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Transcript

Hamster Book Club - Anachrophobia by Jonathan Morris (featuring Agent Mills) · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:13
  All irregularities will be handled by the forces overly
• 0:17
  bothered by tatty old tie in books.
• 0:23
  Informed heavy criticism may not be used when there is such
• 0:27
  fluff. Medium intellectual weights are
• 0:30
  available. Arnold, Batty.
• 0:35
  Sims, Jenkins. Ford.
• 0:38
  Moss and Mills, Ford and Mills have been assigned.
• 0:50
  Mills, I can detect disturbance in the timelines, time travel
• 0:56
  experiments, turning people into chronometers.
• 0:59
  We have been assigned. Let's go.
• 1:05
  Hello Joe, Thanks for having me back.
• 1:09
  You could have tried to have been steel just for a second.
• 1:12
  I wrote that OK, like you did. Ken Moss made it sound good, but
• 1:17
  I've done my bit. I read it and I was like, can
• 1:20
  you make that sound good? Apparently you can welcome back
• 1:25
  to the Hamster Book Club where Michael Mills and I are going
• 1:30
  timey wimey this week. Something that you're quite fond
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  of, I believe. I love timey wimey and what's
• 1:36
  more, I love spooky wooky. And it being it being spooky
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  season, what could be better than to discuss Anachrophobia by
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  Jonathan Morris from 2002? Yes, which is very dark, very
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  bleak, quite disturbing tale. And to tie into that, my teasing
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  opening question is Michael, how far is too far with these
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  original Doctor Who books? I'm not just talking about sort
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  of graphic horror now, but swearing as well.
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  Angie says a bastard in this, which absolutely would not have
• 2:12
  hit the classic series. And sex as well.
• 2:16
  There's a sort of inferences to sex in this, but we know the
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  books, you know, Colonel's etcetera, etcetera have explored
• 2:23
  sex. How far is too far?
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  I think to give an annoying answer, it's as far as the
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  context of the book and what Doctor Who is being at that time
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  will allow you to do. I mean, I think the books have a
• 2:36
  bit more leeway than the audios do to take a, you know, to take
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  two fairly random examples. If you look at something like
• 2:44
  Combat Rock, which is an incredibly violent Doctor Who
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  book, possibly the most violent Doctor Who story in any medium,
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  anywhere, I I would suggest. You don't need to look much
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  further than the cover as well to see that it's going to be the
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  most violent Doctor Who book. Oh yeah, back when it came out.
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  It's back in the day, back in 2002, same year as Anachrophobia
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  DWM in their preview section used to have a little box out
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  for each new release that said, you know, again towards the
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  author told you the price towards the ISBN and it also
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  said you'd like this if you like, and it would be things
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  like 12 Monkeys or Sapphire and Steel.
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  And for Combat, Rocket said. Cannibal Holocaust.
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  Oh, I was going to go with the hills of our eyes or something
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  like that, you know? Oh no, you need to get much more
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  au fait with your schlocky horror cinema.
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  More of which later, but I think, but I think The thing is
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  the books, the moment you take some that you take a Doctor Who
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  saw and you put it into into a book, you don't have the actors
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  there. You're not presenting it through
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  performance in the same way. So it's already a different
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  thing. And I think if you then want to
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  use that, that distance to create a very different
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  environment, very different always to what's the word metier
• 3:56
  missile said French words for criticism to build it.
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  You can. You can realistically have
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  something that feels very different and doesn't have so
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  much of that what's the word disconnect dichotomy.
• 4:10
  That's that that grinding of gears that kind of comes along
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  when you look even say a big Finnish audio, something like
• 4:18
  Necromanteer, which has a very ill advised and I would suggest
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  problematic. Seemingly unpleasant rape scene
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  in. It yes.
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  Or attempted rape scene. Either way, not great and.
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  That's, you know, what the writer said about that.
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  I'll have to tell you this. Yeah.
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  What did he say? He said no.
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  There's no actual implication of rape, just that she was beaten
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  up. Like that's the better the
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  better option. That's not great.
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  And having listened to that fairly recently, I don't know
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  that I would agree with that reading, but but so you know
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  that that that's some person enough, but then it's it's it's
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  almost made worse by the fact that you have Peter Davison
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  there. So it's sort of being it is
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  being put into the same mental space as Kinder or forward to
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  Doomsday do. You think the pro softens the
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  blow then? I think it does because it
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  you're processing a story in a different way.
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  You know, I think there is just a distancing effect from what
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  it's talking about. And I think the books can
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  sometimes try, you can sometimes get things like a, you know, we
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  can enjoy Doctor Who and the Destiny of the Daleks by Terence
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  Dix. But in many ways it is just
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  trying to track, trying very hard to close the gap between
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  pros and television at a time before most people had video
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  recorders, right? Whereas and it's never going to
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  close that gap. And in some ways, the attempt
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  and the failure to do that is part of what makes nobilization
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  so very charming. But at the same time, you can go
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  further away because you have that disconnect because
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  especially when it's a Doctor Who is who we've not seen much
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  of on television or we've seen a very different form of on
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  television. So I think you can, I do think
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  it does soften the Burr. I think it does give you more
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  excuses, I think, But when I say what does the context allow as
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  well? It's also who is the implied
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  audience? Because Doctor Who, even if
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  you're just looking at the classic run, has very different
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  tones at different times, has very different approach.
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  You sort of has very different ideas of what it wants to be.
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  You know, it's it's a shared construct far more than you
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  know, arguably any other major science fiction series.
• 6:28
  You know, even something like say Star Trek, OK, most Star
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  Trek has had nothing to do with Gene Roddenberry for a very long
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  time. But there is still is the
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  imagined idea that there is this some sort of platonic ideal of
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  well, actually not platonic ideal.
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  The idea that there is this imagined version of Star Trek is
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  true to some idea, whereas there's no platonic ideal of
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  Doctor Who other than what you were brought up with at a
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  certain point, probably. So, you know, for some, that's
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  why some people have a real problem with say, what the
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  Virgin New Adventures did, because they think in Doctor Who
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  everything gravitates around and towards maybe being the poetry
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  era. Or maybe it's, I don't know, the
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  for some reason the last Tom Baker series.
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  And then suddenly you're presented with something that
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  has drugs and guns and violence, but like actually in a grown up
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  way or, or closer to grown up way than Eric say would.
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  And that doesn't feel like Doctor Who to you at all.
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  But I can see. I can see the two ends of the
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  scale with the new adventures because, like, I've recently
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  read Transit and I've recently read damaged goods.
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  Yeah. And Transit, I think is taking
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  sort of the wrong approach. It really is indulging in so
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  many adult themes that at no point it feels like a Doctor Who
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  book to me. Whereas Damaged Goods, I suppose
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  I said the same thing, didn't I? I just think it's a better
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  written book and I think it applies the horrific elements.
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  I don't know, less like a club, more like a scalpel, you know?
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  It's so specific in what it's trying to do that it really got
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  under my skin. Maybe the whole thing is
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  subjective. I.
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  Think it's also an element to which damaged goods feels like a
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  more this is a problematic phrase, but grown up book.
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  It feels like it's written by an adult who has some engagement
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  with some of those adult themes. I think I agree with you that
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  there is a bit of adolescent edginess to transit and to
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  certain some other new adventures.
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  It's like sex swearing, really grown up.
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  Yeah, really serious. And it's just a bit like being
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  on Twitter. Maybe that's it then.
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  Maybe it's the difference between an an adolescent
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  approach and a mature approach. And I think the books can do
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  both, you know, like early Torchwood where it's like we can
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  do sex and swearing and sex gas. And, you know, have you ever
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  been fucked so hard that you've, you know, gone to another
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  universe and all of this bullshit that they did, it was
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  so childish, but trying to be adult.
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  And then later on they did stuff like Children of Earth and it
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  was just a mature take on the same sort of stuff.
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  And I think the books are absolutely.
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  But then like you said about the audiences there where you get
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  something like Combat Rock, which is Grizzly, and then next
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  week you've got Warmonger. So who the fuck are these books
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  for? You know, they're, they're
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  entirely desperate audiences. That's the charm of the BBC
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  book. Especially the past.
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  I think maybe, you know, you talk about, you know, sex and
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  swearing and violence. I think maybe perhaps what we're
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  saying with some of this is so just to finish off on the
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  context, there is also an element of if you were then to
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  suddenly sometimes when you're reading a Terence Dix book,
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  right? It's Terence, it's Uncle
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  Terence, and that's great and it's lovely to have him back.
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  If you're reading something like Shakedown and suddenly people
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  are taking drugs, No, it's just wrong.
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  It's discordant. Your quote on the 8 doctors
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  episode where he was talking about I can't remember what the
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  drug dealers name was in London, you know, and the stuff and all
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  that. Machete Charlie.
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  Agonising isn't it? Old man tries to be hip and
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  fails. But there's there is that.
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  Yeah. So I think there is old man
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  trying to be hip and it just being discordant to the story
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  you're telling versus are you writing a story that is engaging
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  with the adult nature of the themes, what we talk about and
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  talking to an adult audience. What I'm trying to say, and what
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  I've been trying to say over far too many words over the last few
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  minutes, is, do I believe this person writing about sex has had
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  sex? Probably not for the most part,
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  no. But then so going back to Combat
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  Rock and War Monger, they've both got a gang of bounty
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  hunters in them, right? And in Combat Rock, they're
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  really vile, horrible rapists and and they're going around
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  murdering people in horrible ways and they all end up being
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  murdered in hideous ways. It's real rapper horror.
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  And then in Warmonger you have a race of bounty hunters that go
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  around raping people, but they just go around going, well, you
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  know, we're going to start planet.
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  There's nothing wrong with a bit of casual rape, you know, And
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  it's just it is very it's a very childish take on the same idea.
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  I think it does come down to the skill, right, Because you come
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  to an acrophobia and I just think the horror is very
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  specifically dumb. There are scenes of people, you
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  know, dying in horrible ways, and it's described, you know, as
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  bloody pulp shooting out of clock faces and things like
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  this. And it's quite horrific.
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  But I don't think it's ever too much.
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  I don't think it's ever too far. No.
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  And there is. Horror as a genre is, yeah, any
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  genre. It is too broad to to be easily
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  encapsulated. But I I like your point you make
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  about specificity in horror. There's a very famous Stephen
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  King quote that I'm almost loathe to repeat, it's been said
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  so much. But let's do it anyway.
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  Which is, he said when it comes to writing horror.
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  So the very best thing I can do is frighten you.
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  And if I can't frighten you, then I'll scare you.
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  If I can't scare you, then I'll gross you out.
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  And there are those sort of three levels.
• 12:09
  But I think the difference there is you're right, specificity, a
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  bit like comedy. You know, the some of the best
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  jokes land because someone manages to capture and express
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  something that you understood but never realized.
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  And there's a little bit about with horror as well, of
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  capturing in the best horror, of capturing ideas and especially
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  things like psychological horror and insecurities that you didn't
• 12:36
  realize that you had, things that you didn't know were scary
• 12:40
  in some way and unsettled. If you think of something like
• 12:42
  do you remember the first time you saw you saw The Blair Witch
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  Project? Do you remember counting just?
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  Killed me, I couldn't sleep that night.
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  No, it was. I don't think I have had any
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  scarier experience in my life than watching The Blair Witch
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  Project for the first time. It's dated because it now,
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  because it's very much a product of its time.
• 13:01
  But one of the reasons it worked was because it very ably
• 13:07
  exploited the very similitude of home video footage in in the 90s
• 13:16
  before we were all used to that. At a time when we were used to
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  seeing home video footage being used on telly because it was hip
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  and cool and easily accessible. But but that you would never
• 13:26
  thought of as being scary. You know, if you point to any
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  one thing that happens in the Blair Witch Project, it's not in
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  there's nothing you can say that is a scary thing that happens in
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  the Blair Witch Project. It's.
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  Just it's unknowable really, is it?
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  You don't really understand what's happening and they're
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  reacting in a hysterical way to it.
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  Yeah. And so with horror, how do you
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  do that? How do you capture what is the
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  unknowable? How do you capture what is the
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  thing that you have not realised terrifies you?
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  And I think, as you've said, that probably brings us on to
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  anachrophobia. It does, although I'm just going
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  to say one more thing because we talked a lot about horror there
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  less about the sex and the swearing.
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  And I actually don't think the sex and the swearing is an issue
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  from possibly iceberg onwards because they realized actually
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  we've gone too far. So there was a point, there was
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  a couple of books in the new Adventures where they were sort
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  of fucking and I don't mean having sex.
• 14:19
  They were saying the word fuck on every other page and then
• 14:23
  they just pulled right back from me and started saying crock
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  instead. And I don't really like these
• 14:27
  made out swear words, but I prefer them to the frankly very
• 14:31
  childish deployment of swear words that they do.
• 14:35
  And with the sex, I think transit onwards, I don't think
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  it's really an issue. I think transit might be the
• 14:41
  biggest issue and that is the docs are downstairs in the
• 14:45
  kitchen making lunch whilst he hears children laughing
• 14:47
  upstairs. Which is actually Cadia to
• 14:49
  having the best sex she's ever had that she has an orgasm that
• 14:52
  takes her into the next century or something like that and then
• 14:56
  eats cola nuts. But I think from sort of the
• 14:59
  midpoint of the new adventures right way through until today, I
• 15:03
  don't really think that sex and the swearing is really a problem
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  anymore. Well, that's about, that's about
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  maturing, isn't it? There's a certain degree to
• 15:09
  which you reach a point, hopefully in your life at which
• 15:14
  sex and swearing just become matter of fact of life.
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  There they are things that happen and and experiences you
• 15:21
  have and things you can do and they are not novel and edgy in
• 15:26
  the way that they were when you were 15.
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  I mean, it didn't stop the oath of the setting up shop in a
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  whorehouse, but you know you and I are going to get to that
• 15:34
  another time. Let's swing around to a rack.
• 15:37
  No, not arachnophobia. This is an easy mistake to make.
• 15:41
  Anachrophobia. Did you just a Morris?
• 15:44
  Did you just discover the pun? Yeah, thank you.
• 15:47
  I'm usually a little slow on these things, you know?
• 15:52
  Lane screwed the blankets around her and waited alone in the
• 15:55
  blackness, listening to her own breathing and the ticking of the
• 15:59
  clock. Still no calms from station one,
• 16:02
  said Hammond. That time expert should have
• 16:04
  arrived hours ago. Lane side.
