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Hamster Book Club Election Special - The Dying Days by Lance Parkin (featuring Michael Mills) · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:01
  Grey Haven swept past him, slotting a computer disk into a
• 0:05
  terminal and tapping a few keys. That's now grabbed him and threw
• 0:10
  him against the back wall. Staines was staring at the Bank
• 0:14
  of monitors. The orbiter is still holding his
• 0:17
  position. Grey Haven stood.
• 0:20
  The Martian towered over him. I know of your plans, Staines
• 0:27
  told me. Ox now raised his huge right
• 0:31
  claw and fired the gun on his wrist.
• 0:34
  The computer terminal pulsed and shattered.
• 0:37
  Staines isn't bright enough. Oh, but I am.
• 0:41
  The Home Secretary said, stepping forward.
• 0:44
  You were planning to send a signal to the Mars orbiter.
• 0:47
  You opened the air locks before by remote control.
• 0:50
  You were planning to drop a bomb or something.
• 0:52
  Grey Haven looked over at him, and when he spoke, there was a
• 0:56
  tone of respect in his voice. The Mars 97 is powered by two
• 1:00
  atomic reactors. If the computers received the
• 1:03
  right signal, they can be sent to miss phase and send each
• 1:06
  other critical. The explosion will be the
• 1:08
  equivalent of A-100 megaton bomb.
• 1:11
  You can probably guess which parts of Mars are targeted.
• 1:15
  The Archaea. Hicks now grunted.
• 1:18
  The territory of his own clan. He checked the instruments once
• 1:22
  again. The orbiter has not moved.
• 1:26
  You have failed. The Martian pointed at
• 1:29
  Greyhaven's legs and fired his Sonic disruptor.
• 1:33
  Every bone below the knee joint shattered.
• 1:37
  The Prime Minister buckled, unable to do anything but
• 1:39
  scream. For the first couple of seconds,
• 1:42
  Staines was smiling. You thought I was stupid, didn't
• 1:46
  you, Teddy? You underestimated me, you see.
• 1:49
  Ixnarl ignored him. Why?
• 1:52
  He asked because he killed Eve. Staines explained, trying to get
• 1:57
  back into the conversation. That blonde slip of a thing?
• 2:02
  Really Teddy? I told you it should be trouble.
• 2:05
  Staines, you really are an idiot.
• 2:08
  Greyhaven said through clenched teeth.
• 2:10
  The fact that my so-called ally tried to murder an entire
• 2:14
  village full of innocent people, including a woman I was fond of
• 2:19
  didn't help, but I've always known that this thing would try
• 2:23
  to betray me. He thinks that we're animals.
• 2:26
  What were you going to use those prisoners at Gatwick for?
• 2:29
  Medical experiments, target practice, food.
• 2:33
  The home secretary bent over him, smiling.
• 2:36
  The Martians need a workforce. You said so yourself.
• 2:40
  Their population has seen rapid decline over recent centuries.
• 2:44
  Those criminals would have been put to useful work on Mars.
• 2:48
  Gray Haven's body was screaming at him, telling him that his
• 2:51
  only hope for survival was to lapse into unconsciousness.
• 2:55
  Grey Heaven knew better than that.
• 2:57
  He wasn't going to survive. He only needed a minute more.
• 3:02
  Do you remember the words? To rule Britannia, Britain's
• 3:08
  never shall be slaves, Staines laughed.
• 3:13
  Ixnal and myself are partners, Teddy, we knew that you'd try to
• 3:16
  double cross us. The Martians are helping to
• 3:19
  solve prison overcrowding. Those men of a lifers, the
• 3:23
  habitual criminals, the least desirable of the undesirable.
• 3:27
  The scam of the Earth. It's Gnarl Histon agreement.
• 3:32
  Staines was smiling his idiot grin.
• 3:35
  The Martians are our natural rulers, Teddy.
• 3:38
  They are superior beings. And you think that the Martians
• 3:43
  will let you have any power? Greyhaven rasped.
• 3:48
  They see our state-of-the-art science, our computers, lasers
• 3:52
  and nuclear reactors, and they sneer at them.
• 3:55
  To IGS. Now the pinnacles of human art
• 3:58
  are finger paintings. Our greatest philosophers speak
• 4:01
  platitudes not fit for the playground.
• 4:04
  The Martian raised his arm. He's going to kill the human
• 4:08
  race like a farmer sprays his crops, and with the same
• 4:11
  compassion for the insects. I knew that all along.
• 4:15
  I also knew that Martians were weak.
• 4:18
  Most of them are impotent. Those that aren't a diseased are
• 4:20
  disordered. Look at that thing.
• 4:22
  Ask him why he needs constant blood transfusions.
• 4:25
  Ask him whether that massive brain of his can function
• 4:28
  without stimulants. Mars is dying, its people are
• 4:33
  dying. But we have this world.
• 4:37
  We will adapt it to our needs. Wagner has prepared plans for
• 4:43
  the first colonies. Within a century this planet
• 4:47
  will be iris formed, it's temperature lowered, it's
• 4:52
  atmosphere thinned. We will survive.
• 4:57
  You think that your puny human intellect is a match for mine?
• 5:03
  Grey Haven laughed. Is he delirious?
• 5:08
  No, I'm not Grey Haven snapped. King genius, you have overlooked
• 5:14
  one small detail. Indeed.
• 5:18
  Ixnell hissed scornfully. Yes.
• 5:21
  Grey Haven said, only needing to block out the pain just long
• 5:25
  enough to finish one more sentence.
• 5:28
  The fact that it takes 5 minutes to send a radio message from
• 5:33
  Earth to Mars. Staines and Ixnell spun to face
• 5:38
  the monitors. My signal should be arriving
• 5:43
  now. The orbiter's telemetry began to
• 5:47
  alter. The altitude was dropping.
• 5:49
  The retros were firing. The nuclear reactors began
• 5:53
  redlining. The computer interpreted the
• 5:56
  data, plotting the course of the orbiter as it skipped down
• 6:00
  through the thin Martian atmosphere.
• 6:02
  It was passed the equator, streaking over the Valis
• 6:05
  Marinaris and the Noctis Labyrinth, crossing the mare
• 6:09
  Erythraeum several times faster than the speed of sound.
• 6:13
  If the Martians lived underground, Grey Haven
• 6:15
  reflected, they probably couldn't hear the Orbiter
• 6:17
  slicing its way down. The Martians were scared of
• 6:21
  fire, and now their sky was ablaze.
• 6:25
  The Orbiter detonated right above the Argya.
• 6:40
  Grey Haven was still laughing when Igsnau broke his neck.
• 6:52
  Hamster book club. The Doctor Who Novel Review
• 6:56
  Podcast with Joe Ford and Michael Mills.
• 7:11
  The Dying Days by Lance Parking. Welcome back to the Hamster Book
• 7:26
  Club. My name is Joe Ford and I'm back
• 7:30
  again. Again with the fabulous Michael
• 7:34
  Mills, a recurring guest of well, I mean, how many have we?
• 7:38
  How many have we done now? Oh, I don't know, it'd be
• 7:41
  voluntary count. 15. 200. 200. No, we haven't, But no one can
• 7:49
  prove that. We've.
• 7:50
  Done, in fact. But we've mostly done good
• 7:52
  books, haven't we? You and I.
• 7:54
  Yeah, now we. Have had a conversation about
• 7:56
  this I'm. Sorry.
• 7:58
  About about how we're going to have to start doing some pretty
• 8:00
  shitty books and we're going to start immediately with the next
• 8:04
  episode. But when?
• 8:06
  I'll tell you at the end of the episode what that is.
• 8:08
  OK, because it's a book I've not read yet.
• 8:11
  No, Well, no. I can almost guarantee it's
• 8:13
  going to be absolutely terrible, but it may surprise us.
• 8:17
  However, today we will not be talking about a terrible book.
• 8:22
  No today, sorry. We should have started this with
• 8:25
  BOM. BOM.
• 8:27
  BOM. Remember the conceit we promised
• 8:31
  people, Joe. Yes, this is a hamster booklet
• 8:34
  of Elections Special. How insufferable of us.
• 8:38
  You just thought you thought there's too much politics.
• 8:40
  There's too many terrible people taking up time in my ears.
• 8:43
  I want some hamster book club. Well, tough people, you have a
• 8:46
  democratic responsibility, so you're going to be politicised.
• 8:50
  Is that the word? We'll go with it.
• 8:54
  Yeah, anyway, so we thought we'd jump on the bandwagon and have
• 8:56
  insufferable bit insufferable bit of whimsy I've.
• 8:59
  Got to be honest with you, I started reading this book
• 9:01
  because obviously you recommended this book as our
• 9:04
  election special. A few chapters in going, what
• 9:08
  the fuck's this got to do with politics?
• 9:10
  Then about 1/3 into the book I was like, oh, OK, yeah, it makes
• 9:13
  sense. It speaks.
• 9:14
  Poorly to me that I was sat on the sofa watching Rishi Sunak
• 9:18
  give his speech in the rain. Why?
• 9:19
  Were you watching that? I mean, why would you do that?
• 9:23
  Well, my wife is a civil servant, so she sort of had to
• 9:26
  have it on for professional reasons.
• 9:29
  Can I tell you something? About Rishi Sunak.
• 9:32
  What's? All the time, you know, he was
• 9:33
  one of my weird crushes. You know, you have weird
• 9:35
  crushes, people that are really ugly, but for some reason you
• 9:38
  fancy. But then unfortunately he got
• 9:41
  the position of Prime Minister and now I hate his guts.
• 9:45
  Oh, there we are. There we.
• 9:46
  Go That is a. That is a genuinely weird crush.
• 9:49
  My other two are Robert Wedd and Richard Iowardi.
• 9:53
  They're less weird. I know they're very.
• 9:54
  Smart. I do like a small bloke, you
• 9:56
  know. That's the trouble.
• 9:57
  I don't think we should act that small if I'm honest.
• 10:01
  There we go, Bit of satire. Good, good.
• 10:03
  Keep it going. Actually, do you know what news
• 10:06
  report? And this is Joe Ford reporting
• 10:13
  from the Hamster Book Club. Lord, is it?
• 10:16
  Lord Grey Haven has taken charge as a enormous spaceship.
• 10:21
  It's hovering above Great Britain the the entire political
• 10:26
  system in ruins and the provisional government has been
• 10:30
  put together. How am I doing so far?
• 10:32
  I thought you were robbed when they gave that bit in Aliens of
• 10:34
  London to Andrew Moore. Honestly.
• 10:36
  Oh. He was terrible, wasn't he?
• 10:37
  What connects all of these people?
• 10:39
  We cannot tell. Awful.
• 10:43
  Don't axe Andrew Moore. So yes, oh, this speaks.
• 10:46
  This speaks poorly with me, but I finished watching that speech.
• 10:49
  Ran out into the streets as people were going general.
• 10:51
  Election. General election.
• 10:52
  And immediately texted Joe to say we should do the dying days.
• 10:58
  Oh. Actually, it is quite a lot to
• 11:00
  say about politics. It Yeah, yeah.
• 11:02
  It wasn't just randomly picking Doctor Who, but Quick Joe.
• 11:06
  We need to do Saint Anthony's Fire.
• 11:09
  But you've seen now I'm getting desperate for these sort of ICE
• 11:12
  broker questions now to start off with.
• 11:15
  And so I very often say to you now, Michael, please think I
• 11:17
  have something intelligent for us to talk about and you through
• 11:21
  the question. Oh come on, tell me what was the
• 11:23
  question? Do you think Doctor Who books
• 11:26
  should be political? Then I've got me to thinking,
• 11:31
  which doesn't happen too often, but I was thinking, well, how
• 11:35
  many Doctor Who books are political?
• 11:37
  Because I can only think of a couple.
• 11:40
  Can you think of that many? Well, everything is political.
• 11:43
  Well. Yeah.
• 11:44
  I'm sure you can find readings and everything, but sort of
• 11:46
  overtly political. I think there's a bit of satire
• 11:50
  in the Tomorrow Windows, but yeah, I'm a bit stuck there now.
• 11:59
  The well mannered war. Oh.
• 12:02
  What was that all about? Tell me.
• 12:04
  What the well mannered war is. That's the one where the kid
• 12:07
  doesn't canine run for president or something like that on an
• 12:10
  alien world. OK.
• 12:12
  No, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Any more?
• 12:17
  Yeah. So you're well, yeah.
• 12:20
  But The thing is, whatever I understand is that I did, you
• 12:23
  know, I, I did a journalism degree, right?
• 12:25
  So as far as I'm concerned, everything's political, man.
• 12:28
  Everything's a signifier. I've.
• 12:29
  Just thought of another one. Oh good.
• 12:31
  The middle sections are far the time, but we're talking about
• 12:34
  Thatcherism and. Damaged goods.
• 12:37
  That's. Incredibly political.
• 12:38
  Yeah, Yeah, I suppose it's, it's that sort of 80s period.
• 12:42
  I think it brings it out people and.
• 12:45
  The Giggle, which we did, the novelisation of the giggle where
• 12:47
  you have the, the President of the United States, you're
• 12:51
  trapped inside the the mind of the President of the United
• 12:54
  States. Can you find your way out?
• 12:56
  There we go. There's lots of them.
• 12:57
  There must be more Millennium Shock that's got that's got
• 13:00
  Terry Brooks, who's a pastiche of Tony Blair in it.
• 13:03
  Now we've started, it's just going to be loads, isn't?
• 13:07
  It the longest day, doesn't that have something in there or I
• 13:11
  think there's a sequence. During the invasion of the
• 13:13
  Gallifrey Chronicles, you know, which gets a bit political,
• 13:16
  where we're talking about where the eve sort of very briefly
• 13:19
  says about how they're coping with the war invasion, that.
• 13:23
  Would make sense, yeah. Yeah.
• 13:25
  All, all of Andrew Clarkmell's war NA's they've got, they've
• 13:29
  got political elements to them being such.
• 13:32
  Tragedy Day. Political.
• 13:37
  Yes, I think. So in very broad brush strokes.
• 13:41
  OK, so there's quite a bit. So the question was, should
• 13:44
  Doctor Who books be political? Should.
• 13:45
  Doctor Who books, should they be doing this?
• 13:48
  Yes, but not too often I don't think.
• 13:51
  OK. I think it would get a bit like,
• 13:53
  I think like you said, I think there's probably lots of
• 13:56
  political illusions that you can make if you want to with stories
• 14:00
  set on other planets with political systems and things
• 14:02
  like that. But in the in the way that this
• 14:05
  book, The Dying Days, is political, I thought that we
• 14:08
  should be doing that all the time because it would make this
• 14:10
  less special as well. Yeah, no.
• 14:13
  That's, that's, that's that's a fair point.
• 14:14
  And I think if, yeah, we're talking overtly political
• 14:18
  stories here, then I think you actually need to be engaging
• 14:25
  with the actual nature of politics and you need to have a
• 14:27
  bit of a brain behind it. Otherwise it just turns a little
• 14:30
  bit into Carnival of Monsters. You know, Espion's painted grey
• 14:36
  or in the book, you know, the book equivalent, Go and everyone
• 14:39
  sort of such thing as it's a very funny take on the civil
• 14:42
  service. You think, no, it's not, is it?
• 14:44
  You know you can end up with things like the Sun Makers on
• 14:47
  TV, right? I love.
• 14:48
  Both of those stories, yeah. It's not deep political satire,
• 14:53
  though. I.
• 14:53
  Think it's supposed to be, is it?
• 14:55
  Although play tracks line up, don't touch it.
• 14:57
  It could be, you know, full of hideous diseases.
• 15:02
  I think Richie Sunak talked about that before he sent those
• 15:04
  people off to Rwanda or. Satire.
• 15:07
  There we go. Although of course he at the
• 15:09
  time of recording he hasn't sent anyone to No.
• 15:11
  He's trying to find a loophole. He's been trying very hard to
• 15:15
  find that loophole. This.
• 15:17
  Is good. This is good.
• 15:18
  More satire, more political country.
• 15:21
  What do I think? I think I, I think you need to
• 15:28
  be intelligent enough in that your writing to actually have
• 15:35
  something to say about politics in what you're writing about.
• 15:39
  So we'll get into this with the dying days, but versus Davis has
• 15:42
  a lot of politics in his, in his his writing and his Doctor Who
• 15:45
  books. I mean, to take another bit of
• 15:47
  another Doctor Who book that has a lot of politics in it.
• 15:49
  His epilogue to Rose that was included in adventures in
• 15:54
  lockdown Rose, the epilogue, you know, that's, that has an autumn
• 15:58
  clown turning into Boris Johnson.
• 16:01
  You know, that's, that's, that's pretty of it.
• 16:04
  I think maybe what I've alluded to is what if you, if you so, if
• 16:09
  you can do that and you can make a point and you can offer a
• 16:10
  commentary on it. I think that's good.
• 16:12
  I, I like that. I, I think that's so intelligent
• 16:15
  is it's done here in a few of the other books we've mentioned.
• 16:17
  I think it'd be quite rewarding. And I think it's interesting
• 16:21
  because Doctor Who does POD TV at different times has danced on
• 16:24
  the edges of all that, you know, John Pirk, we quote UN quote
• 16:27
  establishment figure. I know that's that's problematic
• 16:30
  and being torn, torn apart, but but he is presented as a
• 16:34
  character who is sort of interacting with the apparatus
• 16:37
  of government in different ways, but it never actually turns into
• 16:40
  anything political. I think it is very interesting
• 16:41
  to have stories where you do actually go, OK, no, but what
• 16:43
  what does that mean? And books can actually do that
• 16:46
  and say, OK, if an alien invasion did happen now, what
• 16:49
  would be the governmental response?
• 16:51
  How would how would an occupying force actually operate?
• 16:54
  That's that's that's quite interesting.
• 16:55
  The bits in all you can put in historical context.
• 16:58
  So something like Father time, as you say, it's talking about,
• 17:01
  you know, factors effect on northern England through in the
• 17:06
  context of, you know, almost a slight fairy tale is is
• 17:09
  brilliant and damaged goods is every bit as angry as anything
• 17:11
  Russell Davis ever wrote. What I have a problem with is
• 17:14
  when it's that slightly more generic haughty, haughty,
• 17:17
  haughty. Oh, politics, you know, millions
• 17:21
  in in bowler hats, which just all gets a little bit London
• 17:25
  theatre audience. Nicholas Briggs, big Finnish
• 17:28
  stories that have you. What I hate is it's that thing
• 17:31
  when as you know, you know when you go to the you know when you
• 17:34
  go to the theatre, right? Being the intelligent cultures,
• 17:37
  chaps, about time that we are and you go and see a a new a new
• 17:41
  play or maybe a classic one as well, or maybe no, This is the
• 17:45
  worst. This is the worst.
• 17:47
  I went to see the National Theatre Live of King Lear with
• 17:50
  featuring Ian McKellen, and if you've ever been to National
• 17:53
  Theatre Live you always get that little reel at the front before
• 17:56
  it wears the actors backstage talking about the play and one
• 18:00
  of the actresses playing one of the daughters said.
• 18:02
  Don't get that out of the start, do you?
• 18:03
  I'll be straight out the door. I don't know.
• 18:06
  Why don't they give a shit what the actors think about the play?
• 18:08
  Just show me the play. Well.
• 18:10
  This had one of the actresses play one of the daughters
• 18:13
  saying, every night before we go on, I say to everyone, Brexit
• 18:18
  and King Lear is about Brexit. And then everyone goes and then
• 18:22
  and then you get that moment. You get that moment in these
• 18:25
  plays where someone's there on stage and they make a little
• 18:27
  joke, you know, a Shakespeare joke about which wasn't funny
• 18:32
  in, you know, 1599 and it's certainly not funny in 2024.
• 18:37
  But where they'll say something, say something like, but a
• 18:40
  Kingdom should not be torn asunder by its leaders and turns
• 18:45
  the audience and all of the middle class people go, there's
• 18:49
  a little bit of that. There's a little.
• 18:52
  You're hanging out with a wrong crowd, I'm telling you.
• 18:55
  There's a little bit of that though.
• 18:57
  It's some Doctor Who novels, don't you think?
• 18:59
  Sometimes when they try to political.
• 19:02
  Winky, Winky out of the Winky. Winky do.
• 19:05
  You know what? I think Malcolm Hulk has a good
• 19:08
  stab at some political writing in his target versions of his TV
• 19:12
  stories. The Colony in Space, which I
• 19:15
  will say a million times over is a very angry book politically,
• 19:18
  and Frontier in Space as well, which presents a future
• 19:22
  political system that is more complex than we usually get.
