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Hamster Book Club - Si Hart Top and Bottom Ten Books · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:00
  Welcome back to the Hamster Book Club.
• 0:03
  My name is Joe Ford. And in what feels like an
• 0:07
  unusually long time, although in reality I think it's about six
• 0:12
  weeks or so, I'm here today with the truly, truly magnificent, my
• 0:18
  lovely friend, Mr. Simon Hart. Hello.
• 0:21
  Sorry. Hello, six weeks.
• 0:23
  It's a bloody long time for us. No, I've been having meltdowns
• 0:27
  and all sorts, all right. Yeah, I know.
• 0:31
  You've been very patient with me and now you've got about four on
• 0:35
  the belts coming up. Yeah, well, that'll teach you.
• 0:40
  That'll teach you. What are you talking about?
• 0:42
  Well, yeah, that's true as well. So.
• 0:45
  We're about to embark on a rather new endeavour today.
• 0:49
  Well, we are. Well, well, you're saying No,
• 0:52
  actually, you have to remember I did the first one of these and I
• 0:56
  haven't come back and done any more since.
• 0:58
  So. So it's new and old.
• 1:02
  It was such a success, that first one, and I promise you it
• 1:06
  was. I mean, it was a great book.
• 1:07
  We talked about that. I thought, no, I've got to give
• 1:10
  these have a book club as a chance.
• 1:12
  Exactly. And in fact, so much so, I've
• 1:14
  disassembled. That book.
• 1:16
  Book Group. And put you in a new one,
• 1:17
  haven't I? Well, exactly.
• 1:19
  Yeah. You know what?
• 1:20
  That's fine. They'll manage without us.
• 1:23
  And just as a little taster, that book grub now book Grub
• 1:26
  book club even now consists of sigh, Stephen B, Jack Koya.
• 1:33
  I mean, the intelligence that's there with that trio, the amount
• 1:36
  of Doctor Who trivia, there could be a symbol.
• 1:39
  Well, that's very true. I'm there as well, but I'm
• 1:42
  mostly just. Facilitate and give the odd
• 1:44
  opinion. You always say that and it's not
• 1:46
  true. Now I.
• 1:47
  Know you'll be fighting me left, right and centre, probably
• 1:50
  starting tonight. Oh, you wait.
• 1:53
  Can I ask you A? Question before we start.
• 1:56
  Well, of course you can before we go into because today we're
• 1:59
  doing your top ten and bottom 10 Doctor Who books.
• 2:03
  Yes. Which are my favorite things to
• 2:05
  recall? A bloody clue what you're going
• 2:07
  to throw at me. Can I ask you what's your Doctor
• 2:11
  Who book journey? So where did it start?
• 2:15
  And then sort of take me a little bit through the ranges.
• 2:19
  Now I'm going to ask you to rank the ranges at the end of this
• 2:21
  episode. So don't don't sort of give me
• 2:23
  your preferences, just sort of as you discovered them.
• 2:27
  Well OK, so with me Doctor Who was almost immediately books
• 2:34
  after TV. So pretty soon after season 17
• 2:39
  was on, my brilliant and wonderful Doctor Who fan cousin
• 2:44
  Adrian laid out a big pile of Target books on his bedroom
• 2:49
  floor and said to me, oh, you can borrow one of those and get
• 2:52
  your mum to read it to you. How old did that was?
• 2:57
  I'd have been four or five, probably 5, and so got all these
• 3:03
  brilliant covers and I picked Destiny of the Daleks.
• 3:08
  Is it because Tom Bass was been a bit?
• 3:10
  He's got that sort of his hands to his mouth, Daleks all around
• 3:14
  him. And it was Daleks, it was Tom.
• 3:17
  And as it turned out, it was a story I knew.
• 3:20
  So, so and basically we didn't look back from there.
• 3:25
  My at that point we, me and my sister were living with my mum
• 3:31
  and my grandparents while my my parents were having marriage
• 3:35
  problems. And so my granddad and my mum
• 3:38
  took me to the library and the librarian said Oh yes of course
• 3:42
  we've got lots of Doctor Who books and laid out a big pile of
• 3:46
  the hardback target books on the table and asked me to pick 1 and
• 3:51
  I picked the Dalek Invasion of Earth.
• 3:53
  I've. Noticed enough theme with your
• 3:55
  choices here. Well, Daleks were cool, weren't
• 3:57
  they? You know, And that was it
• 3:59
  basically over the next next couple of years, my mum read me
• 4:04
  a chapter a night, every night that that inspired me to want to
• 4:11
  learn to read so that I could read these books myself.
• 4:15
  On my 6th birthday I started my own collection of Target books
• 4:19
  and that started my collector gene going and I haven't looked
• 4:24
  back. So you're literally the, you
• 4:26
  know, like a lot of people say, the cliche of, oh, picking up
• 4:29
  Terrance 6 books and it got me into reading.
• 4:32
  You are that person. I am and I am.
• 4:35
  And I told him that and he said, oh, everyone says that, but I
• 4:38
  meant it. And I absolutely was desperate
• 4:41
  to read them myself. And, and it was always the
• 4:44
  Terrance books, always the Terrance.
• 4:46
  Say, were they always your favourites?
• 4:48
  Yeah, and they still are. I'm going to keep my pound dry.
• 4:54
  But yeah, those were the ones I admired.
• 4:58
  Lots of the other writers. I loved the emarta.
• 5:01
  But I always found as a as a youngster, I found Malcolm
• 5:04
  Hulk's books, which everybody loves, really difficult because
• 5:08
  they were big, they're quite and the Terrance was was achievable.
• 5:14
  Terrorists could achieve a lot with economy.
• 5:17
  Absolutely, and writing simply is far more of a skill than
• 5:23
  writing florids prose many new adventures PDASEDASMAS you could
• 5:29
  learn from this. Did you ever hear that?
• 5:32
  Story about Terrance being asked to do the quick reads.
• 5:35
  Yep. And Justin Richards went to him.
• 5:38
  Now look. It cannot be.
• 5:40
  The words can't be too long. The sentences can't be too
• 5:42
  complicated. You know, exist for people that
• 5:44
  have difficulty. Region.
• 5:45
  And he went Justin. That's how I write anyway.
• 5:52
  So yeah, so I mean, basically I grew up with Doctor Who books
• 5:57
  and then I was 15 when time when Genesis came out and the New
• 6:02
  adventures hit and wow, I was ready.
• 6:07
  So I thought, but these books did.
• 6:10
  You get them all. Did you collect them all?
• 6:12
  Oh yeah, absolutely, from the start.
• 6:15
  And then I went. To that room, haven't you?
• 6:16
  Yeah. Well, yeah, then I went to
• 6:18
  university and by the end of my first term I was broke.
• 6:24
  So I finished at No Future and I would pick up random ones after
• 6:30
  that when I could afford them. And then fortunately I stopped,
• 6:34
  finished university and got a job just as all the really rare
• 6:38
  books were coming in. So I bought Long Barrow and the
• 6:43
  Dying Days. If you'd have bought several
• 6:45
  copies, you know you could buy a house next week.
• 6:48
  Damn it, yeah, I mean my my good friend Lee Binding bought me a
• 6:55
  copy of So Viola Sin for £1.50 in a remainder bookshop.
• 7:00
  I couldn't. Get it for £150 now.
• 7:03
  I couldn't find it at the time, but he found me a copy, so I had
• 7:06
  and then then they remained the whole lot of the missing
• 7:09
  adventures and the new adventures and I cleaned up a
• 7:11
  pound each. So then did you keep going when
• 7:14
  the BBC started? Then I went to the BBC and I
• 7:17
  have every single BBC book as well.
• 7:20
  Can't say I've read every single BBC book because but the
• 7:25
  majority I did and I followed the 8th Doctor arc all the way
• 7:29
  through it's many convoluted versions and I adored them.
• 7:33
  We might have to do some of these ones you haven't read, you
• 7:36
  know, like a first one I. Can't remember which ones I
• 7:38
  haven't read. Now that's super do.
• 7:40
  I have a good think about that. All right.
• 7:42
  Did I come to your house once? And I mean in this fabulous
• 7:47
  room. Full of SO.
• 7:48
  Many books. It was like he cleared out about
• 7:50
  15 libraries when your past doctor and eight doctor books in
• 7:55
  colour order rather than. Still are to this day, mostly
• 8:00
  because I have no idea what order they come in.
• 8:03
  You do me a favour then, please and just look at your shelf now
• 8:07
  and just tell me, pick a colour and tell me what books are in
• 8:11
  order there. OK, white into blue starts with
• 8:16
  the Infinity doctors. Brilliant.
• 8:18
  Fear itself. Oh.
• 8:20
  Right. Drift.
• 8:22
  Oh, okay. Barber Time, OH.
• 8:25
  Boy, you just talked about that. Haven't.
• 8:27
  You divided loyalties. Oh dear.
• 8:30
  Yeah. Time 0.
• 8:33
  Oh, you're sort of heading into light blue now.
• 8:36
  Into light, yeah, because there aren't that many white ones.
• 8:38
  The white ones were special so that that's just an easy bit of
• 8:41
  colour there. Why?
• 8:42
  It's pretty strong, isn't it? You know, Yeah.
• 8:45
  I might have to ask you to examine all your showers.
• 8:47
  Right? And tell me what's the strongest
• 8:48
  colour? Not now, but like for another
• 8:51
  book club. OK, consider that homework.
• 8:53
  OK. I don't think it's brown.
• 8:56
  There are. A lot of dreary Longest day.
• 8:59
  Oh my God. I do quite like the Reds and the
• 9:02
  Blues are pretty good as. Well, yeah, the Blues are
• 9:04
  strong. Yeah.
• 9:06
  So there. Yeah.
• 9:06
  So. So I read all of the Edas and
• 9:08
  then the new series books came along and I read most of those,
• 9:13
  but they weren't aimed at me and the books were not aimed at me
• 9:16
  anymore. And that was fine, but I just
• 9:19
  didn't. I bought the whole lot and I got
• 9:22
  rid of the whole lot. That's the only part of my new
• 9:25
  collection new. Series up, you know, in your
• 9:27
  town, didn't I? Yeah.
• 9:29
  Probably yours, yeah. No, no, I don't.
• 9:32
  All the hardbacks, but they were lovely and they were fine, but I
• 9:36
  didn't feel the attachment to those that I did.
• 9:40
  But a range that I really did love and we'll be touching on
• 9:43
  this later, was the Big Finish short trips.
• 9:46
  I thought that was a magnificent range and something that is
• 9:50
  quietly forgotten, mostly because people can't get hold of
• 9:53
  them anymore because they're very expensive.
• 9:56
  But I 1 Christmas my ex partner Steve bought me the whole lot
• 10:01
  when Big Finish was were lost the license.
• 10:04
  So I I've picked up a few down the years, but he picked up the
• 10:09
  ones I hadn't got. So I have a whole set and
• 10:11
  they're a really strong run generally, you know?
• 10:14
  We may have to do some of that with our book.
• 10:15
  Yeah, well, I like a Doctor Who short story.
• 10:18
  Yeah, well, I like it when it's all based around a theme, you
• 10:20
  know? Yes, and things like the
• 10:22
  centenarian or companions or a universe.
• 10:26
  Yeah, good fun. Good ideas.
• 10:28
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, bloody hell.
• 10:30
  So you have done the whole journey there and.
• 10:32
  Non fiction. I, I sorry, non fiction.
• 10:35
  Oh, well, yeah, more non fiction was there from pretty much the
• 10:39
  start as well. So the first ever Doctor Who
• 10:41
  book that I owned was a non fiction Doctor Who book.
• 10:44
  One that I had bought for me was The Adventures of Canine and
• 10:48
  Other Mechanical Creatures, which very nearly made my list
• 10:51
  because I absolutely adore that book because Terence writes a
• 10:55
  conversation between the doctor and canine.
• 10:58
  So what is better for me than that with the reminiscing over
• 11:02
  their adventures? Isn't there a really good
• 11:05
  reading on YouTube? Oh, I.
• 11:06
  Haven't found that. Oh, I'll have to have a look.
• 11:09
  No, it's you, isn't it? No.
• 11:10
  No, no, no, that's a different set of books.
• 11:13
  Is that AK 9 story as well? Yeah, but I'm keeping quiet.
• 11:18
  But yeah, yeah, non fiction pretty much from the start again
• 11:23
  and things like the making of the Visitation book, Doctor Who
• 11:28
  Celebration, The Key to Time were works that I love straight
• 11:33
  off. And then obviously the how
• 11:36
  stammers Walker books. I was absolutely at the right
• 11:39
  age for that, that discovery and just having this whole story of
• 11:46
  those decades because Doctor who'd finished so we could have
• 11:49
  the whole story. And I did that and I've got
• 11:52
  shelves and shelves. I'm just looking round of non
• 11:54
  fiction books and there's 12344 and a half shelves of non
• 12:01
  fiction Doctor Who. I mean, I won't, I won't detail
• 12:04
  them all, but I'll, I'll throw a few out and I know you're going
• 12:07
  to say yes to all of them, but let's see the discontinuity
• 12:09
  guide. Loved it.
• 12:11
  The program guide. Well, the, yeah, yes, but the
• 12:16
  programme guide I found a little bit superfluous, but I had, I
• 12:21
  had a volume of the original version.
• 12:24
  But by the time the one came round in 89, I kind of knew all
• 12:28
  of that. And it was all right.
• 12:30
  It had a lovely cover and and of course I bought it because you
• 12:33
  do, but I was kind of looking for a bit more by then I think.
• 12:38
  What about the companions? 60s seventies, 80's the.
• 12:42
  Handbooks, yeah, all the handbooks I loved, particularly
• 12:46
  when they did that thing that now all the DVDs and things have
• 12:49
  done like a commentary of the story and how they made it and
• 12:53
  and it was the first glimpse into lots of the paperwork
• 12:56
  because that was coming available.
• 12:58
  So the actual story of how Doctor Who was made was more
• 13:03
  available. So yeah, I devoured all of those
• 13:05
  things like. License denied and things like.
• 13:08
  That, yeah, read that. Yep.
• 13:10
  And yeah, friends of mine had things that were in there that
• 13:13
  they'd written, which was just incredible.
