12:00
  not sure if it's been the best book I've read, but it might be
• 1:12:04
  my favorite experience so far on the book club.
• 1:12:07
  But just because it it blew my socks off and I really didn't
• 1:12:10
  expect it to. So thank you, Andrew.
• 1:12:13
  It was a wonderful choice. Oh well, thank you Jacqueline
• 1:12:15
  Rayner for writing. Such a brilliant book.
• 1:12:18
  It's just no pressure but the next.
• 1:12:20
  One you recommend but needs to be really really good combat.
• 1:12:26
  Rock, don't worry about. Andrew, the pressure's on us
• 1:12:29
  now, Joe. We can't.
• 1:12:30
  We can't choose a fucking steaming pile of shit, Arsenal.
• 1:12:33
  Excuse me? I did choose the next one.
• 1:12:35
  And he's already. Said, yeah, you're enjoying it
• 1:12:36
  that much. It's getting better.
• 1:12:39
  It's getting. Better.
• 1:12:39
  Oh, thank God for that. And.
• 1:12:44
  Then one day not long after. Ian had popped round to tell her
• 1:12:48
  in utter astonishment that he'd been told the doctor was a woman
• 1:12:51
  now. Claire's great, great grandson.
• 1:12:54
  Stephen rushed in with a paper parcel under his arm.
• 1:12:58
  Grandma Claire. Grandma.
• 1:13:00
  Claire, it came. Doctor Bear's new present came.
• 1:13:04
  Grandpa Jerry said to bring it straight away to show you.
• 1:13:08
  Stephen pulled back the wrapping and there was a bright orange
• 1:13:11
  top and a stylish tweed overcoat.
• 1:13:15
  Oh Doctor Bear will look so smart in these.
• 1:13:19
  Claire told him. He picked up the bear from the.
• 1:13:22
  End of her bed. Stripped off its rainbow
• 1:13:25
  T-shirts and braces and dressed it in the new clothes.
• 1:13:29
  Claire was right. Doctor Bear did look very, very
• 1:13:33
  smart in them. Got to go, said Stephen.
• 1:13:37
  Got a piano lesson. Enjoy it, darling, said his
• 1:13:40
  great, great grandmother. Maybe you can come and play me
• 1:13:44
  some of your pieces later. Mm, Hmm, he said, sounding.
• 1:13:47
  Exactly like Jerry. Had when he was a little boy and
• 1:13:51
  ran off. Claire couldn't.
• 1:13:54
  Take her eyes off Doctor Bear. Sitting once more at the end of
• 1:13:57
  her bed, the doctor had watched over.
• 1:14:01
  Jerry from when he was. A boy all the way through to
• 1:14:03
  today, with that boy, now a wonderful father and grandfather
• 1:14:08
  of almost 67 years. The day when Jerry had been
• 1:14:12
  lost. In London had.
• 1:14:13
  Been the worst day of her life, or her life as it had been that
• 1:14:16
  far. Yet it had brought them all so
• 1:14:19
  much happiness in the end. Happy ever after.
• 1:14:23
  Not quite. Not for her, but for poor humans
• 1:14:27
  stuck in this one place, living through one time.
• 1:14:30
  It hadn't been so bad. She'd had a lot, oh so much
• 1:14:35
  happiness along the way. Thank you, Doctor.
• 1:14:40
  Bear. She whispered and closed her
• 1:14:43
  eyes for the last time. Thank you, Doctor Bear I.
• 1:14:52
  Say and thank you, Doctor, for everything.
• 1:15:05
  Well, before we talk about that one.
• 1:15:08
  Do we all have a recommend this week?
• 1:15:10
  Oh shit. Oh, so Andrew doesn't?
• 1:15:13
  Luke, do you ever? Recommend this week?
• 1:15:16
  Well. I mentioned at the start.
• 1:15:18
  I'll do it again. Earth World.
• 1:15:21
  Not only is Earth World one of the best jumping on points for
• 1:15:26
  Doctor Who novels, if you want to jump on and just go, if it
• 1:15:31
  got reprinted, so there's a 50th anniversary reprint of it, it's
• 1:15:36
  pretty easy to get, actually. Like the next 10 books are
• 1:15:39
  fairly easy to get to if you're a little bit savvy and know
• 1:15:41
  where to look. And it's a very strange cover,
• 1:15:44
  isn't it? The new one?
• 1:15:46
  Isn't it Paul McCann standing on the world?
• 1:15:49
  Yeah, I really like that cover. I like that whole.
• 1:15:53
  Set where they kind of went a bit.
• 1:15:54
  Abstract with them my version of 10 little alias.
• 1:15:57
  Oh, Spoiler is just William Hartnell holding this bizarre
• 1:16:02
  crystal. I don't know what that's all
• 1:16:03
  about. Yeah, anyway, sorry Luke.
