Latest / A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast / Hamster Book Club - Time & Relative (featuring Michael Mills)

Transcript

Hamster Book Club - Time & Relative (featuring Michael Mills) · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:02
  It was sleeting badly through the roaring wind.
• 0:05
  I heard a sound. I turned and looked back up the
• 0:08
  hill towards the school. 3 snowballs were rolling down the
• 0:12
  road in formation. They were the spearhead of a
• 0:15
  deliberate avalanche, a purposeful wall of white.
• 0:19
  We all got out of the way, abandoning the post.
• 0:23
  The Avalanche hit the checkpoint, smashing the wooden
• 0:26
  variant pole, and knocked over the Brazier, instantly
• 0:29
  extinguishing the coals. The Avalanche turned away from
• 0:33
  US-led by the three huge snowballs, and ran up against
• 0:37
  the armored car. I saw the metal, deeply scored
• 0:40
  by ice daggers. Then the vehicle was buried.
• 0:44
  Machine gun fire came out of the white whirlwind.
• 0:47
  We all threw ourselves to the ground.
• 0:50
  Corporal Spots didn't get out of the way fast enough.
• 0:53
  Bullets hauled him off his feet and tore him up.
• 0:56
  Friendly fire. My ears hurt with the noise and
• 1:00
  the cold. I found myself holding hands
• 1:03
  with John, gripping tight. We were wadded together between
• 1:07
  a fixed cement rubbish bin and a red telephone box.
• 1:11
  The phone box was almost entirely filled up with soft
• 1:14
  white snow. A pale human hand was pressed up
• 1:17
  against the glass from inside the avalanche ground, like 1000
• 1:21
  lions hurling wickedly curved chunks of ice out of its heart.
• 1:26
  1 soldier, clumsy in his winter gear, tripped.
• 1:29
  Snow slammed down on him. A couple of soldiers ran off
• 1:33
  into the snowstorm. I thought I heard screams.
• 1:37
  The three snowballs, each about as tall as a pony, rolled lazily
• 1:41
  out of the storm that was settling around the wreck of the
• 1:44
  armoured car. The first advanced to Jillian
• 1:47
  and the Captain and stopped. The ball shifted its insides and
• 1:51
  a smile came to the surface. The tree bark smile I had made.
• 1:56
  That's our snowman, I said. John's father took out his gun
• 2:01
  and shot the ball. This time the bullet speared
• 2:04
  through like a very long finger. The tunnel filled in instantly.
• 2:09
  The ball settled, rising like dough, forming cold nights.
• 2:14
  Jillian held out her thermometer like a charm to ward off evil.
• 2:19
  Suddenly she was lifted off her feet.
• 2:22
  I screamed. John and I tried to catch her,
• 2:25
  but instead broke her fall by being under her when she landed.
• 2:29
  More cold nights piled on Captain Brent.
• 2:32
  He bent the wrong way at the waist.
• 2:35
  The cold nights kept jostling around, pouring ice blows down
• 2:39
  on John's father. His arms kept flailing, but only
• 2:42
  with the repeated impact. Dad, he shouted.
• 2:47
  Come away, John said, Jillian quietly in his ear.
• 2:50
  But there's no time. John had to be helped.
• 2:54
  This wasn't the world he had expected, a world without his
• 2:58
  father. Welcome back to the Hamster Book
• 3:12
  Club. My name is Joe Ford and I'm back
• 3:16
  with the delectable and smart, witty, engaging and incisive.
• 3:22
  Michael Mills. Hello, Joe, That's that's a
• 3:25
  rather lovely introduction. Thank you very much.
• 3:28
  I I wondered who you were leading to do.
• 3:30
  You know what I've got to tell you something now I'm going to
• 3:32
  tell you on on camera. Your book club episodes are
• 3:37
  extremely popular our. Eight doctors has saw to the
• 3:43
  number one most listened to book club.
• 3:46
  Episode and that's the last one we did.
• 3:49
  I think we can call that a reappreciation, can't we?
• 3:51
  Finally, the public is realising that they were wrong.
• 3:54
  I hope all those hundreds and hundreds of people are now
• 3:57
  scouring eBay to find the eight the cops are by terroristics.
• 4:01
  Come on BBC, there's nothing. There's nothing smutty in it.
• 4:04
  You can do an audio book Dan Starkey's free do.
• 4:07
  You think they'll never republish any of these books
• 4:11
  again? Or do you think that that their
• 4:13
  time has come now? They've done well, they've done
• 4:16
  some of them as as print on demand, I think as ebooks.
• 4:19
  So there are some random ones that you can get through Amazon,
• 4:23
  like I think far time year of intelligent tigers.
• 4:27
  It's a fairly random selection though.
• 4:30
  I mean I. Don't using those two though,
• 4:32
  they sound like they're the ones worth reading.
• 4:35
  Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, they were very smart
• 4:36
  than the ones they went back to. But in terms of more broadly, I,
• 4:40
  I don't see a reason why not You, you couldn't do all of them
• 4:44
  because some of the really just some of them would just be
• 4:47
  completely inappropriate for the people who might go and pick up
• 4:50
  a Doctor Who. But no.
• 4:50
  And that is something they need to be aware of that the audience
• 4:53
  has gone back to the children that it's was originally for.
• 4:58
  But they have the same problem with the Virgin New Adventures
• 5:01
  and they've republished some of them.
• 5:03
  So I think, you know, individually they could, they're
• 5:06
  coming to the end of the target novelizations for the
• 5:09
  audiobooks. And if people are still buying
• 5:11
  them, I'm sure they'll want something to replace them.
• 5:13
  How annoyed must those scalpers have been?
• 5:16
  You know there's people on eBay that sell these things for
• 5:18
  hundreds of pounds. When in the The 50th Anniversary
• 5:22
  Monsters collection, human nature came out, they must be
• 5:25
  like. God damn it all, they need to.
• 5:28
  Do is reprint Lung Barrow and so Viola sin to put basically
• 5:33
  several ebayers out of business. Yes, all the dying days.
• 5:39
  Oh, with the dying days, yes. You know what I don't?
• 5:42
  I can't think of a reason you couldn't do The dying days,
• 5:45
  because there's only one bit of it that might be problematic for
• 5:47
  kids. And that's very much
• 5:48
  implication. It's.
• 5:50
  A light read, I find. Pardon.
• 5:54
  It's quite a light read, I find. The dying days.
• 5:58
  Yeah, no, it's absolutely no, it's it's it's really breezy.
• 6:01
  It feels a lot more like new series Doctor Who than almost
• 6:04
  anything but was put out during the world this year, so I think
• 6:06
  it would sit quite well, to be honest.
• 6:08
  The campaign starts now A. Little spoiler for the next
• 6:11
  episode that you and I are doing, which is a new series
• 6:14
  adventure and the first time we would have dipped our toes into
• 6:17
  that with the book club. But actually Dying Days does
• 6:21
  kind of read like a new series adventure, you know, sort of
• 6:24
  like like pros that goes down like vanilla ice cream.
• 6:28
  A simple plot, but just with lots of good character stuff in
• 6:31
  it. Yeah, start reprinting them now,
• 6:33
  please. We want to put these people out
• 6:35
  of business. I was a bit surprised when they
• 6:37
  did the monster collection that it wasn't in there because they
• 6:40
  could have had a nice shot of a modern ice warrior on the front.
• 6:44
  Yeah, they were. They were mostly BBC books,
• 6:47
  weren't they, in those collections?
• 6:48
  And there was a couple of virgins and a couple of targets
• 6:51
  or one target. Was it remembrance?
• 6:54
  Yes, yes, I think it was. But Shakedown was definitely
• 6:57
  there in the and to the sounds of time, we're both in the
• 7:00
  monster collection. Absolute classics.
• 7:03
  Oh, brilliant. Yeah.
• 7:04
  Well, look, Michael, today I've bestowed a great responsibility
• 7:08
  upon you. Yeah, of all the
• 7:09
  responsibilities you've had in your life, this has been the one
• 7:12
  that you've agonised over the most.
• 7:16
  You. Bring up delivering the
• 7:18
  question, the icebreaker question for this episode.
• 7:21
  Off you go. What episodes that hasn't been
• 7:26
  novelised? Would you like to see novelised?
• 7:28
  Antoine, Joe. Well, I fought long and hard and
• 7:33
  I figured it has to be new series, right?
• 7:35
  Because all of the classic series have mostly been
• 7:39
  novelised, right? I mean, if you had said
• 7:41
  dimensions in time, I'd have left this recording right now,
• 7:44
  got in my car, driven to your house and punched you.
• 7:46
  So are you mad someone has novelised Dimensions in Time?
• 7:49
  There's a full version of Have. Oh they must have done.
• 7:53
  The Internet can't leave things alone.
• 7:55
  This is why we have AI, because we just can't not do things when
• 7:58
  we can. Somebody offered my over half a
• 8:00
  copy and he who loves Dimensions of the Time said no, you're all
• 8:04
  right. I don't need to know the
• 8:06
  motivations of Pat Butcher in Dimensions of Time.
• 8:10
  No, I. Would like to see Chris
• 8:15
  Chibnall. Write a novelisation because I
• 8:19
  want to see. I would like to see how he would
• 8:21
  handle the prose, hopefully better than he handles dialogue
• 8:25
  most of the time, and just because he would have to work
• 8:30
  fucking hard to justify the shopping list of elements in it.
• 8:36
  I would like to see a novelisation.
• 8:38
  Of the power of Doctor. Wonderful.
• 8:43
  Because, well, one is a big crowd pleaser, so people would
• 8:46
  buy it, right? But two, I just want to see how
• 8:51
  Chippers would write, how he would write a book like I, I
• 8:55
  think it would be fairly terrible.
• 8:59
  They do say not. Eric Saywood levels of terrible,
• 9:02
  but sort of more than the sort of Craig Hinton levels of
• 9:05
  terrible. Oh oh.
• 9:07
  Hinton liked a bit of fan wank. Let's be honest, I think he'd
• 9:10
  win the term, didn't he? I think he claimed to have done,
• 9:13
  yes. Yeah, yeah.
• 9:15
  So, but also he's got scope to write fabulous set pieces, you
• 9:20
  know, to. He's got so many characters in
• 9:23
  there that he can, you know, bring all of them to life in
• 9:25
  various spectacular ways. And it's his sort of love level
• 9:29
  to the Doctor Who and the end of his doctor's era.
• 9:33
  And so I think it would be a good one for him to have a go
• 9:35
  at. So I would really love to read
• 9:37
  that. That's a great choice and.
• 9:39
  I'd be willing to be pleasantly. Surprised.
• 9:42
  See, I think what would be exciting about that as well is
• 9:44
  that it would have have to be an absolute brick of a book as
• 9:48
  well. Because the reason the power of
• 9:50
  the Doctor gets away with quite as much as it does is the
• 9:54
  kineticism of it all the speed, the throwing something at new at
• 9:58
  you every single shot almost of the visuals of people coming and
• 10:01
  walking out. That doesn't necessarily
• 10:03
  translate well to prose. So you have to start fleshing
• 10:05
  out what is Vinder doing? When when was he summoned here?
• 10:09
  Where is the train going? Why was the?
• 10:12
  Keegan survive falling down that lift shaft etcetera, etcetera.
• 10:17
  Well, I also feel like the direction of the editing smooth
• 10:20
  over a lot of the problems in that script as well.
• 10:23
  Yeah, you're right. It would simply be interesting
• 10:26
  to then compare and controls with the giggle to see how Chris
• 10:28
  Chippendale translates a musical sequence into the written word.
• 10:32
  Well, it would be an intriguing read, I think anyway.
• 10:36
  Absolutely. I'm assuming that you're not on
• 10:38
  the same page with me. Oh, I am on the very next page,
• 10:43
  or rather the previous page because the the book that I
• 10:49
  would like to see no. You wouldn't.
• 10:52
  I would it is Legend of the Sea Devils.
• 10:56
  What by Ella Rose? Oh yeah, if she's free, or James
• 11:01
  Goss if not, because he was his good job and.
• 11:04
  Why? I'll tell you why, Michael.
• 11:05
  Why is that? I'm glad you asked, Joe.
• 11:09
  It's because I think some of the most interesting novelizations
• 11:14
  that we've had are of the store, not the the absolute classics.
• 11:19
  You know, no one's going to no one goes.
• 11:21
  Oh, you should read the novelization of the caves of
• 11:23
  Andrazani or, or do you know, do you know what's amazing?
• 11:28
  I just say, remember, it's the Daleks.
• 11:29
  But that's a really bad example. So forget I said that.
• 11:32
  Forget I said that one. But I'm thinking of things like
• 11:35
  Battlefield and episodes on screen, which is I, I, I like
• 11:39
  it, but it has problems. It doesn't articulate itself
• 11:42
  terribly well. But the novelisation, that
• 11:44
  chance for a second go at it freed of production
• 11:50
  restrictions, freed from, you know, special effects budgets or
• 11:55
  the rest of it. And to be able to, you know,
• 11:57
  give you the fluidity of time and perspective that prose
• 12:01
  brings becomes a frankly, what if.
• 12:04
  If you thought the novelisation of Battlefield was what the TV
• 12:08
  episode of Battlefield was, you would think it was one of the
• 12:10
  undisputed classics of classic Doctor Who.
• 12:13
  And there's quite a few other examples like that.
• 12:14
  I find I found reading the Underwater menace novelisation
• 12:18
  more interesting than reading the novelisation.
• 12:20
  It's a destructor, frankly. Better story.
• 12:22
  You read that one, It's a destruction.
• 12:24
  The novel is. 15 times the length of the TV story, but you
• 12:27
  go down into the Tardises. It's a fabulous steampunk TARDIS
• 12:31
  that he creates. Yeah, absolutely.
• 12:34
  Or even things just like the space Pirates where you sort of
• 12:36
  have the ability to, I mean, I know you can't actually watch
• 12:39
  most of the space pirates, but you have the ability to just
• 12:43
  absorb it and reinterpret it in your in your mind's eye as this
• 12:47
  huge space opera. So and you come to them without
• 12:51
  those expectations that you get something amazing.
• 12:54
  I'll be now and again you do get, you know, as we said,
• 12:57
  Remembrance of the Dialects is an excellent TV episode.
• 13:00
  There's an even better novelization, but I think this
• 13:03
  is free. You don't have to treat the
• 13:08
  original as being sacrosanct, and Legend of the Sea Devils is
• 13:12
  an episode that has some fairly obvious flaws in it.
• 13:16
  Shall we say Yes, You. Pointed a lot of them out on our
• 13:19
  last recording. Which people may not have heard
• 13:22
  of the times comes out so you so if you want more of me talking
• 13:24
  about legend the sea devils don't worry there's.
• 13:26
  More, It's a good one. It's enticing.
• 13:28
  Yeah, Go. On so you could fill in all of
• 13:31
  those gaps. There'll be a lot of expunge
• 13:32
  material to put back in and make sense of it all more, but
• 13:35
  there's so many intriguing avenues in that story that just
• 13:38
  aren't explored that you could a really good novelizer could go
• 13:41
  actually, that's interesting and a bit like Battlefield.
• 13:43
  Let's smooth over some of these ideas that are there.
• 13:46
  Let's really smooth it out. There are some themes here in
• 13:49
  this story that are quite interesting, but they're not
• 13:51
  properly articulated. You know, you could go deeper
• 13:53
  into the back story of Madam Ching Ching, the pirate queen,
• 13:59
  who doesn't get much to say. We could see a bit more about
• 14:02
  what's going on in the past and learn about what is what is the
• 14:05
  keystone other than just a thing that does things.
• 14:08
  There's lots of really interesting.
• 14:09
  Ideas. You know if a lot of this was in
• 14:11
  that original script. I I have no doubt that there was
• 14:15
  more there than we saw on screen.
• 14:19
  However, I've also seen enough other Christian episodes to know
• 14:22
  that it's probably not a get out of jail.
• 14:24
  Free class not putting all the blame on triple.
• 14:25
  For this one. Sorry, apologies.
• 14:29
  But I suppose the novel gives you a chance.