• 13:16
  And then suddenly, sort of in over the last 20 years, you've
• 13:19
  got things like About Time. I've loved that series, even
• 13:23
  though it contains much that is apocryphal or wildly inaccurate.
• 13:28
  It's a very odd opinions as well.
• 13:30
  Yeah, that's the. But the essays are brilliant
• 13:34
  and. All, of course, the Toby and
• 13:36
  Rob. Yeah, all running corridors.
• 13:39
  Yeah, yeah. And just sort of the exploration
• 13:42
  of the wider words of Doctor Who.
• 13:44
  So there were collections of the original fan club magazines and
• 13:50
  just odd things that I've bought down the years that I look at
• 13:53
  and think, oh, the Target book. And recently I bought the book
• 13:57
  about the New adventures and the missing adventures because it
• 14:01
  all sort of ties in and and I'm just looking think I'm just
• 14:04
  surrounded by Doctor Who books and it's a you.
• 14:08
  Are a librarian, aren't you? Well, exactly, yes.
• 14:11
  Librarian when the books aren't in order, though.
• 14:14
  So yes, so trying to narrow these down to 10 has been
• 14:19
  incredibly difficult. Yeah.
• 14:21
  I'll be super interested to see which ranges that you sort of
• 14:24
  delve into. I've got one question to ask you
• 14:27
  before we go in. OK.
• 14:29
  And let's let's alternate. So we'll start with like maybe a
• 14:32
  top and then go to a bottom, yeah.
• 14:34
  Oh, no. Let's start with a bottom.
• 14:35
  So I'm never nasty about Doctor Who very often.
• 14:39
  Oh, please. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm
• 14:41
  gonna relish this. You know how I love to bottom?
• 14:44
  Oh sorry, yeah, start with my question was.
• 14:51
  Yeah. Have you double banked any
• 14:53
  writers? Because like most people have
• 14:56
  done this sort of like yo, I could choose every Christopher
• 14:59
  Beulis novel from my bottom 10, but I've only shown some one.
• 15:03
  I've tried to be fair because there are some authors.
• 15:07
  It's very easy to kick. If there's anyone I'll trust to
• 15:10
  be fair, it's you. And so I try, and also because
• 15:15
  I've listened to lots of the top tens recently, I've also tried
• 15:19
  not to completely copy John Arnold, which is very tempting.
• 15:23
  Him being the same age as me has made it very difficult because
• 15:27
  he's chosen lots of the things I've.
• 15:29
  So I've tried to think outside what anyone else might do.
• 15:34
  The thing is like some people will double bank choices, but
• 15:37
  there's always going to be a different reason each time
• 15:39
  because every reading is personal to each person.
• 15:42
  Exactly. And what might hit brilliantly
• 15:45
  when you're 25 might not hit so well when you're 49 or whatever.
• 15:50
  So revisiting these is very would be very interesting.
• 15:55
  Will you shove the first one in my bottom then please?
• 15:57
  OK, right. I am going to start and I
• 16:01
  haven't put these in any any particular ranking.
• 16:03
  So you're just going to get a random list.
• 16:05
  So I'm not, although there is, I could probably tell you what the
• 16:09
  worst ever Doctor Who book is wonderful.
• 16:12
  And actually I'm going to start with that because it's a book
• 16:17
  that I I've read and at the time I kept a diary and I remember
• 16:23
  finishing it and I was on a train journey and writing in the
• 16:27
  diary. I've just finished this book and
• 16:30
  I couldn't tell you a single thing about it, even though I
• 16:33
  have literally just finished it. It is that unmemorable.
• 16:38
  That's is it. It is the book of the Still by
• 16:42
  Paul Ebbs which. So that's the worst Doctor Who
• 16:46
  book of all. Time.
• 16:47
  Well, it's the worst Doctor Who book because even minutes after
• 16:50
  I finished it, the whole thing had vanished from my mind.
• 16:55
  I love that. Book I I couldn't tell you a
• 16:59
  thing about it. To this day I'm sure it's
• 17:00
  brilliant, but for some reason it just would not.
• 17:06
  No staying power in my head whatsoever.
• 17:09
  I can tell you one thing that happens in it, but the doctor
• 17:12
  takes the book of the steel and turns it into sort of like a an
• 17:15
  enormous paper aeroplane and flies it past.
• 17:20
  He flies his paper airplane past the sun.
• 17:22
  That's quite. Memorable.
• 17:24
  Well, you'd think. That was memorable, wouldn't
• 17:25
  you? But apparently my brain decided
• 17:28
  no, no memory of that whatsoever.
• 17:32
  Andrew Kapoor ends up in some mad.
• 17:34
  Bollywood musical halfway through going boom?
• 17:36
  Check. A lick.
• 17:37
  A lick. No, I've got nothing.
• 17:41
  And I I don't think it's a bad book.
• 17:44
  I just think it was utterly, utterly unmemorable for me.
• 17:48
  And that is the worst sin, where you've spent hours with
• 17:52
  something and you can come away and have no memory of it
• 17:56
  whatsoever. And this is a problem with a lot
• 17:59
  of Doctor Who books, is that they come and they go and they
• 18:03
  pass by without leaving a trace in your head.
• 18:06
  Particularly when there's so many of them.
• 18:08
  I don't think I've got the brain space to hold them all anymore.
• 18:11
  I know what the other books you read as well.
• 18:13
  You know you. Can't.
• 18:13
  Well, exactly. And I do read a hell of a lot of
• 18:15
  other books, that's the thing. So I.
• 18:17
  Think with like TV, Doctor Who, because it's like that visual
• 18:20
  stimulus, like memorable images coming at you.
• 18:23
  But it is easier to sort of keep it in your head.
• 18:26
  But a book, yeah, I can understand.
• 18:29
  Yeah. And that's also because there
• 18:31
  are some books on my list that absolutely are really memorable
• 18:36
  and have memorable images in them that have stayed with me.
• 18:39
  So there's just something in this one that blocked me
• 18:42
  completely. And I don't know whether I was
• 18:44
  just at 8th Doctor overload with the Ark and everything at that
• 18:49
  point. But yeah, sorry Paul ebbs.
• 18:52
  Sorry. Paul ebbs.
• 18:53
  Not for me. We are crowning you.
• 18:55
  The worst writer of a Doctor Who book ever.
• 18:58
  Well, I don't mean to think he was the worst writer, I just
• 19:00
  think it was probably more me than him.
• 19:03
  But that one just was immediately number one on my
• 19:06
  list of worst books. I think the worst might be Neil
• 19:09
  Penswick. But anyway, let's see how we go.
• 19:11
  Yes, let's. Swing round to your top ten
• 19:14
  list. Then, OK, so in a choice that no
• 19:17
  other person in the whole world would ever pick in their their
• 19:21
  top ten Doctor Who books, I'm choosing the Adventures of
• 19:25
  Canine series by David Martin, which is and there are four
• 19:30
  books in this series. And I'm choosing all four
• 19:32
  because they're small and it's Canine and the Time Trap, Canine
• 19:35
  and the Zeta Rescue, Canine and the Beast of Viga and Canine and
• 19:40
  the Missing Planet. The beast of Viga that.
• 19:44
  Sounds amazing, brilliant. And look, there's the Beast of
• 19:47
  Viga himself. My God, it looks like the fly.
• 19:52
  And these are little picture books.
• 19:54
  I don't know if you've ever seen one, but they have one page of
• 19:58
  picture, one page with quite large text.
• 20:01
  They're very basic stories, but what was brilliant about them
• 20:05
  was that age 5 they were introducing me to huge sci-fi
• 20:10
  concepts in a really digestible and understandable way.
• 20:15
  So canine and the missing planet.
• 20:17
  Canine goes through a time rift and finds a planet.
• 20:24
  Sort of sitting there, he goes into this this thing that he
• 20:28
  didn't spot a time warp and finds this planet and finds this
• 20:33
  missing ship. And there are dinosaurs and
• 20:35
  there's a farm. It's Earth, you know, and it's,
• 20:41
  it's little things like that and.
• 20:44
  Dinosaurs. Missing planets, Monsters.
• 20:47
  Yeah, the Beast of Bega is about an area of space where there's
• 20:54
  like a psychic alien, and the lasers on this space station
• 20:59
  that they're building keeps revealing these monsters, but
• 21:02
  the monsters are all in the heads of the people because
• 21:05
  they're seeing different things, and it's a brilliant idea, The
• 21:08
  Time Trap features that. Doctor Who fiction peaked at
• 21:11
  this point. No, but for me.
• 21:15
  It's your imagination. Yeah, but age 5, these were
• 21:18
  brilliant stories and they're they're tiny and they've got
• 21:21
  canine in them, so. So the.
• 21:24
  Ratio was one picture to one page, your picture to one page
• 21:28
  of words. Sort of ratio, I like, you know?
• 21:31
  Absolutely, and the pictures were great.
• 21:33
  So, you know, this is a a largely forgotten series because
• 21:38
  probably not many people got them, but I got got them week on
• 21:43
  week for being good at school. So that kind of takes me back as
• 21:48
  well. So it was when they knew how to
• 21:50
  reward kids. Absolutely see Tales of You
• 21:53
  every time I've got. To say, you know, I think you
• 21:56
  are right. I don't think that's going to
• 21:57
  appear on anyone else's top 10. List and but for me, they're
• 22:02
  vitally important and so when I was looking at my list,
• 22:06
  sometimes it's books, particularly my favorite books.
• 22:10
  They were books that have been important to me, as well as
• 22:14
  books that are the best books because if you're asking for
• 22:19
  favorite books. That's it's a different matter.
• 22:23
  I've been stocking up that fire and that orphanage overseas so
• 22:28
  we can throw one of your choices into the fire.
• 22:32
  Who's going to be warming up the hands of the kiddies?
• 22:35
  OK well actually this is an author who is double dipping on
• 22:39
  my list and I have to say this is actually one of the biggest
• 22:44
  crimes against Doctor Who non fiction ever.
• 22:47
  And this is Through Time by Andrew Cartmel, now 2.
• 22:52
  Cartmel's on your list have. You now Andrew Cartmel is a
• 22:55
  fascinating man, but every time I read one of his non fiction
• 22:59
  books I come away thinking far, far less of him than I did
• 23:03
  before it started. Why is that?
• 23:04
  I really enjoyed Script Doctor, but it's obviously written by a
• 23:09
  20 something old man who is lusting after every woman who
• 23:14
  start, young woman who stars in the show and it's quite full of
• 23:20
  himself and I don't think he always comes.
• 23:22
  But that's the point of a diary, is that you're the central
• 23:25
  person in it and everything else.
• 23:27
  But through time it's far worse because basically he's given the
• 23:31
  task of exploring the 26 years and the TV movie of Doctor Who
• 23:38
  and basically comes to the conclusion that the only Doctor
• 23:41
  Who that was good was the talents of Wenchuang and every
• 23:45
  story that Andrew Cartmel. Worked on.
• 23:48
  I remember being so angry with this book I.
• 23:50
  Threw I It was a library book and I threw it across the room
• 23:54
  because I just said just shut up, I don't care.
• 23:58
  He didn't. Mind the Sea Devils too much.
• 24:00
  I seemed to. Didn't, No.
• 24:01
  No, but but pretty much all of the 80s until he came along.
• 24:05
  Yeah. Oh and it was just soul
• 24:07
  destroying reading. I'm just thought, what is the
• 24:09
  bloody point of this? But I do you think as well, if
• 24:12
  you're going to take a critical eye to other people's work, take
• 24:16
  that same critical eye to your own.
• 24:18
  Absolutely. And yes, as I've said many
• 24:21
  times, he's a great scripts editor, but he's not a good
• 24:24
  editor of scripts, you know, and he's not, he can't see the good
• 24:29
  in other people's work. A lot of the time that came
• 24:32
  before him. And I just wondered who he
• 24:36
  thought the audience for this was, because he wasn't finding
• 24:39
  even trying to look for anything positive.
• 24:42
  So it just came off as as Bitme desk ego.
• 24:48
  So bid me, Dawson really talk. About anything else but his own
• 24:51
  work, no. Exactly.
• 24:52
  And that's fine. And if Andrew Cartmel just stuck
• 24:55
  to his own then that would be fine.
• 24:56
  But trying to critique other people, you've got to find a
• 25:00
  balance, and I don't think he really did.
• 25:02
  So funny, isn't it, Because you've got bid me that one in
• 25:04
  the JNT, You've got Cartmel at the other end, right?
• 25:07
  They've both got enormous egos, you know, and did good.
• 25:10
  Work. I know you've got Eric Saywood
• 25:12
  in the middle. Who doesn't think?
• 25:15
  Much of himself at all, You know the most.
• 25:18
  Or anyone else? You know what I mean?
• 25:20
  He's not, he's not a particularly charismatic or
• 25:23
  ecotistical man, no. And well, maybe that shows in
• 25:26
  the work a little bit, you know, possibly.
• 25:29
  Oh, I can only wholeheartedly endorse this particular choice.
• 25:33
  I can't wait to see what your second choice is.
• 25:37
  Well come on, let's praise something then.
• 25:39
  OK, so I'm going to do another non fiction book as something
• 25:43
  that I loved and actually I sent you a copy of this recently and
• 25:47
  this was Inside the TARDIS by James Chapman, which is a
• 25:52
  serious look at the themes of Doctor Who by era.
• 25:57
  And it is just absolutely beautifully written, beautifully
• 26:03
  researched, and full of incredible, beautiful insight
• 26:09
  into the show thematically. And every I, I go back and
• 26:15
  revisit it every so often and I just fall in love with it even
• 26:19
  more. And I wish he would keep
• 26:20
  updating it so that we could get the next next few eras because
• 26:24
  he's done that once and sort of picked up sort of much of the
• 26:28
  new series. But it's just fabulous.
• 26:33
  This is a small insight into the sort of person that saw how I
• 26:36
  was because he knew I was going for a very tough time and he
• 26:39
  sent me a copy of this book to take my mind off my woes and I
• 26:43
  tore for it in about two days. This book and I, I picked it up
• 26:48
  and I thought another overview of Doctor Who.
• 26:50
  What on earth has this got to say?
• 26:52
  And I read the first couple of paragraphs and I could really
• 26:56
  see the intellect that he had poured into this book, but it
• 26:59
  wasn't like Elizabeth Sandifer style intellect where it's like
• 27:03
  somebody going, oh, well, I've got 15 PhDs.