• 16:08
  I'll take the van out, see if they've got held up.
• 16:11
  The all pervading smell and taste of the base was getting to
• 16:14
  her everywhere with stale tobacco, sweat and oil.
• 16:18
  She longed for a cold, fresh breeze upon her cheeks.
• 16:22
  If you're sure. Bragg is worried that if alters
• 16:25
  may have captured. Don't worry.
• 16:26
  I could do with a bloody break. She climbed out of her bunk and
• 16:29
  crossed to the sink. Her wrist stung.
• 16:33
  It had been bound in rags. Lane leaned on the bowl and
• 16:36
  looked into her reflection in the mirror.
• 16:39
  How long had it been? Months, years.
• 16:42
  She'd lost track. Her door opened, Sure appeared
• 16:47
  in the doorway. What do you want?
• 16:50
  She heard herself say. He stepped in.
• 16:54
  I want some of your time. Shaw had sat on the opposite
• 16:59
  bed. How much?
• 17:01
  She said hoarsely. Shaw looked her up and down with
• 17:05
  his slit eyes. He smiled.
• 17:08
  You know how much? However long it takes, I can
• 17:12
  afford you. Lane steeled herself and began
• 17:16
  to unbutton her uniform. Her skin crawled and she felt
• 17:21
  nauseous. She ignored the part of her mind
• 17:24
  telling her to stop. She avoided Shaw's eyes as he
• 17:27
  studied her, leaning back on his palms, licking his lips in
• 17:32
  anticipation. He began to undo his own shirt.
• 17:37
  Lane's eyes prickled with tears and she collapsed onto her bed
• 17:40
  and stifled her sobs. She was alone and frightened.
• 17:44
  Her chest heaved. What was happening to her?
• 17:47
  Why couldn't she remember? The next time she looked in the
• 17:56
  mirror, she saw a clock where her face should be.
• 18:01
  She gave a scream even though she had no mouth.
• 18:04
  She reached her hand to her lips, but it touched only glass
• 18:09
  in front of her. The second hand tick tocked its
• 18:11
  course around the numbers. Each.
• 18:13
  Tick echoed in her head. Her panic consumed her like
• 18:17
  drunkenness. Lane forced open a drawer and
• 18:20
  pulled out a knife. She had used this knife before.
• 18:24
  She knew what she had to do. There was only one way out now.
• 18:29
  She lay her wrist over the sink, holding it there.
• 18:32
  She rested the blade against a vein.
• 18:35
  She rocked the knife back and forth, building a rhythm.
• 18:39
  And then she swiped hard, digging into the flesh, forcing
• 18:44
  the knife in, twisting it deeper, dragging it across her
• 18:47
  arm. But the pain didn't come.
• 18:51
  She looked down. The skin at her wrist had
• 18:54
  cleaved apart. She dropped the knife and
• 18:57
  gripped the flesh, peeling open the wound.
• 19:01
  The skin parted to reveal a mass of whirring wheels, pinions,
• 19:05
  governors, coils and springs. An intricate system of cogs and
• 19:09
  gears spinning in perpetual motion.
• 19:24
  Hamster book club. The Doctor Who novel review
• 19:28
  podcast with Joe Ford and Michael mills.
• 19:42
  A Necrophobia by Jonathan Morris.
• 19:53
  Right, so I've got a feeling that my experience of reading
• 19:58
  this this time round was. A lot more pleasurable than
• 20:02
  yours, am I wrong? No, you're wrong.
• 20:06
  Oh. Next time on Hams Book Cup,
• 20:09
  we'll be talking. About Jesus, I just spat my
• 20:12
  coffee out. Can you warn me when you're
• 20:16
  going to be witty? Hold up a sign a few minutes
• 20:20
  before. No, I think I think you're
• 20:23
  wrong. I I, I really like this book.
• 20:27
  I I really like microphobia. I think when it's good, it's
• 20:30
  very good. I think when it's not so good,
• 20:32
  it's very slow, but we can maybe get into it into some of why
• 20:35
  that you tell me first why you why you loved it.
• 20:38
  I tore through this book in two days, right in about 3 blocks.
• 20:44
  I, I loved it because I loved how the plot unpeeled like an
• 20:48
  onion. So you're sort of presented with
• 20:50
  your standard Doctor Who adventure.
• 20:52
  There's two sides warring and then we go into one of the
• 20:56
  bases. It's it's all very sort of
• 20:58
  Armageddon factor at this point. And then I liked how how it all
• 21:03
  sort of unpeeled that you realize the futility of the
• 21:07
  conflict. And then we head out into the
• 21:11
  clockwork town at the end and you realise that even the people
• 21:14
  behind the wall don't even know they're fighting anymore and it
• 21:17
  sort sort of keeps opening out and nothing is quite as it
• 21:21
  seems. I also like the fact that it is
• 21:23
  an Ark book, but it's just disguised as your regular base
• 21:27
  under siege story until the very last scene and it ends on a
• 21:31
  whopper of a cliffhanger. I think it is the best example
• 21:36
  of a base under siege in any of the books because I could feel
• 21:41
  the claustrophobia in every. I mean, we weren't, they're
• 21:44
  inside those horrible TR suits for most of the thing, and
• 21:48
  you're always aware of that. So there is like claustrophobia
• 21:51
  dripping throughout this book, and I think it uses the
• 21:57
  continuity of the time really adeptly as well.
• 22:02
  Looking back and looking forward, I think it's doing a
• 22:06
  lot of things, but most of all, it's just a fucking scary book.
• 22:09
  It's really scary with some horrific imagery, and that's my
• 22:14
  Doctor Who. Absolutely.
• 22:17
  So to put a bit of fresh on those bones, the Doctor, Fitz
• 22:20
  and Angie are in the TARDIS, travelling back from the very
• 22:23
  far distant future of Endpoint in the previous book.
• 22:26
  Hope again. It's just nice when they pick up
• 22:27
  in that way, isn't it, you know? I'll tell you what is nice is
• 22:31
  the fact they don't labour the point, but they have actually
• 22:35
  brought a character arc to an end point.
• 22:38
  If you'll forgive the farm in the last book where Angie has
• 22:42
  finally come to terms with the death of Dave because she had
• 22:45
  the possibility to resurrect him and that all went hideously
• 22:48
  wrong when she betrayed the doctor, blah blah, blah.
• 22:50
  And at the start of this book, she just has a little moment
• 22:53
  where she goes thinking back on him now, it's not painful.
• 22:57
  It's what is it? She says.
• 22:58
  It's like wine spilling out across the table on a
• 23:01
  restaurant. She just, she remembers the good
• 23:03
  memories. So they they have actually
• 23:06
  brought. And it's so rare for the books
• 23:08
  to do this, a character arc to a conclusion.
• 23:11
  And it's just a very gentle reminder of that.
• 23:14
  Yes, it's very skilfully done. And having had that resolution
• 23:19
  in the in the tilus, it is. It is the Tilus is drawn down
• 23:22
  out of control and there's some brilliant stuff early on with
• 23:25
  the where we're reminded that this is a Doctor Who not at the
• 23:29
  height of his powers, both because of both because of his
• 23:34
  memory loss that he has been experiencing for I think by this
• 23:36
  stage couple of years that has been running for now at.
• 23:40
  Least two years. Yeah, yeah.
• 23:42
  And more recently since the adventurous Henrietta St., which
• 23:45
  I think was three books before the loss of his second heart
• 23:52
  removed by Sabbath. His physical weakness is
• 23:58
  threaded throughout this entire book.
• 23:59
  Isn't it because he's he's physically punished in this
• 24:02
  book? There's a point that is returned
• 24:04
  to a number of times, which is that the Doctor is now
• 24:05
  essentially mortal, which is an interesting update.
• 24:08
  And it's it's it sort of gets to the heart of I think of what
• 24:11
  they were trying to do with the whole memory loss thing, which
• 24:15
  was because often I think some criticism of this arc in this
• 24:21
  era is the Doctor lost his memory, but they didn't do
• 24:24
  anything with it, but they did do some interesting things with
• 24:26
  it. And it's very, it's a very
• 24:27
  obvious time idea. You know, this is a very
• 24:29
  Smallville version of Doctor Who of, you know, taking your
• 24:32
  character back to basics, back-to-back to their
• 24:34
  beginnings. And that idea is interesting.
• 24:39
  But that we had had sort of that trajectory since the Virgin New
• 24:43
  Adventure, since the 8th Doctor replaced the 7th, which we've
• 24:45
  discussed in a number of previous episodes of this being
• 24:48
  a Doctor Who was a response to the arch manipulator, the the
• 24:52
  the one who was expression of some multidimensional being and
• 24:56
  played chess on planets. And now he's literally a man.
• 25:00
  But by making him that vulnerable and yet still
• 25:03
  brilliant and witty and improvising and all of those
• 25:06
  things, I think he he just seems more impressive for it.
• 25:10
  Yeah, yeah. And it's, it's, it's, you know,
• 25:13
  you could even tie it into the whole this idea that really gets
• 25:17
  returned to with the 8th doctor of basically him being a Christ
• 25:22
  figure, which is, you know, he was, he was, he resurrected, he
• 25:26
  was there in the shades and then he, he died to save the universe
• 25:30
  from its sins. You know, it's, it's pretty
• 25:32
  strong. And this is him becoming a
• 25:34
  mortal. One thing that constantly was in
• 25:36
  the back of my head, because I've not long read the Gallifrey
• 25:38
  Chronicles and you know the big twist in that, Sorry, spoilers,
• 25:41
  everybody, That inside his head is all those super, super
• 25:44
  compressed Matrix memories. Yeah, yes, that's always, every
• 25:48
  time He was endangering it, I was going, Oh my God, if he
• 25:51
  dies, all of those memories are going to be gone, you know, But
• 25:54
  it's the only, it's the only reading you could possibly have
• 25:56
  after you finished the range of books and gone back and read
• 25:58
  some. Yeah, it's brilliant, isn't it?
• 26:00
  He's he's carrying Gallifre around in his mind, but also a
• 26:05
  brilliant twist, which is that makes sense for that, that no,
• 26:09
  it's not that he doesn't remember.
• 26:11
  It's that he can't remember because if he were to remember.
• 26:14
  Which also explains why he never goes out to I love.
• 26:16
  Parking. I didn't think anybody could
• 26:18
  possibly have given an explanation that was satisfying
• 26:21
  and brilliant and you did it. But what?
• 26:25
  Sorry, we will get into the story, but you brought this up,
• 26:28
  so let's go with it. The whole thing about him losing
• 26:31
  his heart, because I've heard you and others criticize the
• 26:36
  sort of lack of editorial structure and control.
• 26:41
  And when I was reading it, I was like, maybe this is something we
• 26:44
  need to rethink because this book looks back to adventurous
• 26:49
  in Henry Ed St. as a moment that the doctor may want to change in
• 26:52
  his past and as pivotal to the book.
• 26:56
  And obviously losing his heart and that is why he is so weak in
• 26:59
  this. But it also hints to the future
• 27:02
  because at one point, Mr. Mistletoe, who we'll get to
• 27:05
  later, goes, yes, the Doctor's heart is in the right place.
• 27:09
  Which is absolutely a teaser for Camera Obscure coming up.
• 27:13
  And I'm wondering if there was a bit more of this going on that I
• 27:15
  actually thought. The truth is that the the books
• 27:19
  are very uneven in terms of how well they tie into each other
• 27:24
  spoil as well this this book. An example of that even here is
• 27:27
  that this book ends on a cliffhanger that is not resolved
• 27:29
  in the next book. So but yes, it would be unfair
• 27:34
  to characterize all of the books as as being lacking in any sort
• 27:38
  of integration, and this is definitely one of the better
• 27:39
  examples. You could definitely do a sort
• 27:41
  of, you know, it's The X-Files thing, isn't it?
• 27:43
  Mythology versus monster of the week.
• 27:44
  You could probably do a reading order of the Myth arc 8th Doctor
• 27:48
  books, which of this era which would be the adventurous of
• 27:51
  Henrietta St. Anachrophobia History One O 1
• 27:54
  Camera, obscure, timeless. You know, skipping, skipping,
• 27:58
  skipping all the way along. Took out all the standalones and
• 28:01
  you've got a damn solid arc there.
• 28:04
  Some of the standalones are very good.
• 28:05
  Actually they are, and not all of the arc ones are brilliant,
• 28:11
  but but yeah, this this does tie in very nicely.
• 28:13
  And and from the start, you know, we we find the characters
• 28:15
  as they were left in hope. So having established this, yes,
• 28:19
  the TARDIS is drawn down to, well, we don't know where it is,
• 28:24
  because one of the things this book does sort of well, it's
• 28:27
  foundational ideas, and it runs throughout it and something it
• 28:29
  does brilliantly is dislocation. Role for sure.
• 28:33
  Even in the TARDIS at the start, right where it's described as
• 28:38
  the three of them surrounded by endless blackness, where there
• 28:41
  would normally be archways leading to the kitchen,
• 28:43
  laboratory, filing room and library, now there was
• 28:45
  absolutely nothing. So even from that point on we
• 28:49
  are totally dislocated from our usual safety.
• 28:53
  Yes, and they land on a a planet.
• 28:56
  We don't know what planet it could, it could points made, it
• 28:59
  could be Earth, it could be somewhere else, it could be the
• 29:01
  future. I don't know if it's I've never
• 29:03
  established that the characters we need are human.
• 29:06
  At no point, I don't think it's the planet of the clock people.
• 29:09
  We'll call it that. So it lands, lands on this this
• 29:12
  planet where a war is being fought between two warring
• 29:14
  sides, the plutocrats and the defaulters, and it is a
• 29:18
  landscape of snow and mist and trees and seemingly lifeless,
• 29:28
  apart from the occasional soldier who's coming to probably
• 29:31
  shoot you in the face. Think of every John Perry story
• 29:34
  location shoot. You know the Dungeness of clause
• 29:37
  of axos is only miserable. Was that?
• 29:40
  Only much better, much more atmospheric.
• 29:43
  I didn't see a quarry at any point in this.
• 29:45
  I saw because. We're inside that base for most
• 29:48
  of it. I saw, I saw trees disappearing
• 29:52
  into the snowy mist everywhere. And it's terrifying.
• 29:57
  And this war that's been fought in two sides is being fought
• 30:00
  with time as a weapon. So bombardments of so what's
• 30:04
  what's, what's the wonder material called?
• 30:06
  Croninium. Croninium.
• 30:08
  Croninium, it's something like that, yeah.