• 1:16:08
  So yeah. Earth World.
• 1:16:10
  It's it's hilarious. It will also give you a bit of
• 1:16:14
  an anxious existential crisis. There's some beautiful moments
• 1:16:17
  that it runs the gamut of emotions and it does them well
• 1:16:20
  and it's not one of those. Books where you.
• 1:16:24
  Open it up expecting 282 pages. And it's not 282 pages because
• 1:16:31
  if you look at the new copy of 10 Little Aliens, it's 300.
• 1:16:35
  The book is bigger and it's longer in Page count, so you
• 1:16:39
  must think like the original BBC version of that fucking thing's
• 1:16:42
  got microscopic print. You know that original cover
• 1:16:47
  though, with the Mike Tucker? Aliens on it.
• 1:16:49
  They sort of weird clay aliens. Do you remember those do?
• 1:16:53
  You remember those free? Triplets.
• 1:16:55
  In Earthworlds, Asia, Antarctica, and is it Africa?
• 1:16:59
  They've all got continent names I think, and they're all like
• 1:17:02
  Goldilocks but absolute psychos. Terribly evil.
• 1:17:07
  Yeah. Oh, so you know.
• 1:17:11
  A minute Are we doing Earth World one day?
• 1:17:13
  Is that on the list? I don't know.
• 1:17:15
  It's on the oldest we got. It might be on someone else's
• 1:17:18
  Jesus. I'll get in trouble.
• 1:17:19
  Again, coming to a book club near you, I don't know who the
• 1:17:24
  fuck with I thought I would recommend.
• 1:17:28
  Oh, well done. Off you go.
• 1:17:29
  Quick, Get Me Out of this. Hole well, just being just being
• 1:17:32
  lazy the. Story that I talked about
• 1:17:34
  earlier, Blood and Ice, that 1212 Doctor and Clara story.
• 1:17:39
  So it's yeah, it was a Doctor Who magazine comic and it is in
• 1:17:44
  the collected volume called The Eye of Torment.
• 1:17:48
  I can't remember what the other stories are in that era, but
• 1:17:50
  it's worth it for a Blood and Ice, which is a really good
• 1:17:54
  story and a really kind of necessary story I think for
• 1:17:57
  Clara's story arc. Every time you recommend these
• 1:18:01
  graphic. Novels, you know, I get very
• 1:18:03
  excited. I'm going to Forbidden Planet
• 1:18:04
  just like you did with that other strip last time.
• 1:18:06
  Do you remember you said it was in the sales section?
• 1:18:08
  Forbidden Planet. I was going the next day.
• 1:18:10
  I've got there. They've all bloody gone.
• 1:18:12
  I'm sure I'll find a copy of this one, though I would like to
• 1:18:16
  stay on topic and recommend The Squires Crystal by Jacqueline
• 1:18:22
  Rayner, featuring one of these very detailed and arty Caroline
• 1:18:28
  Edwards covers here, which is half beneath half.
• 1:18:33
  Very toned man. Both naked, but unfortunately
• 1:18:37
  they're holding a crystal so you can't see her.
• 1:18:39
  Is it the same one Hartnell's carrying on the?
• 1:18:41
  Front of the it's exactly the same.
• 1:18:44
  Look at that. It's Hartnell naked behind that
• 1:18:47
  crystal. Oh, bloody oak.
• 1:18:48
  No, this is a really needed. Job Why have you read this?
• 1:18:55
  Have I ever you? Read, I think so ages ago.
• 1:18:58
  No, I I haven't read any. Of the Benny novels, I don't
• 1:19:02
  think I will lend this to you to read right because.
• 1:19:05
  The premise of this book is is that it's that old body swap
• 1:19:08
  thing. But Paul Bernie Summerfield ends
• 1:19:11
  up in the in the body of this chap here and experiences what
• 1:19:16
  it is to be a man for most of the pages of this book.
• 1:19:19
  And during several hilarious sequences where this port this
• 1:19:23
  man is turned on by the women around him, Bernice experiences
• 1:19:27
  an erection for the first time. And Jacqueline Rayner describes
• 1:19:30
  it as OK. Oh my God.
• 1:19:32
  It moves on his own. I can't keep drawing it.
• 1:19:36
  She tries to tape it down. And also, it's so, so funny.
• 1:19:40
  But it's also a pivotal art book because.
• 1:19:43
  He's in the body of this man and the entity of this man is in her
• 1:19:48
  body and has it off with Adrian the the construction worker.
• 1:19:54
  On the Bracks Hotel. Collection.
• 1:19:56
  And that's how Bernice falls pregnant and has her son Peter
• 1:19:59
  eventually. So it's a really important book
• 1:20:01
  as well. That's just fucking hilarious,
• 1:20:04
  honestly. Poor Benny, she's got a
• 1:20:06
  dreadful. Body odor.