• 27:06
  So you better keep that in mind while you read this.
• 27:08
  It was just very smart, very funny, but all of the original
• 27:13
  observations about the series whilst being packed full of
• 27:17
  facts. Yeah, and drawing things
• 27:21
  together that didn't feel like they fitted together, but he
• 27:24
  found connections in things that were were incredible.
• 27:27
  It's like it was like a black archive, wasn't it?
• 27:29
  A particularly well done black archive for the entire series.
• 27:33
  Yeah, and it's just, and he's an academic, but he writes in a non
• 27:39
  academic way and it's really accessible.
• 27:42
  And seriously, I think it is one of the best books about the show
• 27:46
  thematically that there's ever been written.
• 27:49
  There's, there's a point where you start to think, OK,
• 27:53
  everything has been said about the Doctor Who has, especially
• 27:56
  the classic series, right? So many words have been written.
• 27:59
  Good words, bad words, terrible words.
• 28:03
  This was all new to me. A lot of it.
• 28:05
  You know, a lot. And you're right.
• 28:07
  Finding those themes that run through eras and producers and
• 28:11
  doctors and decades and yeah, wonderful stuff.
• 28:17
  Really, really fantastic book. OK so I've noticed we've heard
• 28:21
  on the side of non fiction so far.
• 28:25
  Yep. We're going across now to your
• 28:27
  bottom 10 list again. OK, there are with Doctor Who
• 28:35
  fiction, there are many, many crimes that can be committed.
• 28:40
  And one book that that I think fulfills those crimes
• 28:45
  beautifully is Evolution by John Peel, which has, which has no
• 28:55
  kind of ambition other than to get Tom Baker into his Sherlock
• 29:00
  Holmes costume from the talents of Wing Chai Yang and have a
• 29:05
  adventure that's like the Hound of the Baskervilles.
• 29:08
  And it's it's a Hinchcliffe story by absolute numbers.
• 29:15
  And it's just designed to fill pages.
• 29:19
  It's not saying any. It hasn't got anything of no to
• 29:23
  say. It's not making any kind of
• 29:29
  well, it it, it's just there. It's Was this Peel's first
• 29:33
  original novel? I know he don't.
• 29:34
  Know it's his second original novel after Genesis.
• 29:38
  Oh boy, even. Worse.
• 29:41
  Well, maybe you're on par with and of course, you know what's
• 29:43
  coming, don't you? War of the Daleks, second son of
• 29:46
  the Daleks. They very nearly made the list
• 29:49
  but I thought they were too obvious.
• 29:51
  But I just remember reading it and thinking, well this is all
• 29:53
  perfectly pleasant but what's it doing other than fulfilling
• 29:58
  nostalgia? And I was hoping for more from
• 30:01
  The Missing adventures. And this is the second one.
• 30:05
  And they're already doing a story completely by the numbers.
• 30:08
  And I get why they were doing it, but it wasn't pushing
• 30:12
  forward in any way. It was just there for the
• 30:16
  Hinchcliffe fanboys to wank over basically.
• 30:19
  As Stephen B ably prove because he chose quite a few missing
• 30:22
  adventures for his top ten list, there was some real innovation
• 30:26
  in that range. Oh absolutely.
• 30:27
  And once it started going. But they really should have
• 30:31
  kicked someone out to the start I think.
• 30:33
  Yeah, absolutely. And there were good books to
• 30:37
  come very quickly. But I can understand them
• 30:40
  absolutely playing it safe. But John Peel was also playing
• 30:45
  it safe, and it's it's just not worth your time.
• 30:49
  I when I when I read War of the Daleks recently for the book
• 30:52
  club, it was probably the. Most oh, I remember.
• 30:56
  Experience. Shouting at that book as I was
• 30:59
  reading it. Oh my God, the files are in
• 31:02
  their trousers from the Daleks under their astronaut suits.
• 31:05
  Oh. Fuck off that whole reckon with
• 31:08
  antalles the planet. Oh, for God's sake.
• 31:12
  Oh God. I mentioned to you in one
• 31:16
  conversation once that oh, it was a pity scar and was
• 31:19
  destroyed and if I ever got the chance I'd do something about
• 31:22
  this. I don't care that.
• 31:25
  Nobody was happy with it except John Neal.
• 31:28
  Yes. Good choice.
• 31:29
  And you know what appeal does usually end up on most people's
• 31:32
  bomb? Ten list.
• 31:34
  Sorry, John. Understandable.
• 31:36
  Well, let's praise an author then.
• 31:38
  OK, so I am going to go for for one of the ranges that I didn't
• 31:42
  cover in my little preamble and I'm going for Doctor Who and the
• 31:47
  Tides of Time and and Steve Parkhouse.
• 31:54
  I would have gone for Voyager, which is actually my favorite,
• 31:57
  but John Arnold said everything that I needed to say about that
• 32:01
  and was beautiful about it. So I wasn't going to add
• 32:03
  anything and I will say everything he said was
• 32:06
  absolutely right. But The Tide of Time was also
• 32:09
  particularly brilliant and was the first epic Doctor Who story
• 32:13
  that I followed month on month in Doctor Who Monthly as it was
• 32:17
  at the time. And the artwork is beautiful.
• 32:20
  Once Dave Gibbons has got some photos of Peter Davison he can
• 32:25
  use, he gets the hang of it very quickly.
• 32:28
  But it tells this wonderful, big, surreal, odd story about
• 32:33
  how a cricket match affects the whole universe.
• 32:37
  It's got the Time Lords, it's got Rasalon, who we've not
• 32:40
  really seen at that point. It's got Sir Justin, who is a
• 32:45
  beautiful and wonderful companion for the story, who
• 32:49
  turns out to be the stone statue in the church in Stockbridge at
• 32:53
  the end. It's got Shade who's just super
• 32:57
  cool. Who would go on to being Minnie
• 32:59
  and 8th Doctor Koch exactly? And we'll we'll come back later
• 33:02
  on and, and it's, and it's got a cameo from Zoe in.
• 33:10
  One man boy heart was probably beating at a rate it's.
• 33:12
  Got a page where they're looking at a rubber duck on the scanner
• 33:16
  and can't work out why there's that and they're in a fairground
• 33:21
  and the perspective is all oh, it's just beautiful.
• 33:24
  And the artwork? And where all the meteors come
• 33:27
  down on the on the village? No, that's the stars fell on
• 33:31
  Stockbridge, which is the next one along.
• 33:33
  But the whole of the 5th Doctor run is a really strong run of
• 33:37
  comics. But time to time, I think is a
• 33:40
  great, great Doctor Who story told visually and beautifully.
• 33:45
  You know, we may have to add that to our list of book club.
• 33:47
  Happily do that. OK, well, you're being far too
• 33:51
  kind right now. I think it's time to send
• 33:54
  someone else into therapy. OK, where should I go?
• 33:58
  Where should I go next? Oh, I know.
• 34:02
  Let's go for in recent years. Well, I say recent years.
• 34:10
  Actually, there's not very recent now at all.
• 34:12
  There was a big run of books where they got a big name
• 34:16
  science fiction author to come and write a Doctor Who
• 34:20
  adventure, and there was some great ones.
• 34:23
  But there was also the coming of the Terrifiers, which was the
• 34:27
  dreariest load of bollocks as ever.
• 34:32
  Sorry, it could have been written in another language.
• 34:34
  For all it made sense. Absolutely, and in many ways
• 34:39
  Michael Moorcock is a really great fit for Doctor Who because
• 34:42
  his Stainless Steel Wrap series is very similar in lots of ways,
• 34:47
  has a similar tone and tongue in cheekness and Britishness that
• 34:52
  would make him a perfect fit. But I had no idea what that book
• 34:56
  was about at the end of it, and I read it and it was enough of
• 34:59
  one word to sport something about it.
• 35:02
  Alternative universes and pirates.
• 35:04
  But like, it was so dense and it was so thick with overly
• 35:10
  elaborate language and words that I'd never heard of.
• 35:13
  I was like, who is this aimed at?
• 35:15
  This can't be aimed at kids. If I was six years old reading
• 35:18
  that book, I wouldn't get past the first page, no.
• 35:21
  And it, it was huge. It was publicized everywhere.
• 35:24
  It was on on the table in Waterstones.
• 35:27
  It was, it was front and centre. It was a big coup, but it was
• 35:32
  just awful. Well, because you had great
• 35:34
  writers like Baxter, wrote one, didn't you?
• 35:36
  Stephen Baxter, Stephen. Baxter's Wheel of Ice and Asda
• 35:39
  Reynolds Harvest of Time are two brilliant books.
• 35:43
  Really. Really.
• 35:44
  Well, I mean, obviously Noemi Alderman's borrowed time, she's
• 35:49
  gone on to be a very popular. Writer.
• 35:50
  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so they really did, like
• 35:54
  you said, get some really great writers in.
• 35:57
  Yeah. I mean, I don't ever really want
• 35:59
  to go back to that book. Someone begs me to put me.
• 36:03
  Up on it. Don't worry, I'm not putting it
• 36:04
  on our list. No, I'm lying.
• 36:07
  Michael Mills has already asked me.
• 36:10
  Well, of course he has. Good luck, Michael it.
• 36:12
  Will be a new low point in my life.
• 36:14
  Yeah. Great.
• 36:16
  Bad enough once. But yeah, you are right,
• 36:20
  absolutely indecipherable. Yeah, and.
• 36:23
  Like you said earlier about writing simply, you know, yeah.
• 36:26
  It's an art form. All right, well.
• 36:31
  Let's see what's going right to the top of the shelf then.
• 36:34
  OK, well, Speaking of writing simply and beautifully, I'm
• 36:40
  choosing a Terran Sticks. Yeah, now and this is.
• 36:42
  I figured what would be here, but I just wouldn't have a clue.
• 36:44
  You know. Which one?
• 36:46
  I looked at the shelf and thought I could pick any of
• 36:49
  these and on a particular day this would be my favorite.
• 36:52
  But when I remember going back to a lot when I was a child and
• 36:55
  this is a really silly choice and no one would expect it.
• 36:58
  I really loved the novelization of The Invisible Enemy.
• 37:04
  Right, OK. And you have to bear in mind I
• 37:07
  hadn't seen The Invisible Enemy when I read this, but we had, we
• 37:11
  had the hardback in my local library in Harman's Water in
• 37:14
  Bracknell. And it had a beautiful cover.
• 37:18
  And it as a, as a young, well, youngest child, I would have
• 37:23
  been quite young when we read it first.
• 37:24
  But I borrowed that a lot and read it a lot myself.
• 37:29
  And it was just the most exciting story and it was
• 37:33
  beautifully written by Terence. And I say that Terence at his at
• 37:39
  this period is 109 pages. And that's your lot.
• 37:44
  But as a young child, those were absolutely perfect because they
• 37:49
  were readable in a week for me, borrowing it from the library
• 37:53
  and I could give it back. And I loved them and devoured
• 37:56
  them. And I devoured this book.
• 37:58
  It was pacey. It had brilliant special effects
• 38:01
  in my head. The prawn looked like it could
• 38:04
  actually move in my all those things.
• 38:08
  And you know, I've only picked one target for this list and I
• 38:11
  wanted something that represented it all.
• 38:14
  And I went through all the Curse of Fenrix and the Myth Makers,
• 38:19
  which absolutely love. But then I remembered I didn't
• 38:22
  love the Myth Makers as a child because I didn't get it.
• 38:26
  I wasn't old enough, I hadn't got the references, and I only
• 38:29
  got that as an adult. Same with the Romans.
• 38:31
  I only got the Romans last year and I hated that book as a 13
• 38:35
  year old. But Terence Stix's books were
• 38:38
  completely accessible, completely readable.
• 38:42
  I could read by the time I finished really reading The
• 38:45
  Targets. I remember reading Nightmare of
• 38:47
  Eden in 25 minutes. That was the paciest story ever.
• 38:52
  That was sort of age sort of 14. I would have been then and and
• 38:56
  then I put the targets away and I didn't touch them until the
• 39:00
  audio books came out. And then hearing people read the
• 39:04
  books aloud reminded me of all the things that I loved being
• 39:08
  read aloud to me. And so, you know, the Invisible
• 39:12
  Enemy is an average book, but it was never average to me.
• 39:15
  The. Thing about Terrance is I think
• 39:18
  you were that age, weren't you, where you wanted in the book
• 39:21
  what hit the screen. OK, so you wanted the that's
• 39:25
  maybe why the Romans and the myth makers and all of that.
• 39:28
  Yeah, I don't think I cared that much, to be honest.
• 39:32
  I it's a, it's a difficult thing.
• 39:35
  I think the Romans I just found impenetrable because of the
• 39:38
  letters. And it was the way it was
• 39:40
  written rather than the content of it.
• 39:42
  And so I found it difficult to follow as a story, but I loved
• 39:47
  it when the books deviated from the TV show, particularly on the
• 39:51
  ones that I knew well, when you were getting extra material and
• 39:54
  things like that. But also there was nothing I
• 39:58
  liked more than it just being a straight retelling.
• 40:00
  But you have to remember from the majority of classic Doctor
• 40:04
  Who I came to as a book before I even saw it.
• 40:07
  There was no chance I was ever going to see The Invisible Enemy
• 40:09
  in 1984. So but.
• 40:13
  The thing is with terrorists is is.
• 40:15
  But he very subtly does make differences.
• 40:18
  He does. He makes those TV stories big
• 40:21
  budget on the page. In a way that the TV.
• 40:24
  Show never could. He adds shades of character to
• 40:26
  people. Sometimes he'll do prologues
• 40:28
  where he's telling you about various empires and things like
• 40:31
  this. Pyramids and Mars Horns of
• 40:32
  Naiman, you know. Yeah.
• 40:34
  And in this book, particularly in in episode 3, there's Doctor
• 40:42
  Parsons, who is Doctor Professor Marius assistant who gets
• 40:46
  killed. And he makes it really as a
• 40:50
  child, I was moved by that death.
• 40:52
  And that's a character who's got about four lines.
• 40:55
  But suddenly his death meant something.
• 40:58
  And that's a skill when it's a character who's dressed in like
• 41:01
  bright green, bigger hugging PVC, who's not the greatest
• 41:07
  actor in the whole world, but he gives his death something that
• 41:10
  isn't there on TV, and that's a real, real skill.