• 30:10
  So named. We'll go with that.
• 30:13
  No Cronon crononium, is it? Cronium.
• 30:16
  Yeah, we'll go with that. Crononium which is a time active
• 30:22
  substance which can be used as a weapon and is being used as a
• 30:25
  weapon by both sides to create both.
• 30:27
  What's the terms of these accelerated time and?
• 30:31
  Decelerated time. Decelerated time AT and.
• 30:33
  DT zones and DT zones, and they're sort of in this no man's
• 30:37
  land of there's pockets of it all over the place where these
• 30:40
  sort of time bombs have got literal time bombs have gone
• 30:42
  off. Where one minute you could walk
• 30:45
  into something and age to death, or the next minute what what
• 30:49
  happens you turn into a baby. No, you're, you're sort of
• 30:52
  frozen in time and days or weeks or centuries have passed and you
• 30:56
  don't even realise it. And it's, it's utterly
• 31:01
  terrifying that you can't see where you're going.
• 31:03
  Half the point is repeatedly made that you can barely see.
• 31:06
  You know, if you're driving an armoured car, you can't see
• 31:08
  through the sleet on the windscreen.
• 31:10
  If you're out of it, you can't see through the mist or the
• 31:12
  trees. It's impossible to tell where
• 31:14
  you are at any moment. Your whole sense of time could
• 31:17
  be rapidly accelerated or decelerated in in an instant.
• 31:21
  You the, you mentioned the TR suits, which are these sort of,
• 31:25
  you know, nightmarish vision of the future, sort of the
• 31:31
  aesthetic is radiation suit meets gas masks.
• 31:34
  There's a bit in this book where Angie remembers watching Threads
• 31:37
  as a child and that it's that sort of vibe, you know,
• 31:40
  nightmare vision of a future gone wrong.
• 31:42
  They just describe every time they have to go inside them of
• 31:45
  like the foul smelling air inside.
• 31:47
  It's just miserable inside one of these suits.
• 31:50
  Yeah, and it's what people who, you know, I've never had to wear
• 31:53
  one, but people who, who, you know, when people recall wearing
• 31:55
  gas masks in the Second World War, you know, they all talked
• 31:58
  about that sense of claustrophobia, of being locked
• 32:01
  in and the world outside is, is horrible.
• 32:03
  I felt it when I was reading this.
• 32:04
  I felt as if I was enclosed in something half the time just
• 32:08
  because he kept reminding you of it.
• 32:10
  And that, that, that, yeah, that endless dichotomy between the
• 32:13
  sort of agoraphobia of this outside world that you can't get
• 32:16
  any fix in versus that sense of walking around.
• 32:18
  You know, there's the the visual imagery in this book is so
• 32:21
  strong. There are bits where you are,
• 32:23
  you're really in the process, but you're seeing it through the
• 32:24
  lenses of of these of these suits.
• 32:29
  So this this nightmare, let's get.
• 32:30
  But the point is repeatedly made.
• 32:31
  We don't know where this is. We don't know when this is
• 32:33
  happening. We have no way.
• 32:34
  The TARDIS is dead. The Doctor Fitz and Angier
• 32:38
  quickly picked up by by one of the soldiers who's come looking
• 32:42
  for the time expert and is taken back to research station 40
• 32:47
  suddenly occurs to me at type 40.
• 32:51
  It's probably a probably deliberate in it where where the
• 32:57
  it's the plutocrats, isn't it the plutocrats who are
• 33:01
  conducting time experiments, but these time experiments in a way
• 33:07
  that we've I don't think we've ever seen a Doctor Who before.
• 33:10
  Now this isn't, this isn't some actor who was in Crown Court
• 33:15
  last week standing on little platform and going no, no, no,
• 33:20
  this they are engaged in a series of what they call time
• 33:23
  dives. So.
• 33:24
  I wrote, right, I wrote, We travel in time all the time in
• 33:28
  Doctor Who. So why does this suddenly feel
• 33:30
  so dangerous? Because it because this idea of
• 33:34
  actually move individuals moving through a dimension that we are
• 33:38
  not meant to, it suddenly feels like a, you know, an aberration,
• 33:43
  like you're doing something taboo and dangerous that you're
• 33:45
  travelling into it. So if we can just pause,
• 33:47
  remember as well the, the one of the first comments I wrote down
• 33:51
  when I got to this bit about the whole tone of the and the
• 33:55
  aesthetic that's presented of this, of this book, because it's
• 33:59
  also, it's like the research centre is a deliberate mishmash
• 34:03
  of technologies. You know, it's, it's got that
• 34:05
  general feel of, of basically wrote down was if Terry Gilliam
• 34:10
  directed a war movie, that's what you've got.
• 34:15
  It's got real 12 Monkeys vibe. It's got real sort of Brazil
• 34:18
  vibe. Yeah.
• 34:20
  It's that sense of all of this is happening somewhere in the
• 34:23
  20th century. And it's just it, it does have
• 34:27
  that real sense of both dread and the absurd at the same time.
• 34:33
  Well, the whole book does, Yeah, but especially and, and it's the
• 34:37
  fact that it is clearly leaning into like a diving bill.
• 34:41
  Yeah. It's this huge chain suspending
• 34:44
  this enormous round ball that that that people get inside.
• 34:48
  The ball then descends into this pit, into the vortex or
• 34:52
  whatever, spins at an incredible rate and whoosh, they're back in
• 34:56
  time. And plunging back in time and
• 35:00
  they have clocks that are counting back the years and the
• 35:03
  dates and. That is so clever, isn't it?
• 35:05
  All of that, all of that is my time matching your time.
• 35:09
  Because then the second these two are out of sync, you know
• 35:13
  we're in trouble. You've got the yes, you've got
• 35:15
  the time in the base, you've got the time inside the capsule and
• 35:17
  you've got the time outside the capsule.
• 35:19
  And it's just, it's just clocks ticking away and people reading
• 35:22
  the times that are coming out. And no, it's fine.
• 35:24
  No, it's fine. And then just noticing they're
• 35:25
  getting seconds out of time, but that they're not lining up in
• 35:28
  the same way. But when they travel back to
• 35:29
  time, this isn't, you know, the, this isn't, you know, the
• 35:32
  swirling vortex of Doctor Who. Neither is this the sort of time
• 35:34
  lapse photography of The Time Machine.
• 35:37
  This is again, something dislocated.
• 35:38
  We have left time, we have stepped outside of causality.
• 35:42
  So you know, they're, they're, they're 30, 20 years back,
• 35:45
  they're 40 years back, they're 50 years back.
• 35:47
  But all they can see outside is blackness because they are
• 35:50
  plunging out of the universe and times you know, you are, it's
• 35:53
  like you are going, you're in this claustrophobic and yet
• 35:56
  agrophobic as we've set environments.
• 35:58
  But at the same time that you, you just want to escape.
• 36:00
  And this is the escape, but it's into a nothingness.
• 36:03
  And that something bangs on the sphere and is trying to get in.
• 36:08
  And it is so scary. It's terrific.
• 36:11
  I think midnight, those bangs in midnight, you know, But whilst
• 36:14
  this experiment's going on, and I noticed as well that he was
• 36:17
  sort of writing at a measured pace, and the second that
• 36:20
  experiment started, the pace of the writing, the dialogue, it
• 36:23
  was one bit after another bit. It was really like the whole
• 36:27
  thing was just spiraling out of control suddenly.
• 36:30
  It's like it what there is, I would say in in the best bits of
• 36:34
  this book. We'll get on some of my
• 36:35
  reservations in a bit, but in the bit where the books bits,
• 36:39
  the bits where the book really works, there is just that sense
• 36:41
  of dump, dump, dump, dump. That there is a clock ticking
• 36:46
  away in the background of all of this.
• 36:47
  The events are progressing, that things are changing, that that
• 36:51
  they are being that every decision is your endlessly
• 36:54
  whether every decision is carrying these characters
• 36:56
  forwards to something that feels dreadful, that you can't say
• 37:00
  what what it is they're doing or what's happening or what's going
• 37:03
  wrong. But they are chained to their
• 37:07
  own, the consequences of their own decisions, and that this is
• 37:10
  not going to end well. There is the the ostensible idea
• 37:13
  of the time experience is that this will allow them to travel
• 37:15
  back in time and change the past, to end the war in the
• 37:19
  past. And yet there's never any real
• 37:22
  sense of how that connects, that they're just doing something
• 37:26
  wrong. Yes.
• 37:29
  And, and that wrongness then creeps into the people inside
• 37:34
  that ball when they're brought back.
• 37:36
  And we are introduced to this concept of anachrophobia, which
• 37:39
  is described as like decompression sickness with time
• 37:43
  being in the right place at the wrong time, which is what was
• 37:47
  happening during the experiment. They call it a mental condition
• 37:51
  with a systemic response, but effectively they're just laid
• 37:55
  out and then very sinister things start happening to them.
• 38:00
  Yeah, so we get this idea that at first it's presented as if
• 38:03
  it's as if it's a psychological illness, as you say, that these
• 38:05
  people who have travelled in time just cannot, cannot cope
• 38:09
  with being back in, out, as you say, decompression sickness or
• 38:11
  astronauts struggling to re readjust to gravity when they're
• 38:14
  back on Earth. That's a brilliant concept to to
• 38:17
  hook to time travel, right, because you absolutely
• 38:19
  understand what he's trying to say.
• 38:21
  And this is it. So the his presentation of time
• 38:24
  travel and time in this is very different to a lot of what we
• 38:30
  get in Doctor Who. I think this is part of why it
• 38:32
  feels different. So you'd have heard Ken do the
• 38:35
  sapphire and steel bit at the back at the the start of the
• 38:38
  podcast. So what, why, why did we do
• 38:40
  that? Were we just being particularly
• 38:43
  odd this time? Because I'm as delicious as
• 38:46
  Joanna Lumley and you're as cold hearted as David McCallum.
• 38:50
  I. Always wanted to be illy, I'll
• 38:52
  Curry Arkin. You're as handsome to be.
• 38:55
  Fair. Thank you so much.
• 38:57
  And what he's doing. So what Jonathan Ross is doing
• 39:02
  here is before I pick this book up again, I'd read a few things.
• 39:07
  Read a few things of people talking about Sapphire and Steel
• 39:10
  in reference to it. And I thought, as we've moaned
• 39:13
  about in the podcast before, which is, oh God, Doctor Who
• 39:16
  fans, can you not just compare everything to the three other
• 39:19
  programs you've watched? You're just saying that because
• 39:21
  it's not very like Blake 7. But then I remembered, oh, but
• 39:24
  hang on a minute, these books are written by Doctor Who fans,
• 39:26
  aren't they? As well, and I am.
• 39:29
  I am very far short of being a Sapphire in Steel aficionado.
• 39:33
  I've never watched a whole assignment.
• 39:35
  I've seen the odd episode here and there.
• 39:37
  And because it is one of the other programs that Doctor Who
• 39:40
  fans watch, I I have read and know far more about it than I
• 39:44
  than I should for a program I've never really engaged with.
• 39:47
  But I can give you the vibes. And I think I think the second
• 39:52
  you do conceptual horror and time travel, you cannot help but
• 39:56
  make the leap to sapphire and steal.
• 39:57
  And interestingly, there's a wonderful bit in an interview
• 40:02
  with Johnny Morris in I, I Who one of the I Who's where, he
• 40:05
  basically says he was writing to Rob Shearman, who was writing
• 40:09
  Chance at Midnight whilst he was writing and acrophobia and they
• 40:13
  were comparing with bits of sapphire and steel they were
• 40:15
  stealing so they didn't steal the same bits.
• 40:20
  But I think, you know, from my understanding of like the vibes
• 40:23
  of Sapphire and Still and what little I know about it and how
• 40:25
  that was coming across here was its presentation of time, which
• 40:30
  is in Doctor Who. Doctor Who tends to present time
• 40:33
  time with a capital T as a sort of pseudo scientific thing.
• 40:37
  It's all about entering the vortex and TT capsules and
• 40:41
  Archer on energy. It's all bollocks but it, but it
• 40:45
  constructs itself as being a science.
• 40:48
  This this talks about time as as a force almost in the same way
• 40:56
  that gravity is a force or pressure is a force, that it is
• 41:00
  something that acts upon us in ways that we are literally not
• 41:05
  equipped to understand. So that's the whole thing with
• 41:07
  time rules. One thing that makes the time,
• 41:09
  one thing that I think makes so many presentations of the Time
• 41:11
  Lords boring is this idea that they just render everything
• 41:14
  boring. So they make even time travel
• 41:16
  sound boring because they just talk about Type 4, TTT, the
• 41:19
  capsules, Mark three. That's all we've got.
• 41:21
  Lost Castellan. Or if you put up your Osmic
• 41:24
  projector shield or whatever they say in Doctor Who, where is
• 41:29
  this? You'd struggle to pull together
• 41:33
  a schema of how time is proposed to operate within this book, but
• 41:41
  it's all it is, all in the best way vibes.
• 41:45
  It makes sense as it it feels internally consistent as this
• 41:50
  malevolent thing that you shouldn't mess with because you
• 41:52
  will. Somehow that time is time is the
• 41:56
  thread in the fabric of reality that these people are just
• 42:00
  latching onto somehow, and they're tugging at it, and in
• 42:03
  tugging at it they are they are unhooking so much more and that
• 42:08
  they are pulling apart forces of which they cannot comprehend,
• 42:13
  but in a much scary way. I love to feel as if they held
• 42:16
  out a hand for a malevolent force and it came through.
• 42:20
  It starts infecting them, and then in a way that only a force
• 42:24
  from the time vortex could, it starts using time in very
• 42:28
  sinister ways in order to transform and trap these people.
• 42:33
  And one thing I will say for this, and I think what you've
• 42:35
  just said, you know, brings it home as well, is for all that
• 42:37
  it's referencing sapphire steel, which at the time this book came
• 42:40
  out, the last episode was 20 years old, it still feels
• 42:44
  contemporary. It doesn't.
• 42:46
  So one of the reasons we often complain about Doctor Who fans
• 42:48
  having such limited frame of reference is because we we're
• 42:51
  moaning about those big Finnish audios that just want it to be
• 42:54
  Saturday tea time 1975 all over again.
• 43:00
  This is drawing on Sapphire Steel and what it's trying to do
• 43:03
  as Times of Midnight does and yet feels like science fiction
• 43:06
  of the late 90s that turn early naughties turn of the men in
• 43:10
  science fiction. So yeah, 12 Monkeys probably at
• 43:12
  the very early end end of that of that period.
