Latest / A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast / Talks to Paul Quinn about his choice of The Haunting of Villa Diodati

Transcript

Talks to Paul Quinn about his choice of The Haunting of Villa Diodati · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:38
  Welcome back to our hamster with a blood pen knife, the Doctor
• 0:41
  Who commentary podcast pull Will you get the candles going,
• 0:48
  please Will you turn the lights down?
• 0:50
  There's a wind blowing and I think you've got a good book in
• 0:54
  you tonight. There are three good books that
• 0:59
  emerge from this event that we're looking at here tonight.
• 1:02
  Tell. Me E literary event here that
• 1:05
  we're about to view. Are you talking about my book?
• 1:07
  Are you talking about the fictional books that we're going
• 1:09
  to see in the next episode? Whichever.
• 1:12
  One you want to talk about. Oh.
• 1:13
  Well, mine doesn't exist yet, so let's not jinx that.
• 1:15
  But yeah, here we are. We're going to see the birth of
• 1:18
  not just Frankenstein, but also the vampire and also whatever it
• 1:25
  is that Byron writes during this event that may or may not be
• 1:30
  ripped off by John Padore when he writes the vampire also
• 1:33
  during this event. So this is the most important
• 1:35
  literary event of the 19th century that I think we're about
• 1:38
  to see here, turned into a kill fest by Doctor Who because we
• 1:43
  are looking at the. Haunting of Villa, dear Darcy.
• 1:48
  Now just a small caveat. Originally we were going to do
• 1:51
  time flight tonight. I feel as if we may have swung
• 1:53
  in the other direction in terms of quality.
• 1:56
  I I will not have shit talk about time flight and we are
• 2:01
  going to do in time flight and so everyone can hear what would
• 2:04
  have been my pitch to Orbis books black archives for time
• 2:08
  flight because. Time.
• 2:12
  Set aside, put in anthe ailing in a Papiomache racist mask.
• 2:17
  Spoilers for anyone who haven't seen it yet.
• 2:19
  There's a lot more going on in time flights.
• 2:21
  So that is something we are going to do.
• 2:23
  But yes, in terms of quality on screen, we have gone in the
• 2:28
  other direction in terms of quality on script.
• 2:30
  We're we're equal pagans here I think.
• 2:34
  Wow I think I think this is top five new who tell me I'm wrong.
• 2:43
  Do you mean top five, the revival from 2005?
• 2:46
  Absolutely, yes. The end of the revival as we've
• 2:49
  just seen it this year. I don't know if I put top five,
• 2:54
  I put top ten. I think it's a brilliant episode
• 2:56
  and I think I, it might be my favorite Jodie episode.
• 2:58
  I I of all the time. I, I think so, yeah, I think so.
• 3:03
  I don't know, I haven't watched it in a while.
• 3:05
  So it might be kind of new nostalgia kicking in that.
• 3:08
  I mean, I do, like I said to you before we come on the call, like
• 3:11
  I said on Jim Allenby's talk, and I think I might have said
• 3:14
  this so hard because I do say the same things over and over
• 3:16
  again. And history was much, much
• 3:19
  kinder to Jodie Whittaker than the Not My Who shits were and
• 3:25
  still are. I think this is a great run in
• 3:28
  the show's history. I think probably it does become
• 3:31
  a bit too focused on the fans, certainly when you get into
• 3:34
  Thomas Jordan and Flux. But it's a great series, It's a
• 3:38
  great run. Chipman was a great showrunner
• 3:41
  and I don't think there was as much bullshit going on behind
• 3:44
  the scenes as there had been with Russell T Davis Part 1 and
• 3:48
  in the revival. And certainly the kind of weird
• 3:51
  bin fire of Moffett ISM, which was a different type of bin fire
• 3:55
  from RTD. But this seems calm, structured,
• 3:59
  focused and you get. Cast, but get on, you know.
• 4:04
  And, and the fact, you know, I don't know we're going to have
• 4:06
  every Doctor Who back in Big Finish, but we have got Jodie
• 4:09
  Wicker back and she was a great ambassador for the show.
• 4:12
  She is a great ambassador for the show.
• 4:14
  She was a great Doctor. She is a great Doctor.
• 4:16
  And this is a great story. I do think because the reaction
• 4:20
  was the same mix because they're people that love this era,
• 4:23
  always love this error. But Mick, certainly because that
• 4:26
  was the case. I just think there's rich
• 4:29
  pickings for those people that took against it at the time.
• 4:32
  Now the I'm hearing it all the time.
• 4:35
  Or do you know what? After what's come recently, I
• 4:38
  went back and watched Chip Nolan.
• 4:39
  Jesus Christ, that's much more to my taste.
• 4:41
  Is it always just what's coming out now people don't like?
• 4:44
  Yeah, I mean, if if the current stuff is shit, you will go back
• 4:48
  and you will look more kindly. I think I I think I do think
• 4:53
  flux did become did turn it into a show for the fans far more
• 4:59
  than it had been previously. I think what's interesting with
• 5:02
  11, when you don't have any returning monsters or returning
• 5:05
  villains, you have these stand alone stories.