• 41:13
  You know, every time I do a big weighty Doctor Who book I'm
• 41:18
  currently 2/3 of the way through interference by.
• 41:21
  Lawrence. Miles, which is a big, big book.
• 41:24
  I always fancy something light afterwards.
• 41:26
  I've got the invisible word to me, Target.
• 41:28
  I'm going to read it after. Go and read that, it won't take
• 41:30
  you long, Alec. Cleanser.
• 41:32
  Yes. Yeah, with a lot of targets,
• 41:37
  it's the story. It would be without all the TV
• 41:41
  stuff that's got to go on to make it so.
• 41:44
  They're almost huge. Like, you know, like you and I
• 41:47
  have said before, Baker and Martin were so ambitious, all
• 41:50
  those ideas. They're.
• 41:51
  Just made for the page. Definitely OK.
• 41:55
  And that is a unique choice because of all those targets you
• 41:57
  could have chosen. Yeah, no one else is going to
• 42:00
  choose that. All right, let's, let's bury.
• 42:06
  OK, well I mean, this is kicking a horse that everyone else has
• 42:09
  kicked, but it really is a crime against literature and it's
• 42:12
  Resurrection of the Daleks by Eric Saywood.
• 42:14
  I still haven't read it. Don't.
• 42:17
  You're not. You're not losing anything by by
• 42:20
  reading it. You're not winning by reading
• 42:22
  it, believe me. So.
• 42:23
  This is something you've read recently.
• 42:26
  I've read it in the last few years, yeah.
• 42:28
  And it's it's just awful and and to be fair, I don't think
• 42:34
  generally his novelisations for Target were were bad books
• 42:38
  generally at all. The visitation is is basic, but
• 42:41
  the others he's really trying to do something I.
• 42:43
  Like the twin dilemma? Sorry.
• 42:45
  Yeah, The Twin Dilemma is brilliant, very funny.
• 42:48
  Yeah, it is. Unexpectedly, he's got a real
• 42:51
  sense of humour. But Resurrection, The Dalek.
• 42:54
  So much has been riding on this book coming out and being
• 42:58
  novelized, and it's read it. And just think, this is a load
• 43:02
  of drivel. Like why didn't they have
• 43:05
  someone ghostwrite it? Well, this is the thing.
• 43:08
  And both of the both of those books had novelizations that
• 43:12
  were written around the missing Adventures time.
• 43:15
  So Paul Leonard was down to do Resurrection and Gareth Roberts
• 43:19
  was doing Revelation and I believe they were both started,
• 43:24
  if not completed, because they thought they'd got a
• 43:27
  breakthrough with the paperwork, similar to how the John Peel
• 43:29
  novelizations had come. And that came to nothing.
• 43:33
  And then we get them finally in 2019-2020 and wasn't worth the
• 43:40
  wait. Neither of them, but
• 43:42
  Resurrection was particularly poor.
• 43:44
  The the only. Part of this I've experienced at
• 43:47
  all was when Mark put on Terry Malloy gamely reading Revelation
• 43:52
  of the Daleks and I listened for 5 minutes to this backwards
• 43:58
  language. I went please turn this off.
• 44:01
  I can't listen to this anymore. Poor Terry Malloy.
• 44:06
  Yeah, and I've heard Bonnie Langford get through mouthfuls
• 44:10
  of Pip and Jane Baker prose, and it's so much better than this at
• 44:14
  the. Time when they're on.
• 44:15
  It's amazing. You know how I know?
• 44:16
  They end those chapters on an exclamation mark.
• 44:19
  You know she will exclaim, exclaim.
• 44:24
  OK, great choice. And a popular choice as well.
• 44:27
  Yes. Wow, come on, let's extol the
• 44:30
  virtues of another book. OK, let's go for a missing
• 44:37
  adventure and this is one that made a huge impression on me.
• 44:44
  And this was Killing Ground by Steve Lyons, which?
• 44:48
  Features author of this book club.
• 44:50
  Which features the single most graphic and terrifying
• 44:56
  description of what it is to be turned into a Cyberman, and that
• 45:02
  for that alone. And it takes a character from
• 45:05
  another book I'll be discussing shortly, takes them into this.
• 45:11
  And it's someone who wants to experience what it's like to
• 45:14
  become a Cyberman. And so they describe it.
• 45:16
  They're basically an archivist who is describing what happens.
• 45:21
  And it's all on tape. And, and the final act of this
• 45:26
  conversion is the tape being crushed under foot by a site by
• 45:31
  the Cyberman that this character has become.
• 45:34
  It's incredible. I can't remember the story
• 45:37
  around it, but those chapters depicting what happens to you
• 45:43
  were the most chilling. And I have there are two Doctor
• 45:48
  Who books that have scared me, this one and Anachrophobia.
• 45:52
  Oh boy, I've. Just read that.
• 45:55
  Yeah, which is absolutely terrifying.
• 45:59
  And that was everything that I wanted a Cyberman story to be.
• 46:03
  And, and the fact that they're becoming revenge of the
• 46:06
  Cybermen, Cybermen as on top of that just makes it funnier,
• 46:10
  almost funnier and more more pathetic, but absolutely
• 46:15
  astonishing writing. And it's the start of the
• 46:18
  rehabilitation of Colin's doctor as well, which Steve Lyons is
• 46:22
  seeing through. We've got the first original
• 46:26
  companion that's given retrospectively to Doctors,
• 46:31
  which will become a hugely big thing for Big Finish,
• 46:34
  particularly with the 6th Doctor, you know?
• 46:37
  And it's, so it's Grant Markham and it's.
• 46:41
  Yeah, it, I just remember it being a phenomenal read.
• 46:44
  I, I just wish I could remember more of the plot.
• 46:46
  And I think that's when I need to go back and read again.
• 46:49
  But those images stayed with me. I've I've never read that book
• 46:54
  and it is being covered by a book club.
• 46:56
  I can't wait because Luke sins Jenkin who wants to do it.
• 47:01
  He just says it is one of the most nasty and graphic Doctor
• 47:05
  Who books. And yes, and you know me, I
• 47:08
  don't like Doctor Who dark and graphic, but that was brilliant.
• 47:14
  It's scarier because it's all in my head and I'm not seeing it
• 47:17
  so. The fact that it has stayed with
• 47:19
  you all these years. Yeah, exactly.
• 47:21
  And I, I can remember, I know exactly what day that was.
• 47:24
  I was reading it in 1997 because it was the day I was going to
• 47:27
  see the shop that I was going to take over and run for the first
• 47:30
  time. So it's all sort of, I was
• 47:33
  reading it in the car on the way there, so yeah.
• 47:36
  It's so weird how certain passages or lines in a book can
• 47:41
  jam in your head. Right.
• 47:42
  I don't remember anything at all about the taint by Michael
• 47:46
  Collier apart from the fact that Fitz was introduced.
• 47:49
  But I do remember the nurse that worked in the home was this
• 47:53
  awful character who fancied the guy who run it.
• 47:56
  And there was a line where she went.
• 47:59
  She really hated it when he looked ugly or something like
• 48:02
  that. And I was like, I think just
• 48:04
  jams in my head. It's just so weird.
• 48:07
  Strange, isn't it? But that's the power of good
• 48:10
  prose. Well, so from dastardly Cybermen
• 48:16
  to. To Byzantium, Oh God.
• 48:22
  Exclamation mark. So you like casual sex and
• 48:26
  violence and Doctor Who? Well, no, but what?
• 48:33
  And that was bad enough. But what really, really pissed
• 48:38
  me off about that book, and I can remember it really annoying
• 48:41
  me as I was reading it, was this is written by a Doctor Who fan,
• 48:45
  right? Who knows Doctor Who inside out,
• 48:49
  but gets the characterization of the regulars completely and
• 48:53
  utterly wrong. And Ian Chesterton in this book
• 48:57
  is basically, if they'd written it for Ben Jackson, it would fit
• 49:01
  better. This is an innuendo loving,
• 49:04
  cheap slang using science master for 1963, apparently.
• 49:12
  And every single line that the character said in this book felt
• 49:16
  completely and utterly wrong to the point that I was just
• 49:21
  willing him to shut up. He's making innuendos.
• 49:23
  He's making saucy jokes. That's not Ian Chesterton.
• 49:28
  And it's just like. Yeah, this is like, how can you
• 49:33
  get this so wrong? You've got this great because
• 49:35
  the story's not not bad, but it's the wrong people in the in
• 49:40
  the story and it just Jarred completely.
• 49:44
  And that's really irritating when you've got people who know
• 49:48
  this stuff inside out and they're shoehorning their the
• 49:52
  characters that we know to do things that they wouldn't do.
• 49:56
  Because there's so much evidence of Ian on the screen.
• 50:00
  Surviving. Exactly.
• 50:01
  It's not even like he's a missing character.
• 50:05
  Even in the the one Doctor Who story with saucy jokes, you know
• 50:10
  the Romans. So he was in, he wasn't the
• 50:13
  saucy one in there. No, he, he was the straight
• 50:16
  what? The straight man for the whole
• 50:17
  thing. And so it just didn't ring true.
• 50:19
  And that took me out of the book.
• 50:22
  You know what? We're finally in alignment.
• 50:24
  That was on my bottom 10 list. Oh, there we go.
• 50:26
  Oh, brilliant. But I just, I thought everything
• 50:28
  about that. All the dialogue, the plotting,
• 50:32
  the prose, everything was just turgid.
• 50:34
  About that but. It was trying so hard to be.
• 50:38
  What the Romans wasn't, the Romans were.
• 50:40
  Sophisticated comedy. And this is trying to.
• 50:43
  And this was just cheap. Yeah, and it didn't fit with
• 50:48
  Doctor Who at all. And other writers have written
• 50:50
  for that team in a comedy and pulled it off.
• 50:53
  I think the plotters was magnificent.
• 50:55
  So funny. And the character of King James
• 50:58
  in that was actually based on a friend of mine.
• 51:01
  Yeah, my my friend James, oddly enough.
• 51:04
  Goes chasing after Vicky who who King James thinks is a boy it's.
• 51:09
  Very funny. Great book, but.
• 51:12
  Byzantium full of bin. Yep.
• 51:16
  So as I alluded to shortly, shortly ago, my next choice is
• 51:23
  the Cybermen book by David Banks and Andrew Skilletta as one of
• 51:28
  my much about this. For years I thought this was the
• 51:32
  single best Doctor Who book in the whole world ever.
• 51:36
  It's kind of been superseded. But what it did was it took part
• 51:44
  of Doctor Who and examined it for the first time and it
• 51:47
  examined it in huge detail. So it starts off with an
• 51:53
  exploration of real life cybernetics.
• 51:57
  So an exploration and history of cybernetics touching on the work
• 52:02
  of Kit Peddler and and that then it takes the story world of
• 52:10
  Doctor Who and tries to piece together cyber man history from
• 52:14
  the evidence we have on TV. So it's sort of pulling strands
• 52:19
  of Doctor Who together, the fictional world, and building up
• 52:23
  a coherent picture of how the Cybermen changed and evolved.
• 52:28
  Like a whole timeline. The whole timeline,
• 52:32
  unfortunately, as it was being written and published, Silver
• 52:36
  Nemesis came out. So it didn't get to cover that
• 52:39
  other than sort of acknowledge it had been made.
• 52:42
  But David Banks went back later and wrote about how Silver
• 52:46
  Nemesis fitted into this chronology when he was doing the
• 52:49
  audiobook version of the The Story of the Cybermen.
• 52:52
  He. Could have reissued this in
• 52:54
  2006. Two. 1007 I asked him about this
• 52:58
  and yes, he had ideas. And then it covers the making of
• 53:05
  Doctor Who and then the extra stories of the Cybermen.
• 53:09
  So the comic strip appearances and and things.
• 53:12
  So for the first time ever, this is the first time anyone has
• 53:15
  taken just one bit of Doctor Who, pulled it apart, made it
• 53:19
  all work, and it's full of the most beautiful and often
• 53:25
  breathtaking pieces of artwork. There's a a three page comic
• 53:30
  strip telling the Cyberman story by Andrew Scilletta with with
• 53:36
  images from all the different Cybermen stories that's telling
• 53:40
  the story. There's a timeline with all the
• 53:42
  different helmets telling where where you are with different
• 53:45
  Cybermen. There are sort of full length
• 53:47
  schematics of each version of the Cybermen with with arrows
• 53:52
  telling you what's changed between stories.
• 53:55
  And it's just a beautiful piece of work that was emulated many
• 54:00
  times afterwards and was never quite so.
• 54:03
  Things like the Gallifrey Chronicles and then the Doctor
• 54:05
  Who and the Monsters where people are really trying to do
• 54:09
  the same thing, but it's never they can't get that lightning in
• 54:14
  a bottle he's on. His own David Banks.
• 54:16
  Pretty much David Banks was the main author and Andrew Skilletta
• 54:22
  was the the designer and sort of featured artists, but they
• 54:27
  pulled artists from across Doctor Who to to do bits and
• 54:31
  pieces for them as well. Astonishing, isn't it?
• 54:33
  This man who played the cyber leader in all these stories, so
• 54:37
  he's got an intimate view of the side men.
• 54:40
  As. It's being made and has written
• 54:42
  this amazing book about the side men would then write Iceberg.
• 54:47
  Well, I know that nearly made my list in the bottom.
• 54:51
  Fuck you, you fucker, you fucking wanker.
• 54:54
  Fuck you. I fucking hate.
• 54:58
  You. Was it ace in that one or just
• 55:02
  Benny? Or no, no, it was Ruby Duval.
• 55:06
  Because they were. Birthright at the time and
• 55:09
  having a much better time of it. Yeah.
• 55:11
  Oh, terrible book. Yeah.
• 55:13
  Do you know what? He's got this on the shelf
• 55:14
  downstairs. I've never opened it.
• 55:16
  I'll kind of look at those illustrations afterwards.
• 55:18
  It's gorgeous. It really is the most beautiful
• 55:20
  book. Wow.
• 55:22
  Oh this really has been a very unique list.
• 55:24
  I'm loving it. I told you it would be.
• 55:26
  OK, so that's a, that's a top 10.
• 55:27
  So back to the bottom. OK, what happened?
• 55:33
  We Oh, I know. Let's have my double dip with
• 55:35
  Andrew Cartmel. OK.