• 19:28
  And then I absolutely adore Evasion of the Dinosaurs and
• 19:32
  it's savage attack on the left wing side of politics as well.
• 19:36
  Given that he was a left winger, he was very much.
• 19:39
  Left winger so I. Think I think you can do it.
• 19:43
  But can I be honest with you? Yeah, I do find politics a bit
• 19:47
  dull. Sorry about that.
• 19:50
  Well. Welcome to the Action Special
• 19:51
  podcast everyone. But I didn't find it dull at all
• 19:57
  in this book because it's channelled through such a
• 20:01
  riveting character. And I think that is the key.
• 20:05
  You can make you can make this sort of savage attack on the
• 20:09
  interesting if it's been told through an interesting person.
• 20:13
  And Grey Haven and is it Grey Haven?
• 20:15
  I want to get the name in the dying days.
• 20:17
  The Ian Richardson character is just fucking phenomenal.
• 20:22
  He is. You can see Richardson saying
• 20:25
  every line in this book. He's captured him perfectly.
• 20:29
  And for we kind of gone into the book now and we for Lance Parkin
• 20:34
  to so bold facedly, because I read those notes at the end of
• 20:38
  your book. Lance, did you get those at the
• 20:42
  end of your book? Have you got a physical copy of
• 20:44
  The Dying Days? No, I've still got Wonderfully.
• 20:48
  I still have printed out versions of the e-book from when
• 20:52
  it was put up on Bbci and you could print it out and I have
• 20:55
  them in a ring. Binder, do you have the notes at
• 20:57
  the end? Yes, where he says, you know, I
• 20:59
  couldn't possibly comment as to whether in Italy enriches his
• 21:03
  character from House of Cards, but you know, you could put that
• 21:05
  reading if you won. And he captures that character
• 21:09
  so perfectly and how he just plays the political system, the
• 21:14
  people, the Ice Warriors, everybody.
• 21:17
  It's so masterful. It's so interesting.
• 21:20
  That's how you do it. I think through through a really
• 21:22
  great political character. Yeah, like any satellite, it has
• 21:26
  to land, doesn't it? That's the that's the real
• 21:28
  thing. But.
• 21:29
  What you normally get is somebody like Kufbutt.
• 21:31
  Do you remember Kufbutt? He was Nicholas Briggs, his
• 21:37
  village. Character.
• 21:38
  In the fourth series of the 4th Doctor Adventures.
• 21:41
  And he's a politician played by David Warner of All P David
• 21:45
  Warner, You know, he made that. Man do terrible things.
• 21:48
  Oh. Bless him.
• 21:49
  I'm like, well, no, it was pretty good when he played the
• 21:51
  Oh no. He he was, he was always
• 21:53
  excellent, the script that he was given and always up to his.
• 21:56
  Bit of an interest really, wasn't it?
• 21:58
  Yeah, but, you know, he was exactly what you said there.
• 22:01
  That was all nudge nudge wink wink all the time.
• 22:04
  You know, without him ever doing anything interesting at all that
• 22:08
  you couldn't accuse Grey Haven of that, could you?
• 22:11
  You might very well think about Jenna.
• 22:13
  I couldn't possibly comment. Well, that you have a lot to
• 22:17
  say, that is. Francis Urquhart's catch phrase.
• 22:20
  From, I said. Cards.
• 22:22
  Sorry I've never watched it. You said you've never seen it.
• 22:26
  How comes you know it? I.
• 22:27
  Have seen. It.
• 22:28
  Oh, I beg your pardon? Oh, he's going to be saying.
• 22:31
  You needed to re watch it, yes. OK.
• 22:34
  This episode is going to be a lot of work.
• 22:35
  Listeners, bear with us. Jesus Christ, I really don't
• 22:38
  know much about politics. But you do know a bit about
• 22:42
  Doctor Who books, So should we give some context for the dying
• 22:44
  text? Yeah, go on.
• 22:53
  Right. So it's supposed to be an action
• 22:54
  special. This is sort of unintentionally
• 22:56
  and I think the concluding part of little trilogy that we've
• 22:58
  been doing on this book club, which is we're.
• 23:00
  Going backwards though. No.
• 23:03
  We're not. We're blue, wobbly, wobbly.
• 23:05
  Time is vampire science, and now we're doing the dying days.
• 23:10
  Yeah. Why not of the the early days of
• 23:14
  the 8th Doctrine, the handover from Virgin New Adventures to to
• 23:17
  the BBC? So as faithful listeners, we'll
• 23:20
  recall Virgin lost the licence to publish Doctor Who books
• 23:25
  stolen. If I hadn't already done the the
• 23:30
  the front circuit line, that would have been a better place
• 23:32
  to do it just there. So let's pretend I did to
• 23:34
  everybody and you do it again. For me.
• 23:38
  You might very well think that I couldn't possibly comment.
• 23:41
  Thank you. Thank.
• 23:42
  You did. He say that all the time, every
• 23:44
  time somebody accused him of doing something terrible in
• 23:47
  house cards. No, it was.
• 23:49
  It was the line that he used with the journalist character
• 23:52
  Matty Storin of a way of confirming something without
• 23:55
  confirming it. So it was a sort of phrase of
• 23:58
  him leaking information to to the press.
• 24:02
  Stop. I'm gonna watch this now.
• 24:04
  Oh, it's good, it's good. As Benaronovich said.
• 24:09
  Amateur steel genius borrow. No amateur steel genius borrows
• 24:14
  and Doctor Who authors get it off the back of a lorry, no
• 24:17
  questions asked. But as we've said before, I was
• 24:20
  all bit into Doctor Who very effectively, just very quickly.
• 24:25
  Do you know who directed House of Cards?
• 24:28
  No. Paul Seed Do you know who Paul
• 24:31
  Seed is? No, he.
• 24:34
  Played the graph in Decay when the Rebus operation.
• 24:38
  Yes, I could always bring it back to Doctor Who.
• 24:42
  He was so embarrassed because whilst making that people kept
• 24:45
  bringing in videos of the Rebus operation and forced him to
• 24:48
  watch his dreadful performance as the villain.
• 24:52
  Ian Richard found it very amusing.
• 24:55
  The. Who?
• 24:56
  Curiously, Ian Richardson on the list of people who were
• 25:00
  bizarrely never in Doctor Who. Yes.
• 25:03
  It's never actually we had a mission, isn't it?
• 25:05
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 25:06
  Well, I mean, now he has been a doctor.
• 25:07
  He's been about 15 books. But yes, and he did the opening
• 25:12
  relations for Demos Rising, which starred his son, Miles
• 25:14
  Richardson. Do you know every Ian Richardson
• 25:17
  that turned up in Lance Park in novels?
• 25:20
  Oh gosh, you can usually work it out, can't you?
• 25:23
  Definitely the old mano in Gallifrey Chronicles he.
• 25:27
  Is, and he is, he's the he's one of the Nazis in just war.
• 25:34
  He's. Cosgrove, the fellow that's
• 25:37
  doing the fake time travel in training futures he.
• 25:40
  Is and in and in Father Time, he doesn't turn up and doesn't turn
• 25:45
  up and doesn't turn up. And then right at the end, when
• 25:47
  the doctor is in the time engines, having all these
• 25:49
  visions of his future and other lives, he has a vision of Ian
• 25:54
  Richardson saying I wondered when I'd turn up.
• 25:57
  Wonderful. The only one that's left is the
• 25:59
  Infinity Doctors. Well, I don't have a clue in
• 26:01
  that one. You'll have to reread it.
• 26:05
  Yeah, Oh, let's have a a a repeat interview with Lance
• 26:08
  Parkin, although we'd better put aside 10 hours.
• 26:12
  So. Virgin.
• 26:14
  Virgin had lost the license 1996.
• 26:17
  Thank you. Put us on.
• 26:18
  And but the way of such things was there was about, I think
• 26:22
  about a year left to run out of the license before we'd
• 26:24
  officially finish in 1997. But due to the way in which
• 26:27
  these things were commissioned ahead, they actually only had
• 26:30
  time to do 1/8 Doctor book, which would be their last book
• 26:34
  they could Commission as being their 8th Doctor by the time
• 26:36
  they've tied up all the other threads.
• 26:37
  And as as Lance Parkin described it has described it, the reason
• 26:43
  he ended up writing it was because everyone else was
• 26:45
  already doing something else. Kate, they're all doing 8th.
• 26:49
  Doctor books or they're doing Bernice new adventures.
• 26:52
  Yes, well, or Kate, if you're Kate Orman, you're tying up so
• 26:56
  violence in. But also writing vampire stars
• 27:00
  with John Blum, so. She was already done.
• 27:02
  She was already double booked, yes, and Paul Cornell was
• 27:05
  already doing the first Oh, Oh no, it isn't the first Benny
• 27:09
  book. So so yes, that's barking.
• 27:11
  But you know, I, I, I think I think Lance rather doing himself
• 27:14
  down there because he's terrific and I think it already very
• 27:18
  quickly established himself with just war and cold fusion and
• 27:21
  then the dying days, which was there.
• 27:24
  A was there like a we have to do an A of doctor one.
• 27:27
  We just one we just have to get one out.
• 27:30
  Well, they could have ended with long Barrow.
• 27:32
  There's nothing to say they couldn't have ended there long.
• 27:34
  Long Long Barrow is really where the storyline of the Virgin New
• 27:38
  Adventures finishes and The Dying Days is a sort of epilogue
• 27:43
  capstone victory lap type story that really serves as much of A
• 27:47
  purpose of setting up the doctorless Benny Summerfield new
• 27:51
  ventures. So although Virgil had lost the
• 27:53
  licence to do Doctor Who books their their idea was that they
• 27:57
  would continue the series but without the doctor, but focusing
• 28:00
  on the character of Benny Summerfield and other elements
• 28:02
  original to the range that they still had access to.
• 28:06
  So yeah, I think it's the the phrase that Lance uses in the
• 28:11
  notes to the e-book edition is a capstone story.
• 28:14
  So, yeah, a finale in the style of all good things from Star
• 28:18
  Trek the Next Generation of of, you know, putting a putting a
• 28:22
  bow on the box, I guess I'd. Like to offer an opinion though,
• 28:25
  that I think The Dying Days is a better closing chapter than Long
• 28:29
  Barrow. Because Long Barrow, as good as
• 28:32
  it is, it's quite sort of melancholic, isn't it?
• 28:35
  Whereas this is this is sort of a rip roaring adventure and it
• 28:38
  ends with Brigadier Leffridge Stewart laughing his head up.
• 28:41
  It's such a triumphant note to go out on.
• 28:44
  It. It it, it really is, I think the
• 28:48
  phrase that I kept coming back to throughout this book is not
• 28:51
  actually a quote from this, from this book.
• 28:52
  It's it's, it's the line from the return of Doctor Mysterio of
• 28:57
  everything ends and it's always sad, but everything begins again
• 29:00
  too. And that's always happy, be
• 29:02
  happy. And there is there is a
• 29:05
  triumphant note. It goes out.
• 29:07
  So a bit of context as well. So because context is really
• 29:10
  important with this book, Virgil lost the license.
• 29:14
  This was relatively acrimonious. I think, you know, in the years
• 29:19
  since, it's been made clear that people on the Virgin side were
• 29:21
  not terribly impressed. I think there's actually a DVD
• 29:23
  feature about the Virgin New adventure somewhere where Mark
• 29:25
  Gaters actually says, I don't care who sees this.
• 29:28
  I think it was, I think it was terrible.
• 29:30
  The BBC took the license back off Doctor Who's, though still
• 29:34
  one. Of the first past Doctor
• 29:35
  adventures, the round hits. You have to bring this up with
• 29:39
  him. Go and go and wait outside the
• 29:41
  National Theatre. Hypocrite, like most
• 29:43
  politicians. Good good, good yes keep it
• 29:46
  going keep it going. So this yeah so this this book
• 29:51
  is is is is a somewhat triumphant book is a very happy
• 29:56
  book. But the context is important
• 29:57
  because that is sort of flying against I think what people were
• 30:00
  expecting from this. So you asked you know why why
• 30:04
  did they do 1/8 doctor books? They feel they had to well, when
• 30:06
  we spoke to Lance his he did, you know, don't want to put
• 30:10
  words in his mouth, but you know, he certainly didn't think
• 30:12
  it was impossible. And I've heard this speculated
• 30:13
  by others as well, that maybe it was a little bit of an FU from
• 30:17
  Virgin, but you know, you're not going to have, you're not going
• 30:20
  to have we're. Going to write what I've talked
• 30:23
  about and it's going to be better than anything you put out
• 30:26
  of the entire fucking run. I think that was not quite.
• 30:30
  True, but you're getting there. Not quite true.
• 30:32
  Yeah, exactly. I think, yeah, I should, I
• 30:36
  should say Lance didn't say that, but I think it's basically
• 30:38
  wouldn't be surprised if that was the case, shall we say.
• 30:42
  But I think also there was a hot minute.
• 30:43
  I'm sure I remember reading an old DWM.
• 30:45
  There was a hot minute there where the after the TV had been
• 30:48
  announced but before Virgin lost the licence, where they were
• 30:51
  saying, Oh no, we they were just expecting to continue with the
• 30:53
  books and they said no, no, the doctor will take over.
• 30:56
  So perhaps they had already imagined that at this point.
• 30:59
  That's when you know the poor McGann Dr. would come in anyway,
• 31:01
  which was a a full year after the TVM had been coming on.
• 31:04
  So this is had been on. So this is the odd thing because
• 31:06
  of the TVM having happened so quickly.
• 31:08
  It wasn't like when Doctor Who came back in 2005 or even with
• 31:11
  the relaunch this year and last year where there was enough time
• 31:14
  to sort of get your ducks in a row and get all the time media
• 31:17
  there and to get the get the time writers in for some set
• 31:19
  visits. No, no, no, no, it came, I think
• 31:22
  it was announced. I think it was announced like
• 31:25
  really late in 95 or very early in 96.
• 31:28
  And then it was all in what was it May?
• 31:31
  And then it was gone again as sort of quickly as it comes.
• 31:33
  So you know, the DD Rum comic strip took a little while to
• 31:36
  catch up. The books took a whole year
• 31:37
  because of their leading times. Well, the rest of it, the only
• 31:40
  the only time media that really hit the ground running was the
• 31:43
  radio time comic strip. That was so for a long time.
• 31:46
  That was your only 8th Doctor content, and Big Finish didn't
• 31:50
  didn't get Paul McGann in for another four years.
• 31:54
  One, I didn't think he'd be interested after the TV show
• 31:56
  flopped. Well exactly.
• 32:00
  So so yeah, so that's what came here.
• 32:02
  And but the adding to that context was this acrimony that,
• 32:04
  you know, Virgin had wanted to carry on with it visibly were
• 32:07
  carrying on with it in the only way they could.
• 32:09
  And as part of all of that, it had been reported in SFX
• 32:16
  magazine that they'd be killing the Doctor off in this book that
• 32:20
  was that was leaked. And so that was the the thing
• 32:24
  that everyone knew going into this book was this is the book,
• 32:26
  this is Virgin's last book. They're doing an Eighth Doctor,
• 32:29
  they're doing an Eighth Doctor book before the BBC get in there
• 32:31
  and they're going to kill the Doctor off.
• 32:33
  So what would you say? F you, Yeah.
• 32:37
  Francis Urquhart and. It's.
• 32:40
  Called The Dying Days and well. Can I just say because he does
• 32:45
  say in his notes at the end of this book that this book is in
• 32:48
  fact set in the 8th Doctor terms after the 8th Doctor books from
• 32:52
  the BBC. He gives his age as 1200 year,
• 32:58
  1200 years old and in fact. Is it lesbian?
• 33:01
  No, and in fact, I think that was large that that that wheeze
• 33:05
  was largely abandoned. So I think it's in the sky as
• 33:07
  early as the Scarlet Empress, The doctor remembers.
• 33:10
  Yeah, so. So.
• 33:12
  I think in the shadow of Avalon, the Brigadier is in a very
• 33:16
  different place to where he is now.
• 33:18
  And there's no, in fact, I think Doris is dead in the shadow of
• 33:21
  our Avalon. He's a he's a grieving widow.
• 33:25
  Yes, she dies in a boating accident.
• 33:27
  Yeah, but that but Paul Cornell. You're a heartless man, but.
• 33:32
  That takes place after the dying days, so and you know, wibbly
• 33:35
  wobbly time. You want me?
• 33:36
  The doctor could have done it the other way around.
• 33:37
  So that's very. True, but you.
• 33:39
  Probably didn't. Let's not.
• 33:40
  Try and think about that too much.
• 33:41
  No, it'll make our heads hurt, won't it?
• 33:45
  So, so we've got two big motives for this.
• 33:48
  We're going to tell 1/8 Doctor Book, and we're going to set up
• 33:51
  Bernice for her triumphant new range of novels that's going to
• 33:56
  run for 1015 years or so. And third one, we're going to
• 34:00
  give a big valedictory last run out for the Doctor Who Virgin
• 34:05
  New Adventures, so. And wait 4th 1/4. 1.
• 34:10
  We're going to do what we realise that we've never done
• 34:14
  before and that is a contemporary alien invasion
• 34:18
  story in the New Adventures somehow has bypassed them for
• 34:22
  the last 60 odd books. They've.
• 34:24
  Never managed to do it and. Now, I think that's very telling
• 34:29
  of just how original and innovative those books were that
• 34:34
  they didn't go for the obvious thing that the TV show went for
• 34:37
  all the time. You know, the fact that they, it
• 34:40
  never even occurred to them to do it.
• 34:42
  And at the end they went, Oh my God, you know, we've never done
• 34:44
  the obvious thing. Yeah, it is it is, notes Les
• 34:50
  Parkins says they were he and Rebecca Levine were discussing
• 34:53
  the things that TVM should have done and then realized that the
• 34:57
  Virginia adventures never done some of them before.
• 35:01
  So yes, it's it's the book in which Mars Attacks and Great
• 35:06
  Britain great. It's it's great conceit.
• 35:09
  So 1997, this is a this is also, it's worth saying, a really
• 35:15
  deliberately contemporary novel, which is important when we're
• 35:17
  discussing politics as well. It is very much of the moment of
• 35:20
  of of 1997. It's similar, sort of not almost
• 35:25
  even more so, but in in Doctor Who telly terms, I guess you
• 35:27
  could compare it to something like say, the War Machines or
• 35:31
  the Faceless ones or new series The Bells of Saint John.
• 35:34
  As in an episode that is really excitedly, deliberately
• 35:38
  contemporary, that it's not just using present day.
• 35:43
  Present day Earth is a sort of generic backdrop which, let's be
• 35:45
  honest, it's often what present day stories.
• 35:47
  Are but it is telling that story from two points of view.
• 35:51
  It's telling it from the point of view of the Doctor and his
• 35:53
  friends, which all those other stories you've just mentioned.
• 35:56
  That's the only point of view we get.
• 35:59
  And it's telling us from the point of view of the fabulous
• 36:03
  Lord Grey Haven as well. Yes, amazing.
• 36:06
  So 1997 Earth is Britain, importantly sorry, is returning
• 36:12
  to Mars for the first time in 20 years.
• 36:14
  Remember the Ambassadors of Death?
• 36:16
  Remember those Mars probes that we haven't mentioned since?
• 36:18
  Loved all those links. So that, that that was the first
• 36:21
  contact. Yeah.
• 36:22
  Ambassadors of Death. Well, no Mars.
• 36:26
  That's Mars Probe 7, isn't it? So they've been what?
• 36:30
  Which probe did they say was the one that?
• 36:34
  Mars Probe 1. Presumably there's a there's a
• 36:36
  passing reference to that. He names the first men on Mars
• 36:41
  in passing. They're called something like
• 36:44
  Groves and Carswell or something like that.
• 36:47
  Who planted the Union Jack at the foot of Olympus Mons and
• 36:53
  that was 20 years ago and the Mars probe we get all this
• 36:56
  fantastic back story where he sort of ties the unit era
• 37:01
  politics in into the real life politics of of the year.
• 37:05
  So there's he establishes that the Mars probe programme was
• 37:09
  Britain's attempt to keep up with the US and the Soviets in
• 37:13
  the space race was OK. Well, they've really.
• 37:15
  Perked up in those sections because it felt very like who
• 37:18
  killed Kennedy to me. Tied together all these parts of
• 37:21
  Doctor Who continuity and then feeding them into this story.