• 14:31
  If Loads was taken out, like Kirsten Henrik, you've got the
• 14:34
  chance to put it all back in. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.
• 14:37
  So there is a a purpose to it because, you know, I can get as
• 14:41
  much fun as anybody else can out of reading Doctor Who and the
• 14:43
  Sun Makers, but I'm not really getting anything I didn't see on
• 14:46
  screen. It's just another opportunity.
• 14:47
  It's an opportunity to engage and experience that story in a
• 14:52
  in a, in a new way. But I feel like there would be a
• 14:54
  purpose of something legend see devil.
• 14:56
  It's like they always say, remaking films is a great idea,
• 15:00
  but you you shouldn't remake the good ones, you should remake one
• 15:03
  that didn't work the first time round.
• 15:05
  And I think we don't appreciate enough as Doctor Who fans, but
• 15:09
  novelisations actually give you a chance to do that.
• 15:12
  And if you if you had a good writer, whether that's Ella
• 15:16
  Rhode or someone stepping in like James Goss for the Giggle
• 15:19
  or Mark Platt for Battlefield, a good writer.
• 15:22
  There are great set pieces there.
• 15:24
  You know, the monster coming out the ocean, the TARDIS under the
• 15:26
  water, you know, sword fights on pirate ships, leaping Super
• 15:32
  Mario Sea Devils. Like you could have a lot of fun
• 15:34
  right in that stuff in progress. Oh 100% and you could expand on
• 15:39
  them as well. You know, we only get very
• 15:40
  brief, brief glimpses of the Sea Devils underwater world.
• 15:45
  Imagine exploring. That's a bit more like the
• 15:46
  TARDIS in The Edge of Destruction.
• 15:49
  And what's super interesting is I read the novelisation of the
• 15:52
  witch hunters. Who wrote that one, Joe?
• 15:57
  God damn it. Edit this bit Joe.
• 16:01
  I was. Going to say Joe Ford but what's
• 16:03
  her? Name.
• 16:05
  I'm terrible and I do you know, I always This is why I keep
• 16:08
  forgetting yellow Rhodes name, because I'm just awful with
• 16:10
  names really, am I? Know and Oh well, I've got it,
• 16:13
  I've got it, I've got it. And OK, which is what was so
• 16:17
  interesting about The Witch Hunters by Joy Wilkinson is her
• 16:22
  depiction of the 13th Doctor on the page was one of the most
• 16:27
  interesting depictions I've ever seen of her character.
• 16:30
  And we got under her skin a little bit.
• 16:32
  And there was far more about her being a woman in history in the
• 16:38
  book as well. And all of that was so much more
• 16:40
  interesting. I mean, I do like the episode,
• 16:41
  but but it's stuff that you, when you're telling her one
• 16:45
  passer in 45 minutes, which is covering all of that, you don't
• 16:49
  have time for this stuff. So I think the 30th Doctor might
• 16:52
  actually, possibly, I mean, I love Jodie, but possibly divorce
• 16:55
  from Jodie might actually come alive on the page in a really
• 17:00
  different way. Yeah, I really enjoyed that
• 17:03
  novel. It's not.
• 17:04
  I think it begins to hint at something that is a really
• 17:08
  interesting idea with the Doctor being being a woman for the
• 17:13
  first time in in in their memory is that the Doctor comes from a
• 17:20
  society that is not post gender. They have biological sex, but
• 17:24
  there isn't as as hung up on on sex and gender as we are.
• 17:28
  You know, he has that wonderful speech with with Bill in world
• 17:32
  enough and time at the very start.
• 17:35
  Is it all girls in the future so.
• 17:38
  Preparing us for the future, wasn't he?
• 17:40
  Exactly. So there's an idea there that
• 17:42
  you have a character who comes from a society where that
• 17:44
  doesn't matter to the same extent and doesn't come in the
• 17:47
  same hang ups that does for us, but who has spent thousands of
• 17:51
  years hanging around with people for whom it does matter and who
• 17:55
  has been in a male body for as much of that time as they can
• 17:59
  remember. And then suddenly they find
• 18:01
  themselves in that world, in a different and they realise, oh
• 18:06
  actually this has mattered to everybody else the whole time.
• 18:09
  And I'm now discovering that. And it's not Doctor Who discover
• 18:12
  sexism, but it would be the Doctor realising how they have
• 18:15
  internalised gender in a way to sort of critique that moment
• 18:19
  where he goes, Oh yeah, gender doesn't matter.
• 18:22
  Which is very easy for an old white man to say or someone who
• 18:24
  is in the body of an old white man.
• 18:26
  And I think that novelisation really begins to to sort of get
• 18:30
  under the skin of that idea, which really.
• 18:32
  It's a shame they didn't do more of it if I'm honest.
• 18:34
  However, if they are going to novelise Legends of the Sea
• 18:37
  Devils and Power of the Doctor, well, there's your chance.
• 18:41
  You heard it here, online sources say.
• 18:46
  I'm sure it'll be on some new sites by the end of the day.
• 18:48
  We'll be all over Twitter next week.
• 18:50
  Oh my God, They're novelising Barrel.
• 18:53
  They're talking amazing. It's being ghost written.
• 18:57
  Sasha Duan's writing it, actually.
• 19:00
  I'll read the hell out of that. Oh, 100%.
• 19:12
  Good question, fantastic question.
• 19:15
  I'll try and come up and sign that matches that next time.
• 19:18
  Well, what are we here to talk about today?
• 19:20
  Because I think between the two of us, we came to the conclusion
• 19:25
  that we both wanted to read this book.
• 19:28
  Yes, we did. So we were talking about, you
• 19:30
  know, what books could we talk about in the book club?
• 19:31
  What different places could we go to?
• 19:33
  Doctor Who has so many of them. Let's not spend all of the time
• 19:36
  in the Doctor's adventures, as much as we might want to.
• 19:39
  Shame, Shame. I'd love to.
• 19:42
  And then we remembered, oh, do you know what?
• 19:44
  Actually, there was a whole other range of Doctor Who books
• 19:48
  for a little while. That's exactly the same time as
• 19:50
  the 8th Doctor adventure Rich Who.
• 19:52
  That hasn't been discussed on the book club yet and that is
• 19:55
  the Telos Doctor Who novella range.
• 19:58
  Which I know very little about. So this is an education for me
• 20:03
  of whatever scant knowledge you have about this range.
• 20:07
  Yeah. Well, I'd like to ask you first
• 20:09
  of all, I mean, do you know anything about the the
• 20:13
  conception of this range of books, why the hell it came
• 20:16
  about and why it only lasted a couple of years?
• 20:20
  Yeah, well, I mean, I know a little bit.
• 20:25
  You know, if there's anyone listening who can fill in a
• 20:26
  small blank, do let us know. But it started in 2001 when
• 20:31
  Doctor Who was very dead, so maybe a little bit easier to get
• 20:34
  your hands on a license than it once was.
• 20:37
  And tells publishing, which I believe was set up by David J
• 20:39
  Howe, a name that's been associated with Doctor Who
• 20:41
  during the wilderness years in a number of different ways and at
• 20:44
  different times. And the ideal was that they
• 20:47
  would be novellas, as the name suggests, so much shorter, only
• 20:51
  about 100 or so pages, that they would attempt to be more
• 20:57
  experimental, that they would try to tell within that limited,
• 21:00
  more limited page from different types of Doctor Who stories and
• 21:04
  different ways of approaching Doctor Who.
• 21:06
  And I think, I think from what what I understand, there was
• 21:09
  also the idea that they would try and get some some new
• 21:12
  writers in and maybe some people who were already established or
• 21:15
  already been published as science fiction and fantasy
• 21:18
  authors to come in to have their go at Doctor Who.
• 21:21
  Their attempt to do a Doctor Who story best style way they would
• 21:26
  like to do over 100 or so page and they put it out and it would
• 21:30
  be read by about, oh, I don't know, couple of 1000 people at
• 21:32
  most. And the other big difference was
• 21:35
  importantly for licensing reasons, they had to be in
• 21:36
  hardback, which was a genuine part of the licence.
• 21:39
  Apparently that was part. Of the reason I didn't pick them
• 21:41
  up, you know, it's because I don't like reading hardbacks.
• 21:44
  I like softbacks. I like being add up.
• 21:45
  Really. Abuser book.
• 21:49
  I mean, it's you're free to do what you want to do in the
• 21:52
  privacy of your home of course, but well, but I think my memory
• 21:56
  is also a bit more expensive as well because they were hard back
• 21:59
  as well. They.
• 22:00
  Have at all work in them. I believe they were released.
• 22:03
  Each one was released in two editions, which probably tells
• 22:06
  you something about the very much the collector fan market
• 22:09
  they were aimed at. One was standard edition, which
• 22:12
  was plain hardback, 2 colours with some sort of symbol, a
• 22:19
  different one for each. I know what words you're going
• 22:21
  to use. Are you going to say Deluxe I?
• 22:23
  Was going to say deluxe edition legally obliged to describe it
• 22:26
  all these years later. Branding works, people.
• 22:29
  And then there's the deluxe edition, which as you say, came
• 22:31
  with, I think each one came with a sort of frontispiece, lovely
• 22:35
  bit of artwork depicting a a scene or somehow evoking the
• 22:39
  novel. And I think those ones were
• 22:41
  generally also signed by the author.
• 22:45
  Thousands of copies. Oh, I don't know.
• 22:48
  I don't actually have. I doubt it was that many.
• 22:49
  I don't have any access to figure to sales figures or
• 22:52
  anything like that. I can't tell you how many people
• 22:53
  read them, but I can't imagine it was many.
• 22:56
  I saw them lingering in Forbidden Planet for years and
• 22:59
  years. Like unsold.
• 23:01
  So did it capture a market? I, I mean, I can't give you, I
• 23:06
  can't give you any insight. They continue to go on.
• 23:07
  I think they so they ran from 2001 to 2004 and I'm pretty sure
• 23:12
  the reason they stopped when they did was because Doctor Who
• 23:15
  was coming back to telly and so the BBC was pulling all the
• 23:18
  licences back in. And this was around the same
• 23:20
  time that, if I'm right, Dapol lost, finally lost the licence
• 23:25
  of the action figures and tell us got cut short and a famously
• 23:29
  big finish would have been would have been for the axe, but
• 23:31
  Russell T Davis interceded and saved them.
• 23:35
  So. Maybe maybe that would have been
• 23:37
  a mercy killing if that had gone ahead, you know, maybe that
• 23:41
  maybe that's where they peaked. If big, this is interesting.
• 23:44
  This is like if The Simpsons had ended in 1997.
• 23:47
  It would be Remember, it's one of the greatest TV series of all
• 23:49
  time. If Big Finish had ended in 2004.
• 23:53
  It would have been what? 5-5 years and of a pretty solid
• 23:59
  run of audios. Going out on the next life,
• 24:02
  Yeah, or. Maybe not.
• 24:05
  Yeah, I don't think we should go out on the divergent universe
• 24:08
  somehow created. The Chrome on well, that was the
• 24:13
  big impact that Doctor Who come back had on Big Finish, at least
• 24:15
  in the immediate in the immediate term, was that they
• 24:19
  the divergent universe went from being Four Seasons, I think they
• 24:23
  had plans down to two seasons released in the same calendar
• 24:27
  here. I mean, of all the things we
• 24:29
  have to thank Rusty Davis for, that might be the greatest thing
• 24:32
  we should thank you for. No more divergent stories.
• 24:35
  Anyway, sorry, back to Telos. Well, yes, for Telos.
• 24:38
  So I mean, you know, they were still, as far as I'm aware, they
• 24:41
  were still going and actually they they they birthed the spin
• 24:44
  off range as well. Not from the book we're
• 24:45
  discussing, but one of the other books, the Cabinet of Lights
• 24:48
  gave birth to the series time Hunter, which continued in the
• 24:52
  same format and ran for another few good few more years.
• 24:55
  I think up until I want to say 2000 and six 2007.
• 24:58
  I'm sure it'll be corrected. Habit of light, Daniel Omani
• 25:02
  wasn't. It.
• 25:02
  That's right. And that was very popular, that
• 25:05
  one I remember. Is that an unspecified Dr. It is
• 25:09
  an unspecified yes. See, I do remember some bits
• 25:11
  about this wrench. There we go there.
• 25:13
  Well done. Well done.
• 25:14
  Keep it up. It's.
• 25:15
  Just a. Few scant details.
• 25:18
  Time Hunter. What is?
• 25:19
  Is that still going? No, I think it ran until a few
• 25:26
  years younger. It was still it was definitely
• 25:29
  still running when the show came back.
• 25:33
  And actually a few people who later went on to have quite a
• 25:35
  lot of involvement in Doctor Who spin offs ended up writing for
• 25:37
  that. You know, I think if I'm right
• 25:39
  in saying I think George Mann's first bit of Doctor Who related
• 25:42
  credit was a time Hunter novel. Yes, they man looks things up on
• 25:47
  the Internet to like any good podcast.
• 25:51
  Time Hunter ran from 2003 to 2007.
• 25:54
  That's not that fair. Run.
• 25:56
  That's a. Fair old one.
• 25:57
  Yeah. And I've read a few of them and
• 25:59
  they're not bad, you know, They're pretty good.
• 26:02
  Interesting. I'm.
• 26:03
  Trying to think about other ones that I remember about.
• 26:05
  I know Kate Ormond did one, I know Keith Topping did one
• 26:10
  called Ghost Ship, which I think was really panned.
• 26:13
  A Fourth Doctor one I think so. But I think like the BBC books,
• 26:18
  they were hit and miss in terms of their reception.
• 26:22
  Yes, very much so. I I've read a few of them, not,
• 26:25
  not a huge number, but there, there were definitely some,
• 26:28
  there were definitely some highs and lows, which I suppose if
• 26:30
  you're trying to be experimental and try to bring in different
• 26:32
  voices, sometimes it's going to work and sometimes it's not
• 26:35
  going to work. I know I've read The Dalek
• 26:37
  Factor, the very last one by Simon Clark, which is an
• 26:40
  excellent piece of Doctor Who horror.
• 26:42
  But then. Book club near you.
• 26:46
  Little spoiler alert there, and but then you also got things
• 26:50
  like Frayed, which was a rather boring attempt to do the 1st
• 26:56
  Doctor and Susan before the events of An Unearthly Child,
• 27:00
  which was very strange returning to the well when they'd already
• 27:03
  done it so very well right at the start of the range.
• 27:07
  Who wrote Frayed? I think it was Stephen Cole
• 27:11
  under his under his Tara. Sam's is.
• 27:13
  It Tara Sam's wrote it, yes, Yeah.
• 27:15
  OK, cheeky. What?
• 27:16
  I mean, he's written enough books with his name on it, I
• 27:19
  don't know why he's disguising himself now.
• 27:21
  I would love to get, I'd love to, to, to read a deep read on
• 27:24
  what went on with that really, because you know, we've said
• 27:29
  they were still going at the time they lost the licence.
• 27:31
  But I so, you know, I assume it was a fairly small endeavours.
• 27:35
  Maybe they wouldn't, you know, they didn't need to maintain
• 27:37
  terribly big sales figures. But just on the outside, looking
• 27:41
  at what they produced, it does feel a bit like at times they
• 27:44
  were not managing to quite do what they'd what they'd set out
• 27:48
  to do. When, as you say, you've got
• 27:49
  Steve Cole. And nothing against Steve Cole
• 27:51
  at all whatsoever, but if you're looking for new voices in Doctor
• 27:55
  Who, even. Topping Kate Orman.
• 27:58
  I mean, you know, and they're good and bad writers, but
• 28:01
  they're the same writers. Andrew.
• 28:03
  Cartwell was there maybe what, a third that were brand new
• 28:06
  writers. Yeah, yeah.
• 28:08
  I mean, I suppose, and this is pure, this is pure speculation.
• 28:12
  Imagine that, people openly speculating on a Doctor Who
• 28:15
  podcast presenting as fact. Rageous.
• 28:19
  I mean, I suspect if you, if it's, you know, if it's not that
• 28:21
  big a range, it's in 2000 and three 2004.