• 55:37
  And I'm good to go for cats cradle warheads.
• 55:41
  Now I will say Riot, this is a very Marmite book.
• 55:45
  It could go either way this book.
• 55:47
  Absolutely. And I can, I can see why it was
• 55:50
  so loved, but it's not Doctor Who.
• 55:54
  And this is the problem I have, particularly with the new
• 55:57
  adventures, is that a lot of the time the authors are a bit
• 56:01
  embarrassed that this is Doctor Who.
• 56:03
  And so they're trying to force it to be things it isn't.
• 56:06
  And they're forgetting all the things that actually makes
• 56:08
  Doctor Who, Doctor Who. So this barely features the
• 56:12
  Doctor. So that's a a minus point, but
• 56:16
  it doesn't make a it's just making the Doctor be mysterious
• 56:19
  and and manipulative and and he's so dark and it's just so
• 56:24
  boring. To be honest, I'd much rather
• 56:26
  he'd be there sorting this problem out rather than leaving
• 56:29
  it to ace. It's full of guns and bombs and
• 56:33
  things exploding all over the place.
• 56:36
  The cover is one big explosion is.
• 56:39
  It not. Has he got Ace on the front with
• 56:41
  a machine gun? Is that right?
• 56:43
  And the ace and the and the cat and the machine gun.
• 56:45
  Yeah. And I just think there are so
• 56:50
  many stories you can tell in the world of Doctor Who and this is
• 56:54
  the one you want to do. And I don't quite get why this
• 56:58
  is it. And there are so many other
• 56:59
  books that that do this, that take it.
• 57:02
  I can understand wants to take Doctor Who to places that it's
• 57:05
  never been. But you have to remember that
• 57:08
  it's Doctor Who. And I think sometimes I come
• 57:11
  come across, I think particularly as a quite
• 57:14
  conservative with a small C Doctor Who fan, where Doctor Who
• 57:20
  has a particular ethos and A and a hope.
• 57:24
  And in so many of these books, there is no hope.
• 57:27
  The world is so dark and horrible and bleak that even the
• 57:31
  Doctor is horrible and bleak. And so why would you want to
• 57:36
  explore this? And this colours a lot of Doctor
• 57:40
  Who fiction for me. And why?
• 57:41
  I think there are certain ranges that are better because they
• 57:44
  remember what Doctor Who is and what it feels like.
• 57:49
  I always say there's a period of the new adventures and it's sort
• 57:52
  of like around the Falls of Shadow, Parasite and all of
• 57:56
  this, and it's just characters being tortured and just having
• 58:01
  the worst time, people being killed.
• 58:03
  Left, right and centre. Like you said the doctor barely
• 58:05
  being in it and when he's in it he's just vile.
• 58:08
  Ace is toxic and I'm like, why are we?
• 58:13
  I hate to be that person, but what has happened to the magic
• 58:16
  of Doctor Who? And I will say, you know Ian
• 58:22
  Martin, who we both know, he absolutely raves about the
• 58:27
  Cartmel trilogy of New Adventures.
• 58:29
  He loves all three of them. For me, that is about as far
• 58:33
  from the Doctor Who I want to read as you can possibly get.
• 58:37
  I can actually consider the warlock the animal.
• 58:42
  Oh yeah, that's nasty, isn't it? The figure.
• 58:45
  Section is just unpleasant and it's adult in a way that like,
• 58:51
  you know, you know, we say Doctor Who can be too adult.
• 58:54
  This is like adult plus, yes, in no way should a child be picking
• 58:59
  up that book under any circumstance.
• 59:01
  And it's a Doctor Who book, so a child should be able to pick it
• 59:03
  up. Yeah.
• 59:05
  And it's, yeah, it's not suitable for children.
• 59:08
  But I won't say he's a bad writer, I think.
• 59:10
  I think he he can write prose. He can write.
• 59:13
  Well, characters. But boy, it's nihilistic, isn't?
• 59:16
  It. Yeah, absolutely.
• 59:17
  And this is something that comes through in in a lot of his
• 59:20
  Doctor Who work sort of after the series has gone.
• 59:24
  So yeah, maybe we're lucky we didn't get a fourth year.
• 59:28
  Interesting. Choice.
• 59:29
  Well, let's praise another book then.
• 59:32
  OK, so I was, I was thinking about the EDA's and obviously
• 59:39
  we've been talking about interference in our our group
• 59:42
  chat and I don't have happy memories of that, but I really
• 59:48
  loved the adventurous of Henrietta St.
• 59:51
  Oh wow, we should not have expected that.
• 59:55
  From you just the image of Sabbath pulling out the doctor's
• 59:59
  heart made me Oh my God, I was eating my lunch at the time in
• 1:00:04
  the staff room in Bracknell library and just tiny prints
• 1:00:09
  didn't storytelling, but I absolutely adored it and I'm and
• 1:00:14
  I'm although. Interference perhaps wasn't for
• 1:00:20
  me. There was so much that was good
• 1:00:21
  in it, but I didn't like what it did overall.
• 1:00:25
  And he's a very brave writer, but I'd loved him from Alien
• 1:00:29
  Bodies. Alien Bodies was magnificent,
• 1:00:31
  but John Arnold chose that. So I thought I would shock you
• 1:00:34
  with a very late. You have shocked me.
• 1:00:37
  And I know what I loved the Sabbath arc.
• 1:00:41
  I'm about, like I said, 233 interference.
• 1:00:43
  I understand completely why a Doctor Who fan of a certain type
• 1:00:48
  would detest that book, because it is just wrong on so many
• 1:00:54
  levels. I didn't detest it, I just, I
• 1:00:58
  just didn't agree with what it was doing.
• 1:01:01
  I understood why it was doing them and because you could mess
• 1:01:04
  around with Doctor Who continuity, but I didn't get
• 1:01:08
  where the hell it was going to go.
• 1:01:10
  When when poor old. But don't forget, anyone guess
• 1:01:13
  where it was going to go? Gets that cup.
• 1:01:15
  Of coffee thrown in his face and there's blood running down the
• 1:01:18
  TARDIS walls. It's like fuck me.
• 1:01:20
  OK. What did you think of the the
• 1:01:23
  style of adventurism like being done as a historical document?
• 1:01:26
  Because some people said there's a bit of distance because it's
• 1:01:29
  not being relayed as a as a story.
• 1:01:32
  But around the same time, I'd read a book that did something
• 1:01:35
  similar, which if you asked him about his book, Fraser would
• 1:01:40
  have chosen as his book choice in Desert Island Picks, which is
• 1:01:46
  Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which was very much a
• 1:01:49
  historical document from around a similar kind of time.
• 1:01:54
  And so I was very much in that mindset and very much enjoying
• 1:01:58
  reading someone doing the same thing but with Doctor Who.
• 1:02:01
  And I think it's a brave and beautiful piece of Doctor Who.
• 1:02:06
  The only thing I think could have made it put more perfect
• 1:02:09
  than it already is is if he could have done what he wanted
• 1:02:13
  to do and say it was Benny that put together that historical
• 1:02:16
  document because that that was his idea.
• 1:02:19
  That tiny extra layer would have been wonderful.
• 1:02:23
  You didn't mind Sabbath, did you say?
• 1:02:25
  Now that's not opinion. Either, I know, I know, but like
• 1:02:28
  really likes that era of the Edas from the burning on to the
• 1:02:33
  end. Actually, I think there's a
• 1:02:35
  there's a really strong run there and we've got new authors
• 1:02:39
  coming in and doing lots. Of women.
• 1:02:42
  Lots of women. Tabloid, Rose Maxwell, Halladay.
• 1:02:47
  And suddenly you've got this whole different perspective on
• 1:02:52
  Doctor Who and people who actually like Doctor Who.
• 1:02:55
  I think Doctor Who adventures. What an idea.
• 1:02:59
  The arc was convoluted and all over the place and I'm not going
• 1:03:02
  to say it was perfect because it wasn't, but I was gripped by
• 1:03:07
  those stories. Good.
• 1:03:08
  Grace side, we're definitely have to cover one of those, Sam.
• 1:03:11
  Get to my pot Mace. Unfortunately, you've just done
• 1:03:15
  the one that I would have loved to have.
• 1:03:17
  What was that? An acrophobia?
• 1:03:19
  Which it was terrifying and beautifully written and oh, and
• 1:03:23
  actually, I'm going to go back and read that one after hearing
• 1:03:26
  your book club because I. Believe he murdered them all
• 1:03:28
  with a load of mustard gas. So.
• 1:03:30
  Horrific. But brilliant, really.
• 1:03:35
  Really good. And that that proved to me that
• 1:03:37
  I can enjoy time. You want me It just.
• 1:03:39
  Yeah. Exactly.
• 1:03:40
  By Steven Moffett. Yes, and that's the thing.
• 1:03:45
  And so let's go back to the other end of the EDAS and
• 1:03:52
  another thing that typifies everything that I disliked
• 1:03:55
  Doctor Who books doing, and that is Genocide by Paul Leonard.
• 1:04:00
  OK I I get this. I want you to explain this.
• 1:04:04
  We've got talking horses, which is absolutely fine.
• 1:04:07
  We've got the Doctor and Sam, which is absolutely fine, but
• 1:04:10
  what is not absolutely fine is making Joe Jones have a
• 1:04:16
  miserable, horrible, horrible life.
• 1:04:20
  And of all the characters in Doctor Who, to do that to Joe is
• 1:04:26
  the most vicious and nasty thing and so unnecessary.
• 1:04:33
  And this is all part of Doctor Who fans wanting Doctor Who to
• 1:04:37
  be grown up, and grown up means everyone's got traumatic,
• 1:04:42
  horrible lives. So again, in interference, just
• 1:04:45
  the throwaway line that Sarah Jane is sterile because she
• 1:04:48
  travelled in the TARDIS. Why?
• 1:04:51
  Why? Do you know what that is?
• 1:04:52
  My one massive con with Sarah's depiction in that like otherwise
• 1:04:57
  she's but that is so unnecessary as well.
• 1:05:02
  And it's this horrible thing where horrible things have to
• 1:05:05
  happen to good people because the universe is horrible.
• 1:05:08
  Probably sure. Yes, absolutely.
• 1:05:11
  Remember Sarah Jane getting a bullet in the head in bullet
• 1:05:15
  time? Lishore Dodo getting the head.
• 1:05:20
  Dodo, yes, and space syphilis. Yeah, Ben and Polly not getting
• 1:05:26
  together, all of these things, it's just like, do you have no
• 1:05:30
  joy in your lives? Joe is the worst.
• 1:05:33
  That depicted Joe just angry. She's really angry, isn't she?
• 1:05:40
  And and so coming into the death of the doctor was such a joy
• 1:05:46
  because that's absolutely the life that Joe would have.
• 1:05:49
  And Russell got that beautifully right.
• 1:05:51
  And Paul Leonard, I really liked a lot of your books, but that
• 1:05:54
  one a load of old horseshit giant talking horse sheds.
• 1:05:59
  I I think those early EDA's at first sort of five or season no
• 1:06:03
  alien bodies is in it and vampire science but God it feels
• 1:06:07
  from. Oh yeah?
• 1:06:09
  Oh well, we're going to have an adventure with the Zygons and
• 1:06:12
  Jago and Lightfoot in Victorian England.
• 1:06:14
  Why? You're not doing anything with
• 1:06:17
  it. There's nothing new in there.
• 1:06:18
  You're just trying to get a Talons feel.
• 1:06:21
  Terence, can you come in, please, and write a small short
• 1:06:24
  story from every other story you've ever written, ever place?
• 1:06:28
  Yes, of course I can, and I'm going to forgive Babusa, it's
• 1:06:32
  all. I quite enjoyed that one
• 1:06:35
  actually. It's terrorism.
• 1:06:37
  It's. Terrorism.
• 1:06:38
  But yeah, exactly. But yeah, just that that was
• 1:06:41
  such a slog, those early books. Genocide.
• 1:06:44
  Yes, in that bin. Yes, OK.
• 1:06:50
  Back to the tops. No, I think I've only got 2 more
• 1:06:52
  left. What it'd be in both directions.
• 1:06:55
  In both both directions now. So oh.
• 1:06:58
  Let's. Come on, let's.
• 1:06:59
  Price some So as I mentioned earlier, I'm going to choose a
• 1:07:03
  big finish short trips collection.
• 1:07:06
  OK and I'm choosing short trips time signatures, which is edited
• 1:07:12
  by Simon Guria and I'm and it's a great little collection of of
• 1:07:18
  related stories about music. But I'm choosing this for a
• 1:07:22
  particular reason, because the first story in this collection,
• 1:07:26
  I was reading it and I was reading it and knowing exactly
• 1:07:31
  what was coming next and knowing what was coming next, right down
• 1:07:35
  to the dialogue that was coming. Because it's a story set in the
• 1:07:38
  TARDIS with Jon Pertwee and it's his way back from Metabolis Free
• 1:07:44
  to Earth, and he's basically almost paralysed and can't do
• 1:07:48
  very much. But he's solving this, this last
• 1:07:51
  mystery that is brilliant. And I was reading it picking how
• 1:07:57
  do I know? How do I, why am I getting such
• 1:07:59
  a sense of deja vu? And it turned out that story had
• 1:08:02
  been published in one of the previous short trips.
• 1:08:05
  And I've read it before, and I knew it really well because of
• 1:08:08
  that. And I hadn't realized till later
• 1:08:11
  on. I mean, that is indicative of
• 1:08:13
  what the books, whether it's the short trips or the regular
• 1:08:16
  books, they do love plugging gaps, don't they?
• 1:08:18
  Like they do, but it can be done very well.
• 1:08:20
  And that was done very well. And I just remember this being
• 1:08:23
  a. Really.
• 1:08:24
  That one. I'm Simon Guria, I've just
• 1:08:27
  looked it up. So yes, an over chill too early
• 1:08:32
  I. Would like to.
• 1:08:33
  Say about Simon Guria because he wrote and edited a number of
• 1:08:37
  short story collections for the Big Finish Benny range.
• 1:08:40
  He did. Life during wartime was very
• 1:08:43
  good. Oh.
• 1:08:44
  That was Cornell who did that one.
• 1:08:45
  What was that? Cornell?
