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Transcript

Hamster Book Club - Terror of the Vervoids by Pip and Jane Baker (featuring Paul Quinn) · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:00
  Following her hunch, Mel slipped stealthily into the cargo hold.
• 0:05
  On tenderhooks she skirted the main aisle, keeping to the
• 0:08
  perimeter of each pool of light to avoid detection.
• 0:12
  Every Creek, every step tested her resolution as she made for
• 0:17
  the melaly lit hydroponic centre.
• 0:19
  Passing a door marked technical store, she froze.
• 0:23
  What are you doing prowling around down here?
• 0:26
  It was Edwards, the young communications officer.
• 0:29
  He had come to the stores for a micro component.
• 0:32
  Prowling. Why should I be prowling?
• 0:35
  Mel had decided to bluff it out. Because this area is off limits
• 0:40
  and I suspect you know it. The disapproval lacked
• 0:43
  conviction. Mel's vivacious and attractive
• 0:46
  personality had registered with the young officer when he had
• 0:50
  championed her on the bridge. Exploiting his admiration, Mel
• 0:54
  eschewed subtlety. I wanted a peep at the
• 0:57
  hydroponic centre. Any reason in particular?
• 1:01
  I think you could tie in with that mysterious mayday call that
• 1:04
  was sent from your communications room to the
• 1:06
  TARDIS. Edwards rubbed the back of his
• 1:09
  neck as he remembered the unpleasant sensation of being
• 1:11
  not cold, but the unseen assailants.
• 1:15
  I'm not going to touch anything. She promised.
• 1:17
  What harm could it do? Edward's opuracy was melting as
• 1:22
  he gazed into her beguiling brown eyes with their long
• 1:25
  fringed lashes. I'll probably regret this, but
• 1:29
  come on. A conducted tour only, no
• 1:31
  wandering off on your own. Little did he realize how
• 1:34
  prophetic that prediction would be as he led Male towards the
• 1:38
  hydroponic centre. Male used the occasion for more
• 1:41
  prying. Tell me, who's the woman in the
• 1:44
  Dragon's voice? Professor Sarah Lasky, she's an
• 1:47
  agronomist. So our two assistants, Bruckner
• 1:50
  and Dolan, if they were agronomists, Mel knew the study
• 1:54
  of plant life with their subject and therefore this specially lit
• 1:58
  and watered centre must have been set up for them.
• 2:01
  Edwards confirmed this. Yes, we had to allocate part of
• 2:05
  the hold. They'd reached the outer gate
• 2:07
  and while Edwards pressed his palm against the PPR lock, Mel
• 2:10
  read the warning notice. Why is there any low spectrum
• 2:14
  light allowed in the place? Something to do with
• 2:16
  photosynthesis. Low spectrum light allows the
• 2:19
  plants to stay dormant. The outer gate swung open.
• 2:23
  I'll go ahead, he said. Don't want you breaking your
• 2:26
  pretty neck in the dark. He placed his hand on the inner
• 2:29
  mesh gate. In a cascade of sparks, Edwards
• 2:33
  was slammed against the fence. Lights flared.
• 2:36
  His body convulsed, a powerful current search for his quivering
• 2:40
  frame crucifying him. Arms outstretched, his
• 2:44
  electrified corpse slumped to the floor.
• 2:46
  A high tension cable had been malevolently attached to the
• 2:50
  mesh, creating a death trap. Ghast male instinctively backed
• 2:55
  several paces, unable to take in the Cora, shaken free by the
• 2:59
  impact. The cable was arcing, bathing
• 3:02
  Edward's body in intermittent flashes of white light.
• 3:05
  Screaming male fled from the hole to fetch help.
• 3:09
  But not only Edward's body was being bathed in the white
• 3:12
  lights. The arcing from the cable
• 3:15
  reached beyond him to the giant pods.
• 3:17
  The nearest pod began to rupture.
• 3:19
  A small slit severed its central seam.
• 3:23
  The same with the next pod and the next right?
• 3:27
  Along the road. The pods started to burst, eerie
• 3:31
  enough in itself, but from the first ruptured seam came an even
• 3:36
  more horrendous sight. A flexing waxy olive, vainly at
• 3:42
  hand, clawed through the ever widening gap.
• 3:48
  Welcome back to the Hamster Book Club.
• 3:50
  My name is Joe Ford and fresh from his reappraisal of love and
• 3:57
  war madness, Mr. Paul Quinn. Hello, Paul.
• 4:01
  Hello, Joe, How are you? There's only one way we could
• 4:04
  possibly have gone after reappraising Paul Connell and
• 4:08
  that is reappraising Pip and Jane Baker.
• 4:15
  I wrote recently that we need to get over the idea that defending
• 4:20
  Pip and Jane Baker is the equivalent of saying that you
• 4:22
  like wanking off small, yapping dogs.
• 4:24
  Because Pip and Jane. There's a lot of needless hate
• 4:28
  for those two. There's a lot of.
• 4:32
  Wanking off small yapping dogs as well.
• 4:34
  You know, I don't want to kink shame anyone, but you shouldn't
• 4:37
  be doing it, lads, unless the dog's written out consent for
• 4:39
  you. But yeah, Pip and Jane, I don't
• 4:42
  understand the hate towards them.
• 4:44
  I just, I mean, yeah. And so it's interesting to read
• 4:47
  the book because I, I, I there, there are three, there are three
• 4:50
  TV scripts, 3 and a bit if we include End of Trial of a Time
• 4:54
  Lord, there's they're, they're all good, solid scripts.
• 4:58
  There's a good argument to make that Mark of the Rani is the
• 5:00
  best Doctor Who script of season 22.
• 5:02
  I see, I see Doctor Who script as opposed to some of the other
• 5:06
  stuff that's going on there. I love time in Irani.
• 5:09
  People have heard me on on Jim Allenby will know that's my into
• 5:12
  TV Doctor Who and I stuck with it and I and I and I I stand by
• 5:16
  that decision and I think time in Irani is a cracking story.
• 5:20
  I like Terra the verve voice, but it's their weakest script.
• 5:23
  I. Think oh, OK, and I I think it
• 5:26
  might be my and now my favorite. The best are two very different
• 5:30
  things. It might be my favorite
• 5:32
  production of season 23 because I just think they threw
• 5:36
  everything at this one and then a blast making it.
• 5:38
  Do you know I've got a memory, and tell me if I'm wrong,
• 5:42
  because you and me did watch a lot of Doctor Who when we were
• 5:45
  nippers. I've got a memory of watching
• 5:47
  Terror the Vervoys with you sitting in that chair by the
• 5:51
  door. You know, the one by the door,
• 5:53
  you had the sofa and then the one by the door.
• 5:55
  I was sitting in that chair you were in the one by the fire, and
• 5:58
  we were watching Terror, the Vervoys, and both loving it as
• 6:02
  far as I can. I'm sure that's right because I,
• 6:05
  I got the, the tin when they came out in the in the in the
• 6:09
  box set as it was then for 93. And so in the TARDIS sets,
• 6:15
  almost certainly. You do remember correctly.
• 6:17
  We were sitting there watching, I mean.
• 6:19
  What did you have on the tin? Baker it might be.
• 6:25
  That's just all the ones they dumped around Crawley.
• 6:27
  But yeah, I must have got it for my birthday that year.
• 6:30
  I mean, I think I think DWM review which does stick with me
• 6:35
  where this describes the season as a cure.
• 6:37
  It's a good in place and bad in others.
• 6:39
  I think that's a review that still stands.
• 6:41
  I like 23. You can see the problems that
• 6:43
  are there. A lot of them were unavoidable
• 6:45
  error. They were they were unforced
• 6:47
  errors on the part of a production team, but I think by
• 6:50
  and large it stands up well. Vervoids used to be my favorite
• 6:53
  story in the season. I think it's probably slipped to
• 6:56
  number 2 now, but it won't slip any further.
• 6:58
  What's 1 now then? Mind warp at the moment.
• 7:02
  Oh yes, you know what? Hamster's been reappraising mind
• 7:04
  warp quite a lot lately. Mind what's really good it's
• 7:08
  it's mental and like I don't know Martin go any further and
• 7:12
  looking at mission to Magnus, isn't it?
• 7:14
  I don't know that I love Philip Martin and he was a real fine
• 7:19
  for them and it was rare for them to find somebody really
• 7:21
  ficked as well as that, but I don't know he was going any
• 7:23
  further, which is a shame. I've recently listened to
• 7:26
  Mission to the Magnus for Too hot for TV and yeah maybe mine
• 7:31
  warp should be where he stops and other women I'm not for sure
• 7:34
  or. Try and do something completely
• 7:36
  different. But I I don't know.
• 7:37
  I mean, it's interesting. It's interesting people pick on
• 7:41
  Pip and Jane Baker, and but there's a sense in which the
• 7:46
  writers you get in 23 is the inevitable endpoint of the
• 7:51
  inability to develop new writers.
• 7:54
  Because if you look at who's in 22, so Paula Moore, she doesn't
• 7:58
  write that script. It's sabled.
• 8:01
  Possibly Levine, if you believe him.
• 8:03
  Levine writes the scene in the cupboard.
• 8:05
  The Levine cupboard scene. All the continuity points from
• 8:08
  the 10th planet. Basically, you don't need and
• 8:11
  that if you took that scene out, Attack on Sybon has a much
• 8:13
  better reputation because the I was doing a recording with
• 8:17
  Cyhart last night and we were talking about how good the stuff
• 8:21
  on Contemporary Earth is in Part 1 of that.
• 8:24
  It's really well done. Robinson can direct Martin, he's
• 8:28
  there in 23. Pip and Jane are there in 23,
• 8:31
  and then you've got Holmes. Should he come back?
• 8:34
  Probably not, but he does. Glenn McCoy they're not going to
• 8:37
  bring back. And then it's just sabled.
• 8:39
  So there's a kind of a sense in which, having whittled down and
• 8:42
  annoyed writers under 2020 and 21, so Gallagher won't be back.
• 8:48
  Grim Wades not allowed back. This is who you've got left and
• 8:51
  so you work with what you got. And Pip and Jane Baker can write
• 8:54
  a script. I don't know they can write a
• 8:55
  novel, but they can write a script.
• 8:58
  I mean, I enjoyed the book, but all more, all their problems are
• 9:02
  there and all their strengths are there as well.
• 9:03
  And I, I think they're, they're well deserving of a reappraisal
• 9:06
  by fandom. I think it's because they
• 9:09
  because they're brave enough to make themselves public and they
• 9:12
  go on that wretched TV programme with Paki, Caldwell and Chipnall
• 9:15
  getting stuck into them and because they look like they've
• 9:17
  fallen out of a picture on Sapphire and Steel, where
• 9:19
  they've come forward from the 1950s.
• 9:22
  I mean like hinge and bracket for God's.
• 9:25
  Sake but actually I I think I think they're they're really
• 9:28
  important into that season. I don't think that season gets
• 9:31
  finished, but for they can sit down and knock out a script in.
• 9:34
  Three days. Yeah, I mean, the only other
• 9:37
  people who can do that are David Agnew.
• 9:40
  So it's it's it's various iterations of that with a load
• 9:43
  of whiskey. Of course, if we believe those
• 9:45
  stories, I can't see anyone else doing it.
• 9:46
  And of course, they're in the kind of same crisis that
• 9:50
  Williams is in at the end of 15 and at the start of 17 for
• 9:57
  Invasion of Time and City of Death, but without the added
• 10:01
  bonus of a legal threat to them, which of course is what they're
• 10:04
  working with here, what they produce.
• 10:05
  And given the kind of mess that the storyline is in by that
• 10:08
  point, I think season 14 of Trial of a Time Lord is is a
• 10:12
  small miracle. We fixate on a couple of lines
• 10:15
  of dialogue in it. I had, I had a bit of a Barney
• 10:20
  living with a Doctor Who fan. You know, it's dangerous, isn't
• 10:23
  it? One false argument and the
• 10:25
  relationship will never be the same again.
• 10:27
  And I was, you know, deal last week and I knew we were having
• 10:31
  this call coming up, so I thought I'd put on time and the
• 10:34
  Rani with the Pip and Shane commentary track with McCoy and
• 10:37
  Bonnie Langford and my overall comes down there, I guess.
• 10:40
  Why are you listening to this pair?
• 10:42
  They are the worst thing that ever happened to Doctor Who,
• 10:44
  right? And I love the Pip and Jane
• 10:47
  commentaries because they passionately defend their
• 10:51
  position and the reasons that they did what they did and why
• 10:56
  they wrote in a particular way, why they use, you know, crazy
• 10:59
  verbose words, how they structured the story, all of it.
• 11:05
  They're they're massively full of praise for JNT and what he
• 11:09
  could bring to the screen with the ministry.
• 11:11
  They understood the budget. They knew the budget that was
• 11:13
  coming into Doctor Who at the time.
• 11:15
  It was nothing. And they're they're full of
• 11:17
  praise for McCoy, full of praise for Colin Baker.
• 11:20
  Like they loved working on the show.
• 11:22
  I don't think they were a bad fit at all.
• 11:25
  I just think that's where science fiction perhaps was at
• 11:29
  this. Point.
• 11:30
  They're not right in sci-fi, though.
• 11:31
  I mean, their filmography is really interesting because it's
• 11:36
  not as long as you'd expect, because you'd think like, say,
• 11:39
  Anthony Reed, he's got about 100 entries on IMDb, and that's
• 11:42
  before you get into his historical work and he's worked
• 11:46
  for the Authors Association. But Pip and Jane, they do cheap
• 11:50
  films in the 50s and 60s, so they do those kind of detective
• 11:53
  crime things. So they know about working on
• 11:55
  small, don't they? Don't they work with Christopher
• 11:57
  Leave in some price people like? Yeah, on the one, what is it?
• 12:04
  It's not the day the earth caught fire, but it's something
• 12:06
  similar to that Christopher Lee's in that Liz Fraser is in
• 12:09
  one of their crime ones as well. Liz Fraser died last year and it
• 12:13
  was a kind of a reappraisal of an important figure kind of
• 12:16
  become forgotten or was just kind of looking at as doing
• 12:19
  these eccentric old women roles. And then of course they do.
• 12:22
  They do Space 1999 and they do one of those crying dramas
• 12:26
  there. It's one I'm not familiar with,
• 12:28
  but I've been catching up on a lot of those ITV franchise
• 12:31
  programs. So they've got a solid
• 12:33
  background in TV production. So they do know what they're
• 12:36
  talking about, and they're often.
• 12:37
  Doctor Who before Graham Williams offered them Doctor and
• 12:41
  I think Verity Lambert, they talk about Variety Lambert and
• 12:44
  they talk about Graham Williams and that they said they said no
• 12:47
  and one of their mates went are you mad?