• 5:07
  And then into 12 it looks like that you bring the master back
• 5:10
  and and a great version of the master.
• 5:12
  You know, the revival has had two top tier masters, Missy and
• 5:18
  and and the master under under under Chibnall.
• 5:21
  And then you go full into not just something something for the
• 5:26
  fans, but something for the fans that they won't, may not like
• 5:29
  and like the timeless children. And but before that, you you you
• 5:33
  have this kind of sustained exercise in terror.
• 5:37
  It's a brilliant Cyberman. It it it's it's.
• 5:40
  Mad. Chip Chipnall does the Cyberman
• 5:43
  better than Moffat and Davis. Chipnall does the Sultarans
• 5:47
  better than Moffat and Davis. I as aside from series one I'd
• 5:53
  probably say he doesn't Daleks better as well.
• 5:55
  I think he just get he understands the old.
• 5:57
  I don't think he tries to innovate too much, he just
• 5:59
  focuses on what makes them great.
• 6:02
  Yeah, and and he does return the angels to greatness as well.
• 6:05
  Yeah, he does. Yeah.
• 6:08
  I watched this just before we came on the call and I was
• 6:12
  struck by the direction of this episode.
• 6:16
  Like I think a haunted house story is the most pony cliched
• 6:21
  genre TV thing you can do. And aside from a couple of
• 6:25
  examples, How the Ghost Stole Christmas from The X-Files is
• 6:28
  another great example. I think they're often let down
• 6:31
  by sort of leaden an atmospheric direction.
• 6:35
  Emma Sullivan, I think this is her only episode.
• 6:39
  I think she just knocks it out of the park.
• 6:42
  There's it's thick with atmosphere, this story.
• 6:45
  I mean I think Doctor Who doesn't done hasn't done that
• 6:47
  many haunted house episodes. So although it is a happening
• 6:50
  cliche, Hide Ghost Light and the funfair episode in The Chase and
• 7:01
  maybe Day of the Daleks. Yeah.
• 7:04
  It's playing with it and there's, there's, there's kind
• 7:07
  of some of some liftings of it for Brain and Morbius maybe.
• 7:13
  But it's not there that often. And so when it turns up, you
• 7:17
  have to do it well, because you're right, it is.
• 7:19
  It's the biggest cliche in TV. And of course, because you have
• 7:23
  some stunning examples. I mean, just last week talking
• 7:28
  pictures, Afro pub, no advertising whatsoever.
• 7:30
  Dumped maybe the greatest one of all time.
• 7:32
  The stone tape was there Friday night.
• 7:34
  John Deere. He I was was was Toby Haddock.
• 7:37
  He doing a tweet along to it as well.
• 7:39
  So you have to get it right. Otherwise it just looks like ho
• 7:43
  hum, just another haunted house ghost.
• 7:45
  Like doesn't have the greatest director in the world, but it
• 7:47
  gets it on the script and some of the directorial techniques he
• 7:50
  uses. But here you're right, it's a
• 7:52
  kind of a, it's a total effect. Use of camera, use of lighting,
• 7:56
  use of angles. A real sense of building up, of
• 7:59
  terror. The child as well, of course.
• 8:02
  Just I mean, we will talk about the child, right, because I
• 8:05
  could have sworn when I first watched this, I held my breath
• 8:08
  and I don't do that very often in doctor thinking.
• 8:11
  Is he going to kill that child or for a second I thought he
• 8:14
  was. But I do think as well.
• 8:16
  I do think they're they're addressing complaints about the
• 8:20
  era here. I think there's plenty for the
• 8:22
  free regulars to do, the free companions.
• 8:24
  They all get something to do in the story.
• 8:27
  So they're utilized really well. But it still has, and another
• 8:30
  cliche is a big cast of guest characters.
• 8:33
  That's another complaint about the era.
• 8:35
  Beautifully defined, all of them with that superb exposition
• 8:39
  scene where they're all dancing. So it's all done through jokes
• 8:43
  and gossip. So we're getting everything we
• 8:45
  need to know about those characters in a really fun way.
• 8:48
  It pushes Jodie like everyone goes, you know, Joe doesn't get
• 8:51
  Doctor moment. She's not heroic enough, she's
• 8:53
  not well. She gets some wonderful speeches
• 8:55
  and this she gets to confront a Cyberman.
• 8:58
  Jodie Whittaker has an ability to to do Cold Fury in a way few
• 9:04
  other actors can without it pitching into kind of being
• 9:08
  overplayed or underplayed. Her first truly great scene as a
• 9:12
  Doctor is in the Sugara experiment when she's extolling
• 9:15
  the virtues of the engine, and it's a beautiful moment in a
• 9:18
  weird old episode. It's a better episode than
• 9:20
  people think, but the some of the stuff here is astonishing
• 9:23
  and you can see why she was cast, just what a good actor she
• 9:28
  is and, and, and and and how she, she when she gets good
• 9:31
  material. And of course, the other great
• 9:33
  cliche of the, of the, you know, complaints is, oh, there's a
• 9:35
  script. It was a script.
• 9:36
  What? What do you mean?