• 37:25
  Really clever. Yeah, and that all ended in
• 37:29
  acrimony, which we'll get onto in in in scandal 20 years
• 37:34
  previously, circa 1977, I think is sort of where it's meant to
• 37:37
  land. But now 1997, Britain is
• 37:41
  returning is returning to miles for the for the first time in a
• 37:45
  it's a big deal, big moment of national pride.
• 37:49
  It arrives the astronauts they cut they have to cut off contact
• 37:54
  with the astronauts, the live feed because the astronauts have
• 37:57
  discovered an archway on the surface of Mars.
• 38:02
  They lose contact with the astronauts and mere hours later
• 38:07
  the Martians arrive on Earth. What an amazing set up this is
• 38:12
  believe. Me.
• 38:13
  This does sound very like a Doctor Who's story.
• 38:16
  I've seen the Christmas Invasion with a probe going off and then
• 38:21
  the aliens emerging in a very similar way with a huge
• 38:24
  spaceship hovering over London. And you said to me what you
• 38:27
  know, as I was reading this, Yes, Joe.
• 38:29
  But you know, you do have to remember this came 15 years
• 38:32
  before or however long before that.
• 38:34
  And how this this creates the template for what the new series
• 38:40
  then takes and runs with. I was reading this and I was
• 38:45
  saying to you, oh, God, this all feels so a bit familiar.
• 38:48
  And yeah, it does feel familiar because they took all the last
• 38:51
  Parker's ideas and they did it on the TV show over and over
• 38:54
  again. He sort of, he set them up,
• 38:56
  didn't he? For for for this sort of story
• 38:59
  going forward. Yeah.
• 39:00
  I mean, it is, it's almost eerie reading this now.
• 39:05
  How much of knew who. So I think it was eight years
• 39:08
  before before Rose. It's almost eerie how much of
• 39:13
  what the new series would choose to do both on a macro level and
• 39:17
  a micro level appears in this book.
• 39:20
  And you know, you think, why is that?
• 39:22
  I think among other things, among all the other motivations
• 39:25
  that we've already listed for writing this book, it's also
• 39:28
  kind of a response to the TV movie as as as was the 8
• 39:32
  Doctors, as was vampire science in different ways.
• 39:35
  This is a response to that. I think Lance Park is sort of
• 39:38
  maybe wanting to demonstrate and the Doctor Who could be made by
• 39:42
  the BBC in 1997 that you could do a version of it that was
• 39:47
  closer and closer, at least more in the style of the classic
• 39:52
  series in the lineage of it than the TVM, which was, you know, a
• 39:55
  bit more of a departure, a bit more and sort of contemporary
• 39:57
  sci-fi, making Doctor Who fit the contemporary sci-fi mold
• 40:00
  rather than, you know, making Doctor Who for for the 1990s,
• 40:04
  perhaps. And so I think a lot of what
• 40:06
  he's doing in this book is a lot of what Russell T Davis would do
• 40:10
  in the subsequent. Which is OK, we're working out
• 40:12
  how do you tell a Doctor Who story within the British TV
• 40:17
  drama landscape of the time? Because, you know, there were
• 40:20
  some popular US sci-fi imports at the time.
• 40:24
  We've mentioned, you know, The X-Files many times in relation
• 40:27
  to the books of this era. But you know, the the, the Star
• 40:30
  Trek TNGS and DS Nines and Voyages.
• 40:32
  But even they, I think were viewed as as a bit cultish in
• 40:36
  some ways. That's almost I think this is
• 40:38
  period is when cult TV started to emerge as a term.
• 40:43
  The the Radio Times comic strips were on the sci-fi page of the
• 40:47
  Radio Times. You know, it was its own little
• 40:49
  thing, despite how popular Babylon 5 might be among certain
• 40:53
  certain areas, so. Blaze, he didn't take that for
• 40:57
  inspiration. I'm sure someone did.
• 40:59
  I'm sure there's an Eighth Doctor adventure that is
• 41:01
  absolutely Doctor. Vander Decken's children as
• 41:04
  bloody ghastly. On British TV you didn't, you
• 41:08
  didn't get this, you know, you didn't really get explicit
• 41:11
  sci-fi at this time. Instead you've got things that
• 41:14
  were sort of mediated sci-fi, but it was very much looked down
• 41:19
  on as a genre, as I think all of that discussion a bit in terms
• 41:21
  of being cold suggests. And probably Doctor Who might
• 41:24
  even have been pointed out as an example of in the popular
• 41:27
  understanding why we don't do sci-fi anymore.
• 41:29
  Oh, because we can't do it on a British budget.
• 41:31
  Oh, because it looks cheap. Oh, because it's silly.
• 41:34
  So instead you've got things like bugs that worked very you
• 41:40
  come. From Bugs Michael I.
• 41:42
  Loved bugs, God, as a child I loved bugs.
• 41:46
  I love it. Now you know.
• 41:48
  It's how every villain is middle class and sounds very posh.
• 41:52
  And all of it happens at Canary Wharf.
• 41:56
  That's right. Yeah.
• 41:58
  It's sorry Carl, I have instructed.
• 41:59
  Your flow then please continue. Yep.
• 42:01
  So you think you have cipher, but you did things have like
• 42:03
  bugs, which worked very hard to convince you that they weren't
• 42:07
  science fiction. And in fact, I think Colin Brake
• 42:09
  has said in places, you know, we we said no, no, everything that
• 42:12
  happens in bugs could happen in real life when it's all
• 42:15
  bollocks. It was all it was all cipher it.
• 42:18
  Tipped towards science fiction in the second series and the BBC
• 42:22
  were really angry and they said no claw it back.
• 42:25
  But the third series, we don't want it to sci-fi well.
• 42:27
  Precisely. And even, you know, I was, I was
• 42:29
  a kid at this time and thinking about it, even even on
• 42:33
  children's telly, there was some great stuff done.
• 42:36
  But you still. Didn't even then didn't get.
• 42:37
  Sci-fi, you know, you had dark season at the start of the very
• 42:40
  start of the decade, but by this point, 1997, you think about
• 42:45
  what the, you know, the sort of older kids stuff, this stuff,
• 42:48
  arguably stuff, you know, kids who should have been watching
• 42:50
  Doctor Who in a fairy universe, what we were watching instead,
• 42:53
  you had things like the Queen's nose, which was a bit fantasy,
• 42:56
  but it very much wasn't sideline.
• 42:57
  It was very grounded. Yet the demon headmaster is
• 43:00
  probably the closest that the Doctor Who kids in the 1990s
• 43:04
  actually got. And even that dark.
• 43:06
  Season, maybe. Well, I was going to say, but
• 43:08
  that was right. That was right back at the
• 43:10
  start, wasn't it? That was what, 19901991 And you
• 43:12
  know, we're, I think the landscape had changed by this
• 43:15
  point. I don't.
• 43:16
  Think it was until Doctor Who came back in 2005.
• 43:18
  I don't think anybody trusted that the science fiction show
• 43:22
  could work until he made that work.
• 43:25
  No, 100%, because even beyond, you know, you go beyond this
• 43:28
  point, you'd get things, you'd get the odd things here and
• 43:30
  there like Ultraviolet. But again, that's very grounded.
• 43:35
  It's very, very, very grounded. It's sort of deliberately making
• 43:37
  the point of vampires, but in the real world.
• 43:40
  But in the real world it's always, if you don't remember
• 43:45
  it, it's difficult to get across how hard British drama had to
• 43:48
  work to convince the audience that it wasn't sci-fi.
• 43:53
  It's always like, well, how do you do Doctor Who in that?
• 43:54
  Because Doctor Who is sci-fi. So while there weren't many
• 43:58
  sci-fi shows, there were a lot of thrillers, as Bugs has
• 44:03
  demonstrated right there, right there was a lot of these.
• 44:06
  House of Cards was was also a thriller.
• 44:09
  This was the era of of the conspiracy boom, right?
• 44:13
  For all the reasons that you could go into, you know, X-Files
• 44:15
  was huge and all of it's related spin offs films like the Blair
• 44:19
  Witch Project was getting to all of that sort of business as
• 44:21
  well. Louis Thru's Weird Weekends had
• 44:23
  a whole episode about going and meeting cultists and the one
• 44:26
  about meeting survivalists. And So what Lance Parkins is
• 44:33
  sort of doing, especially in the first part of the book, is he's
• 44:37
  making Doctor Who fit the fit into the mould of a techno
• 44:40
  thriller and not. Until that that spaceship
• 44:45
  arrives. That's when it becomes science
• 44:48
  fiction there. Yeah, Yeah.
• 44:50
  Exactly. And in a different way.
• 44:53
  Not exactly. They don't exactly overlap.
• 44:55
  But that's also largely what Russell T Davis did when he
• 44:58
  brought it back. And the first time he he said
• 45:00
  that with Rose, the reason they used the Autons was because he
• 45:04
  needed a monster that could conceivably fit in the real
• 45:09
  world. And Aliens of London has a lot
• 45:11
  of thriller in it. So I mean, I said weirdly
• 45:13
  specific details that this matches up, no?
• 45:16
  Matter what he did in that first series, he always had one for on
• 45:20
  Earth, didn't he? Russell C.
• 45:22
  Even things even down to, you know, Christopher Eccleston's
• 45:25
  costume, which is the most muted of any doctor's costume, because
• 45:28
  you couldn't in TV drama of the time, you couldn't have someone
• 45:31
  step out even in Matt Smith's costume, you know, would have
• 45:35
  just been a bit too eccentric or shooting out was might have
• 45:37
  been, you know, a bit a bit too, you know, designer.
• 45:41
  You need to have someone. British.
• 45:43
  British TV in the mid noughties. There was a lot of fine drama
• 45:46
  but bloody hell it was all so, you know, cutting it.
• 45:51
  This these Doctor Who needed to look like he could be in cutting
• 45:54
  it right. I mean, even even the most out
• 45:59
  there series series one episode, the end of the world still has a
• 46:03
  scene shot through Jackie Tyler's washing machine of her
• 46:07
  doing her laundry. You know, like he, he, he just,
• 46:10
  they just couldn't dive straight into it.
• 46:13
  I don't think people were ready for it.
• 46:15
  No, but you know, he, he, he eased the audience in across the
• 46:20
  across the course of that. So by the end of it, you know,
• 46:23
  by the passing of the ways, yes, a lot of that is still self
• 46:26
  contemporary and that's still important to all of this.
• 46:30
  But you know it is. It is a massive speed, yet you
• 46:34
  build all into a massive space opera of Dalek fleets and space
• 46:37
  stations and Emperor Daleks. You know, you, you said two
• 46:42
  inspirations there. And I think actually you could,
• 46:44
  you could make an equation of what The Dying Days is, House of
• 46:48
  Cards meets The X-Files and add in A-A big dash of Doctor Who is
• 46:54
  I think those are the three things that are in play here.
• 46:57
  Yeah, 100. Percent and you know in sort of
• 46:59
  squaring that circle of of Doctor Who for the 1990s or
• 47:02
  Nortis. So since only eight years
• 47:04
  between between these two things coming out and even less between
• 47:08
  them being written. So you know, the context in
• 47:10
  which they were being produced very similar.
• 47:13
  And it's it's you know, that's certainly that spark is
• 47:17
  important writer. Look at how much of new series
• 47:21
  who is is anticipating this. As you've said, the plot is very
• 47:24
  similar to Christmas Invasion. So much.
• 47:26
  I mean, the spaceship over London is the obvious one, but.
• 47:30
  Even down to the even down to like micro details.
• 47:33
  So the assassination of a Prime Minister who may or may not be
• 47:36
  Tony Blair as the as the as the plot is launched, aliens
• 47:41
  attacking Earth under a sort of interplanetary false flag
• 47:44
  operation, which is what turns out to be the case of.
• 47:46
  It turns out that Grey Haven, who has been in charge, who's
• 47:50
  sort of been masterminding the Mars Probe 97 mission, has been
• 47:55
  secretly in cahoots with the Martians since the 1970s when
• 47:58
  they shut down the Mars Probe missions originally, and has
• 48:01
  deliberately manipulated things so that the Mars Probe mission
• 48:04
  will give the Martians a pretext to invade.
• 48:06
  Which is. Very similar thinking to what
• 48:08
  goes on with the Slovene in Aliens Upon the World War 3.
• 48:11
  Christmas Invasion absolutely shows the invasion from the
• 48:14
  political seat of power after just as this does.
• 48:17
  Even down to there's there's scenes of the Ice Warriors
• 48:21
  attacking the House of Alan Rhodes and there there are
• 48:24
  scenes in Rusty Davis's era more in Sarah Jane than Doctor Who,
• 48:27
  with aliens attacking domestic houses, Cybermen bursting into
• 48:31
  doors in Army of Ghosts and things like that.
• 48:34
  There was so many bits where I was going.
• 48:35
  My God, this has been torn out and used wholesale by the new
• 48:39
  series. Well.
• 48:41
  One of the things that keeps coming up here and keeps coming
• 48:43
  up again in Aliens of London is this invasion is the day that
• 48:47
  humanity at large finds out aliens exist.
• 48:49
  Yes. That is, except it's not.
• 48:51
  That's accepted both. They all forget about that at
• 48:54
  the end, you know they. All have to fake out on it a bit
• 48:56
  because so that's Park. One of the thing other things
• 49:00
  Lance Park has said about the book is that he could only
• 49:02
  really get away with doing such a public invasion, but because
• 49:04
  it's the last one, so they'd never have to deal with the
• 49:06
  consequences of it, which Russell to Davidson, Stephen
• 49:08
  Moffitt soon found out you had to I.
• 49:11
  Think it shows just how magnanimous Lance Parkin is,
• 49:14
  because obviously Lawrence Miles saw a lot of his ideas being
• 49:16
  used wholesale, My Sleep and Moffett and various other people
• 49:20
  and had a public meltdown about it.
• 49:22
  Lars Parkin probably watched the Christmas Invasion and went, oh
• 49:25
  wow, I did some good there, didn't I?
• 49:26
  You know. I think there was a phrase,
• 49:30
  there was a really great phrase that I I read an interview with
• 49:33
  with Lance Age that really stuck with me where he said having
• 49:36
  worked on Doctor Who novels in the wilderness years and then
• 49:39
  then seeing it brought back so triumphantly, Boris Davidson was
• 49:43
  a bit like having your homework marked.
• 49:45
  And so you sort of see what you got right and you got wrong
• 49:48
  about it. And, you know, I mean, that's
• 49:52
  still a very. Muted reaction though.
• 49:54
  Oh, you know, I've been. On the phone, Russell, you
• 49:57
  prick. All right.
• 49:59
  I know you've read The Dying Days.
• 50:01
  Well, we've we've spoken to Lance now, so we can attest to
• 50:03
  what a lovely man here so. Gorgeous, gorgeous.
• 50:06
  And you'll finally. Get to hear the last part of
• 50:08
  that interview alongside this episode.
• 50:13
  I can only apologise on Joe's behalf.
• 50:16
  All right, she was bad as Rod. I mean, yeah, he even has real
• 50:23
  life news readers providing the exposition about the invasion.
• 50:27
  It's just oh anyway. And how and how he captures the
• 50:33
  invasion so economically, like he'd the passing of time.
• 50:36
  It's exactly how Ross T Davis does it as well.
• 50:39
  So there is a moment in this book that we should touch on
• 50:44
  that leads to a time jump. It's about half 2/3 of the way
• 50:48
  through the book. There is a specific moment we'll
• 50:51
  talk about in a minute, which follows a time jump, which when
• 50:54
  and after the The start of the next chapter is a week later and
• 50:57
  we find our hero in suddenly. Dalek invasion of Earth
• 51:01
  territory, you know, very different.
• 51:03
  The rebels are fighting back. And that is exactly I read that
• 51:06
  and I thought, oh bloody hell, this is this is episode 2, isn't
• 51:10
  it? This is suddenly.
• 51:12
  We're in the last of the Time Lords after Sound of Drums.
• 51:15
  You know, yeah, there's a world in which this is, this is 2, you
• 51:19
  know, two books, 2 episodes. OK, So we finished, we finished
• 51:24
  episode one, The Dying Days. Now on episode 2, The War of the
• 51:26
  Worlds. You know, it's it's fantastic.
• 51:33
  There is a thing that I think I said this to you when we spoke
• 51:37
  to Lance, we talked about that old that, you know, the very old
• 51:41
  fashioned Doctor Who argument about Rad versus trad.
• 51:44
  Should Doctor Who tie in fiction, attempt to be
• 51:48
  traditional in terms of trying to tell stories in the style of
• 51:51
  Doctor Who as it has already been?
• 51:53
  Or should it be more radical in trying to do new things and
• 51:56
  different things with that franchise as a vehicle?
• 52:00
  And The thing is, this book made me realise it's both.
• 52:04
  If it's well, if it's successful enough, Rad will end up looking
• 52:08
  trapped. Oh, I'm trying to think of now
• 52:11
  other times that's happened. Time, Worm, revelation, there's
• 52:15
  a lot of stuff in that. Look at look at alien bodies.
• 52:18
  A lot of those ideas then ended up in the new series in Steven
• 52:22
  Moffat's era. And actually, by the end of
• 52:24
  that, we were going, oh, we're doing this again, are we?
• 52:27
  The Doctor's dying again, OK, You know, yeah, you're right.
• 52:30
  You're right. Because I.
• 52:31
  Remember the first time I read this was when it was on the BBC
• 52:36
  on BBCI as it then was as an e-book released in weekly
• 52:40
  instalments. That was exciting and did that
• 52:44
  was that was 2002 before before Doctor come back.
• 52:48
  I were very like, Oh my God, this is brilliant.
• 52:50
  This is what Doctor Who should be like.
• 52:53
  And it was. And Rita, it was one.
• 52:56
  Of one of the many times where you've had to point things out
• 52:59
  to this simpleton in our messages is that there was me
• 53:02
  saying to. You I send you a message, guy.
• 53:05
  Oh, it's all a bit traditional, isn't it?
• 53:07
  I mean, alien invasions and all of this.
• 53:09
  And you'll go and go. No, this is when it was rad.
• 53:12
  You know, this hasn't been done before in the books.
• 53:14
  And I, you know, I was like, Jesus Christ, yeah, it's true.
• 53:17
  It's true. So I think context is keep like
• 53:19
  when you read this, it's important if you read this after
• 53:21
  all those new series, of course this feels familiar because
• 53:25
  they've they have done it a million times because.
• 53:28
  You know, we can all say in terms of making Doctor Who work
• 53:30
  within the context of, of, of TV of the time, it's also very
• 53:35
  typically trying to show you why Doctor Who is good enough that
• 53:38
  it should come back, what Doctor Who can do differently.
• 53:40
  So the first third of the book is quite House of is House of
• 53:43
  Cards beats X-Files in terms of that very, you know, oh, you
• 53:48
  know, exciting, pacey techno thriller.
• 53:52
  There's a brilliant book. I don't just keep quoting the
• 53:54
  author's notes, but they often they are every bit as as good as
• 53:58
  the actual as the book in terms of the insights.
• 54:02
  But there let's focus. He had the discussion with Reck
• 54:05
  Levine that realising that the thing Doctor Who could do that
• 54:10
  The X-Files for all those huge contemptuous The X-Files is
• 54:13
  always about the aliens are here and nobody knows the aliens are
• 54:16
  here and nobody knows what Doctor Who can do.
• 54:20
  The aliens are here and there they are.
• 54:23
  And so you have a whole third that is all X-Files out of
• 54:27
  cards. And it's not, I don't, you know,
• 54:29
  I don't believe the aliens have taken over Kent Mulder.
• 54:32
  No. Bam, the spaceship suddenly is
• 54:35
  so. One thing they could never do on
• 54:37
  The X-Files because then everything would have changed.
• 54:39
  It was a one. I kept saying eventually they'll
• 54:41
  do the big alien and they never did it.
• 54:44
  And there's a fantastic moment, which is that there is a subplot
• 54:47
  about a a TV journalist who gets in contact with some conspiracy
• 54:53
  theorists who are basically, it's that running joke that
• 54:55
  Doctor Who fans in the Doctor Who universe are conspiracy
• 54:58
  theorists who are actually just obsessed with real life
• 55:01
  inventions that have been covered up.
