Latest / A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast / Hamster Book Club - The Doctor Trap by Simon Messingham (featuring Andrew Batty & Luke Sims-Jenkins)

Transcript

Hamster Book Club - The Doctor Trap by Simon Messingham (featuring Andrew Batty & Luke Sims-Jenkins) · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:02
  Planet One changed over. Across the globe, silos opened,
• 0:07
  warehouse doors rolled up, and long disused monorail stations
• 0:11
  flickered into electric life. Automated airfields raised
• 0:15
  atmosphere craft into launch positions.
• 0:18
  After many decades, factories began to make real things again.
• 0:23
  Clouds spread from the polar zones, clouds seeded with
• 0:27
  particles generated in orbiting satellite stations.
• 0:30
  The clouds moved quickly through the troposphere, igniting storms
• 0:34
  wherever they thickened. Electricity bust and forks of
• 0:38
  lightning crashed down, pouring energy into specially
• 0:41
  constructed reservoirs. The robots bustled, millions of
• 0:45
  them, churned out of their storage containers and gathering
• 0:48
  in legions across the surface of Planet One, they swarmed above,
• 0:53
  on, and below ground. Planet One had never been so
• 0:57
  busy. Well, not for the 69 years since
• 1:00
  Sebastian had last bothered to test the support functions.
• 1:04
  The robots worked tirelessly in the wind and the rain.
• 1:07
  Like armies of ants, they unblocked concealed entrances
• 1:11
  and raised gigantic communication mass across rain
• 1:14
  lashed muddy plains Beneath the oceans.
• 1:17
  Robots activated oceanic thermal power units to drive unthinkably
• 1:21
  powerful fusion motors. They work without pause, and if
• 1:26
  one robot malfunctioned due to systems failure accident to a
• 1:30
  plain old wear and tear, another two leaped into the breach to
• 1:33
  take its place. The work gangs were on a
• 1:36
  deadline. The clock was ticking.
• 1:39
  All this to capture one man. Robots didn't have opinions, but
• 1:43
  if they did, they must have hoped it was worth the effort.
• 1:47
  The clock ticked and ran down as lights winked out Into Darkness
• 1:51
  across the planet, from the poles to the equator.
• 1:55
  The robots stopped where they stood.
• 1:57
  The great roaring whirl of labour ceased.
• 2:01
  Planet One rebooted hamster book club the Doctor Who
• 2:21
  novel review podcast with Joe Ford, Luke Sims Jenkins and
• 2:26
  Andrew Batty The doctor trap by Simon messingham.
• 2:43
  Hello everyone and welcome to hamster book club.
• 2:46
  My name is Luke, and with me, as always when I do these, is Mr.
• 2:51
  Andrew. Say hello, Andrew.
• 2:53
  Hello. And and Mr. Joe say hello.
• 2:56
  Oh, hello there. It's lovely to be here.
• 2:58
  Thank you for having me. Link.
• 3:00
  I feel like that was your best like radio announcer boy.
• 3:04
  Lovely. I'm down here.
• 3:08
  Can I just say say. Shit a lot.
• 3:10
  Because mostly when I ask people to do that.
• 3:12
  They just take the piss. And go, oh, I'll come back
• 3:15
  through. Also ridiculous like that.
• 3:18
  Can I just say very quickly, professional, you know how you
• 3:20
  were both like Avenger girls before?
• 3:23
  Yeah. I missed out on that, so I'd
• 3:25
  like to be Purdy from the new adventures please.
• 3:29
  Nice. And if I stand up on the window,
• 3:31
  my pajama bottoms will fall down.
• 3:35
  I've been watching Sapphire and still for the first time so I
• 3:38
  want to be one of them. What we're here to talk about
• 3:42
  today. We're here to talk about Simon
• 3:46
  Messingham's new series adventure The Doctor Trap with
• 3:51
  the 10th Doctor and Donna and Sebastian.
• 3:58
  Well, yes. Totally misrepresented on the
• 4:01
  front cover, by the way. So oh.
• 4:02
  Completely and these covers honestly, I don't know what
• 4:05
  we'll. We'll get there, but before we
• 4:08
  start, I did pose you both with. Our opening question, which was
• 4:14
  a bit ambiguous, so I apologize, and I asked you, what is your
• 4:18
  ideal Doctor Who book? So that is not to name a Doctor
• 4:21
  Who book, but in terms of prose and tone and length and chapter
• 4:28
  length and all of this, like, what's the sort of book you like
• 4:30
  to read? And I'm going to throw it across
• 4:33
  to Andrew. 1st and we're going to try and guess the book you're
• 4:36
  talking about. I didn't have a particular book
• 4:39
  in mind, but maybe as I'm talking like it will
• 4:43
  crystallize. But yeah, I think in a shock
• 4:49
  twist that will surprise no one, I think I gravitate towards the
• 4:54
  nineties, 2000s sort of format of Doctor Who book as kind of
• 5:00
  the gold standard. You know, you're sort of 250
• 5:04
  pages, quite pacey, doesn't stick around too long, but has a
• 5:12
  kind of enough, enough length to kind of get into it.
• 5:15
  That sounded more obscene than I would get to.
• 5:20
  Yeah. I feel like, as kind of prose
• 5:25
  Doctor Who stories go, yeah, that that's sort of twice the
• 5:29
  length of a of a target novel. Feels like it's the sort of
• 5:32
  sweet spot I guess. I was used to Do you know those
• 5:36
  280 pages? They always seem to be 280 pages
• 5:39
  the the last. 8. Books or something like that.
• 5:42
  Yeah. And I'd always, because I
• 5:44
  desperately loved reading those books.
• 5:46
  I'd, I'd sort of get to a certain point and then I'll be
• 5:49
  counting down how many pages. Oh, there's only 100 pages left.
• 5:52
  Oh, there's only 50 pages left. I'd still tear through it, but.
• 5:56
  Here's a good length. Yeah, it was always quite nice
• 5:58
  and consistent. And as you say, you kind of you
• 6:01
  got used to the the sort of flow of it.
• 6:03
  And sometimes it, it's also quite funny that there are there
• 6:08
  are books that are that are longer in that range, but they
• 6:10
  just shrink down the point size. So it's still, even if it was a
• 6:14
  long book, it's still kind of felt.
• 6:16
  Henry Industry. Amount of page.
• 6:18
  There was a very inconsistent font size, right?
• 6:22
  Yeah, Yeah. How about there was those
• 6:25
  authors who maybe like were meant to hit a certain word
• 6:28
  count, just kept on doing their own thing.
• 6:31
  And then it was like, OK, we don't really have time to edit
• 6:33
  this. So yeah, let's just let's just
• 6:35
  take this down to like size 6 points and hit print do.
• 6:39
  You remember Terence's end game, you know when he came in under
• 6:42
  running and Justin Richard had to write some and then they
• 6:44
  still had to blow up the font to the.
• 6:46
  Point where it's about 5 words per page just to actually.
• 6:50
  Justify the cup? What about chapter lengths?
• 6:53
  Are you I don't like any chapters at all.
• 6:55
  Or do you like short snappy chapters?
• 6:58
  Yeah, I'm kind of a short, snappy chapter fan.
• 7:02
  I think, you know, something that you can kind of, you know,
• 7:06
  read before bed and you don't feel like you're kind of leaving
• 7:09
  it sort of halfway through. Yeah.
• 7:13
  And but I mean, there it's. I think we're quite lucky in the
• 7:19
  because there was such a wide range of authors.
• 7:22
  There's so many different types of books out there that you kind
• 7:26
  of got. It could be different from
• 7:28
  month, month to month than kind of very stylistically different
• 7:33
  as well as some kind of format wise.
• 7:35
  So yeah, I'm I'm still still pining for those years so.
• 7:41
  I'm not sure where we're going to have them again though, if
• 7:42
  I'm honest. So that's why I treasure them
• 7:44
  now. That's why we're kind of
• 7:45
  celebrating them now. Well, not unless.
• 7:48
  Unless Disney pulls the plug. I mean, I've heard grumblings
• 7:51
  today, but. It's all rumours, I'm afraid.
• 7:54
  Well, Luke, your ideal Doctor Who book, let's hear it.
• 8:00
  It it isn't that sweet spot of 250 to 300.
• 8:03
  I would say Henrietta Street is a 600 page novel crammed in a
• 8:07
  282 pages, by the way. But like between 2:50 and 300
• 8:13
  usually seems to be the sweet spot like that that that that's
• 8:18
  might be like that's the four part.
• 8:21
  That's that's a four part book right there.
• 8:22
  I feel like that like a four part is usually the sweet spot
• 8:25
  for a Doctor Who's classic story and I feel like that.
• 8:29
  That. That, in terms of book form is
• 8:31
  about that. Short chapters, 10 pages please.
• 8:34
  10 pages or less. My favorite.
• 8:37
  Some of my favorite writers don't adhere to this at all, so
• 8:41
  that's annoying. I have AHD so attention issues.
• 8:44
  Sometimes nice short little chapter will make me feel like
• 8:47
  I'm getting through this book quicker even though I'm probably
• 8:50
  reading at the same same pace. Was it so like it's like a, if
• 8:55
  it's a short chapter as well, it's like, well, I could just
• 8:57
  squeeze this in before bed, you know?
• 8:58
  Yeah. And I feel better that I've read
• 9:00
  a bit more. Yeah, absolutely.
• 9:04
  Prostyle. I don't mind if it changes up as
• 9:06
  long as I feel like the authors got a handle on the characters
• 9:10
  they're writing for and they've got their own nice little style
• 9:13
  about them. So yeah, my, my sweet spot.
• 9:17
  It also is is those books for me, like I started watching
• 9:22
  Doctor Who 89 or 90. So I never saw Doctor Who on the
• 9:27
  telly until live until like 96, like when the movie came out,
• 9:30
  right. And the books are just even
• 9:33
  though I I was too young for the first half of the 90s, a lot of
• 9:36
  them went over my head. The books are kind of like just
• 9:39
  as important to me as a lot of TV stories are.
• 9:41
  So I like that that round of virgin and because I was of the
• 9:46
  age at the time, I probably like the the BBCEDASPDASA lot more
• 9:53
  just because I was just now, I was old enough to read them and
• 9:58
  understand them at the same time I was.
• 9:59
  And I'd seen enough Doctor Who there that I was like, Oh,
• 10:02
  that's a reference to Mary Whitehouse though.
• 10:04
  That's a reference to to these people behind the scenes and
• 10:07
  things like that. So rereading Time of Your Life
• 10:10
  was a revelation to me because I'd never even seen Trial the
• 10:12
  first time I read it. So.
• 10:14
  Yeah, they do flirt. The Nsas do flirt with maturity
• 10:19
  at times. There are a couple that I've
• 10:22
  talked about in the past, but I don't think we're going to see
• 10:26
  risks like the New Adventures and the 8th Doctor adventures
• 10:30
  possibly ever again. I mean, even the the big authors
• 10:34
  that came in like Stephen Baxter and things like that, they were
• 10:37
  still, they were writing complicated books, but they were
• 10:39
  still writing. A kid could technically pick
• 10:43
  that up. Yeah.
• 10:45
  I hate to say it, but I've been very specific.
• 10:47
  I've got a whole list here, so Please be patient with me.
• 10:50
  I still AM. I've literally, I got to the end
• 10:53
  and I realized I was talking about a particular book and I
• 10:55
  know you guys have read it, so here we go.
• 10:58
  You ready? So I I thought I like snappy,
• 11:01
  clever, funny and engaging prose.
• 11:05
  So prose is very readable but makes you laugh and has layers.
• 11:09
  It's a Paul Mars book. No more than 2020 page chapters
• 11:14
  with good cliffhangers. You know, like not every
• 11:17
  chapter, but like every two or three.
• 11:20
  It's got to have like an. Absolute.
• 11:21
  Oh my God, I'm going to put it down now, but I can't wait to
• 11:23
  come back to it tomorrow. I like.
• 11:26
  Theme in your. Head full of big ideas as well,
• 11:29
  so a book that's sort of fizzing with ideas and creativity.
• 11:34
  I put 280 to 300 pages because I always liked it when those books
• 11:38
  pushed it just a little bit above what we expected.
• 11:42
  That's that sort of extra page count.
• 11:43
  You look at those books like some of the new adventures they
• 11:47
  did with that, like Adventurous on Henriette St. like alien
• 11:51
  bodies, like they're the ones that that sort of a bit edgier.
• 11:56
  I like immediately engaging characters, like having someone
• 11:59
  to care about right from the off.