• 9:38
  What? What is it in the scripts that
• 9:40
  you think is deficient? Because you're only using that
• 9:42
  because you know full well that if you complain about her, if
• 9:45
  you can't point to performance, it's because you don't like it
• 9:47
  because it's a woman and therefore you are just a
• 9:50
  misogynist. And I'm pretty sure the Venn
• 9:53
  diagram of people who didn't like Shuky Gatwa because he was
• 9:55
  black and the vendor and people who didn't like Jodie Whittick
• 9:58
  because she was a woman is actually a circle.
• 10:00
  And they're sat there in the middle, wanking furiously on
• 10:03
  their YouTube essays about it. But they obviously haven't
• 10:06
  watched her at all, frankly. And I was.
• 10:09
  I was at a convention right a couple of weeks ago and there
• 10:12
  was a. Bless you for you.
• 10:14
  In the queue for like I was, I wanted to get a Peter Davidson
• 10:18
  picture because I these one of the few doctors I haven't, and
• 10:21
  she's banging on about the chimney era and she's going, Oh,
• 10:24
  well, you know, nothing against Jody or anything like that.
• 10:27
  This woman in the queue, really loud woman.
• 10:30
  She wants everyone to hear her, but it's the writing that I just
• 10:33
  couldn't get on with her. She dressed up, wait, wait.
• 10:36
  And then in the next second, she's extolling the virtues of
• 10:39
  the robot revolution. I was like, well, there we go.
• 10:45
  I mean, I'm not going to tell you about that because of course
• 10:47
  we are going doing RTD Series 2 who aren't we?
• 10:52
  So we'll, we'll, we'll, but that's an interesting choice.
• 10:57
  But I don't think all those complaints are without merit.
• 11:01
  I think occasionally there can be too much exposition.
• 11:04
  I think occasionally there are too many guest characters, and I
• 11:06
  think occasionally the regulars don't get enough to do.
• 11:09
  They're just sort of ciphers in the scripts.
• 11:12
  But I do think this episode gets all those things bang on.
• 11:16
  The problem of course and it's Darren Davison. 3 companions is
• 11:20
  a lot and if you haven't got 7 episodes of the TARDIS crew
• 11:25
  dragging themselves over mountains to get down to Peking,
• 11:30
  you know you run out of things for the companions to do.
• 11:32
  Which of course is why you have to kill off Adric.
• 11:36
  And I think once Ryan leaves, actually, you can see that their
• 11:42
  focus in 11 on Ryan is probably the miss focus because it
• 11:47
  ignores Yas and Yas is a really great companion And the
• 11:51
  relationship. I mean, I know Meg has spoken on
• 11:56
  videos of me about the the the kind of baiting that goes on in
• 12:01
  the relationship between Yas and the Doctor.
• 12:03
  And it's really heavily handedly addressed in the reality war
• 12:08
  when when Whittaker comes back. And it's kind this kind of tras
• 12:14
  RTD pointing out what Chipnall didn't do and that he shouldn't
• 12:17
  have done. Well, let's wait and see what
• 12:19
  everyone then writes to say what RTD did that he shouldn't have
• 12:23
  done, but he did it anyway. When when we get, you know, if
• 12:25
  we ever get Doctor Who back on the telly again and it's not on
• 12:27
  on on CBeebies, right? It's not going to be appropriate
• 12:30
  for them to address that. But this once you get it down to
• 12:34
  two, which is more natural number of companions travelling
• 12:39
  or one for preference in new who then you can see just how good
• 12:44
  that targets team is. 3 is a different juggling act.
• 12:47
  It doesn't always work, but it does work here.
• 12:49
  You're absolutely right here. I've just listened to Vampire
• 12:53
  Weekend, which is the first Jodie Big Finish.
• 12:56
  So it's just her and Mandip. Yeah, and they get loads of
• 12:59
  Jewel Ox witty fast when that chemistry is on fire.
• 13:04
  And actually, those scenes in Halloween Apocalypse where it's
• 13:07
  just the two of them, it's gold. I know.
• 13:11
  I love that. And I think that was a good
• 13:13
  choice to put him in there. Very likeable.
• 13:15
  And they made a great threesome. But yeah, you're right, I think
• 13:19
  maybe 3 was too many, despite the fact that I like all three
• 13:22
  characters. Oh, no, they're all fine.
• 13:24
  And you can you can see, you could see combinations of the
• 13:27
  doctor and two of them. And it's it's brilliant.
• 13:30
  But 3 is too many, I think in in the current shape of a of a
• 13:37
  Doctor Who story, because the 45 minutes is a really testing
• 13:42
  amount of time in television terms, because it's only really
• 13:45
  42 minutes once you take out the credit sequence.
• 13:48
  And then you've got to have a story, you've got to have a
• 13:50
  villain, you've got to have other characters, and you've got
• 13:53
  to have something for your companions to do.
• 13:54
  And eventually you end up with, let's just have them asleep in a
• 13:58
  delta wave machine feel 4 episodes.
• 14:01
  Fuck it, that will do. Ryan Mcgraham could be at the
• 14:05
  casino just playing, you know, playing at the crabs tables.