• 1:20:07
  You know, she's got a stiffy in the morning.
• 1:20:09
  She's having a terrible time. In this book.
• 1:20:11
  It's basically Bridget Jones's Diary, but with Benny in them,
• 1:20:14
  in the head of a man. It's wonderful and it's not a
• 1:20:18
  240. Pages, it's a really quick read,
• 1:20:22
  but just with all of those things we said about and it
• 1:20:26
  really leads into a theme of identity and who you are.
• 1:20:30
  And Bernice goes on a bit of an existential crisis when she's in
• 1:20:34
  the body of this man. It's Yeah, it's wonderful.
• 1:20:37
  I think I've recommended the Glass Prism before, which is 2
• 1:20:40
  books after this. So Jack Rennie was knocking out
• 1:20:43
  classics at this point because I think she did wolfsbane in the
• 1:20:46
  same year as well. And Earth, well, the year
• 1:20:49
  before. So she was on a creative high at
• 1:20:52
  this point. But yeah, typical Jackie and
• 1:20:56
  Rayner. Fabulous.
• 1:20:59
  Well, we have already mentioned what we're doing next, but
• 1:21:03
  perhaps you're Andrew. You would tell everybody what
• 1:21:06
  you're currently insuring. We are staying in the. 60s by a
• 1:21:13
  way of the early 2000s and we are doing 10 Little Aliens by
• 1:21:19
  Stephen Cole, which I believe is sort of Agatha.
• 1:21:26
  Christie meets. Starship Troopers meets Choose
• 1:21:32
  Your Own Adventure. So yeah, I'm intrigued.
• 1:21:36
  I'm about 50 pages in at the moment.
• 1:21:39
  It's it. We're very much in the Starship
• 1:21:42
  Troopers space. It's very lots of guns, lots of
• 1:21:45
  soldiers. So I'm looking forward to when
• 1:21:47
  it those other influences start to kind of come into the mix all
• 1:21:52
  about. 3 chapters in. And I've gone.
• 1:21:56
  Past the easing bit, which is very helpful because I can keep
• 1:21:59
  referring back to it like which characters that again, but
• 1:22:01
  actually he's already defined the characters quite well.
• 1:22:04
  But. It is all very, very macho, very
• 1:22:07
  masculine, very Battlestar Galactica with the with the
• 1:22:12
  occasional moment with the 1st Doctor, Paul and Ben, who seem
• 1:22:16
  really well characterized. But I do remember this being a
• 1:22:19
  great faux Agatha Christie with some great surprises, and the
• 1:22:26
  Choose Your Own Adventure section being really good.
• 1:22:28
  So stick with it. Luke, if you started yet I'm
• 1:22:31
  halfway, I have no idea what the fuck you're talking.
• 1:22:33
  About with this choose your own adventure stuff and now I'm
• 1:22:35
  excited. I stopped when I was halfway
• 1:22:37
  because I'm like, I haven't even done the book club for imaginary
• 1:22:41
  friends yet. What the fuck are you doing?
• 1:22:43
  So I put it down and I'm like, I'm going to and then have
• 1:22:47
  another read of this. So I was just like a little bit
• 1:22:49
  fresh, but I'm halfway. It's like, yes, Starship
• 1:22:52
  Troopers and Aliens and there's lots of mysteries and like
• 1:22:56
  little things being said. I thought I'd need to refer to
• 1:23:01
  I'm doing the book club for the next book already, but I'm
• 1:23:03
  excited to get to the choose your adventure stuff.
• 1:23:06
  Well, I think it's quite exciting because it does give us
• 1:23:09
  the. Chance to talk about Starship
• 1:23:11
  Troopers esque movies, about Agatha Christie and if we've got
• 1:23:14
  any sort of relationship with that and Battlestar Galactica
• 1:23:17
  and the 1st Doctor, Polly and Ben, which we won't get to talk
• 1:23:20
  about a lot. So I'm excited, absolutely.
• 1:23:24
  Yeah, yeah. Well, how do we?
• 1:23:25
  Round this thing off usually. I think, Oh, no, wait, Andrew.
• 1:23:29
  I usually wave and lamely say to you, no, no goodbyes.
• 1:23:33
  What we should do is. Hand it over to Andrew started
• 1:23:36
  off the episode. And then I don't have to worry
• 1:23:38
  about it. So over to you, Andrew.
• 1:23:41
  Well, thank you very much. Loyal listeners for joining us
• 1:23:45
  better be another. Journey through.
• 1:23:48
  Doctor Who literature, I hope you join us all again next time.
• 1:23:52
  Oh, so polite, thank. You very much.
• 1:24:00
  Bye. The.