• 12:01
  And if that doesn't happen, I'm not saying anything.
• 12:05
  I will struggle just a little bit.
• 12:07
  I did just wave the Doctor trout there.
• 12:10
  I like shock arc twists, especially in the 8th Doctor
• 12:14
  books. And there's always, you know,
• 12:16
  there were very often there was good arc twists, you know,
• 12:18
  things, things that would surprise you and then push you
• 12:21
  on into the next book. And finally, a big, bold,
• 12:25
  memorable cover. Something to entice you.
• 12:28
  I really. Now that last one is where where
• 12:30
  this book falls down, unfortunately.
• 12:32
  But what book am I? Talking about, gentlemen.
• 12:36
  I actually have no idea for 2nd. There I thought you might have
• 12:40
  been like Mad Dogs, but then you said the cover wasn't great and
• 12:43
  I was like, oh, Mad Dogs cover is like one of the best alien.
• 12:47
  Bodies. I was talking.
• 12:48
  About alien bodies. Alien bodies.
• 12:51
  Yeah, I read it. It's just about the perfect.
• 12:53
  Doctor Who book for me. Big ideas, very readable prose,
• 12:56
  very funny, lots of creativity, fantastic characters.
• 13:01
  We talked about all this at the time.
• 13:03
  Yeah, that's my ideal Doctor Who book.
• 13:07
  Unfortunately, none of those things seemed to be the case for
• 13:11
  me upon reading Doctor Trap by Simon Messingham.
• 13:22
  Excellent segue. Thank you.
• 13:24
  Thank you. Although I don't.
• 13:25
  Know where I'm going to put in that jazzy music there I'm.
• 13:29
  Going to ask you first how you guys feel about Solomon
• 13:35
  Messingham as an author overall before we start talking about
• 13:38
  this book, because I think there's some mixed opinions what
• 13:41
  you've read before. And yeah, just sort of how how
• 13:44
  you took to his style. Let's start with Luke.
• 13:51
  Strange England is not my favorite.
• 13:54
  It's it's not the worst thing I've ever read, but it's
• 13:56
  definitely not my favorite. But I feel sorry for that was
• 13:59
  his for him. That was his first book because
• 14:01
  like in that era, if your first book was a real stinker, you
• 14:05
  might not get another shot or it might be years until you give it
• 14:08
  another shot at at writing one. So that's kind of happened to
• 14:12
  him. Yeah, he was.
• 14:14
  That's his. That was his only virgin book.
• 14:15
  And he didn't turn up again until I think Zeta Major or
• 14:19
  maybe Faces or something like that.
• 14:21
  But I've liked most of his BBC, you know, that 98 to 2005 kind
• 14:29
  of run. I like most of his books from
• 14:31
  that run. See the major Davidson book
• 14:33
  sequel to Planet of Evil, which I have a soft spot for season
• 14:38
  13. So I like that.
• 14:41
  Tomb of Valdemar is absolutely wonderful.
• 14:43
  Yeah. Why the hell didn't we read that
• 14:45
  instead? Yeah, right.
• 14:49
  So The Indestructible Man is a book that's managing to slide
• 14:57
  out of my grasp every single time I try to get a copy of the
• 15:00
  fucking thing, so I've never read it.
• 15:02
  Both. Of you have given the eBay
• 15:03
  prices. We might have been bidding on
• 15:06
  the same copies like. Every time we.
• 15:09
  Talk about it. I swear that price goes up and
• 15:11
  up, you know? Yeah, someone had a copy of that
• 15:13
  for like $60.00, but now all all all nearest off or I was like,
• 15:17
  would you take dirty? He didn't respond and that's
• 15:20
  fair enough. So there's, there's, there's
• 15:23
  books of his I've really engaged with, but then there's I guess
• 15:27
  Strange England and then the Infinity Race, which aren't my
• 15:31
  favorites, no. How about you then, Andrew?
• 15:37
  Yeah, I think yeah, I had to had to Google a list quickly to kind
• 15:42
  of remember which one Simon Messingham wrote because I mean
• 15:46
  he is quite prolific, but I think he never really had one of
• 15:48
  those sort of stand out ones where you thought this is a
• 15:51
  Simon Messingham. So I don't really have like a
• 15:54
  huge sense of like this is what a Simon Messingham book is going
• 15:57
  to be like. But that said, I, I think I said
• 16:02
  this in the last episode, I really enjoyed Strange England
• 16:05
  when I read it as a teenager. I was probably about 14 or 15
• 16:09
  when I read it. And I think that's probably the
• 16:13
  right age for sort of tone of that book because it's super
• 16:17
  dark. It's so graphic.
• 16:19
  Isn't. It.
• 16:20
  Really violent, but it's kind of like this sort of, it's like
• 16:25
  this Victorian Manor house setting where all the characters
• 16:28
  are kind of trapped and all these dark things cut start
• 16:31
  happening to them. And it's got a bit of a sort of
• 16:33
  steampunk aesthetic before steampunk was really a thing.
• 16:38
  And then it ends with quite a kind of when you find out what's
• 16:41
  going on, it's I enjoyed the twist.
• 16:45
  I think a lot of people don't enjoy the kind of when you find
• 16:47
  out what actually is going on in Strange England because it is
• 16:49
  quite a sort of fanish, fan wanky idea of what's happened
• 16:53
  new. Adventures, you surprise.
• 16:55
  Me. But, you know, as a teenager, I
• 16:58
  really liked it and, and yeah, it was on the, it was full of
• 17:01
  ideas and I think it kind of sparked and it's full of strong
• 17:04
  images. There's like a bit where this
• 17:09
  girl gets this horrible, like, sort of insect stuck in her
• 17:13
  throat and then it kills her. And yeah, that kind of stuck
• 17:17
  with me, yes. I mean, given you you haven't
• 17:20
  read that for what, decades? Yeah, yeah.
• 17:23
  Weirdly, it's just a really memorable one for me.
• 17:28
  But yeah, of of his other books, I think the only one I've read
• 17:32
  is Infinity Race, which I hate, which I think is kind of, it's
• 17:39
  not. It's not all to do with it being
• 17:42
  a bad book. It it's that it came.
• 17:44
  It's one of those weird books that you got in the particular
• 17:48
  in the 8th Doctor run where something really massive in an
• 17:51
  ARC would happen and you'd be so excited for the next book.
• 17:55
  And then the next book would just be completely unrelated and
• 17:57
  would not continue any of the storylines or even really
• 18:00
  acknowledge that anything had happened every now and.
• 18:03
  Again, right, you'd get mad dogs after Adventurous, which was a
• 18:06
  huge book and it doesn't matter that it's kind of ignoring it
• 18:09
  all because it's so great. But yeah, they did have an
• 18:11
  annoying habit of. Yeah.
• 18:13
  And it it kept. So it came directly off to Time
• 18:15
  0, which kind of yeah. I was just just new.
• 18:18
  ARC all about parallel universes, and then this book
• 18:23
  just didn't feel like it was part of that ARC at all, and
• 18:26
  didn't address the kind of new companion who'd been maybe
• 18:30
  introducing the one before as this kind of mysterious compact.
• 18:32
  Yeah, it was. It was a frustrating read.
• 18:34
  I can't really remember anything about the story other than just
• 18:37
  being being really annoyed at it for not continuing that.
• 18:40
  Do you? Remember then they followed that
• 18:43
  up with the domino effect. Which I think is one of the
• 18:45
  worst EDA's of all time. I really.
• 18:49
  Liked the? Oh my.
• 18:50
  Oh, add it to the list, right? Come on, I finally come to terms
• 18:55
  with that one. I remember reading that one
• 18:57
  after the Infinity race and thinking oh.
• 18:59
  This has gone the dogs. What's happened?
• 19:01
  Then I got reckless engineer and I was like, OK, we're heading in
• 19:04
  the right direction. Then it was the last result.
• 19:07
  And. Timeless.
• 19:08
  And it just kept getting better and better.
• 19:10
  Again. I was like, OK, good.
• 19:13
  Yeah, so, so sort of in in summary, I've really liked one
• 19:18
  of his books and really not liked another one of his books.
• 19:22
  Didn't really have a sense of who he is and what his kind of
• 19:25
  characteristics are as a author so went into this quite blind.
• 19:30
  Yeah. I'm.
• 19:32
  I'm almost entirely In Sync with Luke.
• 19:35
  I hated Strange England. My I've read my review because I
• 19:39
  sort of was looking at my solar messaging reviews and it was it
• 19:42
  sort of views between one out of 10s and 10 out of 10s and there
• 19:46
  was no real middle ground. And Strange England I gave a one
• 19:49
  out of 10. I must have been in a really bad
• 19:50
  mood when I read that one because just reading the blurb I
• 19:53
  was like, well this just sounds like quintessential Doctor Who
• 19:55
  to me. Horror in a lovely Victorian
• 19:58
  garden. Tomb of Valdemar.
• 20:00
  I loved Indestructible man. I loved Zeta Major, had a lot of
• 20:06
  good stuff in it even though it was a bit too violent.
• 20:08
  The Infinity race was tedious beyond description.
• 20:12
  Not quite as tedious as the Doctor trap, but it was pretty
• 20:15
  tedious. I think the thing that typifies
• 20:18
  his style is that he has no style, and he does turn himself
• 20:23
  to like, so Strange England is sort of grotesque horror, and
• 20:28
  then Tomb of Aldemar is like dark fantasy and the Infinity
• 20:33
  race. I'm not sure what that is
• 20:35
  actually, if I'm honest. It's a regatta on the sea,
• 20:39
  whatever genre you want to call that.
• 20:41
  It's enlightenment. Good bad.
• 20:43
  Thank. You indestructible man is is
• 20:47
  Jerry Anderson. So it's that sort of pop sort of
• 20:49
  genre science fiction. Yeah.
• 20:51
  So he just tries his hand at everything he does like doing
• 20:54
  interesting things with perspective, especially in Tomb
• 20:59
  of Aldemar where there's, I'm not going to tell you, Andrew,
• 21:01
  because it's a wonderful twist. And maybe one day we'll cover
• 21:05
  that one. There's a brilliant twist at the
• 21:06
  end of that where the the who's telling you the story is
• 21:10
  revealed. It's really wonderful.
• 21:13
  Feel like. We might need to have like a
• 21:15
  redemptive redesignment. If you listen to this, Simon,
• 21:20
  we're going to do one of the good ones.
• 21:21
  All right, all right, well, let's let's swing around
• 21:26
  finally, because we've been talking about doing this
• 21:28
  recording for a little while to the doctor.
• 21:31
  Trap. And I'm going to ask for your
• 21:35
  initial thoughts on this book now you've read it.
• 21:38
  And then we'll go into some of the specifics and I'm going to
• 21:43
  reverse the order. Let's go back to Andrew.
• 21:46
  Oh yeah, Initial thoughts just kind of bored.
• 21:52
  It just didn't engage me at really much at any any point and
• 21:58
  I was I was expecting this to be a good one.
• 22:00
  I feel like when it came out this was quite highly regarded.
• 22:04
  I don't know, I don't know where I'm getting that from.
• 22:07
  Maybe it got like a good DWM review or like maybe the the
• 22:11
  forums were quite excited about this one, but maybe the.
• 22:14
  Other two books in the batch were bad and this is the only
• 22:17
  good one, so maybe that elevated it like a little more.
• 22:20
  But yeah, it just left me a bit cold.
• 22:21
  What was? The Ghost of India and the other
• 22:24
  one was Gary Russell's One Beautiful Chaos, and those were
• 22:26
  both pretty good, but I lauded this one when it came out, so
• 22:30
  fuck knows what I was on when I read it the first time around.
• 22:33
  And how about you then, Luke? I well, the 1st 60 pages I was
• 22:39
  like, wow, oh, I did sign up for the Doctor Who book club.
• 22:43
  OK, let's go. But then it kind of just clicked
• 22:46
  and I'm not saying I loved it and it was the best thing ever,
• 22:50
  but I just thought it was a nice, easy breezy read.
• 22:54
  And then I was like, how's the breezy read going to translate
• 22:58
  into a errand? A bit of podcasting, but I'm not
• 23:02
  going to have that trouble since you guys didn't like it that
• 23:04
  much. But it's also I'm in terms of
• 23:08
  the new series, I feel feel like I'm probably not as harsh on
• 23:13
  this either because I've only seen this season of Doctor Who
• 23:17
  wants when it came out, I liked it.
• 23:20
  It's probably my favorite tenant season.