• 14:08
  Yeah, I mean, you, Yeah, you, you, you with the weaker
• 14:11
  episode, I think do suggest that.
• 14:12
  But the stronger episodes, I mean, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm
• 14:14
  gonna, I'm gonna piss people off here.
• 14:16
  What's it? Battle of Razaks before or
• 14:17
  whatever it's called. That's a great episode.
• 14:20
  All you think is you can come at me.
• 14:22
  I can be found online. You can tell me what I think.
• 14:24
  That's a great episode. Pirate Planet with a budget.
• 14:28
  It's not, it's not untrue. It's got messed up Jedi in it.
• 14:32
  It's got suddenly Tim Shaw is a genuine threat and you can see
• 14:37
  what Children was doing. Wicker's brilliant, but the
• 14:39
  three main the three companions have got something to do.
• 14:42
  Graham there's a moral choice there and it's it's awesome.
• 14:46
  So on it when it works, it works really, really well.
• 14:49
  I. Don't think Can You Hear Me does
• 14:51
  that as well. It gives all three of them a
• 14:53
  very different mental health plot line and approaches that
• 14:56
  subject in really different ways with each of them.
• 14:58
  I think they absolutely can do it.
• 15:01
  I've got one more question then before we press play, and that
• 15:04
  is I know because we had a quick conversation off Mike a second
• 15:07
  ago that you have some issues with the Witch Finders for its
• 15:13
  historical accuracy. Yeah, well, this is delving
• 15:17
  into, you know, a more recent history and a very important
• 15:23
  moment in literary history. Any issues here?
• 15:28
  No, but that's because one, I'm a hypocrite, 2.
• 15:32
  I've been drinking. And three, what it's asking you
• 15:37
  of history here is different to what it's asking in the witch
• 15:39
  Finders. So the witch finders, what is
• 15:42
  it? Is it meant to be Pendle, isn't
• 15:44
  it in 1610 or 1612? Sorry, here comes the old early
• 15:48
  modernist bore hat on. And there is indeed a witch
• 15:52
  trial in Pendle. It's particularly nasty one and
• 15:55
  but it's probably to do with the fact that because it's
• 15:57
  Lancashire, you've got Rex and Catholics there.
• 16:00
  And so it's probably an attack on survivors in the Catholic
• 16:04
  community. James the 1st is nowhere near
• 16:07
  Pendle at that point. James doesn't do it.
• 16:09
  And and the fact that they've got a woman as the witch Finder
• 16:12
  is odd because it was the the most famous Witch Finder from 20
• 16:15
  years later, of course, is Matthew Hopkins, who of course,
• 16:18
  famously is played by Vincent Price in in Witch Finder General
• 16:23
  and Michael Reeves 2nd and final film.
• 16:25
  It's a great piece of folk horror.
• 16:27
  But yeah, I think I'm, I'm, I'm kinder to that now than I was.
• 16:31
  I played a few years ago. It's a piece of hope horror.
• 16:34
  I think it's brilliant and just as a piece of horror.
• 16:37
  And to be fair, as historically inaccurate as it may be, Alan
• 16:41
  Cumming is very funny and I can't remember her name her from
• 16:46
  Downtown Abbey as Becca. So it's she's.
• 16:49
  Aaron. Osborne Finnegan, isn't it?
• 16:51
  That's it, she's fantastic in that role.
• 16:54
  I mean, I think Alan Cummings really deserves a much better
• 16:58
  story than this and Lux. Well, he's got two shots now,
• 17:02
  all right. Yeah, well, maybe please at some
• 17:06
  point, maybe because he deserves it, because Alan Cummings is is
• 17:10
  brilliant. But Lux, yeah, he's he's better
• 17:12
  as soon as the first. I think I.
• 17:14
  Watched her show the other day, you know, with him and Miriam
• 17:16
  Margulies because they're busy mates, sort of.
• 17:18
  Going around. Going around Scotland, yeah,
• 17:21
  it's King James and the Meep. Hang it out.
• 17:25
  Very odd. It's stranger.
• 17:27
  You can put those combinations together, can't you?
• 17:29
  Anyway, sorry, historical accuracy and digitality.
• 17:33
  Well, it, it kind of all you need is that they're there
• 17:37
  because of course it, it doesn't really dwell on Frankenstein or
• 17:43
  the vampire or Byron's career, because by Byron's interest in
• 17:47
  this and that he's kind of a bore.
• 17:49
  He's trying to seduce the doctor and the doctor just isn't
• 17:52
  interested in this walking cock. And but he does get the kind of
• 17:57
  really twisted relationships there that Byron shagged his way
• 18:00
  through that and they're attempting to get back together.
• 18:03
  And so you do get quite a a nice in miniature idea about this,
• 18:09
  this relationship between Byron and Shelly.
• 18:13
  Obviously it's irrelevant to, to to the episode, but I mean, what
• 18:16
  happens after they're in the villa and Polidori writes the
• 18:21
  vampire, which was the first major vampire fiction.