• 55:03
  So there's as ATV journalist from America, he was contacted
• 55:05
  by some of these conspiracy theorists and they're just about
• 55:09
  to break the biggest story ever, which is they've looked at the
• 55:13
  footage from the Mars probe 797 landing and they've worked out
• 55:17
  that it's all fake, that Britain never went to Mars, perfectly
• 55:22
  logically introduced. He's literally there on the
• 55:25
  phone calling his agents about to tell him that it's all fake,
• 55:30
  Britain never gone to Mars, there's no Martians, and then
• 55:31
  suddenly. The Martian spaceship, there's a
• 55:35
  huge shadow overhead. Although what I love though is
• 55:40
  the conspiracy all boils down to Greyhaven again, doesn't he,
• 55:43
  having made contact with the Martians and all of that stuff
• 55:46
  has been going on for years leading up to this point and
• 55:50
  that that was all really well done.
• 55:53
  Can I also close back around to politics for a second?
• 55:56
  Yeah, Election special. Election special.
• 55:57
  Well, what? I what I wanted to do was read
• 55:59
  out and this is sort of a sizeable chunk, but it won't
• 56:01
  take me too long, right? And I feel as if because Lars
• 56:03
  Parkin did the work for me, I'm now going to do the work for the
• 56:07
  frankly unintelligent, handsome or blunt penknife audience.
• 56:11
  Because Lars Parkin managed to summarise the political system
• 56:16
  so concisely in a way that I understood and pleased.
• 56:20
  That is no mean fee. Are you ready for this?
• 56:25
  I'm sitting comfortably. OK, Can I, I, I encourage all
• 56:30
  listeners to imagine Joe in full Jon Snow mode on a big or Jeremy
• 56:36
  Vine on a, a Big Blue screen with plenty of graphics
• 56:39
  explaining this. And I'm I will be whoever the
• 56:45
  board news reader is who needs to go to bed because it's 3:00
• 56:47
  in the morning. Just, I've just listened to how
• 56:49
  succinct this is, because I understood everything I needed
• 56:52
  to know about the police, even me, Okay.
• 56:56
  Home Secretaries tended to be idiots, Veronica Halliwell
• 56:59
  reflected, or they wouldn't have accepted the job.
• 57:02
  There were three top cabinet posts below the Prime Minister
• 57:04
  himself, and nominally they were of equal rank.
• 57:07
  The Foreign Secretary flew around the world for free,
• 57:09
  enjoying five star hotels and banquets at least three times a
• 57:12
  week. The Foreign Office staff and the
• 57:14
  network of embassy staff did most of the actual work and it
• 57:17
  was difficult to be unpopular at home or with your party, unless
• 57:20
  you accidentally started a war, which happened, but not that
• 57:24
  often. The Chancellor of the Exchequer
• 57:26
  had ultimate control of the economy.
• 57:28
  He had set levels of interest rates and taxation, and he also
• 57:31
  had the final say on public expenditure.
• 57:34
  That means that he could tell his cabinet colleagues how much
• 57:36
  money they had to spend that year.
• 57:38
  It also meant he'd retire to a dozen dictatorships of top
• 57:41
  London banks and financial institutions.
• 57:45
  He would be unpopular during a recession, popular during a
• 57:48
  boom. Are you getting this?
• 57:49
  It's so, so simply saying he generally win the respect of the
• 57:53
  party who'd see him as firm but fair.
• 57:55
  And an ex chancellor usually stood more of a chance of
• 57:58
  becoming Prime Minister than anyone else.
• 58:00
  Finally, and most importantly, the third senior man, the Home
• 58:04
  Secretary, was in charge of all matters domestic.
• 58:07
  And that was the problem. The Home Secretary was the man
• 58:10
  who had to deal with every child murderer, escaped prisoner,
• 58:13
  dangerous dog, inner city riot, drug dealer, illegal immigrant,
• 58:17
  terrorist, car accident, rapist, crack pavement in Britain.
• 58:20
  None of these were nice things. It was very difficult to do the
• 58:23
  job well and the best, the best hope for was to have a quiet
• 58:26
  time. There was no foreign travel.
• 58:29
  Both wings of your party would gang up on you when something
• 58:31
  went wrong and the public blamed you personally every time they
• 58:34
  ran out of toilet paper. So anyone who wanted to be the
• 58:37
  Home Secretary was an idiot. It.
• 58:40
  Was just all there. And I was like, Oh my God, Lars
• 58:43
  Parkin has just explained politics to me in a way that I
• 58:45
  can understand, in a way that no one ever has before.
• 58:49
  Lars, thank you very much. But this is what we're saying
• 58:53
  right about should, should Doctor Who books do politics?
• 58:57
  You have to be able to actually, actually engage with politics to
• 59:01
  say, so this is what it's about. This is how it fits into a
• 59:03
  Doctor Who story. And this is how we tell a Doctor
• 59:05
  Who story. Who?
• 59:06
  Understands. So we don't all know this stuff,
• 59:10
  yeah. OK, here's here's let me put it
• 59:12
  another way then. Doctor Who often dresses up as
• 59:15
  other genres, right? So it can be a, a, a gothic, it
• 59:18
  could be a Regency romance, or it could be gothic horror or it
• 59:22
  could be Alien again. And this is Doctor Who dressing
• 59:26
  up as a political techno thriller.
• 59:27
  But the understands that in order to do that, in order to do
• 59:30
  any of those things well, you have to understand the
• 59:32
  conventions and the workings of those genres.
• 59:35
  Otherwise it is just dress up box time.
• 59:38
  And this does that really well because it does engage with
• 59:43
  politics, it does engage with the nature of politics and and
• 59:46
  politics at that specific time as well.
• 59:48
  So one of the things that like weirdly, one of the questions
• 59:51
  that is never addressed because again, within the context of
• 59:53
  when this book came out, you sort of don't feel it needs to
• 59:56
  be, is why is Britain returning to Mars?
• 59:59
  Why at this moment, it's not half for 20 years, not half.
• 1:00:01
  But if you're reading this in 1997, well, you know, because
• 1:00:04
  it's presented, It's presented as natural here because at that
• 1:00:06
  time, the British. Popular sentiment was riding a
• 1:00:11
  wave of national optimism that came with economic recovery,
• 1:00:15
  which had actually begun under the Tories and the whole Cool
• 1:00:18
  Britannia movement as well. And that swept New Labour to
• 1:00:22
  power right around the time this happened.
• 1:00:24
  So there's, there's quite a famous anecdotes about this book
• 1:00:26
  that there was a, a minister, Tory minister at the time who
• 1:00:29
  was a big Doctor Who fan. I think it was transport
• 1:00:31
  secretary. That might not be right.
• 1:00:34
  Big Doctor Who fan and on election night 1997, when the
• 1:00:37
  Tories were swept out of power for the first time since they've
• 1:00:42
  been elected in 1979. On that night he was at the at
• 1:00:52
  the local constituency, wherever it was that his results were
• 1:00:55
  going to be announced, furiously reading the dying days behind
• 1:00:58
  the scenes because he wanted to have read every new adventure
• 1:01:01
  under a Conservative government but once.
• 1:01:03
  We went to the Dolks. The bad lucks of violence in
• 1:01:06
  came out after this. So but, but, you know, there
• 1:01:12
  there was this real moment of of, you know, cool Britannia
• 1:01:15
  everywhere, the big national options, the Spice Girls were
• 1:01:18
  the biggest acts in the world. James Bond was back.
• 1:01:21
  The swinging Austin Powers was right in the wave of like all
• 1:01:24
  that nostalgia for not the swinging swinging London of the
• 1:01:28
  1960s. If you're interested in any of
• 1:01:30
  this, I recommend Daniel Rachel's book Don't Look Back in
• 1:01:34
  Anger, which is an oral history of Cool Britannia.
• 1:01:36
  And it's really interesting on all of this sorts of stuff.
• 1:01:40
  You know, things can only get better because the was the
• 1:01:42
  anthem of New Labour's election, because that was the sense, of
• 1:01:45
  course, the Doctor Who version of that.
• 1:01:47
  We're going back to Mars. Britain will be great again.
• 1:01:52
  Well. You say?
• 1:01:53
  That, you know what? So what's Gray Haven?
• 1:01:55
  What, what, what is this alliance with the Ice Warriors
• 1:01:58
  all about then, Michael? And I've got a quote here for
• 1:02:00
  you where he says, just think, 1000 new factories pouring out
• 1:02:05
  technology that's centuries ahead of anything on the market
• 1:02:07
  at the moment. It's the start of a new
• 1:02:09
  industrial revolution with Britain at the forefront.
• 1:02:13
  Jobs, prosperity, security, international prestige and
• 1:02:17
  power. Not just international
• 1:02:20
  interplanetary. Awful.
• 1:02:22
  That was such a great line. Yeah.
• 1:02:28
  So the, the, the, the, the plots that we find out that Grey Haven
• 1:02:32
  has with Zanal, I think that's how you pronounce it.
• 1:02:36
  The Martian warlord is that is that Mars is a dying world.
• 1:02:40
  At this time. There are still Martians on
• 1:02:41
  Mars, but their world is dying and has been for, for decades.
• 1:02:45
  And basically what's what's happening here is good old
• 1:02:49
  fashioned gunboat diplomacy, by which we mean that the Martians
• 1:02:56
  are going to be given a pretext for invading and conquering
• 1:03:00
  Britain, and very specifically only Britain.
• 1:03:03
  There's a sub, there's a subplot, there's a great.
• 1:03:04
  Line about the rest of the world sighing with relief when they
• 1:03:07
  realise that Britain's been targeted.
• 1:03:11
  That's brilliant as well. I'd like to quote the line.
• 1:03:13
  Do you know, despite the Euro skeptics, I don't think that the
• 1:03:15
  British government ever threatened to smite the EU
• 1:03:18
  before. I genuinely laughed out loud on
• 1:03:23
  the train of that one. So, but so the Martians will
• 1:03:27
  take over and in exchange for the supply of Martian
• 1:03:30
  technology, Britain, Britain will produce fertilizers because
• 1:03:36
  Earth is a fertile world will produce fertilizers and new chem
• 1:03:40
  that will allow the Martians to begin to to will allow Mars to
• 1:03:47
  flourish once again means they can start growing crops there
• 1:03:49
  again. So, you know, there is there is
• 1:03:53
  this idea that actually Greyhaven, for all that he is a
• 1:03:56
  villain and he is a villain, his motives are arguably noble.
• 1:04:02
  He's not a he is a megalomaniac. He does want to be in charge of
• 1:04:04
  all of this. But at the bottom of it all, he
• 1:04:07
  is trying to achieve something that British politicians, oh,
• 1:04:11
  since the Second World War have been trying to achieve, which is
• 1:04:14
  to, you know, regret, you know, get Britain's place at the top
• 1:04:18
  table back one once again and very carefully, which I think
• 1:04:22
  was possibly a result of circumstance because this was
• 1:04:25
  written before the 1997 election, but published
• 1:04:28
  afterwards, and possibly because that Grey Haven's political
• 1:04:30
  allegiances are very carefully noncommittal.
• 1:04:32
  I mean, he's based on Francis Urquhart.
• 1:04:35
  So I think you you read him as a Tory, which Francis Urquhart?
• 1:04:39
  Absolutely. Did.
• 1:04:41
  Yeah, but but at the same time, you know, if you try to work out
• 1:04:43
  the the timings of what? So he was meant to be a minister
• 1:04:46
  in the 70s during the unit era. There's a lovely sort of
• 1:04:49
  inference or or detail that he was minister for technology in
• 1:04:52
  the 1970s and that he poured tons of money into R&D to try
• 1:04:56
  and, you know, get British, you know, get British brains working
• 1:05:00
  for business, which implicitly explains why there's so many
• 1:05:03
  unit stories that are that have some element of like
• 1:05:05
  breakthrough technologies in it as well.
• 1:05:07
  Oh, the green death boss. Yeah, that was because of all of
• 1:05:10
  this money coming in and robot, all of them.
• 1:05:15
  But you know, if you think about that time, well if if he was
• 1:05:17
  there in the mid to late 70s, he was probably Labour, wasn't he?
• 1:05:20
  And I think it's deliberately a bit contradictory as to what he
• 1:05:22
  is. And Staines, who is his, who is
• 1:05:25
  the idiot Home Secretary is sort of his useful idiot throughout
• 1:05:28
  this and kind of sidekick I think really could be either a
• 1:05:33
  Tory or Labour. So I think I think it is
• 1:05:37
  deliberately trying to say something more generally about
• 1:05:41
  what British politicians have been trying to achieve and the
• 1:05:43
  ways in which they behave and they act and what have you.
• 1:05:46
  And it does that a lot of a lot of really quite interesting ways
• 1:05:50
  in there as well. You know, this is the whole
• 1:05:52
  thing about he, they assassinate the Prime Minister and that's
• 1:05:57
  almost forgotten wonderfully. And they almost forget, like the
• 1:05:59
  public almost forget that that's happened because they do it at
• 1:06:02
  the exact moment of the Martian invasion.
• 1:06:03
  And he just sort of steps in in the chaos and makes himself
• 1:06:05
  acting Prime Minister. And, you know, there's all this
• 1:06:09
  sort of stuff that is, you know, getting at the idea that
• 1:06:11
  democratic processes can be a break on executive power well
• 1:06:14
  back. That's what they're designed to
• 1:06:16
  be. You know, one of the purposes of
• 1:06:17
  democracy is, is that leaders should not just be allowed to do
• 1:06:21
  whatever they want to do. They should be answerable, you
• 1:06:24
  know. But the result of that is that
• 1:06:26
  it leads to some of the greatest issues the.
• 1:06:29
  Government crumbling and an enormous spaceship overhead that
• 1:06:32
  he can pretty much do what everyone's at that point.
• 1:06:35
  Everyone is a bit distracted. Yeah.
• 1:06:37
  Exactly. And, you know, this is this is
• 1:06:39
  an idea that Russell T Davis would very much return to in in
• 1:06:41
  Doctor Who many times, which is, you know, the fragility of
• 1:06:44
  society and government. And it's the ways in which it
• 1:06:48
  can be usurped by by bad actors. You know, in Rose, the epilogue,
• 1:06:52
  he pretty much accuses Boris Johnson of doing exactly that.
• 1:06:55
  When he brings back the master, he makes him a politician turn
• 1:06:59
  left. He has Britain very rapidly
• 1:07:01
  descend into, you know, into a very poor state, as again
• 1:07:06
  happens on a global scale in Miracle Day.
• 1:07:10
  So, you know, this is all, this is all really interesting.
• 1:07:12
  There's even a line, it seems like where Gray Haven says half
• 1:07:15
  the staff of Downing St. were unwilling to serve here or
• 1:07:18
  they're in mourning. I had to order out for lunch.
• 1:07:20
  Still, it always was part of the plan to slim down the government
• 1:07:22
  machinery, so if you get even getting a gag about ministers
• 1:07:27
  endless desire to fire civil service.
• 1:07:31
  What I. Loved about Grey Haven though,
• 1:07:32
  is, is that he's always quite a contingency no matter what's
• 1:07:35
  going on. A bit like his character in
• 1:07:37
  House of Cards, I'm sure. And so he's going to lie down.
• 1:07:40
  There's no questions of plunder. Dr. He says we will open a
• 1:07:42
  trading relationship with the Martian people.
• 1:07:45
  Like you said, this is supposed to be beneficial on both sides.
• 1:07:48
  But he's got this plant creating the Red Death gas at the same
• 1:07:52
  time, just in case, just in case, in case anything goes
• 1:07:55
  wrong with this allegiance. He's going to wipe a lot of them
• 1:07:58
  out. Well.
• 1:07:59
  Zenal does, yes, the Martian warlord, so it's worth
• 1:08:02
  mentioning the Martians as well and the way they're presented in
• 1:08:04
  this way. Can we so?
• 1:08:06
  The two scenes from. Their point of view were just
• 1:08:10
  expertly risen, I thought. Yeah.
• 1:08:13
  So so the you have Grey Haven and the other principle then is
• 1:08:17
  Zenal who is the Martian warlord and interestingly also make a
• 1:08:21
  point that he's not like the warlord of all Mars.
• 1:08:23
  He like Grey Haven just represents one clan on on Mars
• 1:08:26
  as well, which is really interesting.
• 1:08:28
  And the Martians are presented as a stagnant society on a dying
• 1:08:32
  world. And although he is monstrous
• 1:08:38
  Zenal and does many terrible things, there is something I
• 1:08:41
  think deliberate mirroring going on with Grey Haven.
• 1:08:44
  Because this is a world in decline.
• 1:08:46
  There is seems to be no way that they will survive or have or
• 1:08:49
  achieve anything. And in fact, they do tie this
• 1:08:53
  into the future history continuity established in
• 1:08:55
  earlier version New Adventures of Benny, knowing that this is a
• 1:08:57
  race whose ultimate destiny is that they're going to be largely
• 1:09:01
  massacred by mankind in about 100 years time when man makes it
• 1:09:05
  to Mars on the. Tied into New Adventures
• 1:09:07
  continuity. Yeah, yeah, it's I wasn't.
• 1:09:10
  I wasn't sure, I assumed it was. Yes, the 1000 Year War, which I
• 1:09:14
  think was mapped out in the future history cycle quite early
• 1:09:17
  on in the Virginia Adventures when they made we.
• 1:09:20
  Went to Mars and we got engine and things like that so I'm sure
• 1:09:22
  we dealt with and all those books.
• 1:09:24
  Yeah, so legacy. As well.
• 1:09:25
  Oh, that's Pentagon, isn't it? But the Martians are in it as
• 1:09:28
  well. So I'm sure it's touched on the
• 1:09:29
  1000 year war war something the thousand day war, sorry, was
• 1:09:32
  something that was brought up quite a lot.
• 1:09:33
  So there's some interesting mirroring going on because as
• 1:09:36
  with Grey Haven has this he's he's, you know, he's believed
• 1:09:39
  that what he's trying to do is make Britain great again.
• 1:09:41
  There's also an element, there's an awe for all that he is a
• 1:09:43
  warlord is actually the only Martian who appears to be trying
• 1:09:46
  to do anything to make his people's lives better.
• 1:09:52
  But it's also quite interesting because I think there's also a
• 1:09:56
  way in which the depiction of of that, of he makes him a very
• 1:09:59
  rounded character. Has, you know, the the Ice
• 1:10:03
  Warriors are pretty much the only monsters and classic
• 1:10:06
  doctors who get anything approaching 1/3 dimension to
• 1:10:11
  them in, you know, in the Curse of Belladon, where oh, actually
• 1:10:13
  they're not the baddies, but he he keeps that rounded idea.
• 1:10:18
  But there's also idea that this is a counter reaction to that
• 1:10:20
  very Trek inspired noble depiction of the ice wars that
• 1:10:23
  recurred throughout the virgin adventure.
• 1:10:25
  Whenever virgin adventures touched on the ice wars, which
• 1:10:27
  they did a lot, it was sort of that idea of, oh, they're not
• 1:10:30
  actually the baddies. They're sort of maybe like
• 1:10:33
  Klingons in TNG. It was.
• 1:10:35
  A bit dull it. Was a bit so here he makes them
• 1:10:38
  the villains, but he makes them well-rounded villains.
• 1:10:41
  You know, they are rounded and relatable characters who have
• 1:10:43
  different motives and relationships to the
• 1:10:45
  protagonists. But these, these ones are
• 1:10:48
  bastards. And they're, but they're just as
• 1:10:50
  much bastards as the humans they're working with.
• 1:10:53
  But. They're vulnerable as well, and
• 1:10:55
  I'm going to read a passage because I think it's ingenious
• 1:10:58
  on Lars Parkins part to take what was actually acting
• 1:11:03
  decisions made in the series, the hissing and the lumbering
• 1:11:07
  and all of this, and to write scenes from their point of view
• 1:11:10
  the first time they step foot on the earth.
• 1:11:13
  He says he had waited until nightfall before emerging, and
• 1:11:16
  the light level was almost exactly right, but the heat was
• 1:11:19
  overwhelming as he floated down towards the ground.
• 1:11:22
  How do you say his name, Zanau? Zanau found himself gasping for
• 1:11:26
  breath, sucking in warm wet air for the first few instance until
• 1:11:30
  he was used to it. Breathing tearing air was like
• 1:11:32
  drowning in soup. It was an odd sensation.
• 1:11:35
  The thick air was rich with nitrogen but so much more
• 1:11:38
  besides. Earth was a whole new world of
• 1:11:41
  smells. The air was damp and feted like
• 1:11:43
  a rubbish dump. The air buzzed and with the
• 1:11:46
  smell of loam and dung and choking petrol fumes.