• 23:22
  Donna's my favorite companion of the that first Russell T Davies
• 23:26
  era anyway. So I'm like, yeah, that's an
• 23:28
  easy sell. But I don't remember lots of the
• 23:32
  continuity. I have no idea when this book
• 23:34
  set or anything like that. I was just like, yeah, it's just
• 23:37
  a Doctor and Donna adventure for me.
• 23:38
  So I don't have a lot of that to bring to it.
• 23:42
  So I just took it as an, as an adventure just to just to read
• 23:46
  it. And it was, it was fine.
• 23:50
  Yeah, it was. It was OK.
• 23:52
  I'm pleased. There's a redemptive voice in
• 23:54
  here somewhere because the 1st 50 pages was such a chore.
• 24:01
  It was like waiting for treacle for me.
• 24:03
  And I was like, what's going on? We're on this planet one with
• 24:07
  this fellow Sebastian. More on him later.
• 24:11
  And all these bounty hunters are turning up and there's a, what
• 24:16
  is it a Society of extinct species about as well.
• 24:21
  And we're with the Doctor and Donna in Antarctica with sort of
• 24:25
  10th planet references in in what feels entirely unconnected.
• 24:30
  And there's a fella called Barris turning up who is the
• 24:34
  Doctor's greatest fan, who has been surgically altered to
• 24:39
  appear like the Doctor, for whatever reason, are still a bit
• 24:42
  baffled by. And it was all this stuff and
• 24:46
  no, there was just no focus on one character.
• 24:50
  And I was like, just stop jumping about all over the place
• 24:53
  and just tell a story. And and so I feel like there was
• 24:57
  this sort of omnipresent. Author, that was.
• 25:00
  Aware of everything and he wasn't really letting me in on
• 25:04
  anything. Yeah.
• 25:06
  Do you know what I was expecting from this book from the blurb on
• 25:09
  the back? So this is just a little section
• 25:11
  of the of the of the blurb, but it says he's brought together
• 25:15
  the finest hunters in the universe to play the most
• 25:17
  dangerous game for the deadliest quarry of them all.
• 25:22
  They are hunting for the last of the Time Lords, the Doctor.
• 25:25
  So I thought that this was going to be like Doctor Who, Hunger
• 25:28
  Games. I thought it was going to be the
• 25:29
  Doctor trapped in this world, going through various different
• 25:33
  zones, fighting different hunters.
• 25:37
  And I was like, OK, you know, that not the most exciting idea
• 25:39
  to me in the world, but I get that that's what's that was what
• 25:43
  I was expecting from it and. Why?
• 25:45
  That would appeal to kids, right?
• 25:46
  But yeah, exactly why that it's quite a simple story.
• 25:49
  You've got all you can change it up every few chapters with a
• 25:52
  different zone and a different hunter and different.
• 25:55
  And there's a little bit of that in this book, but it's it's not
• 25:58
  that that's not the focus of it at all.
• 26:00
  But it isn't the doctor though, is he?
• 26:02
  It's Baris in the No it's. Always Baris in the Yeah, the
• 26:05
  doctors. In the mansion with Sebastian
• 26:07
  sort of winding up the robots for some reason.
• 26:09
  The Doctor. Almost never gets haunted in the
• 26:11
  Doctor. Yeah, it's it's so there's so
• 26:16
  many, like there's so many ideas in this book and it's kind of
• 26:20
  like it's a little bit like he gets bored of each idea before
• 26:25
  fully like Sebastian. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 26:30
  Don't tell. Me it was.
• 26:31
  It was a very measure. I don't think it was, it was
• 26:35
  just badly. Written.
• 26:39
  But yeah, that I feel like there's there's probably about
• 26:42
  five or six ideas in this book that could have made a great new
• 26:46
  series adventure book for kids. The idea of having like a
• 26:50
  doppelganger Dr. You could do a whole thing on the thing of like
• 26:53
  being trapped in a creepy hotel, like Hotel California type
• 26:57
  thing, which they then do in what was the episode called.
• 27:01
  Sorry. Which one the?
• 27:05
  The the Matt Smith one in the hotel.
• 27:07
  Oh, the. God complex, the God.
• 27:09
  Complex and yeah, and like robot butlers and all of that stuff
• 27:14
  and Arctic bases, like it's just so many things fused together,
• 27:18
  but none of them really done that well.
• 27:24
  One thing I really want to talk about, because I think it is a
• 27:28
  sign of a bad riser and I know Simon Messingham can write a
• 27:33
  great book, so I am baffled by this approach, was the shifting
• 27:38
  perspectives. And it's not.
• 27:40
  Not even one. Not a single chapter is written
• 27:43
  from the point of view of one person.
• 27:45
  Every chapter. It.
• 27:48
  Jumps about from the robot Butler's point of view to then
• 27:51
  Sebastian's point of view to Barrister's point of view to
• 27:54
  Donna's point of view. And I'm like whose?
• 27:57
  Book is this, yeah. I kind of felt like there was
• 28:00
  going to be a point to that because there was they do the
• 28:05
  thing where you've got the, the real doctor and the fake doctor
• 28:07
  and then you immediately find out that they've changed places.
• 28:10
  Like that's not like you'd think there'd be like a, a which one
• 28:15
  is which type thing, But then it also kind of tries to do a which
• 28:18
  one is which thing. But then you just find out that
• 28:21
  actually the ones that you thought were each other were
• 28:23
  each other all the way through. So you think that there's going
• 28:26
  to be a bit whether you where the the person in The Who the
• 28:30
  pros is describing as the doctor is actually Barris and the pros
• 28:33
  is but it's not that like the pros is right, Like it's
• 28:38
  character has each character and it's it's not trying to hoodwink
• 28:41
  you, which is really weird all these.
• 28:43
  Extended sequences of them trying to make the Doctor reveal
• 28:48
  that he is the doctor because we.
• 28:50
  Know it's you, Doctor, you know, So it becomes this sort of
• 28:52
  battle between the Doctor and the robots and then Sebastian's
• 28:56
  like, well, I think it might be you as well.
• 28:58
  So I'm going to shove you in this scanner, this torture
• 29:01
  scanner and see what happens. And I'm like, what's this got to
• 29:04
  do with all the hunting, all that on the back of the book?
• 29:06
  I don't understand. And it feels like Sebastian has
• 29:10
  lots of kind of changes of heart or he just comes in and stops
• 29:14
  the robots from doing things just as sort of narrative
• 29:17
  convenience rather than him being a consistent character.
• 29:21
  It's only. Page 150.
• 29:22
  We've got another 100 pages to go.
• 29:24
  Yeah, yeah, it's literally. That bitten snake dance and end
• 29:27
  of episode 3, you know where he's like, give up, I'm going to
• 29:30
  kill them now. And then Tanner comes along and
• 29:32
  goes no stop. But it happens 10.
• 29:36
  Times in this book. All right, I'm going to try and
• 29:39
  focus us on Sebastian for a second, and I'm going to ask
• 29:42
  Luke who the fuck is Sebastian? Well, he's supposed to be this
• 29:50
  hunter and controller of this planet.
• 29:53
  Could planet one lovely name and.
• 29:57
  But wait, no, he's really some kind of scientist from the
• 30:02
  1970s. I'm like, well, yeah, was.
• 30:05
  That true on. Planet One was that.
• 30:07
  Real. I thought that was another
• 30:08
  sleight of hands. Was that actually?
• 30:10
  I was hoping they ever confirmed.
• 30:13
  It did they. It wasn't very.
• 30:14
  Clear if he was lying or if that was actually his origin story,
• 30:18
  but like. If you're going to lie, like I
• 30:20
  feel like Sebastian, the he's, he's the kind of liar that would
• 30:23
  be like he wouldn't tell you. You went to the park.
• 30:27
  No, I went to the park today. I fucking saw a dead body.
• 30:30
  Oh my God, There were these dogs there for everywhere doing all
• 30:33
  this weird stuff. There's these punks throwing
• 30:36
  glasses at fucking cars and shit.
• 30:38
  What the hell is going? On in your.
• 30:39
  Neck of the woods, yeah, that's. Right, That's what happens when
• 30:42
  I walk down. But you know, I'm just trying to
• 30:45
  like that would be ever, ever tell someone a story and they've
• 30:49
  got a story similar to it and that's better.
• 30:51
  That's that's kind of what Sebastian's is.
• 30:55
  Oh, sometimes he's not that good.
• 30:59
  No, man, it's like he changes his mind, like, oh, yeah, it's
• 31:03
  the scan. Show that you're a Time Time
• 31:05
  Lord. No, it's probably fault in the
• 31:10
  machine or something, because I don't have my special machine
• 31:15
  things that make me control things with the power of my
• 31:18
  mind. I'll just turn that off.
• 31:20
  Why would you turn that off? You're giving me as succinct an
• 31:24
  answer to my question as this book.
• 31:26
  Did You Know? How succinct it is like if the
• 31:32
  deal listeners would like to look at a copy of the front
• 31:35
  cover, it's on the Internet to do that.
• 31:37
  Who is? That on the cover.
• 31:40
  Sebastian, he looks like an English stockbroker that's going
• 31:44
  on a hunting holiday to shoot an elephant or something.
• 31:47
  You know, like, oh, we showed us.
• 31:48
  Not one of the bounty hunters. See I because.
• 31:52
  He's described like his outfit is described kind of like this,
• 31:57
  but he's. Described as as having blonde
• 31:59
  hair and being a total hunk. Yeah, which I think you guys
• 32:05
  have. Got very gay for a little while.
• 32:07
  When we were all sending the pictures to each other of what
• 32:10
  we thought Sebastian actually should have looked like on each
• 32:12
  other, I. Apologize, mine was a bit pawny
• 32:15
  but you know. That's all right.
• 32:17
  I, I, I sent, I sent the lads a photo of Fabio, who is, I don't
• 32:23
  know where he's from. I think he's Italian.
• 32:24
  I can't, I can't say for sure, but blonde model, lots of
• 32:28
  muscles. My mum was a romance book reader
• 32:32
  and he was on lots of them in the 80s and 90s.
• 32:35
  Like insane. I was an actor.
• 32:38
  I thought he was he's porn star. No, he he, he was not an actor.
• 32:42
  He's just a model that's on lots of romance covers.
• 32:45
  Covers like. Mils and Boone and things like
• 32:47
  that, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
• 32:49
  So my mom used to read a lot of heaps of that stuff.
• 32:52
  And yeah, I saw a lot of Fabio, yeah.
• 32:57
  After. Luke's.
• 32:59
  Reading of Sebastian Andrew, I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to
• 33:02
  ask you for another reading on Sebastian.
• 33:04
  Could you please tell me who this enigmatic character that I
• 33:07
  spent a hundred 250 pages with is?
• 33:10
  Yeah, I mean, he's, he's just a very odd villain.
• 33:14
  I think he's just such a contrarian that is really hard
• 33:19
  to get a handle on him. And then so I think the problem
• 33:23
  that I have with Sebastian is the problem I have with the book
• 33:26
  as a whole is that it's there are so many twists and reversals
• 33:34
  and changes that it meant that I was second guessing everything.
• 33:40
  So it meant I was never invested in any aspect of the plot
• 33:43
  because I was expecting it to be flipped on its head a moment
• 33:46
  later, which is what happened. And it's also what happens with
• 33:50
  Sebastian's character and that you've got, he's initially this
• 33:54
  kind of controller of this entire planet.
• 33:57
  Then you find out this 1970s stuff and then you think like,
• 34:02
  oh, maybe it's this version that's talking to Donna and
• 34:04
  saying he's in 1970s. That's what.
• 34:06
  I thought is that? The original one and the other
• 34:09
  is some sort of like robot duplicate or a clone or
• 34:12
  something. And he's gone out of control.
• 34:15
  No, he's not. He's just lying.
• 34:17
  And then at the end it's also then the doctor kind of
• 34:20
  convinces him that he is a robot, but then he's not a
• 34:23
  robot. And it's like I just don't care.
• 34:26
  But just like just any shit is going to happen on the next
• 34:30
  page, so why should I care the. Bit where was trying to convince
• 34:33
  him that he's a robot and then a few pages later it turns out
• 34:37
  there's robot copies of everyone and I'm like what am I reading?
• 34:40
  I don't know anymore. I know what you mean though, if
• 34:44
  you. Do that sort.
• 34:45
  It's like boy who cried wolf in it.
• 34:47
  Yeah, you stop. Believing what you're seeing is
• 34:50
  every 10 pages, yeah. What you've seen for the last 10
• 34:53
  pages isn't true. Yeah.