• 12:49
  That'll be a pension for you. Do it the next time you're
• 12:52
  asked, just do it. So J&T asking and there they
• 12:54
  were. I've gone with that now just.
• 13:00
  And how generous they are towards the production, how they
• 13:02
  enjoy doing it, and that they defend their work.
• 13:05
  Yeah, and and and I think. Mark leave the room then.
• 13:08
  And you didn't speak for three days?
• 13:12
  Excited ground separate Pip and Jane love.
• 13:14
  Now I've told him to fuck off and get on with his work.
• 13:17
  He's supposed to be working at the time.
• 13:19
  Look, I wrote down, Yeah, a small list of things.
• 13:21
  Now you tell me if I'm right or if I'm wrong.
• 13:23
  OK. Before we even go into Vervoise
• 13:24
  itself. Yeah.
• 13:26
  You tell me if of strength in Pip and Jane's writing.
• 13:30
  OK. Yeah.
• 13:32
  For good or for bad. So they're educational.
• 13:34
  They like to educate you. There's some education about
• 13:37
  plants and things like this in this.
• 13:39
  They they like educating you in history and Mark Arani.
• 13:43
  I mean, they tentatively tell you some bits about Einstein and
• 13:46
  Pastor and things like that. But but they do like to teach.
• 13:50
  Yes. They remember the kids.
• 13:53
  They remember to not. They make it scary, but they
• 13:56
  make it scary enough so that children can watch in their
• 13:59
  parts of season 22, which I'm sure you wouldn't put in front
• 14:02
  of a young child. Yeah, they, they, they recognize
• 14:05
  the fact that there's a horror content, but it should be
• 14:08
  appropriate. And so it stands out in 22 what
• 14:11
  they're doing differently to where it kind of goes over the
• 14:13
  top in 22. So yeah, absolutely.
• 14:16
  They put the Doctor front and centre.
• 14:18
  They make him a heroic figure, but likeable and funny as well.
• 14:23
  Yes, that is unusual in Colin Baker's time.
• 14:25
  I mean, they're appalled. They they talk about in the
• 14:28
  Vervoy's commentary, they talk about Colin Baker walking around
• 14:31
  that wall in Revelation of the Dialect.
• 14:33
  So we watched this story where you were just walking around a
• 14:36
  Stonewall for a whole episode. What were you doing?
• 14:39
  You weren't part of the story. And he goes, yes, Eric wrote
• 14:42
  that one. And they were like, oh, right,
• 14:44
  OK. Yeah, I mean, that's
• 14:46
  interesting. Well, the kind of the, the, the
• 14:48
  kind of acknowledgements there about what they know about say
• 14:51
  Ward, presumably from dealing with him directly, but also in
• 14:54
  the right of white as well. Because it's it's significant to
• 14:56
  me that say, Ward never writes in this country again after 85.
• 15:01
  Telling they love a good set piece and Terra the Verbos is
• 15:05
  full of set pieces. You know the electric defence
• 15:07
  mail going to the Pulveriser. But so is Mark of the Rania, the
• 15:10
  Doctor going down the hill. You know the hologram male in
• 15:14
  Tom and the Rani. They like packing the story full
• 15:16
  of fun set pieces. I think they're genuinely funny
• 15:20
  writers. They can write a funny line and
• 15:23
  they can write not funny lines as well.
• 15:25
  But that pantomime stuff at the start of Tom and the Rani, you
• 15:28
  know, the asides to the camera with the Rani in Kate O'mara's
• 15:33
  mouth. It's hilarious.
• 15:35
  You know, why was why was the Rani dressed like you male?
• 15:38
  Perhaps she's fashion conscious. You know, they can write a funny
• 15:41
  line, they can structure a story.
• 15:45
  They absolutely know how to set up a story and then pay it off.
• 15:48
  And we'll get there with Terra, the verboids.
• 15:51
  They love big, strange, silly ideas like growing dinosaurs,
• 15:55
  plant monsters, and pulsating Einstein fuel brains.
• 15:59
  You know they're not afraid, but don't do to be a bit wacky and
• 16:04
  finally moving us on to the book of Terra Lavervois.
• 16:08
  They love language. They.
• 16:11
  Do love language? They do love language.
• 16:13
  And they love giving Colin language in particular.
• 16:17
  Which of course, is part of the problem when they come to write
• 16:21
  time the Ronnies. There's that weird idea that the
• 16:24
  Colin Baker loved that they they that the McCoy mangles phrases,
• 16:32
  doesn't he? And it's meant to be because
• 16:35
  he's he's doing the opposite of what he did is calling Baker.
• 16:37
  But Baker didn't really do that. There's something there's
• 16:40
  something gone wrong there in the in the notes that have gone
• 16:42
  to them. But yeah, I mean, but again,
• 16:45
  your mark of the ride. What's interesting.
• 16:47
  No, what's interesting with time of the Irani is that they get
• 16:50
  stuck into the Doctor has to go a bit strange after his
• 16:53
  regeneration. But actually in the script, it's
• 16:56
  because of the injection he gets from the massive injection gun
• 16:59
  from the Rani, because when McCoy wakes up, he's straight
• 17:02
  into the action. And you do think they're going
• 17:04
  to do something different? I know.
• 17:05
  Wait, they're not. It's a plot reasons this time.
• 17:08
  And of course you can get away with a lot.
• 17:09
  But yeah, Mark, Mark, the right Morgan can direct really well
• 17:13
  outside. You see, he'd done, he'd done,
• 17:15
  or he was doing Knights of God and the action scenes and
• 17:19
  Knights of God, brilliant. You know, the, the, the attack
• 17:21
  on the convoy in that first episode.
• 17:23
  Anyway, there's no Knights of God.
• 17:24
  It's on YouTube because you can't get it on DVD because it's
• 17:27
  part of the TV's memory dump. Nothing being released on video.
• 17:31
  It's really, really well directed.
• 17:32
  Moore's a really good director and he's, you know.
• 17:34
  Took out great show in the Galaxy.
• 17:35
  That might be the sexiest quarry we ever had in Doctor Who in
• 17:38
  time and there aren't they. It's brilliantly.
• 17:41
  It's not a quarry, I believe it's an alien world for each
• 17:45
  because. The blue foil that's on the
• 17:47
  rocks. I don't notice it the the
• 17:50
  citadel works really well the the Irani's lair with the
• 17:53
  rocket. Like it's it's really good.
• 17:54
  And it's not just nostalgia. It's not me thinking back to
• 17:58
  something I watched when I was 9 because I've watched it numerous
• 18:00
  times since that and I enjoy it every single time.
• 18:03
  I cringe at a couple of lines of dialogue.
• 18:05
  But it all the problems of time in Irani are in the first one or
• 18:08
  two episodes, fans need to get over themselves because all of
• 18:12
  those all of those things you listed, there are definite
• 18:14
  strengths of people from Jane. Art of snowing fans like Doctor
• 18:17
  Who being pantomimic, certain fans and that's the issue with
• 18:21
  that because it is a total pantomime in places.
• 18:24
  Well, I mean, it's an important transition.
• 18:26
  It's an important transition time in the right that you move
• 18:28
  and the costume is the key moment, isn't it?
• 18:31
  When When Colin Baker's horrible costume is resigned to the bin
• 18:37
  or the dressing up box and McCoy gets something that looks more
• 18:40
  normal. And what's also telling, of
• 18:42
  course, is when Mccoy's braces go under his pullover in Pyramid
• 18:48
  in Paradise Towers, it's all visually telling you they're
• 18:51
  moving away from the Oh yeah, because he is a pantomime.
• 18:55
  They do shift into kind of pantomime opera grotesque mode
• 19:00
  in 2223. But Pip and Jane can write that.
• 19:02
  It's weird. They're background and kind of
• 19:05
  crime film. But they can work with this kind
• 19:08
  of the, the, the, the grotesque nature of Doctor Who by that
• 19:10
  point by producing the least grotesque story, I think.
• 19:15
  Although interestingly, I think potentially Terror the Vervoids,
• 19:19
  despite his light tone, might be the most grotesque story of my
• 19:24
  warp. It has moments though.
• 19:26
  It's oh. You know, I mean, I mean, Martin
• 19:28
  Ronnie is the less great, least grotesque 22. 22.
• 19:32
  Vervoids. Absolutely, because they
• 19:36
  position the grotesque alongside the clinical and so you don't
• 19:39
  necessarily notice it because the ship is very clean.
• 19:42
  I mean the lounge is horrible, but the money is just not there
• 19:44
  for the lounge. It's a garden centre but they're
• 19:47
  heaping up of the bodies and the implication that the bodies are
• 19:50
  going to be compostable. That puzzle, those poor actors,
• 19:55
  that poor old man playing Mr. Kimba, he's lying there on the
• 19:58
  floor. What's interesting with Kimba
• 20:00
  course is they make it even worse in the book because he
• 20:02
  gets a bit of a back story. It's really, if I it was kind of
• 20:06
  lurking in my memory. I knew you were something about
• 20:08
  his son and it's all the watch and then he dies.
• 20:10
  It's really, really horrible and really bleak because, and what's
• 20:13
  interesting is you get a kind of interiority with him that he's
• 20:16
  now he broods on the fact that he's caught.
• 20:19
  Because Hallett's death, which you don't get in the TV at all,
• 20:22
  but it's there in the book, and they've got the wherewithal to
• 20:25
  actually add that level of character to it.
• 20:27
  And it's absolutely brilliant moment.
• 20:29
  It's a horrible moment as well. Yeah, drag.
• 20:31
  All the stuff about how difficult it is to drag the
• 20:33
  bodies now, I think the verbal is being able to talk is a
• 20:36
  horrendous decision, but they needed something there.
• 20:40
  It's the opposite. I think of what you said when we
• 20:42
  were doing season 15, that the Fendal not being able to talk is
• 20:46
  the strength because you can't reason with death, whereas
• 20:49
  there's too much conversation. Even that setting aside that
• 20:51
  one, is because. There as verbose as all the
• 20:54
  other car, aren't they? We are doing splendidly.
• 20:57
  Yeah, and it's worse in the book, I think.
• 20:59
  I think there's extra lines in the book that aren't there in
• 21:01
  the TV, whereas what you just want is no dialogue.
• 21:05
  And it's just. But the problem is you need
• 21:08
  someone to then say why they're doing what they're doing.
• 21:12
  I, I, I read the book and then I was like, oh God, man.
• 21:17
  I know there's an audio book of this read by Bonnie Langford.
• 21:20
  And I'm like, I have to listen to it because there were so many
• 21:24
  sort of declamatory sentences ending in exclamation Marks and
• 21:28
  then so many dot, dot dots all about.
• 21:32
  I thought, how is she going to read this?
• 21:34
  Fuck me, Paul, she is game. She just goes for it.
• 21:37
  She knows. I think she knows.
• 21:39
  It's sort of pulpy. Crap, but she can't.
• 21:42
  Just background. Yeah, man, oh man, It's a great,
• 21:45
  great reading. She's doing wonderful voices for
• 21:48
  everybody. She's sibilant for the vervoids.
• 21:50
  But in all of those moments of drama, man, she sells it.
• 21:54
  How does she cope with the very strange sexualizing of Mel
• 21:59
  that's in the book? Because it's a really weird
• 22:01
  decision that down to the doctor knowing that she's got a 22 inch
• 22:05
  waist and Edwards. Edwards is all over her, isn't
• 22:09
  he? Yeah, I mean, he's got, he's
• 22:10
  got, he's got Janet there, but he's like, clearly, I mean,
• 22:13
  Janet would be well. He likes a redhead.
• 22:15
  So do Why, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 22:18
  But it's really weird. You know how petite she is.
• 22:21
  And he's it's it's. Such a weird.
• 22:23
  Moment in the book because it's nowhere in the TV script.
• 22:26
  With the targets, right, it's so interesting, the bits that the
• 22:29
  authors choose to expand, isn't it in prose?
• 22:33
  And that, like you said with Kimber there, that sexualization
• 22:36
  of male wish certainly wasn't on the screen.
• 22:38
  There's a bit towards the end, just before Lasky dies, what he
• 22:41
  learn about her mum and all that.
• 22:43
  It's like, I was just like, yeah, they certainly choose
• 22:46
  their moments in this book. Lasky's really interesting
• 22:49
  character though, because Lasky is both the Ronnie and the
• 22:51
  Doctor. I like the fact, right, that
• 22:56
  Lasky is so unimpressed with the Doctor.
• 22:58
  Now, if we'd have had a scene, you know, the bit where male
• 23:02
  bewitches Lasky and the Doctor can't, and they're just both
• 23:05
  dismissing him, he can't get a word in edgeways.
• 23:07
  Yeah, if we'd have had that scene around Attack of the
• 23:10
  Cybermen, we may have been able to sort out a lot of the issues
• 23:13
  with the sick Doctor. The problem, of course, of
• 23:16
  attack on Simon is all the female characters are.
• 23:21
  Yeah, there's no, there's no human that it's a weird season
• 23:24
  that in terms of it's inability to really deal with human women
• 23:28
  was actually have doing that until really Amkara in
• 23:33
  Revelation. But that is another strength of
• 23:36
  Pippen. Jane Wright.
• 23:36
  They do write a strong woman, The Raleigh male Professor
• 23:40
  Lasky. Yeah, I think that in Time and
• 23:43
  the Ronnie. I I think that that kind of
• 23:46
  debate that Lasky has about ethics in science is a really
• 23:51
  interesting scene. It's a really fascinating scene.
• 23:54
  And when Bruckner says to her, yeah, she because she brings up
• 23:58
  Galileo, doesn't she so Kardashian learning moment in
• 24:01
  the book, it's kind of Hanford because they put she's referring
• 24:04
  to the Italian scientist born in 1459 and I.
• 24:08
  Thought they do that throughout the entire book, don't they?
• 24:10
  Why did you do that? But it's a really interesting
• 24:13
  idea because it tells the children and like frankly,
• 24:16
  adults in the audience about Galileo and it positions Lasky's
• 24:20
  work in a long history of science because it's suddenly a
• 24:22
  moment of which actually they've produced something useful, not
• 24:26
  these psychotic plants that they've given a killer thorn to.
• 24:31
  And and it's the type of debate around science morality that the
• 24:34
  Rani has with the doctor in Time of the Rani and Mark of the
• 24:37
  Rani. So it's fascinating that Lasky
• 24:39
  has that discourse there, but also the doctors, those type of
• 24:42
  discussions as well. If you think about Genesis where
• 24:45
  he has these arguments with Davros, that's where Lasky is
• 24:48
  the doctor as well. And the fact that it's Lasky
• 24:50
  goes, I must go and try and talk to them.