• 1:11:50
  This planet was meant to be vibrant and alive but it's stank
• 1:11:53
  of rotten fruit. And he does lots of scenes
• 1:11:57
  directly from the aliens point of view and just giving such an
• 1:12:02
  interesting reading on how they were depicted on TV.
• 1:12:06
  He had been here a full Earth Day and grown almost used to
• 1:12:09
  weighing three times more than was normal.
• 1:12:11
  But can time with combined with the temperature and the smell
• 1:12:15
  and the air like soup, it was all too much.
• 1:12:19
  Yeah, he really reminds you that alien is a relative term in all
• 1:12:24
  of this. And I think whenever, whenever,
• 1:12:32
  whenever we we're seeing the humans from Zanal's perspective,
• 1:12:36
  as you, as you know said there, it's it's the Earth, but it's
• 1:12:38
  also talking about the humans as well.
• 1:12:40
  And they render all of the human names in in a sort of cod
• 1:12:45
  Martian where as well. So Grey Haven becomes Goreya
• 1:12:48
  Haven and Stains becomes Danes, which is which is wonderfully
• 1:12:53
  done, but it gets well. It's got a sense of disdain from
• 1:12:56
  them. Yeah.
• 1:12:57
  You know, in every scene they were very unimpressed with Earth
• 1:13:01
  and the human race. Yeah.
• 1:13:04
  But it's because it builds them as, you know, well, branded
• 1:13:08
  characters, relatable characters, empathetic
• 1:13:10
  characters, doesn't mean they can't still be villains and.
• 1:13:15
  Funny. I.
• 1:13:16
  Am to share the my throne with this Jesus Christ, Zanal
• 1:13:20
  bellows. I would accept no joint
• 1:13:22
  sovereignty. Bring this Christ here.
• 1:13:25
  I shall challenge him to a duel with the weapons of his
• 1:13:28
  choosing. Come on, I.
• 1:13:31
  Knew that was going to be the Lord you're going to go.
• 1:13:32
  It's brilliant, isn't it? But but there's all this
• 1:13:36
  mirroring as well because both in classic villain this thing
• 1:13:39
  both as you touched on both Grey Haven and Zanal have a
• 1:13:42
  contingency plan. You know each of them has a plan
• 1:13:45
  to wipe out the other if this goes out.
• 1:13:46
  So turns out that Zanal is his scientists are secretly
• 1:13:50
  manufacturing the red death, which is this living gas that
• 1:13:53
  could destroy all life on Earth. And at the same time, Grey Haven
• 1:13:59
  has left Mars, the Mars Probe 97 orbiter in orbit of Mars for the
• 1:14:04
  entire book because at the Denim Mall when he realises that Zanal
• 1:14:10
  has betrayed him. This is a book that features
• 1:14:12
  what can only be described as Chekhov's time delay.
• 1:14:16
  The Ultimate Pyramid of Mars Reference the time delay 5
• 1:14:19
  minutes between Earth and Mars. So it's established very early
• 1:14:24
  on. It's pretty, it's part of
• 1:14:24
  thinking the initial scenes with the, the Mars landing that there
• 1:14:27
  was a 5 minute time delay in broadcasts from from Earth to
• 1:14:30
  Mars. And there's a fantastic moment
• 1:14:32
  where the, I mean, it's, it's horrific, but it's fantastically
• 1:14:37
  rendered where Grey Haven, realizing that Zanal is going to
• 1:14:41
  betray him, activate his contingency plan and Zanal
• 1:14:44
  thinks he's won and has Grey Heaven about to die.
• 1:14:47
  And Grey Havens last, last words are there's a 5 minute time
• 1:14:52
  delay and realizes the moment he walked in, he had set the the
• 1:14:55
  orbiter with its atomic drive, which when it's first mentioned,
• 1:14:59
  do you think it's just a brilliant bit of 60s throwback?
• 1:15:01
  No, this thing's got an atomic pile, and he drops it onto the
• 1:15:05
  Martian city and there is a line.
• 1:15:07
  You can probably guess which part of Mars eye target is and.
• 1:15:12
  You go, you can, you can hear the Murray Gold score screaming
• 1:15:20
  up and there is a, there is a but I'll say, but this happens
• 1:15:24
  and it is and it is a huge epic moment.
• 1:15:27
  But also Lance Barton gets across the horror of this of of
• 1:15:31
  the of the there is a new he has dropped a nuclear bomb on Mars
• 1:15:35
  and there is a line, as you said about you know how his and I
• 1:15:39
  have been so uncomfortable on on Earth.
• 1:15:41
  There is a line. The Martians were scared of fire
• 1:15:44
  and now their sky was ablaze. And that genuinely sent chills
• 1:15:48
  down being when I read that tells you.
• 1:15:49
  Enough, doesn't it? Although.
• 1:15:51
  To be fair to Greyhaven, he does give him a warning.
• 1:15:53
  He goes. You're too clever to trust now,
• 1:15:57
  old chap, so we know you've got something up your sleeve.
• 1:16:00
  Whatever it is, use it now. You won't get another chance.
• 1:16:05
  Yeah, so. All of the games they're playing
• 1:16:08
  are just fabulous. That was my favorite part of the
• 1:16:12
  book, I think. It's been, and all, very House
• 1:16:15
  of Cards. All very House of Cards,
• 1:16:17
  although I don't remember what's his name Urquhart.
• 1:16:20
  I don't remember his his nick being snapped, although the line
• 1:16:24
  where he goes Greyhaven was still laughing when so now broke
• 1:16:28
  his neck. It was.
• 1:16:29
  Great. Yeah, as you can.
• 1:16:32
  See here Richardson laughing his head off, but he's of course all
• 1:16:35
  this terrible distraction even though he's going to die.
• 1:16:38
  Oh, it's brilliant. Speaking of Earth and Mars as
• 1:16:42
  well, we should also mention another book that plays quite an
• 1:16:45
  important role in this. And it's not a virgin new
• 1:16:48
  adventure. It's not even ABBC book in the
• 1:16:50
  future. No, it's HG Wells is The War of
• 1:16:53
  the Worlds, which this book is in constant conversation with
• 1:16:57
  because it was published in 1997, which was a century after
• 1:17:00
  the War. The world's original
• 1:17:02
  civilization, exactly a century. And the title The Dying Days,
• 1:17:07
  Well, it's actually a line from the themes onto Licence to Kill,
• 1:17:11
  but it's also sort of riffing on the famous opening line, which I
• 1:17:16
  think of of the world, which I think everyone can only read in
• 1:17:19
  Richard Burton voice of no one would have believed in the last
• 1:17:22
  years of the 19th century. And you know, other than last
• 1:17:25
  year's we had the dying days. And there was a specific
• 1:17:27
  reference to this book early on. It's being set in the dying days
• 1:17:31
  of the 20th century. And it's, you know, Mars attacks
• 1:17:36
  Earth landing in London and it's it's you know, it's not it's not
• 1:17:40
  a one to one, but it's just an interesting if you're a fact fan
• 1:17:43
  like me, it's the sort of thing just love spotting all the
• 1:17:47
  references and inversions throughout this.
• 1:17:50
  So rather than, you know, in the red wheat, you have the red weed
• 1:17:54
  in the war of the worlds. And here you have the red death.
• 1:17:57
  There's even a bit where on the there's all the Martian
• 1:18:00
  spaceship there war machines are described as being the, you
• 1:18:03
  know, tripods and the flying spaceships from the movie
• 1:18:06
  version. But and some of the chapter
• 1:18:09
  titles. So the first chapter of this is
• 1:18:11
  what we saw from the empty house, which is a play on what
• 1:18:13
  we saw from the ruined house, which is a title brilliantly
• 1:18:18
  though, and this is my favorite. So listeners, this is a Lance
• 1:18:22
  parking book. So there is a version of this
• 1:18:24
  podcast that would just be us going through and providing
• 1:18:27
  verbal footnotes of all those. You'll get the chance at the
• 1:18:30
  end. Remember, I always throw it out
• 1:18:32
  to you and say whatever you haven't said, say your piece.
• 1:18:34
  You could be there an hour if you want.
• 1:18:36
  Well. At this point, I would just like
• 1:18:38
  to say that in it's either the introduction or the notes to
• 1:18:43
  chapter one that's Parkins says that a lot of the a lot of the
• 1:18:47
  character names are taken from the War of the Worlds.
• 1:18:52
  I thought that's interesting. Just, you know, being me, I
• 1:18:54
  thought, I wonder how many of them I can, you know, spot as
• 1:18:56
  guide as I go through. And I was sort of going on, I
• 1:18:59
  thought, well, there's Ogilvy. So the mission controller is, is
• 1:19:02
  Ogilvy in this and Ogilvy is the astronomer in in the War of the
• 1:19:06
  Worlds. That was fairly easy.
• 1:19:08
  One thing about HGLS is he often didn't name his characters.
• 1:19:11
  That's the thing. So the the main character of the
• 1:19:13
  War of the Worlds is called the journalist and the main
• 1:19:15
  character in the time traveller is just called the Time
• 1:19:17
  Traveller, you know, all that sort of thing.
• 1:19:18
  So I was thinking, well, there can't be that many people and
• 1:19:22
  that many character names to take from the Wall of the
• 1:19:24
  World's, right? So.
• 1:19:25
  So I was sort of going back over character names and trying to
• 1:19:28
  spot them. And when we did Father Time, I
• 1:19:30
  accused Lance Parking of being a bastard.
• 1:19:33
  And I'd like to repeat that accusation here, because so.
• 1:19:37
  Many well. We have Ogilvie, right?
• 1:19:39
  OK, so there's one now. There are some that when you
• 1:19:42
  start to spot these sort of things.
• 1:19:43
  So some of them are just named after places from the World War.
• 1:19:46
  So Staines is a place in the war of the wilderness character
• 1:19:50
  here. And there's a character called
• 1:19:51
  Mayberry Hill called Colonel Mayberry Hill.
• 1:19:54
  And Mayberry Hill is a is a place in that the American
• 1:19:59
  journalist that we mentioned earlier, who is a big second
• 1:20:02
  character, her name is Eve Waugh.
• 1:20:04
  Yes, you pointed this out to me in a message.
• 1:20:06
  Yeah, yeah. But.
• 1:20:09
  I thought, oh, like Evelyn Waugh who wrote Scoop, which is a
• 1:20:12
  satire. I figured, yeah.
• 1:20:15
  Only she then points that out and you think be odd to make
• 1:20:19
  that joke and then have a character pointed out the first
• 1:20:22
  she's called Eve War. The 1st chapter of the War of
• 1:20:24
  the Worlds is called the Eve of the War.
• 1:20:28
  That's not the most annoying one.
• 1:20:30
  The most annoying one is later on in the book we beat a
• 1:20:32
  character called Raymond Heath, or Ray Heath as in Heat Ray.
• 1:20:42
  There's got to be more of these and I'm annoyed I haven't
• 1:20:44
  spotted more of them. What does?
• 1:20:46
  What does? Where's the null from?
• 1:20:47
  Tell us last there's. There's a place called Bambera.
• 1:20:50
  In War of the West. People don't realise that that
• 1:20:55
  the that the Martians shouted. Let's bridge Stewart, I mean.
• 1:20:59
  There's there's one thing though, you know, talking about
• 1:21:02
  Father Time, talking about this and I'm sure talk about more
• 1:21:05
  Love Parking books is there are so many Easter eggs in there
• 1:21:09
  aren't there to be unearthed every time.
• 1:21:11
  Look, we said it before. Every time you read it, you're
• 1:21:13
  going to pick out something else on a Michael.
• 1:21:15
  Now it says something about the complexities of this book that
• 1:21:21
  we are well over an hour into discussion it and we haven't
• 1:21:25
  even mentioned the Doctor Bernice or breed their left
• 1:21:29
  bridge Stewart yet. This.
• 1:21:32
  Must be remedied. Shall we mention one of them?
• 1:21:35
  So should we talk about Brigadier Alistair Gordon
• 1:21:40
  Lethbridge Stewart? Yes, please.
• 1:21:43
  Gordon M. So this this book, this is book
• 1:21:47
  is actually only set a couple of months after Battlefield because
• 1:21:51
  Battlefield was set in 1997, although broadcast in 1989.
• 1:21:55
  And so the Brigadier is back in this and he is in retirement.
• 1:22:01
  He is very much depicted as being a man out of time.
• 1:22:04
  You know, there's there's a wonderful scene where he has to
• 1:22:06
  get Doris to work the e-mail for him because he just doesn't
• 1:22:10
  understand. He just doesn't understand any
• 1:22:13
  of it. But as secrets of being
• 1:22:14
  unearthed. And again, this is classic
• 1:22:16
  conspiracy thriller stuff. So.
• 1:22:19
  So the reason that the mass probe missions ended in 1977, we
• 1:22:24
  are told here is because the commander of the final mass
• 1:22:27
  probe mission went mad and murdered his crew mates.
• 1:22:32
  Only here in this book, this character Alex Christian, after
• 1:22:37
  20 years in prison, breaks out and he hunts down the one old
• 1:22:41
  friend who he thinks will believe him to tell the truth,
• 1:22:45
  which is that he it was a stitch up.
• 1:22:47
  He didn't killed his crew mates, they were killed by Martians and
• 1:22:50
  he's been in prison for 20 years keeping it secret that there are
• 1:22:53
  Martians and his old friend is Brigadier.
• 1:22:56
  Asked Gordon Lethbridge Stewart. And it's very much an old
• 1:22:58
  soldier being drawn back into things, but someone who has who
• 1:23:04
  is not uncomfortable with where they are, is not dissatisfied
• 1:23:10
  with what he did. But he does feel that he's never
• 1:23:13
  got the recognition he deserves, that the point is repeatedly
• 1:23:17
  made that he's still a Brigadier.
• 1:23:20
  And they make the point, which, and this is an interesting thing
• 1:23:22
  of, you know, emergent storytelling, right?
• 1:23:24
  Which is that as I, as I understand it, I think there's
• 1:23:27
  AI could be wrong here, but I think the point is made that on
• 1:23:29
  retirement, brigadiers are normally promoted to Colonel as
• 1:23:32
  a sort of recognition. And that that never happened for
• 1:23:34
  him. Now, of course, that's just
• 1:23:35
  because the Doctor script writers just know he's known as
• 1:23:38
  the Brigadier. He talks about Colonel Crichton,
• 1:23:41
  doesn't he? About how he only dealt with two
• 1:23:44
  or three alien invasions and they promoted him straight away,
• 1:23:48
  whereas the Brigadier obviously has dealt with hundreds of these
• 1:23:50
  bloody things, Yeah. Because he made too many he, you
• 1:23:55
  know, he made too many enemies. He annoyed too many people
• 1:23:57
  through all those John Perky things.
• 1:23:59
  So the one but never did anything wrong.
• 1:24:01
  So the one punishment they do is just a bit like, a bit like, you
• 1:24:04
  know, political satire, a bit like John Perko never being
• 1:24:07
  allowed into the house, never been giving appearance, Right,
• 1:24:09
  Joe? If you say so.
• 1:24:14
  Actually, I, I must say this because I'll kick myself if I
• 1:24:17
  don't get this in this episode somewhere he annoyed people
• 1:24:20
  during lots of those invasions, including, and I quote actually
• 1:24:24
  Doris. We did manage this by ourselves
• 1:24:26
  more times than not. Not.
• 1:24:28
  It wasn't always around when the band Rules tried to destroy the
• 1:24:31
  ozone layer, was he? We managed to beat.
• 1:24:35
  We managed to beat the Dravins without him, didn't we?
• 1:24:40
  What is he trying to say? That the Doctor just didn't come
• 1:24:42
  around when it was all the shit monsters I.
• 1:24:45
  Think that is very much the inference, yes.
• 1:24:48
  I want to see the dravine invasion so badly.
• 1:24:52
  I'm not imagining a version of, you know, the the Eve Miles bit
• 1:24:55
  from Miracle from Children of Earth's camera going.
• 1:24:59
  Sometimes I think the reason the doctor doesn't come because he
• 1:25:03
  turns away in shame. Sometimes I think the reason
• 1:25:06
  doesn't come is because he cannot be buggered.
• 1:25:10
  Oh, no. Oh, come on, the bad rules.
• 1:25:12
  Trying to destroy the ozone layer.
• 1:25:14
  Oh glorious. David A McKinsey write that book
• 1:25:17
  now. No, but it's pretty good though,
• 1:25:21
  isn't it? He he is an old soldier who
• 1:25:27
  feels like he's never going to get the chance to really justify
• 1:25:30
  himself and that he did what he needed to do and that he can
• 1:25:33
  live with the fact that he'll never get reward from that.
• 1:25:35
  But that doesn't mean it doesn't make him sad.
• 1:25:37
  And across this book is given not to redeem himself, but a
• 1:25:43
  chance to prove himself to those who would doubt him.
• 1:25:47
  And in some ways that does feel a bit reflective of Doctor Who
• 1:25:51
  as a whole, because, you know, the bigger deal is a bit of a
• 1:25:53
  you know, he's he's after the doctor.
• 1:25:55
  He's one of the, you know, greatest embodiment within a
• 1:25:57
  character of classic Doctor Who, right?
• 1:25:59
  There's always that slight implication whenever the Doctor
• 1:26:02
  in the modern series talks to Kate about her dad's, that he's
• 1:26:05
  talking a little bit about classic Doctor Who.
• 1:26:06
  There isn't he? And I think there's an element
• 1:26:12
  that improving himself across this book to once again, that's
• 1:26:16
  Doctor Who proving itself like, you know, there's a reason these
• 1:26:19
  things work. There's a reason these things
• 1:26:20
  were successful. And here and here I am.
• 1:26:22
  And it's it's a very lovely Brigadier book.
• 1:26:24
  There was a moment that I thought summed up the Doctor and
• 1:26:29
  the Brigadier's relationship from the Brigadier's point of
• 1:26:32
  view that actually made me choke back a tear.
• 1:26:34
  And I'll very rarely get to that point in Doctor Who books.
• 1:26:38
  And it's the bit where the Brigadier stays behind to rescue
• 1:26:43
  the Doctor and the IT reads like this.
• 1:26:45
  The Doctor was puzzled. They left you behind.
• 1:26:48
  I stayed the Brigadier there simply for you.
• 1:26:51
  But the risk, Doctor Bambera may not realise it, but you're the
• 1:26:56
  only person on this planet that can stop those things, that
• 1:26:59
  makes you the most valuable asset.
• 1:27:02
  And this was the zinger. And of course you're a friend.
• 1:27:06
  I was just like, that's gorgeous.
• 1:27:08
  And I don't need more than that. That's perfect, no?
• 1:27:12
  It's it, you know, we mentioned Battlefield and Battlefield is
• 1:27:17
  the best Brigadier story. It's the best story for the
• 1:27:20
  Brigadier because it's moldry Undead is too complicated.
• 1:27:23
  It's the one that examines him as a character and this feels
• 1:27:26
  like it's carrying on some of that work.
• 1:27:28
  You know, God's the line that gets me every time from
• 1:27:30
  Battlefield. You know, can this world do no
• 1:27:33
  better than you as it's champion?
• 1:27:36
  Is it? Probably.
• 1:27:37
  I just do the best I can. Oh, it's gorgeous and.
• 1:27:40
  There's a lot of the. Best it's your stupid stubborn
• 1:27:43
  thick and a nuts go you're supposed to stay in bed oh
• 1:27:46
  really doctor come along now oh or even better good Lord is that
• 1:27:53
  a spaceship bunk you know oh he's just brilliant in that so I
• 1:27:58
  don't think courtney's comfortable in Morgan undead
• 1:28:01
  with what they're asking him to do half the time whereas he's at
• 1:28:04
  home in battlefield he. Is at home in Battlefield.
• 1:28:08
  Oh, well done. Well.
• 1:28:10
  Done. Play is the hero.
• 1:28:12
  I meant being the champion. It's the It's the best joke
• 1:28:17
  you're going to get in this political satire episode.
• 1:28:21
  I think, I think as ever, he's like that, that stalwart
• 1:28:23
  character in this that you can absolutely rely on.
• 1:28:26
  And when the Doctor's out of the action, then the Brigadier and
• 1:28:29
  Benny form a brilliant team together, yes.
• 1:28:32
  So I think what what is brilliant about battlefield and
• 1:28:36
  works is carried on brilliantly. Here is this idea of, and this
• 1:28:39
  relates is this idea, the Brigadier is the person who is
• 1:28:43
  there when the Doctor isn't, when the Doctor doesn't turn up.