• 28:24
  How many name sci-fi authors are you going to be able to get to
• 28:29
  come and write a Doctor Who book for you?
• 28:30
  It's not like now. When the TV show here and the
• 28:34
  BBC were then holding out the hand to people like Stephen
• 28:37
  Baxter, I'm not surprised you bit their hands off.
• 28:40
  You know, he's already popular and had a popular show to his
• 28:45
  sales galore. Well, I don't know how The Wheel
• 28:47
  of Ice did, actually, but I'm sure he did fairly well.
• 28:51
  I hope so. That's not.
• 28:54
  That one day as well, you know, that would be an intriguing one
• 28:56
  to do. Sorry, that's that's a bit
• 28:58
  indulgent. Go ahead.
• 29:00
  Oh, you know. That's all.
• 29:02
  But they did manage it. They did get some name authors
• 29:05
  in there, as I've mentioned. They had Simon Clark, well known
• 29:08
  horror author, wrote Night of the Triffids, the official
• 29:10
  sequel to Day of the Triffids, and he wrote The Dalek Factor.
• 29:14
  They also had people like Louise Cooper, who wrote Riptide, very
• 29:17
  respected science fiction author, bringing her particular
• 29:20
  take on Cornwall and the the folk and the folklore of that
• 29:26
  county to Doctor Who as well. And they had Kim Newman.
• 29:30
  Wow, seamless. I've been doing this too long
• 29:34
  now the. Listener can't see how smug I
• 29:36
  look to myself then. Not only is he doing the
• 29:39
  question at the start, now he's literally controlling these
• 29:41
  things up in your hands. Go ahead.
• 29:45
  Yes, Kim. Newman's Time and Relative,
• 29:48
  which you did just mention a book there that explored the
• 29:52
  Doctor and Susan three, An Unearthly Child.
• 29:56
  Are we then suggesting that this is the superior version of that
• 29:59
  story? Well, I know we're meant to keep
• 30:01
  our summations to the end generally in good reviewing
• 30:03
  things, but yes, this is a very good book and This is why we
• 30:06
  wanted to talk about it. Thank you for listening to the
• 30:09
  Habster Book Club and we'll see you next time.
• 30:14
  OK, I basically do have notes on this book but it's a ton of
• 30:18
  quotes and basically the whole book.
• 30:22
  Well, should we start now? Listeners, if you want to get a
• 30:24
  cup of tea and settle down. South Time and Relative by Kim
• 30:27
  Newton. I tell you what, I absolutely
• 30:30
  loved. I think there's definitely a
• 30:32
  space in Doctor Who fiction for novellas because I love the
• 30:36
  length of this book. I read it in about 3 1/2 hours,
• 30:39
  and I had a blissful afternoon reading this with copious cups
• 30:43
  of coffee and a couple of doughnuts.
• 30:46
  Yeah, and it just. Flew by primarily because this
• 30:52
  was a bloody well written book. But the pros itself was
• 30:57
  supremely good, I think, as Kim Newman written a lot.
• 31:01
  I don't really know his history. Oh, he's written a ton of that.
• 31:03
  So I mentioned Kim Newman for a bit here.
• 31:05
  Let's talk about him. Probably primarily known,
• 31:08
  certainly at this time as a fit TV and film journalist.
• 31:12
  Been writing for Empire for Donkeys years.
• 31:15
  Does the Video Dungeon column, or certainly did, where he
• 31:18
  reviewed lots of straight to TV and straight to DVD movies.
• 31:23
  Noted expert on I think particularly but not exclusively
• 31:27
  horror and and genre film and TV in particular.
• 31:31
  He he wrote a fantastic history of horror cinema, but anyone
• 31:35
  listening to this should go out and read.
• 31:37
  Now you can carry wearing headphones when he goes to the
• 31:39
  shops and buy called Nightmare movies, which is a wonderful,
• 31:43
  wonderful book latterly and interestingly.
• 31:48
  So by the time he came through a time time relative, he had
• 31:50
  written a number of novels and they tended to be horror or
• 31:53
  fantasy or sci-fi and they'd sort of done well.
• 31:57
  They were very well respected. But I think they were very much
• 32:00
  in the people who read sci-fi and fantasy will read these
• 32:02
  types of books, books like the Nightmare or the Quorum.
• 32:06
  And he'd also started writing what was probably his best known
• 32:08
  series, which is Anno Dracula, which you may have heard of,
• 32:12
  which started in I think it was the 90s.
• 32:17
  And they were series of books which imagined what if Dracula
• 32:22
  had won? So what if in?
• 32:25
  That that already sounds great. It Yeah, they're great.
• 32:30
  So the first book imagines A Victorian London that is some
• 32:32
  years after Dracula's plan actually worked out in the book
• 32:35
  Dracula, and he is now the Prince Consort of Queen
• 32:38
  Victoria, but basically has become the ruler of of England
• 32:43
  and the British Empire. And then sounds.
• 32:45
  Like a a Doctor Who story in Hinchcliffe's time.
• 32:48
  Yeah. Absolutely, though as well, one
• 32:51
  of the techniques he uses, well, one of his sort of hallmarks is
• 32:54
  that in order to populate these, these worlds are not just
• 32:57
  counter factual. These books are also counter
• 33:00
  fictional. So his idea of the way he
• 33:02
  presents the past and any particular era in in any of his
• 33:05
  books almost is that he gives you, he plays on the popular
• 33:10
  imagining of that time. And he does that by drawing on
• 33:13
  both fact and fiction. So historical characters appear,
• 33:17
  but so diversions of fictional characters from that era but who
• 33:21
  are different. These, these are the people who
• 33:23
  exist in this. Version where you're going with.
• 33:25
  This, yeah. And in other Dracula, he then
• 33:28
  subsequent books go through the subsequent 100 years alike you
• 33:32
  on different times, following the history of this and giving
• 33:34
  us this slightly twisted version of reality with familiar people
• 33:37
  from from both history and fiction.
• 33:41
  And some of those already come out at this point and were very
• 33:45
  well respected. But I think he hit his he hit
• 33:48
  his greatest types of popularity as an author, actually
• 33:50
  subsequent to time and relative when there was the whole boom in
• 33:53
  vampire novels and dark fantasies of post twilight, Anna
• 33:58
  Dracula was republished and became a massive hit.
• 34:01
  And so did the subsequent as well.
• 34:02
  And now you can if you go down to your local waters, they've
• 34:05
  probably got at least one of them there and he's written tons
• 34:06
  more of them since. And they're all, they're all
• 34:08
  brilliant. So you should go and read those
• 34:10
  so. But Doctor Who books this book
• 34:12
  club is over. The Anno Dracula Book Club is
• 34:15
  starting as of next week. On board.
• 34:19
  Yes, absolutely. And we can segue it because in
• 34:22
  among all the fictional characters, who turned up our
• 34:24
  one or two from Doctor Who at certain times.
• 34:26
  Really. Yeah, there's one set during.
• 34:29
  There's one. One of the books is set during
• 34:31
  the First World War and Lady Jennifer from the War Games is
• 34:37
  in. Wow, how did he get away with
• 34:41
  that? Oh, he's very clever about
• 34:43
  skirting copyright. She called Lady.
• 34:47
  Jennifer. I think, I think she's, I think
• 34:50
  she only makes a cameo appearance and she's referred to
• 34:53
  as by whatever her actual name is, like Jennifer Buckingham or
• 34:57
  something like that. Well.
• 34:58
  Why don't you like, I read a non fiction book that Kim Newman
• 35:02
  wrote about the the early days of Doctor Who and he makes no
• 35:09
  secret that he absolutely loved the black and white era of
• 35:12
  Doctor Who and then kind of fell out of love with it in the 80s.
• 35:17
  He really didn't like it in the 80s.
• 35:19
  I think he said he he quite liked the first Peter Davidson
• 35:22
  season because that felt a bit like season one again.
• 35:25
  And then he just lost all interest in it after that.
• 35:27
  It just wasn't for him. It was a very well written book
• 35:29
  and it was a mixture of critique and sort of production
• 35:33
  information. So that's really all I knew in
• 35:36
  front before this. Yes, but he is.
• 35:40
  Clearly knows his stuff. Oh, I don't think anybody knows
• 35:44
  more of their stuff than Kim Newman does.
• 35:46
  The man is still walking encyclopedia.
• 35:50
  But should we give an introduction to what he what he
• 35:53
  had to say about Doctor Who and what happens in time and
• 35:55
  relative SO? Go ahead.
• 35:58
  We we open in the big freeze of 1963, which as I'm sure our very
• 36:04
  educated listeners will know, was an actual historical event,
• 36:07
  was the deepest winter they'd been in in in Great Britain for
• 36:12
  possibly 100 years or more. Barely a Thor for months on end,
• 36:18
  steam trains having to plough their way through banks of snow.
• 36:21
  It was a big deal. Ask your grandparents, they'll
• 36:24
  tell you the. Thing the bit that I found most
• 36:27
  alarming was the where he said about all the toilets being
• 36:30
  blocked up with ice. You know they're they're picking
• 36:33
  away at them or them all sitting in the in the classrooms with
• 36:37
  the buns and burners with flames firing at just so they could get
• 36:40
  some warmth. In the bloody rooms.
• 36:41
  Well, you can't imagine it, can you?
• 36:42
  But it's it's very evoxive. It's very evoxive.
• 36:45
  The physical edition of this book is is is white at is white
• 36:50
  with blue highlighting and done in an effect to make it look
• 36:53
  like the book itself. It's just the book itself is
• 36:55
  frozen because cold permeates this book and this story.
• 36:59
  And huddling around those Bunsen burners, we meet a young girl
• 37:05
  called Susan Foreman, who has been at Coal Hill School for a
• 37:09
  few months now. As she notes at the very start,
• 37:13
  they've been here for five months, but it's always been
• 37:14
  1963 and it's only March. So there's an actual line about
• 37:20
  not worry when worrying about continuity.
• 37:23
  Oh, I love that line. Although I, I.
• 37:25
  Could see at least 2/3 of the audience reading this hurling it
• 37:29
  out of the wall at that point. You know, those ones that need
• 37:32
  to know where these things fit in.
• 37:34
  Oh ABS, absolutely. But.
• 37:36
  You know where it fits in before an unearthly child.
• 37:38
  Before an unearthly child. Yeah, they've been here for five
• 37:41
  months and it's always been 1960.
• 37:42
  The only time it gets confused. Is when that second First Doctor
• 37:46
  and Susan book came out, and that's when you know, the
• 37:48
  argument rages on to this day. Exactly.
• 37:52
  And this book that we are reading is the diary of Susan
• 37:56
  Foreman that she is writing to keep, to help her make sense of
• 38:00
  everything that's going on because she's an alien on a new
• 38:03
  world, but she's also a teenage girl who feels very alone and
• 38:06
  needs someone to talk to and doesn't really understand
• 38:09
  herself or her past. And as she is trying to make
• 38:14
  friends and trying to fit in and trying to understand her
• 38:16
  grandfather, she realizes that the cold is getting deeper, the
• 38:20
  cold is spreading, and that the cold might actually be coming
• 38:26
  for them. So I think what you get there is
• 38:30
  that didn't happen in 1963. So Kim Newman is very much doing
• 38:33
  what Kim Newman does here, which is he is giving us a popular
• 38:35
  memory of the big freeze of 1963, one in which it lasted for
• 38:39
  months, one in which the Thames froze over, which never actually
• 38:42
  happened, but happens here. One that where there was the,
• 38:47
  the, the army was getting ready to roll out and take over in a
• 38:51
  coup. All of these stories that you've
• 38:52
  sort of heard and you're sort of aware of about the 1960s and
• 38:56
  popular history and cultural history all there mixing
• 38:59
  together into a time that never actually was, but you sort of
• 39:03
  remember. He's turning that historical
• 39:06
  fact into a Doctor Who story. Exactly.
• 39:09
  Bravosa. It's like the The Great Fire of
• 39:11
  London with pteroleptals, you know?
• 39:14
  Yes, yes, exactly that, and continuity and reality be
• 39:19
  damned. Because this is the story we're
• 39:21
  telling it. Well, also it's being told.
• 39:23
  From Susan's point of view, yeah.
• 39:25
  So it's a very unreliable story. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
• 39:33
  But it's also that thing if it's interesting, you said that he,
• 39:35
  he was a fan of black and white Doctor Who.
• 39:37
  Because if Doctor Who had ended in 1969, it would be very much
• 39:43
  I've, I've always felt seen alongside things like The
• 39:46
  Avengers, like The Prisoner, like Adam Adamant lives very 19.
• 39:50
  It is a very 1960s television, especially when you consider how
• 39:53
  how little we know about any of the characters or their
• 39:56
  background or why any of this is happening for the first six
• 39:59
  years. He really is that.
• 40:00
  I still think it would have a huge cult following.
• 40:02
  I still think it would be well remembered.
• 40:05
  Yeah, an. Institution, that is.
• 40:08
  Not an institution and I think the popular idea of what it was
• 40:11
  and what the tone of it was and where it fitted would be
• 40:14
  different. It would be, I say an Avengers
• 40:17
  or the prisoner. And a lot of that is is about
• 40:23
  presenting sort of semi parallel realities, things in which we
• 40:27
  don't know things, things in which the world looks like we
• 40:30
  know the world to look, but doesn't actually behave in the
• 40:32
  way we know the world to behave. If you think of The Avengers is
• 40:35
  a really good example of that. The Avengers takes place in a
• 40:37
  very fairy tale nonsense version of Britain that just looks a bit
• 40:42
  like the Britain we know. The prisoner makes a whole point
• 40:47
  out of making reality unreliable on building things around
• 40:51
  recognised signatures. And that is something that Kim
• 40:54
  Newman really returns to here. He makes the Doctor and Susan
• 40:58
  characters, or Susan certainly someone who doesn't even know
• 41:01
  her own past or herself and can only really put it talk about
• 41:05
  things in these metaphorical terms and these figurative
• 41:08
  terms. That's an idea we return to a
• 41:10
  lot. And yeah, I, I, I remember at
• 41:13
  the time when this came out and I couldn't read it, but I saw
• 41:15
  some slightly sniffy reviews that think at the time that the
• 41:19
  idea of it being Susan's diary was somehow juvenile or it was a
• 41:24
  slightly retrograde approach in some way that it was, you know,
• 41:27
  this was, well, I know this is, this was 13 year old me.
• 41:30
  Don't get me wrong, I hadn't read it.
• 41:31
  This was just what was being told.
• 41:32
  But to me, the idea that you had a book that was Susan Foreman's
• 41:35
  diary, you know, this came after the Virgin Books era where
• 41:38
  they'd literally banned writers from going into the doctor's
• 41:41
  head. You weren't, you were not
• 41:43
  allowed to write from his perspective.
• 41:45
  And I think it maybe had the air of something like Doctor Who and
• 41:47
  the Pescatons or some of those semi remembered, rather mad and
• 41:52
  off brand annual adventures. That's the sort of thing they
• 41:55
  do, right? That's not what that's not what
• 41:57
  proper book does anymore. Bad and right.
• 42:00
  So just so such a basic approach.
• 42:02
  I was obviously completely wrong, but there was probably
• 42:06
  some idea that you shouldn't breach the mystery of the Time
• 42:09
  Lord mind. But but.
• 42:11
  They. Don't.
• 42:12
  Well, all. Of that stuff is obscured by
• 42:15
  this memory loss that she's got. Yeah, and of course that idea is
• 42:18
  all bollocks anyway, because the idea that Susan is a mysterious
• 42:22
  character is a massive fan myth, right?
• 42:24
  She isn't a mysterious character on screen at all.
• 42:27
  It's just that we're not told anything about her.
• 42:29
  She's not given any background. She's not given any character
• 42:32
  at. All I mean, there's a few hints,
• 42:33
  isn't it? The telepathy and things like
• 42:35
  that, what this did. Yeah, this captured perfectly
• 42:40
  that edgy, awkward young girl, that sort of exotic young girl
• 42:46
  we saw in the first episode of Doctor Who that come the second
• 42:50
  episode of Doctor Who, they ditched completely and just
• 42:53
  turned her into a whiny brat. This in this book, this is the
• 42:57
  Susan I would have loved to have seen, and I think Caroline Ball
• 43:01
  would have loved to have played as well.