• 24:52
  They're my creation and essentially sacrifice itself.
• 24:54
  It's a fascinating character there as well.
• 24:57
  It doesn't always work because because Lasky is kind of an
• 25:02
  aggressive figure and there's there's some point to which you
• 25:05
  just go, maybe the director could have toned you down a bit.
• 25:07
  But I think I think it's a really interesting character and
• 25:10
  that all that discourse around science, morality, you're not
• 25:13
  getting that from anyone else. Well, that's what really works
• 25:16
  is when you give it to Anna Blackman, right?
• 25:18
  And she's just having a ball with it.
• 25:20
  Yeah, and you get all the strengths there of Anna Blackman
• 25:23
  from The Avengers. But also now that she's been
• 25:25
  around for so long, of course, she's just staring down the
• 25:28
  barrel of playing kind of slaggy grandmother in the upper hand,
• 25:31
  which is coming down the line. Oh I loved.
• 25:33
  Her in that. But yeah, yeah, it was.
• 25:36
  I mean, it's great casting anyway, You know what's his name
• 25:42
  is the Commodore. Oh.
• 25:43
  Michael Craig. Craig, but he was in triangle,
• 25:45
  though, wasn't he? Speaking probably with Kate
• 25:47
  O'Mara, of course. Indeed a weird unsexual
• 25:51
  performance when she isn't she sunbathing naked on the top of a
• 25:54
  ferry or the topless on the top of a ferry.
• 25:56
  And what's his name? Malcolm Story is Dolan.
• 26:01
  Oh, that's a. Great turn I think.
• 26:03
  Big names here that they've got in in in this and people I
• 26:07
  think, I think that's also how they get away with some of the
• 26:10
  more over the top moments in the script is that they've got
• 26:14
  actors who can handle it. Weaker actors would really lend
• 26:17
  into it, or or they wouldn't. Well, you know, there's a line,
• 26:20
  right, that Dolan says in the story where he goes, you know,
• 26:26
  very subtly he goes, some fool must have introduced low
• 26:29
  spectrum light into this, but a worse actor would have gone some
• 26:33
  fool, you know? I mean, I think in terms of
• 26:36
  acting, the weak link, weird enough, is the actor playing
• 26:39
  Hallen, because he doesn't have to do nothing persuades me that
• 26:43
  he's this great investigator the the the doctor knows and
• 26:46
  admires. It's just some lad in a beard.
• 26:48
  He goes. My name is Grenville.
• 26:50
  He's gone. I've never been to sell a store.
• 26:53
  You must be mistaken. Yeah, and then everyone hug and
• 26:56
  mug around. I mean, that whole Hallett plot
• 26:58
  line. I I don't really understand it
• 27:01
  because I I watched the original version and I watched the weird
• 27:05
  re edit for the Blu-ray. Stick with the original.
• 27:08
  The trial scenes are great in the original.
• 27:10
  The trial scene and the trial scenes in this I think I sent to
• 27:13
  you in a message there the week before last.
• 27:15
  The trial scenes in this are probably the best in the season.
• 27:17
  They're much better than what Holmes is doing for Mysterious
• 27:20
  Planet. The opening scene there when
• 27:23
  obviously you've got the shock of Perry's death.
• 27:25
  So spoilers there. I'm also might spoil some Golden
• 27:28
  Age detective novels as well shortly, but baking is a really
• 27:33
  great subdued performance and and the dialogue is better
• 27:37
  because they're not doing the whole stackyard knackers yard,
• 27:40
  which is just so tedious and which was only really inviting
• 27:43
  Baker to just go slightly too far, slightly too arching.
• 27:47
  I think the best, the best critique on what's on the screen
• 27:52
  is in terms of of where he goes. Well, no, every instinct in my
• 27:56
  being would have made me prevent her.
• 27:58
  And then in cuts, Jason with and yes, you did nuts.
• 28:02
  And then we got back to the action and that end of
• 28:04
  cliffhanger to Part 1. They know how to set up that
• 28:07
  cliffhanger. Oh, they've got some brilliant
• 28:09
  set pieces, because the end, the end of two is maybe the most
• 28:12
  disturbing thing in Doctor Who at that point in time.
• 28:15
  And they enjoy writing it here as well.
• 28:17
  The pulsating, veiny face. They really extend it in the
• 28:20
  book and and Ruth Backs is a tragic figure and what what's
• 28:24
  interesting thing back on their three scripts they've they've
• 28:26
  always have a figure whose death haunts you.
• 28:29
  Luke's death in Mark Dharani is really horrible.
• 28:34
  It's kind of inevitable once he's corrupted.
• 28:36
  But the transport translation. Is they'll only see the tree
• 28:38
  though, don't they? They only see the tree.
• 28:40
  Well, the issue, the issue there of course, is that the BBC had
• 28:43
  made a decision, not they. They would make a decision the
• 28:46
  following year not to end with someone turning into a tree with
• 28:48
  Edge of Darkness because Bob Peck's meant to turn into a
• 28:50
  tree. And they go it's a bad idea and
• 28:53
  probably someone should say this is a bad idea here because they
• 28:56
  only focus because his dad. It's kind of it's really hard.
• 28:59
  And sans death as well in time of Iran and Ruth Baxter here,
• 29:04
  they they have these still moments around the death where
• 29:08
  in a period in the show, right. I'm not sure they necessarily
• 29:11
  take death seriously. There's a lot of deaths and say
• 29:15
  what thinks he's doing something different with deaths, but I'm
• 29:17
  not sure he is particularly in Revelation.
• 29:20
  The death that really works in Revelation that hits home is
• 29:24
  Stangos because begging to be killed.
• 29:28
  It's a really strong moment. But actually in the rest of the
• 29:30
  run, it's Pip and Jane. You look to who can write these
• 29:33
  characters and then when they, when they die and they die
• 29:37
  through no fault of their own, you it really they, they, they
• 29:40
  hang the story hangs around with you afterwards.
• 29:43
  On the subject of death, right, I think the you know, that Colin
• 29:47
  Baker, we used to say he wanted to characterize the Doctor as
• 29:49
  like you, he's unpredictable. He won't always has a morality
• 29:52
  all of his own. He won't always behave in a way,
• 29:55
  you know, some a person might die and he'd be like, Oh, well,
• 29:58
  Butterfly may be crushed and he'll be absolutely devastated
• 30:01
  that I think that was the example that he gave.
• 30:03
  The end of this story does that so brilliantly, where male gives
• 30:07
  a very human reaction to see in that compost heap of bodies.
• 30:10
  And this is obscene. And Oh my God, it's the most
• 30:13
  horrific thing I've ever seen. And then the doctor goes look at
• 30:16
  if they're obeying instinct, like, you know, don't, don't
• 30:19
  just look at it in human terms. I think that's a great scene.
• 30:23
  Yeah, it is because I mean, it's too cramped in that space and I
• 30:28
  don't think you necessarily get the.
• 30:31
  Not another shot in a book, but in a huge hold, you know?
• 30:34
  Yeah, and it's dark as well, of course, because it's it's
• 30:36
  overlit. I think the hold in in the TV
• 30:39
  programme, whereas the book is much better or something about
• 30:42
  when, when Bruckner severs an arm off a vervoid and the arm
• 30:47
  comes after him in the corridor. It's a, it's kind of funny, but
• 30:50
  it's also terrifying as well. There's a, there's a lot of good
• 30:53
  stuff in the in the book. They keep emphasising the
• 30:55
  noseless nature of. Them and they what is it the
• 30:59
  waxy green leaves or something like that?
• 31:03
  They kept using the same descriptions over and over
• 31:05
  again. Because the the I hadn't I had
• 31:07
  forgotten how important the leaves are at various points in
• 31:11
  the in the story as part of the investigation.
• 31:15
  And so the emphasis on on the texture is probably right, but
• 31:19
  they probably needed a thesaurus for synonyms for waxy.
• 31:24
  But the waxiness is where it's the kind of because the Verbos
• 31:27
  are natural and unnatural at the same time.
• 31:28
  And so I think they get that really well, I think.
• 31:33
  Hey, what's another word for waxy?
• 31:35
  I'll just use it again. Well I so there was a big
• 31:38
  interview wasn't there in DWM with them when they went around
• 31:41
  the house there was a vervoid halfway up the stairs wasn't
• 31:43
  there? But I don't remember if it ever
• 31:44
  got into how they wrote and I'd be fascinated to know.
• 31:48
  Do they sit at the same desk typing away?
• 31:51
  Are they in different rooms? It's really interesting how what
• 31:54
  they're. Pre confidential, but it'd be
• 31:55
  great to see, wouldn't it? Yeah, could have been great to
• 31:58
  see. I, I think I, I, I never really.
• 32:01
  There are worse scriptwriters in Doctor Who across the entire
• 32:04
  world, and it's. They're never boring.
• 32:08
  They're always giving you stuff. They're always giving you words
• 32:12
  and ideas and set pieces. And you know about some Doctor
• 32:15
  Who writers aren't doing that. Well, I don't, because they're
• 32:18
  not. They're not really constrained
• 32:20
  by continuity. I There's a real sense of even
• 32:24
  if Ian Levine had rocked up to their house, they'd have given
• 32:26
  him a cup of tea and just left him sitting in the front room
• 32:28
  and just gone and written something.
• 32:30
  And they ain't afraid of no one as well.
• 32:32
  Jane Baker was famously, you know, horrid to Andrew Cartman.
• 32:36
  He's trying to make changes to time and the Rani.
• 32:38
  And she's on the phone going, no, I'm not doing it.
• 32:40
  Tell him no. And they're desperate.
• 32:42
  So they're just going to have to put out what we write.
• 32:45
  I think the problem there was that they've been around for a
• 32:47
  long time by that point, and Cartman was.
• 32:49
  A clash of two approaching. And I think, I think even
• 32:54
  though, because there's a weird sense in which that's an end
• 32:57
  point, then he gets new writers and he gets what they've tried
• 33:01
  to do on Doctor Who for years and never managed it.
• 33:03
  They bring in these writers. But actually they're, they're a
• 33:04
  necessary thing. They're a kind of a hangover
• 33:06
  there. John Nathan Turner likes them.
• 33:10
  That's the other thing to that point.
• 33:12
  They're they're go to figure. And absolutely they're they're
• 33:15
  older and I think a sense of professionalism because given
• 33:18
  what's gone down in the production office during 23, not
• 33:21
  that John Nathan Turner is necessarily the most
• 33:23
  professional figure by that point, but what say Ward has
• 33:26
  done? And you could tell that old
• 33:28
  hands wouldn't like it and that he can trust these who'd come
• 33:32
  in. They can write this because they
• 33:34
  can turn it around and they'll do something decent with it.
• 33:36
  And they've got the actors there and go Clough can direct as
• 33:41
  well. You know, it's reasonably well
• 33:42
  directed. But I think you're wrong.
• 33:45
  I. Think that's the important
• 33:46
  thing. He can structure it and he can
• 33:48
  pace it as well. And again, it comes down to what
• 33:52
  what's the problem? I mean, I think, I think episode
• 33:57
  13, there's some really horrible moments in it.
• 34:00
  And I think, I think Bonnie Langford's production
• 34:02
  performance is pretty poor in 13.
• 34:05
  But I think the script is inviting that level of you to
• 34:08
  play that. How utterly evil of you to say
• 34:12
  that. But even even even the
• 34:14
  revelation of the Valleyard is bodged because it's and what's I
• 34:19
  was thinking is you. You describe Timeless Children
• 34:23
  as the Masters PowerPoint, don't you?
• 34:25
  Yes, I do. Yes.
• 34:27
  And and it's raises chagrin. It's the same plot in Ultimate
• 34:32
  Foe. The Doctor can't discover about
• 34:36
  his future, the Master has to tell him.
• 34:38
  Timeless Children, The Doctor doesn't know about his own past,
• 34:41
  The Master has to tell him. But at least it's visually
• 34:43
  interesting in time as children in this one, the mask on the
• 34:46
  screen, as I've always known. The doctor.
• 34:48
  Dum Dee dum Dee dum Dee dum Dee dum ohh.
• 34:50
  No, but that's Anthony Alien, the best time of his life.
• 34:53
  It's a really good performance. Romania, I'm no fan of Anthony
• 34:56
  Alien, but it's he's the best thing there at that moment.
• 34:58
  And then Colin Becker. Just a minute.
• 35:00
  You just call him the Doctor done with the keyboard, but even
• 35:06
  then they fudge it because it can't be the Doctor.
• 35:08
  It's some weird fetch version of the Doctor and he was kind of
• 35:10
  shat out of him and says we're kind of affinities again.
• 35:13
  We come back to triple rated this season, but he's
• 35:16
  essentially. Really.
• 35:18
  Yeah. But in Terror of the Vervoids,
• 35:21
  the trial scenes work really, really well.
• 35:23
  And you're right, to cut them out of the TV version is bizarre
• 35:27
  because it's one of those weird instances where I I think it is
• 35:31
  one of the About Time essays asked who's narrating this show
• 35:35
  and weird enough. So yeah, if you get into new
• 35:38
  who's so Clara is narrating Name of the Doctor, the Doctor ends
• 35:43
  up narrating time of the Doctor, The Doctor introduces this and
• 35:47
  you've still got it. And then because it's a
• 35:50
  detective drama on one level, I don't need some particularly
• 35:55
  good detective drama, and I will say that.
• 35:56
  I do love that opening. No, he's like one of them will
• 35:59
  become a murderer. And in the in the book, there's
• 36:03
  loads of questions. They don't weird questions.
• 36:07
  I don't am I meant to ask that question?
• 36:09
  They are. Literally addressing the
• 36:10
  audience all the time in the book.
• 36:12
  They are narrating the book. But in.
• 36:15
  But what's interesting then in Vervo is when the when you get
• 36:18
  the scene where you see the doctor smashing up the
• 36:23
  communications room. Yeah, that's the one bit, isn't
• 36:25
  it? And the doctor says, I didn't do
• 36:27
  that. What's interesting then is it it
• 36:30
  it, the narrative becomes unreliable.
• 36:33
  So say something like and now like, if you haven't read Agatha
• 36:37
  Christie's Murder of Roger Ackroyd, you need to turn off at
• 36:39
  this point because I'm going to refer to it in a way that's
• 36:41
  going to make it quite. Clear.
• 36:42
  I've talked about it every time. Don't worry.
• 36:45
  So obviously we we never trust a narrator in a detective Look
• 36:50
  after Murder Roger Ackroyd because he's an unreliable
• 36:54
  narrator. And so then you get into, you
• 36:57
  know, how far are narrators unreliable in detective drama?