• 43:17
  But you also have things like Event Horizon, you know, this
• 43:21
  where they, you know, that's not time travel, that's
• 43:23
  teleportation, isn't it? But they go into hell, and they
• 43:26
  come out in that mixing of the fantastic and the science
• 43:29
  fictional as being used within a horror context, as I did, as as
• 43:34
  a modern version of Frankenstein, of all the other
• 43:37
  ancient horrors, of the point at which science, science becomes
• 43:41
  man's vanity, That that we science means knowledge, doesn't
• 43:46
  it? Isn't that right?
• 43:48
  But the point at which we realize the egocentricity and
• 43:52
  our pride in thinking we understand these things and they
• 43:56
  don't. It's very, it's what I'd call or
• 43:59
  like to think of as industrial green and black sci-fi Alien.
• 44:04
  Well, because all the tones are are green and black in all those
• 44:08
  films, you know, Alien. And absolutely in this book as.
• 44:11
  Well, yeah, it's got the aesthetic of Alien Resurrection
• 44:14
  or The Matrix. So these these soldiers have
• 44:19
  come back and have clearly been infected by something.
• 44:22
  Yeah. So what does our hero, Doctor
• 44:24
  Who decide to do? Come on, Fitz.
• 44:27
  We're going to go in the ball ourselves.
• 44:29
  And see what? See what on earth is trying to
• 44:31
  get in? I mean, I thought, are you mad?
• 44:34
  He does it with a big smile on his face as well.
• 44:36
  Basically, the only humour from this book is coming from the
• 44:38
  Doctor at this point. It's a very serious book, isn't
• 44:42
  it? It's a very serious book and
• 44:45
  again, as is, you know, work the way it works.
• 44:47
  Within that arc, the Doctor himself is confronted with his
• 44:50
  pride, as is Fitz. So there's a point really early
• 44:52
  on of Angie straight up realises what a perilous situation
• 44:56
  they're in. The TARDIS isn't working, they
• 44:57
  don't know where they are. They're in the middle of a
• 44:59
  literal war zone. They could die at any minute.
• 45:02
  And Fitz is so cash to begin with is like, I've been doing
• 45:06
  this for years, Like, it's fine, I'm going to get some sleep
• 45:09
  while I can. And the Doctor feels even
• 45:12
  commands. Yeah, I've infiltrated this
• 45:13
  whole situation very nicely. What do I do now?
• 45:15
  I take command of things and I go and have a look at what's
• 45:17
  going on and I'll be fine. And their hubris is punished.
• 45:23
  So they just. You don't realize it at this
• 45:25
  point, but there is another little character are playing out
• 45:28
  here, and that is Angie realizing she's had enough.
• 45:32
  And I think it really starts here where she's put through the
• 45:35
  ringer. And then it happens again in
• 45:37
  Camera Obscura where the doctor dies, you know, nearly dies
• 45:41
  every other chapter. And then she just says at the
• 45:43
  end of that book, I just can't do this anymore.
• 45:46
  And that's why she decides to go in time 0.
• 45:48
  But I think this is this is like the opening point.
• 45:51
  And you're right. She is the one that realizes
• 45:53
  early on, yeah, this is a terrible situation, we should
• 45:55
  go. Yeah, absolutely.
• 45:58
  And. I mean, more on Angie later,
• 46:00
  because there's other things I want to say.
• 46:02
  I think she's brilliantly written in this book.
• 46:05
  It's a very good Angie book. So the Doctor and Fitz get in,
• 46:08
  get in the get in the ball, which not just the diving bell,
• 46:11
  but also what are they called the on the old grandfather
• 46:14
  clocks, you know, the weights that descend and go down.
• 46:17
  So there's, you know, there's clock imagery coming into it all
• 46:19
  again and they. You, like you said, you can't
• 46:22
  just see it, can't you? This is such a visual book.
• 46:25
  I was, I so I read this book back in 2002 and haven't gone
• 46:28
  back to it since. But I realised in reading it,
• 46:31
  the imagery was all straight back there.
• 46:33
  I was remembering exactly how I had pictured the experiment
• 46:37
  chamber, the isolation ward, the entrance to Station 40.
• 46:41
  Yeah, every. Every single book.
• 46:42
  What I realised as well is it is very powerful, very memorable
• 46:45
  imagery. It is actually imagery they
• 46:47
  could do on the TV show as. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah,
• 46:50
  absolutely. This, this could this could very
• 46:53
  well be on television. I think there's a lot in
• 46:56
  Jonathan Morris and Stephen Moffat as writers.
• 47:00
  Basically mates, aren't they? Oh, it didn't.
• 47:03
  When you interviewed Jonathan Morris, didn't he say, didn't he
• 47:06
  say when he was doing the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip that he
• 47:08
  got so good at aping Stephen Moffat style that more than once
• 47:11
  they had to reject an idea because they were going to do it
• 47:13
  on telly? And that that he said to him, do
• 47:15
  you know, one day you should do that Armistice that they did on
• 47:18
  the battlefield? And Stephen Moffatt said if I
• 47:20
  ever get that desperate or I'm leaving the show.
• 47:22
  Funnily enough, he went just after that.
• 47:28
  So doctrine Fitts plunged back in time and are arrested
• 47:31
  hundreds of years in the past. Whatever that means.
• 47:33
  It just means distance, doesn't it really?
• 47:35
  In this sense, you know, they are hundreds of years distant
• 47:38
  from where they left and it's just this ball.
• 47:40
  And as you say, something bangs on the door and it is.
• 47:44
  And there was just. Black.
• 47:45
  I was tearing through the pages at this point.
• 47:50
  What is it? What is it?
• 47:51
  I mean, you'd already give me a little spoiler on WhatsApp as to
• 47:54
  what was tried to escape the time vortex.
• 47:57
  So let's go into that bit. So they return and it within the
• 48:00
  base, they and the previous astronauts have brought this
• 48:03
  infection anachrophobia that it is clearly becomes.
• 48:07
  It's very apparent that it is not just a psychological
• 48:12
  condition when we have a really striking scene in which one of
• 48:17
  the characters who has become increasingly confused, who can't
• 48:21
  keep track of events in their own head, suddenly realizes that
• 48:26
  their face has become the face of a clock.
• 48:29
  It should be ridiculous. I tried to do a picture for this
• 48:34
  episode right of me with a clock in front of my face and it just
• 48:38
  looked ridiculous. And yet listen to this.
• 48:40
  Listen to, just listen to how he writes it so simply the clock
• 48:43
  face, you know, as it was set further back into his head than
• 48:46
  his own features would have been.
• 48:48
  That is just horrible. He scrabbled over the smooth
• 48:51
  surface, failing to find the eyes and mouth and throughout
• 48:55
  the descriptions of the clock, faces.
• 48:58
  I just thought they were so scary.
• 49:01
  You're right. I mean, obviously it's it's a
• 49:03
  reference to the Greeks painting the Great War of the three chest
• 49:10
  up thing of the guy with the the apple obscuring his face, which
• 49:13
  is an unsettling image. So he's building on that.
• 49:17
  But he, he, he captures this potentially absurd idea and
• 49:22
  turns it into body horror, that thing that, as you say of he, he
• 49:25
  knows the people suffering it realise the absurdity.
• 49:27
  They can see, they can smell, they can hear, but they can't.
• 49:30
  They put their hands up to their face and they're just feeling
• 49:32
  glass. And you know, body horror is
• 49:34
  about the, the, the taboo of the of one's self, of one's bodily
• 49:43
  limits being broken. That's a reminder of, I suppose,
• 49:48
  of death, of mortality, of that who we are is not our minds,
• 49:53
  that we are physical objects. And the sudden destruction of
• 50:00
  that barrier is so alarming. But the genius of the idea of
• 50:06
  them turning into clocks, I think it's, it's not so much the
• 50:09
  body horror, which I think works really well, It's the
• 50:12
  psychological horror of the fact that these beings can use
• 50:17
  people's personal timeline to take them back to a point where
• 50:21
  they've done something terrible or made a mistake.
• 50:25
  And if you and and gives them the capacity to change that
• 50:29
  moment and it's basically making a deal with the devil.
• 50:32
  Once you do that, you basically vacate your own life and these
• 50:37
  beings take over you. And that's how you get the clock
• 50:39
  face, Which then gives us a way of looking into the your
• 50:44
  glimpses of the backstories of the non regular characters and
• 50:50
  to use continuity with our regular characters in a very
• 50:55
  specific and quite revealing way.
• 50:58
  Yeah, to to read a quote from the book, our lives have meaning
• 51:02
  because of the immutability of our pasts.
• 51:04
  We are who we are because of what happened to us, what we've
• 51:07
  experienced, what we have done Correct.
• 51:10
  So if we destroy our pasts, it follows that we destroy
• 51:13
  ourselves. And this is this is a theme that
• 51:17
  turns up in quite a few of Jonathan Morris's book, the
• 51:20
  books and other works. It's it's here, it's in Flip
• 51:23
  flop, it's in touch by an Angel, which is this idea of time
• 51:30
  travel as a temptation because of the regret we all live with
• 51:35
  that idea of if only I could go back and do things differently.
• 51:39
  You know that turns up again in Flip Flop where you get caught
• 51:41
  in this endless cycle of realities because people always
• 51:44
  think it would be better oh God if it had gone differently.
• 51:47
  I. Think I think anachrophobia does
• 51:48
  it more effectively just because it's much more sure of its tone.
• 51:54
  Yeah, it's much more sure of its tone, I think.
• 51:56
  But equally I think it's much more.
• 51:58
  It's much darker than Touched by an Angel, which similarly has
• 52:01
  someone transported back in time and given the the the
• 52:05
  opportunity to change the worst thing that ever happened to
• 52:07
  them. But it's it's it's much lighter
• 52:09
  story, but it is this idea of that as an ultimate temptation
• 52:14
  like, well, actually, what if, you know, time travel can be
• 52:18
  visiting the dinosaurs or going into the future.
• 52:20
  But if you take that down to if you were to reduce it to the
• 52:24
  scope of a human life, it becomes quite a scary thing.
• 52:28
  You know, this vector that we're all stuck on.
• 52:31
  What if that could be changed? What if that could be looped
• 52:33
  changed? What does that mean for
• 52:34
  anything? Well.
• 52:35
  Because it puts it puts the reader in the position of
• 52:38
  thinking about your worst decision or your blackest
• 52:42
  moment. And you know, I was thinking, Oh
• 52:44
  my God, that argument I with my mum before she passed.
• 52:47
  If these clock people gave me that opportunity to go back and
• 52:51
  rewrite that, would I be enticed?
• 52:53
  Would I be a clock person talking to you right now?
• 52:55
  Yes, I would. So I, I get it, I get it.
• 52:58
  And the doctor's line of they will take you back to your
• 53:02
  worst, your blackest moment, and give you the chance to do things
• 53:05
  differently. Nobody would be able to resist
• 53:08
  that. Nobody, not even me.
• 53:11
  And his is losing his heart in The Adventures of Henry
• 53:14
  Registry. Angie's is obviously losing Dave
• 53:18
  and the choices she made in the previous book.
• 53:20
  And there's even a moment for Fitz where he looks at all the
• 53:24
  women that he's slept with over the years and he thinks, do you
• 53:27
  know what? They've all started to look like
• 53:28
  missed opportunities. So they all get because I think
• 53:32
  in the first half of the book, they're sort of lightly
• 53:35
  characterized in service of the very sort of dense plot that's
• 53:40
  taking place. But then the second-half of the
• 53:42
  book where we are getting in their heads and, and this, you
• 53:45
  know, looking back into their past is happening.
• 53:48
  That's when they all really sort of start coming alive.
• 53:51
  Yeah, well, in horror you have to establish the status quo
• 53:54
  before you disrupt it, don't you?
• 53:55
  That that there has to be a a happiness as a normal state to
• 53:59
  be disrupted. You have to see the camp
• 54:01
  counsellors smoking, shagging and having a great time before
• 54:06
  the masked serial killer turns up to stab the ball.
• 54:08
  Otherwise there's no horror. And similarly here you need to
• 54:11
  be happy to a certain extent. The Doctor, Fitz and Angie
• 54:13
  having an adventure before it all really goes to pieces.
• 54:17
  And unusually for a Johnny Morris story, I think he usually
• 54:20
  sketches in his guest characters really well.
• 54:22
  They're a bit faceless in this until until we start seeing
• 54:29
  those moments. So the base commander has
• 54:32
  homosexual tendencies that he's always ignored.
• 54:35
  But there was that one person that, you know, he could have
• 54:38
  had a moment with back in the past.
• 54:39
  Somebody beat their wife and they want to go back because
• 54:42
  that ended their marriage and he wanted to change that.
• 54:45
  And so so there are there are touches.
• 54:48
  I don't think it's the strongest guest cast he's ever written,
• 54:51
  but I think he does go some way to to improving that at this
• 54:54
  point. Yeah, yeah, I do think they all.
• 54:57
  I would be lying if I said I was always sure of which one was
• 55:01
  which. Yeah, I agree.
• 55:03
  There is only one female character other than Angie in
• 55:08
  it, which I do think feels very dated now, but she.
• 55:12
  Doesn't have that most horrific moment in the entire book
• 55:14
  though. Oh God, yes.
• 55:16
  In terms of in terms of what is acceptable, I think a character
• 55:23
  trigger warning for self harm here, a character re cutting
• 55:28
  their own wrists would not get anywhere near the franchise
• 55:32
  these days, even within you can't imagine Torchwood even
• 55:34
  having done that. Actually it's, I mean, it's
• 55:37
  incredibly affecting. And and just the the the horror
• 55:41
  of finding all those cogs and Pistons and clock bits inside
• 55:45
  the arm. As they do it well, the Yeah,
• 55:48
  the the obscenity of it that you would do this, you know, this,
• 55:51
  this this, this, this huge and terrible act.
• 55:54
  And then it doesn't actually even mean the thing you think
• 55:57
  it's going to mean that you've actually been robbed of what you
• 56:00
  thought of what what of of of the ultimate point of your
• 56:05
  desperation. If that makes sense.
• 56:09
  Is is incredible horror moment. So I've got a feeling this is
• 56:13
  the point where you start to struggle with the book.
• 56:16
  So this is a bit where I start to struggle.
• 56:17
  So this is the point at which everyone starts turning into
• 56:20
  clocks, which is great. Love that you mentioned earlier
• 56:23
  on this is a base under siege story.