• 43:04
  This is Susan Foreman, The Unearthly Child.
• 43:07
  The. Best I think this is the the
• 43:09
  best depiction of Susan I I've ever seen in any medium.
• 43:13
  I would not disagree. You know, Kim Newman, he takes
• 43:16
  it as she's presented on screen and has a look inside that head,
• 43:19
  or at least the diary. So you say she's not reliable
• 43:22
  nation. She is.
• 43:22
  But more importantly, this is also her trying to trying to
• 43:25
  interpret her own thoughts and her own feelings in that very
• 43:27
  flawed way that Diaries, a diary isn't just a record of exactly
• 43:30
  what's going on my head or it shouldn't be.
• 43:32
  It is a flawed attempt to capture yourself in some way.
• 43:36
  And that really comes across now she is, she's a nervous,
• 43:40
  confused young woman from a place she doesn't talk about
• 43:45
  with a great deal of affection for her grandfather, but also a
• 43:49
  great deal of frustration with him and suspicion of him.
• 43:55
  And they also nicely touch on she has a bit of she might have
• 43:58
  a bit of an emergent crush on rebels, which ties did nicely
• 44:01
  with your. It gives her a bit of.
• 44:02
  That's not the only hint of the future.
• 44:04
  She right at the end of the book, she goes, you know, if
• 44:06
  they ever catch up with us, our people, you know, he'll be
• 44:10
  forced to go on trial after, little do you know, you'll be.
• 44:14
  Welcome by then. Well, if I may quote because of
• 44:20
  consistent talking back in Class, A teacher wanting to
• 44:23
  wanted to give grandfather 1,000,000 lions in the cane.
• 44:26
  Grandfather appropriated school equipment the box without a note
• 44:29
  from the groundskeeper and bumped off double jog persuading
• 44:32
  me to ditch games and come along with him for a family holiday.
• 44:34
  We're off the grounds of the truant officer is on the case.
• 44:37
  We've been on a spree of rule breaking, smoking behind the
• 44:39
  bike sheds, running in the corridors, stealing from the
• 44:41
  tuck shop, laughing at assembly, appearing improperly uniformed.
• 44:48
  Brilliantly. Good, isn't it?
• 44:50
  Yeah, yeah. I'll tell you what, one of many
• 44:54
  brilliant things he does with Susan I really love.
• 44:57
  There's a line at the beginning which explains why she's at
• 45:00
  Cohen Health School, because they never really go into too
• 45:03
  much depth in An Unearthly Child.
• 45:05
  She's just there to be mysterious.
• 45:07
  The line is that I have to go to school with my fault.
• 45:10
  It was my idea. I thought it important to fit
• 45:13
  in, struck with some Pin Pinocchio notion of it, of being
• 45:17
  a real live girl. Grandfather made it tiresomely
• 45:21
  clear that he thought I was being silly.
• 45:23
  So that's established early on, that she just felt as if she
• 45:26
  needed to embed herself inside. They were staying here.
• 45:31
  And that's the reason why he steps in at the end of the book,
• 45:34
  to save the day. Because she has emerged into
• 45:38
  that society. She's made friends.
• 45:40
  She's seen that humanity has some worth, and then she manages
• 45:44
  to express that to her grandfather at the end.
• 45:46
  And that's the only fucking. Reason why he decides to.
• 45:50
  Step in and save the day. Effectively, I thought all that
• 45:54
  was beautifully done. Yeah, it's wonderful.
• 45:56
  It has some really interesting thoughts on the relationship
• 45:58
  between the Doctor and Susan as as that little bit just hinted,
• 46:04
  the suggestion is that he took he had to run away for some
• 46:06
  mysterious reason that that he's hinted at get hints.
• 46:10
  But but Susan can't remember this.
• 46:12
  So that one of the things that makes her even more mysterious
• 46:14
  is that she can't remember why they left or maybe get on to
• 46:18
  that in a bit. But that certainly we get the
• 46:21
  impression that the doctor brought her with him because he
• 46:23
  didn't want to be alone, not because she needed it, not
• 46:26
  because of regardless of what he might tell himself, she needed
• 46:29
  to come with him. He didn't want to be alone.
• 46:32
  And yet there's something the quiet cruelty of families, I
• 46:37
  think, is reflected in their little bit as well, the idea
• 46:40
  that he's wrenched her away from the home she knew before she was
• 46:43
  really old enough to form herself in it.
• 46:45
  Your Susan is not Romana. She left home before she was
• 46:49
  still a teenager, a child possibly, and now has been
• 46:51
  dumped in this other world in which he is very remote from
• 46:55
  her. He for most of the book, the
• 46:57
  Doctor is a remote figure who sort of hanging about doing his
• 47:00
  own things when Susan gets home from school, like a distant
• 47:04
  parent, like a distant grandparent, and he's not giving
• 47:07
  her any support to find her own place in this world.
• 47:10
  So this, this really lovely idea there as well.
• 47:12
  But she's her. It's impossible to tell the
• 47:15
  point at which her alienation is stops being about the fact that
• 47:19
  she's an alien, and how much of that is because she's a lonely
• 47:22
  teenager. Alienation is just complete,
• 47:27
  isn't it? Wherever she is, The TARDIS, The
• 47:29
  school or on Gallifrey, Oh, sorry, not Gallifrey.
• 47:32
  Unnamed planet that they come from, in fact.
• 47:36
  But what I did like was how even though, you know, her education
• 47:39
  had begun on unnamed home world of the Doctor and Susan, there's
• 47:44
  a wonderful line where she goes. I don't think I believe in rules
• 47:49
  at all, even especially the primary rule.
• 47:52
  I feel meddling is an obligation.
• 47:55
  So that and that Newman stresses several times that that's beaten
• 47:59
  into them on your own planet. Do not meddle.
• 48:03
  And yet she's already a bit of a rebel.
• 48:06
  Yeah, no, she is. And there's this.
• 48:08
  There's another great quote as well, which Susan, Susan writes
• 48:11
  of the Doctor. I knew he does have feelings.
• 48:13
  If I have them, and I certainly do, to the point of being driven
• 48:16
  mad by the irreconcilable emotions swarming through me
• 48:19
  every minute of every day, then so does he.
• 48:22
  We aren't human, but we are people.
• 48:25
  And there's that lovely idea as well of that, that process you
• 48:28
  go through as a teenager from, you know, of transitioning from
• 48:31
  child to adulthood, of realizing that there are no grown-ups in
• 48:34
  the world, that the grown-ups are people just like you with
• 48:37
  all the same insecurities, all the same hang ups all the same,
• 48:41
  as she says, emotions and reasons for doing things and
• 48:44
  that they may not always be gods.
• 48:47
  And there's a reason that they are fleeing what is presented
• 48:51
  as, as it was in the 1960s when it was into that.
• 48:53
  And certainly things like the war games, a race of gods that
• 48:57
  they they are what's his name? He took the fire and brought it
• 49:02
  down to a Prometheus. They are Promethean figures who
• 49:05
  have come down and left there is I'd, I'd love to touch on.
• 49:09
  There is a fantastic description of their departure from
• 49:13
  Gallifrey here, which is for me, this is just one of the best
• 49:17
  ways of it. I I, I love this idea of how the
• 49:19
  tunnels are presented as we see them in the war games and hints
• 49:21
  of that in the 1960s where they are distant and seemingly
• 49:25
  unknowable and that you couldn't know them in any way.
• 49:28
  And I know that just sort of calcified into what we see in
• 49:31
  the Purwi year. And they turn.
• 49:34
  Yeah. And then and then to the point
• 49:35
  where Robert Holmes sort of necessarily had to just destroy
• 49:38
  that with the deadly assassin, which then just gave us a
• 49:41
  different type of boring time that we've had ever since.
• 49:43
  But these figures, those guys, those three people who turn up
• 49:46
  at the end of the in the final episode of the War Games or
• 49:49
  who's coming? As a man.
• 49:51
  They are gods on Olympus, judging, judging their own who
• 49:54
  ran, who took the fire and ran away.
• 49:56
  But Newman, Newman really runs with that as well because as
• 49:59
  we've touched on, he likes 1960s Doctor Who.
• 50:01
  He likes this version of Doctor Who and and one that operates in
• 50:05
  that way. So the place they come from,
• 50:09
  they are from outside time and that's time with a capital T
• 50:13
  that's their world is is not a part of the flow and the
• 50:18
  function of things that it is static and it is ossified.
• 50:20
  But that that is itself not just because we're really boring when
• 50:24
  we sit around doing boring dialogues and saying things like
• 50:27
  the Doctor Who's often been a rebel, but at times, no, not
• 50:31
  that they are also because that is the form of their power that
• 50:34
  they have taken themselves out of causality and meaning and
• 50:36
  action. And this description, which she
• 50:38
  says I want to be a part of time and space.
• 50:42
  When we left home, machines in the box came to life, clocks to
• 50:46
  take away the seconds, odometers to measure the miles.
• 50:49
  Grandfather put those devices there, though they had no
• 50:51
  purpose until we ran away. Home isn't a place where
• 50:54
  anything happens. Space there is like it is inside
• 50:57
  the box. If you're measuring all the
• 50:58
  dimension in the universe, the space of home doesn't count.
• 51:01
  When we left, we winked into existence, entering the steady
• 51:05
  stream that runs from past the future, emerging from the box to
• 51:09
  become dimensional. Before that I don't even know if
• 51:12
  I if we qualified as being alive.
• 51:15
  It's gorgeous. That gave me goosebumps reading
• 51:18
  that. The bit about the clocks coming
• 51:20
  to life after they left. That's just how calcified they
• 51:25
  were on their own planet. I was like, God, that's
• 51:28
  gorgeous. That and that idea of why is,
• 51:30
  you know, why is there a clock? Why are all these timepieces in,
• 51:33
  in the, in the TARDIS? It's, it's an act of rebellion.
• 51:36
  It is something that doesn't exist.
• 51:38
  That that idea that Gallifrey is a place where a clock has no
• 51:42
  purpose is that is. Better than that, the last line
• 51:47
  of I don't even know we qualified as being alive before
• 51:52
  that gives you that's that throws weight behind them going
• 51:56
  on their adventures. That is all the justification
• 51:59
  they need, and that's why we're completely on their side.
• 52:02
  Yeah. Why did the Doctor, why did the
• 52:04
  Doctor leave? Why do the gods ever come down
• 52:06
  from the mountain? It's because they want to live.
• 52:09
  Because. Probably since later on we learn
• 52:11
  it's just because it's so bloody boring.
• 52:13
  That's why they weren't alive, because it was Ark of Infinity,
• 52:15
  you know? Well, when we spoke, when we
• 52:17
  spoke to Lance Parkin on this very podcast, he wrote the
• 52:20
  Infinity Doctors, which is probably one of, you know,
• 52:22
  another rarely good Gallifrey story.
• 52:25
  And yet he said to himself, having written this huge
• 52:28
  Gallifrey and epic, he came to the conclusion that Gallifrey is
• 52:31
  the place that the story begins. When they leave, the moment you
• 52:35
  return, you have to confront these ideas of it's been boring
• 52:38
  and nothing happening because, you know, this is this is
• 52:42
  something, this is something we often forget.
• 52:44
  You know, these, this idea of as we've touched on, you know, as
• 52:46
  the gods coming down is, is that's in the giggle, which we
• 52:50
  spoke about as well. This is an idea that is
• 52:52
  recurrent in Doctor Who because it's embedded in the DNA.
• 52:54
  And whether whether we or fans are willing to think about it in
• 52:57
  these terms, there is the fantastical to this, There is
• 53:00
  the ancient, there are really old ideas in here of gods
• 53:04
  because they're called Time Lords, for Lord's sake.
• 53:07
  You know, that's what that's what they are.
• 53:09
  So it resurfaces time after time after time.
• 53:12
  But this is a universe of omnipotent powers.
• 53:15
  And that that's actually where that is where the Doctor is
• 53:19
  from. Why is the Doctor doing any of
• 53:21
  this? It's not because he wanted to go
• 53:22
  out and set right and fight injustice and stuff like that.
• 53:26
  It's because he wanted to live to.
• 53:29
  Exist. To exist, to be meaningful.
• 53:32
  Gallafray is only it's only interesting when we when you're
• 53:36
  not there. OK, so scrap out every single
• 53:39
  story where we're actually going to Gallifrey and said perhaps
• 53:41
  the Infinity Doctors that's doing interesting things.
• 53:44
  It's interesting here because it's the thing they're running
• 53:47
  away from. It's interesting in RT DS time
• 53:50
  because it's the thing. That no longer exists and the
• 53:52
  ramifications of that, but the second you set foot on that
• 53:56
  goddamn planet, Jesus Christ, all storytelling possibilities
• 53:59
  stop. He's right, the clocks do stop.
• 54:05
  Exactly that exactly that it is and yet he he just this feels
• 54:10
  again a little bit almost talking about it heretical that
• 54:13
  you're talking about the time laws and cafe and what have you
• 54:15
  in in 1960s Doctor Who. You're not meant to do that
• 54:19
  actually, because they don't turn.
• 54:20
  Up explicitly state anything. Does he like you know?
• 54:23
  Passage you read there was very ambiguous, but we know exactly
• 54:27
  what it's. Referring to because we know
• 54:28
  what comes later. Yeah.
• 54:30
  And there is a recurrent idea that Susan is very aware that
• 54:33
  she can't Remember Remember where she came from, that she
• 54:37
  can't really remember this. So the passage we read when
• 54:39
  she's talking about it in terms of school and what have you, she
• 54:42
  says the own she has. I haven't got the exact quote,
• 54:46
  but it's along the lines of I can only talk about if I'm not
• 54:49
  quite talking about it. I can only talk about it by
• 54:51
  putting it into the terms of the world.
• 54:53
  But I am here with right now and it's not entirely clear at any
• 54:59
  point whether the reason she can't remember is because of
• 55:03
  something deliberately done to her by the time was presumably,
• 55:06
  or whether it is itself the act of becoming of of entering time,
• 55:09
  of becoming alive. You know, again, H, Greece,
• 55:13
  River Styx, divide, living in the dead and all the rest of it.
• 55:17
  You can't carry between two worlds.
• 55:18
  This is a, again, it's a very old idea and yet it's there
• 55:21
  embedded and being explored in a semi fantastical way that Doctor
• 55:26
  Who has always had a necessary but semi begrudging relationship
• 55:32
  with. You know, that's the problem
• 55:33
  with something like Christopher HP needs ear and when it wants
• 55:35
  to be hard sci-fi and it wants jets and all that.
• 55:37
  No, because that's not what Doctor Who is.
• 55:39
  Doctor Who is something a bit fantastical and it's interesting
• 55:42
  that with RTD Two, what little we've seen of it, what little
• 55:45
  we've been told, he's very, we're now very much remembering
• 55:48
  that. Direction.
• 55:48
  Yeah. Yeah, there's a wonderful line.
• 55:50
  You talk about the sort of foggy patches where Susan is talking
• 55:54
  about the Doctor. She was thinking about
• 55:56
  grandfather. I'm sometimes worried, terrified
• 55:58
  that the fog patches get bigger as we grow up.
• 56:02
  And I was like, gosh, that's, that's a really interesting that
• 56:05
  could be a really interesting reading of dementia because he's
• 56:08
  an old man. But then I was going, my God,
• 56:12
  how did Kim Newman know all about the Timeless Child all the
• 56:15
  way back then there? Is a there is a possible reading
• 56:21
  there? There is a possible reading
• 56:23
  right at the end. Susan is talking to one of her
• 56:25
  friends and says that she she thinks her people may have
• 56:29
  removed some of their memories and she doesn't, and she doesn't
• 56:32
  think it's the first time they've done it.
• 56:39
  Yes, Oh, wonderful. But.
• 56:42
  Whilst I'm talking about the depiction of Hartnold's First
• 56:46
  Doctor, I just want to read a couple of passages which I just
• 56:49
  thought so perfectly depicted him.