• 37:01
  Vervoids itself becomes unreliable in a really
• 37:04
  interesting way. I don't think they meant it to
• 37:06
  be that interesting at all, because the, the, the, the
• 37:10
  problem with the way the Doctor is able to review the evidence
• 37:15
  of what's still to come, which of course creates a paradox
• 37:18
  anyway. He must surely have been able to
• 37:20
  see who the murderer was, because the the matrix must
• 37:23
  know. I mean, in the book, there's
• 37:25
  that fabulous moment where the, the, the, the Inquisitor, it
• 37:29
  says she'd really got caught up in the whodunit that she's
• 37:32
  trying to solve this thing. Because the other thing with
• 37:34
  with trial of the Time Lord, I mean, this the trial room gets
• 37:39
  is really boring and there's no sense in which this is the way
• 37:43
  to film it. You know, all those clunking
• 37:45
  costumes to turn around to look at a screen behind them.
• 37:48
  So maybe having the screen on the floor or if they had money
• 37:51
  to do a hologram, they'll. Get a fucking line of dialogue.
• 37:54
  Any of those time laws, they're just sitting there for 13 weeks.
• 37:58
  But that's because they look that that's the same at Crown
• 38:00
  Court though, you know, which was still on TV at this point.
• 38:02
  The jury never speak. It's only the foreman at the
• 38:04
  end. So they're kind of locked into
• 38:05
  that mode. But it's a great story about
• 38:08
  watching. It's a great story about viewing
• 38:11
  the narrative, and then the master turns up inside the telly
• 38:14
  and he's been watching everything outside the telly and
• 38:17
  inside the telly. It's phenomenal kind of meta
• 38:20
  textual meta theatrical text in a way really doesn't mean it to
• 38:24
  be. And so the whole thing is that
• 38:26
  is it. The whole thing is them watching
• 38:27
  Doctor Who stories and commenting on, well, it's how
• 38:31
  none of it makes any sense. When's it gonna get going, you
• 38:33
  know? I mean, I think it's Cornell,
• 38:37
  isn't it? He wrote a long piece that's in
• 38:39
  license denied where he imagines what the proper version of 23
• 38:42
  would be. And it ends with the the Daleks
• 38:44
  turning up. And I think that would be great.
• 38:47
  But what we've got is a sustained critique of the show
• 38:50
  itself, by the show, by old hands and the current scripted
• 38:55
  editor. And then along come these two
• 38:57
  and go, oh, it's just going to write a whodunit in space.
• 39:00
  I swear some of it's digs though, right?
• 39:02
  The bit where in this where the Inquisitor goes, yeah, I find
• 39:05
  and these graphic violence appalling.
• 39:09
  I swear that's supposed to be Michael Grade, right?
• 39:11
  Absolutely no, no, no, no. It clearly is all those.
• 39:13
  You know, I thought you'd lost yourself.
• 39:15
  That's a comment on the on the 18 months, isn't it?
• 39:17
  Oh no, it it clearly is Angio. It's, it's, it's Christmas
• 39:23
  carols. So of course your visits from
• 39:25
  the past and then, yeah, I, I, it's a, it's a mess.
• 39:29
  If he can see adventures from his own future yet, any
• 39:33
  adventure from his own future via the Matrix, can't he just
• 39:36
  sort of listen in to a conversation where the end of
• 39:38
  trial of a Time Lord is spoken about in the future and you go,
• 39:42
  ah, do you know what? I've been looking at the future.
• 39:44
  It turns out you're me all along.
• 39:46
  Yeah. Arrest that man.
• 39:47
  Or the evil in me distilled into Michael Jason's body.
• 39:51
  I don't know. I mean, the, the, I think part
• 39:54
  of the issue is it isn't it, isn't it that James Brie got
• 39:57
  really annoyed because the Keepers meant to have a much
• 39:59
  bigger role at the end of it and because of the revisions to the
• 40:02
  script. And I suppose there's a sense in
• 40:04
  which there's a more interesting version of the story which makes
• 40:08
  more use of the dreamscape of of the Matrix than we actually get
• 40:11
  here. Well, actually watching.
• 40:13
  Some of it the other couple weeks when we started working on
• 40:16
  this and I think the dream within a dream where it's
• 40:19
  clearly intersecting with Tale of Two Cities and the music
• 40:26
  actually that's it's works really, really well.
• 40:29
  Oh, well, directed, isn't it? Yeah, far, far better place
• 40:32
  that. Kind of the the the music, the
• 40:34
  kind of sub Music Hall and you want more of that, I think.
• 40:38
  And I think part of the problem is that you go from that really
• 40:41
  striking end of episode where the docs being pulled down into
• 40:44
  the the mud and then you just get the the I mean, I don't know
• 40:48
  what the decision was to have Michael Jason disappearing and
• 40:51
  reappearing and disappearing and just make him stand there and
• 40:54
  give this dialogue. The dialogue's kind of shit, but
• 40:56
  just make him don't try and make it more interesting by putting
• 41:00
  in this kind of visual tick that doesn't really do in here except
• 41:03
  to annoy the audience. And it's those moments, I think
• 41:05
  when people go this doesn't really work.
• 41:07
  But who was it who was picking up online in the week?
• 41:10
  I don't know if you saw this, that they were talking about
• 41:14
  modems and we didn't think modems existed then, but modems
• 41:17
  existed for about 1926. But it's one.
• 41:19
  Is it Pitbull? James Brother is a scientist,
• 41:22
  right? Yeah, stuff from them.
• 41:24
  So. That's that's the one bad side
• 41:26
  to those commentaries. They're so earnest when they
• 41:28
  talk about the research. Well, you know, Pip's brother is
• 41:32
  a scientist and he assured us that that's absolutely true.
• 41:40
  But. Yeah.
• 41:42
  Swinging his background to tear the verb Always.
• 41:45
  Yeah. Why don't you tell me why this
• 41:48
  isn't an Agatha Christie story? OK, so the clue is there.
• 41:54
  Obviously the Lasky's reading Murder on the Orient Express and
• 41:58
  other mysteries, isn't she? That we get big close up of the
• 42:01
  book in case we've missed her reading it earlier on.
• 42:04
  And writing it in the book as well, isn't she?
• 42:05
  I think. I think she's reading it in the
• 42:07
  book. She.
• 42:07
  Must be. And I think the whole business
• 42:09
  about the room numbers is a homage to the fact that Mrs.
• 42:13
  Hubbard has to use a different room on the way out when they
• 42:17
  trial run the murder as opposed to when it actually takes place.
• 42:20
  And of course, sorry Joe, I'm talking over you there again.
• 42:23
  Well, no. No, no, no.
• 42:24
  I'm not about to talk over you. At one point, you know, it does
• 42:28
  appear that everybody is up for no good.
• 42:30
  Is this like a good sort of murder mystery?
• 42:33
  Everybody does seem to have a motive for being doing something
• 42:36
  something. Corrupt my, my, my problem with
• 42:39
  it is things happen that there's no, it's not really explain why
• 42:42
  they do. I don't know why Dolan sets a
• 42:44
  booby trap on that gate. Oh, because he's evil, that's
• 42:48
  why. And he wants to murder.
• 42:49
  Lots of people that's. Not a great set piece, that's
• 42:54
  why. It's a great set piece.
• 42:55
  But he didn't. It could have been.
• 42:56
  It's a security. Measure what though?
• 42:59
  He doesn't because he wants all the light.
• 43:01
  Doesn't. He's for the Verbo's to pop out.
• 43:03
  Why does donor want the verbo's to pop out at that point in
• 43:05
  time? The whole point is to get them
• 43:07
  back to earth and then you sell sell them to this company.
• 43:11
  They use them for slow labour, there's no reason for to have
• 43:14
  them loose on the. Share He could have just taken
• 43:16
  the pods back and then just put them out in the sun.
• 43:19
  Which is clearly his plan because I, I, I, I also don't
• 43:22
  know who Hallett's investigating because why is he investigating
• 43:27
  this, the thermologist or agronomist?
• 43:30
  Because we, we don't know there's any evidence of any
• 43:32
  wrongdoing. Brooklyn is clearly really
• 43:34
  disturbed by what they've done. And there's been the infection
• 43:37
  of Ruth Baxter, but that's an accident that's not deliberate.
• 43:41
  And so, and he sends the message before he's dressed up as a
• 43:46
  Megarian and he's investigating them.
• 43:48
  And what does he? He steals the seeds, but the
• 43:50
  seeds are kind of a Macguffin because.
• 43:51
  Or there are, there are there are, there are a subplot that
• 43:53
  doesn't go anywhere because. He just leave a no for God's
• 43:57
  sake. So I don't understand and I
• 43:59
  don't Dolan, I don't know how he gets the poison into that
• 44:02
  horrible plastic pot of coffee that the Megarians are drinking
• 44:06
  in their straws like, like babies.
• 44:08
  It's really, really weird. And what's interesting in the in
• 44:16
  in the edit on the TV, once you take out the trial sequence, you
• 44:21
  don't necessarily know how the doctor realizes that the
• 44:24
  Megarian isn't Megarian. And so he doesn't get to show
• 44:26
  off his big Hercule Viro moment. I I suppose he talks about
• 44:30
  exercising the grey cells, doesn't he?
• 44:32
  And they are trapped on. Yeah, they can.
• 44:35
  Only the murderer can only be there on the ship.
• 44:38
  There's nowhere someone could have come from.
• 44:40
  So yeah, it's like, and then there were none.
• 44:42
  Or it's like, obviously murder on the express or like, even,
• 44:46
  say, murder Roger Ackroyd, where there's a lot placed on a
• 44:49
  footprint on the window sill to suggest it's someone from
• 44:52
  outside the house. But of course it isn't.
• 44:55
  I mean, Christie at her best. So in the like the run from the
• 44:59
  1920s through to about 195960, the plucking tends to be
• 45:06
  absolutely flawless. And it's only when you get into
• 45:08
  Latha Christie and interesting looking at Lucy Worsley's book
• 45:12
  on Agatha Christie, she's looked at or she's looked at someone
• 45:15
  else's research that compares Christie's sentence length and
• 45:20
  words that she uses in the later books compared with earlier.
• 45:24
  And the sentences are less complex and there's less the
• 45:29
  same words appear repeatedly, which they're suggesting is a
• 45:32
  sign of dementia. And so Christie, famously, the
• 45:35
  plots get much looser where you get to passenger to Frankfurt,
• 45:40
  which is one of her thrillers, where Colin's put an an
• 45:43
  entertainment or I know it's an extravaganza, Isn't it on the
• 45:46
  title page? Because the editor knows the
• 45:48
  plot makes no sense. Here it's about some child of
• 45:51
  Hitler that survives the war because it's a bit like boys
• 45:55
  from Brazil. This doesn't have the kind of
• 45:57
  tightness of a Christie plot, I don't think, because it prompts
• 46:00
  too many questions, because what Dolan does doesn't really make
• 46:03
  much sense because the last thing you need is the Vervoids
• 46:06
  going nuts. You're right, of course.
• 46:08
  We have lots of different potential suspects and these
• 46:12
  these various different plot lines that are running alongside
• 46:15
  you. But I don't think it really
• 46:16
  works as a. You think they're just throwing
• 46:19
  a lot of things at the screen hoping to distract you?
• 46:24
  No, I'm not sure it's that. I just.
• 46:25
  I just think because I don't know, was this a crisis
• 46:28
  production or it? Was yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 46:30
  They wrote it in a in a hurry, as usual.
• 46:33
  So they're not thinking in terms of does it make sense for Dolan
• 46:36
  to actually have done this that they need, they need a light
• 46:39
  source to get the Vervoids out of the pods.
• 46:42
  And what's the best? It's a great end of episode.
• 46:45
  They're great. You're right.
• 46:46
  They're absolutely brilliant on set pieces.
• 46:48
  What's interesting in the book is you get references to
• 46:51
  Vionesium throughout the story, that the sun lamp is the
• 46:55
  vionesium. So actually in the book they let
• 46:58
  they already introduce how they're going to resolve this
• 47:00
  and and it's really well done, I think because if you just read,
• 47:04
  I think. That's neat as well.
• 47:05
  That's very Christy in that the the the intro to the ship is
• 47:09
  they're taking a consignment of this rare metal vionesium that's
• 47:13
  right at the start of the story. And how do we conclude the
• 47:16
  story? The vionesium Mel, you know
• 47:19
  it's. It's neat.
• 47:20
  I mean, there's a sense that we don't don't think of it in terms
• 47:22
  of that because of Christie, but they're inviting us to.
• 47:24
  And that's the problem. Because it's not.
• 47:26
  I mean, I don't I Doctor Who doesn't really do murder
• 47:28
  mysteries that well. I think robots to death is the
• 47:30
  best of them. People misunderstand that
• 47:33
  because they're going. Yeah, but it can't be a murder
• 47:34
  mystery because, you know, the robots have done it straight
• 47:37
  away. Yes, because they're the weapon.
• 47:39
  It's Taron Capel is who you're looking for.
• 47:41
  But of course then the. Really bad way that they shoot
• 47:45
  that screen where you obvious Dask is Tarrant Capel in that
• 47:49
  and then you start thinking what is this meant to be a pastiche
• 47:52
  or a parody which would work because of course Talons is a
• 47:54
  parody and. I mean, sometimes it's nice to
• 47:57
  be a head though, right? When I figured out it was Dask,
• 48:00
  I'm like shit, well when are they going to figure out is
• 48:02
  Dask? It is, but it is.
• 48:04
  I don't think it's deliberate. I think, well, it's either
• 48:06
  deliberate, in which case it's a pastiche, or it's unfortunate
• 48:08
  shooting. There's a murder mystery in
• 48:10
  Marinus, isn't it? And the doctor investigates.
• 48:12
  That seems to work. Quite well, but it's quite
• 48:14
  slight. But then of course that's Terry
• 48:17
  Nation having worked across different genre or awareness of
• 48:20
  what's on the telly at that point.
• 48:21
  So it works quite well. There's a murder mystery in
• 48:24
  Mission to Destiny, isn't it? And that works quite well in in
• 48:27
  Blake 7. But the the clue is so bloody
• 48:29
  or. Oh, Sarah, Sarah.
• 48:32
  Is it 5? I know why it's an S.
• 48:34
  Come on Poirot, pack up mate. Time to go on holiday.
• 48:39
  All right, Terry Nation, I think Chris is doing all right.
• 48:43
  Our Cops, I suppose is an interesting one.
• 48:45
  We can try and do murder mysteries because of course it's
• 48:48
  going for crime drama in space, but I don't.
• 48:50
  By and large. Murder mysteries and Doctor Who.
• 48:53
  I'm not sure they're necessarily a particularly good fit.