• 1:28:46
  I'm first. I'm the person that I have to
• 1:28:48
  deal with. I'm going to say, and I will do
• 1:28:49
  the best I can. And this book, as well as being
• 1:28:53
  the last Doctor Who version of Adventure is also really the 1st
• 1:28:58
  or least the sort of pilot. It's, you know, when they do an
• 1:29:00
  episode of, they do an episode of TNG that's really an episode
• 1:29:03
  of DS9 because they want to see if they've commissioned DS9.
• 1:29:05
  I know that's not how DS9 happened, but you know what I
• 1:29:07
  mean. Complain about it on your other
• 1:29:10
  podcast. It's a little bit like the pilot
• 1:29:14
  episode for the Benny New Adventures.
• 1:29:16
  And so we'll get on to why, for quite a large part of this book,
• 1:29:21
  Benny is our hero, not the Doctor, because the Doctor is
• 1:29:25
  not is is is just not present. Get on to why portions of this
• 1:29:29
  book. And there is a theory of, well,
• 1:29:31
  again, this whole book is constantly fact and fiction or
• 1:29:34
  intention throughout this book because anyone reading it, as
• 1:29:37
  we've mentioned, will be reading it with the context of its
• 1:29:40
  publication. Well, the Doctor's not around
• 1:29:43
  anymore. What do we do when the Doctor's
• 1:29:45
  not here? But the adventures continue and
• 1:29:48
  there's a lot of Benny having to find her feet in in, in all of
• 1:29:53
  this. And she has to find out how do
• 1:29:55
  you exist outside of, you know, the Doctor's narrative shield
• 1:29:59
  when? And they make the point she's
• 1:30:03
  very deliberately depicted as not being a Doctor substitute.
• 1:30:08
  I think that's something they're very conscious they didn't want
• 1:30:10
  to do with them. They didn't want us.
• 1:30:12
  To have all the answers straight away like he, yeah.
• 1:30:14
  Because that's such a disappointment the second he.
• 1:30:16
  Shows up, the story's basically over.
• 1:30:18
  Isn't it in the climax? Yeah, in some ways that is.
• 1:30:21
  I heard your recent episode about tales of terror with, with
• 1:30:25
  James Luck in which the public, I think James made the point
• 1:30:30
  that in so many of those stories, the Doctor turns up and
• 1:30:31
  just ends the story. And so there's almost an
• 1:30:33
  argument that in in these sort of stories, how do you stop the
• 1:30:35
  Doctor just ending it now? Yeah, basically.
• 1:30:39
  Makes a suggestion that those Bernie's new adventures are
• 1:30:42
  going to be a bit more interesting, you know, yeah.
• 1:30:44
  Getting to the solution might be a bit harder, yeah.
• 1:30:47
  Because she is more reliant on others than the Doctor, you
• 1:30:51
  know, she is very much a part of a team with the Brigadier and
• 1:30:54
  Bambera and UNIT. Although could I?
• 1:30:56
  Say, in a love of spectacular moment of stupidity.
• 1:31:00
  Oh, dear. I don't know why I send you
• 1:31:02
  messages. I also so stupid.
• 1:31:03
  I'll send say my message again. Well, why is this book suddenly
• 1:31:07
  being told from the point of view of Bernie Summerfield's
• 1:31:10
  Diaries? That's that very odd choice to
• 1:31:12
  make. I can all see you reading that
• 1:31:15
  guy. Oh, God, How do I sell him?
• 1:31:20
  You were very gentle. Thank you.
• 1:31:22
  Yes. Yes.
• 1:31:25
  Because she is a viewpoint character, but she's not a
• 1:31:29
  superhero and she is going to be the protagonist of all the
• 1:31:32
  future books they hope people will carry on buying, basically.
• 1:31:35
  Where her story starts her, her first new adventure is there,
• 1:31:38
  isn't it? Yeah.
• 1:31:39
  In fact, there's a there's a lovely sequence at the start of
• 1:31:42
  this book where it opens on Benny.
• 1:31:45
  So it opens on Benny in the house, the house on Allen Rd.
• 1:31:51
  which is one of many sort of kisses to the past throughout
• 1:31:53
  this, you know, throwing back to the vision adventures.
• 1:31:56
  And there's a wonderful sickness of her.
• 1:31:57
  She's gone there. She's been dropped off by
• 1:31:59
  Katyatu Leatherby Stewart's another little cameo from, you
• 1:32:02
  know, a fan favorite character to meet the doctor.
• 1:32:06
  And he doesn't turn up when he's meant to.
• 1:32:09
  So she just has these days in the house on a road by herself.
• 1:32:13
  And it's this lovely metaphorical sequence of her
• 1:32:17
  being in this big old house that's full of memories but
• 1:32:19
  empty of people. So she's remembering being there
• 1:32:21
  with Jason, who she's now separated from.
• 1:32:24
  She remembers being there with Ross, who's now died.
• 1:32:27
  She remembers being there with Chris, who's, who's now left the
• 1:32:29
  doctor. And there's a really quite
• 1:32:35
  potent, sort of almost last day of uni vibe, you know, when
• 1:32:40
  everyone's packed up and left and it's all just a it's, it's
• 1:32:43
  just too quiet, remember? All the great times we had here.
• 1:32:46
  Remember all the and it is and that idea that this book, people
• 1:32:50
  really probably expected it to be a bit more dua than it
• 1:32:55
  actually is. You know that maybe that's the
• 1:32:57
  sort of error they're coming into it.
• 1:32:59
  It's it's an it's an end. It's an end of an era.
• 1:33:04
  I. Think the the next time,
• 1:33:07
  bizarrely, Lance Parkin gets to do this with the Gallivray
• 1:33:10
  Chronicles. That is a lot more dour.
• 1:33:14
  It's doing as many kisses to the past, but it's way more obvious
• 1:33:18
  about than than this. I think this is so invested in
• 1:33:21
  it's it's store. It's, you know, original story,
• 1:33:25
  but those kisses in the past are sort of peppered throughout and
• 1:33:27
  actually it does it there in that first chapter and then just
• 1:33:32
  gets on with being a rollicking good time.
• 1:33:34
  Yeah, and I guess because maybe it needed to be, it needed to be
• 1:33:39
  more optimistic because with the Gallery Chronicles, we all know
• 1:33:43
  Doctor Who had scored the biggest prize.
• 1:33:45
  It was coming back with this. The Doctor didn't, Doctor Who
• 1:33:50
  didn't have any visible future, was going over to the BBC
• 1:33:52
  novels, but BBC range. But I think there's a real sense
• 1:33:56
  that Doctor Who never felt more dead to fans than it did in
• 1:34:01
  9798. There was a sentiment that now
• 1:34:03
  gets missed. At the time of the TVM failing
• 1:34:08
  was the death knell that was Doc, You know, all the first
• 1:34:11
  half of the 90s, like, oh, it'll come back, it'll come back,
• 1:34:13
  it'll come back. And it had come back and it had
• 1:34:15
  failed. And it's like, well, that's it
• 1:34:16
  then. It's never going to happen
• 1:34:18
  again. And there's, you know, we love
• 1:34:21
  to point out in these podcasts when Doctor Who characters
• 1:34:24
  comment on the state of Doctor Who.
• 1:34:27
  And there is a bit in this where Betty says, I think he's
• 1:34:30
  speaking for Doctor Who fans in 1997.
• 1:34:32
  When she says, as you can imagine, I was at a low ebb.
• 1:34:35
  The Doctor had come back as someone else and this.
• 1:34:37
  And just as I was getting used to him, he'd been taken from me.
• 1:34:40
  And this time he wouldn't be coming back.
• 1:34:42
  And I think that is talking about Doctor Who.
• 1:34:46
  But but why? Why does she within the
• 1:34:50
  narrative, Joe, what does Benny mean?
• 1:34:54
  The doctor has been taken from her, and this time he isn't
• 1:34:56
  coming back. Help me well.
• 1:35:01
  One thing that doesn't get mentioned enough when people
• 1:35:02
  talk about this book is it's the book where they kill Doctor Who.
• 1:35:08
  Well, not forever. He's back at the end.
• 1:35:09
  Oh. Spoilers.
• 1:35:10
  Thanks for not actually going along with my little bit of
• 1:35:12
  wind. To be fair, they do.
• 1:35:14
  They do that same thing they did in The Glorious Dead where they
• 1:35:19
  have killed the doctor off, apparently, and then they wait
• 1:35:23
  for ages for him to come back to the point where you're thinking,
• 1:35:28
  my God, actually, I know he's not dead, but is he dead?
• 1:35:32
  Yeah. So, so the it's one thing that
• 1:35:36
  people reading this book knew happened in it was that the
• 1:35:39
  doctor was going to be killed off because that had been
• 1:35:41
  reported by SFX, which let's face it, if you're reading Dr.
• 1:35:44
  New Adventures, you were reading SFX.
• 1:35:47
  So you knew that and didn't have a hunty?
• 1:35:49
  Thing to do though, wasn't it? Well, it would have been.
• 1:35:53
  It's news, I suppose. Well, when we spoke to Lance, he
• 1:35:57
  did speculate on how that news got out because as far as he was
• 1:36:00
  aware that was just an idea that was shared between him and
• 1:36:03
  Rebecca Levine. And in Lance's own words, he
• 1:36:06
  didn't tell us a fact. So there was a everyone really
• 1:36:15
  just knew the doctor was kill off.
• 1:36:17
  So they play with that deliberately.
• 1:36:18
  About halfway 2/3 of the way through the book, they the
• 1:36:23
  Doctor sacrifices himself. So the Red Death is released to
• 1:36:28
  kill the Doctor and to remove him.
• 1:36:31
  And it is killing kills a whole village of people in pursuit of
• 1:36:35
  him. And so in order to save the
• 1:36:38
  world, he sacrifices himself. He allows it to get it.
• 1:36:40
  Having first saved a cat. How?
• 1:36:42
  How very new adventures. He saves a cat.
• 1:36:45
  Oh. I.
• 1:36:45
  Was rolling my eyes at that .0. God, yeah.
• 1:36:48
  Come here. Pussy.
• 1:36:49
  Pussy. We're doing survival all over
• 1:36:51
  again. I.
• 1:36:52
  Think it's one of many points where he's deliberately playing
• 1:36:54
  or no, no, he said. That in those notes at the end,
• 1:36:57
  he. Goes.
• 1:36:57
  I'm I'm tipping my hat to the new adventures, to the shit as
• 1:37:02
  well as the good stuff and. Then he sacrificed himself and
• 1:37:05
  there's a again, brilliant visual imagery of this, these
• 1:37:08
  swirling clouds surrounding him. It's a great.
• 1:37:11
  Moment although. And the opposite of Jenny baby
• 1:37:14
  says his last words. Would you like a Jenny baby?
• 1:37:17
  And then when? He came back to, you know, when
• 1:37:19
  he came back in the climax and gave the explanation, I was
• 1:37:23
  like, well, that's as terrible as any other explanation as to
• 1:37:26
  how the doctor cheated death. Respiratory bypass system, la,
• 1:37:30
  la, la. Yeah.
• 1:37:31
  Yeah. So a good third of the book
• 1:37:33
  plays out though, under the pretense of the Doctor is dead
• 1:37:36
  and it's just Benny and the Brigadier.
• 1:37:38
  And you know from what is that a lot of people reading this
• 1:37:40
  because they've read in SFX, believe the Doctor had been
• 1:37:42
  killed off. They genuinely believe they've
• 1:37:43
  done it. And that's the point is made.
• 1:37:45
  That's why they make the point about him being 1200 years old,
• 1:37:47
  whereas in Vampire science he's said to be just over 1000.
• 1:37:50
  Was to say like, Oh no, no. So just give that a little extra
• 1:37:53
  hint that this takes place after all those books.
• 1:37:55
  So this is when he died. So after everything else that
• 1:37:57
  happens, the Doctor dies in this book.
• 1:37:58
  And I'll tell you the truth, when I read this book in 2002,
• 1:38:02
  when it was an e-book and I didn't know anything else, I
• 1:38:04
  thought they'd killed him. Because in the author's notes,
• 1:38:07
  Lance keeps up that that joke as well.
• 1:38:10
  In his notes, he he goes on. I genuinely thought they killed
• 1:38:14
  the doctor off in this book because I hadn't read it much
• 1:38:16
  about it before. I was like wow bloody hell as.
• 1:38:19
  Well, as being a good shock moment, though, I just think it
• 1:38:22
  came at the right part of the book to keep things interesting,
• 1:38:25
  to suddenly shift the narrative to Benny, to suddenly have those
• 1:38:29
  first person diary extracts to, to then have them having to find
• 1:38:34
  the solution without the doctor's help.
• 1:38:36
  I just think it was a really savvy move to do it regardless
• 1:38:38
  of the shock of it. Yeah.
• 1:38:40
  Which was very well done. Yeah.
• 1:38:42
  And it's. No, no, I am going to very
• 1:38:48
  quickly say my one disappointment with this book
• 1:38:53
  because I did come away with one disappointment and that was I
• 1:38:57
  didn't get a lot from the 8th Doctor in this.
• 1:39:00
  I got an awful lot from people's relationships with him.
• 1:39:05
  So the Brigadier with the 8th Doctor and especially Bernice
• 1:39:09
  with the 8th Doctor. But very often, just from her
• 1:39:12
  point of view, that's what made that work.
• 1:39:15
  But in a way that when we read vampire science, he just was so
• 1:39:19
  alive on the page all the time. I don't know.
• 1:39:23
  I didn't. I didn't get a lot.
• 1:39:28
  Just as I mean, I, I did enjoy this.
• 1:39:30
  There is, there is less character work with him than
• 1:39:33
  there is in vampire science, which is, you know, in large
• 1:39:35
  part a character study on the 8th Doctor and one of the things
• 1:39:38
  that works about it. And this is much more, you know,
• 1:39:40
  there's much more going on in this book.
• 1:39:42
  There's less space for that. I I see where you're coming
• 1:39:45
  from. I did enjoy him in this.
• 1:39:46
  I liked you know, and they were given sweet FA in terms of how
• 1:39:51
  to the character of the ex doctor from the TV movie.
• 1:39:54
  So you know, there is again have to bear in mind building from
• 1:39:56
  the ground up here. But there is something of that
• 1:40:00
  experienced innocence to give the line from from vampire
• 1:40:04
  science about him. This this idea of someone who's
• 1:40:07
  not always seemingly so completely open and honest and.
• 1:40:14
  Emotionally open, shall we say, and yet seeming to be in a
• 1:40:17
  slightly different room the whole time.
• 1:40:19
  But also the sense that he's someone who was at peace with
• 1:40:21
  himself. I quite liked that.
• 1:40:25
  Yeah, he was. He was doing all the beats.
• 1:40:27
  I would expect the Doctor to do the bit, the bit where he's at
• 1:40:29
  the party. I was seeing the 8th Doctor and
• 1:40:32
  Grace at that party in the TV movie.
• 1:40:34
  You know, that bit where we have the bomb.
• 1:40:37
  He jumped out. That's very, very doctorish.
• 1:40:39
  When he came along at the end, he was very impressive.
• 1:40:42
  So none of it was bad. I just didn't think it was as
• 1:40:45
  vivid. When I had a character like Grey
• 1:40:47
  Haven in this book who was riveting to read about, I was
• 1:40:52
  like, OK, that's the doctor. That's fine.
• 1:40:55
  Yeah. Yeah, I, I did, I did like this.
• 1:40:58
  But it, it is a, it is a subtle depiction.
• 1:41:02
  And I think the adoption depiction has been quite a
• 1:41:04
  subtle character. So it's a bit enigmatic.
• 1:41:06
  There's there's a line where she notes it says when she first
• 1:41:08
  meets the doctor Benny this is and thinks his voice had a hint
• 1:41:12
  of the doctor's Celtic lilt, but only a trace, which is a a nice
• 1:41:16
  little observation about Paul Mcgann's slightly for buddly an
• 1:41:19
  accent and but it's also, I think, speaks the idea that
• 1:41:25
  there's just a lilt of the doctor about him.
• 1:41:27
  Like if you're thinking of it in terms of the 7th Doctor, also
• 1:41:31
  another. Thought about him when she well.
• 1:41:33
  We'll get on to that Very. Collected her thoughts and began
• 1:41:36
  Dr. Your new body is very well. I say very.
• 1:41:40
  That doesn't mean I personally think I mean compared to the way
• 1:41:42
  you used to look of course, but not everything goes on looks.
• 1:41:46
  I mean she's basically saying he's very fuckable.
• 1:41:50
  There's a brilliant bit Ala again, Ala vampire sites where
• 1:41:53
  you know, in the in the in the thriller mould, the the Doctor
• 1:41:57
  gets slipped and notes by this by this young chap working for
• 1:42:02
  who's been working for the British Space programme and
• 1:42:06
  telling him to meet him. You know, tell him to meet him.
• 1:42:08
  It's his flat and to bring carnations and the Doctor's
• 1:42:11
  like, what could it possibly mean?
• 1:42:13
  And Benny's Benny has to explain it might not be his motives, may
• 1:42:18
  not be plot. Relevant.
• 1:42:21
  Yes. And I love that in both books,
• 1:42:24
  yeah. He's very good, He's so.
• 1:42:26
  Naive. Well, he's never been that
• 1:42:28
  pretty before. Of course he is.
• 1:42:30
  I'll. Tell you, I'll tell you one
• 1:42:31
  thing, Lance Parkin gets dead on about the 8th Doctor.
• 1:42:35
  That a lot a lot of 8th Doctor novelists got wrong in the 90s
• 1:42:40
  and noughties. His height.
• 1:42:45
  His height, His. Height.
• 1:42:47
  If you read back these 8th doctor laws, loads of them
• 1:42:49
  referred to him as being tall. He.
• 1:42:50
  Isn't. No, no, I've met him recently.
• 1:42:56
  Betty said get get I I think it's purely because of all of
• 1:42:59
  those publicity photos of him stood next to Sylvester McCoy
• 1:43:02
  and a Sylvester McCoy is genuinely tiny and B for McGann,
• 1:43:06
  who stood on the lip of a of the TARDIS, but so.
• 1:43:10
  In one of his, in one of his very doctorish moments, you
• 1:43:12
  know, he rummages through his pockets and finds his usual sort
• 1:43:16
  of junk, you know, cricket ball, an elephant feather and a bag of
• 1:43:19
  cola nuts, I suppose. I I hope you get the reference.
• 1:43:25
  I, I I do you want to explain for the boys and girls at home?
• 1:43:28
  Yes, well, there's a lovely new adventure called Transit by
• 1:43:31
  Benaronovich where a a hooker uses cola nuts distinctive taste
• 1:43:39
  to remove the taste of semen from her mouth.
• 1:43:42
  Last park in, I'll see you, Good Lord.
• 1:43:47
  Good Lord. Our refined listeners have just
• 1:43:49
  spat up their teeth. They.
• 1:43:51
  Came expecting politics, he did say.
• 1:43:56
  Interesting choice of good stuff.
• 1:43:57
  And the bad. Good stuff and the bad, yeah,
• 1:44:03
  so, but no, he gets the height right.
• 1:44:04
  There's Benny says he was about her height and I, of course, I
• 1:44:09
  looked it up. Paul McGann, 5 foot 8 1/2
• 1:44:12
  inches. Emma Thompson, who was the
• 1:44:14
  physical, who was very much the model for Benny at this time, 5
• 1:44:17
  foot eight. There we go.
• 1:44:18
  Well done, well done. Small round of applause.
• 1:44:23
  Although Benny is not really Emma Thompson anymore, is she
• 1:44:25
  not? Not, not anymore.
• 1:44:27
  She is now as fair has been. Lisa Ban What?
• 1:44:30
  I will say is I thought the 8th Doctor and Benny.
• 1:44:34
  Actually, no, I'm going to say Benny and the 8th Doctor because
• 1:44:37
  she's just the more vivid character.
• 1:44:39
  They were brilliant combination together, like they were like
• 1:44:42
  gangbusters together and. I.
• 1:44:45
  Would have happily read more new adventures with that pairing.
• 1:44:49
  100% because I mean she was brilliant with the 7th Doctor
• 1:44:53
  and you know, I'm I am a fan of the of the new adventures 7th
• 1:44:56
  Doctor. I had moments where in general,
• 1:45:00
  the concept of the character I like, but, you know, that always
• 1:45:05
  played off the idea that she was, you know, she was very
• 1:45:06
  grounded. She was, she was someone who was
• 1:45:08
  very down to Earth. And he was someone who was, you
• 1:45:10
  know, in the stars and his brain working.