• 34:55
  And other than the Doctor and Donna, there's just no
• 34:58
  characters in this to latch onto or root for.
• 35:01
  Like there's nothing like they try and make Barris this sort of
• 35:04
  tragic figure, even though he's been a villain for half of it.
• 35:07
  Nothing to him. I don't care that like been
• 35:10
  convinced he's the Doctor for half of it.
• 35:12
  We haven't seen who Barris is and I don't care.
• 35:15
  If Barris had been our point of view character throughout the
• 35:20
  entire book, yeah, just make it do all those clever twists, but
• 35:23
  do it from the point of view of Barris and actually just making
• 35:26
  a fully rounded character, this could have been made to work,
• 35:30
  yeah. Because he's an absolute like
• 35:31
  Doctor fanboy. He's awesome.
• 35:36
  So yeah, you could have, it could have been a bit like sort
• 35:40
  of Love and Monsters or something like that, where
• 35:41
  you've got this kind of person who's really thinks they know
• 35:44
  the Doctor and tries to replace him.
• 35:47
  And you could have done something really interesting
• 35:49
  with that. But again, it's one of those
• 35:52
  half explored ideas of the book that just tries to pack too much
• 35:57
  in and doesn't really to do any of it satisfactorily.
• 36:01
  I was. At Big Finish Day the weekend
• 36:04
  before last, right? And I was sort of about 100
• 36:06
  pages into this book at that point, and there was somebody
• 36:09
  there that had obviously come as David Tennant's doctor, but
• 36:13
  looked so like David Tennant. And I kept saying to Mark, it's
• 36:17
  Paris. Paris, he's going I.
• 36:20
  Thought what you're talking about, you know.
• 36:22
  Yeah, I'm not like, have you guys read the Tomorrow Windows?
• 36:28
  Yes. Yeah, there's.
• 36:29
  Like a there's like a sort of tragic young fanboyish character
• 36:35
  in that as well, who spoiler alert, turns out to be the
• 36:38
  villain of the entire piece. But and it really works well
• 36:41
  because that big reveal that I've now just spoiled apologies,
• 36:46
  it's hidden really well. So when the when the rug pulls,
• 36:49
  they're sort of very you're kind of going, Oh, God this, bless
• 36:52
  him, this spotty kid, so desperate to impress tricks and
• 36:56
  and you got on a journey with that character.
• 36:58
  But I just felt like I don't know.
• 37:00
  No, nothing was done with the idea that he was a fanboy of the
• 37:03
  doctors either, And that's a really fun idea.
• 37:07
  No come. On Will you please say something
• 37:09
  nice about this book? All right, well, I wish there
• 37:13
  were more hunting segments because one of the hunters, I
• 37:16
  can't remember his name. I'm sorry.
• 37:17
  Gentlemen quite liked him because he comes from this area
• 37:21
  that's kind of war-torn, like like Scaro is.
• 37:25
  And now he's got soldiers with him, but they're all like robot
• 37:29
  duplicates of what the soldiers are.
• 37:30
  So when they're when they're out of the zone that he's supposed
• 37:34
  to be hunting in, they're supposed to shut right down and
• 37:37
  stuff. But he figures out a way to be
• 37:39
  like, no, no, no, this is a secret base from from our
• 37:42
  enemies and stuff. This is new technology and
• 37:44
  stuff. They're coming for us.
• 37:45
  Let's go. So and then robots kind of help
• 37:47
  him. He's he's really cool like this
• 37:51
  hunter guy. And why do I not know his name?
• 37:53
  He's not that important in a book.
• 37:55
  And it's just like a couple parts here and there where you,
• 37:58
  you see how kind of cunning and like and clever he is at being
• 38:02
  like, all right, he's doctors in a different zone now.
• 38:05
  Or this has happened, all this has happened.
• 38:07
  This is what I, this is what I need to do.
• 38:09
  And then it's after something different.
• 38:12
  Then you've got this interesting kind of like another interesting
• 38:16
  hunt of the kind of whites and it has like this full kind of
• 38:19
  shell thing or something that waits for its prey and then kind
• 38:23
  of spiders it up and things like that.
• 38:25
  I like the robot butlers because this.
• 38:29
  I did too. Whilst I did like this book, it
• 38:34
  was all right. The robots are doing what I am
• 38:38
  like screaming at this book to do.
• 38:40
  And they're like, they're like, this is a doctor right here,
• 38:42
  Come on. Are you stupid?
• 38:45
  You a fucking idiot. And there was.
• 38:48
  One ripple, wasn't it, where one of the robots really thought
• 38:51
  he'd got one up on the Doctor, and the Doctor had actually done
• 38:54
  a clever double blast, which meant all the evidence pointed
• 38:58
  to the robot, which I thought was quite nice.
• 39:01
  That was a nice bit. Do you know, I wondered if
• 39:05
  listen, I've got to stop doing this, if listening to the the
• 39:07
  audio book would help with this. And it's read by Russell Tovey,
• 39:11
  who despite his enormous ears, is a very handsome man.
• 39:14
  So I thought that that might help.
• 39:17
  And the voice he chose for the robot butlers.
• 39:20
  I'm going to do an impression now just I mean, and go and
• 39:22
  listen to this, folks. All right?
• 39:24
  I'm not lying. He decides to do a voice like
• 39:28
  this and, and and that character's on like page one.
• 39:32
  So he's stuck with that voice. Sebastian, what is going on?
• 39:37
  I'm like Russell Tova, you are a wonderful actor.
• 39:40
  What are you doing? What's he?
• 39:41
  Building it was. Very similar.
• 39:44
  And then for Sebastian, he chose this sort of hello, my name is
• 39:48
  Sebastian. Oh, God, no.
• 39:51
  I turned it off after 10 minutes and went, I'll go back to that
• 39:54
  turgid prose. Oh.
• 39:56
  My goodness. I imagine the robots talked like
• 40:00
  like Futurama robots because they were very cartoony in my
• 40:02
  head so I just imagined them almost saying black jagged
• 40:06
  hookers like Bender or something, but not like like
• 40:08
  this Butler bots and stuff in that show.
• 40:10
  So I just for some reason I had Doctor Who meets Futurama robots
• 40:15
  and it kind of worked better in my head than Mondeisian cyber
• 40:19
  voices. Wow.
• 40:20
  That's a choice. There's an episode of Futurama
• 40:23
  where I can't remember what it is, but Amy keeps doing
• 40:26
  something really stupid and all of the other characters keep
• 40:29
  shouting at her like, no, you moron.
• 40:31
  I just felt like that's what the robots were like with Sebastian.
• 40:35
  Just like, what are you doing? Wasn't.
• 40:38
  Your amnesia robot from Futurama?
• 40:40
  Oh no, Simpsons. Was it The Simpsons?
• 40:42
  No, the amnesia is from Futurama.
• 40:45
  I don't know why Futurama. Maybe it's because it was
• 40:47
  running at the same time. It was like the we'll try and.
• 40:50
  Get a reference in every episode, all right?
• 40:53
  Have I ever of you 2 read the wonderful 8th Doctor comic strip
• 40:57
  The Autonomy Bug? Yes, Luke.
• 41:01
  The Doctor This is going to sound stupid because I love
• 41:05
  comic books. Batman, Spider Man, and Doctor
• 41:09
  Who all helped me become a reader of or anything but my one
• 41:15
  spot for Doctor Who, My one blind spot for Doctor Who is
• 41:19
  comics. I have not read many of them at
• 41:22
  all. Like I beat the MAPE I saw for
• 41:25
  the first time on the on the telly.
• 41:28
  In some. Ways that's probably the better
• 41:29
  option in all this because the comics so great but the autonomy
• 41:34
  bug is a really wonderful very sort of it starts off overtly
• 41:38
  comic about this horrible scientist and he abuses these
• 41:43
  robots and it's basically like a robot revolution there's these
• 41:46
  cute looking robots and it becomes a sort of tragedy and
• 41:49
  then has a hugely uplifting ending when the robots overthrow
• 41:52
  him and then you know are living their best life as this robot
• 41:56
  called it it's gorgeous yeah I think the.
• 41:59
  Artwork is really cartoony. It's Roger language artwork, so
• 42:03
  it it looks like it's going to be this sort of wacky cartoony
• 42:08
  adventure, but then it's actually like really like moving
• 42:11
  and and heartfelt. It kind of it's a bit like the
• 42:14
  like the crooked world. It's kind of looks one way, but
• 42:18
  then makes you feel all the feelings and there's.
• 42:20
  So many different robots you put in, isn't it as well?
• 42:22
  So yeah, the Ark's gorgeous. But I kept thinking, like,
• 42:27
  Sebastian is abusing these robots horribly.
• 42:30
  He keeps murdering them horribly like that.
• 42:33
  This could have been like an equivalent autonomy bug story
• 42:36
  about these robots all sort of rising up against him.
• 42:40
  No, not a bit of it. He's just a bastard.
• 42:43
  That does horrible things to robots and there's.
• 42:45
  A sequence where we hear about Planet 1 coming to life and in
• 42:48
  its centre, all the robot factories building all these
• 42:52
  fabulous things. And I really thought the book
• 42:54
  was going to sort of head towards, you know, the, I don't
• 42:57
  know, the robots gaining independence.
• 42:59
  Nah, yeah. And there's there's that really
• 43:01
  weird prologue and sort of epilogue where it's sort of the
• 43:05
  myth of planet one. I think it's like all in
• 43:09
  italics. And it's like building up this
• 43:11
  sort of mythology of planet one. And then when you actually go to
• 43:14
  planet 1:00 and you're just like, it's not all that like why
• 43:16
  are you building it up? Just a kind of mismatch between
• 43:20
  where it. Should have stayed as a myth.
• 43:22
  Yeah, between the. Kind of grandeur of that opening
• 43:24
  and then you get there and you're like, oh, that's it.
• 43:27
  Well, you. Said the word that, you know,
• 43:28
  all those zones in it. Yeah, in One Direction.
• 43:32
  I was thinking pleasingly about the keys of Marinus and all the
• 43:35
  various. And then, alarmingly, I was also
• 43:38
  thinking about the interzones of the Divergent universe.
• 43:42
  This is somewhere in the middle, I think.
• 43:46
  OK what do you think of this as a sort of as a as a kind of a
• 43:52
  heist, not a heist. That's not the right word.
• 43:56
  You know, all this sort of tricksiness of this book, It it
• 43:59
  does feel it does feel like a sort of a hustle episode, but as
• 44:03
  written for very stupid eight-year olds in the Doctor
• 44:07
  Who format. What do you?
• 44:08
  Think about it on that level I. Wish it was the highest in this
• 44:13
  book. I wish.
• 44:17
  Yeah. I don't know.
• 44:18
  I would have see, I I kind of like a heist story.
• 44:23
  I kind of like hot time heist. Is that the one with Capaldi?
• 44:25
  I like that story as well. So you could do some really cool
• 44:29
  things like I don't know, you got to sneak by the robots.
• 44:32
  Oh, this one's got the the lasers or something with planet
• 44:37
  one, you could make up anything or whatever that's like maybe
• 44:42
  Donna's in there and that's why I don't know if he that's what
• 44:46
  he has to do. He has to break Donna out or
• 44:47
  something. But yeah, even Donner in this,
• 44:52
  maybe that's why she's like by herself in a in a hotel for most
• 44:56
  of the book, because she was around Barris and Sebastian like
• 45:00
  proper and the Doctor and all these robots and stuff.
• 45:03
  She'd have figured it out in 5 seconds.
• 45:06
  And it's like, right, this is, you're the Doctor, you're
• 45:08
  Barris. Even if she got it wrong, he
• 45:10
  cares, you know, like you're, you're Sebastian, you're an
• 45:13
  idiot and all that kind of stuff.
• 45:14
  I think she would have made this book shorter if she was.
• 45:17
  What were those sequences in the hotel all about The.
• 45:21
  The hotel bits were my favorite bit of the book.
• 45:24
  When is that? Is that damp praise there?
• 45:26
  Yes. But yeah, I felt like that could
• 45:31
  have been a story in itself. And that kind of like it played
• 45:35
  to Donna's strength in, you know, she's, you're putting her
• 45:38
  in this frustrating situation. So she's she's trapped in like a
• 45:43
  Travelodge, basically. Nothing's really happening.
• 45:48
  She's got nothing to do, but she can't escape.