• 56:54
  The first one is there are times when grandfather doesn't know me
• 56:57
  or himself. He arrives at the end of a
• 56:59
  sentence, having forgotten how to begin it.
• 57:01
  Then he gets flustered. He tries to cover his lapses
• 57:04
  with a bad temper, but I see how they hurt him.
• 57:08
  I can feel his frustration and pain.
• 57:10
  And I was reading that and I was like, OK, that could be a
• 57:14
  comment on Hartnell's line fluffs, or that could be a
• 57:19
  comment on Hartnell's career from sort of Caroline Ford's
• 57:23
  point of view. And Newman would know about all
• 57:26
  of that. He, he's researched this era so
• 57:28
  well. Just that sort of anger and
• 57:31
  frustration that he had that everyone talks about that his
• 57:34
  career didn't go the way. So I just thought that was a
• 57:36
  really nice, possible sort of three-way depiction of Arnold.
• 57:42
  But the the line I loved. It's very simple line.
• 57:46
  He loves fiddly problems that test his cleverness.
• 57:49
  He gets so caught up in the detail he often forgets the
• 57:52
  purpose of it all. And I could just see Arnold.
• 57:54
  There, and that TARDIS fiddling about with things at the
• 57:57
  beginning of every single story. Like, he knows these characters.
• 58:01
  He's he's examined the actors in the roles.
• 58:05
  He has, and I think he's a very astute student of character and
• 58:13
  people's behaviours as well. Because putting it into the form
• 58:17
  of a diary, you know, as, as we mentioned earlier, the idea of
• 58:20
  literally being a document in which someone tries to get their
• 58:22
  thoughts in order is, is very consciously done here.
• 58:27
  An epistolary narrative. That's the word, isn't it?
• 58:30
  As. Is is very fond of that word.
• 58:33
  As was Bram Stoker. Dracula isn't a pistol.
• 58:35
  He talks about epistemological quandaries, yes.
• 58:39
  That's right. Yes.
• 58:40
  So he's doing that. He's also having those things
• 58:42
  where Susan's also trying to get insights into how the doctor's
• 58:45
  thinking and how he thinks differently, and she's studying
• 58:48
  and trying to make sense of him. We also have two of Susan's
• 58:54
  friends who are sort of, you almost want to say, but this is
• 58:58
  too cute. What are their names?
• 58:59
  What are their names? Their names are John and
• 59:04
  Gillian. Yes, I'm I'm sure he's never
• 59:08
  read those comics at all. I'm a.
• 59:12
  Martian, you mean? And Jillian?
• 59:14
  Yes, John the Martian and Jillian, and they are two of the
• 59:18
  other kids who don't quite fit in in school, so they sort of
• 59:20
  end up becoming friends again. This is quite nice.
• 59:23
  This is the way things happen in life sometimes.
• 59:24
  It's not because they seek each other out or they necessarily
• 59:27
  spot anything in each other they're particularly, you know,
• 59:30
  interested in or attracted to. It's that it's just that they're
• 59:34
  the three outsiders. They're the three who don't
• 59:36
  quite fit in, so they sort of end up occupying the same kind
• 59:39
  of edge space within, within the community of the school, school
• 59:43
  life. I like to think that John is
• 59:45
  that boy from An Unearthly Child in the very first scene who
• 59:48
  looks over that girl's shoulder and goes a book.
• 59:52
  And no one can stop you thinking.
• 59:54
  I know exactly. But you know, there's some,
• 59:58
  they're really interestingly described as well because
• 1:00:00
  they're the ones who accompany her through it and.
• 1:00:03
  John is the son of an army man, You know, we get hints at their
• 1:00:09
  home life as well. So Susan is depicted as having a
• 1:00:11
  very difficult home life, which A, she absolutely does have, and
• 1:00:13
  B, that's the instigating thing in the whole of Doctor Who is
• 1:00:17
  that she gets followed home because they're worried about
• 1:00:19
  her home life. Both John and Jillian have
• 1:00:25
  difficult home lives depicted in this.
• 1:00:28
  Yes. So John has a very overbearing
• 1:00:30
  father who is in the army and has very, very strict, very
• 1:00:38
  traditional ideas of masculinity and a sort of barely concealed
• 1:00:42
  contempt for his son's ability to live up to these.
• 1:00:46
  Because he he sees himself as the big man, as as the army man,
• 1:00:49
  and he wants his son to be the big army man.
• 1:00:51
  And I read a line about his dad because it just captures so
• 1:00:57
  perfectly how quickly Newman captures a character.
• 1:01:02
  Soldiers were in the High Street setting up the inspection point.
• 1:01:05
  Captain Brent John's father was bossing the soldiers about,
• 1:01:08
  doing his best to be polite to women, doing his best to be
• 1:01:12
  polite to women in queues who asked him questions.
• 1:01:15
  He was better at bossiness than politeness and basically tells.
• 1:01:20
  Me a lot about that man. Oh, so much.
• 1:01:23
  And then as as the story goes on, so as the cold really begins
• 1:01:26
  to set in and as the threat becomes more apparent and more
• 1:01:31
  immediate, we John's dad becomes a bit more of a bit more of the
• 1:01:36
  narrative because he's basically, he's very right wing.
• 1:01:40
  He's quite Brexity. I think we can say yes.
• 1:01:43
  Yeah, he doesn't shy away from the racism of 1963, does he?
• 1:01:48
  He does not at all. And also, but also that idea of,
• 1:01:54
  you know, yeah, I said Brexity, that idea of, you know, sort of
• 1:01:58
  British exceptionalism as well, that, you know, we can do
• 1:02:00
  anything better. And Kylie O Kyrie O Come on
• 1:02:03
  boys. And the idea that the that
• 1:02:07
  dichotomy, that one that is sometimes seen in the British
• 1:02:11
  right wing or character in the British right wing of at the one
• 1:02:13
  hand being talking about freedoms and liberties while
• 1:02:16
  also enacting quite authoritarian acts and cracking
• 1:02:20
  down on things as long as it's not the people that they think
• 1:02:22
  might vote for them to do it. And you see that here.
• 1:02:24
  He's basically trying to establish, it's not clear how
• 1:02:28
  much actual authority he has to do this, but he is seen trying
• 1:02:31
  to establish a state of emergency so they can bring it.
• 1:02:34
  And then, you know, that comes clearly that's drawing on that
• 1:02:36
  sort of cultural memory of all these stories and conspiracy
• 1:02:39
  theories about the coup against Harold Wilson in the 1960s.
• 1:02:44
  And yet Newman is clever enough that he he doesn't let us scoff
• 1:02:50
  at that character because he recognizes the danger of that
• 1:02:52
  character. You know, he's not just someone
• 1:02:54
  who says just he's not something just is mean to his son and and
• 1:03:01
  rub some on the head and stuff. No, these are these are really
• 1:03:03
  like more existentially dangerous ideas that are buried
• 1:03:06
  in the British psyche because as that goes on, that states
• 1:03:09
  emergency. It's not all about Dad's Army.
• 1:03:12
  This mentality has got into John.
• 1:03:13
  We are shaped by the need to please and try to understand our
• 1:03:16
  parents. As Susan is with her grandfather
• 1:03:18
  comes to the point where John ends up pointing a gun at the
• 1:03:22
  headmaster's head and announcing there's an emergency.
• 1:03:26
  These act these things that so he's discovered.
• 1:03:29
  John's the one that keeps talking it.
• 1:03:31
  They're saying it's the Russians, isn't it?
• 1:03:33
  The cold is the thought of the Russians.
• 1:03:34
  And that could only have come from his dad because.
• 1:03:38
  Yeah, because one of the. Great things about having adults
• 1:03:43
  and kids in this is there's there's a wonderfully sort of
• 1:03:45
  childish comment from Susan that adults don't understand.
• 1:03:50
  They refuse to accept what's in front of them.
• 1:03:53
  If it's ridiculous, which this is, it's walking snowmen that
• 1:03:56
  are coming to kill you, what's the line?
• 1:03:59
  Hang on, there's no point with grown-ups.
• 1:04:02
  They live on a different plane of reality.
• 1:04:03
  I don't know if they choose to or not, but they have the
• 1:04:06
  strange ability to ignore what's going on in front of them.
• 1:04:09
  So there's this sort of idea that the kids, because they have
• 1:04:12
  an imagination, they're the only ones that can actually stop this
• 1:04:15
  bloody thing. Yeah.
• 1:04:16
  And there are various, there are various theories that are put
• 1:04:22
  forwards as to where the cold comes from and what it's doing.
• 1:04:25
  And yet they're all embedded in the existing prejudices of the
• 1:04:29
  people who are putting them forwards.
• 1:04:31
  So I should say the cold is is across the plot.
• 1:04:34
  What becomes clear is that this is actually an intelligence.
• 1:04:37
  The cold is somehow sentient and ruled the IT was the.
• 1:04:41
  Dominant the Silurians again, isn't it?
• 1:04:43
  It's something that existed before humanity that wants to
• 1:04:47
  plan it back. Yeah, exactly.
• 1:04:49
  And possibly in the last Ice Age and it's now reawakening.
• 1:04:52
  And there's there's all sorts of theories.
• 1:04:53
  So there's the idea that some of them suggest it's to do with the
• 1:04:55
  Russians and some of them suggest, no, it's actually to do
• 1:04:57
  with the Americans. And then there's like, oh, well,
• 1:05:00
  actually it's neither. It's to do with just the warming
• 1:05:02
  of the planet that's been going on ever since mammalian life
• 1:05:05
  began. And we've just now reached this
• 1:05:06
  point and again. Sorry, could I say the line the
• 1:05:11
  doctor says how he describes this?
• 1:05:13
  It's all quite simple, child. This fellow.
• 1:05:15
  The cold was here first. It wakes up after a lengthy
• 1:05:18
  snooze to find his home world crowded with John and Johnny.
• 1:05:21
  Come lately. No wonder it's on a bit of a
• 1:05:24
  tear. But you know, it's because we
• 1:05:29
  think about these and do the frames as being Doctor Who fans.
• 1:05:31
  So obviously everyone reads that and goes, hey, it's like the
• 1:05:33
  Solarians. But you know, Kim Newman is, is
• 1:05:37
  a student of of of cult media and film and and literature.
• 1:05:40
  So you can see how that's also him, as he does in the
• 1:05:42
  anodracular books and a lot of his other works, how that's him
• 1:05:45
  also drawing on the fiction of the period to present.
• 1:05:49
  This is a very influenced by British 1960s it it influences
• 1:05:55
  and and texts. So you know that whole threat.
• 1:05:57
  It's it's a bit day of the Triffids.
• 1:05:59
  You know, it's quite John Wyndham the situation they end
• 1:06:01
  up in of this sort of apocalypse, but where it gets
• 1:06:04
  really cold and there's groups of survivors having to find
• 1:06:06
  their way through with threats out there in the world come
• 1:06:09
  across other groups. It's a bit the day the earth
• 1:06:13
  caught fire, you know, putting it in a very British idea.
• 1:06:15
  What discussion of oh, it's down to the Americans and the
• 1:06:17
  Russians and they finally killed us all and we'll see it here in
• 1:06:20
  Britain. But also a bit queter Mass and
• 1:06:22
  the pit I think maybe is where he's going with the idea of this
• 1:06:25
  ancient threat that is now re emerging.
• 1:06:28
  He wrote a fantastic BFI film classics on queter mass, the
• 1:06:31
  pit. Another one to add to your
• 1:06:32
  reading list listeners. So he's really he's really
• 1:06:36
  smart. And again, that comes back to
• 1:06:38
  the idea of he is he, he is evoking the popular memory of
• 1:06:43
  that period through history of the great cult, but also through
• 1:06:46
  the types of texts that we now that are now our easiest way of
• 1:06:49
  engaging with, with that period. The most immediate way, let's
• 1:06:51
  face it, with Doctor Who fans, a lot of what we know about 1960s
• 1:06:54
  Britain comes from watching Doctor Who indeed.
• 1:07:00
  And. Other cult shows of the time.
• 1:07:02
  Oh yes, we're very. We're very well read.
• 1:07:03
  Before I imagined it all looked like The Avengers if I'm honest.
• 1:07:07
  Yeah. Everyone lived in.
• 1:07:09
  Pretty villages, you know, There was karate scenes going on all
• 1:07:12
  the time. Absolutely.
• 1:07:16
  But then, yeah, So to get back to John and Gillian, so talk
• 1:07:18
  about John. But I mean, Gillian is a very
• 1:07:21
  interesting character because I think the the implication there
• 1:07:26
  is she is someone who is, I think at the very least, being
• 1:07:29
  beaten by her father. I think we get the implication
• 1:07:31
  that's possible. Every time.
• 1:07:33
  Susan always spills that Julia rounds on her doesn't mean and
• 1:07:37
  like if you do it, we are through.
• 1:07:38
  If you say a word, it's it's all implied.
• 1:07:42
  Nothing sort of specifically stated, but.
• 1:07:46
  But it's it's it's it's all it's all there as well.
• 1:07:48
  And I think there's possibly also a suggestion that she might
• 1:07:50
  be, you know, near a divergent in some ways that, you know,
• 1:07:53
  Susan comments on how she really struggles with a lot of things
• 1:07:57
  in class, but it's really excellent with other in other
• 1:08:00
  ways in organising and and doing different things.
• 1:08:03
  And I think across all three of those characters, across Susan,
• 1:08:06
  across John, across Jillian in different ways, you get that
• 1:08:09
  recurrently in that idea of that inability to existing in a world
• 1:08:14
  in which you don't quite fit in different ways.
• 1:08:17
  Whether that's the expectations of John father, whether that's
• 1:08:20
  the literal alienness of Susan or whether that's, you know,
• 1:08:24
  potential neurodivergence in the in the case of Gillian, as well
• 1:08:27
  as those, those those quite damaging differently
• 1:08:30
  relationships with their parent figures, which obviously effects
• 1:08:32
  quite badly on the doctor in this.
• 1:08:34
  And there's a there's a theme in this book in which the Doctor is
• 1:08:37
  the person who learns to become a parent by the end of it.
• 1:08:41
  There's a line towards the end. Where starts to learn starts
• 1:08:45
  quite there at the end of the book.
• 1:08:47
  No, absolutely. It's only because he sees her
• 1:08:50
  that. Distress, I think is why he he
• 1:08:53
  acts at the end, but I think that's that's the.
• 1:08:56
  First, the only. Sort of point in this book where
• 1:08:58
  he's truly empathetic towards her.
• 1:09:02
  Yeah, he really isn't. He's a very distant figure.
• 1:09:04
  And there is, you know, there is a process in, in children
• 1:09:10
  growing up where not only do children come to see their
• 1:09:12
  parents as people, but parents come to see their children as
• 1:09:16
  people as well, rather than as, as, as independence.
• 1:09:18
  But there's also a process of the Doctor finding a family in
• 1:09:23
  Ian Barber and Susan throughout those first four stories.
• 1:09:26
  Or that's and Newman can't preempt that.
• 1:09:29
  He can have the Doctor making the first step.
• 1:09:33
  Yes. But yes, ATV series does the
• 1:09:35
  rest of the work. I think yes, I think what he
• 1:09:37
  really what he does quite nicely here is present an idea of how
• 1:09:41
  the Doctor, well, how the Doctor appears in those very first, you
• 1:09:45
  know, his very first appearances in in doctrine, of course,
• 1:09:48
  doesn't turn up to the end of the first episode.
• 1:09:51
  So there's that case and then. Asked it as well and.
• 1:09:53
  You those reviews that you found that said the Doctor was out of
• 1:09:56
  character in this siding of the cold, that is exactly.
• 1:09:59
  Who the doctor is in An Unearthly Child.
• 1:10:02
  Exactly. Exactly.
• 1:10:03
  Contempt. For the human race.
• 1:10:06
  He is. He's not a nice man.
• 1:10:08
  And you know, I think Alan Moore has has made similar comments in
• 1:10:13
  a very respected author with a loose connection to Doctor Who
• 1:10:16
  as well. He's he's made comments in the
• 1:10:18
  interviews that he thought that William Hartnell as Doctor Who
• 1:10:20
  was a fantastic figure of being untrustworthy, of being
• 1:10:25
  unlikable as of being a real anti hero.