• 1:45:12
  He would be, you know, he was sat there floating in space and
• 1:45:15
  she was, you know, she was having to get appointed or
• 1:45:19
  something like that. But here you've got a Doctor Who
• 1:45:21
  will grab her by the hands and take her running, you know, who
• 1:45:25
  will thrust her into the adventure and be there right
• 1:45:27
  alongside her. That they are.
• 1:45:30
  Yeah. They work wonderfully together.
• 1:45:31
  And it does sort of feel, you know, just to carry on this.
• 1:45:37
  When we spoke about the 8, the 8 Doctors, we said that that felt
• 1:45:41
  like a book from a world in which the TV movie had been a
• 1:45:45
  huge hit with Kit, with kids and Doctor Who was all over the
• 1:45:48
  place. When we read Vampire Science, we
• 1:45:49
  said that read like a book from a world which the Virgin New
• 1:45:53
  Adventures had carried on. I don't think there is any other
• 1:45:56
  world in which The Dying Days exists because it's specifically
• 1:45:59
  written to be the last Virgin New Adventures and the only 8th
• 1:46:03
  Doctor one. But it does sort of feel like we
• 1:46:07
  were robbed of a world in which the 8th Doctor can play.
• 1:46:09
  And in fact, there's even little.
• 1:46:10
  I always get impression that like maybe Lance Parkin and
• 1:46:13
  others feel like that as well. They might see more because in
• 1:46:15
  the Infinity Doctors, there's a there's the the Infinity Doctor
• 1:46:19
  gets among many Lynchian visions that he has, he's one of a
• 1:46:25
  pregnant Benny. And, you know, that's just you
• 1:46:28
  think, yeah, some, you know, as, as the 7th Doctor said in Tales
• 1:46:35
  of the TARDIS, you know, sometimes I died, sometimes I
• 1:46:38
  didn't. Sometimes the Doctor and Benny
• 1:46:40
  didn't travel together, and sometimes they did, out there
• 1:46:43
  swirling away in their memory TARDIS with all the kids.
• 1:46:47
  A lovely idea, this. Knows writers going please,
• 1:46:49
  please, can we have my way No, no, there's Sam Jones.
• 1:46:52
  Do we know what you get? All right, I.
• 1:46:54
  Mean that makes that makes the whole Sam Jones even worse.
• 1:46:57
  Now you've said that. Well, no, I could.
• 1:46:59
  I do. I appreciate that they tried to
• 1:47:01
  do something very different, you know, and they, they did try and
• 1:47:07
  rectify mistakes and blah blah. We've talked about it elsewhere
• 1:47:09
  or by science last time, but yeah, it just works so well
• 1:47:14
  here. The only other time I can
• 1:47:16
  remember the 8th Doctor and Benny being together was after
• 1:47:19
  the short story collection Life During Wartime.
• 1:47:23
  There was a short story collection called A Life Worth
• 1:47:25
  Living, and he's in one of those.
• 1:47:27
  Really. He's.
• 1:47:29
  He he's in another story you're referring to, it's called be
• 1:47:32
  Forgot and it's in a Christmas Treasury.
• 1:47:35
  Oh, OK, well there you go. It's in a Christmas treasury and
• 1:47:38
  Bernice is angry, isn't she? She said we went through fucking
• 1:47:41
  hell on back where were you? And it's a great story.
• 1:47:45
  And he also turns up at the christening of Peter in the
• 1:47:50
  glass prison as well. But those are the only other two
• 1:47:52
  times I can think of the meeting.
• 1:47:54
  There's one more big Finnish anthology Company of Friends,
• 1:47:59
  yes. Of course it's.
• 1:48:00
  The 8th Doctor and Lisa is the is the 8th Doctor and Benny
• 1:48:02
  together? But and there'll be more to say
• 1:48:06
  on the the Doctor and Benny shortly, but before that we
• 1:48:09
  should say yes. So the Doctor, the Doctor and
• 1:48:11
  the 8th Doctor Who did not die, in fact is revealed in the denim
• 1:48:16
  more to have been alive the whole time, comes back in
• 1:48:18
  triumphant fashion as Benny's about as Zanal's about to
• 1:48:21
  unleash the red death and kill Benny.
• 1:48:24
  But Zanal's that a voice calls out.
• 1:48:26
  You know, and it's the 8th Doctor, he's alive, he's back.
• 1:48:29
  What does he? Say I can't remember.
• 1:48:31
  Oh. I've not got the whole speech.
• 1:48:33
  He lists all of his titles. You know I am the OH.
• 1:48:37
  God yes, that was the other moment where I groaned.
• 1:48:41
  I am the 8th man bound. Oh fuck.
• 1:48:44
  Off. Maybe it's not a bad thing.
• 1:48:46
  Even Lance. Said in his notes that was
• 1:48:49
  divisive, that moment. He says I'm the guy with two
• 1:48:53
  hearts. He says another title he gives
• 1:48:56
  himself and that is life's champion.
• 1:48:59
  Fat fans. Fat fans.
• 1:49:02
  So silence, Joe. He's pointing at me.
• 1:49:07
  Fact fans, you may not be one Joe Barr listeners are that's he
• 1:49:13
  was he was actually in the spirit of in the spirit of being
• 1:49:16
  actually, you know, very celebratory and a very
• 1:49:19
  optimistic and confident and rightfully confident and proud
• 1:49:23
  ending. He he was keen that there'd be
• 1:49:25
  some kind of handover to the BBC books, but the timeline actually
• 1:49:29
  didn't work out for him to do anything particularly major with
• 1:49:31
  it. But there is one reference in
• 1:49:33
  this book to the BBC books, which is when he's listing his
• 1:49:37
  titles when he returns, you know, to introduce himself, he
• 1:49:41
  one of them. He gives his life's champion
• 1:49:43
  which is title that is applied to him in vampire science.
• 1:49:49
  OK, because what I was going to say before I was pointed out in
• 1:49:53
  a very dismissive way was art for a lot of this read.
• 1:49:59
  Tell me if you think I'm mad. I don't think this felt like a
• 1:50:03
  new adventure. This was far too fun.
• 1:50:07
  Frankly, I find the New Adventures very gun, very
• 1:50:10
  serious, you know, full of soldiers and people going
• 1:50:14
  through terrible torture and things like that.
• 1:50:16
  I know there's the odd Book of Light relief, but there's
• 1:50:19
  there's. Very.
• 1:50:20
  Few sort of unpretentious adventure stories like this,
• 1:50:26
  right? So for a lot of this, I was
• 1:50:28
  going my God, this is what the new adventures could have been
• 1:50:31
  all along. Really fun until I got to this
• 1:50:36
  bit where he started saying I am the 8th man bound.
• 1:50:38
  I was like oh bloody hell there they are.
• 1:50:40
  There's the new adventures I'll. Tell you what, if that scene
• 1:50:44
  wasn't written to Murray Gold, I am the Doctor, It's only it's
• 1:50:48
  only because that track wouldn't be written for the 13 years.
• 1:50:52
  Yeah, he would have thought as like as dramatic for the 8th
• 1:50:55
  Doctor. But the really clever thing as
• 1:50:57
  well is Lance Barking pulls the same trick that George RR Martin
• 1:51:00
  does in the Game of Thrones books of Song of Ice and Fire,
• 1:51:04
  which is that although the 8th Doctor has been absent from the
• 1:51:07
  story as we've been told it, what we actually realised is
• 1:51:09
  that various background events that have been referred to
• 1:51:13
  throughout that sequence have been the Doctor secretly running
• 1:51:16
  around using the fact that they will think he's dead to try and
• 1:51:19
  solve things. Which is really clever.
• 1:51:22
  Those two characters go missing for that entire portion of the
• 1:51:26
  book. Oh right, I was with them the
• 1:51:28
  whole time behind the scenes. It's very, very cleverly done.
• 1:51:32
  And then the Denny Moore, which is, you know, you end on a big
• 1:51:36
  let's park in I think we mentioned this in five time has
• 1:51:38
  got an action movie sensibility and an impressive ability to
• 1:51:43
  capture that on that on the page, which is.
• 1:51:48
  Really hard. We've said before, haven't we,
• 1:51:50
  how that can be very tedious in a book.
• 1:51:52
  Very. Tedious and very difficult, but
• 1:51:55
  it does it brilliantly here and does it fantastically in, you
• 1:51:58
  know, the the virgin New adventures going out on a heck
• 1:52:02
  of a set piece, which is Zenal has been thwarted.
• 1:52:05
  His people are dead. So he's going to leave the
• 1:52:07
  Earth, but he is going to to activate his contingency plan
• 1:52:11
  and release the red death over London and wipe out wipe out all
• 1:52:16
  life on Earth. Earth will be a dead world like
• 1:52:18
  Mars, and the 8th Doctor is aboard the spaceship as it as it
• 1:52:22
  rises and. So cry and.
• 1:52:27
  Thwarts it and the spaceship is the spaceship was blown up in a
• 1:52:31
  brilliant bit of because he remembers this is a political
• 1:52:33
  thriller. He does the classic thing of
• 1:52:37
  Zenal, you know is is you know I will destroy all life on earth.
• 1:52:43
  And the Doctor has been broadcasting his message to UNIT
• 1:52:45
  and UNIT blow up the warship, but not before Zenal drops the
• 1:52:50
  doctor out out of a hatch to fall to his death.
• 1:52:54
  And in what I think is you've seen.
• 1:52:56
  The drawing of that. It's if you've that was my
• 1:53:00
  wallpaper desktop. Oh no.
• 1:53:03
  That was my desktop for ages. Yeah, Paul McGann with the.
• 1:53:07
  With. Falling through the sky with the
• 1:53:10
  with the spaceship explode. Grow it's.
• 1:53:12
  I think it's on TARDIS wiki listener if you've not seen it
• 1:53:15
  go. All of the situations are
• 1:53:16
  lovely. That is one of that is for the
• 1:53:18
  all time great Doctor Who book images you.
• 1:53:20
  Know when at the end of the Galafroy Chronicles, he's on
• 1:53:23
  that, that an enormous termite hill in Guinea Basu.
• 1:53:29
  And they go, whoa, how are you going to stop him?
• 1:53:31
  He goes, I've got absolutely no idea, but I'm the doctor.
• 1:53:34
  And then he leaps into the his cocktails flying everywhere, the
• 1:53:39
  true hero. And that's how the book ends.
• 1:53:41
  And he leaps. Is he sort of referring to this
• 1:53:44
  again? Yeah.
• 1:53:45
  I think, I think when we spoke to Lance in the the 3rd as yet
• 1:53:48
  unreleased part of the interview, he's.
• 1:53:50
  Coming. Oh, right, he.
• 1:53:52
  Said that there were there were a few points where he was trying
• 1:53:55
  to evoke the dying days in in yeah just to call back to it not
• 1:54:00
  least in in the Gatsby chronic that is another way that he
• 1:54:05
  touches on that of course is that this is the final virgin
• 1:54:08
  new adventure. So of course the 7th Doctor gets
• 1:54:11
  a little cameo in a very lovely little scene where after the
• 1:54:16
  Doctor is dead, the next chapter opens with Benny waking up in
• 1:54:19
  the house on Allen Rd. with everyone still around.
• 1:54:21
  When it kind of it was all the dream style sequence.
• 1:54:23
  And the 7th Doctor has brought her breakfast in bed and she
• 1:54:28
  discusses basically the whole events of the Virgin New
• 1:54:30
  Adventure. Since, I don't know, somewhere
• 1:54:32
  around Original Sin maybe? And he's just commenting on how
• 1:54:37
  unlikely, how unlikely it all seems.
• 1:54:40
  Can I just? Make a quick note for the house
• 1:54:42
  on Allen Rd., because I think inadvertently that was just the
• 1:54:47
  best idea to see that location through the new adventures where
• 1:54:52
  I don't always get a great sense of the domestic.
• 1:54:56
  But the fact that every companion, they, they both had a
• 1:55:00
  story in that house. And I really felt it here that
• 1:55:03
  it was, it was a very important place.
• 1:55:05
  So then when in another brilliant action sequence, may I
• 1:55:08
  say the Ice Warriors attack and they're smashing through the
• 1:55:12
  doors, I was feeling really sad. I was like please know so this
• 1:55:15
  is the last new adventures. Don't destroy that house,
• 1:55:18
  please. It's been our only happy
• 1:55:19
  memories for the past 60 fucking books.
• 1:55:22
  And I don't think he quite went that far, did he?
• 1:55:24
  It's still intact. At the end, No, it's still
• 1:55:26
  intact. Oh no.
• 1:55:27
  It has to be, of course, doesn't it?
• 1:55:28
  Because there's future things occurring in it, yeah.
• 1:55:31
  Yeah, it's, it's a, it's a lovely conceit and another
• 1:55:33
  little, you know, another little idea to pull out of the idea of
• 1:55:37
  the Doctor as a time traveller. This house that is, I think the
• 1:55:40
  line here is that it's almost constantly occupied, but no
• 1:55:42
  one's ever been there for more than a couple of weeks at a
• 1:55:44
  time. You know, it's like, it's like
• 1:55:45
  Merlin's cottage and the Sword of the Stone or something.
• 1:55:47
  It's just I think. Oh no.
• 1:55:49
  That's where he. That's where he.
• 1:55:51
  Lives with. Miranda isn't it, I think.
• 1:55:53
  It's implied Yes. No, no.
• 1:55:54
  He put it in the nose. It's in the nose.
• 1:55:56
  Yeah. Oh, that's in the nose.
• 1:55:59
  So that's that's where he's living in the early 80s with
• 1:56:02
  Miranda that had. Always been my head cannon but
• 1:56:05
  I'd completely missed that it was in the OR it was in the
• 1:56:07
  notes. Oh, perfect, perfect, perfect
• 1:56:10
  anyway. Sorry, back to where we were.
• 1:56:11
  Action sequences. 7th Doctor through space, 7th Doctor.
• 1:56:15
  So. The 7th Doctor makes it we get a
• 1:56:17
  dream 7th Doctor Who gets a cameo appearance here, and the
• 1:56:20
  dream 7th Doctor also gets a cameo appearance in the
• 1:56:23
  Gallifrey Chronicles, representing the Doctor's locked
• 1:56:25
  memories. So I think, oh, there's a little
• 1:56:28
  bit of the Doctor's mind that is forever the 7th Doctor just
• 1:56:31
  plotting away the whole time he. Just has this brilliant ability
• 1:56:36
  to make a book that stands on its own and a series of books
• 1:56:40
  that all linked together, doesn't it?
• 1:56:41
  Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:56:43
  So brilliant action, see, because I think so to go back.
• 1:56:45
  So we left the 8th Doctor plunging to his inevitable
• 1:56:47
  death. And for me, this is one of the
• 1:56:52
  the definitive 8th Doctor in prose sequences.
• 1:56:55
  So the Doctor has been dropped out of the spaceship above
• 1:56:58
  London. He there's literally nothing he
• 1:57:00
  can do, but he works out a plan to save himself before he hits
• 1:57:03
  the ground, which is he starts going through all his pockets
• 1:57:07
  and all of the little things that he's picked up throughout
• 1:57:09
  the story over the previous week or so.
• 1:57:12
  In fact, there's a bit earlier on in the book where in London,
• 1:57:15
  Benny and the 8th Doc, the Doctor on top of the Martian
• 1:57:17
  spaceship trying to escape. This is much earlier on when
• 1:57:19
  they first meet the Martians. And Benny says to him, how do we
• 1:57:22
  get down from here? And he says, ask me in a week.
• 1:57:25
  And this is a week later, he's falling.
• 1:57:27
  And he, he did little things that he's picked up at various
• 1:57:31
  points, like A roll of bin bags that he picked up because it's
• 1:57:34
  seated that they need 4 bin bags at the house and some curtain
• 1:57:37
  rings he picked up at one point. And he's got some cord as well
• 1:57:41
  and a, a kind of helium that he, that he fell out of the, the
• 1:57:47
  spaceship with. And he basically, what a
• 1:57:49
  wonderful image is this. He makes himself a huge a huge
• 1:57:54
  balloon out of all these bin bags filled with helium and
• 1:57:57
  drifts down to after. He's falling, bear in mind.
• 1:58:00
  He's falling and he drifts down to earth, dangling from the
• 1:58:04
  bottom of them. And it's just, it's a lovely,
• 1:58:07
  such a lovely image. And no, that's not the
• 1:58:12
  definitive 8th Doctor moment in this book, I think you'll find.
• 1:58:16
  If we could please talk about the fucking.
• 1:58:19
  So as. We've talked about this with
• 1:58:22
  Lance Parkin for some time. In fact, he went on about this.
• 1:58:27
  So there's a there's a lovely little bit in the epilogue where
• 1:58:32
  the final scene with the Doctor and Benny is the Doctor dropping
• 1:58:35
  her off at our. Brazil Garden.
• 1:58:38
  What's? It called the University on
• 1:58:40
  Della where she's based. Yeah, the University on Della
• 1:58:43
  where she will be based for the Benny version of adventures.
• 1:58:46
  And he's dropping her off and helping her move in and all the
• 1:58:48
  rest of it. And it's do you know what I
• 1:58:52
  think it is? Given that Lance Parkin wrote
• 1:58:55
  Trading Futures, I think this is the Doctor Who version of the
• 1:59:00
  final scene from a Roger Moore or Timothy Dalton James Bond
• 1:59:06
  film. You know, where they've saved
• 1:59:09
  the day. And then it's the hero and the
• 1:59:10
  girl back in the bedroom. They even they even open a
• 1:59:14
  bottle of champagne, you know? So here's to U.S. star moments
• 1:59:18
  and the only. Time it would ever work because
• 1:59:22
  you've got Betty who, let's face it, has been having it off
• 1:59:26
  throughout the new adventures and you've got the doctor, this
• 1:59:30
  romanticized Doctor Who has shown an interest in women.
• 1:59:34
  It is one appearance on television.
• 1:59:37
  It's can I say the line please can.
• 1:59:40
  I can I read you? Can I read you the section
• 1:59:42
  please? Oh.
• 1:59:44
  My God. Let me do it, Benny the Doctor
• 1:59:50
  produced a very large bottle of champagne and grins.
• 1:59:53
  Napoleon gave this to me for services rendered.
• 1:59:55
  The very first magnum of Brutes Imperial.
• 1:59:57
  I've been saving it for a special occasion.
• 1:59:59
  He popped the cork. This is tremendous oversight on
• 2:00:02
  my part, but I don't have any wine glasses.
• 2:00:05
  Mugs will do. Benny unpacked a couple and the
• 2:00:07
  Doctor pawed. When he had finished, they held
• 2:00:08
  them up. Wolsey watched the proceedings
• 2:00:11
  with interest. To the event, To the adventures
• 2:00:13
  of Professor Benny Somerfield. The Doctor declared to a.
• 2:00:17
  Benny paused for a moment and then smiled.
• 2:00:20
  Doctor Who might change but won't ever die.
• 2:00:23
  To the future, wherever and whatever it might be.
• 2:00:27
  The Doctor said. The future?
• 2:00:29
  Benny echoed. They clinked their mugs
• 2:00:31
  together. I better go.
• 2:00:34
  The doctor said quietly when he finished his champagne.
• 2:00:36
  Benny hesitated, looking into those deep blue eyes of his.
• 2:00:40
  Yes. Look, before you leave, there's
• 2:00:42
  one thing I have to do that I'd never forgive myself otherwise.
• 2:00:45
  The doctor looked puzzled. What would that?
• 2:00:47
  She grabbed the lapels, his Brock coat, kissed him square on
• 2:00:49
  the mouth and pushed him down hard onto the bed whilst he
• 2:00:53
  jumped out of the way. Pushed him down hard, you say?
• 2:00:57
  They. Fuck, let's be honest, they fuck
• 2:00:59
  all right? We mentioned that we mentioned
• 2:01:03
  company of friends and when Benny that opens with Benny
• 2:01:07
  recapping her relationship with the doctor and she says
• 2:01:09
  something like she mentions this story in a sense.
• 2:01:11
  And then we shook hands. It's.
• 2:01:16
  Such a great ending. It's.
• 2:01:17
  Brilliant I. Mean.
• 2:01:18
  That's not even quite the ending, is it?