• 18:25
  I've got a a student in the third year, he's working on
• 18:28
  vampire fiction at the moment. And so they've done this,
• 18:32
  they've done the vampire as part of a wider look at the vampire
• 18:37
  from some texts are probably Stoker uses.
• 18:40
  So when the vampires believed to be to be real and then going all
• 18:44
  the way up into Buffy and how the at the 19th century, the
• 18:47
  vampire shifts have been about the vampire to be an encoding
• 18:50
  for something else. So about sexuality or about
• 18:55
  foreign invasion or about the crisis of masculinity or about
• 18:58
  about AIDS. I think what you get into the
• 18:59
  20th century and Polidori. Polidori seems to have killed
• 19:03
  himself. He's accused of plagiarism when
• 19:06
  he publishes the vampire there. Everyone thinks his Byron has
• 19:09
  written it, although it's clearly his Byron is the vampire
• 19:11
  in that. And so there's an interesting
• 19:14
  story that they didn't touch on because it's kind of irrelevant.
• 19:17
  What they want is, as you said, it's a haunted house.
• 19:20
  Here they are. They write these two major
• 19:23
  texts. I mean, obviously the vampire is
• 19:25
  largely unknown, but of course it leads to Camilla and then it
• 19:28
  leads to Dracula and then this kind of whole vogue for, for
• 19:32
  vampires in fiction, which broadly always speak in Dracula.
• 19:36
  The, the, the idea of the sexy vampire, I think does come from
• 19:39
  here. And it is, it's Byron himself.
• 19:41
  It's interesting that in this story they undercut the notion
• 19:44
  of Byron's seductiveness. The Doctor is immune to it and
• 19:47
  he never tries it. Yes.
• 19:48
  I don't think I'm is remembering that.
• 19:51
  No, really Interesting. There is just the Doctor that he
• 19:54
  tries, right? Scene as.
• 19:55
  Well, I mean, it's kind of, it's really interesting use of some
• 19:59
  of the scenes that we'd be familiar with from Pride and
• 20:02
  Prejudice, for example. So you said about the dance,
• 20:04
  about the gossip. It's really making use of.
• 20:08
  Those type of scenes in in Jane Austen, but more particularly in
• 20:11
  the TV adaptations of it. So it's a really literate piece,
• 20:14
  but it's a really silly literate piece as well.
• 20:16
  And I love it to bits. But I haven't seen it in a
• 20:18
  while. So I might discover something
• 20:20
  here that I might go, I don't really like this Joe.
• 20:24
  Why can't we watch Time Flights? We're going to watch Time
• 20:27
  Flight. Don't you watch Shalom bash
• 20:29
  Warren on. Oh God no, that's racist.
• 20:32
  Shut up, Joe. Lasting, Lasting.
• 20:36
  And that is another the one criticism I really want to bring
• 20:41
  up because you know how people say about the first female
• 20:46
  doctor and we didn't get enough gender politics in the show.
• 20:53
  Yeah. In the same way that, you know,
• 20:54
  Shooty Gatwald was hired and the very first scene he shot was the
• 20:58
  end of dot bubble. I think there is, it's just
• 21:04
  subtle. I think it's there in the witch
• 21:06
  finders. Absolutely, because she's not
• 21:09
  considered, you know, she couldn't be possibly be the
• 21:11
  witch Finder general because she's a woman.
• 21:14
  She's there for innate gossip or whatever he accuses her of.
• 21:17
  It's absolutely here in Diadati and then in War of the Sontarans
• 21:23
  as well, where the general refuses to acknowledge military
• 21:26
  advice from her because of her, because of her gender.
• 21:30
  So I think it's there that Chip Norway is just, he's a more
• 21:33
  subtle writer than. David, come David's become a
• 21:37
  very, very didactic, verbose writer.
• 21:40
  I think the only time that really works, and again it it's
• 21:43
  one for when we look at the second season of Shuki Gatwa, is
• 21:48
  when in the machine of the story, it's the Doctor as a
• 21:52
  black man as opposed to the Doctor being played by a black
• 21:56
  man. And it's very, he says in my
• 21:58
  black skin. And it's really interesting then
• 22:01
  that it's becomes the Doctor is black, not that the Doctor being
• 22:05
  played by a black man. I'm almost willing to bet
• 22:07
  though, just because of how that episode turned out, that that
• 22:11
  was the one that RTD had the least.
• 22:14
  I don't think he. Changed Oh, I'm sure that's
• 22:16
  true. I'm sure that's true.
• 22:18
  I mean, I, I, I love I like the last five episodes of that
• 22:21
  season There there's there's a there's a spoiler for what's to
• 22:24
  come, you know, in a in a clear sign of insanity.
• 22:28
  I am going to defend the reality.
• 22:31
  So will I, don't worry, not wish I look, but Jesus.
• 22:35
  Well, look. Should we go in and watch this
• 22:37
  haunted house story? And because perhaps you can tell
• 22:40
  me what the mysterious ghosts that Graham keeps seeing
• 22:44
  throughout the episode are all about.
• 22:46
  Because we don't ever get an explanation.