• 48:55
  We recognise the fault, we recognise the story they're
• 48:58
  telling, right? Because it is like one of those
• 49:01
  Sunday night ones with all of these celebrity guest stars in
• 49:04
  there. We've been told there's a
• 49:06
  murderer involved and, you know, we're instantly in there sort of
• 49:10
  trying to figure out who's doing what, who's up to what.
• 49:12
  There's, there is a pic. You know, there's something odd
• 49:15
  going on in the isolation room. Clearly someone's dressed up as
• 49:18
  a McGee. There's weird stuff happening
• 49:20
  left, right. The the, the the.
• 49:22
  The, the, the use of red herrings is, is, is really good.
• 49:25
  And I think yeah, they, they, they can structure a plot.
• 49:28
  I think Raj suddenly turning around and that he's in this
• 49:31
  plot. The Magarians, I don't know if
• 49:33
  that comes too late because he's very rushed that.
• 49:36
  And in the book there's only about 20 pages left when they
• 49:39
  introduced that plot like. I do love though in the book how
• 49:41
  they really stress how sort of impotent.
• 49:44
  Right. Yeah, yeah, right.
• 49:45
  Yeah. And.
• 49:46
  How he's his nuts are constantly being grabbed by the cupboard
• 49:50
  door. I, I think, I think it works
• 49:53
  better in the book than on TV, actually, weirdly enough, I
• 49:55
  think you need that kind of that authorial intervention to go,
• 49:59
  this is a weak man, because then the Doctor starts looking at him
• 50:01
  strangely and the Inquisitor picks up on that.
• 50:04
  And I can't think that that's in the TV programme where she goes.
• 50:06
  You seemed perturbed by it. I was, as you will see, I mean
• 50:09
  the weird there's a weird moment in the book where the
• 50:13
  commodore's not sure what he should do and was it he says
• 50:15
  this, this Solomon like musing will end in catastrophe aren't?
• 50:21
  They they love Solomon. But then again, you know, it
• 50:25
  introduces an idea that a generation earlier, I mean, that
• 50:29
  would have been natural for them, the notion of the wisdom
• 50:31
  of Solomon. But but the time this goes to
• 50:33
  air in 8586, that's just starting to move out of common
• 50:37
  parlance. And so to have it in the book,
• 50:39
  it's kind of natural for them. I don't think it's a teaching
• 50:41
  moment, I just think it's natural.
• 50:43
  But it's that idea of a difficult decision.
• 50:44
  And the Commonwealth was to make a decision.
• 50:46
  He decides to do nothing. So again, I'd say I think it's,
• 50:50
  I think the book is more critical of the Commodore than
• 50:53
  the TV programme. Yeah, there's a lovely bit,
• 50:56
  isn't there, where the Commodore's just sitting on the
• 50:58
  bridge, Yeah, watching the ship sailing through space and
• 51:02
  thinking about his career. Yeah, I was like, whoa, I'm
• 51:05
  kind. Of done with a bit of that on
• 51:06
  the screen actually. I don't know how you do it
• 51:08
  that's the problem though because it was when the when the
• 51:10
  Commodore does think about his career you get the really over
• 51:12
  overwritten dialogue about the doctor and the the peril him an
• 51:16
  intrigue yeah yeah and you know although.
• 51:20
  In a, in a era full of, oh, I'm going to see my old friend
• 51:26
  Asmael Magellan, whoever in whatever story, I do think this
• 51:31
  is the most effective one. There's an immediate shorthand
• 51:34
  between the two of them because they know each other.
• 51:36
  I like the fact that he is outwardly dismissive of the
• 51:40
  Doctor, but actually he wants the Doctor to investigate.
• 51:43
  I think that's quite neat. It's a very Christy moment as
• 51:46
  well, of course, because it's in Murder on Neural Express.
• 51:51
  He's Bianchi in the film, but he's not Bianchi in the book, is
• 51:54
  he? Because he knows Poirot, he can
• 51:56
  invest. He can ask him to investigate
• 51:57
  him because he's the only authority figure from the Wagon
• 52:00
  Li company. He can do that.
• 52:02
  It's the same way in Oh God, what's that terrible one around
• 52:08
  the the archaeological dig. No, a point with death that the
• 52:14
  one at the dig is murdering Mesopotamia, which has one of
• 52:17
  the worst endings of Annie Christie whatsoever, you know,
• 52:20
  Oh my God, he was wearing a beard.
• 52:23
  The point with death, of course, because he knows the military
• 52:25
  officer is in charge. And of course, it's a lovely
• 52:27
  reminder about British Mandate and and because a text of its
• 52:31
  time becomes a historical document.
• 52:33
  See, the Commodore needs have that type of relationship with
• 52:35
  the Doctor because he just you could see a version of this
• 52:37
  where the Doctor gets locked up for most of the first episode
• 52:40
  and then the murder happens and the Commodore has to trust him.
• 52:42
  You don't need that. And so because they've got so
• 52:44
  much plot, let's just get the Doctor in his investigator.
• 52:47
  And yeah, it's a very paro moment there, I think, Roger.
• 52:50
  I think, I think that's the best criticism of the Colin Baker era
• 52:54
  of all in Trial of a Time Lord is because obviously is that's
• 52:57
  what's on trial at the point at this point, yeah, is when the
• 53:01
  Commodore says to the doctor, or why every time you turn up
• 53:04
  people seem to die. That's a very pointed line.
• 53:08
  Which is also the Valley Arts point.
• 53:10
  But of course, you know, it's it's corrupting the Valley Arts
• 53:12
  case. And again, it comes back to the
• 53:14
  doctor's got all access to all his potential futures.
• 53:17
  He picks this one and doesn't see that getting all the plants
• 53:21
  because he's a wishful. The Inquisitor does say you do
• 53:23
  seem to be flouting authority, Doctor.
• 53:25
  Rather. Than I mean, I think I think
• 53:28
  your point about the compost heap is an important one
• 53:33
  because, and it's a criticism of this, I think I think about time
• 53:37
  make the point and other people have that the doctor must surely
• 53:40
  know that in killing all the Vervoids that he it is an act of
• 53:45
  genocide. But is there a weird moment in
• 53:47
  which the doctor doesn't think the valley is as a separate
• 53:49
  species? Is he viewing things so
• 53:51
  differently? It wouldn't really be a doctor
• 53:54
  thing to do, but I can see that as the panic of writing it gets
• 53:58
  in you. You put that in there or that
• 54:00
  like some things are just so evil they have to be destroyed.
• 54:02
  Well, is he just so used to wiping out hole racing though
• 54:05
  the the Ice Warriors and seas of death, you know, sending them
• 54:08
  into the sun? He's so used to doing that sort
• 54:10
  of thing now, you don't even think of all they were evil, you
• 54:12
  know? Well, it's also, of course,
• 54:14
  because it's different from, say, the killing of Shock Eye in
• 54:20
  Two Doctors. Shock Eye is evil, but the way
• 54:23
  that he's dispatched it peculiarly brutal.
• 54:25
  And then you get the terrible James Bond type pun at the end.
• 54:28
  Whereas here there's a real sense in which if we don't do
• 54:31
  this, everyone will die. And then there's there's.
• 54:34
  An appropriately mournful tone as well.
• 54:37
  How sad it came to this. Yes, yeah.
• 54:41
  And I think, and it tracks back to how they write Baker at the
• 54:45
  start of the episode. I think they write Baker really.
• 54:48
  Really. Oh, I think they're the best
• 54:49
  writers, Baker. They they love Colin and they
• 54:53
  want to make Colin the hero of Doctor Who.
• 54:56
  And the one thing I think this gets absolutely bang on as a
• 55:00
  detective book is the Doctor and Mel investigating this story.
• 55:05
  I just think they're a great pairing.
• 55:09
  They are I mean Bonnie Langford gets a lot of stick but and but
• 55:13
  actually they can write Bonnie Langford, I think in a way a lot
• 55:17
  of other people can't or they don't really get what she can
• 55:21
  do. I think Clough the point is made
• 55:23
  before, isn't it that how she screams in key to into the into
• 55:28
  the theme tune at the end of one.
• 55:29
  She's a consummate performer and I within the how they devise
• 55:34
  this. I think she works really well.
• 55:36
  I think they do weird things that are in the book.
• 55:38
  I think that the nation's. Specialisation of that.
• 55:41
  Yeah, I. I don't know.
• 55:43
  It's, it's it's the fact that she's so raring to go.
• 55:45
  It's such a contrast to Tegan and Perry are always like, let's
• 55:49
  let's go back to the TARDIS. She comes dashing out going.
• 55:51
  Come on, Doctor, hurry up, you know.
• 55:54
  That's why I think in new who this kind of mournful male
• 56:01
  kicking around like lamenting the dead people or it's it's in
• 56:05
  it's in what's that really terrible book about the space
• 56:14
  angels and it's kind of it is fan wank.
• 56:17
  Isn't she in that one? The the oh, the quantum
• 56:20
  Archangel. Yeah, Isn't she in that and
• 56:22
  there's kind of. Yes, operatically.
• 56:24
  So. Yes, like.
• 56:25
  We're all kind of weird, miserable Mel, and it's really,
• 56:28
  really odd because the character is an upbeat figure.
• 56:34
  I think of male, right? I think of her climbing up the
• 56:37
  apparatus with the microphone. Yeah.
• 56:40
  Eavesdropping on the ver void, you know, and just totally
• 56:42
  getting involved. That seems even better in the
• 56:45
  book, of course, because then you know, really what she's done
• 56:47
  is she's looking around for amplifier and it's a, it's a
• 56:49
  really acute moment. The problem is then in rather
• 56:51
  than just hearing this kind of creepy hissing noise, which is
• 56:55
  what they're hearing and the racking that's really well done
• 56:57
  as well. You then get the whole info dump
• 57:00
  about what they're going to do, and with more time they might
• 57:03
  have come up with something better than that.
• 57:05
  But given what they've got, I think they do pretty well.
• 57:08
  I think they do every. Time she's in trouble in this
• 57:11
  story every time, like the electrified fence been shoved in
• 57:14
  that bin. It's because she's investigating
• 57:16
  and she's getting too close. There's a reason it's not just
• 57:18
  her being a victim. I think it's also indicative
• 57:23
  that Pip and Jane Baker probably haven't watched much Doctor Who
• 57:26
  up to that point. And they're looking, it's no,
• 57:29
  no, no, no, absolutely that they look back to an older model of
• 57:32
  the companion. And it's a kind of it's like the
• 57:35
  closest I think to Mel at this point is Zoe like up for the
• 57:41
  adventure got that kind of technological background, gets
• 57:45
  into trouble, gets out of scrapes or the Doctor or or
• 57:48
  Jamie that instance to save from the scrapes.
• 57:49
  And I think that kind of upbeat performance, kind of enjoying
• 57:58
  these things. There's a real, I mean, I think
• 58:00
  Janet Fielding. And it has to be at a script
• 58:03
  level, the fact that Tegan is there for so long and doesn't
• 58:06
  want to be there but can't escape from it.
• 58:08
  I mean, we talk about Clara and the Doctor being locked and then
• 58:11
  and Capaldi being locked into that kind of terrible thing,
• 58:15
  isn't it? It's worse at Tegan and
• 58:17
  Davidson, though, because you never really get a sense there
• 58:20
  of why she's staying with him. Because Davis is not allowed to
• 58:22
  be fun, so why are you staying here?
• 58:24
  He's quite boring. You're facing death every week.
• 58:28
  Why didn't you stay at Heathrow? At least with Clara you don't.
• 58:31
  You know, Capaldi, he's on a good, he's on a high, then he's
• 58:33
  on a low. It is very strange.
• 58:35
  So for Melton, let's go on adventure.
• 58:37
  It it was really, really good. And she makes astute
• 58:41
  observations throughout this story.
• 58:43
  She starts figuring things out. She's putting the finger at
• 58:46
  certain people. You know, she has that emotional
• 58:49
  reaction at the climate. I just think they, they, they
• 58:52
  give her a good start. And actually, when they take
• 58:54
  over in Part 14, suddenly Mel's really proactive again.
• 58:59
  She's running into the Matrix for trolls and illusion, you
• 59:02
  know, and they're having fun interactions.
• 59:03
  You know, that bit where where he goes, don't open that a joke
• 59:06
  of the door. There's that monster there.
• 59:09
  She's got better dialogue and what what's interesting, of
• 59:13
  course, that having written a who done it, what they avoid is
• 59:17
  Mel as Watson as idiot, which of course had had dogs adaptations
• 59:24
  of Sherlock Holmes up until Grenada and Grenada's on by this
• 59:28
  point. David Burke is Watson by this
• 59:30
  point. I think they're just moving into
• 59:32
  Edward Brett. And what's notable in the in the
• 59:36
  Grenada version is they don't make Watson an idiot.
• 59:39
  They make him. He's intelligent.
• 59:43
  He can ask the questions because it's so often the story is
• 59:45
  Watson falls asleep, he wakes up, Holmes has solved it and and
• 59:49
  the, you know, Nigel Bruce's bumbling version becomes the
• 59:52
  version people think about Watson.
• 59:54
  But actually, that's never what Watson's meant to be.
• 59:56
  I it must be before this, Michael Dipton wrote a Sherlock
• 1:00:01
  Holmes story called The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, and
• 1:00:05
  they're investigating Jack the Ripper.
• 1:00:06
  And it turns out that Sherlock Holmes is Jack the Ripper.
• 1:00:09
  Which kind of makes sense, of course, because, yeah, in Ripper
• 1:00:12
  ology, he's got sort of a medical background.
• 1:00:14
  Well, the first time we meet Holmes in studying Scala, he's
• 1:00:16
  in, he's in the dissecting lab. And of course, Watson is a
• 1:00:19
  doctor. So Watson views Holmes butcher
• 1:00:22
  in some woman's body through a window.
• 1:00:24
  He spies on him. So again, it's all kind of about
• 1:00:26
  watching things. So there's a, there's a sense in
• 1:00:28
  which you've got a, a, a revised version of the detective
• 1:00:34
  assistant relationship. And I think you see it here.
• 1:00:36
  Weird enough when they do the Poirot's for ITV, they're going
• 1:00:40
  to go full on Hastings as full. But occasionally he makes the
• 1:00:43
  right point. But of course that's part of the
• 1:00:45
  problem with Christie's. Christie's version of Hastings,
• 1:00:48
  he's only really interested, I think in in curtain when he
• 1:00:51
  comes back and then there's a real kind of emotional heft to
• 1:00:54
  him. Where is this Vervoys?
• 1:00:56
  They are doing something different.
• 1:00:57
  There they are. It's yeah, the great lie around
• 1:01:02
  Bonnie Langford is all she does is scream, and it's kind of real
• 1:01:05
  throwback. It's not.