• 1:10:30
  And he found, well, he said quite unkind words about all of
• 1:10:33
  the following ones that are let listeners look up for
• 1:10:34
  themselves. But that's, you know, that is a
• 1:10:38
  particular image Doctor, which I think sometimes as Doctor Who
• 1:10:41
  fans or at least as a collective as terms of of Doctor Who media,
• 1:10:45
  how it seeks to present that character since is not the
• 1:10:48
  version that we perhaps like to see.
• 1:10:51
  Maybe that's not how people sometimes like to think of the
• 1:10:54
  First Doctors being they like the cuddlier, more whimsical
• 1:10:57
  Wizard of Oz figure that he became later on, Which is fine,
• 1:11:00
  and I'm not arguing against that.
• 1:11:02
  But that's not who he is when we first meet him, and that first
• 1:11:05
  character is worth is worthy of examination in his own right.
• 1:11:09
  And you're right. Remembering that, yeah, the
• 1:11:11
  dialects, he's willing to risk everybody's life to radiation
• 1:11:15
  just to explore that city. Ian calls him an old fool
• 1:11:18
  angrily. In the next story, Barbara calls
• 1:11:20
  him a stupid old man and he's trying to kill.
• 1:11:23
  Them. I mean, dysfunctional doesn't
• 1:11:26
  begin to cover it in those first couple of stories.
• 1:11:28
  No. And you know, we touched on the
• 1:11:29
  Timeless Child earlier. Actually, one of the best
• 1:11:32
  criticisms I saw of the Timeless Child concept came from Stephen
• 1:11:36
  Bush, who's a who's a writer for the, I think, political editor
• 1:11:39
  at the FT, but also a big Doctor Who fan.
• 1:11:41
  And he was saying that his problem with the Timeless Child
• 1:11:43
  is that it robs the doctor of that arc, that if the Doctor was
• 1:11:46
  always a hero, there's always someone who was off going around
• 1:11:50
  and setting rights wrong. Well, what happened?
• 1:11:52
  What happened with Ian and Barbara and Susan and Vicki and
• 1:11:55
  the rest of them, you know, no one changed him.
• 1:11:57
  That character has not changed ever since.
• 1:11:59
  But we see him changing when? Joe Martin regenerated into Sir
• 1:12:01
  William Harlow, was sort of reset and became a prickly
• 1:12:04
  bastard. Yeah, it happened.
• 1:12:05
  It happened with Pete Capaldi. Yeah, that's true.
• 1:12:08
  That's true. Can we, can we circle back
• 1:12:10
  around to Gillian for a second? Because there's a wonderful
• 1:12:15
  moment in this and you will understand this more than
• 1:12:18
  anybody else because I think it's that sort of teenage
• 1:12:23
  emotion that you go through and it's captured so brilliantly in
• 1:12:27
  Father Time in that middle section that we both absolutely
• 1:12:30
  loved there. And I think you had to establish
• 1:12:33
  that they were like young girls having fun together at the
• 1:12:38
  beginning of this to sort of sell the friendship.
• 1:12:40
  And they go. They go to the.
• 1:12:42
  Pictures, they get dolled up and they go to like an X-rated movie
• 1:12:45
  that they and hilariously Ian and Barbara are there as well.
• 1:12:48
  And so they're sort of hiding away from them in cinema.
• 1:12:51
  And then they go out for a drink afterwards.
• 1:12:54
  And Jillian's flirting with the older lads and then Susan drops
• 1:12:59
  that she's younger than she appears because she's all tarted
• 1:13:02
  up. And Jillian rounds on her
• 1:13:05
  because they she's dolled up Susan as well.
• 1:13:07
  And she goes, oh, what do you look like forehead?
• 1:13:09
  A sad clown. And it's.
• 1:13:12
  Just one of those moments where a friend says something so
• 1:13:16
  painful and Susan, like, basically runs back to the
• 1:13:18
  touch. She's absolutely devastated.
• 1:13:20
  She thinks the friendship's over.
• 1:13:22
  I thought Newman captured all of that stuff so.
• 1:13:25
  Evocatively, like I. Felt what Susan was feeling in
• 1:13:28
  those moments. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:13:31
  Of the of that very teenage idea of, you know, being in such a
• 1:13:35
  hurry to grow up and that needs to be serious and to be taken
• 1:13:41
  seriously and to have the edge over the other.
• 1:13:45
  And as you say, there's this wielding of big emotions and big
• 1:13:47
  words in a way that is that can be hit for.
• 1:13:49
  Oh, yeah, you're right. That that sells this, that it
• 1:13:52
  isn't just some sort of, you know, empty invention novel in
• 1:13:56
  which a man pretends to be a teenage girl.
• 1:13:59
  He's really capturing something that again, we spoke to Lance
• 1:14:01
  Spark and you mentioned all the time, he said writing that I
• 1:14:04
  don't know what it's like to be a parent, but I knew what it's
• 1:14:05
  like to be a teenager. And I think you're getting that
• 1:14:09
  memory from Kim Newman and you can recognize it.
• 1:14:11
  But again, that the relationship she has with those two, John and
• 1:14:15
  Gillian, it's so vital to the climax of the book and why the
• 1:14:19
  Doctor steps in that Susan convinced him.
• 1:14:21
  But there's also a. Wonderful package.
• 1:14:24
  Passage, package. Forgive me.
• 1:14:26
  There's another wonderful passage where you he describes
• 1:14:31
  John Gillian and Susan talking those sort of nonsense
• 1:14:35
  conversations that you only had when you were a young child.
• 1:14:40
  And it's Julian calling John the Martian, saying that he looks
• 1:14:43
  like meek on Dan stairs enemy and the eagle, which annoys John
• 1:14:46
  because the meek and is apparently evolution and Julian
• 1:14:49
  say the same difference and and like we just I mean, we do you
• 1:14:53
  and me, because we talk about dogs who now, But when you grow
• 1:14:56
  up, you stop having those stupid conversations, don't you?
• 1:14:58
  But don't mean anything. It's I don't know if you ever.
• 1:15:01
  Seen that scene in Stand By Me where they're all sitting around
• 1:15:03
  the fire and they're talking about Minnie Mouse's boots.
• 1:15:07
  You. Know it's, it's that sort of
• 1:15:08
  thing and I've just I've totally bought the friendships.
• 1:15:12
  Yeah. And that is vital.
• 1:15:14
  You said it was vital to the the resolution because the the
• 1:15:18
  resolution is, as you say, through the Doctor's feelings
• 1:15:22
  for Susan, for Susan's feelings for her friends.
• 1:15:24
  The Doctor realizes that actually he can save all that.
• 1:15:28
  It's really interesting that the the resolution comes down to the
• 1:15:31
  Doctor's morality. It's it's actually presented as
• 1:15:33
  being quite an easy problem for him to solve.
• 1:15:36
  Yeah, like like a. Flick of a switch.
• 1:15:38
  It's it's literally the flick of a switch.
• 1:15:41
  But it does. Structure again, but for quite a
• 1:15:43
  long time he doesn't feel like he can interfere.
• 1:15:45
  He's got a real feeling of it's not right because as you say,
• 1:15:49
  the rules of the Time Lords that he is from outside of time.
• 1:15:51
  It's buried in him quite deeply is the idea that it isn't for
• 1:15:56
  him to interfere. That would that would be
• 1:15:58
  completely wrong. There's a line where she says he
• 1:16:01
  might have been a habitual rule rule breaker, but he was set in
• 1:16:04
  his ways and describing. That Gillian confronts the
• 1:16:10
  doctorate says you're a monster. You're worse than the fanatics
• 1:16:13
  who wanted to sacrifice Malcolm. You're worse than my old man.
• 1:16:18
  You'd let your granddaughter die rather than throw a switch.
• 1:16:21
  You're worse than anyone in history ever.
• 1:16:25
  Which again, is such a brilliant teenage, you know, teenage
• 1:16:29
  exaggeration, but also maybe, given what the threat is, not
• 1:16:32
  entirely unearth. Give it a couple of stuff the
• 1:16:34
  Doctor does later in the run. I think there may be something
• 1:16:37
  in that, you know? It's brilliant, but you know,
• 1:16:40
  but the, the whole book is building that relationship
• 1:16:44
  between those 3 characters and that friendship.
• 1:16:46
  Because if you didn't have that, then that and there have been,
• 1:16:50
  we've all read and seen terrible versions of that ending of, you
• 1:16:55
  know, the the marvel super super God comes down to judge humanity
• 1:17:00
  and he goes, ah, through your love and willingness to
• 1:17:03
  sacrifice for each other, I have seen the worth of humanity.
• 1:17:06
  I shall spare you and goes off back to space.
• 1:17:09
  And this app absolutely isn't that because it's sold on it.
• 1:17:12
  It is all about emotions. It's all about interpersonal
• 1:17:15
  relationships. It's all about the power of the
• 1:17:19
  doctor is the power of his friends.
• 1:17:20
  No, no, not quite that far. Well, there's there's another
• 1:17:27
  element to the climax, of course, and that's Malcolm and
• 1:17:31
  his gonk that's been well set up earlier in the story where the
• 1:17:35
  doctor's like, oh, what's this now?
• 1:17:37
  Oh, or how imaginative. And just because he thinks this
• 1:17:41
  one child exemplifies the fact that the human race has a sliver
• 1:17:46
  of imagination, that they have a right to survive that he
• 1:17:50
  actually flicks the switch. I thought that was glorious and
• 1:17:53
  how that had been set up. Yeah, and again, ties in
• 1:17:57
  thematically so well with the depiction of where they've come
• 1:18:00
  from, a place of immense power and no imagination, where
• 1:18:04
  nothing surprises you and nothing ever changes, where
• 1:18:08
  you're not alive. And so it's not he, he can't, he
• 1:18:13
  can't have the Doctor become the Doctor.
• 1:18:16
  We know because that happens on screen.
• 1:18:18
  But you can absolutely say, well, here's how we first see
• 1:18:21
  him. Here's who, here's how I imagine
• 1:18:23
  he must have been in order to leave Gallifrey in the 1st
• 1:18:26
  place. He left because he was a git.
• 1:18:28
  He left because not because he was some rebel and some freedom
• 1:18:31
  fighter who wants to go off and set the universe to right.
• 1:18:33
  He left because he was an awkward, you know, old git.
• 1:18:37
  What were you saying? The war games?
• 1:18:39
  I was bored, yeah. Exactly, exactly.
• 1:18:44
  And so he thinks, well, you know, that sort of fits with the
• 1:18:49
  guy who was shown at the start of it, but he can queue it up to
• 1:18:52
  start to show that he is heading in that way because even, you
• 1:18:57
  know, the ends of the ends of an unearthly child.
• 1:18:59
  The very first episode, he he kidnapped Ian a Barbara in an
• 1:19:04
  act of desperation. Like that's this is sort of
• 1:19:06
  thing that like years later he's doing, you know, with those
• 1:19:08
  business. But that level of interference
• 1:19:10
  is because he's absolutely terrified that something that
• 1:19:12
  something's going to happen. That well, as we know here, he's
• 1:19:15
  worried that if if he becomes too nice, this also plays into
• 1:19:20
  his not wanting to interfere, which is this idea that he's
• 1:19:22
  worried that if he becomes too active in time then he will be
• 1:19:25
  noticed that as they put the line.
• 1:19:28
  Here, the line here is he's especially wary of the teachers
• 1:19:30
  of at Cole Hill because he has a strange idea that educators are
• 1:19:34
  the sharpest, most dangerous intellects on the planet.
• 1:19:37
  And that's one of the last lines of the book is utterly setting
• 1:19:40
  up on an early child. Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:19:43
  Absolutely horror he must have felt when they walked, you know,
• 1:19:45
  when he found them in there in the junk yards.
• 1:19:47
  Yeah. And that is, that is brilliantly
• 1:19:50
  done. And there's a lovely line as
• 1:19:53
  well where Susan's sort of meditating on what's been
• 1:19:55
  happening. And she says, I think he was
• 1:19:58
  using me to test the human race, sending me out among them to
• 1:20:01
  make a decision for him to think through a problem he was too old
• 1:20:04
  to tackle by himself. If so, it was a close thing.
• 1:20:09
  And that's the other sorts of. If you're going to go back this
• 1:20:12
  far into the doctor's history, it would just be tempting to
• 1:20:19
  have prequelitis where it's a story where just everything
• 1:20:22
  slowly comes into shape for the last thing.
• 1:20:25
  But you should play on the tragedy of that.
• 1:20:27
  Again, this goes into historical.
• 1:20:28
  This goes to the things which is which is that how easily things
• 1:20:32
  could have gone differently and that is something that is
• 1:20:38
  touched on here which was if. She hadn't gone to school if she
• 1:20:41
  hadn't met Malcolm, if none of those things had happened, if
• 1:20:43
  she stayed in the TARDIS. Well, that's it, yeah.
• 1:20:46
  I was taken over. The cold has taken over.
• 1:20:52
  Yeah, I think it is. It is brilliant that also fans
• 1:20:56
  will love this bit the Doctor when he's he's captured the cold
• 1:21:00
  and he takes it to Pluto in the far future.
• 1:21:03
  And there's a brilliant bit where the TARDIS appears to like
• 1:21:06
  the Doctor goes to the TARDIS by himself and he's very confident
• 1:21:08
  that he can pilot the TARDIS exactly right.
• 1:21:09
  So the TARDIS appears to like fade away and then immediately
• 1:21:12
  fade back in. And it's only later that Susan
• 1:21:14
  checks the logs and finds out that the Doctor needed five goes
• 1:21:17
  to get to Pluto. And then?
• 1:21:21
  That five adventures, then. And then more, yeah.
• 1:21:23
  Then more than a dozen to get back.
• 1:21:25
  So, you know, don't worry. That's where you can fit in all
• 1:21:27
  of those stories from the annuals where he's travelling by
• 1:21:29
  himself. Oh, especially the one where he
• 1:21:31
  gets stripped out by those blokes.
• 1:21:33
  You read that? I thought that was a doctor.
• 1:21:35
  I think that was some fan fiction you found, Joe.
• 1:21:38
  We've, we haven't really talked about the cold itself very much.
• 1:21:41
  I love how that's depicted as there's a line here.
• 1:21:46
  The grandfather says, luckily, that the cold has no grudge, no
• 1:21:50
  capacity for cruelty. It was riding its home of humans
• 1:21:53
  in a way a person might clean algae out of a fish tank or take
• 1:21:57
  medicine to purge a germ colony. So I, I just love the fact that
• 1:22:01
  this, this wasn't like a alien takeover.
• 1:22:04
  It wasn't a revenge thing. They were just like, no, no, no,
• 1:22:07
  you're just in my way, like. But how it's sort of depicted as
• 1:22:12
  we're sort of doing Stephen Moffitt's The Snowmen.
• 1:22:15
  There are. There are genuine sort of evil.
• 1:22:17
  Snowmen about the streets and big snowballs that gather
• 1:22:20
  momentum and create huge avalanches in the middle of
• 1:22:23
  London and, you know, blizzards of razor sharp snowflakes that
• 1:22:29
  are cutting people to pieces. It's a formidable foe, isn't it?
• 1:22:34
  Yeah, no, it is. It is elemental.
• 1:22:37
  It is, You know, if anyone's ever, if anyone ever remembers
• 1:22:41
  their particularly cold student house when the heating wasn't on
• 1:22:44
  and trying to get to sleep, you know.
• 1:22:45
  My house now what are you talking about?
• 1:22:51
  Like, you know, you remember that the cold is inescapable.
• 1:22:53
  That is something, again, that's very cleverly done here of, of
• 1:22:56
  quite, quite a recognizable experience turned in, turned
• 1:23:02
  into a monster. You know, Steven Moffat's very
• 1:23:05
  good at that sort of thing as as well.
• 1:23:06
  You know, what was that thing out the corner of your eye?