• 22:49
  I mean, there's probably a bit of sapphire and stealing that as
• 22:51
  well somewhere. That's about a thick with
• 22:53
  atmosphere. Well, do you want to count a
• 22:54
  suit? 321.
• 23:01
  Here we go. Let's see if this can play.
• 23:05
  Is that playing? Yeah.
• 23:07
  You've got a Lake Geneva and a house on a hill.
• 23:10
  Which of course, if you know, you know.
• 23:13
  And if you don't know, it gives you an indication of where you
• 23:16
  are at least. I won't keep banging on about
• 23:20
  the direction, but I will say that pretty much every shot in
• 23:24
  this episode. Is amazing when you get the shot
• 23:28
  of the cyber man but you don't know it's the cyber man on the
• 23:30
  lake when it appears. Got a genuine chill then where I
• 23:35
  rarely get with Doctor Who. No, I do.
• 23:37
  You know, when I got it was when the Cyberman first goes up to
• 23:40
  the baby and looks down and the face, it's, it's all kind of in
• 23:45
  shadows and it's not quite a Cyberman's face.
• 23:47
  It's really ghoulish. I mean, it is.
• 23:50
  There's a lot of the Borg in this.
• 23:52
  I think it made me think when they opened the drawer in Q who
• 23:57
  and the baby's lying in the drawer.
• 24:00
  But, but scarier, they go further.
• 24:02
  Oh, yeah, this is much scary. Yeah, yeah.
• 24:04
  A bit where he says, well, we will get there because I think
• 24:07
  he's, I think this is Chipnall addressing a Moffet trope about
• 24:11
  love conquers all. The bit where we think that
• 24:14
  Shelley's going to convince our Shad because she says, you know,
• 24:16
  you're a, you're a father. You know love conquers all when
• 24:19
  he just goes no, no, I slit their throats.
• 24:23
  I mean, Chipnall, I think Chip was more realistic, I think.
• 24:29
  Oh Paul, I love the Butler man, he gets so much comedy in this.
• 24:35
  Well, again, it's playing with a trope, isn't it?
• 24:37
  The what what the Butler's doing these type of things.
• 24:39
  They're the murderer or they're the last week killed.
• 24:43
  I think in Anthony Reed's episode of Saffron Still, which
• 24:47
  was again is the haunted house episode which is not liked but I
• 24:51
  I really like that. Which one?
• 24:52
  The first one. No, it's the one where it's kind
• 24:56
  of like they go back to the 1930 and it's.
• 25:00
  With that crazy old woman in it, yeah, it becomes a murder
• 25:02
  mystery. But I love the fact that he
• 25:06
  keeps popping into the room and scaring the shit out of Graham
• 25:08
  all the time. He just sort of emerges.
• 25:10
  Isn't he? He's like, because butlers are
• 25:12
  scary in these things. They've become a cliche, haven't
• 25:15
  they? Because the Butler is
• 25:16
  everywhere. So here we are.
• 25:17
  This is Byron, isn't it? With Mary Shelley.
• 25:19
  And I forget the other woman is is it Byron's sister or is it
• 25:23
  Shelley's sister? I can't remember now.
• 25:24
  You know me, but why didn't pay attention at school?
• 25:26
  Is this all accurate then? This did occur.
• 25:29
  Well, by Byron is on a lake in Geneva in 1816.
• 25:34
  Byron does have a complicated love life, including Shag and
• 25:37
  his own half sister, and the Shelley's are on the lambs.
• 25:41
  They do end up there. And of course there is.
• 25:43
  I forget the other woman is who's trying to wreak into the
• 25:45
  relationship with Byron. Because Byron is the great
• 25:48
  shagger of the early 19th century.
• 25:51
  So is it accurate? It's accurate in terms of what
• 25:54
  we think about Byron because of course, famously he's mad, bad
• 25:58
  and dangerous to know. What's interesting here is he's
• 26:01
  not the focus, and he's a kind of.
• 26:05
  I do like the pay off at the end though where he tries to.
• 26:08
  He basically says to the woman who's trying to Rick into the
• 26:10
  romance, come on, let's go and fuck, and she just goes no Sir,
• 26:13
  the spell is broken and walks away from him.
• 26:16
  I mean, what's interesting, I, I said this to you in a, in a
• 26:19
  message, yes. And I've said it before about
• 26:22
  how Chipnall, Chipnall's use of history is very similar to what
• 26:26
  Horrible Histories had done and were doing.
• 26:29
  So of course, if you look at who he who he includes in his story,
• 26:33
  so Rosa Parks famously, then you have partition Mary Seacole.
• 26:41
  Mary Seacole, who? There's a whole song about Mary
• 26:43
  Seacole, and it's been really important to and that's why the
• 26:47
  right really don't like Horrible Histories.
• 26:49
  They've kind of gone off the boil about it, but they were
• 26:52
  really wild. On Chipnor, who either, really?
• 26:55
  It's interesting, but Chipnor does pick these type of figures
• 26:57
  that Horrible Histories are looked at who've been overlooked
• 27:00
  or that you challenge the assumptions or the the kind of
• 27:04
  the approved appearance of these figures.