• 56:24
  It's a base under siege story for 2002, so that's good.
• 56:27
  It doesn't feel like it's just AP stuff.
• 56:29
  There is that idea of what what Doctor Who can be sometimes, and
• 56:33
  I don't think Rusty Davis, Orchid Shipner, or Steve Morvitz
• 56:36
  particularly led to this too hard.
• 56:38
  But there is a version of Doctor Who in the 21st century that is
• 56:40
  updating the old versions. Rather than trying to do
• 56:42
  something new, let's do a version of the old story.
• 56:44
  But let's do it in 21st time, 21st century style.
• 56:47
  Interestingly, you know, for my DACA who reviews interview with
• 56:50
  Johnny Morris, that's exactly what he said.
• 56:53
  I was going to quote it. I want to write a Doctor Who
• 56:56
  story that could be televised now that feels like Doctor Who
• 57:01
  of old but told now. There we go then.
• 57:04
  Exactly, the downside of that is in probably the third quarter of
• 57:11
  the book, it does just turn into the inevitable running around
• 57:14
  the base like I if I wanted to, they could have kept a little
• 57:19
  map of everyone running up and down the base, up and down the
• 57:22
  base, up and down the base. We need to we need to get to the
• 57:24
  test. We need to get to the isolation
• 57:25
  ward. Let's run to the isolation ward.
• 57:27
  We need to go to the experiment chamber.
• 57:28
  Let's run to the experiment chamber.
• 57:29
  Oh, we need to go to the airlock.
• 57:30
  OK, I'm at the airlock. OK, now I'm going down to the
• 57:32
  basement. Oh, but I was down there in the
• 57:34
  basement before now. Oh, yes.
• 57:35
  Well, now I'm back in the basement now.
• 57:36
  Oh, I should go to the basement as well.
• 57:37
  Yes, go and hide in the basement.
• 57:38
  OK, well I'm getting the. Flashbacks of deep blue sea.
• 57:41
  You know, when the water started pouring into the corridors and
• 57:44
  Fitz and the fellow, you know, walking through the water, I was
• 57:47
  like, OK, where's the sharks? It's every sort of trapped,
• 57:51
  trapped in a claustrophobic atmosphere.
• 57:53
  Cliche, isn't it? But it is very well written.
• 57:57
  It's, it's very, it's very well written.
• 57:59
  Yes, there's no, there's no problem with the prose.
• 58:00
  It's just the instant at this point does just become a bit of
• 58:03
  a runaround. What I did like about this
• 58:06
  section was this is where Angie's brain really gets put to
• 58:12
  work and she starts looking for invoices and things like this
• 58:15
  and she realizes that the war has been deliberately prolonged
• 58:20
  in order to, and she gives a motive as to why it's doing as
• 58:23
  well in that if you have a sustained war, then you know,
• 58:28
  technological achievements leap on and you can get rid of all of
• 58:32
  your wasters as soldiers. There is a profitable reason for
• 58:37
  having a sustained war. And I loved all of that stuff.
• 58:40
  I just loved one of my criticisms of Angie is she's not
• 58:44
  often enough written as smart as she should be.
• 58:47
  And she's she's putting it all together here completely away
• 58:51
  from the doctor. And I loved all of that.
• 58:54
  Yeah, I, this is I, I struggled a little bit with this
• 58:58
  rationalisation of what was going on, of the war being
• 59:01
  maintained for profit, basically.
• 59:05
  Because it felt a little bit like they've been such effective
• 59:12
  body horror, psychological horror up to this point that it
• 59:15
  just felt like too broad a satire to lay on top of that, to
• 59:19
  suddenly say, because it's always.
• 59:21
  So the idea that we're presented with is that the war is
• 59:24
  happening because they live in a society, the plutocratic empire,
• 59:27
  this idea that it is entirely run for for profit, that
• 59:31
  whichever decision yields the greatest reward, that people
• 59:33
  don't matter, money matters. Which, you know, it's a fairly
• 59:36
  broad satire of post that, right?
• 59:37
  Politics in the UK, right? That that's what we can all see
• 59:40
  that. But we've all sort of accepted
• 59:42
  to think of everything in monetary terms.
• 59:44
  But these colonists have defaulted on their payments and
• 59:47
  now they've got to pay their debts.
• 59:50
  And now the empire is coming to reclaim the planet.
• 59:52
  Yes. And I actually thought it was
• 59:55
  far more effective, the idea that you just have this, this
• 59:58
  massive empire that was willing to just expend lives and and
• 1:00:03
  bombs and money to shut down a reclaim from an obviously poorer
• 1:00:11
  and less able and less fortunate colony.
• 1:00:16
  I thought that was a much more, I did a more in keeping with
• 1:00:20
  what we had that didn't feel so discordant, but also just
• 1:00:22
  scarier in some ways. And more to the point, that was
• 1:00:24
  much more brutal. I think that idea of of a war
• 1:00:27
  being run for profit, maybe it's just because, you know, this was
• 1:00:30
  written in 2002, OK? You know, we had 911.
• 1:00:33
  We'd had the invasion of Afghanistan.
• 1:00:34
  Iraq hadn't happened yet. But war was still something that
• 1:00:37
  felt quite distant and even sort of it felt like something, you
• 1:00:40
  know, we've mentioned threats and it does feel a bit like it's
• 1:00:44
  a product of of a lot of Cold War thinking of war as a
• 1:00:49
  hypothetical of, oh, what if it were to happen?
• 1:00:51
  It's ever present, the threat of it, but it's not actually there.
• 1:00:53
  But what if it did explode? What if we did have this war?
• 1:00:55
  And what if it did? And it would mean the end of the
• 1:00:57
  world? I just think now maybe with the
• 1:00:59
  world as it is in 2024, where, you know, globalization feels
• 1:01:05
  like it's gone bad, but it's reverse of it.
• 1:01:07
  We've, we've got a war in Europe for God's sake.
• 1:01:10
  And you know, in small, in small ways, admittedly, but we're
• 1:01:12
  feeling the effects. We all feel the effects of that.
• 1:01:15
  I think we're all just at least I just felt too aware of what a
• 1:01:20
  war actually means in practical sense to actually buy into this
• 1:01:24
  really quite broad satire of, oh, you know, you can run a war
• 1:01:26
  for profit. It just, it felt like it was
• 1:01:30
  born of a 1980s suspicion of the American military industrial
• 1:01:33
  complex, and it just, it felt dated.
• 1:01:36
  Maybe I'm dated then, because I totally bought the rationale.
• 1:01:39
  And I thought the sort of human cost to it was ghastly.
• 1:01:44
  You know, the fact that these were people that had defaulted
• 1:01:47
  on their payments and they were just getting rid of them in this
• 1:01:50
  horrible war. And then even worse was the
• 1:01:53
  ending where the, the the counting machines that are
• 1:01:58
  effectively, you know, keeping this war going.
• 1:02:02
  They don't even know why they're making the money anymore.
• 1:02:05
  Like they're literally this whole thing is being sustained
• 1:02:08
  and nobody knows why. And lots of people are dying.
• 1:02:11
  And I think the obscurity of it, I don't know, it pleased me,
• 1:02:15
  You. Know and that's fine and I it's
• 1:02:20
  not badly done like I can see how it's and there's some there
• 1:02:23
  is some nice imagery around it and we must mention Mr.
• 1:02:26
  Mistletoe. But I think it's I think my
• 1:02:30
  biggest issue was that that that idea just didn't feel like for
• 1:02:35
  me, it fitted with the very immediate and internal horror
• 1:02:41
  that was so much of the rest of the book.
• 1:02:43
  It's a very. Sort of, Doctor Who answer,
• 1:02:45
  isn't it? It's all about the money.
• 1:02:46
  Yeah, but Mistletoe, who turns up, walks out of the walks out
• 1:02:52
  of the snow in the middle of all of this, who is the what's his
• 1:02:56
  name? He's the auditor who has been
• 1:02:59
  sent from the on highs to see. How this is what It stops being
• 1:03:02
  Doctor Who, Sorry. It stops being Sapphire and
• 1:03:04
  Steel and starts being Doctor Who again because you wouldn't
• 1:03:08
  have a mist toe in Sapphire and Steel.
• 1:03:11
  That sort of eccentric character that comes along and is clearly
• 1:03:14
  manipulating events, but you're not sure why.
• 1:03:17
  Although I should mention before you leave sapphire and steel
• 1:03:19
  behind, there's also something of what I know, but there is
• 1:03:22
  something of the shape isn't there?
• 1:03:24
  The faceless suited. In the Clock Facebook.
• 1:03:27
  Absolutely, yes. So mistletoe is, is is sent in
• 1:03:31
  and sort of becomes the villain. He becomes the sort of face of
• 1:03:34
  the of of the forces of the political empire who are running
• 1:03:38
  all of this who's who's pinstripe suit, you know,
• 1:03:41
  stereotypical businessman, but quite a big bloke.
• 1:03:43
  And I think he is needed at the point he turns up.
• 1:03:47
  You need someone to come in, Yeah, and and disrupt things.
• 1:03:52
  And actually I think the there is also a danger with this sort
• 1:03:55
  of this inaccrophobic times starts to angle a little bit
• 1:04:01
  towards some of the kind of industrial sci-fi episodes you
• 1:04:04
  get in a lot of modern Doctor Who, the worst of which do just
• 1:04:06
  feel a bit blank and a bit, oh, it's corridors again, isn't it?
• 1:04:11
  Yeah, and you can't exactly get great dialogue generated with
• 1:04:14
  faceless plot. Face people, you know, you sort
• 1:04:17
  of need a villain. It's the problem.
• 1:04:19
  It's the problem that Doctor do endlessly wrestles with, which
• 1:04:21
  is that monsters can't dialogue. But I think this is the sort of
• 1:04:25
  witty character that Jonathan Morris writes extremely well.
• 1:04:30
  He's talking about what we were just talking about there, about
• 1:04:32
  water profit. And he just goes, yes, it's a
• 1:04:35
  means of generating wealth whilst also downsizing.
• 1:04:39
  You know, he's, he has great lines, I think.
• 1:04:43
  He reminds me a lot of the Alex, Alex Mcqueen's character in The
• 1:04:48
  Thick of It. He's the sort of blue sky
• 1:04:51
  thinker what brought in, you know, endlessly referring to the
• 1:04:53
  he has the sense of smoke superiority because he
• 1:04:55
  represents the establishment. You know he's one of the ones
• 1:04:58
  who makes the decisions that affect others, even though he is
• 1:05:01
  himself as much of a pawn is anyone else.
• 1:05:03
  I think sort of post the 8th doctor range.
• 1:05:06
  You know this is Sabbath, right? Regardless, Oh, shush,
• 1:05:11
  regardless of of you know, whether you've done it all or
• 1:05:13
  not. But at this point, when reading
• 1:05:16
  them month to month, Sabbath's only been in one book.
• 1:05:19
  So I don't think I think the ending is a genuine.
• 1:05:22
  It was a surprise to me when I read it.
• 1:05:24
  Yeah, I've one of the things I remembered and actually I've
• 1:05:26
  forgotten that the revelation that it was Sabbath comes.
• 1:05:28
  So it's that in the last scene you discover that he is that
• 1:05:31
  mistletoe has been Sabbath all along, which he describes as it
• 1:05:35
  all having been a matter of perception.
• 1:05:38
  And we'll come to that when we talk about that last scene,
• 1:05:40
  which flips the entire emphasis of the book on its head.
• 1:05:44
  Yeah, absolutely. But, and, and, but knowing it
• 1:05:47
  was Sabbath, I did realise that he was, or it came to me that he
• 1:05:51
  seemed to be described as, and talking like Orson Welles.
• 1:05:54
  And Orson Welles was the the physical model for Sabbath, I
• 1:05:57
  seem to recall. But yeah, so he comes on and
• 1:06:01
  he's of course the other, he's the other part of the the
• 1:06:04
  Magritte painting, isn't he? He's he's the suited man with
• 1:06:08
  the bowl of hat. So, so, so yeah, that's really
• 1:06:12
  great. And but so we have mistletoe, we
• 1:06:16
  have the doctor, we have the clock faced people.
• 1:06:20
  The other threat that the clock faced people face, there's a
• 1:06:24
  brilliant bit where one of the characters just shoots one of
• 1:06:27
  the clock faced people and it takes the bullets and dies and
• 1:06:30
  fixes like, oh, thank God. For the first time we've
• 1:06:31
  actually encountered a monster that can be shot.
• 1:06:35
  But then it rewinds time I. Love that and and like it keeps
• 1:06:39
  doing that, doesn't it? Yeah.
• 1:06:41
  And there's a bring idea that is set up very early on, right at
• 1:06:43
  the start of the book that they because hope the previous book
• 1:06:47
  took place in the unimaginably distant future and they've been
• 1:06:52
  travelling for a very long time to sort of get back into any
• 1:06:54
  sort of period. They recognise there's what
• 1:06:57
  you're going to say. There's a great line which is
• 1:06:59
  that travelling back in time is harder than going forwards
• 1:07:01
  because you're going uphill. That's so great.
• 1:07:04
  And which is dropped in as a joke at the start and yet
• 1:07:07
  becomes a really important element of the sort of internal
• 1:07:11
  logic. Because if they are going to
• 1:07:13
  turn back time and those bullets are going to vanish and they get
• 1:07:16
  a chance to go again, that takes an enormous amount of energy for
• 1:07:19
  them to do it. They can only go back so fast.
• 1:07:22
  There's even a point of the doctor will put doctor and Angie
• 1:07:25
  locked themselves in a room and the doctor's counting how long
• 1:07:28
  it is and eventually when they've been in there for 4
• 1:07:30
  minutes, he's like, OK, we're too deep now.
• 1:07:32
  You know, they can't rewind time to stop us getting in here.
• 1:07:35
  They can't go back that far. But then it creates this dilemma
• 1:07:37
  of how did you kill something that can just unwind time?
• 1:07:40
  But they tried grenades and they die hot.
• 1:07:42
  The clock people die horrible deaths horribly describe deaths
• 1:07:44
  from from these grenades, but they just read one time.
• 1:07:49
  So how did you do it? And it's probably 1 of in terms
• 1:07:53
  of what's acceptable and how far you can go.
• 1:07:56
  Ultimately what the Doctor does to the clock people is is up
• 1:08:00
  there with damaged goods in terms of violence enacted by the
• 1:08:04
  Doctor on a villain. Do you want to tell?