• 45:50
  And the kind of when she tries to walk out of the place, it
• 45:53
  just ends up taking her back in the loop to the hotel.
• 45:57
  And that kind of plays to all of her.
• 45:58
  Like, can I speak to the manager?
• 46:00
  Character traits and frustrations.
• 46:03
  And then she also gets a really good bit where Sebastian comes
• 46:07
  into the hotel and tries to trick her into revealing
• 46:10
  information about the Doctor. And she figures him out really
• 46:13
  quickly. And it's a great companion
• 46:14
  moment where she kind of, initially, she's quite flattered
• 46:18
  by this hot man kind of showing an interest in her.
• 46:21
  But she uses that kind of experience that she's had with
• 46:26
  the guy from The Runaway Bride to know I'm being used here.
• 46:30
  He's playing me and I'm not going to stand for it.
• 46:33
  And then instead of doing the smart thing and playing along
• 46:36
  with it and trying to turn the tables on him, she immediately
• 46:39
  just calls him out and. Donna and.
• 46:41
  Ruins it, which again is very Donna.
• 46:43
  And so I thought that was great. But also there are parts of this
• 46:48
  book where Donna is massively out of character.
• 46:51
  And it really confused me because I was like, of all the
• 46:56
  companions, like Donna feels like the one the is the easiest
• 46:59
  to get a grasp on. But then there's all these
• 47:02
  little bit bits of the book where it's like, have you
• 47:05
  watched an episode with Donna? There's just like there's so
• 47:10
  many little asides where she's talking about how handsome the
• 47:13
  Doctor is, and it's like that's just fundamentally not part of
• 47:19
  the character you. Just want to mate.
• 47:22
  Well, you ain't mate with me, sunshine.
• 47:23
  Exactly. And it's not just once.
• 47:26
  There's about 5 bits of the book where she, like, describes the
• 47:29
  doctor as really handsome or like, yeah, just compare, like
• 47:34
  compares Sebastian to him. And it's like, what is this?
• 47:38
  This isn't this isn't the character that we know.
• 47:40
  Yeah. She'd not describe him as a dog.
• 47:42
  Yeah, yeah. And it that initially got me
• 47:44
  thinking, was this written for Martha?
• 47:46
  But then Luke corrected me and said no, definitely not.
• 47:49
  It was, it was always intended to be Donna, do you think?
• 47:52
  Salma Messingen's just got a hard on for David Tennant and he
• 47:56
  needed a character to say it. I don't.
• 47:58
  Know, I think just maybe he just wasn't that into this pair of
• 48:01
  characters and not that invested in them as maybe it's just not
• 48:06
  his era. I think he he wrote the Doctor
• 48:08
  fine, but it just seemed to miss some of the parts of what make
• 48:12
  those two characters connect and what makes them work.
• 48:15
  It's. Interesting you say that about
• 48:17
  the Doctor because I thought this was a really bland reading
• 48:20
  on tennis Doctor. I've just read Sick Building by
• 48:23
  Paul Mars and I did say in that episode that he gets him spot
• 48:28
  on. Like it's it's David Tennant's
• 48:30
  words, his inflections, his energy, his body language.
• 48:35
  It's really annoying because it's so like, you know, and
• 48:37
  David Tennant can be very annoying as the Doctor
• 48:39
  sometimes. Whereas I just didn't get any of
• 48:43
  the source sparkle in this. Maybe that's because he's
• 48:47
  pretending to not be. The Doctor for a long book.
• 48:51
  So yeah, this some of my info, it came from a podcast called
• 48:58
  The Power of Three. They proved to me that Paul
• 49:01
  Leonard is still alive by by speaking to him.
• 49:04
  I know. I know what Christopher Buell
• 49:05
  sounds like and actually sounds like a perfectly charming, nice
• 49:08
  kind of person. That's a shame.
• 49:10
  I didn't love his books a lot more.
• 49:14
  And he's on this was like, oh, how do you how do you get this
• 49:16
  job? How do you get it?
• 49:18
  General question. You pretty much ask all the
• 49:21
  writers, right? Like mostly either pitch for it
• 49:23
  or they come to you and say, hey, do you want to write one?
• 49:26
  And it was the latter for so I'm missing big Justin rang him up
• 49:33
  and was just like, hey, you interested in writing a new
• 49:36
  Doctor adventure NSA and I'm like in my head, I'm like, if
• 49:41
  you're a writer of Doctor Who books, you haven't written one
• 49:43
  for a while. New series is pretty hot Tenant
• 49:47
  and Donner is like going off the charts.
• 49:50
  What you'd say yes, like you would say yes, I would say yes,
• 49:55
  I would. Say yes, and I can't write
• 49:57
  prose. Yes, exactly.
• 49:59
  Like, so you'd say yes and you'd say yes whether or not you're a
• 50:04
  fucking fan of the year or not. So I do.
• 50:07
  I don't remember everything in that podcast.
• 50:09
  I'm not going to put words in Mr. Messingham's mouth or
• 50:14
  anything. Did he say?
• 50:14
  No then. No, he said yes to writing a
• 50:17
  book, but he also said that he wasn't a huge fan of of the the
• 50:24
  new series as well. So, yeah, so.
• 50:30
  It does feel a bit like that. It feels a bit like someone
• 50:34
  who's got all the building blocks of the new series, but
• 50:36
  not necessarily the love for it. And you can the way that it's
• 50:42
  quite frenetic and nothing really connects and things just
• 50:46
  there's lots of random stuff mashed together.
• 50:48
  I guess you know, if if you're one of those classic series fans
• 50:52
  who came to the new series, saw this 45 minute new format where
• 50:56
  everything's kind of condensed and rushed and it's mashing up
• 50:59
  things together that you may be aren't really a fan of that This
• 51:03
  might be the book that you've right when commissioned and kind
• 51:08
  of ate that style, but not really be that invested in it.
• 51:12
  I didn't think it had any of the I like.
• 51:15
  One thing I will always say about Rusty Davis's vision for
• 51:19
  Doctor Who is it's just full of heart, you know?
• 51:21
  It's full of great characters that are very funny and lots of
• 51:25
  sentiment. And there was there was none of
• 51:27
  that here. It wasn't funny.
• 51:30
  I didn't think any of the characters were particularly
• 51:32
  warm or easy to warm too. And like we didn't go on.
• 51:39
  We could have done with Barracks, as he said, but we
• 51:40
  didn't really go on any kind of a journey where we felt anything
• 51:44
  for anybody. I mean, the characters are felt
• 51:46
  most sorry for were these robots having a Reds cut off and things
• 51:49
  like that. And if that's the case, then I'm
• 51:52
  in a bit of trouble with the characters in this book.
• 51:55
  Think a funny scene for me would have been say say Barris Dr.
• 52:00
  bumps into Donna and Donna's like how do I know you're the
• 52:04
  actual Doctor? But but Barris fails to like
• 52:08
  convince her what or the other? Maybe because he's such a fan,
• 52:11
  he knows like all the answers or something like that.
• 52:14
  Because like, he's a massive Doctor Who fan or something.
• 52:17
  I don't know. I thought there'd be a little
• 52:18
  bit more of the Fanny Fanny thing.
• 52:22
  There, there was a bit where, yeah, I've made a note of this.
• 52:26
  I can't actually remember it happening, but Donna has to make
• 52:29
  a choice between the two doctors and she chooses the wrong one,
• 52:33
  which, you know, that's quite a nice little you can see and it
• 52:37
  you know, we've just had that in were blue Yonder.
• 52:41
  They were yeah, I think that that's that's one of those
• 52:44
  moments that kind of works. But I mean then it's it's again
• 52:49
  like 2 pages later it's reversed again you.
• 52:52
  Said Fanish. There was references to the rest
• 52:55
  on Warrior Robot. So for a second I thought
• 52:57
  Terrence Dicks was right in this and the we're in as well.
• 53:00
  I was like my God, oh classic KU monsters.
• 53:02
  Wow, wonderful. But that was nothing either.
• 53:04
  It's just a trophy room, so. And what the hell has he got
• 53:08
  against Bracknell? I'll tell you what, I've been to
• 53:10
  Bracknell, Rob, my friend Cy Heart lives there.
• 53:12
  It's very nice. That hotel was supposed to be
• 53:17
  that. But Luke, can I ask what is the
• 53:19
  equivalent of a Travelodge in where you live?
• 53:22
  You know, budget hotels. Miserable ones.
• 53:25
  Oh, we don't usually get the names of them, but Charity and I
• 53:30
  do very frequent #4 in Melbourne because we're two hours out of
• 53:32
  the city. So nice cheapish motel be be
• 53:36
  great. But this, this hotel didn't seem
• 53:38
  any worsely described in a place that I might stay at.
• 53:42
  Seemed even nicer, actually. Don't know what our problem is.
• 53:45
  I want. To I want to ask you guys about
• 53:47
  the pros and like sort of the nuts and bolts of how this is
• 53:51
  written because we've sort of said there's no, no real
• 53:54
  characters to grab hold of that the perspective is changing that
• 53:58
  it's always sort of doubling back on its on itself in terms
• 54:02
  of its plot twists. Will you engage with the writing
• 54:06
  style? Andrew No.
• 54:11
  I kind of knew that's where we were carrying.
• 54:13
  Why not? The prose in this is very scant,
• 54:18
  which can be nice sometimes. And you know that very
• 54:22
  economical prose can sometimes be very breezy, easy and easy to
• 54:25
  read. But there's a lot of dialogue
• 54:30
  with kind of minimal description.
• 54:32
  But to me, that just made it really hard to follow what was
• 54:36
  actually going on in a lot of points.
• 54:38
  Particularly at the beginning where you've got all these kind
• 54:40
  of separate worlds and you're not really sure how they line up
• 54:46
  because you've got kind of like the Doctor and Donna in the
• 54:49
  Arctic base, and then you've got this double of the Doctor, and
• 54:53
  then you've got the Sebastian robot scenes.
• 54:56
  And I was just, I just find it really hard to follow that in
• 55:00
  that opening of the book and actually understand what was
• 55:03
  happening, which characters were where.
• 55:06
  And yeah, it it didn't work for me.
• 55:09
  And I must admit that I did skip through a few of the later
• 55:13
  passages, particularly the ACT could have.
• 55:17
  Been the bits that revealed everything.
• 55:19
  Maybe, maybe. But some of the sort of action
• 55:23
  sequences where it was like, I just want to know where Point A
• 55:27
  goes to, like, just take me to point BI, don't need to read,
• 55:31
  like all this stuff about, like, robots blowing up.
• 55:34
  And yeah, so I was a very bad reader with this one, but it
• 55:38
  just didn't. It didn't to me, Andrew.
• 55:41
  'S in a very black place with this book, when this 250 page
• 55:46
  book with enormous font and he's still have to skip over huge
• 55:50
  passages. What did you think?
• 55:52
  What did you think then, Luke? Did you like the style of this?
• 55:56
  No, and I like this book. It was all right the first 50-60
• 56:04
  pages. I think we've all kind of said
• 56:06
  it. I found I was like, I found it
• 56:09
  hard to go hard going and also the fuck is going on, but not
• 56:14
  necessarily in the oh, I'm interested to see what's going
• 56:18
  on. I don't know what it is, but
• 56:19
  let's see. But more on the way of like
• 56:23
  who's this what I can't think in.
• 56:26
  That when we cut, the fuck is that?
• 56:28
  Cut to new characters? Who's this?
• 56:30
  And then we were in a new seat, like who's that?
• 56:32
  What's going on? Yeah, stay still.
• 56:36
  So about Yeah, so page 60 issue kind of clicks and it becomes
• 56:41
  readable. But this is my Maybe I'm just a
• 56:46
  snob, or maybe I just felt like I had it so good for so long.
• 56:49
  But I remember the reason I didn't read too many of these
• 56:53
  back in the day and it was it was brought to the fore.
• 56:59
  Now, maybe it's because we are also, by comparison, like I
• 57:03
  just, we read Fear Itself last and then we go into this.
• 57:06
  The thing is, it's written to a younger audience and and I'm
• 57:13
  used to a little maybe a little bit more detail, not necessarily
• 57:17
  violence and darkness and stuff. Not all those books are like
• 57:20
  that. There's plenty of fun, like
• 57:22
  fluffy ones, but with a lot of I know characters or something to
• 57:26
  latch onto that or thread that you want to want to pick up on.