• 1:23:08
  What did that? What if that statue moved when
• 1:23:10
  you weren't looking? They're thinking along similar
• 1:23:12
  lines here. When we were reading this, you
• 1:23:13
  texted me saying, do you think Steven Moffat read this before
• 1:23:16
  he wrote The Snowman? And actually, I was more
• 1:23:17
  surprised that only two people in 50 years of Doctor Who came
• 1:23:20
  up with Killer Snowman, because it happens such a.
• 1:23:24
  Weird. I think it works better in the
• 1:23:25
  book. You know, I can visualize it
• 1:23:27
  without those sort of bubbly snowman going about the place.
• 1:23:30
  Well, as Colin Baker always says, the budget's bigger in
• 1:23:32
  your head. It's it's not wrong, but I do I
• 1:23:35
  like the fact that the, the cold is present from the very first
• 1:23:39
  word in the book, Like the first line, I think is a description
• 1:23:43
  of how cold it is. So it's not like we're ever
• 1:23:46
  seeing the contrast. We're never seeing the enemy
• 1:23:48
  coming in. It's here, you know, it's only
• 1:23:52
  the first half of the book. We it's like across a week or
• 1:23:56
  something, isn't it? Because the diary extracts go
• 1:23:58
  from day-to-day. The second-half of the book then
• 1:24:01
  just become one long night of the cold on the move.
• 1:24:05
  And it's essentially, you know, half the book is an action
• 1:24:09
  sequence of them trying to get to the TARDIS and to convince
• 1:24:12
  the Doctor to save the day. Yeah, it's a journey back across
• 1:24:16
  Shoreditch in the snow, which which, you know, has an
• 1:24:21
  evocation of those sort of partner we're going to walk a
• 1:24:25
  long way, stories like Marco Polo and the Tardic Fish, but
• 1:24:29
  without feeling like it's just doing sort of big Finish
• 1:24:31
  prestige type. The last episode of Another of
• 1:24:34
  Your Child, I swear it's them just going from the caves and
• 1:24:36
  the TARDIS, just running along the plains, you know, trying to
• 1:24:39
  get away from the Cavemen. Yeah, Yeah, exactly that.
• 1:24:42
  And he does, he does it very nicely the way that that he sort
• 1:24:46
  of ramps up the idea. So the cold goes from at the
• 1:24:49
  start just being something recognizable and uncomfortable.
• 1:24:52
  It's becoming deeply uncomfortable.
• 1:24:54
  And it's only the fact that it is actually benevolent.
• 1:24:56
  And this is getting for you that wonderful thing that horror
• 1:24:58
  often does. Blair Witch Project is a great
• 1:25:00
  example of this, which is you only realise how you only
• 1:25:04
  realise that you're in danger when you're already far too far
• 1:25:08
  into the danger. And actually it began quite some
• 1:25:12
  time ago earlier in the book. But it's interesting you
• 1:25:15
  mentioned for the time as well earlier on talking about
• 1:25:17
  adolescence, because here as there, there's that connection
• 1:25:20
  of winter and the cold with childhood.
• 1:25:22
  Father Time begins with that wonderful passage about the
• 1:25:27
  snow. Works in the books, doesn't it?
• 1:25:28
  It just is so evocative. It's so evocative and I think is
• 1:25:34
  evocative in talking about childhood and transitions
• 1:25:36
  because there is that sense of magic about it.
• 1:25:39
  It doesn't exist about any other season.
• 1:25:40
  Like we have wonderful memories of, you know, summer holidays as
• 1:25:43
  kids, but it's not an entirely different world, The world a
• 1:25:46
  snow day when your child is magic, that's the closest you
• 1:25:49
  come to experiencing it. And yet the very different
• 1:25:51
  experience of that as as an adult.
• 1:25:53
  It's interesting that both Lance Barking and Kim Newman fall on
• 1:25:56
  that idea of, of using snow to talk about the the, the journey
• 1:26:01
  from childhood to adulthood. It's it's, it's a theme and it's
• 1:26:05
  very cleverly done. Well, given that they're both
• 1:26:11
  older men at that point, you know their memories of their
• 1:26:14
  childhood must be sharp ass. Well, I suppose Lance parking
• 1:26:18
  must have been what I'm going to throw a guess here. 30s maybe
• 1:26:22
  Kim Newman was similar age this I don't know where we'd be a
• 1:26:26
  child of the 60s. So I suppose we were writing
• 1:26:27
  this could have been some, I don't know, circa 40.
• 1:26:29
  I'm going to do a world guess, which is I guess maybe a time
• 1:26:32
  where you yeah, speaking, Speaking of someone in his in
• 1:26:36
  his in his 30s now. I think it's the the time at
• 1:26:38
  which you sort of begin to actually recognize that you are
• 1:26:41
  an adult now. The point at which your
• 1:26:42
  childhood does feel like a a completely different and
• 1:26:45
  separate plane of existence, not just how you were when you were
• 1:26:49
  younger. So maybe there is something to
• 1:26:50
  that idea that at that age you do begin to look back and you
• 1:26:53
  go, oh, yeah, it's maybe that's where midlife crises come from.
• 1:26:57
  I don't know. It's the it's the beginning of
• 1:27:00
  realizing that you are fundamentally no longer a child,
• 1:27:02
  which in your 20s you've got to kid yourself.
• 1:27:04
  It's the. World in a midlife crisis now
• 1:27:05
  because I feel like every TV show is on Nostalgia Fest for
• 1:27:09
  past decades. You know, strange things and all
• 1:27:11
  that. Yeah, there's a lot of, there's
• 1:27:16
  a lot of referentiality going on, isn't there?
• 1:27:18
  There is a real danger that maybe you know, some things I
• 1:27:21
  feel about generative IO. Maybe that's the end point of
• 1:27:25
  all of this is the point at which everything is just
• 1:27:27
  referencing things that happened before and not trying to be
• 1:27:30
  original. Well, that's why 80s Doctor Who
• 1:27:32
  and late Chipnall, you know, and late Mock here well.
• 1:27:36
  Maybe we just don't would like to look around ourselves to see
• 1:27:38
  what's happening right now. We'd rather look back.
• 1:27:41
  Three decades where things were probably not that much better.
• 1:27:46
  Quickly go back to Malcolm. I really liked how that
• 1:27:51
  character was used to really present the terrible racism that
• 1:27:56
  was prevalent at the time. Keep your gully or go out of the
• 1:28:00
  way. Miss is a line in this.
• 1:28:01
  Right, I sort of recoiled away from the book.
• 1:28:04
  And I was like, yeah, fuck, people would have said stuff
• 1:28:07
  like that back then and. It.
• 1:28:10
  But I also like how he was used to.
• 1:28:13
  Like, Susan loves him because she loves looking after him,
• 1:28:16
  because she can talk about coming from another planet and
• 1:28:19
  because he's six. He just believes her, you know?
• 1:28:22
  There's no question that she doesn't, I thought.
• 1:28:25
  I thought he was. A.
• 1:28:26
  He was very useful throughout the story.
• 1:28:29
  Yeah, yeah, he was. And you're right.
• 1:28:30
  It's good that, you know, as as with, you know, John's father
• 1:28:35
  and certain things they don't that he that he doesn't want,
• 1:28:40
  although he's clearly someone who who must be has an affection
• 1:28:42
  at this time. And the text this time stuff is
• 1:28:44
  very deliberately not romanticizing it.
• 1:28:47
  Like he wants to put the problems there.
• 1:28:49
  And I suppose if you're going to go back and do this story and
• 1:28:54
  revisit 1960s Doctor Who you have, you can't just present it
• 1:28:58
  as it was presented then, because the depiction of, of
• 1:29:02
  Britain and of, of, of lived reality was incredibly partial
• 1:29:06
  in those days. You know, that happens.
• 1:29:07
  That happened in TV Doctor Who, you know, when with Ace in the
• 1:29:11
  bed and breakfast and, you know, finding, finding signs about
• 1:29:14
  who's not welcome. And I think, I think it's
• 1:29:17
  important that it does that. And I think he does it really
• 1:29:19
  well. I mean, I don't think we're
• 1:29:21
  there yet, but I think it's certainly worth looking at how
• 1:29:24
  far we've come. Yeah, no, 100%.
• 1:29:27
  This is not to say that the the, the, the presence then or 2002
• 1:29:32
  or 2024 is by is, is by any means perfect, but equally we
• 1:29:37
  shouldn't. There is a danger, and this
• 1:29:41
  comes up because we punch above our weight, culturally speaking,
• 1:29:45
  on a global stage. And yet there is a problem that
• 1:29:49
  a lot of that is around our history and our past.
• 1:29:52
  And a lot of those depictions are exclusionary.
• 1:29:57
  They don't feature certain people.
• 1:29:58
  They don't tell certain people's stories either because they are
• 1:30:01
  focusing on surprisingly narrow forms of existence that people
• 1:30:07
  had in those times, or they are in some cases just deliberately
• 1:30:11
  excluding that certain people were a part of that at all.
• 1:30:15
  And as a nation that is so have wrapped up in its own history
• 1:30:22
  and so commercially reliant on it when it comes to the culture
• 1:30:24
  and the arts, it's it's really important that we fight against
• 1:30:27
  that and that we tell these that Doctor Who does this and Doctor
• 1:30:31
  Who tells these stories. You know, Thin Ice is a
• 1:30:34
  fantastic TV episode because it takes that as its deliberate
• 1:30:39
  starting point, which is history is not what we not what you
• 1:30:42
  paint it as. I think you you.
• 1:30:44
  I don't know if our largest I mean, I get the anger of him
• 1:30:46
  punching Yeah, that fella in the face.
• 1:30:48
  I never think violence is the answer, but you know, I get the
• 1:30:52
  moment. And just like Ace, angrily.
• 1:30:55
  Taking that sign down, no colours.
• 1:30:58
  There's a line here where Susan got and it's just perfect.
• 1:31:01
  If I were from here I'd be ashamed, but I'm not, so I'm
• 1:31:05
  only angry. It's a great line, isn't it?
• 1:31:10
  And of course, you know, everything isn't right now.
• 1:31:13
  And what you're often doing when you part of the point of
• 1:31:16
  flagging up the the failures of the past is to make us reflect
• 1:31:19
  on the present. Because you're denying people
• 1:31:23
  that the, you know, the people like John's dad, who wants to
• 1:31:28
  live in some imagined version of the past that fits their view of
• 1:31:33
  how the world should be and who should be in it and how they
• 1:31:36
  should behave. You are denying them that
• 1:31:40
  fantasy. You are whole.
• 1:31:41
  You are showing it to be wrong. And you're also, of course,
• 1:31:47
  writing a book in 2002. And if you're making those
• 1:31:49
  points in 2002, you're making them for a reason.
• 1:31:53
  Crazy that a book the length of a target novel has this much
• 1:31:57
  substance, isn't it? And still manages to.
• 1:31:59
  Tell a rollicking good story as well.
• 1:32:02
  Oh yes, absolutely. Next, next episode we will be
• 1:32:06
  doing Doctor Who and the Underworld.
• 1:32:11
  Well, look. I'll always throw this to you
• 1:32:13
  because I know that you probably have notes.
• 1:32:17
  What haven't we covered? Or is there anything else about
• 1:32:20
  time and relative you would like to cover?
• 1:32:21
  I mean, I've got tons of notes and things, but I sort of jumped
• 1:32:24
  about all over the place. Oh.
• 1:32:26
  Yeah, I did love the mention of Wendy Coburn.
• 1:32:29
  Oh, yes, I have Wendy Coburn written down as well.
• 1:32:33
  Oh, a little reference from Missus Hague, who's a character
• 1:32:36
  who appears in a couple of scenes, who is a vicar's wife,
• 1:32:40
  who they end up trapped in a wimpy with for a while.
• 1:32:43
  And she is a character that I think Russell T Davis would
• 1:32:46
  approve of. She, she's the vicar's wife,
• 1:32:50
  thinks very much of that position and what that says
• 1:32:52
  about her and her rightness. But she is, when the apocalypse
• 1:32:55
  comes, concerned only with her own discomfort.
• 1:33:00
  And he has quite AI think, an RTD.
• 1:33:03
  And dare I say it's a little stab at the idea of using
• 1:33:08
  religion as a way of externalizing blame for other
• 1:33:11
  people. Because she's just, she's
• 1:33:12
  horrible, but she's recognized me horrible because she thinks
• 1:33:15
  she's the best person in that room.
• 1:33:18
  I thought that Kim Newman was a bit cheeky by offering out
• 1:33:22
  spoilers to the myth makers when Susan thinks Ask Cassandra, she
• 1:33:27
  saw the future and was kicked to death for it.
• 1:33:31
  There's a bit where that, yeah, the ends.
• 1:33:32
  After having saved the world, Susan's a bit worried that the
• 1:33:35
  Doctor's taken to meddling a bit too much, and he considers going
• 1:33:38
  out and help helping out in the Dark Ages until Susan stops him.
• 1:33:44
  There are lots of lovely little touches like that out there,
• 1:33:48
  lots of hints of what's to come, certainly lots of pointers
• 1:33:51
  towards an unearthly child. Anything else?
• 1:33:59
  We could go on for hours, haven't we?
• 1:34:01
  The Doctor breaks the navigation circuit when coming back from
• 1:34:03
  Pluto, so. I just, I love the fact of all
• 1:34:08
  those adventures, you know, I'm going to try and squeeze them
• 1:34:10
  all. In now with all the annuals like
• 1:34:12
  you said, I did love the line and so you.
• 1:34:16
  Wish to rid yourself of this infants infestation my friend.
• 1:34:20
  What do pests call themselves? Human beings?
• 1:34:23
  Clearly no loss at all in the greater scheme of things.
• 1:34:28
  It changes tune when it comes to the arcane space, wouldn't they?
• 1:34:31
  What my favorite species? It's called grout.
• 1:34:36
  It's called Ian and Barbara. Going off to the cinema.
• 1:34:45
  Anything else? No, it's lovely.
• 1:34:49
  Read it if you can get a hold of it.
• 1:34:51
  Yeah, why is it available just eBay now?
• 1:34:54
  Yeah, they the Telus novellas go for.
• 1:34:57
  I can't make any head, head nor tail of how much they go for.
• 1:35:00
  Some of them are very expensive, some of them aren't.
• 1:35:03
  But good luck if you can get a hold of it too.
• 1:35:07
  Of sort of the range, Would this be your one recommend if you
• 1:35:10
  could just do one? If you could only do one, this
• 1:35:13
  is the one I'd recommend. Yeah.
• 1:35:15
  I think so. I think this is the perfect
• 1:35:16
  example. Everything you said at the start
• 1:35:18
  there. Experimenting, bringing in a
• 1:35:21
  recognizable name with new ideas and just someone writing a
• 1:35:26
  bloody good book. Yeah, yeah, absolutely,
• 1:35:30
  absolutely fantastic. Oh, also, fact fans, the cold
• 1:35:32
  returned in one of Kim Newman's later non Doctor Who stories.
• 1:35:38
  If anyone's got a copy of the Man from the Doyogenies Club on
• 1:35:41
  their shelf, they may wish to turn to the short story Cold
• 1:35:44
  Snap. What are they back from Pluto?
• 1:35:47
  I've not read it. I don't know.
• 1:35:48
  He does this thing, Kim Newman, of sort of parallel
• 1:35:54
  continuities, so versions of characters from different
• 1:35:57
  realities turn up in different continuities.
• 1:36:00
  So that might just be that realities version of the call.
• 1:36:12
  Moving on then to the last section of the episode and our
• 1:36:18
  recommend to everybody. I don't know if anyone actually.
• 1:36:21
  Goes and reads these books that recommends.
• 1:36:22
  But I love doing this because I never know what any of the
• 1:36:25
  guests are going to come out with.
• 1:36:26
  So go on, you start. I would like to recommend
• 1:36:29
  something hang up to date. I would like to recommend Doctor
• 1:36:33
  Who the Cuckoo by Steve Lyons. What's that?
• 1:36:38
  You filthy casual. It is one of the BB CS audio
• 1:36:42
  originals from I think late last year.
• 1:36:45
  It's the 12th Doctor and Joe's favorite, Clara Oswald.
• 1:36:50
  Oh. And instant sell.