• 1:08:06
  The it's the brain of morbid thing, right?
• 1:08:09
  We're going to cyanide Solomon to death.
• 1:08:11
  So yeah, he decides, well, so we need a way, a method of killing
• 1:08:14
  them that is going to be delayed so they're not going to realise
• 1:08:18
  that they're dying. So, you know, for a couple of
• 1:08:21
  hours so they can't rewind back before they put that plan into
• 1:08:26
  place. And so he decides to release
• 1:08:28
  mustard gas and murder the clock people in May.
• 1:08:32
  I I've got a few quotes here. All right through the intercom
• 1:08:37
  and she could hear his clockwork mechanism begin to clatter
• 1:08:39
  violently. A crack appeared in the glass of
• 1:08:42
  his face and instant later it shattered into a spray of fault
• 1:08:46
  lines. The paper within was flecked
• 1:08:48
  with foam and dark blood. The blood spilled down onto his
• 1:08:52
  shirt and hands. And then you got Mr. Mistletoe,
• 1:08:56
  who is just, you know, he don't really care about anyone.
• 1:08:58
  He's laughing his head off going.
• 1:08:59
  It's no good. You're all dead and you can't do
• 1:09:02
  anything about it. He's having a great.
• 1:09:04
  It's a horrific. It it, it is genuinely awful.
• 1:09:09
  There's their their their their fate.
• 1:09:12
  The clock faces shatter and I think multiple is described as
• 1:09:16
  bits of gear work and just awful.
• 1:09:19
  Like bloody. Pulp oozing out of them.
• 1:09:23
  You couldn't put this on TV like this would this couldn't be
• 1:09:25
  televised or two. But the trouble is, is they do
• 1:09:27
  try and read one time, a couple of times.
• 1:09:30
  So they do go back to where before all of these horrific
• 1:09:33
  things have happened, and then they just go through it again
• 1:09:35
  and again and again. Yeah, and eventually they are
• 1:09:39
  dead and the gas is vented. Only they realize that one of
• 1:09:47
  the clock people has gone. Absolutely would be a
• 1:09:50
  cliffhanger moment, wouldn't it? It would be the end of Part 3.
• 1:09:53
  Yeah, absolutely. He left for station 1-2 hours
• 1:09:56
  ago. Oh fuck.
• 1:09:59
  Yes, one of the crew was left two hours ago taking one of the
• 1:10:02
  clock one of the infected team in a sort of stasis capsule for
• 1:10:07
  examination back at Station 1, the centre of the centre of
• 1:10:11
  operations for the whole planet. And then and then the last for
• 1:10:15
  me, this is where it really picked up again.
• 1:10:16
  This is where this is where everything started going again.
• 1:10:19
  So there is a chase scene across through this blasted horrible
• 1:10:23
  world of the Doctor Fitz, Angie mistletoe trying to catch up
• 1:10:29
  with this truck before it makes it to Station 1 and everything
• 1:10:34
  goes to pot. And it's it's it's it's really
• 1:10:38
  good, you know, having suddenly broken out of that base, having
• 1:10:42
  been confined for so long, but now to be out of this world that
• 1:10:44
  is described. And it is every time we go back
• 1:10:48
  outside, it feels like the time distortions have got worse, like
• 1:10:51
  there have been more bombardments.
• 1:10:54
  And so it's described as they're driving, as they're driving
• 1:10:56
  along, the trees are like growing and dying all around
• 1:11:01
  them the whole time as time is speed up and slowed down.
• 1:11:04
  Twisted imagery, isn't it? Absolutely.
• 1:11:08
  What I would say is that in any other situation, a base under
• 1:11:12
  siege story which then goes outside for the last third, I
• 1:11:17
  would say is unacceptable. But for me, the base under
• 1:11:20
  siege, part of it was just long enough.
• 1:11:22
  If this, if it had stayed there till the end of the book, those
• 1:11:25
  last sort of 70 pages, it would, I would have been where you was
• 1:11:29
  in that last quarter, in that third quarter of like, oh, come
• 1:11:34
  on now, let's, let's, let's bring this to an end.
• 1:11:36
  But opening it out like this, it's, you're right, it is
• 1:11:39
  renewed interest in what's going on.
• 1:11:42
  Absolutely. And there's some great, there's
• 1:11:45
  again just a great visual scene. I'd love to, I'd love to mention
• 1:11:47
  where they eventually catch up with the, the truck and they
• 1:11:52
  find it overturned because it's been caught in an attack.
• 1:11:55
  And so, and both driver and infected are missing.
• 1:12:00
  And so they head out into the follow them out into the forests
• 1:12:04
  and they realise they're in ADT zone, so a decelerated time
• 1:12:09
  zone. So everything is frozen around
• 1:12:10
  them. And they pass one of the
• 1:12:12
  soldiers who was chasing, was chasing the people in the lorry
• 1:12:16
  and he's just frozen there, you know, mid run.
• 1:12:19
  And then they find the scientist.
• 1:12:23
  I think it's Hammond, isn't it? Hammond, Hammond, Sapphire and
• 1:12:26
  Steel. There's a character called
• 1:12:27
  Hammond lying there and he's still moving despite the fact
• 1:12:32
  they're in decelerated time zone.
• 1:12:33
  And they realise he's an Android and he has been planted that by
• 1:12:37
  someone this whole time as well. Like to mention, there are
• 1:12:40
  characters called Ash Bishop and another one turns out to be an
• 1:12:43
  Android. I think Johnny Morris has been
• 1:12:44
  watching Alien. Yeah.
• 1:12:46
  Definitely, yes. I think anyone worth their sort
• 1:12:49
  of seen that movie, right? Yeah, and it's also the point
• 1:12:52
  where is it? Sure who's the scientist who's
• 1:12:54
  come with the Doctor in Fitz and Angie reveals himself to be a
• 1:12:57
  double agent as well. So there's lots of double
• 1:12:59
  crossing going on here, but it doesn't turn into a, you know,
• 1:13:02
  full on. And then I bribed the architect,
• 1:13:04
  or I think I'll be taking that sauvage.
• 1:13:08
  Although you sort of, I did feel it was going that way.
• 1:13:11
  And then when we went into Station 1, so that's, that's the
• 1:13:15
  colony town. And in just a moment, I mean,
• 1:13:19
  I'm going to read this, the, the image of this town full of
• 1:13:23
  clockwork people. They're stuck in my head more
• 1:13:26
  than anything. Sort of.
• 1:13:28
  Thinking back before I reread it, he describes it as a
• 1:13:31
  nightmare of efficiency. Station 1A, Victorian colony
• 1:13:36
  town with all the citizens transformed into clock people
• 1:13:39
  going about their business, mechanically ticking and
• 1:13:42
  talking. Clockwork children in the
• 1:13:44
  playground, Clockwork mistletoes in the bank, clockwork punters
• 1:13:47
  outside the pub. A concrete in a steel Dome
• 1:13:49
  above, lit by lamps, a weak, dismal twilight and lending
• 1:13:53
  everyone dark shadows. The vastness of the construction
• 1:13:57
  was terrifying. It resembled a vast cathedral
• 1:14:00
  with pillars filling every horizon and the echoes of
• 1:14:04
  traffic booming around them. It's really quite disturbing
• 1:14:08
  imagery, isn't it? It's that whole like, yeah,
• 1:14:11
  stuff we recognize completely at that.
• 1:14:13
  I thought uncanny valley completely unlike anything we
• 1:14:17
  recognise. Really scary.
• 1:14:20
  Did you ever see Zombie Flesh Eaters?
• 1:14:23
  Surprisingly no. Released not in outside the UK,
• 1:14:27
  Zombie 2 was a. Scene like this.
• 1:14:31
  Well, yeah, it's got frankly, I think it's got one of the best
• 1:14:35
  endings of any horror movie ever.
• 1:14:37
  So zombie fleshy is very quickly opens with an abandoned boat
• 1:14:40
  drifting into New York harbour. The harbour authorities board it
• 1:14:43
  and the only the the only crew member is a zombie who aboard
• 1:14:49
  this drifting boat and they push him overboard.
• 1:14:51
  One of the one of the policemen gets bitten and they quickly as
• 1:14:55
  he's turning into a zombie as well.
• 1:14:57
  Fast forward, the main characters find where the boat
• 1:15:00
  has come from this island in the Caribbean and they they, they
• 1:15:04
  head back to find out what's been going on this island.
• 1:15:06
  And then the film is all about them encountering zombie zombie
• 1:15:09
  outbreak on this island and dealing with it.
• 1:15:11
  Blah blah blah blah what have you.
• 1:15:12
  At the end, they beat the zombies, burned down the
• 1:15:15
  hospital, jump back in the boat, jump back in their boat and head
• 1:15:19
  back to New York. And the very last scene is they
• 1:15:21
  arrived back in New York and it's been overrun with zombies
• 1:15:25
  because the whole time they were away, the zombie outbreak was
• 1:15:28
  still. Going just like New York, but
• 1:15:30
  with zombies. It's full of zombies and the
• 1:15:32
  last, the last scene is just zombies shuffling across the I
• 1:15:34
  think it's the Brooklyn Bridge or the Manhattan Bridge.
• 1:15:38
  And that is a brilliant ending. And I was very pleased to read a
• 1:15:42
  Doctor Who book that does Zombie Flesh Eaters.
• 1:15:44
  I mean, this is the sort of imagery they couldn't do on the
• 1:15:46
  TV. This is this is, you know, book
• 1:15:48
  budget busting imagery. Yeah, it would be loads of
• 1:15:52
  extras walking through the haze in Cardiff with increasingly
• 1:15:56
  cheap clock masks on. Yeah, terrible.
• 1:16:00
  It's much better in my head. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:16:03
  I just. Like the idea of the dusky
• 1:16:04
  twilight and the weird shadows and it just feels really
• 1:16:07
  nightmarish. Quote we can't gas a whole city,
• 1:16:12
  Fitz, he said. TV's Doctor Who.
• 1:16:15
  Although we had no trouble at all with doing it with those few
• 1:16:18
  people in the base. I mean they defaulted on their
• 1:16:20
  payments so nevermind. Is now a good time to ask who
• 1:16:25
  are the clock people? Well, I mean, it's very
• 1:16:29
  unspecified inside the book itself, but Michael Mills and
• 1:16:33
  Doctor Who Wikipedia informs me that an old enemy of the Doctors
• 1:16:39
  may make an appearance in this book.
• 1:16:42
  Who's that? The Faction Paradox.
• 1:16:47
  Yes. So this is this is this this if
• 1:16:49
  you if you believe a few places online, the the idea is that the
• 1:16:54
  clock people are faction paradox that they are what is left of
• 1:16:57
  faction paradox after the war in heaven that was erased from
• 1:17:03
  time. And you know, these are
• 1:17:04
  creatures of paradox. What happens then while they
• 1:17:06
  were trapped in the vortex as these sort of formless beings
• 1:17:08
  trying to find a way back into reality and that this is them
• 1:17:11
  doing that. And hence the whole sort of
• 1:17:13
  temptation of going, the tempting you into going back and
• 1:17:16
  changing a time, you create a paradox.
• 1:17:17
  You become one of them you know, makes perfect sense and you
• 1:17:21
  know. Figures.
• 1:17:22
  I just can't imagine why they wouldn't mention it.
• 1:17:26
  The reason they wouldn't mention it is because I Johnny Morris
• 1:17:29
  about this on Blue Sky and he said it's not true.
• 1:17:31
  It was never the intention. It was never the intention.
• 1:17:37
  He said that his his idea with his intent with anachrophobia
• 1:17:41
  was to write a book as free of from continuity as possible,
• 1:17:44
  apart from its links to the ongoing story arc.
• 1:17:47
  So and he said, he said also he doesn't see how it would work.
• 1:17:51
  So no, it's it's the best tradition of all things on
• 1:17:55
  Doctor Who. TARDIS Wiki.
• 1:17:57
  If it's not got a citable source, I think the citation is
• 1:18:00
  for a web page that doesn't mention the idea.
• 1:18:03
  OK, so I wants to follow up. Thank.
• 1:18:05
  You for dismissing that rumour. Well, but there is a coder,
• 1:18:09
  which is that the people who are right still writing Faction
• 1:18:12
  Paradox stories clearly believe this to be true because it has
• 1:18:15
  been canonized as true to the Faction Paradox range.
• 1:18:18
  Oh dear. So.
• 1:18:19
  What else do we get? What do we go with?
• 1:18:21
  Well, ironically, Joe, it's a paradox.
• 1:18:26
  No, it's subjective. Whatever you want it to be,
• 1:18:29
  Yeah. Yeah, who are we to tell you
• 1:18:32
  We're just, we're just people. We're just voices in your ears.
• 1:18:34
  We don't tell you how to live your life or what to believe.
• 1:18:36
  But Johnny Morris does have one more trick up his slip, Ward 2
• 1:18:40
  actually, but one more brilliant visual trick up his sleeve.
• 1:18:43
  And that is after we've been introduced to these electronic
• 1:18:47
  counting machines described in Fabulous Clockwork.
• 1:18:50
  A bit like, you know, the plot work soldiers in go in the
• 1:18:53
  fireplace. I was seeing that sort of
• 1:18:55
  intricate, but covered in cobwebs.
• 1:18:58
  You know they're there at. They're calculating machines.
• 1:19:00
  Misses Havisham. Yeah, with no clue at all as to
• 1:19:03
  why they're doing what they're doing.
• 1:19:04
  But they want to go back in time and that's why they did the time
• 1:19:08
  travel experiments in the 1st place, wasn't it?
• 1:19:09
  Was to go back in time and figure out why the fuck they're
• 1:19:12
  doing prolonging this war in the first place.
• 1:19:14
  Who are they making profit for that?
• 1:19:16
  Was got a clue. It's so horrific, but the last
• 1:19:20
  sort of big visual shock is end of chapter Doctor Who turns
• 1:19:25
  round and he's been turned into a clock person.
• 1:19:30
  Another great entry in the cliffhanger of Paul McGann
• 1:19:32
  turning into things, up there with the Cyber Doctor from the
• 1:19:35
  Radio Times comic strip and the Vampire Doctor from the DWM 1.
• 1:19:39
  But he had to do it right. That's irresistible.
• 1:19:42
  And it's safe. Like the second to last chapter.
• 1:19:44
  End it. Ends at a heck of a pace.