• 57:33
  And I guess like, I feel like these books sometimes are a bit
• 57:38
  of a step down in terms of what I was getting prior to the new
• 57:42
  series. So yeah, it's not quite my
• 57:45
  style. It's it's, it's fine, though I
• 57:47
  do like sometimes books that are written like this, like The
• 57:51
  Hunger Games was mentioned. I do like the first two Hunger
• 57:54
  Games books, the last one. Shit.
• 57:56
  So it is possible to be really last 30-50 pages of that fucking
• 58:00
  terrible anyway. But it is possible to write this
• 58:03
  style and be really engaging. It just, I just thought it was
• 58:09
  all right. It's, it's OK.
• 58:11
  Like if it was bad, it would mean I would have been like,
• 58:15
  I'll never read one of these again.
• 58:16
  And because it was just so all right.
• 58:18
  I'm still feeling with the like, if I bought all three of these
• 58:22
  books because, you know, they came out in three batches,
• 58:25
  right? Usually, if I bought all three
• 58:28
  of these and this was the first one I would have read, I
• 58:30
  wouldn't have been in a rush to read the other two.
• 58:34
  And not because they didn't like this book, but because it didn't
• 58:37
  make me excited. It didn't.
• 58:42
  There was always one. With the three.
• 58:43
  There was always one that was a dodge, you know, I I can't even
• 58:47
  remember one time when all three came out and they were all
• 58:49
  winners. Two, if you were lucky, one.
• 58:52
  Usually. The trouble is though, right?
• 58:55
  They say got this reduced word. Count with the Nsas, so they
• 58:59
  have to be a little briefer in in how they're telling the
• 59:02
  story. But that doesn't necessarily
• 59:03
  mean you have to to scrimp this much because like Jack Rayner
• 59:08
  wrote a couple of new series of adventures and she just packed
• 59:11
  it full of humour and fun characters.
• 59:14
  Justin Richards wrote in his own unique style with the clockwise
• 59:19
  man and things like that. The resurrection casket, which
• 59:22
  was a wonderful way. Paul Mars.
• 59:24
  The sick building had some wonderful prose.
• 59:27
  I mean, I don't think Paul Mars. Knows how to write bad prose.
• 59:31
  But he would like, he would describe a forest as sugar
• 59:37
  frosted and things like this where you would just
• 59:39
  immediately, very economically see the scene.
• 59:43
  Whereas this book, I'm never sure if there was actually a
• 59:48
  full description of anything we were jumping about so much, or
• 59:51
  if we were, it was very scant. And then the dialogue.
• 59:55
  Sorry. So I'm messing them up.
• 59:56
  I do hope you're not listening to this.
• 59:58
  The dialogue was so lame. I mean, I just wrote down this
• 1:00:01
  one line which sums it all up. Someone goes, would you call
• 1:00:05
  them your clever glasses? And then the response comes, no,
• 1:00:09
  they're my brainy specks now. Shut up.
• 1:00:11
  I was going, Oh my God, even a child.
• 1:00:14
  Will be reading this and going no sorry I'm losing our cue
• 1:00:18
  points I. Do I do wonder what a kid would
• 1:00:21
  have made of this? Because, yeah, these books were
• 1:00:25
  hugely, hugely popular. Like they were all all over all
• 1:00:31
  of the book shops, all of the supermarkets.
• 1:00:33
  Like this book would have been widely read.
• 1:00:36
  It's I'm slightly worried about a slacking this off so much
• 1:00:39
  because I'm sure there are younger fans who read this and
• 1:00:42
  absolutely loved it. And you know, you come to things
• 1:00:44
  at a young age and they stick with you.
• 1:00:47
  But me, I wish I'd raved about it.
• 1:00:51
  You weren't eight though, were you?
• 1:00:54
  I flatter. Myself, but no, I was not.
• 1:00:55
  No. Oh, we're.
• 1:00:56
  Still in my 20s I think no. Did this come out?
• 1:01:01
  2008 according to the. I was 28.
• 1:01:07
  But yeah, we've all talked about the 1st 60 pages or so.
• 1:01:11
  And I think if I was a kid, I just could not have gotten into
• 1:01:15
  this because it's just so there's nothing to really grab
• 1:01:19
  hold of. And it's like I would have
• 1:01:21
  wanted the Doctor and Donna on page one to read 50 pages.
• 1:01:24
  There's a lot, a lot to read as a as a kid.
• 1:01:28
  And to not have the main characters for that long a
• 1:01:31
  stretch just feels like a really odd plotting and pacing decision
• 1:01:36
  for a book that's aimed at that audience.
• 1:01:39
  And yeah, I can imagine getting through like 15 pages of this as
• 1:01:45
  a kid and just being like, no, I'm going to going to read that
• 1:01:48
  other Doctor Who book I've got over there, like.
• 1:01:50
  Sick Building opens with a wonderful scene from the point
• 1:01:53
  of view of tight, No, A leopard. Yeah.
• 1:01:57
  Running through the forest scares.
• 1:01:59
  So it's immediately sort of arresting.
• 1:02:01
  And then straight into the TARDIS with the Doctor and
• 1:02:03
  Martha. That's what the kids want.
• 1:02:05
  Yeah. I I'm trying very hard to find
• 1:02:12
  nice things to say about this book I have.
• 1:02:15
  A nice thing to say. Oh.
• 1:02:16
  Please come. On so one just an idea in the
• 1:02:22
  book that I thought was really interesting and could have been
• 1:02:25
  taken taken further if the book was more in bed invested in that
• 1:02:29
  kind of exploring the different zones idea.
• 1:02:32
  And was the bit where it kind of felt like they were stuck in a
• 1:02:36
  computer game where it's that big bit on the train station
• 1:02:39
  platform where I think the Doctor Donner and Barris are are
• 1:02:42
  trapped there. And they start looking around
• 1:02:44
  this train station and they find that it doesn't really function
• 1:02:47
  as a as a train station platform because like the door is just
• 1:02:51
  like a picture of a door and they can't get through it and
• 1:02:53
  the stairs don't go to anywhere. And I thought that was actually
• 1:02:56
  a really interesting concept that they could have done more
• 1:02:59
  of that on the whole planet where it's like they're sort of
• 1:03:01
  trapped in this place, which just has the appearance of
• 1:03:04
  reality. But it's actually a kind of
• 1:03:06
  constructed game. And there's a way to get through
• 1:03:09
  it like like kind of early kind of crappy PC computer games
• 1:03:14
  where you know, you'd have you're playing Lara Croft and
• 1:03:18
  you can only go through that door because it's like looks
• 1:03:20
  slightly different to the other because graphics slightly better
• 1:03:22
  on it. Like, I thought that would could
• 1:03:25
  maybe be something that would would capture the imagination of
• 1:03:28
  kids who are used to playing those kind of games and seeing
• 1:03:30
  the Doctor and Donna trapped in that sort of scenario.
• 1:03:34
  But yeah, it was one of those. There's a lot of ideas in here
• 1:03:36
  and a lot of ideas that I wasn't interested in.
• 1:03:38
  But that one, I was like, yeah, that's how you could have done
• 1:03:41
  this and made that sort of Hunger Games scenario of
• 1:03:45
  different zones quite unique and quite interesting.
• 1:03:48
  Yeah, the whole computer game thing, I don't know if you read
• 1:03:50
  Winner Takes All by Jack Rayner, she sort of covered that.
• 1:03:54
  And as good as it's going to be done or in fact, I felt a lot of
• 1:03:57
  this book felt like nuts and bolts of other a wooden heart.
• 1:04:03
  There's sequences in in a forest there which are quite creepy and
• 1:04:06
  people being menaced. Yeah.
• 1:04:08
  I was like, where where is there shiny darkness Does robots
• 1:04:13
  really well. The Mike Mark Michaelowski book
• 1:04:17
  full of wonderful camp. The gayest robots you're ever
• 1:04:20
  going to see in a Doctor Who book outside of something
• 1:04:22
  written by Paul Miles. Well, look, OK, I don't know if
• 1:04:28
  we've got much more to say about the Doctor trap.
• 1:04:31
  But. I am going to ask for everybody
• 1:04:33
  like anything. That we haven't mentioned that
• 1:04:36
  you would like to. Please say your piece now, Luke.
• 1:04:42
  Well, I do. Like that we've gone this far
• 1:04:43
  into the podcast and no one said the doctor.
• 1:04:46
  Crap. Well done.
• 1:04:49
  Thank you. I I thought it was OK after I
• 1:04:56
  got over that hurdle, maybe, maybe my brain was just like,
• 1:04:59
  oh, this is how it's written, all right.
• 1:05:01
  And I adjusted somehow. Yeah, I'm probably going to put
• 1:05:10
  this on the shelf and never pick it up again, except maybe to
• 1:05:16
  move it to another shelf. Andrew.
• 1:05:21
  Yeah, I think this is the first night new series adventure that
• 1:05:26
  we've done and something I quite liked about it, which has
• 1:05:29
  nothing to do with the book or the plot and thing itself, but
• 1:05:32
  just the kind of nostalgia for this era and this sort of
• 1:05:36
  branding of the show. Because it was the the the new
• 1:05:42
  series launch had just such a strong kind of brand identity
• 1:05:47
  and these books are just such lovely sort of artifacts of that
• 1:05:50
  time with the kind of logo, the fonts, the way that each chapter
• 1:05:55
  has that kind of Gallifrey and writing and it's.
• 1:06:00
  Like a brick, isn't it? Yeah.
• 1:06:01
  That's a tactile like, I think the these books, they were just
• 1:06:05
  so smartly kind of positioned in the market because when they
• 1:06:10
  came out, it was sort of that era where there were books like
• 1:06:14
  Series of Unfortunate Events and Spider Wick and stuff like that.
• 1:06:18
  These kind of little hardbacks. And they just pitched these
• 1:06:21
  perfectly for like sort of 10 year old readers who've like
• 1:06:25
  loved these sort of the fact that they're these little
• 1:06:29
  hardbacks just makes it kind of elevates them from those sort of
• 1:06:32
  throwaway paperbacks, even though they're priced like a
• 1:06:35
  paperback. So, yeah, I just think they it
• 1:06:38
  was such a strong positioning in the market, these books, and
• 1:06:42
  there was such a confidence about the show at this time.
• 1:06:45
  And just the whole look at it, the way that everything was so
• 1:06:49
  consistent and all of the materials that were published at
• 1:06:52
  this time in a way that kind of fractured.
• 1:06:55
  I think around maybe like the late Matt Smith Capaldi era,
• 1:06:59
  where I think the kind of brand got a bit looser and then they
• 1:07:03
  changed the logo so many times. And we're in the era now where
• 1:07:06
  we've got just so many kind of disparate looks for Doctor Who
• 1:07:09
  products, whereas, yeah, I've got a bit of nostalgia.
• 1:07:13
  They were. Consistent as well.
• 1:07:14
  They were coming out every couple of months.
• 1:07:17
  Yeah, 3, three or four times. I think it was three times a
• 1:07:19
  year. Three books, can see where.
• 1:07:22
  And then we got to a point, Lake Capaldi, where you were lucky if
• 1:07:24
  you did get three books a year. Yeah.
• 1:07:27
  Although. It is annoying, don't you think,
• 1:07:29
  how much space I take on the shelf because they're so chunky?
• 1:07:32
  I don't have very many of them I've got.
• 1:07:34
  A lot. Well, I'm going to take us.
• 1:07:40
  Back to what I said about what I love about Doctor Who books at
• 1:07:44
  the start of this snappy, clever, funny, engaging prose.
• 1:07:48
  You know, good cliffhangers, fizzing with ideas and
• 1:07:51
  creativity, engaging characters, shock arc, twist and a big,
• 1:07:56
  bold, memorable cover. And The Doctor Trap beautifully
• 1:08:00
  shows us how to create a Doctor Who book with none of those
• 1:08:03
  things in it whatsoever. The cover's all right.
• 1:08:07
  Actually, I do think it was very clever to put the regulars at
• 1:08:10
  the top because the kids would see the Doctor and Donna there
• 1:08:14
  and go, Oh my God, I want that. You know, it's Doctor Who.
• 1:08:16
  It's immediately recognizable, isn't it?
• 1:08:19
  Yeah, absolutely. I can only summarize this with.
• 1:08:24
  This was so unengaging that I did consider and putting it down
• 1:08:31
  and reading the Doctor Who reference guides for the last.
• 1:08:34
  100 pages instead of reading it and I've never done that once,
• 1:08:38
  not even with transit. And I know I forced myself to
• 1:08:42
  finish this book, but I did have to force.
• 1:08:45
  Myself to finish it. I.