• 1:01:06
  Do you know what they say? They say in the verbalized
• 1:01:10
  commentary? We never wrote a single screen
• 1:01:13
  for Bonnie Langford. No.
• 1:01:14
  Those were forced upon us by them.
• 1:01:16
  He wanted screams at the climaxes and all of this.
• 1:01:19
  Just. We wanted her just to be, you
• 1:01:22
  know, they didn't say full of spunk.
• 1:01:24
  That's me talking there. But yeah.
• 1:01:26
  But it's the old Barry. Let's throwback to a description
• 1:01:29
  of Sarah. Isn't it that she's full of
• 1:01:30
  spunk? You know, she's a journalist and
• 1:01:31
  she's full of spunk and it because that's working.
• 1:01:34
  Journalists investigate things independently.
• 1:01:35
  And so she's this kind of 2nd wave feminist figure.
• 1:01:38
  You know what's interesting as well, though?
• 1:01:40
  It's like Pip and Jane have looked at where we've been in 22
• 1:01:44
  with the sick Doctor and Perry. Yeah, Yeah.
• 1:01:46
  And they're like, well, this is in the future.
• 1:01:48
  Let's suggest that time's moved on.
• 1:01:49
  He's mellowed and like, there's a line in the two doctors where
• 1:01:53
  he says, what is it? Small although it is, the human
• 1:01:55
  brain is quite effective when used properly, and it's a proper
• 1:01:59
  insult. Whereas here he goes, well, come
• 1:02:01
  on, Mel, you've got a good brain.
• 1:02:03
  Think. And she starts thinking it
• 1:02:05
  through. And there's just such a tangible
• 1:02:06
  difference with how he treats Mel to how he treated Perry.
• 1:02:10
  Yeah. I, I there's.
• 1:02:12
  There's a whole version of this where you don't get tied up into
• 1:02:18
  Doctor as like morose and kind of verbose and borderline
• 1:02:24
  abusive. Of course across 22, which is
• 1:02:27
  why season 8 of the revival is such a weird decision.
• 1:02:30
  They go down that route because Blake can do kindness, he can do
• 1:02:34
  charm. You can see it there when he's
• 1:02:35
  trying to charm Janet. Oh, the flowers.
• 1:02:38
  Yeah, that bit I love. It I, I, I just, I'm be doing
• 1:02:43
  it. And I'm shocked to discover that
• 1:02:44
  that she was, she died and she was really young when she died.
• 1:02:47
  She was, she Thingy's daughter, isn't she?
• 1:02:52
  She was in, isn't she? What's Derek Sherwin's wife
• 1:02:56
  called? Oh, Jane.
• 1:02:58
  Jane Sherwin. Yeah, wasn't she?
• 1:03:00
  Doesn't she play her mother in pressure point?
• 1:03:03
  She's not a mother in real life though, is she?
• 1:03:04
  No, that's right. I've got that wrong.
• 1:03:06
  Isn't in. Yeah, I think they're mother and
• 1:03:10
  Dorothy. I was really because I mean,
• 1:03:11
  Janet is a weird. It's like the obvious culprit,
• 1:03:15
  right? Pro 80s, you know, putting some
• 1:03:17
  white stilettos and that type of makeup and it's a nothing role,
• 1:03:20
  but actually she does it really, really well.
• 1:03:22
  I feel like she's the one who's acting naturalistically in the
• 1:03:25
  program. She's she's playing it just like
• 1:03:28
  a normal person surrounded by all these outrageous guest
• 1:03:31
  performances. Yeah.
• 1:03:31
  And I think because the stewardess is meant to be the
• 1:03:35
  kind of calm space there at the centre of it.
• 1:03:38
  They do point the finger at male, does, doesn't she?
• 1:03:41
  She goes, oh, the stewardess, Janet, and the doctor goes
• 1:03:43
  Janet, you know. Where of course it could be a
• 1:03:46
  sly nod, but he probably isn't because it's too obscure a text.
• 1:03:49
  But in Death in the Clouds Christie, which of course would
• 1:03:52
  be completely misunderstood in in knew who is the murderers
• 1:03:57
  disguised as a steward. That's how he gets the poison
• 1:03:59
  into the the the old money lender.
• 1:04:02
  What do you think about the doctors bluff with Dolan when he
• 1:04:09
  brings him out into the light? It I it reminds me of the of
• 1:04:15
  where eagles dare, weirdly enough, which is one of my
• 1:04:18
  favorite films and like because I'm I'm full on a Patrick Wymark
• 1:04:22
  fanboy moment because I'm watching the power game, which
• 1:04:25
  is one of the great TV programmes.
• 1:04:27
  Get on it on YouTube everyone, because the with network gone
• 1:04:31
  you're only paying over the top on eBay though I got a cheap
• 1:04:34
  addition. Why Marcus 2nd doctor is another
• 1:04:36
  thing that's blown my mind in the last three weeks.
• 1:04:38
  They apparently was going to be offered second doctor and he was
• 1:04:41
  offered Theodore Maxwell but he couldn't do it.
• 1:04:43
  But if you know where eagles there the business with the
• 1:04:47
  doctor writing the note and passing it to the Commodore kind
• 1:04:52
  of echoes when Richard Burton's character is writing stuff down
• 1:04:55
  in the notebooks and he gets them to confirm about realizing
• 1:04:58
  they're confirming who the master spy is.
• 1:05:01
  And then the business with the gun.
• 1:05:02
  Because when they're collected by the on the plane at the end
• 1:05:05
  of where eagles there and the master spy is on there and
• 1:05:08
  Burton goes, you are pointing that gun at me, aren't you, Cap
• 1:05:11
  Colonel? And then the gun, the trigger is
• 1:05:13
  pulled, but the firing pin has been removed by Michael Hall,
• 1:05:17
  Jordan's character. It's exactly the same, very,
• 1:05:20
  very similar to it. And yeah, that's why I like it,
• 1:05:25
  because it makes me think of We're Eagles there.
• 1:05:26
  And it's one of my favorite films.
• 1:05:27
  Does it work? I think he has to lure him out,
• 1:05:30
  doesn't he? And that notion of the Judas
• 1:05:31
  goat has been running through. And again, a phrase that no one
• 1:05:35
  has used since about 19. 60s except Doctor Who fans talking
• 1:05:41
  about this story. It's weirdly enough when when
• 1:05:45
  you go into Red Hill, there's a pub called, I think it's called
• 1:05:50
  the Jericho Tree or the Judas Tree.
• 1:05:53
  But every time I see it I immediately think Judas Goat.
• 1:05:56
  So Pip and Jane have infected me.
• 1:05:58
  Is it affected? I suppose the problem is there's
• 1:06:01
  no other way of really revealing who's done it.
• 1:06:04
  I don't know why Dolan's kept that tape, weirdly enough, given
• 1:06:07
  there's a pulveriser and there's, I don't know why he's
• 1:06:09
  kept like some type of trophy. I think the use of the tape is
• 1:06:14
  really interesting. I don't, I don't think we get a
• 1:06:16
  real sense of the pulveriser as threat, which we should do
• 1:06:20
  because when we think that Hallett's gone into the
• 1:06:22
  pulveriser earlier on, we've clearly meant to remember that
• 1:06:25
  and and the kind of sense of horror.
• 1:06:27
  Don't have a lie in it. They they need flames or
• 1:06:30
  something. They do.
• 1:06:32
  I mean, it's not quite as bad as the pulveriser in Underworld,
• 1:06:36
  but it's getting close to the pulveriser in Underworld.
• 1:06:39
  You. Had to get something in, didn't
• 1:06:41
  you? It has.
• 1:06:41
  To be an Underworld reference. Yeah, I think.
• 1:06:44
  I think, yeah. I like it because it makes you
• 1:06:45
  think of one of my favorite films.
• 1:06:49
  Does it work as a means of doing it?
• 1:06:51
  I mean, what you couldn't have. And of course it's a great light
• 1:06:54
  that Christie does this because it's a TV thing of gather all
• 1:06:56
  the suspects in the room and then Colin Baker would reveal
• 1:06:59
  who the killer was because at that point there's not many
• 1:07:01
  suspects left. And there's also essentially.
• 1:07:03
  There's enough, though. There's enough Janet, the
• 1:07:05
  Commodore Dolan plants around. That's the issue.
• 1:07:09
  I mean, the Commodore's killer would have been wild, but it's
• 1:07:12
  not structured in that way at all.
• 1:07:15
  I. Still want it to be Janet.
• 1:07:16
  I want her to go off. You know when the Doctor's
• 1:07:18
  singing his opera The Tard, and then she goes around the corner
• 1:07:20
  and berries an axe in the Commodore?
• 1:07:22
  You know it was her all along. She she's.
• 1:07:25
  Stolen. It would make less sense than
• 1:07:28
  what Dolan does because, I mean, that's the major issue.
• 1:07:30
  I can, I can see the plot about using them.
• 1:07:33
  And of course it brings up a discussion about ethics and
• 1:07:35
  there's about history as well. Really quite pointed comment
• 1:07:38
  there about Rome being built on slavery.
• 1:07:40
  Which. Yeah, I love that.
• 1:07:44
  Like dangerous woke lefties. You know a.
• 1:07:46
  Pretty unpromising end though, didn't it?
• 1:07:50
  And again. Like the Doctor has the kind of
• 1:07:52
  moral figure who pushes back on this, but it comes back to he
• 1:07:56
  needs those plants to take them back to Earth to sell to this
• 1:08:00
  conglomerate. The last thing he needs is them
• 1:08:02
  wandering around this spaceship killing people.
• 1:08:05
  But then I suppose it's about, it's about a science experiment
• 1:08:07
  that gets out of control. So you do it in a confined space
• 1:08:11
  to really emphasize what will happen when they get to it.
• 1:08:15
  Because a bit in the book isn't there.
• 1:08:17
  They mankind could have retreated to the desert areas,
• 1:08:19
  but the Vervoys would have adapted.
• 1:08:21
  And so there's a sense of the adaptive.
• 1:08:23
  There's a bit of triffids in there as well, of course,
• 1:08:25
  because the triffids are genetically engineered plants,
• 1:08:27
  aren't they? We think they're from space, but
• 1:08:29
  they're not. It's the it's the meteorite
• 1:08:33
  shower that blinds everyone and then the trippers take over.
• 1:08:35
  So that's in there as well. Again, it's not it's not a
• 1:08:38
  detective drama. That's there's a kind of a
• 1:08:40
  really weird collection of things working in this, and it
• 1:08:44
  works are. The only writers that remember
• 1:08:47
  to give the 6th Doctor a conscience, remember that scene
• 1:08:49
  in Mark of the Rani where he's like, you know, these are human
• 1:08:51
  beings, Rani, they've done you no harm.
• 1:08:54
  And in this, it's like it's slave labour for God's sakes,
• 1:08:57
  you know? And yeah, Irani again, I.
• 1:09:00
  Think it's important because otherwise he just comes across
• 1:09:02
  as a a violent thug sometimes. I think it's a necessary
• 1:09:06
  corrective and I think I think Mark Arani is the still centre
• 1:09:09
  of Season 22. It's it's a reminder of what
• 1:09:11
  Doctor Who can do and probably what he should do as opposed to
• 1:09:15
  all the madness around the other story.
• 1:09:18
  Of course, that's close to that. Weird enough is Time Lash.
• 1:09:25
  Don't disagree, actually, I think there are many problems in
• 1:09:28
  its execution, but I think it is a a reminder that Doctor Who
• 1:09:32
  could be fun and and Pacey Pope, you know, with a bit of history.
• 1:09:38
  But yeah, yeah, there's some good stuff in there.
• 1:09:42
  So it's it's interesting. They're the two reviled scripts
• 1:09:44
  from 22. And I think fandom might be
• 1:09:48
  wrong here. I think they might be wrong in.
• 1:09:50
  They are Paul. Yeah, they are.
• 1:09:52
  But but this I think. Yeah.
• 1:09:54
  I mean, this is this is really good.
• 1:09:57
  The book. Yeah.
• 1:09:58
  I mean, it's got some purple crows in it, but it's Pip and
• 1:10:00
  Jane. What do I expect?
• 1:10:01
  It's a good adaptation. It it doesn't expand it as much
• 1:10:04
  as maybe you'd like some of the better targets do, but it
• 1:10:07
  expands where it needs to. And you do get a sense of
• 1:10:10
  interiority. You you up Kimber's tragedy
• 1:10:13
  because he's the most tragic figure there.
• 1:10:15
  And you do get a real sense of how horrible the Vervoids are.
• 1:10:18
  And also you haven't got their weird mouth.
• 1:10:20
  My wife said to me that book down the table, it won't look
• 1:10:24
  like that. And then she did this kind of
• 1:10:26
  weird half squat to suggest like what the Vervoids look like now.
• 1:10:31
  I was at the birth of all three of my children.
• 1:10:34
  But water bursts and Caesareans, you don't get that kind of sense
• 1:10:39
  of what's on this front cover, which is worse than the TV
• 1:10:42
  program because the way it's shot, of course, that's their
• 1:10:45
  weird neck thing there, isn't it?
• 1:10:46
  But. The shape of this it's so it is
• 1:10:50
  so apparent. So there's a kind of vagina
• 1:10:56
  dentate message in the book or on the cover of the book and
• 1:10:59
  partly in the TV room. There's not actually in the book
• 1:11:01
  itself. I didn't know.
• 1:11:03
  They work really well in the book.
• 1:11:04
  The dialogue is awful though. There should have been a
• 1:11:06
  decision made to remove the dialogue, I think.
• 1:11:08
  But that's not how that what's this is this is the year after
• 1:11:12
  it's published. Oh, it's on the TV, isn't it?
• 1:11:14
  It's, it's 87 the novelisation. So you're not into you're just
• 1:11:21
  coming up to a different way of writing those target books.
• 1:11:25
  You're getting into what Cotton were written by this point.
• 1:11:29
  But then the the the new boys. Right though, Right.
• 1:11:32
  Is that, like, Mark is a massive fan and he's a big nostalgia
• 1:11:36
  fan, and he loves the Goosebumps books from when he was younger,
• 1:11:39
  right? Yeah.
• 1:11:40
  And I picked one up the other day and I'm like, my God, this
• 1:11:42
  is just like Pip and Jane. Lots of dot, dot dots, lots of
• 1:11:45
  moments of tension all the time, you know, but very simply told.
• 1:11:49
  But the difference between Goosebumps and this is, you
• 1:11:52
  know, would a child understand what a recalcitrant assistant
• 1:11:56
  is? You know, would they understand
• 1:11:58
  quixotic gestures? Were the doctors prerogative.
• 1:12:02
  I mean, you'd have to have a dictionary by your side to read
• 1:12:04
  this book sometimes. But that's what I did.