• 1:36:52
  I'm buying it now. And it's really, really lovely.
• 1:36:55
  These, these BBC audio originals, they keep doing them,
• 1:36:58
  they keep coming out. They must be selling.
• 1:37:00
  And yet. No one's talking about them.
• 1:37:03
  No one talks about them and I only dip into them very rarely
• 1:37:05
  if I've sort of got reason to or so.
• 1:37:08
  This one was on included on Spotify Premium for free and I
• 1:37:10
  looked and I thought that's an hour and a bit I'll listen to.
• 1:37:12
  It is this like, you know, Bessie come home and all of
• 1:37:14
  that, Is it all sort of that range?
• 1:37:16
  Yeah, but not, not joined up in that way.
• 1:37:20
  But yeah, they're all audio original to audio audio books,
• 1:37:25
  one reader, some music, 1C DS worth of of story featuring, you
• 1:37:34
  know, Doctor's past and present. And this one is takes place
• 1:37:38
  between must be series 8:00 and 9:00.
• 1:37:41
  So post Danny Pink with Clara, you know, working at Coal Hill
• 1:37:50
  School going about her life. The Doctor is still doing the
• 1:37:53
  regular weekly meet ups with the Doctor.
• 1:37:56
  Only one week. He lands in the TARDIS and
• 1:38:01
  there's somewhere else aboard. He's got a new companion who
• 1:38:04
  he's met while he's been off adventuring and.
• 1:38:08
  Is that the cuckoo in the next? That is the that is the cuckoo
• 1:38:12
  of the title and over sort of subsequent visits because he
• 1:38:17
  drops her back off at the end as he does and then goes off again
• 1:38:19
  with his new companion who is called Eric's, who is a
• 1:38:24
  prospector from what's clearly meant to be the space pirate's
• 1:38:28
  era. Alex is the name of the alien
• 1:38:32
  who works on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise in the
• 1:38:34
  animated series. Well, maybe if you get Steven
• 1:38:39
  Lyons back on the podcast, you can ask him about this.
• 1:38:41
  He will and it's just this really interesting idea of if
• 1:38:47
  you've got Clara, someone who has a home life isn't always
• 1:38:50
  support the targets. What if there was someone who
• 1:38:51
  wasn't, you know, the Doctor goes off and has adventures and
• 1:38:54
  spin off media and even specials have established that he picks
• 1:38:58
  up other companions in the meantime before returning to,
• 1:39:01
  you know, Amy and Rory or Clara or whoever it is.
• 1:39:04
  But you know what, what if, what if Clara, you suddenly became
• 1:39:09
  the occasional recurring character?
• 1:39:10
  What if you were the the, the Kate Stewart or the Jackie Tyler
• 1:39:13
  who's just in it and the Doctor's main narrative is
• 1:39:15
  happening? Wonderful.
• 1:39:19
  It's all told from Clara's perspective, so.
• 1:39:21
  Is she super jealous? Yeah, she goes through a lot of
• 1:39:24
  emotions and there's a really nice journey for her within it
• 1:39:26
  as well, it sounds. Good.
• 1:39:28
  Yes, that's good. It's really interesting.
• 1:39:30
  I've thought about it quite a lot since it came out.
• 1:39:32
  It's just a really interesting idea of sorts of running to
• 1:39:36
  narratives of and what Doctor Who companions experiences of
• 1:39:39
  being with the Doctor can be, you know, the one who has the
• 1:39:42
  home life and the one who's just there on the TARDIS from the
• 1:39:44
  get, you know, and stays there. It's really interesting.
• 1:39:49
  It's really nicely done and it's it's it's just a bit different
• 1:39:55
  as well, which is quite hard to do these days of finding a new
• 1:39:58
  approach. And I think when we talk, go
• 1:40:00
  back and talk about all these old books, one thing that we're.
• 1:40:04
  Very lucky of with with these books and they're allowed to
• 1:40:06
  happen is that so many different explorations and extrapolations
• 1:40:10
  and interpretations of these sets of characters and their
• 1:40:13
  setups. And obviously that's happened a
• 1:40:16
  lot more with the older Doctors because there's been a lot
• 1:40:18
  longer to do it. We had the Wilderness Years and
• 1:40:19
  Big Finish and all the rest of it, but it's only lacked.
• 1:40:22
  Obviously there's a lag before you can start doing that with
• 1:40:25
  more recent Doctors, and it's just interesting to see that
• 1:40:28
  start to happen with the Peter Capaldi era.
• 1:40:30
  You know, we've sort of got enough distance on it now, but
• 1:40:32
  we can look back and say, OK, what if we just start turning it
• 1:40:36
  around and reinterpreting it from different angles.
• 1:40:38
  Now we've got some distance, and long may it continue.
• 1:40:41
  Gorgeous full full length novel audio featuring the 12th Doctor
• 1:40:46
  and Bill that Jonathan Morris wrote with the Daleks in it.
• 1:40:49
  You heard that one? I've not.
• 1:40:51
  Oh my. God, I have to get it across
• 1:40:53
  here. It is amazing how that didn't
• 1:40:55
  make it to the screen is battling.
• 1:40:58
  Do you know actually, but so you made me think of something about
• 1:41:01
  how established writers like Steve Lyons and I'm going to put
• 1:41:05
  Johnny Morris in the same bracket, how they're writing has
• 1:41:09
  changed with the advent of the new series.
• 1:41:12
  So you go back to the sort of early audios that Steve Lyons
• 1:41:15
  was writing like say fires a fires Bombay, fires a Vulcan,
• 1:41:19
  you know, the one Vesuvius with the 7th doctrine, Mel.
• 1:41:22
  And it's a good character tale, but it's all character sort of
• 1:41:25
  focusing towards the plot, which is what classic who did all the
• 1:41:29
  time. They were using that as it's
• 1:41:30
  blueprint. Since the new series has come
• 1:41:32
  along, Johnny Morris is writing, you know, he wrote Festival of
• 1:41:35
  Death, which was Douglas Adams passage, all plot, a tiny bit of
• 1:41:38
  character. Now he writes Touched by an
• 1:41:41
  Angel, which is all character with a good plot, sort of side
• 1:41:46
  by side. And this sounds like it's a very
• 1:41:51
  strong character piece as opposed to a plot piece.
• 1:41:55
  Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely it is.
• 1:41:57
  It's, you know, I. Think it's it's in the spin off
• 1:41:59
  media's favour that we have become so character focused with
• 1:42:03
  the new series. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:42:06
  No, absolutely. And you know, that's a testament
• 1:42:10
  to to the writers, to, to Russell Davis, to Steve, to
• 1:42:13
  Steve Moore and, you know, and Chris Chippen as well.
• 1:42:15
  It's, it's their, their job is to expand the boundaries, not
• 1:42:20
  just to fill in bits of the map that we've already got right.
• 1:42:23
  They need to show you the new ways that Doctor Who can be,
• 1:42:26
  that it can do different types of stories that it can tell.
• 1:42:29
  Sometimes that just leads to you getting people doing the NTH
• 1:42:34
  version of the the TV episode that's already existed.
• 1:42:38
  But other times it's people taking those ideas, those new
• 1:42:41
  lenses, and focusing on different set of characters from
• 1:42:44
  a different era. Like Touched by an Angel where
• 1:42:46
  it's just done. Yeah, although Steven Moffett
• 1:42:48
  ideas are just done perfectly, I think something very much
• 1:42:52
  shifted, didn't it? The gear shifted when Jackie
• 1:42:54
  Tyler went the mumps. I've been waiting here.
• 1:42:59
  For you, you know, and you and we were.
• 1:43:01
  For the first time ever. We were like.
• 1:43:03
  Oh yeah. What was it like?
• 1:43:04
  What would it be like? For those left behind, if these
• 1:43:07
  people just go off into time, we'd never thought about it for
• 1:43:09
  26 years, you know? All all the companions step
• 1:43:13
  aboard the TARDIS and then they either just spend the whole time
• 1:43:16
  wanting to get home or just never consider going home again.
• 1:43:19
  Like sometimes that they make that work by frankly blowing up
• 1:43:23
  their home planet. But you know why just why just
• 1:43:27
  why just Perry or Mel or someone or never want to go home and see
• 1:43:30
  people. They started to get there with
• 1:43:32
  Ace in survival at. The end.
• 1:43:34
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or or just the very idea of like
• 1:43:37
  the part time companion. I think that never would have
• 1:43:39
  been conceived in the classic series, would it?
• 1:43:42
  Maybe Joe Brown, That's because he's stuck on Earth.
• 1:43:45
  But apart from that, they were just there for the long haul,
• 1:43:48
  weren't they all? The idea that companions sort of
• 1:43:51
  would go between the TARDIS and their home, like Amy and Rory
• 1:43:54
  did as a way of leaving. Yeah, yeah, just drifting
• 1:43:58
  further away. It's a lot richer for it, don't
• 1:44:00
  you think? A. 100% Well then I.
• 1:44:03
  Would like to recommend a pre new series but a striking
• 1:44:09
  character tale which I think you probably read and that is The
• 1:44:13
  Turing Test by Paul Leonard. I have not read it.
• 1:44:17
  Oh, right, that's going on the list.
• 1:44:20
  I'm sorry. I'm booking you up some more.
• 1:44:23
  It's a wonderful book. It is told from the point of
• 1:44:26
  view. Of Turing and I didn't really
• 1:44:30
  know much about him and it paints him as a sort of an
• 1:44:33
  attractive but tragic figure who absolutely falls in love with
• 1:44:38
  Paul Mcgann's Doctor Who. The book makes no secret that he
• 1:44:41
  utterly fancies him. At one point Paul McGann goes
• 1:44:44
  and you come in upstairs and. Jurin thinks they're going to
• 1:44:47
  have it off and is very. Disappointed when they park
• 1:44:49
  company in the hallway and basically the Doctor's trapped
• 1:44:55
  on Earth at this point. And the whole reason that he has
• 1:45:00
  got cheering on board is to use his mathematics to contact these
• 1:45:04
  aliens because he wants a way off the Earth because he knows
• 1:45:07
  that he can get. So he's using him throughout the
• 1:45:09
  whole book. But that's the thing in the tale
• 1:45:11
  at the end. Sorry for spoiling it.
• 1:45:13
  Is that you don't realise? That until the end of the book
• 1:45:15
  and the doctors there like blinging away, cheering and
• 1:45:18
  screaming at the sky, you know? You've got to take me with you
• 1:45:22
  and just walks away from cheering like discards him at
• 1:45:26
  the end. It's a brilliant Paul Leonard
• 1:45:29
  comes in for a a hard rap, I think sometimes and sometimes I
• 1:45:33
  think he's ambition and he has huge ambition with his books.
• 1:45:38
  Things like The Last Resort, things like Revolution Man, he
• 1:45:43
  wants to push the show in dark and uncomfortable areas.
• 1:45:49
  Revolution Man ends with the doctor shooting somebody.
• 1:45:52
  That's how the story ends, and that was all the time.
• 1:45:55
  But I think this is one time where he actually gets the
• 1:45:58
  execution perfect because it's a lot of first person narration,
• 1:46:03
  captures Turin's voice brilliantly.
• 1:46:05
  There's a lot of history in there, so you learn a lot as you
• 1:46:07
  go along. And it's just this wonderful
• 1:46:10
  sort of edgy, romantic version of Paul Mcgann's Doctor.
• 1:46:14
  But I just love. And it's that dangerous version
• 1:46:18
  of him that you get in the second-half of the books where
• 1:46:20
  you're never quite sure, you know, if he's going to snap
• 1:46:23
  somebody's arm off or kiss him or.
• 1:46:26
  Yeah, it's it's a brilliant book.
• 1:46:27
  Oh, please. Can we add that to the list?
• 1:46:29
  Oh, go on, hurrah. But what's what's next on the
• 1:46:34
  list, Joe? Well, I'm halfway through
• 1:46:37
  already, Michael. I don't think it's going to take
• 1:46:41
  you too long though, if I'm honest.
• 1:46:43
  It's our first new series adventure, our much lamented
• 1:46:48
  range of books. Are you going to be mean about
• 1:46:52
  them? I'm not going to be mean about
• 1:46:54
  them which. Maybe the ones bar Stephen Cole.
• 1:46:58
  They're very boring. Well, what I'll appreciate is
• 1:47:01
  revisiting them when I'm not at university and I'm actually
• 1:47:04
  focusing on them rather than other things.
• 1:47:07
  It's definitely a conversation worth having though, because
• 1:47:09
  obviously in terms of maturity, this was a step down.
• 1:47:13
  In terms of sales, this was an enormous step up.
• 1:47:17
  Yeah, they exploded into every water, stones going.
• 1:47:23
  And you know, it's worth looking at both the compliments people
• 1:47:28
  throw it's way and the criticisms, because I think both
• 1:47:32
  are valid. Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:47:35
  But you know, it would be, it would be silly to ignore them
• 1:47:38
  because as you say, these are the most read Doctor Who books
• 1:47:41
  they've been. I think I'm pretty right in
• 1:47:42
  saying The Stone Rose is the best selling Doctor Who book of
• 1:47:46
  all time. Hundreds of thousands of those
• 1:47:49
  books were selling. I was working for a distributor
• 1:47:51
  at the time. And they still and they and you
• 1:47:53
  can tell that by the number of them that turn up in second.
• 1:47:57
  Man. Jesus Christ, I find that those
• 1:48:00
  first three. What is it?
• 1:48:01
  Monsters inside clockwork. Clockwise man.
• 1:48:06
  Yes, and I find them. In.
• 1:48:09
  Every fucking Oxfam going. You know we grow up, right?
• 1:48:14
  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But we're going, we're not going
• 1:48:17
  to be doing any of those books. No.
• 1:48:20
  We're going to be doing Doctor Who Sick Building by Paul Marsh.
• 1:48:26
  It's great title, isn't it? It's great.
• 1:48:28
  Famously wasn't the original title.
• 1:48:31
  It was announced in Doctor Who Magazine as being Doctor Who The
• 1:48:34
  Wicked Bungalow, and Russell T Davis read that issue of DWM,
• 1:48:39
  rang up BBC Books and went, no, it's not called that.
• 1:48:42
  Oh, really? Yeah.
• 1:48:44
  Wow, but. We'll go into that next.
• 1:48:46
  Yeah, yeah. And what I might do for this one
• 1:48:49
  episode is because I've done a interview with Paul Mars and I'm
• 1:48:52
  going to take out the section where he talks about this
• 1:48:54
  because he talks about how exciting it was to be
• 1:48:57
  peripherally. I didn't get that word out
• 1:48:59
  right, did I? Peripherally involved with the
• 1:49:02
  new series and the parties that you went to and the sort of the
• 1:49:06
  the rules that they were given in the writing of the book.
• 1:49:11
  Yeah. I think actually for such a
• 1:49:13
  slight book, it's a short book. There's a lot to say.
• 1:49:17
  I look forward to revisiting it. Yes, and well before that and
• 1:49:20
  let me thank you very much for your time once again.
• 1:49:23
  And you're typically smart reading of time and relative.
• 1:49:27
  Oh, sorry, go on. No, that was me laughing my
• 1:49:30
  smart the the suggestion that I have a smart reading, but thank
• 1:49:32
  you. Oh, you wait for that.
• 1:49:35
  Awful episodes come with that. Where can people find you
• 1:49:38
  online? I don't think I've asked you the
• 1:49:39
  last couple of times if you want people hounding you on social
• 1:49:42
  media. Yes, if you want to hand me
• 1:49:44
  away, I am on Twitter or X it's still called Twitter.com.
• 1:49:47
  Look at the UR LS I am at call me Kenneth, which is call under
• 1:49:54
  score me under score Kenneth, which I apologise.
• 1:49:58
  I'm also on Blue Sky at Michael dot Mills.
• 1:50:02
  Much easier. Far as I'm aware, you hang out
• 1:50:04
  more on blue sky than you do on the tweets these days.
• 1:50:07
  It's like being in the kitchen at the party, in the party, it's
• 1:50:10
  where all the cool people are. Well.
• 1:50:13
  Thank you very much. And I'll just say until next
• 1:50:15
  time. Bye.