• 27:06
  And so this is Byron. He can't seduce anyone in this
• 27:09
  episode. What says the right?
• 27:12
  You're celebrating women in history.
• 27:15
  Outrageous. Well, because he does it as well
• 27:18
  with what's her name? Oh God, Byron's daughter.
• 27:26
  Love Lace, is it? Or Curt?
• 27:27
  Oh. Ada.
• 27:28
  Ada, yeah, really a key figure who's been overlooked because of
• 27:33
  because Babbage. Babbage has got better PR and of
• 27:36
  course she's absolutely crucial to it.
• 27:37
  And that's a nice link there, of course, that you're able to take
• 27:41
  those two characters and you run them across the across the
• 27:45
  episode. I love this.
• 27:45
  Nobody mentioned Frankenstein and don't interfere.
• 27:48
  So it's like Hartnell's there for a second, you know, do
• 27:50
  rewrite history. I mean, do you know what my mark
• 27:53
  was doing when I was watching this early?
• 27:55
  He was going, Oh my God, imagine if this was the first Dr. Ian
• 27:58
  Barber and Vicki, he goes, it would be great.
• 28:01
  Which you could. Imagine.
• 28:03
  Oh, it's all in the house. Yeah, I think you could you.
• 28:06
  Mentioned the chase earlier. Yes, I think yeah, I think there
• 28:10
  are there's there's a lot of links back to Season 1 and
• 28:14
  season 2 in Chippenham. I think here we are of the
• 28:16
  dancing that we've seen. If you've watched Emma with Ramo
• 28:20
  Lagari in it, if you've seen it in Pride and Prejudice, of
• 28:23
  course, which is the other story.
• 28:25
  It really kick starts the the resurrection of this type of
• 28:29
  classic TV with Andrew Davis script.
• 28:32
  Like most of it. Of course, the one before it is
• 28:34
  is Middlemarch and with all of this is coming into play here I
• 28:37
  think, but as a whole. Catches you up with all of these
• 28:41
  people, with such economy. You know who these people are at
• 28:44
  the end of this scene. There is, there is tremendous
• 28:46
  narrative economy here. It's a great, it's a great
• 28:48
  technique here. It's a sign of of a of a great
• 28:51
  writer and a great script editor and a great showrunner.
• 28:53
  And like just it's not always done as good as this.
• 28:56
  Like I, I really like ascension of the assignment that comes
• 28:59
  next, but you know, when sort of this is yet Lamy and my name is
• 29:02
  Ko Sharma. So I don't want to be a bit
• 29:05
  functional, but it is exceptionally well done here.
• 29:08
  I think that, I think the, the, the difference is that they're
• 29:12
  dealing with real people here. And so some of them.
• 29:16
  They keep coming back to the kid, don't they?
• 29:18
  Do you know, it's that like that?
• 29:19
  You keep seeing the kid. I It's working in two ways, of
• 29:23
  course. Or three.
• 29:24
  Maybe it's the old George Lucas thing.
• 29:26
  If you want to elicit a reaction in an audience, you show them a
• 29:30
  puppy and you threaten to break its neck.
• 29:33
  We've got something going on here, haven't we?
• 29:34
  Then when the Cyberman is there with the child, but of course
• 29:38
  it's moving us forward to significant children, we get to
• 29:41
  the end of the season and the doctor as a child maybe go back
• 29:46
  to Season 6 as well. You could write, you know, the
• 29:48
  most spine channel book of all time.
• 29:50
  So again, very heartening, telling everyone not to
• 29:52
  interfere and then getting involved and then she comes back
• 29:55
  with or we could just do another quadrille, you know?
• 29:59
  You you really? You like the line in the
• 30:03
  Unicorn, don't you? Or is it the wasp in the
• 30:05
  uniform? Yeah.
• 30:08
  I mean, I can't stand that. I, you know.
• 30:11
  Yeah. Gareth Robin, he's he's bloody
• 30:14
  awful. Oh, look, I know about this
• 30:17
  literature and we could be really funny with it.
• 30:19
  He just, he really annoys me. But here I think it works
• 30:23
  because there's a serious intent beneath this, whereas I I never
• 30:26
  took Shakespeare code seriously, which is odd given I'm going to
• 30:30
  pitch a book on it. I don't think the comedy in this
• 30:33
  undermines the horror. Oh, no, absolutely not.
• 30:36
  I think I think it works the way comedy is meant to work in
• 30:38
  horror. It alleviates and the tension,
• 30:41
  the picture drop in there, what's the point of that?
• 30:43
  It's just because it's, it's, it's it's.
• 30:46
  Every cliche, isn't it? The vast smashed?
• 30:49
  You've got the thing there from the Addams Family, for fuck's
• 30:52
  sake, running around. Oh, Bradley Walsh is great.
• 30:55
  Oh, he's. So funny.
• 30:56
  Do you know what I love? The fact is he literally says I
• 30:59
  was just looking for the Carlsey.
• 31:00
  You know, he's gone off looking for the loo and then the the
• 31:03
  what? The Butler comes and gives him a
• 31:05
  piss part and goes. There you go.