• 1:12:07
  If there was a word on Doctor Who I like the sound of, I'd go
• 1:12:09
  and try and look. But you.
• 1:12:10
  Literally were that person that they talk about finding.
• 1:12:14
  It yeah, I'm pretty sure I learned Quixotic from Doctor Who
• 1:12:18
  and not from Don Quixote or Don Quixote.
• 1:12:20
  I'm pretty sure I remember. I really did stare in my mind.
• 1:12:24
  Now, obviously, you know, when you're watching the war games,
• 1:12:27
  Zoe describes the screen as a complete anachronism.
• 1:12:31
  And so one day at school anyway, I know for a fact it was year
• 1:12:36
  eight. I can see it now.
• 1:12:37
  And now we're in the classroom upstairs.
• 1:12:39
  And the teacher went, what? What's a word for something that
• 1:12:42
  doesn't belong in that time? And I go, anachronism and the
• 1:12:45
  classroom. Wow, it's the same way with
• 1:12:53
  there's a one. I did the same thing with anti
• 1:12:55
  diluvian, you know, thanks to Pip and Jane Baker.
• 1:12:58
  Is a great one. I use anti diluvian a lot.
• 1:13:01
  It's the same way with when in Talons, which of course I don't
• 1:13:05
  watch anymore, but the Doctor quotes there's a one eyed yellow
• 1:13:07
  idol to the north of Kathmandu. There's a little marble cross
• 1:13:10
  above the town. I was playing the first of the
• 1:13:12
  Dizzy computer games and that text scrolled across the screen
• 1:13:16
  and I recognized it because it's not Harry Chapman.
• 1:13:18
  It is, it's Kipling. It's a misquotation from the
• 1:13:20
  Doctor, but Doctor Who is great for that.
• 1:13:22
  But it it probably says more about us as viewers and readers
• 1:13:26
  that we want to go and find out what that word is.
• 1:13:28
  What's interesting, of course, Pip and Jane do write for
• 1:13:30
  children. They have got children's books
• 1:13:32
  and they will write what on earth after this, won't they?
• 1:13:35
  So they are, they've got a very strange career that they go from
• 1:13:40
  those kind of pulpy films and they're writing children's and
• 1:13:42
  they're writing this as kind of for children and adults.
• 1:13:46
  What's it called again when he could turn into different
• 1:13:48
  things? I, I, I, I don't know it at all.
• 1:13:50
  So I'd have to, I'd have to go back and check on it, but I
• 1:13:52
  don't. I don't know what on earth at
• 1:13:53
  all. Something transmogrify.
• 1:13:55
  That's what I want. That's a Pippin Jane word,
• 1:13:58
  didn't it now? You say it's purple, The pros,
• 1:13:59
  yeah, and I do agree it's as purple as a bruise.
• 1:14:02
  In place. Spark.
• 1:14:04
  It was constantly making me smile.
• 1:14:05
  I mean, listen to this, please. A courteous gesture that speed
• 1:14:09
  male on her way to a grizzly disposal.
• 1:14:12
  Her erstwhile assistant had cast the innocent collector in the
• 1:14:17
  role of an accomplice to murder. There lay male in blissful
• 1:14:22
  repose. I mean, it's just, it's mad, but
• 1:14:26
  I love it. I mean, there's a sense in which
• 1:14:29
  they're writing penny dreadfuls, yes.
• 1:14:31
  And I think that's not a bad analogy for them either.
• 1:14:34
  The kind of collection of things and the Horror Story that's
• 1:14:37
  there. There is a there is a penny
• 1:14:39
  penny dreadful to their prize, I think.
• 1:14:41
  But I they're they're great. Pippen Jones.
• 1:14:43
  Why? Is all of this, what is it?
• 1:14:45
  I just have to ask one last one. What is all of this sort of
• 1:14:50
  asking questions to the reader? They do it all the time for
• 1:14:53
  them. And at one point they go, was it
• 1:14:54
  light illuminated the patient? That's that.
• 1:14:57
  What's her name? Ruth Baxter.
• 1:14:59
  Ruth Baxter. And then they go just one line.
• 1:15:02
  And what a patience. Yeah, horrible.
• 1:15:05
  Line it's like because, you know is it is it a sexy plant woman
• 1:15:10
  that you're suggesting there? Yeah, that that's a horrible
• 1:15:12
  line. But yeah, the the the the
• 1:15:14
  questions was I mean, I have I've underlined in the book and
• 1:15:17
  I've turned page over like it was a proper academic book.
• 1:15:19
  I was looking on O2. More rivals Brooklyn and Donna
• 1:15:24
  reported to the Pert stewardess Janet.
• 1:15:28
  Listen to this Fear is a is a contagion, an emotional virus,
• 1:15:33
  imperceptible with elevating strength.
• 1:15:35
  It spreads, eroding the fortitude of even the most
• 1:15:39
  stalwarts. Theories of virus would have
• 1:15:42
  done there for what? They, yes, but you probably
• 1:15:45
  could have given a simpler reading to every line.
• 1:15:48
  I that's the problem, isn't it? Because the point they're trying
• 1:15:51
  to make gets overwhelmed by the need to add unnecessary
• 1:15:54
  subclauses to the sentence. The point there is is Brookner.
• 1:15:57
  Brookner's afraid, isn't he? Isn't that the point that when
• 1:16:00
  they use the fear, but I can't remember.
• 1:16:01
  Oh no, no, he's. So it's the guard who goes
• 1:16:03
  around the corner and then gets caught by the verb void.
• 1:16:06
  That's the occasional. Bit right?
• 1:16:07
  You know, the bit I talked about, the Commodore sitting on
• 1:16:09
  the bridge most of his this adult life he spent traversing
• 1:16:12
  the celestial ocean with its impersonal hostility.
• 1:16:15
  And from the beginning, he had never managed to shake off the
• 1:16:18
  feeling of vulnerability. And now the enemy was within.
• 1:16:22
  That's kind of simple. It's quite beautiful.
• 1:16:25
  Because it also plays, it tells us about the Commodore that he's
• 1:16:28
  losing control of this situation and he can't rely on Raj and as
• 1:16:32
  he's because he's a very small crew, weirdly enough as well.
• 1:16:34
  Of course, there's probably a version this for a lot of it is
• 1:16:37
  automated. So it's a bit like some of the
• 1:16:39
  ships in like 7 where you need a minimal crew because you haven't
• 1:16:43
  got the budget, but also for narrative purposes.
• 1:16:46
  Did you notice as well during the climax, you know, when they
• 1:16:48
  plunged the ship Into Darkness, how they describe the the ship
• 1:16:53
  just falling silent in the Dead Space?
• 1:16:55
  That was really a vocative resource.
• 1:16:57
  They can't do it. They're very good on silence,
• 1:17:00
  actually, weird enough for people who have to fill all
• 1:17:02
  their page with noise. They're very, very good on
• 1:17:05
  silence. And again, I think it's because
• 1:17:06
  they've got a sense of creeping dread because what what what's
• 1:17:11
  quite good in this is the idea you've got the murder, but then
• 1:17:15
  you've got something else is going on there.
• 1:17:18
  You've got something, it's kind of a clash between a horror film
• 1:17:20
  and A and a detective novel or detective story, which I think
• 1:17:24
  it works well. I mean, if you look at Robin was
• 1:17:26
  to death, the the horror and the detective element are combined.
• 1:17:31
  These are they're two separate plot lines here.
• 1:17:32
  So of course you've got and they're not red herrings.
• 1:17:34
  Actually, they run in parallel with each other.
• 1:17:36
  Ruth is a red herring. I've got a line for you,
• 1:17:38
  actually, which sums up the horror and the detective.
• 1:17:42
  And there's a dot dot dot in the middle as well.
• 1:17:47
  So the mystery is whatever had been inside was now free dot dot
• 1:17:51
  dot mystery free and shuffling towards the unsuspecting guard
• 1:17:56
  Horror. There you go.
• 1:17:58
  There you go. I suppose the the problem I
• 1:18:03
  think is they know that for the most part, the only people who
• 1:18:10
  would read these on publication had seen the TV programme.
• 1:18:14
  I think that would be a reasonable assumption by that
• 1:18:16
  point, wouldn't it? They they're not necessarily
• 1:18:18
  thinking in terms of people like ourselves who this was probably
• 1:18:23
  our first exposure to Verve voice rather than watching it on
• 1:18:25
  on the video, I think. That's what I think it was at
• 1:18:28
  this point. They're such professionals, they
• 1:18:31
  they absolutely will do the assignment that they're given.
• 1:18:33
  And I think at this point it's before Nigel Robinson came in
• 1:18:37
  with the tar gears and JNT was insisting what was on the screen
• 1:18:41
  is what we want on the page and they deliver that.
• 1:18:44
  They do, but I think I think you probably want more in terms of
• 1:18:49
  like descriptions of the noises these because then the noise.
• 1:18:54
  I don't think the TV is as good as it should be in getting just
• 1:18:57
  the kind of unsettling nature of the noise that these creatures
• 1:19:00
  make and you get that sense of shuffling.
• 1:19:03
  I mean, you want the kind of soundscape that you get with
• 1:19:06
  seed to do. I mean, I'm no great lover of
• 1:19:08
  seed to do, but I think some of the noises associated with the
• 1:19:10
  crinoid in that you want here and you want more of that.
• 1:19:13
  In the book there's a reliance on that.
• 1:19:15
  You know what a Vervoid looks like, whereas actually could
• 1:19:17
  have taken the opportunity to change what the Vervoid.
• 1:19:21
  But Dominican Turner wouldn't have liked that.
• 1:19:24
  They do also like the fact that they have a gift for hyperbole.
• 1:19:27
  The crime we're committing in the name of science will make us
• 1:19:31
  infamous. I mean, people just don't say
• 1:19:33
  things like that enough anymore, you know, they.
• 1:19:34
  Don't. But again, it comes.
• 1:19:36
  It's part of that really interesting discussion about
• 1:19:38
  morality and science because, you know, it's almost like, and
• 1:19:41
  here's the overstatement of the day, Tear the Vervoy.
• 1:19:44
  It's kind of like Oppenheimer. Please continue because it's a
• 1:19:49
  discussion about we can, we can do this thing, but should we do
• 1:19:53
  this thing because of Oppenheimer?
• 1:19:55
  It's about ending a, a war, whereas this is about economics.
• 1:19:59
  And you know, there's a line there.
• 1:20:01
  I think the Vervoids, the Vervoids.
• 1:20:03
  The Vervoids will not be slaves, which I don't think is in the TV
• 1:20:06
  programme. But it's interesting because of
• 1:20:08
  course, you know, if I wanted to, I'd argue that they're
• 1:20:10
  deliberately evoking rule Britannia and Britains will
• 1:20:13
  never be slaves. And therefore it challenges the
• 1:20:15
  audience to see it from the Vervoids perspective.
• 1:20:18
  That they're going to be enslaved.
• 1:20:20
  They know they're going to be enslaved, and therefore they
• 1:20:21
  fight against it. And who are they fighting
• 1:20:23
  against? They make their victims, though,
• 1:20:24
  even though they're murdering everybody, yeah.
• 1:20:26
  Yeah, because it it, it complicates it.
• 1:20:28
  Again, it's Pip and Jane. They're meant to be simple, but
• 1:20:31
  actually they're bringing in these really interesting and
• 1:20:34
  challenging questions around morality and action and
• 1:20:38
  scientific advancement. And there's no, you know, Lasky.
• 1:20:41
  Lasky bristles when Bruckner suggests that she wants to live
• 1:20:47
  on her name. She wants to be like Galileo.
• 1:20:49
  He's up there with Lasky, uphill Galileo.
• 1:20:51
  And she says it's a team effort. But I don't know.
• 1:20:53
  I think Brooke was probably on to something there, that this is
• 1:20:56
  the Lasky project and that she'll be one of these great
• 1:20:58
  scientists. But it's all gone horribly wrong
• 1:21:00
  because they've gone from me in Oppenheimer to Frankenstein.
• 1:21:04
  And like, like you said, they are, they are stuffing in a lot,
• 1:21:06
  yeah, a ton of influences and ideas and some things that get
• 1:21:09
  paid off and some things that don't need to be there.
• 1:21:12
  And it all just sort of washes up.
• 1:21:15
  Let's call it Kaiser pudding, shall we?
• 1:21:17
  But like, they throw away lines like this, which I was like, oh
• 1:21:21
  God, I'd like to hear that explored more.
• 1:21:23
  Which will soon be exhausted if these Earthlings are not
• 1:21:26
  restrained. They're going through the
• 1:21:27
  universe like a plague of interplanetary loskis.
• 1:21:32
  I, I, I and there's a lot here. There's nothing here that
• 1:21:36
  doesn't work. It's a weird success in that you
• 1:21:40
  see this in Doctor Who, the things that just don't work and
• 1:21:42
  shouldn't be in stories. There's nothing in this story
• 1:21:45
  that doesn't work. It just needs a bit of finessing
• 1:21:48
  in places. It needs lower lighting, but
• 1:21:50
  that's the 1980s all over. It needs a better looking set,
• 1:21:54
  so it needs more money, and it just the Dolan's motivation
• 1:21:58
  needs a bit of tweaking. But everything else, it works so
• 1:22:01
  well together. There's no sense in which the
• 1:22:03
  gears crunch as they're changing gear.
• 1:22:06
  Yeah, again, I've said already that the, the the Rudge plot
• 1:22:10
  line kind of feels tacked on, but I'll live with it because
• 1:22:13
  you've got another plot. You've the verb was running
• 1:22:15
  alongside that. I think it it works remarkably
• 1:22:18
  well on the TV. It works as well as a book.
• 1:22:20
  But if you don't like Book and Jane, you're not, you're not
• 1:22:22
  going to get it. But you should probably just
• 1:22:24
  try. With the with the Rudge hijack,
• 1:22:27
  with Brookner trying to push them into the black hole of
• 1:22:30
  Tartarus, with the verve, it just feels like the peril's
• 1:22:32
  stacking up. That's what I like.
• 1:22:34
  So there's tons of momentum and it's like, Oh my God, the
• 1:22:36
  doctor's got assault back and that and that.
• 1:22:38
  Admittedly, the murderer solves half of those problems by just
• 1:22:41
  killing everybody. But and.
• 1:22:43
  What's interesting because you don't get so the cut the cuts
• 1:22:47
  way to the court and not allowed to break up the tension in the
• 1:22:53
  at the end of the story, there's a sense in which.
• 1:22:56
  Of the ending. You can't.
• 1:22:59
  I love Jason's delivery. Oh yeah.
• 1:23:01
  No, I mean once the. Brunch must now be genocide.