• 1:19:47
  So this this book in which time has become increasingly
• 1:19:51
  disjointed, events of increasingly come out of sync
• 1:19:56
  with each other. The Denny, what is the doctor
• 1:19:59
  basically battling Bishop who's the who's the last the clock
• 1:20:02
  people through his own timeline. As Bishop tries to turn, the
• 1:20:05
  Doctor tries to tempt him to change what has gone before, and
• 1:20:09
  the doctor basically. Defeats the baddies with the
• 1:20:13
  power of self forgiveness because, but, but again, it fits
• 1:20:16
  into the arc really well because the Doctor's able to resist that
• 1:20:19
  temptation of of changing the past because he's missing so
• 1:20:24
  much of his own history at this point that he kind of has this
• 1:20:27
  this particular awareness of the central role of memory in
• 1:20:31
  forming identity. So he is presented time and
• 1:20:35
  again with events from going backwards through the book of
• 1:20:38
  where he could have done things differently and prevented this
• 1:20:41
  entire city pertaining to clock people.
• 1:20:42
  And it keeps going. So he's presented with moment.
• 1:20:45
  There's a moment presented with a moment from Hope where he
• 1:20:48
  could have stopped and and she recreated she's tempted in
• 1:20:53
  recreating her boyfriend. There's a moment from Mad Dogs
• 1:20:56
  and Englishmen, whether it decides to go to the dog planet.
• 1:20:58
  And it takes us back to the moment from the adventurous of
• 1:21:01
  Henrietta Street where his second heart is removed.
• 1:21:07
  And he is not only able to resist it, but being Doctor Who.
• 1:21:13
  And you can hear to these 2024 ears, you can hear I Am the
• 1:21:19
  Doctor by Murray Gold, starting to ramp up as Doctor realizes,
• 1:21:23
  well, what you've taken me back in time and maybe I can change
• 1:21:28
  something, but some, but not something that will change where
• 1:21:33
  we end up. And he takes the opportunity to,
• 1:21:38
  having been transported back to Station 40 in the past, he rigs
• 1:21:45
  up what amounts to an improvised time bomb.
• 1:21:50
  And at the end of all of this, they are defeated with a gadget
• 1:21:54
  leaked up to an alarm clock. So he's taken back, I think he's
• 1:21:58
  gone back 24 hours to when he was still in the base or 48
• 1:22:00
  hours and he was still in the base and runs away and quickly
• 1:22:04
  rigs up this thing. He fills the time capsule with
• 1:22:07
  chrononium and brings up the device with an alarm clock,
• 1:22:11
  doing the full little you know, two hands come together thing
• 1:22:16
  sets it for two days time or 20% whenever.
• 1:22:20
  So when he I. Can hear that music, that
• 1:22:22
  furious music just cutting out before the the second hand gets
• 1:22:26
  to the top. Boom.
• 1:22:28
  And back in the present in stage one, they realise, Oh my God,
• 1:22:31
  you rigged up a bomb and I'm 24 hours away from from 24.
• 1:22:35
  I drive away from it clock goes off, activates the the time
• 1:22:39
  capsule. It plunges into the past loads
• 1:22:43
  of the chronononium as the and swirl around all those clocks
• 1:22:47
  you mentioned to the capsule earlier.
• 1:22:48
  They finally meet and the quinonium bomb explodes deep
• 1:22:52
  into deep into the past and seals the rift that has been
• 1:22:57
  created into the vortex and the clock people are no more.
• 1:23:03
  It's a very satisfying ending. It's gorgeous and I just love
• 1:23:08
  the simplicity of the of the clock.
• 1:23:10
  That's the clock itself, you know, after all of this complex
• 1:23:14
  things that have been done with time, it's this simple little
• 1:23:17
  alarm clock that saves the day. It's narratively very
• 1:23:20
  satisfying, isn't it? Well, there is still 1 narrative
• 1:23:24
  slice of hand though, awaiting us in the final scene.
• 1:23:29
  Which is yes, Return to an empty city.
• 1:23:32
  Clock people no more mistletoe reveals himself to be Oh my God,
• 1:23:38
  it's only. Got fists of hands.
• 1:23:42
  He's got fists Sabbath day. He's got fists of hams.
• 1:23:47
  We should have known if it's a huge.
• 1:23:50
  Yes, mistletoe, it was Sabbath all along.
• 1:23:54
  Well done I. Wanted him to do the master
• 1:23:57
  mouse pool, you know. Oh my dear Doctor, you have been
• 1:24:01
  naive. But then all of a sudden, with
• 1:24:06
  no hints at all that this is the case, this is now tied into the
• 1:24:11
  running arc that has been set in place since Adventurous and
• 1:24:15
  Henrietta St. Yeah, and, and this whole, the
• 1:24:18
  whole idea of the war having been won, of having been run for
• 1:24:21
  someone's benefit, we find that the whole events of this story
• 1:24:24
  were set up by Sabbath. Who?
• 1:24:26
  Who tells Angie, Miss Kapoor, I have not been idle.
• 1:24:31
  I have acquired some business associates, shall we say some
• 1:24:35
  very influential business associates.
• 1:24:38
  And these business associates have been at war with the clock
• 1:24:40
  people in the vortex. And that's why the clock people
• 1:24:43
  are are fleeing into our reality, because Sabbath's
• 1:24:46
  associates, whoever they may be, he says.
• 1:24:50
  He says they were not invading, they were evacuating.
• 1:24:54
  And that's because there's something even more terrifying
• 1:24:57
  in the time Vortex that we're yet to meet.
• 1:25:00
  Absolutely. And so Sabbath had basically set
• 1:25:03
  up this whole scenario because he realizes one thing the doctor
• 1:25:07
  is very effective at is removing threats.
• 1:25:10
  So he set up a situation in which these these poor evacuees
• 1:25:14
  were a threat to the Doctor, and sure enough, the Doctor would
• 1:25:17
  rid them, rid the universe of them.
• 1:25:20
  And now the Vortex is the dominion of Sabbath's ABBA
• 1:25:23
  allies. It's gold.
• 1:25:26
  It's a, it's a, it's a brilliant rug pool.
• 1:25:29
  It promises exciting things for the future.
• 1:25:32
  It it provides a completely different emphasis on the story
• 1:25:35
  that you've just read. It does a lot, you know, it
• 1:25:38
  doesn't feel unsatisfying, even though it's sort of comes out of
• 1:25:41
  nowhere and it does tie into something.
• 1:25:46
  There's there's a thematic link to the stories from Adventurous
• 1:25:51
  in Henry St. all the way through to Time 0, And that is, it's
• 1:25:55
  almost as if Steven Moffett's in charge.
• 1:25:57
  There is this obsession with time and time travel now, isn't
• 1:26:01
  there? And we do it in camera, Obscure,
• 1:26:03
  obscure with that machine that splits Octane into 8.
• 1:26:06
  And we do it in trading futures where a man is deviously
• 1:26:11
  pretending to have a time machine.
• 1:26:14
  We're doing it here as well. But the idea is, is what you've
• 1:26:18
  said before is that the Time Lords aren't there anymore.
• 1:26:21
  Time is no longer being governed.
• 1:26:23
  It's now being manipulated. And Sabbath's associates are
• 1:26:29
  well, they they want to do something with the timeline, but
• 1:26:32
  we don't know yet what. Yes, absolutely.
• 1:26:36
  Let's maybe leave that for for another episode.
• 1:26:38
  It's sort of all up for grabs though, isn't it?
• 1:26:40
  It In a series where time is sort of linear.
• 1:26:46
  Now time is up for grabs. Yeah, yeah, 100% that the, that
• 1:26:50
  the, the surety that the time was brought to cause and effect
• 1:26:56
  has been taken away. And this idea of, we've said
• 1:27:01
  before on the podcast, the the conception of Sabbath was when
• 1:27:05
  the Doctor can no longer be the Doctor Who steps up to take that
• 1:27:10
  place. And what sort of person would
• 1:27:11
  want to do that? And with his associates, there's
• 1:27:15
  similar suggestion that at the Time Lords are gone, who would
• 1:27:18
  take their place. It's.
• 1:27:20
  Exciting. It's very exciting.
• 1:27:22
  I won't read the next one. And I actually think until sort
• 1:27:25
  of time 0 Sabbath appearances are extremely well done.
• 1:27:30
  It does out, it does sort of out, stays welcome a little bit.
• 1:27:33
  But anyway, that's another time, sometime never, which may come
• 1:27:39
  off again before the end of this episode.
• 1:27:42
  Michael, summarize your thoughts on anachrophobia then.
• 1:27:45
  I mean, I think we were broadly extremely positive with perhaps
• 1:27:50
  the cliche of running up and down corridors getting in the
• 1:27:53
  way just a little bit. Yes, it's it's a few sprints
• 1:27:59
  short of a classic, but by golly it's good.
• 1:28:03
  Yeah, I'd say it's one of the most effective conceptual
• 1:28:07
  horrors in print that we have in the original Doctor Who books.
• 1:28:13
  And I just Fitz is sort of I, I think Fitz is a little
• 1:28:17
  underwritten, but I think the Doctor and Angie are superb in
• 1:28:22
  this book, both of them. It's a rare 8th Doctor adventure
• 1:28:24
  where Angie gets a better time of it than Fitz.
• 1:28:28
  Indeed. Well, tracking with this theme
• 1:28:32
  of timey wiminess, Michael, I believe you created our our
• 1:28:39
  ranking system this time for who ranks.
• 1:28:41
  So why don't you tell everybody what it is?
• 1:28:43
  Yes. Joe, can you please, if you
• 1:28:45
  would give me your three best tiny, whiny Doctor Who books?
• 1:28:52
  We're sort of nonspecific in what that actually means,
• 1:28:55
  because it's a very obscure term.
• 1:28:57
  Wibbly wobbly. Yeah, no.
• 1:29:01
  Why don't you go first? Come on, we'll knock on back and
• 1:29:02
  forth. Welcome back and forth, right?
• 1:29:04
  Start off easy. Quick one out the bats, one
• 1:29:06
  we've mentioned before, both on this episode and previously, Mr.
• 1:29:10
  Johnny Morris is touched by an Angel.
• 1:29:14
  Oh, of course it is. I mean, of course it's the
• 1:29:16
  Doctor Who booked the Steven Moffett didn't write, isn't it?
• 1:29:19
  Yes, in which the we've mentioned it, it's simply
• 1:29:22
  returning to the theme of what if you could change the one
• 1:29:25
  thing you regret in your life, but focuses on a single man's
• 1:29:29
  exploration of that idea cast back into the into the past
• 1:29:32
  realises that he can live his way through to the point at
• 1:29:34
  which he can change things. It's it it does that wonderful
• 1:29:38
  thing of of taking time travel down to a human scale as well as
• 1:29:43
  revisiting recent history in a sort of fun way of realizing how
• 1:29:48
  far away our own past suddenly seem.
• 1:29:53
  Lovely little book I think highlighted the new series
• 1:29:55
  adventure range. It really shows that you can do
• 1:29:57
  something that works, works for the kids, but that the grown-ups
• 1:30:01
  will get a lot out of as well. It's like Bluey.
• 1:30:04
  I don't want to accuse Jonathan Morris of being, you know,
• 1:30:07
  obvious or stuck on a theme, but my first choice is also by John
• 1:30:11
  Marcus. And I can't accuse him of it at
• 1:30:13
  this point because this is his very first novel, Festival of
• 1:30:16
  Death, which I have done an episode on before.
• 1:30:19
  But it's a book that's told in reverse with lots of plot points
• 1:30:22
  from the end of the narrative, which is the start of the book
• 1:30:25
  informing the start of the narrative, which is the end of
• 1:30:28
  the book. It's incredibly timey.
• 1:30:29
  Why me? It's got lots of circular logic
• 1:30:32
  and it has the Doctor and Romana being just absolutely delighted
• 1:30:36
  that they turn up at the start of this book and they've already
• 1:30:38
  saved the date. Brilliant.
• 1:30:41
  Brilliant. My second one is going to be a
• 1:30:46
  target novelization. I'm going to do Battlefield by
• 1:30:53
  Mark Platt because, yeah, listen, hear me out.
• 1:30:57
  Because Battlefield I like on TV, but it's flawed.
• 1:31:00
  Battlefield, the novelization does that absolutely exquisite
• 1:31:04
  thing. But I think really all of the
• 1:31:05
  books for that last season do. Yeah, the last season, the
• 1:31:08
  classic Doctor Who is, is well regarded, but that the run of
• 1:31:11
  novelizations is God's tear. And one of the many things that
• 1:31:15
  the novelization of Battlefield does, it approaches being sort
• 1:31:18
  of closer to the the ideal version of Battlefield that you
• 1:31:20
  have in your head when you're not watching it.
• 1:31:22
  And it does many things better. But one of them is to really
• 1:31:25
  play up that idea of the Doctor running into his own future,
• 1:31:28
  which is so ahead of its time. And they really pull that out.
• 1:31:33
  And this idea of, you know, the the 7th Doctor Who we've already
• 1:31:36
  got a little bit used to being a little bit of the arch
• 1:31:38
  manipulator. You know, he's already destroyed
• 1:31:40
  the Cybermen and the Daleks the previous season.
• 1:31:43
  And suddenly he's the one being manipulated.
• 1:31:45
  Suddenly he's the one who is who is running in the tracks of his
• 1:31:50
  future self. And it opens with all the way
• 1:31:53
  from the the opening with this future Doctor, the Merlin Doctor
• 1:31:56
  Who, we get a glimpse of taking after on Arthur's funeral pyre
• 1:32:01
  down to the lake. The moment Doctor, I think he's
• 1:32:04
  described as wearing an Afghan coat and having ginger hair and
• 1:32:08
  he's got these little glimpses of him.
• 1:32:10
  And then all the way through we get the that's that theme of
• 1:32:13
  little bits of the future of the Doctor coming across things that
• 1:32:17
  have significance, but he can't, he doesn't have the answers for
• 1:32:19
  them yet. There's a brilliant bit where
• 1:32:21
  they realise that Excalibur can interface with the TARDIS and
• 1:32:25
  because it's the same technology and that's all you get of that.
• 1:32:30
  It's so it's read it now and sort of forget the TV version,
• 1:32:34
  just read it as a book. You can't believe this is a
• 1:32:36
  Doctor Who book that was written in 1990 whenever it was a not
• 1:32:40
  2011. Is that on our list?
• 1:32:43
  Yes. Oh good, otherwise I would have
• 1:32:45
  said put it on the list. Although do you remember the
• 1:32:47
  very last thing that the Second Doctor says in Lungbarrow before
• 1:32:52
  he departs? I've not.