• 1:08:47
  Wanted to switch to the audio book but then I realized the
• 1:08:49
  audio book was abridged so I felt like it was cheating.
• 1:08:53
  Yeah, that's what I think. Yeah, soldiered.
• 1:08:57
  On those. Voices Andrew, My God.
• 1:09:01
  Yeah, maybe I dodged a bullet there.
• 1:09:03
  I wouldn't feel too bad about, you know, saying things like
• 1:09:08
  this about Mr. Messingham's right writing.
• 1:09:10
  I'm pretty sure he got paid handsomely.
• 1:09:12
  This is probably, this probably outsold all of his other Doctor
• 1:09:16
  Who books easily. So he got paid.
• 1:09:19
  He's fine. He's he's doing all right.
• 1:09:22
  I think it does prove. That some of the messenger.
• 1:09:24
  As we said earlier in the episode, is very capable of
• 1:09:28
  producing gold and absolute shit.
• 1:09:33
  And that is a gift, right? You've never quite.
• 1:09:35
  He's like the Chris Carter. You guys know who Chris Carter
• 1:09:38
  is, right? X-Files.
• 1:09:39
  Yeah, you when Chris Carter wrote an episode.
• 1:09:42
  Of The X-Files, it was either going to go one or two ways.
• 1:09:44
  It was going to be the best X-Files ever was or the worst.
• 1:09:48
  And I think Simon Messingham is successfully the Chris Carter of
• 1:09:51
  Doctor Who books. Let's let's feel like.
• 1:10:04
  That was such like underlining. Let's arc the Doctor trap before
• 1:10:11
  poor Cyber Messingham. Needs to call his therapist and
• 1:10:16
  move on to our recommends this week.
• 1:10:19
  And because he's not at all prepared, we'll go over to Luke
• 1:10:24
  first. All right.
• 1:10:25
  What have you got for us? I'm going to be boring, but it
• 1:10:29
  is pretty fresh in my mind and I read it a few weeks ago and it's
• 1:10:32
  kind of stuck with me in a way it never had before.
• 1:10:35
  And it is Time of Your Life by Steve Lyons.
• 1:10:38
  I'm sorry, but it's because I. Try to a chime every.
• 1:10:43
  Time you say that name that's. Right, OK, but I've never read
• 1:10:49
  it before after after I'd already seen trial and so I'd
• 1:10:57
  only read it the once as a teenager.
• 1:10:59
  So I had didn't know much about it then.
• 1:11:03
  I'm reading it and it feels like a very smart book.
• 1:11:07
  It feels very angry as well, and not just the 6th Doctor, but
• 1:11:11
  maybe Steve at the time. I don't know.
• 1:11:16
  And because I feel like I don't know this for sure, maybe
• 1:11:23
  there's a way to ask, but he feels like he loves season 22
• 1:11:29
  and 23 and that book has everything of those seasons in
• 1:11:33
  it, good or bad, warts and all, and it's all the better for it.
• 1:11:37
  Like it's him examining that era and just just boiling it down
• 1:11:42
  into such a way that I really liked it.
• 1:11:44
  And of course you got your Mary White House reference references
• 1:11:48
  and you've you've got jabs that, you know, producers and and
• 1:11:53
  script editors and actors and all this kind of stuff.
• 1:11:56
  Fans as well. All of that is in there.
• 1:12:00
  But it's also a pretty good story too about this weird AI.
• 1:12:04
  And I don't know, I feel like that book you read the blurb of
• 1:12:07
  that, you get what is on the blurb of that, which I can't say
• 1:12:12
  for all the books that I've we've talked about today.
• 1:12:16
  So isn't Colin on the front? Cover wielding an enormous acts.
• 1:12:19
  Oh yeah, in bloody overalls and stuff like that.
• 1:12:22
  Yeah, it's a violent book. And it's so you're saying it's a
• 1:12:26
  celebration rather than a critique?
• 1:12:29
  I'd say it's a bit of both I feel.
• 1:12:32
  I feel like he likes the era. I mean, why would you spend all
• 1:12:36
  that time not just writing one book set after in that era, but
• 1:12:41
  two and emulating that that era very, very well.
• 1:12:46
  I feel like you got to he would have pitched them too.
• 1:12:49
  So there he's even more passionate.
• 1:12:51
  You'd be more passionate about the books you pitch because you
• 1:12:53
  care about the ideas more, you know, so he probably pitched
• 1:12:57
  that that that idea as well. He's probably passionate about
• 1:13:01
  it. I mean.
• 1:13:02
  He likes writing and an angry book because The Witch Hunters
• 1:13:06
  is very angry about religious fundamentalism and the Steelers
• 1:13:12
  of Dreams. That's a surprisingly angry NSA
• 1:13:17
  about the media and what's it called?
• 1:13:21
  Head Games is very angry about the direction the new adventures
• 1:13:25
  have gone in. When Paul Mill pops back and
• 1:13:28
  goes, well, I don't know who you are, but you're not the person I
• 1:13:30
  travelled in the tallest with goodbye and slammed the door.
• 1:13:34
  Yeah, he's he's what you were saying earlier.
• 1:13:37
  Someone, somebody that writes lightly, but it's full of
• 1:13:39
  substance. His books.
• 1:13:43
  So yes, I took the easy way out. Thank you.
• 1:13:46
  We're covering that one soon, aren't we?
• 1:13:49
  I think we're doing Killing Ground, but that's the other
• 1:13:51
  reason I read it because if we're going to do, by the way,
• 1:13:55
  now that I've read both, you don't need to read time of your
• 1:13:59
  life to enjoy Killing Ground. Just just to let you guys know.
• 1:14:04
  All right, there were a couple of references, but we can all
• 1:14:09
  handle a couple of references to the stories we don't remember or
• 1:14:11
  I haven't. Yes, that'd be.
• 1:14:14
  Good, Andrew, since you did send us a message in in the chat this
• 1:14:17
  week saying, you know, I never would have finished this book if
• 1:14:20
  you people haven't forced me to read it.
• 1:14:23
  Why don't you tell us a book that you'd like to read instead?
• 1:14:27
  Well, I was trying to think of the kind of the same, but the
• 1:14:33
  opposite of the Doctor trap. So I was thinking of a new
• 1:14:36
  series adventure with the 10th Doctor, with a writer who'd
• 1:14:41
  written for the BBC Books and Virgin Books before coming to
• 1:14:48
  this series and, and doing their own take on it.
• 1:14:52
  And, and the book I chose was The Eyeless by Lance Parkin,
• 1:14:56
  which is a brilliant new series adventure which came out a
• 1:15:01
  similar time, I think maybe even same year as, as this one, which
• 1:15:07
  just tells quite a simple story and quite an effective way.
• 1:15:12
  So it's kind of the Doctor travelling solo.
• 1:15:18
  He lands on this planet where he's in the middle of this kind
• 1:15:21
  of abandoned city. And at the center of it is this
• 1:15:25
  fortress where some kind of terrible disaster has happened.
• 1:15:30
  And they're kind of ghostly figures around.
• 1:15:32
  And there is these sort of abandoned children roaming the
• 1:15:35
  streets of this of this city. And it's just full of really
• 1:15:39
  evocative imagery. And it came out at a time when
• 1:15:43
  the time war was really mysterious.
• 1:15:46
  And the, the the series wasn't, was just sort of hinting at
• 1:15:51
  this, this thing that had happened, but not really giving
• 1:15:55
  you any detail of it. And this book kind of fits into
• 1:15:58
  that ethos in that it's it's skirting around the edges of the
• 1:16:02
  Time War. It's like, is this thing a relic
• 1:16:05
  of the Time War? Is it maybe, maybe not?
• 1:16:07
  It's kind of ambiguous. And so it's kind of like like
• 1:16:10
  cold fusion or something like that.
• 1:16:12
  One of those books that he did for the Virgin Range where it's,
• 1:16:17
  yeah, looking at sort of Time Lord technology impacting other
• 1:16:20
  places. Or is it?
• 1:16:21
  Who knows? It's ambiguous, no?
• 1:16:23
  I'm reliably informed, you know, by Michael Mills, who studies
• 1:16:26
  these books in a lot more depth than I do, especially Lance
• 1:16:29
  Barking ones, that there are several references in that book
• 1:16:33
  that suggest it's not the Time War on the telly, but the Time
• 1:16:37
  War from the 8th Doctor books than Lance Barking.
• 1:16:40
  So he puts in a few ambiguous references to like, if you're a
• 1:16:43
  fan of those books, there's something you're going to like
• 1:16:45
  here, too. Yeah.
• 1:16:47
  I mean, it's a long time since I read it.
• 1:16:48
  I think I read it when it came out because although I wasn't
• 1:16:51
  reading the new series Adventures, I was like, oh, it's
• 1:16:53
  a Lance Parkin one, I've got to get that.
• 1:16:56
  And it kind of, it's a really strong, interesting visual story
• 1:17:00
  that's going to engage kids, but it also kind of manages to hit
• 1:17:04
  all those fan buttons, but without really doing it in a way
• 1:17:07
  that's going to alienate people. So yeah, I think this is one of
• 1:17:12
  the best new series adventures and I bloody love it, I think.
• 1:17:15
  It's worth remembering, isn't it, that that's why the fact
• 1:17:18
  that we kind of had a bit of an allergic reaction to the Doctor
• 1:17:21
  trap. These could have been, all of
• 1:17:24
  these could have been very generic tie in books and the
• 1:17:27
  fact that they are pretty good, occasionally fantastic.
• 1:17:32
  We're kind of lucky. I don't think the Doctor trap is
• 1:17:35
  the norm with the Nsas. No, and when you look at like
• 1:17:39
  tie in books to other series like like Buffy the Vampire
• 1:17:44
  Slayer, like the books that came out for that, they were shit
• 1:17:47
  they. Never.
• 1:17:49
  They never like connected properly with the TV show and
• 1:17:51
  they'd like immediately be contradicted, whereas these feel
• 1:17:54
  like they're properly of a piece with the era, written by people
• 1:17:57
  who understand the characters and want to be part of this
• 1:18:00
  ongoing story. I think the only fandom that
• 1:18:03
  chalks up as many, but as you know, not as many as not two
• 1:18:06
  because there's so many of the bloody things, but there's a lot
• 1:18:09
  of Star Trek books as well. A lot.
• 1:18:12
  Well, I've actually chosen the same author as one of you.
• 1:18:16
  I say chose. The book just happened to be on
• 1:18:18
  the desk. But it is a good choice worth
• 1:18:21
  talking about. Forgive me whilst I get a
• 1:18:23
  forklift truck as I try and pick this thing up.
• 1:18:25
  It is. A.
• 1:18:27
  History by Lance Barking. The most insane endeavour soon
• 1:18:34
  as ever now. I believe it covers TV, books
• 1:18:40
  and audios. Is that are there comics in here
• 1:18:43
  as well? Does anyone know?
• 1:18:44
  I think it's. Everything.
• 1:18:45
  I think it's even got like short trips and like TV comics and all
• 1:18:50
  of that stuff. Well.
• 1:18:51
  I'll show open it up at some random page and see what I get.
• 1:18:55
  Oh, Luke 1963. The taint, Sam.
• 1:19:02
  Jones meet Fitz Criner. Well, there we go.
• 1:19:05
  But no lots has somehow. Insanely decided to detail the
• 1:19:10
  entire history of the universe of Doctor Who in chronological
• 1:19:15
  note. Is that right?
• 1:19:17
  It is in chronological. It's it's in date order.
• 1:19:20
  Yeah, from hang on. I wonder what the 1st century
• 1:19:23
  is. Were you just indulge me for a
• 1:19:24
  second. What's the very first octave?
• 1:19:26
  Universe or something in terms of the.
• 1:19:28
  Velvet bloody hell, Lance the. Introduction bits a bit long.
• 1:19:34
  What's he saying? The dawn of time, Timeless from
• 1:19:36
  the 8th Doctor range. There we go.
• 1:19:39
  There we go. And what do you imagine is the
• 1:19:41
  end of the universe? Hang on.
• 1:19:43
  Which one? Yeah.
• 1:19:45
  Come on, have a guess. Have a guess, it is.
• 1:19:51
  A. War in heaven, apparently.
• 1:19:54
  It's that faction Paradox. It's a load of.
• 1:19:57
  Gallifrey nonsense here. Gallifrey audio series.
• 1:20:01
  Yeah, more of that, yeah. Anyway.