• 1:23:05
  And then a terrible bit of sin. But yeah, it's a, and again, it
• 1:23:08
  shows that in the wider narrative things now ratchet up
• 1:23:11
  as well. You've had this ratcheting up in
• 1:23:14
  the individual story and then it, it's part of the wider
• 1:23:16
  narrative. Now the doctors are much more
• 1:23:18
  serious, which has been, of course, the the shape of the
• 1:23:20
  season. It starts as an enquiry, it
• 1:23:22
  becomes a trial and now it's a trial for genocide.
• 1:23:26
  And then where do you go after that?
• 1:23:27
  Actually discover that the Doctor is now persecuting
• 1:23:30
  himself. And I know it's messy.
• 1:23:34
  I know a lot of it was done. It was born of desperation.
• 1:23:38
  It's a lot better than people say it is.
• 1:23:40
  Oh. Absolutely.
• 1:23:41
  But again, it's part of it's it's Baker Derangement Syndrome.
• 1:23:44
  They just don't like those two seasons.
• 1:23:46
  They don't always going to come after it either.
• 1:23:47
  But then then they're missing so much with McCoy and yeah,
• 1:23:51
  there's, there's a lot here. Of course, it could be a lot
• 1:23:53
  better. It's it's the messiest part of
• 1:23:55
  the of the entire original run of Doctor Who.
• 1:23:58
  It's the one where it's the hardest to go.
• 1:24:01
  That's one of my favourite stories.
• 1:24:02
  I put that in the top ten because there's a problem with
• 1:24:04
  all of them. But they're I, like I said to,
• 1:24:06
  to last night to, to sight in the 25th anniversary edition,
• 1:24:13
  the special DWM where they do an overview of each season of each
• 1:24:17
  period up to that point, each doctor up to that point.
• 1:24:19
  They make the point that they come close to making a style of
• 1:24:23
  their own. And then something cocks it up.
• 1:24:26
  And I think that's absolutely right.
• 1:24:27
  There's unforced errors. The money's not there.
• 1:24:30
  But the at its best, it's got a vision that's unlike anything
• 1:24:34
  you see maybe since Williams at its best, it doesn't have the
• 1:24:39
  kind of guiding hand of Williams and Reed in 15 and then Williams
• 1:24:44
  and Reed in in in 16. It's a kind of a sense in which
• 1:24:46
  a lot of his accidental, I don't think, say Ward's sitting down
• 1:24:49
  and thinking things through. James, he certainly isn't.
• 1:24:52
  So even more remarkable. They get what they do on the
• 1:24:55
  screen. There are problems, of course
• 1:24:57
  there are. But I think and then and at the
• 1:24:59
  heart of it are this strange old couple who appear to emerge out
• 1:25:04
  of nowhere with this long but not that long of bibliography.
• 1:25:09
  And suddenly they can write for Baker.
• 1:25:10
  And suddenly he is the Doctor again.
• 1:25:13
  Yeah, I think it's wonderful. In fact, you could almost see
• 1:25:16
  say we're getting on the phone to JNT and quoting a line from
• 1:25:19
  Terror the Verboids about PIP and Jane Baker.
• 1:25:23
  Don't you realize what we've unleashed?
• 1:25:27
  But I mean, I go sort of circling it back around to the
• 1:25:30
  start. I don't think their vision for
• 1:25:32
  Doctor Who is an erroneous 1. I think that they understand
• 1:25:38
  what the show is. I do think there is a fresh
• 1:25:41
  young new broom about to come in, which means they just can't
• 1:25:46
  do it anymore because there's so at odds with that.
• 1:25:49
  But in terms of old, Hazard can structure a story and give you
• 1:25:53
  something that's entertaining and thoughtful and a bit fucking
• 1:25:57
  crazy, I think. Terror devoid scores.
• 1:26:00
  Quite highly I I think they could have written for Davidson.
• 1:26:04
  Oh, for sure. Yeah, I think the kind of
• 1:26:07
  questions, morale, morality would have sat very well with
• 1:26:10
  Davidson. I think they might have done.
• 1:26:11
  You know, you see it in Resurrection, but it's a bit
• 1:26:14
  hard to have that conversation when the Doctor's wielding a gun
• 1:26:17
  a shot a Dalek in the what's left of its face and you've got
• 1:26:20
  people's faces being burnt off. But in Warriors you get that
• 1:26:23
  type of discussion as well. I think.
• 1:26:25
  I think they, I think they might have done, they might have
• 1:26:27
  actually done something for Tegan, weirdly enough.
• 1:26:31
  What pleases me is this sort of bizarre and two of detective
• 1:26:36
  drama and horror does seem to have had a massive reappraisal
• 1:26:40
  in later years. Like people that now look at
• 1:26:43
  this story and just find it marvellously entertaining to
• 1:26:45
  watch. And yeah, I've got to say, I
• 1:26:47
  think the book, whilst floored in places, it's a lot of fun.
• 1:26:53
  And I can't offer much more because I'll tell you what,
• 1:26:54
  Paul, not all these books are fun.
• 1:26:56
  No, I think the problem, the problem of course, is that now
• 1:26:59
  that everything's available because we have to rethink when
• 1:27:01
  the target books came out and what their function was.
• 1:27:04
  We were at an exhibition yesterday on, on the, on the
• 1:27:07
  1980s and there was a wall of film posters.
• 1:27:10
  And what was interesting for most of the film posters, there
• 1:27:13
  was a book. You know, tying books were a big
• 1:27:15
  thing in the AC and the Book of the Goonies.
• 1:27:17
  And I think the target range is doing something similar to that.
• 1:27:20
  Before mass video ownership before because videos, yeah,
• 1:27:24
  they were saying that the, the, the average cost of a, of a
• 1:27:26
  video cassette to buy it was 80 lbs, which is prohibitively
• 1:27:30
  expensive. I in the first, the first videos
• 1:27:33
  now with adjustments for inflation are now £3000 if
• 1:27:36
  you're buying them 7/7/50. So I think it's amazing because
• 1:27:40
  we were the last people in our row of houses to get a coloured
• 1:27:42
  TV. We were the first to get a
• 1:27:44
  video. I don't know what my dad was
• 1:27:45
  thinking because he never watched the damn thing.
• 1:27:47
  But I think there's a sense in which we had black and white for
• 1:27:49
  so long. Now we're going to get this high
• 1:27:50
  tech stuff. But I think in a period where
• 1:27:52
  you couldn't afford it or they weren't available, of course,
• 1:27:56
  the books for how you re engage with or engage with for the
• 1:28:01
  first time, this is how you quote UN quote watch these
• 1:28:04
  programmes. Now that they're available in
• 1:28:06
  like 3 different formats, the books don't have that same
• 1:28:09
  function. And so you have to approach them
• 1:28:11
  differently. But it's difficult to approach
• 1:28:12
  them differently because what they are at their weakest is
• 1:28:16
  they're just the TV script with a bit of prose thrown in.
• 1:28:18
  And so they, they can be difficult to reappraise.
• 1:28:22
  And this one I think is it is one that is quite difficult to
• 1:28:25
  reappraise because it's quite thick.
• 1:28:27
  But if you like the TV programme, there's a lot to
• 1:28:29
  enjoy in it because it it expands bits of it.
• 1:28:31
  It's not like the Romans or it's not like Cursor Fenrick.
• 1:28:34
  And it's it's not doing anything like mind breaking with or like
• 1:28:38
  massacre where Lukorochi rewrites a script that was
• 1:28:41
  rewritten anyway. It is what it is.
• 1:28:43
  It's 144 pages. It's terror of the verve voice.
• 1:28:46
  If you're not going to see it again, this is how you this is
• 1:28:48
  how you engage with it. If you're already seeing it,
• 1:28:50
  here's just a different version of it.
• 1:28:52
  Well, and I promise you we will get to some of those juicier
• 1:28:55
  targets at some point. However, we've gone from Paul
• 1:28:59
  Connell via Pip and Jane Baker. What on earth direction are we
• 1:29:04
  going to head in next? When you tell the boys and girls
• 1:29:07
  and others at home, Joe, where we're going, where, where could
• 1:29:10
  you possibly follow those 3 with?
• 1:29:12
  We're doing Alien Bodies Redux, so it's a second reading for me
• 1:29:17
  of Alien Bodies. I feel as if there's more to
• 1:29:20
  explore the book than I did last time.
• 1:29:23
  There was a lot of voices on that call and everyone had a
• 1:29:25
  different take, but I think I can bring more out of this book
• 1:29:28
  myself as well, and you certainly will.
• 1:29:31
  It's Lawrence Miles stepping foot into the 8th Doctor range
• 1:29:36
  and entirely reimagining Doctor Who.
• 1:29:41
  Do you have any memories of this?
• 1:29:43
  I, I, I haven't read it in 15 years and I really enjoyed it.
• 1:29:48
  I really enjoyed it. I I thought.
• 1:29:49
  You may go anti love and war this time you may.
• 1:29:52
  I might, I doubt it, but I think what he does with the Crotons, I
• 1:29:57
  think the Doctor digging up the body, It's, it's just, I mean,
• 1:30:02
  there's, I'm probably misremember bits from
• 1:30:03
  interference. So I haven't read that in 15
• 1:30:05
  years either, 'cause I went on a real run of watching, as you
• 1:30:08
  know, yeah, 1515, three to about 13 years ago before we got
• 1:30:12
  married, weird enough, I went on this real run of reading Doctor
• 1:30:15
  Who, 8th Doctor stuff. I hadn't read before or was
• 1:30:18
  rereading. It's almost like I'm getting
• 1:30:20
  married, so I'll have to leave this stuff behind.
• 1:30:22
  But of course. And so I just thought that how
• 1:30:27
  his focus on the 3rd Doctor always really fascinates me.
• 1:30:30
  Because of course he makes a big thing about that in the big DW
• 1:30:33
  of a DWM interview. The sense in which you could do
• 1:30:36
  something with the 3rd Doctor, You couldn't do the 4th Doctor
• 1:30:39
  because he's too well known. And of course, perk we still
• 1:30:42
  alive, he'll die just around the time interference is published.
• 1:30:45
  And of course, we've all gone through our difficult perk we
• 1:30:48
  phase of not would be liking him, but now we can see how
• 1:30:51
  great that run was. And so I mean, I'm think about
• 1:30:54
  the end of interference, just how he changes the end of the
• 1:30:57
  doctors, the Pertwee's run. It's, it's phenomenal.
• 1:31:01
  It's it sticks me even to this day and I haven't read that but
• 1:31:04
  in years. I mean, bookends, alien bodies.
• 1:31:06
  It's almost like a little prelude of what's to come.
• 1:31:08
  Yeah, I think, I think they're they're kind of the the jumping
• 1:31:11
  we don't have. It reminds me of some of some
• 1:31:13
  Moffitt techniques where he jumps around in that opening
• 1:31:16
  section of alien bodies that that.
• 1:31:18
  Just just how he is. The simplest, the simplest of
• 1:31:23
  stories you could tell. It's an auction.
• 1:31:25
  Yeah. In a single location.
• 1:31:27
  Yeah. And how it expands is the
• 1:31:30
  backstories of all the people bidding at the auction.
• 1:31:33
  It is so beautiful. Well, let's go away and read
• 1:31:36
  that and see what on earth we make of this.
• 1:31:39
  And because I've read so much 8th Doctor stuff recently, I'll
• 1:31:43
  be able to bring sort of how a lot of what starts there.
• 1:31:47
  Where it pays out. Where it where it ends up?
• 1:31:50
  Yeah, wow, fascinating stuff. I'm going to ask you this every
• 1:31:55
  time. Where can people find you
• 1:31:57
  online? They can find me on Blue Sky.
• 1:32:00
  Let's get my I am. Where's my profile?
• 1:32:07
  I am PLJ Quinn dot B Sky Social and you can watch videos on
• 1:32:16
  Paulkins mind dump at YouTube and that's me and there's some
• 1:32:19
  stuff on the YouTube channel for the Chichester Centre for fairy
• 1:32:24
  tales, folklore and fan. No fairy tales, fantasy and
• 1:32:27
  speculative fiction. That's my my Tom Baker lecture
• 1:32:29
  is on there so that's where you can find me.
• 1:32:33
  But mostly losing my mind on blue sky.
• 1:32:35
  I I find that when my path cross with yours that I'm often
• 1:32:41
  entranced in a web of may have an intrigue Paul, but today we
• 1:32:46
  we have done some good work with Pip and Jane Baker.
• 1:32:48
  I hope we've waved the flag and I can't wait till next time.
• 1:32:52
  Lawrence Miles, bring it on. Yeah, awesome, lovely stuff,
• 1:32:56
  Joe. Yeah, everyone go and watch Pip
• 1:32:57
  and Jane over the weekend. The nice thing is, there's only
• 1:32:59
  a few episodes. You can watch them all in an
• 1:33:02
  evening when you otherwise be rocking your minds watching some
• 1:33:05
  toss on ITV on a Saturday night or like don't ever mind the big
• 1:33:10
  stuff on Apple and like binge, binge watch the Bakers.
• 1:33:13
  You'll learn some new words. If nothing else.
• 1:33:19
  The vervoid story, which was episodes which I did show.
• 1:33:24
  No, but that was what I was going to say is that was a sort
• 1:33:27
  of a cliffhanger in that nobody knew.
• 1:33:31
  Do you remember Colin? Nobody knew who was going to.
• 1:33:35
  It also shows that the verb was, is a nice contrast.
• 1:33:38
  We were originally invited to do the Ronnie because you had more
• 1:33:43
  filming than you normally have on Doctor Who, you know,
• 1:33:47
  certainly in those days. And what had happened was that
• 1:33:51
  the previous producer of Doctor Who had a script of ours, a film
• 1:33:57
  script that we'd written for the BBC, that he'd been script
• 1:34:00
  editor on in the office, that John took over.
• 1:34:02
  John in some spare moment, he'd gone read the script and decided
• 1:34:08
  he needed film rights for this. So he got in touch with us for
• 1:34:10
  The Mark of the Army, the second story.
• 1:34:13
  When he got in touch with us because we've been in Spain for
• 1:34:15
  two months and we bumped into him on a lift, he wanted us an
• 1:34:19
  old studio piece because he'd run out of filming and asked us
• 1:34:23
  to do an Agatha Christie sort of country house type mystery,
• 1:34:27
  which, if you remember the whole of the IT was set on a
• 1:34:32
  spaceship. We never, we didn't have a day's
• 1:34:34
  location, which is a sci-fi equivalent of a country house
• 1:34:36
  country. And well, that's all we did.
• 1:34:37
  We, we gathered, we took a better actually, we took a
• 1:34:41
  spaceship on a long journey. We had a the usual group of
• 1:34:45
  characters and you had to discover which one was the
• 1:34:48
  murderer and they all had motors behaving strangely.