• 1:08:46
  Yeah. Yeah, but but, and Guria did a
• 1:08:48
  couple as well. He's just a very sharp bloke.
• 1:08:52
  Yeah, really. His his his missing event, sort
• 1:08:55
  of past doctor adventure. The Time Travellers very nearly
• 1:08:58
  made my list because that's a beautiful book and that.
• 1:09:01
  Stitches together quite a lot of stories in a very clever way,
• 1:09:04
  doesn't? It again that's got a line that
• 1:09:07
  stayed with me and it was hello mum this is Ian.
• 1:09:12
  He brought me home. I just bring the the.
• 1:09:15
  Last line, isn't it? It's so, yeah, it's so gorgeous
• 1:09:19
  and beautiful. I think Simon Guria is much
• 1:09:22
  unsung it both in. The.
• 1:09:24
  Audios the works, I think. He's he's a lovely human being.
• 1:09:29
  And so I'm assuming that that's a sort of a range of authors in
• 1:09:33
  that anthology. Yeah, and I just remember it
• 1:09:35
  being a really nice collection of stories.
• 1:09:38
  It probably isn't the best one, but it's one I remembered.
• 1:09:41
  And I always think that Range kind of never got the kudos it
• 1:09:47
  deserved. It kind of has been forgotten a
• 1:09:49
  bit and I really enjoyed them all do.
• 1:09:52
  You think the short story has its place in sort of Doctor Who
• 1:09:56
  fiction? Yeah, I'm, I there's been quite
• 1:10:00
  obviously over the years now, there's been a lot of short
• 1:10:04
  story collections to smaller or bigger degrees that have worked
• 1:10:09
  really well. I've always really liked the BBC
• 1:10:12
  short trips collections, short trips and sidesteps and more
• 1:10:16
  short trips and and things. I thought those were really
• 1:10:19
  good. The Decalogues were interesting,
• 1:10:21
  but not necessarily brilliant. A mixture of good authors and
• 1:10:25
  bad authors. Yeah, well, Stephen Moffat did
• 1:10:27
  his first story in that. So I think they were high
• 1:10:31
  concepts. Whereas actually sometimes you
• 1:10:33
  just want a collection of stories that are small enough
• 1:10:36
  for that. You just need a short story.
• 1:10:39
  And we've got Paul Mars's first Doctor Who fiction in the first
• 1:10:42
  Short Trips book. Was it an Irish story?
• 1:10:45
  The Iris story with the 4th Doctor and Sarah Jane.
• 1:10:49
  Old flames. Old flames, yes, and I'm sorry,
• 1:10:53
  I have to apologise because Paul Mars so nearly made it in so
• 1:10:56
  many different ways onto my top ten list and there wasn't room.
• 1:11:00
  If if there was room what what book would you have chosen?
• 1:11:04
  Well I the Scarlet Empress for making me howl on a train to
• 1:11:10
  Manchester and reading out the bit about the the death zone,
• 1:11:13
  the Iris with all her crappy enemies being sent.
• 1:11:17
  The zombie. Zombie the Clarks.
• 1:11:20
  Oh, sorry, Fraser. Yeah, I love that.
• 1:11:24
  The Blue Angel I thoroughly enjoyed and that was the one
• 1:11:30
  that made me. No, actually no.
• 1:11:32
  Straight after The Scarlet Empress I went and read his
• 1:11:34
  other fiction straight away. He did a trilogy of of books in
• 1:11:38
  Newton Ayliff and then it turned out half the characters turned
• 1:11:41
  up in the Blue Angel. Because his world is a his
• 1:11:45
  universe is a multiverse of interconnectedness.
• 1:11:49
  To be honest, every single 1. I loved her degree, was just
• 1:11:53
  mad. Mad dogs in English, but I
• 1:11:55
  bloody love that one. Yep, I adored that one and read
• 1:11:59
  that shamelessly. We were out in public.
• 1:12:03
  We're. Going to the Poodle planet.
• 1:12:07
  What's no carrot? Doctor, they want to strip us
• 1:12:11
  naked and put us in a. Kennel Andrew Kapoor Try to not
• 1:12:16
  look down at the doctor and fit and see.
• 1:12:21
  And even sick building was brilliant, you know, love.
• 1:12:24
  Sick building, Oh my God. But he's not on the list.
• 1:12:27
  So let's circle back around to, well, unfortunately, another
• 1:12:32
  post much you'll never care to read again.
• 1:12:35
  It's my final choice. Oh God, make it a good one.
• 1:12:39
  Oh yeah, this is a this is a prime against literature.
• 1:12:43
  And this is by Terence Dudley and it's canine and company the
• 1:12:49
  novelization. Now, why this one?
• 1:12:52
  Because he he novelized a couple.
• 1:12:54
  Yep, they're all awful. I don't care what Stephen B says
• 1:12:58
  about Black Orchids. The cricket match takes up half
• 1:13:01
  a book because he could describe that in mind numbing tedious.
• 1:13:07
  I will say one thing, it's like right place, right time, wasn't
• 1:13:10
  it? He said.
• 1:13:11
  Like the audio came out, he needed something to help him
• 1:13:14
  relax and that's just perfect for that.
• 1:13:16
  Joe, I listened to the audio book and I missed out a whole
• 1:13:20
  disc and didn't notice. Wow, did you sleep?
• 1:13:24
  I just, I just forgot to play disc 2 and have no idea that I
• 1:13:29
  moved on. Nothing had happened, Yeah.
• 1:13:34
  Won't be the first one I rushed. For.
• 1:13:36
  But what's So? Why is?
• 1:13:37
  Company, yeah, on TV it's 50 minutes of actually it's
• 1:13:45
  rubbish, isn't it? But absolutely saved by the
• 1:13:48
  performances, kind of. Charming rubbish.
• 1:13:51
  It is, but the book is, well, OK, so his prose is not great in
• 1:14:01
  the 1st place. He's not a brilliant writer, but
• 1:14:04
  this one has, it's over descriptive.
• 1:14:08
  So it's adding it out because he's only got 50 minutes of same
• 1:14:13
  with the King's demons, really. And there's I, there's, there's
• 1:14:16
  a beautiful paragraph where he described Sarah Jane came
• 1:14:20
  downstairs into her brown room. She was wearing brown and she
• 1:14:23
  made herself a brown breakfast which had brown bacon and a
• 1:14:26
  brown cup of tea and a brown mug.
• 1:14:30
  Really. Yep, something like that.
• 1:14:32
  Then in in the last climactic and dramatic series where Sarah
• 1:14:38
  Jane is manically driving down country lane Zoom.
• 1:14:41
  Into the church. Yeah, he's describing which
• 1:14:45
  route she takes by the road. So Sarah Jane turned off the A
• 1:14:49
  21 and turned on to the B352. This was taking her towards
• 1:14:53
  Bradford Abbas where there was another church that she was
• 1:14:56
  going to have to see. She turned left.
• 1:14:59
  There was a sharp right. And this is like, I think, in a
• 1:15:02
  book. That's like being in the car
• 1:15:03
  with her. Yes, and it's it just is painful
• 1:15:10
  to read honestly. To show him that episode, you
• 1:15:13
  know, Forest of the Dead, where Moffitt showed you that, that
• 1:15:16
  there were gaps in the narrative for a reason, He's cut.
• 1:15:19
  Yes, cut he's permanent moments. And every description of Sarah
• 1:15:24
  Jane is like Sarah Jane grizzled Sarah Jane grizzled, Sarah Jane
• 1:15:30
  was cross. And it's just like, oh, OK, you
• 1:15:35
  really don't like any of the characters who are in.
• 1:15:37
  There, Sarah Jane is a grumpy asshole with this, is she?
• 1:15:39
  Yeah. Well, she is.
• 1:15:41
  Oh. Dear, who reads the the target
• 1:15:44
  of that? The Target book is read
• 1:15:46
  beautifully by John Leeson. Oh, I've got it.
• 1:15:49
  Here it is five times the running length of Canine and
• 1:15:54
  Company. Yeah, he's got to get in all
• 1:15:57
  those Rd. directions. And just like, I mean, that's
• 1:16:00
  beautiful because you've got a canine SAT NAV ready made.
• 1:16:03
  But if you're not following that journey, it's it could be
• 1:16:06
  anything. And it's just, it's just just
• 1:16:09
  awful. And it's like, like Tom Baker
• 1:16:12
  said, it's audible print. If I had to, you know, as a
• 1:16:17
  torture technique, if I had to force you to read either Caitlin
• 1:16:21
  and Company or The Book of the Steel, the two books that sort
• 1:16:25
  of bookended your worst list, you know, which one would you
• 1:16:28
  gravitate? Towards I'm going to go to for
• 1:16:30
  the Book of the Steel because at least I have no memory of what
• 1:16:32
  was in that, whereas with Caitlin and company, I know
• 1:16:35
  what's coming all the way through.
• 1:16:39
  Yeah, I nobody is. Asked to do that on the book.
• 1:16:42
  Club and there's probably a good reason for that.
• 1:16:45
  Yes, we're going to start so end on a high we obviously we're
• 1:16:49
  ending on. Is this the best Doctor Who book
• 1:16:51
  of all time? No.
• 1:16:54
  Oh. But I love it.
• 1:16:58
  Let's hear it. It is the Doctor Who annual
• 1:17:01
  1981. What that's?
• 1:17:05
  So random 1981 in particular. I mean, it could be any of them,
• 1:17:11
  to be honest, but 1981 was the first one that I had bought for
• 1:17:14
  me at Christmas. So you know what, the annuals
• 1:17:18
  get a hell of a lot of stick. But they were pretty much, along
• 1:17:24
  with the early comic strips, the 1st Doctor Who fiction.
• 1:17:28
  And they're, you know, they don't get a lot of love.
• 1:17:33
  And one of the things I've really loved doing with the trap
• 1:17:35
  one team is talking about the audio versions of the annuals.
• 1:17:39
  We're the only people who would even think of covering those.
• 1:17:43
  And the annuals were. There's not enough hours of the
• 1:17:46
  day, all right. No, absolutely not.
• 1:17:48
  I quite agree. But the annuals were the first,
• 1:17:51
  some of the 1st Doctor Who books that I owned and I loved.
• 1:17:55
  And, you know, they were telling, if not accurate, Doctor
• 1:18:00
  Who. They were telling interesting
• 1:18:02
  stories. And, you know, they helped
• 1:18:06
  expand my mind. And I don't care if now, now I'm
• 1:18:11
  old and don't worry about these things, that it's all the things
• 1:18:17
  that I've criticized everyone else for, the characters not
• 1:18:19
  being in character and stories not feeling like Doctor Who.
• 1:18:23
  But these are charming. And these are written at a time
• 1:18:26
  when it didn't matter if Doctor Who wasn't quite like Doctor Who
• 1:18:32
  on the telly, because this was the only other Doctor Who
• 1:18:36
  stories you were going to get each year.
• 1:18:38
  And I think that's worth celebrating.
• 1:18:41
  And sometimes they hit incredible highs unexpectedly.
• 1:18:46
  And so in this this annual, I'm just going to have to put it off
• 1:18:49
  the shelf so that I get the story names right.
• 1:18:51
  Is it the one with Tom Baker on the front?
• 1:18:54
  Yeah, it's the one with Tom Baker and a wibbly wobbly
• 1:18:57
  purple. No.
• 1:18:58
  Do you know which one I was thinking of?
• 1:18:59
  And you'll be able to tell me the year I know it, It's got Tom
• 1:19:02
  Baker. The one I was thinking of, it's
• 1:19:03
  got Tom Baker, you know, in the full circle location.
• 1:19:07
  Next year, yes, it's 821982 annual.
• 1:19:11
  Yeah. Oh, I love that one.
• 1:19:13
  Yeah. And a very.
• 1:19:14
  Fantastic picture of Peter Davidson as well.
• 1:19:17
  But this has there are two stories that I really loved in
• 1:19:20
  this one. One's called A Midsummer's
• 1:19:22
  Nightmare, which is set in in Earth, set on on Earth in
• 1:19:31
  Scandinavia and features the Doctor, Romana and canine.
• 1:19:35
  So obviously it's winning straight off.
• 1:19:37
  And it's just a really great story about the devil and people
• 1:19:42
  possessed. And actually the characters feel
• 1:19:45
  pretty much like they did on TV. But also it has a brilliant
• 1:19:50
  comic strip about canine called Every Dog Has His Day, where
• 1:19:54
  canine has to to win the day and lead a robot uprising against a
• 1:20:02
  mad computer. And that's brilliant.
• 1:20:05
  Can you please just have a flick through?
• 1:20:07
  Are there puzzles in it you know?
• 1:20:08
  Another Oh, there is look, there's there's a a little game
• 1:20:11
  at the back with. Zentovian problem.
• 1:20:15
  Yes, a game for two to four players it.
• 1:20:19
  Was annual size. I was never quite sure who was
• 1:20:22
  being drawn in the pictures. As well as.
• 1:20:25
  It turned like. Sarah or Leela or anyone?
• 1:20:28
  As it turned out, and Paul Mars's brilliant book about the
• 1:20:31
  Doctor Who annuals, the problem was a lot of the actors who
• 1:20:36
  played the companions particularly didn't give the
• 1:20:38
  rights to their likeness and so they couldn't draw them like
• 1:20:43
  they were because they didn't have the right.
• 1:20:44
  So quite often Katie Manning, Liz Sladen and Lola Ward
• 1:20:51
  particularly were people who didn't give those those rights,
• 1:20:54
  so they had to had to fudge it. Sarah Jane looks strikingly like
• 1:20:59
  that actress from the B movie Nymphoid Barbarian and dinosaur
• 1:21:02
  Hell in those things. Because they'd use whatever.
• 1:21:05
  Leila looked a bit like a librarian.
• 1:21:07
  You. Know yes, definite rain Mac A
• 1:21:10
  lot of the time. Sometimes you look like Barbara
• 1:21:12
  Bain, which was very odd so but you know, I find them utterly
• 1:21:17
  charming and the stories sometimes absolutely hit the
• 1:21:22
  mark. Sometimes they're miles off and
• 1:21:25
  you know what? I don't care if anyone else
• 1:21:27
  would never choose those for their top ten, I'm going to
• 1:21:30
  celebrate them. I mean, you, you have chosen a
• 1:21:33
  couple of things in your top ten there that just really caught
• 1:21:35
  you at that young age. Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:21:38
  And I think that, yeah, in fact, I was always going to do that.