• 1:20:05
  Lance. Parkin did this for us so we
• 1:20:07
  don't have to and we don't have to think about where all these
• 1:20:09
  things. So all you people on Gallifrey
• 1:20:11
  base that spend far too much time trying to figure out where
• 1:20:14
  these stories are set rather than just enjoying them.
• 1:20:18
  It's all in here in this enormous 784 page Bible.
• 1:20:23
  If you want the entire history of Doctor Who, thank you very
• 1:20:27
  much. Do you have?
• 1:20:28
  The 1st edition of that the. Third one, the blue one, it's
• 1:20:31
  got the eye. Eye in the middle in the Galaxy.
• 1:20:34
  I think that's the one I have. This is the. 3rd edition I've
• 1:20:36
  got here so. The, the, the first time it came
• 1:20:40
  out was it only had the TV series and the Virgin books in
• 1:20:44
  it and it came out in the same month as Happy Endings.
• 1:20:50
  And I absolutely tore through that.
• 1:20:53
  Like that was my book. I take with me everywhere, like
• 1:20:56
  on car journeys and holidays and stuff like that.
• 1:20:59
  And that one, it's because there's less to cover in it.
• 1:21:02
  It's more creative with how it does it.
• 1:21:04
  And lots of the entries are sort of like newspaper clippings or
• 1:21:08
  like there's some which are like fraud investigation reports on
• 1:21:12
  like crash spaceships and stuff like that.
• 1:21:14
  So it's kind of it's kind of like a storytelling in itself
• 1:21:18
  and then you just get like so caught up in all the footnotes
• 1:21:21
  that go into it. Well, if you ever wanted to know
• 1:21:25
  that, the curse of Peladon. Was followed by the prisoner of
• 1:21:29
  Peladon, and that was. Followed by the.
• 1:21:32
  Pirate Loop, which is another new series of ventures followed
• 1:21:35
  by the Infinite Quest. Well, this is the book for you,
• 1:21:38
  Baby I. Actually used that book for for
• 1:21:41
  our Fear Itself episode because I was like, how does all this
• 1:21:46
  darlek invading the best stuff fit together?
• 1:21:48
  So I yeah, I skimmed it for the hat.
• 1:21:52
  It's nice to know some of us have been doing research.
• 1:21:54
  I wouldn't bother. Yeah, it's, I'm not.
• 1:21:58
  It's not one I could ever sit down and just read, though,
• 1:22:01
  because it's basically synopsis of stories.
• 1:22:03
  But yeah, it's. It's one to dip into.
• 1:22:06
  It's a. Very useful book and you know I
• 1:22:08
  have spoken to Lars Parkin and he is still got his marbles.
• 1:22:12
  I don't know how right and that, but there we are.
• 1:22:16
  Voice. First of all, may I just
• 1:22:17
  apologize to both of you for forcing you to endure the doctor
• 1:22:20
  strap? I'll try not to do anything like
• 1:22:23
  that again, although we have said in the future that we might
• 1:22:26
  try and find a book with a deliberately bad reputation.
• 1:22:30
  Was Warmonger mentioned? You treat keep trying to push
• 1:22:33
  this. Look, Uncle.
• 1:22:37
  Terry is easy to read even when he's bad, so it's not it might
• 1:22:43
  work. I like.
• 1:22:44
  How we've got our list, but everyone like we keep throwing
• 1:22:47
  in rando ones. I just throw in 10 Little Aliens
• 1:22:50
  by Steve Cole the other day. But what are we doing next?
• 1:22:52
  I've forgotten again. Oh.
• 1:22:54
  Yes, I wanted to do Imaginary Friends by Jack Rainer.
• 1:22:59
  You were saying how much you love her as an author, and I got
• 1:23:03
  this one sort of late last year when it was the anniversary, but
• 1:23:06
  I haven't read it yet. So what?
• 1:23:08
  Are those books? So these books, it's a series
• 1:23:12
  called the Decades Collection, I think.
• 1:23:16
  So it was six books that came out to celebrate the 60th
• 1:23:18
  anniversary. So there's one set in the 60s,
• 1:23:21
  one set in the 70s, etcetera. But they, the Doctors aren't
• 1:23:25
  necessarily the Doctors of those decades.
• 1:23:28
  So I think like the Capaldi one is the 1970s one.
• 1:23:32
  So it's just take it, it's a story set in that decade.
• 1:23:35
  But this one is a First Doctor adventure.
• 1:23:39
  Well, it's got the 1st Doctor on the cover.
• 1:23:41
  I'm actually not really sure how this plays out because it's
• 1:23:44
  about a child in 1963 who starts telling his parents about the
• 1:23:51
  dreams he's having about robots on a dead planet.
• 1:23:57
  And yeah, I'm about 6 pages into it, so I'm.
• 1:24:03
  It seems really unusual and it seems like it would be a really
• 1:24:06
  nice companion piece to Time and Relative, which I know you did
• 1:24:11
  recently for another episode. And yeah, I think it's going to
• 1:24:15
  be a really, really interesting one to do and I'll.
• 1:24:18
  Tell you something insane that happened with Jack Rayner at Big
• 1:24:21
  Finish Day. She's quite poorly at the
• 1:24:23
  moment, so she wasn't really out with the crowds, but she went up
• 1:24:26
  and gave a talk and then she just sort of struggled down the
• 1:24:30
  stairs a bit. Her kids helped her into a
• 1:24:32
  wheelchair and I just didn't think that she was going to.
• 1:24:35
  So I thought, God, I've got to go over and say she works
• 1:24:38
  because I fuck it. I love her audios.
• 1:24:40
  I love her books. Her work has given me so much
• 1:24:43
  joy and so I went up to her all work.
• 1:24:46
  Clearly fanboy. Alert, you know, full of
• 1:24:50
  enthusiasm. And she went and she grabbed my
• 1:24:53
  hand, right, and she squeezed it really gently.
• 1:24:57
  And she said, before you say anything, she goes, I've read
• 1:25:00
  your reviews. She goes, I've heard your
• 1:25:01
  podcast, I've heard you're finished, but she goes, you have
• 1:25:05
  been such a supporter of my work.
• 1:25:07
  Thank you so much. And I'm like, what is going?
• 1:25:10
  On In the Universe when Jacqueline Rayner saying thank
• 1:25:13
  you to. Me.
• 1:25:14
  He. Was.
• 1:25:15
  So humble. She was basically, Oh no,
• 1:25:17
  honestly, you know, just knock him out.
• 1:25:20
  No, she was just glorious. And I think she's such a talent.
• 1:25:24
  So I think it's it's a wonderful choice.
• 1:25:27
  I don't know how you guys feel about Jack Rayner's work, but
• 1:25:30
  after I've said that, please say something nice.
• 1:25:33
  I love Earth World. I think it's fucking amazing.
• 1:25:36
  So. And that's a short book.
• 1:25:39
  It's like 220. Yeah, who cares?
• 1:25:41
  In and out. Big ideas, lots of laughs, great
• 1:25:44
  in. Spain.
• 1:25:44
  You guys went Wolf Spain? Yes, I have.
• 1:25:47
  Wolf Spain. But I have not perused again
• 1:25:50
  it's. It's one of those interesting
• 1:25:52
  one that's it's kind of looking at Doctor Who meets magic and
• 1:25:56
  folklore. So quite sort of appropriate for
• 1:25:59
  for the current series really. But the three of us are going to
• 1:26:03
  make some imaginary friends now you've said the synopsis.
• 1:26:07
  The title makes sense. I'm assuming that's like the
• 1:26:10
  Doctor here, Barbara and Susan, right?
• 1:26:12
  I think so. I just haven't got that far yet.
• 1:26:14
  It's, it's, it's really mysterious, the blurb and and
• 1:26:19
  the opening of it. I, I genuinely don't know where
• 1:26:21
  this story is going to go. So wow.
• 1:26:24
  Let's. Find out coming to.
• 1:26:26
  A book club near you? Boys, thank you very much for
• 1:26:30
  your time Again, thank you for reading this dreadful book.
• 1:26:34
  Would you would you once again do me the great one and just let
• 1:26:37
  everybody know where you are online quickly.
• 1:26:40
  I'll never stop sign voting, people.
• 1:26:44
  Look. Yeah, I'm at grumpy two EB on on
• 1:26:49
  the tweety that's. Two.
• 1:26:51
  All right, not grumpy. Grumpy too, Yeah.
• 1:26:54
  Grumpy too. I'm the second one.
• 1:26:56
  Like the sequel, I'm the other grumpy person is grumpy and I'm
• 1:27:01
  the aliens of grumpiness. Like grumpies.
• 1:27:05
  That's maybe what I should have changed my name to.
• 1:27:09
  I want to find that book, you know?
• 1:27:10
  That I want to find that book that's going to make you really
• 1:27:13
  grumpy on this podcast. You can.
• 1:27:15
  Finally, live up to your name. Sky pirates.
• 1:27:21
  It's sky pirates. Fucking hate that book.
• 1:27:25
  It's too short, I'm sorry. I know I had to choose like
• 1:27:29
  this. It's not in the sweet spot
• 1:27:31
  either. It's way too big.
• 1:27:33
  But yes, grumpy two EB on on the tweety hello.
• 1:27:36
  And another impossible to find that's an on Twitter, Andrew.
• 1:27:42
  Thanks, Joe. So my AT is at DW cover story,
• 1:27:50
  my accounts called Doctor Who cover story.
• 1:27:53
  So I post a lot of lovely artwork and retweet nice artwork
• 1:28:00
  of the new episodes, etcetera. So just yeah, follow me if you
• 1:28:03
  want to see some pretty pictures.
• 1:28:05
  But yeah, Joe, Joe and I went into how difficult my my account
• 1:28:14
  is to to type into DWDW because it came about when all of the
• 1:28:21
  Doctor Who products were prefaced with that little stupid
• 1:28:24
  DW logo, which is where it came from.
• 1:28:26
  From what time back from you. Sorry, do you think like?
• 1:28:30
  Doctor. Doctor Who cover story Dr. Yeah,
• 1:28:33
  OK DOCTOR No. And every time I'm typing it in,
• 1:28:38
  I'm going Where is he? And then I go into the the
• 1:28:41
  message Fred. Yeah, DW, yeah.
• 1:28:45
  So apparently I have a terrible personal brand, but try and
• 1:28:48
  follow me anyway. Whilst publicizing everybody
• 1:28:52
  else's fabulous brand, you know. Look, you work ourselves, where
• 1:28:57
  don't you? Yeah, I don't really bring it up
• 1:29:02
  on these anymore because it's they're not related, but I guess
• 1:29:05
  my 2 loves are Doctor Who and professional wrestling,
• 1:29:10
  especially New Japan Pro Wrestling, which is what we talk
• 1:29:12
  about. Me and my friend who's also an
• 1:29:17
  Andrew and we were inspired by another guy who did wrestling
• 1:29:21
  podcast and his name is Joe. So this is fucking weird to me.
• 1:29:25
  Like here we are. But yeah, it's good to never
• 1:29:30
  open podcast if our universe is a colliding and you're into both
• 1:29:33
  those things. Like they're my soap operas.
• 1:29:35
  I don't do soap operas, but pro wrestling is my soap opera, I
• 1:29:39
  guess. Yeah.
• 1:29:40
  I'll have a criticism and a question.
• 1:29:44
  My criticism is, well, they are connected because you're on both
• 1:29:47
  of them, So, you know, that's a good reason to bring it up.
• 1:29:50
  And my question is this what the hell is Japanese pro wrestling
• 1:29:55
  when it's at home? Just think the WWE, you know,
• 1:30:00
  real wrestling entertainment, but think about it, it's mostly
• 1:30:05
  Japanese wrestlers and I like to hit each other a little harder
• 1:30:11
  because you know, wrestling is is it is fake, it's scripted.
• 1:30:13
  But like in Japan, like they like to hit each other a little
• 1:30:17
  harder. I don't like.
• 1:30:18
  Learning a lot I appreciate. That yes, I like seeing guys
• 1:30:22
  pretend to hurt each other, yes. When people are here, he likes
• 1:30:25
  it to hurt. OK, just.
• 1:30:28
  Look like it hurts. 1. Final apology.
• 1:30:30
  No, no, I'm not going to do it again.
• 1:30:32
  Thank you very much. This threesome now in the book
• 1:30:37
  file continues to be an absolute deny, so thank you very much for
• 1:30:41
  your time tonight. Thank you.
• 1:30:44
  Farewell. Bye.
• 1:30:47
  I still get the ending. Right.
• 1:30:49
  Can I? The
• 1:31:29
  music.