• 2:01:20
  Because then we cut to the Brigadier at what's he at a
• 2:01:26
  funeral? It's the well, it's the IT is
• 2:01:29
  the re coronation of Queen Elizabeth the second because
• 2:01:32
  then I was making. But he says in the notes that
• 2:01:34
  one of the reasons doing this was he knew that some people
• 2:01:36
  would want to spoil themselves and skip to the ends of the book
• 2:01:39
  to see if the doctor stayed dead.
• 2:01:41
  And so the last scene is deliberately a big sort of
• 2:01:44
  funereal occasion with no sign of the Doctor anywhere.
• 2:01:49
  I'm, I'm going to do a small reading now then, because I just
• 2:01:52
  think this is the perfect, perfect way to end this book and
• 2:01:56
  to end the new adventures in such a such an optimistic way.
• 2:02:01
  Alistair glanced over at Brigadier Bambera.
• 2:02:04
  His successors were all going to do sterling work, probably even
• 2:02:07
  better than him. He'd like to think he'd set a
• 2:02:09
  high standard for them. Hopefully, in years to come,
• 2:02:12
  people would say that he'd live up to his illustrious ancestry
• 2:02:17
  and that by and large, he'd done a good job.
• 2:02:19
  He knew that he'd had a good innings and despite the old
• 2:02:22
  saying, he'd neither died nor faded away.
• 2:02:25
  Retirement wasn't so bad, not on those terms.
• 2:02:28
  And that is why, in the middle of a packed Westminster Abbey,
• 2:02:31
  one of the most important dates in British history, despite
• 2:02:35
  everything that had happened, General Alastair Gordon
• 2:02:39
  Lethbridge Stewart found himself roaring with laughter.
• 2:02:43
  I just think that's it's gorgeous.
• 2:02:45
  It's gorgeous. It's a gorgeous end to a
• 2:02:47
  fantastic book. Yeah.
• 2:02:50
  Yeah, it's really, it's really written.
• 2:02:52
  What? What a lovely, happy, joyful
• 2:02:58
  note. Because at the end there, he's
• 2:02:59
  not just talking about him, he's talking about everyone who wrote
• 2:03:02
  the New Adventures, isn't he? Yes.
• 2:03:05
  Yeah. It's just brilliant.
• 2:03:08
  I love this book. Yes.
• 2:03:09
  Well, do you remember I sent you a message halfway through
• 2:03:12
  saying, do you know what I like? It's, it's very good and all
• 2:03:15
  that, but it's not all that. And then I got to it again and I
• 2:03:17
  was like, no, no, it is all that.
• 2:03:19
  It is that in fact it for what is very, very easy to read, It's
• 2:03:25
  a really smooth read. This like there's no room.
• 2:03:28
  There's not, no sort of complicated language.
• 2:03:31
  It's not, it's not, it's just really good.
• 2:03:36
  I, I, I can't, I don't know how to summarise it other than that.
• 2:03:38
  But what I would like you to do is to pour over your notes now
• 2:03:42
  your, you know, huge manifesto on the dying days, and just pull
• 2:03:48
  out a few gems because I've still got loads.
• 2:03:51
  Benny gets some time at the Internet Cafe by giving the
• 2:03:54
  manager spoilers for Star Trek Insurrection and Star Trek
• 2:03:57
  Nemesis. I made the notes.
• 2:03:58
  Joe would like this joke. I did.
• 2:04:01
  Well, no, you, you sent me a message about that as well.
• 2:04:04
  And I went. When was that?
• 2:04:06
  And then I remembered. I remembered I like in Lars Lars
• 2:04:11
  Parker's notes that he goes, and I also outed Ralph Cornish from
• 2:04:15
  the Ambassadors of Death for no other reason than it's the sort
• 2:04:19
  of thing we're used to do in the Virgin books.
• 2:04:22
  I've got the Mars Probe 97 landing party.
• 2:04:25
  There's various celebrity guests.
• 2:04:29
  Tons of tons of jokes in this one, but I particularly liked
• 2:04:32
  Richard Branson and Alan Yentob. Were arguing over something.
• 2:04:35
  Now I wonder what the the owner of Virgin Books and the then
• 2:04:38
  director of Drama Entertainment of children's the BBCS could be
• 2:04:41
  arguing about in the last version of your adventure.
• 2:04:47
  Look again, the Doctor says he's 1200 years old, says Lars
• 2:04:52
  Barkin. This book clearly happens after
• 2:04:54
  the BBCA of Doctor books. You can have your ADAS, he says.
• 2:04:58
  But it'll end like this. As mentioned, Lance continues
• 2:05:03
  the gag begun by Kate Ormond that Doctor Who fans, fanzines
• 2:05:06
  and conventions all exist in the universe, but there there's
• 2:05:10
  dedicated to talking about real life invasions.
• 2:05:12
  The government is trying to cover up, Oswald says.
• 2:05:17
  From the Abominable Snowman to the Zygons, Oswald knew his
• 2:05:19
  stuff. He'd even spoken at conventions
• 2:05:21
  in America, and he's described as wearing a duffel coat and a
• 2:05:25
  long scarf. So that's parking.
• 2:05:27
  Even did the gag having him cosplay.
• 2:05:32
  No one is happy with the Martian presence that Bear remind him,
• 2:05:36
  reminded him the EU imposed trade sanctions to prevent the
• 2:05:39
  export of Martian technology. Well, of course they did.
• 2:05:44
  There's a bit early on where Staines is talking to Veronica
• 2:05:47
  Halliwell, who first appeared in the missing adventure System
• 2:05:50
  Shock, about who killed Kennedy. But the in universe version
• 2:05:55
  that's revealed the truth of UNIT and Veronica says we lent
• 2:06:00
  on the publishers and they changed the cover, altered the
• 2:06:02
  dates. So apart from anything else,
• 2:06:04
  fuck you to your attempts to sort out UNIT dating David
• 2:06:07
  Bishop. Well, it's one of, I love this
• 2:06:11
  so much. Well, it's one of the big
• 2:06:12
  questions, isn't it? Live on other planets?
• 2:06:14
  Do you think Zanal's a Protestant or a Catholic?
• 2:06:17
  The Pope has sought an audience with him, you know.
• 2:06:22
  Is there is there a reference to his religion being Martian
• 2:06:25
  conformist or something like that?
• 2:06:28
  Oh. Man, oh, I loved all of that.
• 2:06:31
  I mean, I could just go on and on.
• 2:06:32
  I've got reams of bloody notes here.
• 2:06:34
  Oh. Oh, God, the yeah, there's,
• 2:06:36
  there's just so many. My crew.
• 2:06:40
  My crew were murdered. Well, sorry, Lex, Christian
• 2:06:44
  explains The Brigadier. My crew were murdered on Mars.
• 2:06:47
  Not by me, Brigadier. Cosmonauts.
• 2:06:50
  Are you telling me now that the Russians got to Mars, Lex?
• 2:06:53
  Worse. The Americans.
• 2:06:56
  By. Exact note as well.
• 2:07:01
  I mean, do you have anything else you want to say, sort of in
• 2:07:05
  summary of the dying days? I think it's a glorious book.
• 2:07:09
  It's a, it's a rare thing in Doctor Who of a ever, to use
• 2:07:15
  Lance's term, a capstone book. You know, this sort of puts an
• 2:07:21
  end on something and moves on, and I think it is a product of a
• 2:07:26
  specific moment, but that makes it a very specific and a unique
• 2:07:30
  book in Doctor Who. It does things that it could
• 2:07:33
  only have done because it needed to do something at that specific
• 2:07:36
  time. I think it is remarkable the
• 2:07:40
  degree to which it reaches the same answers to the same
• 2:07:43
  questions as as 2005 Doctor Who and and since has done really, I
• 2:07:52
  think. Everything you just said there,
• 2:07:54
  yeah, could be applied to the doctor and Betty having sex.
• 2:07:57
  I realised you're talking about the book itself, but I was like,
• 2:08:01
  can I go with this as a sentence?
• 2:08:02
  Went on and on and on. I was like, yes.
• 2:08:04
  Including the reference of 2005 where sex definitely hit doctor.
• 2:08:09
  And what better note to end this?
• 2:08:13
  I would like to end by saying something that you taught me and
• 2:08:17
  I think it is absolutely what this book is.
• 2:08:21
  And that is rad before trad. And.
• 2:08:25
  For the New adventures to go out on like an original novel in
• 2:08:30
  their own terms, and then to be taken up by so many other people
• 2:08:38
  to the point where we're all going, oh, actually, isn't this
• 2:08:41
  a bit familiar? I think, I think it deserves a
• 2:08:44
  huge amount of respect, but more importantly than anything than
• 2:08:48
  ending the new Adventures, than, you know, passing the baton onto
• 2:08:52
  the BBC books to start in the Bernie Somerfield novels.
• 2:08:56
  It's just a damn good read. Yeah, it's it.
• 2:09:00
  It is a book that says you can walk my path, you can wear my
• 2:09:04
  shoes, learn to talk like me and be an Angel too.
• 2:09:08
  But maybe you ain't ever going to feel this way.
• 2:09:11
  You ain't ever going to know me like I know you.
• 2:09:14
  I'm singing it now, Joe. Things can only get better.
• 2:09:19
  Only can. Only get better.
• 2:09:22
  Oh, wonderful. Oh my word, I so enjoyed that.
• 2:09:33
  Well, Michael, you know how we usually end these episodes with
• 2:09:38
  with a recommend. Do you have one?
• 2:09:40
  Party political. I know.
• 2:09:42
  Well, I know you're voting reform.
• 2:09:44
  I'll be going. I'll be going with Plaid.
• 2:09:48
  Oh, books. No.
• 2:09:48
  OK, sorry. I don't care about your
• 2:09:52
  political recommendations please.
• 2:09:54
  All I care about is Doctor Who books.
• 2:09:57
  Well, I've got to annoy you then, because I'm going to
• 2:10:00
  recommend a. Political Book.
• 2:10:01
  Well yes, I'm I'm going to, I'm going to pull the James Lark
• 2:10:04
  manoeuvre and recommend a Doctor Who adjacent book.
• 2:10:09
  Oh please. And the book I'm going to
• 2:10:11
  recommend is the KLF, Chaos Magic and the Band that earns
• 2:10:16
  £1,000,000 by John Higgs. Now the KLF.
• 2:10:22
  If you are a Tyson Doctor Who fan, you probably know the KLF.
• 2:10:25
  They were a elect electronic group, late 80s, early 90s.
• 2:10:32
  Also sort of known for sort of being, you know, quite political
• 2:10:36
  and sort of engaging in forms of performance art as well.
• 2:10:38
  Best known as Doctor Who fans because they released Doctor in
• 2:10:41
  the TARDIS under the title The Time Laws.
• 2:10:45
  The very same, but more broadly they're probably best known now
• 2:10:49
  for being, as the title of that book says, the band that burns
• 2:10:52
  £1,000,000 in 1994. They basically exited the music
• 2:10:55
  industry. They said we're not going to do
• 2:10:58
  any more music. They deleted whatever it was you
• 2:11:01
  need to delete to stop people being able to play or rerelease
• 2:11:04
  their music in any way. So you couldn't hear the K
• 2:11:06
  unless you had already had the CDs or tapes.
• 2:11:07
  You couldn't listen to KLF and they filmed themselves on
• 2:11:14
  Scottish Ireland, forget which one, burning £1,000,000 in
• 2:11:18
  banknotes. And they recorded this and
• 2:11:20
  released it as a sort of active almost performance art.
• 2:11:23
  And the question that people have asked ever since then is
• 2:11:25
  why? Why, why, Why burn £1,000,000?
• 2:11:28
  What was the point? A question that the KLF
• 2:11:30
  themselves have struggled to answer.
• 2:11:32
  And in this book, John Higgs sets out to try and answer the
• 2:11:36
  question why did the KLF burn 1,000,000 lbs.
• 2:11:39
  Through an exploration of British culture, of forms of art
• 2:11:45
  such as Dadaism, through magical thinking, and also through its
• 2:11:50
  context within British culture and history.
• 2:11:53
  And it is a journey that takes us in many places.
• 2:11:56
  And one of those places is through Doctor Who because of
• 2:12:01
  Doctor in the TARDIS, Doctor Who's placed within British
• 2:12:06
  popular culture. And it's linked to people like
• 2:12:09
  Ken Campbell, who, you know, Sebastian McCoy is very enjoyed,
• 2:12:12
  very involved in. It's has you probably getting
• 2:12:16
  the sense it's a pretty unique book.
• 2:12:19
  It's a pretty strange book that sort of follows concepts rather
• 2:12:23
  than events, if you like. And I suppose a lot of time
• 2:12:26
  talking about Doctor Who essential to this advances an
• 2:12:29
  idea of Doctor Who as being a sort of self replicating idea.
• 2:12:34
  Talked about Doctor Who as being in some ways.
• 2:12:36
  If you draw a meme theory, which of course was, you know,
• 2:12:39
  established by Richard Dawkins, who, who appears in the darling
• 2:12:42
  days because he has his own Doctor Who thinks as well.
• 2:12:44
  He's one of the guests at the party.
• 2:12:47
  This idea that Doctor Who is is is a self perpetuating idea that
• 2:12:50
  it is a story that doesn't have one single creator that it has
• 2:12:55
  had that exists between and across minds of its various
• 2:12:58
  creators and its various bands, that it is a story that it
• 2:13:01
  encourages its viewers to think of their own stories and to fill
• 2:13:05
  in their own gaps and therefore kind of continues to self
• 2:13:08
  perpetuate. And this idea that Doctor Who
• 2:13:10
  thought of through the idea of magical thinking, through the
• 2:13:12
  idea of meme theory can be seen to have ensured its own
• 2:13:15
  survival. Because when it went off air,
• 2:13:17
  the Virgin new adventures, all of the people who've been
• 2:13:20
  watching it carried on writing it and kept it alive.
• 2:13:22
  And then Dr. fans themselves resurrected in 2005 that it is
• 2:13:26
  is paints this really sort of idea of Doctor whose place
• 2:13:30
  within cultural history as this uniquely regenerating and
• 2:13:35
  immortal idea, which is fascinating stuff in terms of
• 2:13:39
  how ideas actually behave and Doctor Who as a whole idea.
• 2:13:42
  And John Higgs is a is a fascinating writer.
• 2:13:44
  I think this is generally held to be his best book, but he's
• 2:13:47
  also written other books on people like Timothy Leary.
• 2:13:50
  He wrote a book about William Blake.
• 2:13:52
  He wrote a book about James Bond and The Beatles, sort of
• 2:13:55
  counterpointing them. And his next book is going to be
• 2:13:58
  a full book on Doctor Who I think called Regenerate
• 2:14:01
  Exterminate which will be out next year.
• 2:14:03
  But if you only can't keep your powder dry till then, I
• 2:14:06
  thoroughly recommend the KLF by John Nix it.
• 2:14:11
  Was incredible. It's a great.
• 2:14:13
  Book. I've read it probably six years
• 2:14:16
  ago now and I'd say I think about it like once a week.
• 2:14:19
  I. I will get that, although I'm
• 2:14:22
  telling you now it better be as good as you make it sound,
• 2:14:26
  otherwise you can read it to me with that much enthusiasm.
• 2:14:30
  There's a new 10th, there's a new 10th anniversary edition
• 2:14:33
  just been released, which has got tons of footnotes.
• 2:14:34
  I need to get it because I want to read those footnotes.
• 2:14:37
  And I'm pretty sure what the, he, he talked about David
• 2:14:40
  Whittaker in there in the Doctor Who section as well.
• 2:14:42
  And I'm pretty sure I saw something saying Simon Gurier
• 2:14:45
  offered him some notes on David Whittaker, because he's just
• 2:14:48
  written, of course. Yeah.
• 2:14:50
  His biography of him, so yeah. What is that Doctor Who adjacent
• 2:14:55
  book? Is that great?
• 2:14:57
  Imagine how the actual Doctor Who book will be as well that
• 2:15:00
  he's writing. I'm very excited.
• 2:15:03
  Well, I feel a bit garnish now with my recommend after that
• 2:15:08
  riveting appraisal of that book. What I would like to recommend
• 2:15:13
  is because it has a lot of input from new adventure writers.
• 2:15:19
  Licence denied. Do you have that?
• 2:15:23
  No. There's a series of essays that
• 2:15:28
  were written for fan scenes during the 90s, I think the
• 2:15:35
  early 90s, the late 80s. And it is the most infuriating
• 2:15:41
  book because a lot of it is speculation.
• 2:15:44
  I always taken something and interpreting it in another way.
• 2:15:48
  So there's like a whole piece of why Tegan is in love with the
• 2:15:51
  doctor, pulling the few times she she actually looked at him
• 2:15:54
  on screen. You know why Doctor Who is gay
• 2:15:59
  by Paul Cornell is in there as well.
• 2:16:01
  And it's all but it is it is fascinating.
• 2:16:03
  It's it's excellent writers taking sort of scant source
• 2:16:08
  material, weaving it together into some really interesting
• 2:16:12
  narratives. You will find yourself reading
• 2:16:16
  this and getting very angry and nodding your head with a lot of
• 2:16:20
  it and coming away with some ideas that you will take into
• 2:16:23
  your next watch of Doctor Who. It's so it's it's pretty unique.
• 2:16:28
  There's a couple of issues that I think there's AI think there's
• 2:16:33
  a Lance Parking only book of articles that he wrote.
• 2:16:40
  Yes. Is it called time unincorporated
• 2:16:44
  something? Like that.
• 2:16:46
  Yeah, yeah. But yeah, check out license
• 2:16:50
  tonight. It just goes to show you that
• 2:16:52
  fans are insane, but they do have some good ideas.
• 2:16:56
  It's an interesting rate, Michael.
• 2:17:00
  I'm almost too scared after we have been this effusive about
• 2:17:03
  the dying days to ask you where we are heading next.
• 2:17:07
  You and I are grand voyage round.
• 2:17:11
  Sorry, I'm suddenly from Easton grand voyage around Doctor Who
• 2:17:16
  literature talk about adjacent. Will be going beyond the time
• 2:17:20
  spiral breaking breaking free of BBC corporate oversight to
• 2:17:27
  explore the world of spin off, spin off free and.
• 2:17:32
  In a way that I've never done before.
• 2:17:36
  We will be visiting Candy Jar Books, Lethbridge, Stewart range
• 2:17:41
  of tie in novels. We are going to be reading Beast
• 2:17:45
  of Fang Rock by Andy, Frank and Allen.
• 2:17:49
  Now my other half has read this book and he told me it was the
• 2:17:54
  worst book he ever read in his entire life.
• 2:17:57
  Like, genuinely, he said. It was absolutely terrible.
• 2:18:01
  I'm going to go into it a bit more optimistically than that
• 2:18:05
  and assume that because Candy Job released a lot of books now,
• 2:18:08
  haven't they? Yeah.
• 2:18:09
  This is what this is what fascinates me.
• 2:18:10
  So I've not I've not read this book before.
• 2:18:14
  I've the only left Mr. Stewart book I've read is the forgotten
• 2:18:17
  Son, which is the first one when it came out.
• 2:18:19
  You know, it's perfectly decent, but there's since then.
• 2:18:23
  There are a this is beast of rang rock is quite an early one
• 2:18:25
  still, but there are staggering number of them now.
• 2:18:28
  So I'm I'm fascinated to learn a bit more about it.
• 2:18:30
  And I have, so I did just take a little peek on the first page
• 2:18:34
  and read that. And it did feature some, I'll
• 2:18:37
  say, eccentric prose that to complete you into the story.
• 2:18:41
  And should it be a bad book, then it is about time you and I
• 2:18:46
  talked about something less than Stella.
• 2:18:50
  Or maybe I'll love it, and then we'll have.
• 2:18:54
  Our first argument, Yes. Conflict is the heart of Drama
• 2:18:59
  Joe. Have we?
• 2:19:01
  Had a single disagreement in this yet I don't think we have,
• 2:19:04
  I thought. We were going to have a
• 2:19:05
  disagreement about the dying days, but I convinced you that
• 2:19:08
  actually was brilliant. I.
• 2:19:10
  Was romanced by the second-half of the book.
• 2:19:12
  When the doctor fucked off. I was like, oh this is much
• 2:19:15
  better Michael as ever. I mean we've how long are we
• 2:19:19
  going for now? 2 1/2 hours.
• 2:19:21
  This is a long episode. Thank you very much for your
• 2:19:24
  time. What a wonderful book to talk
• 2:19:26
  about. Absolutely.
• 2:19:28
  We should just be able to log off in time for the exit polls.
• 2:19:32
  Oh well done.