• 1:21:40
  Come on, it's me. Of course, of course.
• 1:21:42
  But but I, I think it's kind of delightful, you know, I mean,
• 1:21:47
  it's spawned a career with books.
• 1:21:49
  Well, exactly. You know, I love books from a
• 1:21:52
  very early age because of these books.
• 1:21:54
  So I could have done a whole whole list of just target books.
• 1:22:00
  I could have done a whole. I nearly did a whole list of non
• 1:22:02
  fiction, good and bad, because I could do that.
• 1:22:05
  But they would be very samey. On on the book clubs now I've
• 1:22:10
  started doing these who ranks, I don't know if you've heard of
• 1:22:12
  them or we do top three this top three that.
• 1:22:14
  So you'll have your chance to be ranking more things in the
• 1:22:17
  future. But for now, I am going to ask
• 1:22:20
  you to do one last ranking and that is to rank the ranges.
• 1:22:26
  And I'm going to sort of I'll detail them very quickly for
• 1:22:29
  everybody. So it's the targets, the new
• 1:22:33
  adventures, the missing adventures, the 8th Doctor
• 1:22:36
  adventures, the past Doctor adventures.
• 1:22:38
  Rides. New series Adventures OK and the
• 1:22:42
  Teles novellas if you want to include them.
• 1:22:44
  OK well OK so at the bottom will be the Teles novellas, which was
• 1:22:51
  I I read about 5 or 6 of them and they were so hit and miss
• 1:22:55
  that they didn't work for me at all.
• 1:22:58
  I can see what they were doing, but I think the format of them
• 1:23:04
  was so prohibitively expensive for what you were getting that
• 1:23:09
  it wasn't worth the investment half the time.
• 1:23:11
  And the only ones I read were the ones that the library bought
• 1:23:13
  for me to read at the time and I I just think they were a kind of
• 1:23:18
  nothing range. Well, it was it was a range
• 1:23:22
  where they sort of promised prestige writers and then ended
• 1:23:26
  up with Key. PDA Writers.
• 1:23:29
  People like that, yeah. OK, so that's right at the
• 1:23:31
  bottom. So so the penultimate.
• 1:23:34
  Range would be probably the new series Adventures, just because
• 1:23:38
  I was. If I was 11 at the time of the
• 1:23:42
  of those books, I'd have adored them.
• 1:23:44
  They'd have been absolutely right, but they were too simple
• 1:23:51
  for me. But that said, they were touched
• 1:23:55
  by an Angel by Johnny Morris, so nearly made it to my I've
• 1:24:00
  crossed it out here, but it was so nearly on my top list because
• 1:24:05
  that was a beautiful book and used.
• 1:24:08
  Prisoner of the Daleks is another banger.
• 1:24:10
  As well and there were the occasional one that was
• 1:24:14
  absolutely superb, but generally I knew what they were doing but
• 1:24:20
  they weren't aimed at me and they they passed the time.
• 1:24:23
  As tie in books, I don't think they had any right to be as as
• 1:24:28
  competent. No, absolutely not.
• 1:24:31
  Because they could have just knocked out any old shit and the
• 1:24:33
  kids got lapped them up and actually they did make an effort
• 1:24:37
  to make them good. Books and they cherry picked the
• 1:24:40
  best writers who had come from the Doctor Who ranges to do
• 1:24:44
  that, and that's worth their weight in gold.
• 1:24:47
  OK, so at #3. Would probably be, I think Bri
• 1:24:56
  and I'm going to going to tie the next two because I can't
• 1:25:00
  choose very much between them. And that's the no, actually, no,
• 1:25:04
  I'm not because I'm going to come back to that.
• 1:25:06
  This will be the new adventures. Oh, OK, OK.
• 1:25:10
  I'm going to put them down low because I did love them at the
• 1:25:14
  time and I'm very nostalgic for a lot of them.
• 1:25:18
  But this is so often, it's so far away from my Doctor Who.
• 1:25:26
  It's not my comfort zone, Doctor Who.
• 1:25:28
  And that's a good thing because they need to push the
• 1:25:32
  boundaries. But so often they pushed it into
• 1:25:34
  something that didn't feel Doctor Whoey to me.
• 1:25:38
  So many good things came out of them, but overall I look back
• 1:25:44
  and think a lot of this is very juvenile.
• 1:25:48
  This is very a lot. So many of the writers are new
• 1:25:53
  writers, so they haven't learnt how to write.
• 1:25:55
  You can sense it as and where we get more authors coming back and
• 1:26:00
  back. You can see their style develop
• 1:26:02
  and then finding their voice. But so much of it is just barely
• 1:26:08
  competent storytelling and that I've so much of it I've found
• 1:26:14
  just confused and, and things like that.
• 1:26:18
  And when you've got planet names and character names that you
• 1:26:22
  can't even begin to pronounce because it's full of exclamation
• 1:26:25
  Marks and XS and ZS. And I know exactly why they're
• 1:26:29
  doing this, but that wasn't for me.
• 1:26:32
  That's not I'm not a big sci-fi fan despite loving Doctor Who,
• 1:26:36
  and there's so much of it was pushing towards that that I
• 1:26:39
  couldn't grab hold of this. And like I said earlier, there
• 1:26:43
  was such a lack of hope in so many of the stories that that
• 1:26:46
  really puts me off in hindsight, although I lapped them up at the
• 1:26:49
  time. I wonder if it's sort of similar
• 1:26:53
  reasons that you're less keen on Torchwood as well as.
• 1:26:57
  A yeah, absolutely. It's absolutely.
• 1:26:59
  Professing to be grown up, but it's actually quite.
• 1:27:02
  It's actually really childish, yeah.
• 1:27:04
  And you don't realise that when you're 1617 to 2022 reading
• 1:27:09
  these books, you know, they're, you're absolutely in the moment.
• 1:27:12
  But looking back, they're not for me.
• 1:27:15
  Yeah, they could be mature, you know.
• 1:27:17
  Absolutely. And yes.
• 1:27:19
  And every so often you'd get something like Just War by Lance
• 1:27:23
  Parkin that comes in right towards the end and it is like.
• 1:27:27
  Brilliant therapy, things like that.
• 1:27:29
  You know, absolutely. I remember really loving the
• 1:27:34
  room with no doors and. And these were all quite late
• 1:27:37
  ones. Maybe they just.
• 1:27:38
  Got some late. Yes, the The Dying Days was
• 1:27:41
  tremendous, fabulous, brilliant book.
• 1:27:45
  OK, so the new adventures at three.
• 1:27:48
  Yeah. So what's at 4:00?
• 1:27:49
  So tying together here would be the Missing adventures and the
• 1:27:54
  past Doctor adventures, because there's so little to choose
• 1:27:57
  between them. They're all doing the same kind
• 1:27:59
  of thing and I could it's a hair's breadth between them
• 1:28:05
  because both ranges, when they're at their peak are
• 1:28:08
  brilliant. And I didn't get to talk about
• 1:28:10
  Gareth Roberts's trilogy of season 17 books, which are
• 1:28:14
  bloody amazing and I love them all and particularly.
• 1:28:18
  Have been able to talk about Jonathan Morris.
• 1:28:21
  'S yes, absolutely. The romance of crime.
• 1:28:24
  Even the blurb made me laugh when it said at the back.
• 1:28:27
  And which old enemy of the doctor is waiting in the wings
• 1:28:31
  and he's got a picture of a bloody oak run on the cover.
• 1:28:34
  And it's just like, this is this is perfect.
• 1:28:37
  So when when both ranges are at their peak, they're really good.
• 1:28:42
  But also when they're down the bottom, they're dreadful books
• 1:28:48
  at the bottom of both ranges. And it's so hard to call between
• 1:28:52
  them because they're both doing the same kind of things a lot of
• 1:28:55
  the time. So I mean, another book that
• 1:28:57
  didn't make my list was actually APDA, which was a morality tale
• 1:29:03
  by David Bishop. Which is a.
• 1:29:05
  Beautiful book and puts Jon Pertwee's doctor in an adventure
• 1:29:10
  that he shouldn't be in in the 1950s Gangsters.
• 1:29:14
  Isn't it and? Gangsters, East End gangsters.
• 1:29:17
  And it's wonderful. I read, I had, I got the talking
• 1:29:21
  book of that again the other year and I loved it all over
• 1:29:25
  again so. You know, I can't imagine you
• 1:29:27
  enjoying something like Rags. Not enjoy that.
• 1:29:34
  Joe Grant. Puke it up, maggots.
• 1:29:37
  You know, and, but yeah, and then I'll sort of look at the
• 1:29:42
  and then there's so many Holy Average books by Christopher
• 1:29:48
  Beulis. So many.
• 1:29:52
  So many, you know, and but so many books of that ilk and and
• 1:29:58
  and then you get Deadly Reunion by Harry and Terence, which is
• 1:30:03
  just like, Oh my God, what? Are you island of death?
• 1:30:06
  Yeah. And so many, Yeah, you know, but
• 1:30:11
  when they're high, they're so good and they're taking risks.
• 1:30:15
  And you? Mentioned the time travellers
• 1:30:18
  earlier, didn't you? The.
• 1:30:19
  Time travellers and the witch hunters and oh, what was you
• 1:30:26
  have a. Sons of Koresh I remember being
• 1:30:28
  a really great book. Yeah, I was just looking at that
• 1:30:30
  one actually, with the shaved heads.
• 1:30:32
  Yeah, up there it's Tiger. Loved length Tiger.
• 1:30:35
  Yeah. Fabulous.
• 1:30:36
  Yeah. You know, so lots of the
• 1:30:38
  gathering, which is absolutely the PERT, we love letters to the
• 1:30:42
  PERT. We use blue.
• 1:30:43
  Box The 6th Doctor Perry in the Internet Revolution.
• 1:30:48
  Yeah, and, and you know, and things like the crystal
• 1:30:51
  Busepholus and millennial rites, which are absolutely adored, but
• 1:30:55
  then you've got things that are just utterly, completely
• 1:30:59
  forgettable, like dancing the code or things like that.
• 1:31:04
  So the ranges are so high and low that but there really is
• 1:31:09
  just so little to choose between those two ranges that they tie
• 1:31:12
  for me. Because I are so unpredictably
• 1:31:17
  sort of unpredictable in quality.
• 1:31:19
  They're so fascinating to talk about.
• 1:31:21
  Oh. Absolutely, because you never
• 1:31:22
  quite know what you're going to get.
• 1:31:25
  I'm sure we'll have a lot of fun.
• 1:31:26
  I'm picking some of those. OK, so what's your next choice
• 1:31:29
  then? So after this would be the Edas.
• 1:31:32
  Yes, I thought it was going to. Come a lot lower.
• 1:31:36
  I'm really I'm do you know they were hugely, they were as
• 1:31:40
  inconsistent as anything. They had big convoluted arcs,
• 1:31:46
  but I bought into the lot of them.
• 1:31:48
  I followed them all, and I followed it from start to the
• 1:31:51
  very end. And you know what?
• 1:31:55
  There's so many books in there that I look back and think that
• 1:32:00
  was that was really good. That was a great book that I
• 1:32:02
  really love that and you've. Covered Father Time recently,
• 1:32:05
  didn't you on World? Stories that's so new that only
• 1:32:08
  didn't make my list because I just covered that on someone
• 1:32:11
  else's podcast in depth. I'm going to throw a few a few
• 1:32:15
  names at you and you tell me whether it's a a thumbs up or a
• 1:32:18
  thumbs down. All right, OK, Alien bodies.
• 1:32:22
  Thumbs up. Longest stay.
• 1:32:25
  Thumbs down. That was the longest read.
• 1:32:30
  The Scarlet Empress. Oh, thumbs up.
• 1:32:33
  Turing Test. Thumbs up.
• 1:32:35
  Double thumbs up. That was brilliant.
• 1:32:38
  Brilliant book. Thumbs up.
• 1:32:40
  Earth whales. Kind of in the middle.
• 1:32:46
  The year of intelligent tigers. I admired that, but I didn't
• 1:32:50
  like it. Oh.
• 1:32:50
  Was it OK? So you're the dead.
• 1:32:53
  Brilliant. Grim reality.
• 1:32:58
  Yeah, it's just kind of. Yeah, kind of just there, not
• 1:33:02
  like the Tomorrow Windows which was up.
• 1:33:05
  Crooked World. Crooked world, Brilliant
• 1:33:08
  concept, brilliantly done. So I, I like with the EDA.
• 1:33:12
  So you know, I'm a massive fan. Yeah.
• 1:33:14
  I just think you are right. They are utterly inconsistent
• 1:33:17
  and they change their mind about what they want to do.
• 1:33:21
  From book to book, Yeah. Yeah, he's got amnesia, but we
• 1:33:25
  want to do some continuity this week, all right?
• 1:33:28
  But I do think like when you put them in the new adventure side
• 1:33:32
  by side, I I feel as if they tried more things.
• 1:33:38
  Yes, succeeded more, more times, but they but but also they more
• 1:33:46
  often felt like Doctor Who to me, that they got that
• 1:33:50
  inherently right and there were missteps and things like that.
• 1:33:56
  But I loved Fitz. I thought Fitz was brilliant and
• 1:34:00
  I missed him so much for those that series where the Doctor had
• 1:34:04
  lost his memory again. So the burning onwards and I was
• 1:34:07
  so happy to have him back. It's, it's so rare, isn't it, to
• 1:34:12
  have that Second Doctor and Jamie, Man, man, yeah.
• 1:34:15
  That bro it worked. It did work.
• 1:34:18
  I mean, it worked again with Lebanon and Rory, didn't it?
• 1:34:21
  But it is really rare to get that right.
• 1:34:23
  Yeah, and I know she gets a lot stick, but I really liked Angie.
• 1:34:27
  She's one of my Angie. Yeah, she.
• 1:34:29
  Was. Smart.
• 1:34:31
  She was, she was smart and she was funny and she wasn't having
• 1:34:34
  any of their nonsense, but I loved it when they were
• 1:34:36
  traveling round in compassion. Where did they go in though?
• 1:34:43
  How did they get inside you? I didn't ever want to think
• 1:34:47
  about that. That's not to ask the question,
• 1:34:49
  really. Isn't it?