• 1:32:54
  This is the Welsh 7th Doctor. I've not been Berlin yet.
• 1:32:57
  It's. So funny, right?
• 1:33:01
  That's a yeah and a great choice as well.
• 1:33:02
  And I didn't know any of that happened in the novelization.
• 1:33:05
  So I can't wait to discover all of that.
• 1:33:07
  My second choice is I said to you earlier, it's more wimer
• 1:33:11
  than Timey. And you said, well, what the
• 1:33:13
  hell does that mean? And I said, I'm not sure really
• 1:33:16
  is the last Resort by Paul Leonard, which starts off with
• 1:33:22
  the idea of sort of temporal tourist travel causing all
• 1:33:25
  manner of historical and cultural hiccups, right.
• 1:33:28
  So immediately we're going back in time and put McDonald's next
• 1:33:32
  to pyramids and things like this.
• 1:33:33
  And it has a lot of fun with stuff like that.
• 1:33:35
  But it all leads up to this sort of multiverse or so with with
• 1:33:40
  with having from scene to scene. We are in different universes.
• 1:33:45
  Yeah, we don't. We only realize this because we
• 1:33:48
  think Paul Lennon's forgotten what the characters look like
• 1:33:50
  and what the what the locations are like.
• 1:33:52
  And then no, you've suddenly realized, no, he's doing
• 1:33:54
  something very clever. So we traverse multiple
• 1:33:58
  realities because of all of this infection in the timeline with
• 1:34:02
  these time tourists before the end of the book where he crushes
• 1:34:06
  all possible realities into one devastating timeline in a visual
• 1:34:12
  which the book cover tries to depict but fails miserably
• 1:34:15
  because it's just a few Tardises on a desert plain of there's
• 1:34:21
  hundreds of millions of trillions of Tardises all
• 1:34:25
  encrusting on this spaceship and that basically the whole of
• 1:34:28
  reality is just fucked. We are fucked at this point.
• 1:34:32
  Huge, huge concepts all down to time travel.
• 1:34:36
  Really hard to put into words. I really want to cover it one
• 1:34:38
  day because I'd like to try and unpick it.
• 1:34:40
  It's a very complicated book but it is very timely.
• 1:34:43
  Wimey. A spreadsheet won't help you
• 1:34:46
  now. Help Paul Leonard, if I'm
• 1:34:49
  honest. For my final choice, I'm going
• 1:34:53
  to be my final choice is not a novel, it's a short story.
• 1:34:57
  Don't look at me like that it is a short story by a man whose
• 1:35:01
  name has haunted this episode. This continuity errors of Steven
• 1:35:05
  Moffett of. Course, he had to get in there
• 1:35:08
  somewhere. We're doing Tommy Wyoming.
• 1:35:11
  It's one of. Never read it.
• 1:35:12
  It's in Decalogue 3 Consequences.
• 1:35:14
  Absolute highlight of the book for me.
• 1:35:16
  One of the best Doctor Who stories ever written.
• 1:35:18
  I think. Read this long before he was
• 1:35:20
  writing Doctor Who and thinking he should write some more Doctor
• 1:35:22
  Who. It is the story.
• 1:35:25
  For what you wish for, right? It is the story of the 7th
• 1:35:30
  Doctor needs to save a planet, and the one thing he really,
• 1:35:35
  really needs in order to save this planet is a book from this
• 1:35:39
  library. And so the one thing standing in
• 1:35:42
  the way is the librarian who's not going to lend him the book.
• 1:35:45
  And so the book is told from multiple different perspectives
• 1:35:49
  through memory as you realise this woman thinking back on her
• 1:35:53
  life and remembering different things.
• 1:35:54
  And you realise the Doctor is successively travelling back
• 1:35:57
  through her past. She's a sour, sour old, you
• 1:36:01
  know, stereotype of a librarian successfully travelling back
• 1:36:05
  through her past, making her life this little bit better.
• 1:36:08
  So in different ways, putting onto a nicer bath so that when
• 1:36:11
  he meets her back in the library, she will be a nice
• 1:36:14
  person, kind of spirited and relent him.
• 1:36:17
  The book that she didn't want to lend him adds the story which
• 1:36:21
  the Doctor was being very self-serving and yet improving
• 1:36:24
  this woman's life in every way. A big Stephen Moffett ends on a
• 1:36:27
  brilliant joke which he still won't lend to the book, so he
• 1:36:29
  just goes back and gives a lectures here at university
• 1:36:32
  about the importance of lending library books to friends.
• 1:36:36
  So especially A Christmas Carol, right?
• 1:36:37
  But but for laughs. Yeah.
• 1:36:40
  And I think the fact that it's, I know you have some misgivings
• 1:36:42
  about A Christmas Carol, but doing it's, yeah, a short story
• 1:36:46
  buys you the license to just do a single concept.
• 1:36:50
  As to what is it leads into, what I'm slowly coming to
• 1:36:53
  realize about Stephen Moffett is that he sees it entirely as a
• 1:36:56
  sitcom. Because if that ain't A1 line
• 1:36:59
  sitcom pitch for Doctor Who if ever I heard one.
• 1:37:02
  Yeah. I mean, that's, that's all, all
• 1:37:05
  of Moffett's tropes there, isn't it?
• 1:37:07
  It's an even in a library. But it is also something I've
• 1:37:10
  heard spoken about with all hushed reverence of being, you
• 1:37:15
  know, the opening salvo for an incredible career in Doctor Who
• 1:37:18
  from Stephen Moffett. It it is more indicative of what
• 1:37:21
  his Doctor Who would be than damaged goods is of what Russell
• 1:37:25
  T Davis would be. Absolutely.
• 1:37:27
  Well, I must try and get out. I think Miles got the deck logs
• 1:37:30
  up in the attic and I'll track them out.
• 1:37:32
  I'm sure I'll have to read some pretty terrible short stories as
• 1:37:34
  well that would alongside it. I mean, we could have put, I
• 1:37:37
  could have put in Decalogue 3 as a timely wimy story in its own
• 1:37:41
  right because I need to reread it.
• 1:37:43
  Some stories are better than others, but it does have one of
• 1:37:45
  the best conceits of any of the short story collections, which
• 1:37:47
  is that the events in one story lead it somehow calls the events
• 1:37:53
  of the next story in a sort of Daisy chain or way like.
• 1:37:56
  We should do a short story collection at some point, don't
• 1:37:59
  you think? Yes, we should.
• 1:38:01
  Well, my last choice is I don't even know how I'm going to
• 1:38:04
  explain all this. I have taken a few notes
• 1:38:07
  sometime, never by Justin Richards.
• 1:38:10
  I didn't say it will come up again now.
• 1:38:12
  For some reason, crystals were seeded into the universe at the
• 1:38:16
  very start of the universe, right at the dawn of time,
• 1:38:19
  allowing for the entire universe to be mapped out.
• 1:38:23
  OK, so the Council of Eight can manipulate all the events of the
• 1:38:26
  universe, including killing off several of the Doctor's friends,
• 1:38:30
  including Sarah Jane in Bullet Time, Harry in Wolfsbane, Male
• 1:38:34
  in Heritage, Ace in Loving the Alien, and Sam Jones.
• 1:38:38
  As we find out, although it may be Dark Sam in The Gallifred
• 1:38:41
  Chronicles, it involves putting together pieces of a crystal
• 1:38:46
  skeleton which have been scattered through time in lots
• 1:38:49
  of different time zones, and the Doctor's putting all them
• 1:38:51
  together. And then the skeleton comes
• 1:38:53
  alive, which turns out to be one of the Council of A, who he then
• 1:38:56
  later on shoves into the time vortex and scatters through time
• 1:38:59
  for him to find. Later on, after the Council
• 1:39:02
  attempts to pin down the timeline into one determined
• 1:39:05
  course, the Doctor restores chaos and choice to the universe
• 1:39:09
  by flinging the multiverse back into existence and allowing for
• 1:39:13
  the right to choose in any given situation to be restored.
• 1:39:17
  It's hugely ambitious and it's attempting to tie I I don't know
• 1:39:25
  if it's entirely successful, but I really admire the ambition of
• 1:39:28
  it. It's attempting to tie in an
• 1:39:30
  entire or two ranges of books into one enormous narrative.
• 1:39:36
  Unfortunately, we didn't get the Daleks.
• 1:39:38
  So the Council of A, which are basically the Doctor, right?
• 1:39:42
  It's a incarnations of these skeleton, these crystal skeleton
• 1:39:46
  people, but it's trying to do stuff that stretches from the
• 1:39:50
  dawn of time to the end of the universe, taking in all those
• 1:39:54
  other books along the way. It is.
• 1:39:57
  And as a piece of plotting, it's incredibly well done.
• 1:40:02
  I just wonder if it's so sort of specifically and clinically
• 1:40:05
  done, it loses the oomph that you need in like a season
• 1:40:10
  finale, the sort of the drama of the situation, but.
• 1:40:15
  Me. It's Tommy.
• 1:40:16
  Why me? It's very complicated.
• 1:40:19
  Yeah, I do remember the really enjoying the cleverness of
• 1:40:25
  wrapping all of those events in the recent past Doctor adventure
• 1:40:28
  range into the into the ongoing 8th Doctor adventure.
• 1:40:32
  Arcus only going, oh, well, you've sort of made sense of
• 1:40:36
  what had become a bit of a horrible cliche at that point of
• 1:40:39
  killing off past companions. Yeah, I need to go back and
• 1:40:44
  reread it. I think.
• 1:40:45
  I mean, famously it was a bit of a, it was a, it was a mid season
• 1:40:50
  redraft, wasn't it? The the conclusion of the
• 1:40:53
  Sabbath, which is? I don't know, but I suspect
• 1:40:55
  that's why it ended up going on longer than one might have hoped
• 1:40:58
  it would be. We may have had Lance and the
• 1:41:01
  Daleks. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:41:03
  So we. Were robbed.
• 1:41:05
  At the time that Anachrophobia was written, the business
• 1:41:08
  associates to whom Sabbath referred were the Daleks, and
• 1:41:11
  the idea being that the Time Lords gone, they would arise as
• 1:41:15
  the as the masters of time again.
• 1:41:16
  How prescient. What do you not?
• 1:41:19
  Recall in the adventures of Henrietta St.
• 1:41:21
  You see, don't you, a disc in the sky and you think it's a
• 1:41:25
  sun, but it's it's the imagery of a Dalek ice stalk, the circle
• 1:41:30
  of a Dalek ice stalk and you see it in several stories and in
• 1:41:33
  fact in some time. Never the cheeky bastard.
• 1:41:36
  Once all the IS have been dotted and the T's have been crossed,
• 1:41:40
  he then says an ice stalk swung round watching all of the events
• 1:41:44
  that have been transferred. How can we use all this to our
• 1:41:47
  advantage? He's still got them in there.
• 1:41:50
  That's the beginning of the Time War right there, yeah.
• 1:41:52
  Probably. Probably, but I think the what I
• 1:41:58
  realised was there wasn't really much of this going on in Virgin,
• 1:42:01
  but there was quite a bit going on with the BBC.
• 1:42:04
  Yeah, yeah, to the point where I remember someone saying at the
• 1:42:07
  time around about 2000 and three, 2004 saying they used to
• 1:42:11
  complain that there weren't enough time travel stories in
• 1:42:14
  Doctor and now they're getting a bit bored of them.
• 1:42:16
  You also had things like emotional chemistry.
• 1:42:19
  You also had things like trading futures, as you've mentioned
• 1:42:22
  that you had the rest of the alternative universe.
• 1:42:24
  You'd be hard pressed to find. The book of the Still is a time
• 1:42:27
  loop. The Crooked World doesn't have
• 1:42:31
  time travel in it. No, no, that's the one sort of
• 1:42:34
  peering up, going I'm doing something different.
• 1:42:38
  I've got cartoons, but trading futures though, is this is the
• 1:42:43
  funniest one because you think it's a time travel story and
• 1:42:46
  well, we'll deal with that when we do the book club episode.
• 1:42:50
  We'll just say Ian Richardson's a very bad man.
• 1:42:54
  Michael, what a what a joy. What a joy to talk about how far
• 1:42:58
  you can go, anachrophobia and timey wiming this.
• 1:43:01
  But you and I are heading into well, they're so slightly less
• 1:43:06
  complicated, a less pretentious, and a more effortlessly readable
• 1:43:12
  direction. Yes, next time on the book club.
• 1:43:16
  This is very exciting. OK people, we are going to be
• 1:43:18
  doing Shakedown by Terence Dix. But wait, it will not just be us
• 1:43:25
  two. We will be joined by special
• 1:43:28
  Best Book Club reader and I think probably world shakedown
• 1:43:33
  experts, Mr. Dylan Rees. Author of Downtime.
• 1:43:38
  Honestly, I've been trying to do research on this book and he
• 1:43:40
  keeps bloody popping up on every wiki page there is about this
• 1:43:43
  book. But not just.
• 1:43:46
  But wait, there's more, because later I.
• 1:43:50
  Can't handle more. Not only are we going to be
• 1:43:52
  talking about Shakedown with Dylan here on the Hamster Book
• 1:43:55
  Club, you will also be able to hear all three of us over on
• 1:43:58
  Dylan's podcast Doctor Who Too Hot for TV, where we will be
• 1:44:02
  talking about the film of Shakedown, Return of the
• 1:44:06
  Sontarans. Which you have endured.
• 1:44:08
  Sorry, watched, haven't you? Which I have now seen.
• 1:44:15
  There's a little, I'm not sure how I feel about this.
• 1:44:17
  You know, I'm not used to sharing you with other people.
• 1:44:19
  You're the only person on this book club that goes solo every
• 1:44:22
  single time. But this is Dylan Reece, you
• 1:44:25
  know? You, you stole me off Dylan.
• 1:44:28
  And now I've done five times as many with you.
• 1:44:33
  Look, I just hope this can be a process of healing.
• 1:44:36
  Well, we'll, we'll try and get the therapy going whilst we
• 1:44:40
  whilst we navigate our way through Caroline Forward, Sophie
• 1:44:43
  Aldred and Terence Dix's pros, but it sounds absolutely
• 1:44:47
  delightful. I can't wait to talk to you
• 1:44:50
  about it. Mills, we have an assignment in
• 1:44:55
  the In the far future, crystals have been seeded into the
• 1:44:58
  universe. Let's go.
• 1:45:06
  OK. Thanks, Joe.