• 1:34:50
  The doctor did it with a polite, gentlemanly hiccup.
• 1:34:52
  Every time you've got in, you know.
• 1:34:54
  Excuse me? Well, this could only leave 1
• 1:34:57
  range right at the summit. It's the target books and I'm
• 1:35:01
  so. Pleased someone's finally chosen
• 1:35:04
  the targets for the top. It will always be the target
• 1:35:07
  books because they were my gateway into Doctor Who fiction.
• 1:35:13
  They were my gateway into reading.
• 1:35:15
  They were my gateway into looking at different styles of
• 1:35:19
  cover art. They were my gateway into
• 1:35:22
  understanding that different authors wrote in different
• 1:35:25
  style. They taught me everything.
• 1:35:28
  They taught me words that I didn't know.
• 1:35:31
  And I can remember putting my hand up in Infant School and
• 1:35:36
  when our teacher was right. So how would you start off a
• 1:35:39
  story about your summer holidays?
• 1:35:41
  And I just remember putting my hand up and saying during the
• 1:35:43
  summer holidays and my teacher just looking amazed that I knew
• 1:35:47
  this word. But I knew that because I heard
• 1:35:49
  it in every Terrence Dick's book, you know?
• 1:35:53
  And so often I talk to my mum about all these things and she
• 1:35:56
  said she loved reading them because the best Target books
• 1:36:00
  were made to be read out loud. They were so exciting.
• 1:36:04
  And she said I'd quite often get to the end of a chapter and
• 1:36:07
  think, I don't want to stop reading now.
• 1:36:08
  But we've said it at 1, you know, and that's, it's an
• 1:36:13
  incredible body of work that we sometimes dismiss a bit too
• 1:36:19
  easily because we've got them all on TV now and we can watch
• 1:36:23
  the they're also accessible. But they tell those stories in
• 1:36:27
  such interesting and different ways a lot of the time.
• 1:36:30
  And the things that Terence just coming in and just fixing
• 1:36:34
  something that's really irritated him with the
• 1:36:36
  storytelling logic or whatever. And that's how the, and that was
• 1:36:40
  the end of the Android invasion. The Android invasion was over
• 1:36:44
  the 1st last line of it. It's just, well.
• 1:36:48
  That and. The end of the time monster.
• 1:36:51
  Where, where is it? Where we've got the quote Where?
• 1:36:55
  Benson asks. And what has been going on?
• 1:36:58
  And the Doctor just thinking to himself and that thought the
• 1:37:02
  Doctor was a very good question. This is a load of old arse and I
• 1:37:08
  couldn't never tell Barry in 1971 when he was writing this.
• 1:37:12
  So you know, so many people criticise like Terrance's
• 1:37:15
  original novels. I.
• 1:37:16
  Admire him to this day, right in that first page of The 8 Doctors
• 1:37:20
  and going well, that bizarre adventure in San Francisco full
• 1:37:24
  of illogical events. I don't know what that was all
• 1:37:27
  about anyway. He just can't help himself.
• 1:37:30
  Because that's what my fault. I'm not sure I like this.
• 1:37:32
  New console room. I'm going to go back to the old
• 1:37:34
  white. One there we go let's go bless
• 1:37:39
  him and so do you think when you.
• 1:37:41
  Listen to those target. Audios as well.
• 1:37:43
  It's a. Completely different experience.
• 1:37:45
  Oh, it really is, and it's been such a joy since. 2005 I think
• 1:37:51
  when the first ones came out, to have gone back, because I might
• 1:37:55
  not have gone back and read many of them otherwise, but to have
• 1:37:59
  them read to me has been And sometimes the readers are
• 1:38:02
  dreadful and sometimes it doesn't quite work, but every so
• 1:38:06
  often it all comes together and you've got the best person
• 1:38:11
  reading it and a really great book and it flies.
• 1:38:14
  Jeffrey Beavers. I mean, Jeffrey Beavers is
• 1:38:17
  brilliant. He's.
• 1:38:18
  Averson does a great reading. Oh, his impression?
• 1:38:21
  Of Anthony. Inley is a joy to hear.
• 1:38:24
  Colin, Colin, He's reading of The Two Doctors.
• 1:38:28
  Really good John Leeson reading The Invasion of Time was.
• 1:38:32
  Just like on foot, blanket over me.
• 1:38:35
  So lovely. Can I say Darla Ward reading The
• 1:38:38
  Leisure Hive was just Oh my God, you're in heaven again?
• 1:38:44
  Like A5. Hour orgasm listening to that.
• 1:38:47
  Sorry, Lala. Can I just say to whoever's?
• 1:38:50
  Creating those things, sometimes I.
• 1:38:51
  Like to put on those target. Books to go to sleep to you
• 1:38:54
  know, it's quite relaxing to listen to someone read to you,
• 1:38:57
  you know, when you're going to sleep.
• 1:38:58
  But whoever put the music on for the demons, please don't.
• 1:39:02
  Weird. What's that so dramatic?
• 1:39:04
  And I can't waking up, but I'm like, what's happening?
• 1:39:08
  And that's read by Barry leads and it's gorgeous.
• 1:39:12
  Oh so. Lovely, lovely.
• 1:39:14
  So the target's at the top of the pile then, Yeah.
• 1:39:18
  Well, what a stunning I knew it was going to be.
• 1:39:21
  It. Was going to be getting side
• 1:39:23
  heart. That was the most.
• 1:39:26
  Side heart list you're. Going to get.
• 1:39:28
  Well, what was? Lovely as well.
• 1:39:29
  It really gave us the opportunity to go into places
• 1:39:32
  where. We've never been short tried
• 1:39:33
  absolutely canine books, the annuals, the adventures of
• 1:39:36
  Henrietta St. Didn't expect that no I.
• 1:39:39
  Didn't at all, but before we sign off this.
• 1:39:42
  Episode I'm going to ask you now, where is our new book club
• 1:39:47
  heading? First, we are going to The
• 1:39:50
  Missing Adventures. Thank goodness.
• 1:39:53
  And we are going to to Venice for the Empire of Glass with the
• 1:39:59
  Doctor, Vicky and Stephen. And it is beautiful.
• 1:40:03
  Now that choice was Stephen's. Yes, for our new book club.
• 1:40:09
  I'm going to put you on the spot now, unfortunately and say,
• 1:40:12
  well, I would like you please now.
• 1:40:14
  Oh no, you've already chosen 1. Well, have you?
• 1:40:19
  Unless you want. To change your mind, I mean.
• 1:40:21
  It's because you you chose the dark path that you and I.
• 1:40:26
  Do when and. Never thanks to me, we never
• 1:40:29
  quite got around to it because I couldn't finish it.
• 1:40:33
  It it didn't hold up, It wasn't quite how.
• 1:40:36
  I remembered it. So if you was going to sort of
• 1:40:38
  pull one out now and just go right, we'll do that. 2nd What
• 1:40:42
  would it be? Oh, furiously scanning the
• 1:40:47
  shelves now. Has anyone done the Infinity
• 1:40:50
  Doctors? No, that's a.
• 1:40:54
  Cracking read as well and that will be interesting.
• 1:41:00
  Because everyone has a view of who the doctor is in that one,
• 1:41:04
  and mine is possibly different to everyone else's.
• 1:41:07
  Oh well, I'll ask everyone on the call.
• 1:41:09
  I think that. I think that would be a.
• 1:41:11
  Great read, that was Stephen. 'S number one all time favorite
• 1:41:15
  Doctor Hoover, I don't think. It'll be a chore for him, no and
• 1:41:19
  I loved it too. So.
• 1:41:21
  But then what I might do? For the third one, which I'm
• 1:41:23
  going to throw to was. Throw to Jack to choose for us.
• 1:41:26
  But for the 4th 1:00 I'm going to choose a dog.
• 1:41:30
  The instruments of darkness. No, I did.
• 1:41:34
  Like instruments of darkness. I'm just looking at the self
• 1:41:37
  now. No, I've got to choose myself.
• 1:41:39
  Christopher Beulis. Oh.
• 1:41:42
  The device of death or something like that?
• 1:41:47
  So now I don't. Really need to ask.
• 1:41:50
  You to do this because you know anyone listen to this knows you
• 1:41:54
  very well and they should slightly do by now.
• 1:41:57
  Whereabouts they could find you. Elsewhere, but come on, we
• 1:42:00
  haven't done this for a while, okay?
• 1:42:01
  Well, okay, so I think I. Still have the record of more
• 1:42:07
  hamsters than anyone else and I've just added to my list.
• 1:42:09
  So a country mile the next person is about. 50 behind you.
• 1:42:15
  Yeah. Slackers.
• 1:42:19
  Joe slowed down his recordings now so you'll never catch up.
• 1:42:25
  It's true, but you can hear me, obviously.
• 1:42:29
  I'm a regular host on Trap one where I have covered more than a
• 1:42:33
  few books now, including if you ever want to find out more about
• 1:42:36
  the Doctor Who annuals, they're the place to start with the
• 1:42:39
  audio readings. I listen to your Witch Finders
• 1:42:42
  episode the other day. I really loved it.
• 1:42:44
  That was that. Was a good one, yeah.
• 1:42:47
  Or find me on Maximum Power, the Blake 7 podcast, where we have
• 1:42:52
  completed three series seasons of the show and are about to
• 1:42:56
  embark on Series D, which will be coming at the end of the
• 1:43:00
  year. But more importantly than all of
• 1:43:04
  those, you can find me on my own podcast, which is the Library of
• 1:43:08
  Impossible Things, which is a place where Doctor Who fans
• 1:43:12
  bring an objects that they love to place in the library.
• 1:43:16
  But more importantly, they tell their story of them and Doctor
• 1:43:20
  Who. And it has been an absolute joy
• 1:43:23
  to hear some astounding and brilliant and funny and more
• 1:43:30
  often than not, moving and sad stories.
• 1:43:33
  And it's been a privilege to talk to everyone who's been on
• 1:43:37
  so far and hear why we all fall in love with this silly show and
• 1:43:42
  find different ways to celebrate that love.
• 1:43:45
  What's been so intriguing about your podcast?
• 1:43:49
  Is it's people, A lot of the time it's people I've been
• 1:43:52
  talking to for a long time, yes. And yeah, because I basically
• 1:43:57
  got your back catalogue. Of people because I know them
• 1:44:00
  all. Fabulous people, but but I've
• 1:44:03
  learned so. Much about them that I didn't
• 1:44:06
  know, and especially some of their more vulnerable moments.
• 1:44:11
  Absolutely. So it is a really intimate peek
• 1:44:14
  into what Doctor Who means to those people.
• 1:44:17
  Apparently I'm I'm someone that people tell things to.
• 1:44:21
  That they don't expect to to be saying and the amount of times
• 1:44:24
  we've got to the end and said, well, I didn't expect to go
• 1:44:26
  there, but that's that's a lovely thing.
• 1:44:30
  And I've got much to say about myself.
• 1:44:32
  And you went. You'll see.
• 1:44:35
  And an hour and a half later. But you know, I always check
• 1:44:40
  with with all my guests afterwards when we have talked
• 1:44:43
  about something that is difficult, a difficult subject
• 1:44:47
  or a difficult part of their life to make sure that it's OK
• 1:44:50
  to go out and university. Everyone has said that's a vital
• 1:44:55
  part of my story. So yeah, it's a lovely, it's a
• 1:44:58
  privilege actually to to talk to everyone.
• 1:45:02
  It's like I said with the non fiction Doctor Who books, you
• 1:45:05
  know, you think. Everything's been covered, and
• 1:45:07
  then something like the library turns up and you realize there's
• 1:45:10
  still things to learn. No.
• 1:45:11
  And I I had one guest come on. Because he'd messaged me to say
• 1:45:16
  I'm loving this so much. I desperately want to come and
• 1:45:20
  and talk about this because this is something that no one else
• 1:45:23
  has ever done and no one else has fault of.
• 1:45:26
  And he said, and it's so obvious and I'm kicking myself for not
• 1:45:29
  thinking of this myself. So no.
• 1:45:33
  Fabulous, fabulous podcast. Thank you.
• 1:45:35
  You've created something. Very special there.
• 1:45:37
  And like, just to have everybody's stories there, yes.
• 1:45:41
  And I'm going to get everyone, I'm certain.
• 1:45:45
  People have listened back to their own stories.
• 1:45:47
  You. Know.
• 1:45:48
  Oh yeah, I've listened back to mine.
• 1:45:50
  I think I listened back to Mara and I.
• 1:45:52
  Thought fuck, we had to shut up. But that's, that's what it's
• 1:45:57
  about. That's everyone.
• 1:45:58
  Having their chance to not shut up.
• 1:46:01
  Well, you and I will be reading The Empire of Glass.
• 1:46:05
  We will watching the mysterious planet we.
• 1:46:09
  Will be. Arguing.
• 1:46:11
  Over. Season. 9.
• 1:46:13
  Of the classic series in you're becoming a big finish.
• 1:46:17
  I mean you. Might as well just pick up it's.
• 1:46:20
  The one thing I've been talking about so.
• 1:46:22
  Far and we'll be listening to. Necromantea.
• 1:46:24
  No, we won't. Don't put me through.
• 1:46:26
  That never ever again. But I'll definitely what's your
• 1:46:30
  favorite big finish spin off? Gallifrey.
• 1:46:34
  All right, Series 2. We've done Series 1.
• 1:46:36
  You could do series. Two.
• 1:46:37
  There you go. I'll come.
• 1:46:38
  If you want me, I'll come and do them.
• 1:46:39
  That's got Mary Tam in it. That's.
• 1:46:41
  Brilliant. What was her name?
• 1:46:43
  Pandora. Yeah, fabulous.
• 1:46:46
  Oh, So what a pleasure. Thank you so much for putting so
• 1:46:50
  much time into your list because there was some.
• 1:46:52
  I've got another 20 there. All right.
• 1:46:55
  When I bring this out please. Take a photograph in your list,
• 1:46:57
  all right? We'll put it up as you're
• 1:46:59
  running. You can see my crossings out.
• 1:47:02
  John Arnold did the same thing. He had this.
• 1:47:03
  Whole page of books and I was. Like Venn diagram of Doctor Who
• 1:47:07
  literature. But until Venice, thank you very
• 1:47:14
  much for your time today. It's a pleasure as always, Joe.