• 31:08
  But again, an important learning moment for the children in the
• 31:10
  audience, if they're left at all, is that there's no indoor
• 31:13
  plumbing. Yeah.
• 31:15
  But I love as well, I love that everything is explained within
• 31:18
  this story except for these two ghosts that he keeps seeing.
• 31:24
  Because I think at this point in Nuhu, like the the classic
• 31:27
  series, pretty much said ghosts aren't real, right?
• 31:29
  There's a scientific rationale for ghosts.
• 31:32
  Whereas at this point in Nuhu, I think all bets are off.
• 31:40
  So you get you get a wonderful scene between her and Yas here.
• 31:46
  I can't remember her name, the woman who's trying to romance
• 31:48
  Byron, where Yas actually acknowledges how she feels about
• 31:52
  the doctor. You get a wonderful scene
• 31:54
  between Ryan at the at the piano.
• 31:57
  And obviously you get that great stuff with Graham wondering
• 32:00
  about looking for the loot. I just think there's there's
• 32:02
  lots happening. Let me check this.
• 32:05
  Oh, yeah. It's, it's it's Shelley's step.
• 32:08
  It's Shelley's step. Sister Claire Claremont.
• 32:12
  She had been involved with Byron and she's trying to rekindle the
• 32:15
  relationship. I think this might be the first
• 32:19
  hint that Yas has feelings for the Doctor.
• 32:22
  The unrequited relation. Yeah, the first.
• 32:24
  Time, it's acknowledged. It's a very good use of
• 32:27
  mirroring here, isn't it? That, that the Claire is?
• 32:30
  Yeah, As in Byron is the doctor. And that would be right, of
• 32:34
  course, the outsized personality who maybe doesn't take notice of
• 32:37
  the small people behind them or just drops them there.
• 32:40
  If I'm slurring slightly, dear viewers, it's because I have
• 32:42
  been drinking. Or not, don't worry.
• 32:45
  And I'm still drinking now. So, you know, this might be a
• 32:48
  different version of Paul that we usually get.
• 32:49
  You'll note lack of swearing and a bit of Yeah.
• 32:52
  You're not calmer than usual, you know, you're slightly
• 32:56
  anesthetized. Is that what you're saying?
• 32:58
  Ghosts are interesting, aren't they?
• 33:00
  Because I hadn't, I hadn't, I hadn't tweaked that before.
• 33:02
  Like I said, I haven't watched this for a while because this
• 33:04
  kind of, you know, it was about two hours ago we decided to do
• 33:07
  this, didn't we? Rather than and I in that time,
• 33:10
  I cooked dinner, eaten dinner and bathed one of my sons.
• 33:12
  So and then taking the computer from the other one who was
• 33:15
  watching the the faceless ones at bedtime.
• 33:17
  Just enough time to pull together a few thoughts, you
• 33:20
  know, before watching. Yeah, Byron the great shagger.
• 33:23
  And I mean, it's 2 great egos, of course, because even yeah, I
• 33:27
  mean people who can't downplay Whittaker, you ignore the fact
• 33:31
  that the Doctor is a huge egoist.
• 33:35
  Well, she doesn't stop talking. She's always the focus of the
• 33:37
  room. You get that at the end, don't
• 33:39
  you get that at the end of Flux? So I watched that again last
• 33:41
  night because I meant to record some thoughts for you, but I had
• 33:44
  my thoughts when when the whole ego thing that the time appears
• 33:50
  in the form of the person who's talking to it.
• 33:52
  So it had been a 0 swarm. And here it is as the doctor,
• 33:56
  the giant ego. And here is the giant ego with
• 33:59
  with with with Byron. This is that's John Polidori,
• 34:04
  isn't it? Now he's he's Ryan.
• 34:08
  I think Tosin is way more likeable than people suggest.
• 34:14
  No, I, I, I don't think people really like Ryan at all.
• 34:20
  I don't get that. I don't get that.
• 34:22
  I, I think the point I don't, I think there's inconsistency
• 34:24
  there because his dyspraxia was really important in the ghost
• 34:29
  monument, I think. And there there's, there's a
• 34:31
  kind of sense in which they set him up to be the focal figure in
• 34:35
  this season. And I just don't think it works.
• 34:37
  They're not, they're not running through the whole season with
• 34:40
  him as the focus. What I love is there's a couple
• 34:43
  of moments throughout his run where he the masculinity is
• 34:47
  punctured. So the bit in the ghost monument
• 34:49
  where he goes in with the gun, like, yeah.
• 34:52
  And then he goes, oh, just runs away.
• 34:54
  It's so funny. But in this, in this, when
• 34:57
  Polisuri challenges into a chill, it's like, and he's all
• 35:00
  mouth until he goes off to get a gun.
• 35:02
  There's like, Oh my God, he's getting a gun.
• 35:03
  And he's like there with his fists up, like what's pathetic.
• 35:07
  It's an interesting culture because because Ryan is very
• 35:10
  involved in gaming culture, isn't he?
• 35:13
  I think is what we told her. That's why he's able to shoot up
• 35:16
  all those robots in the ghost monument and and again in at the
• 35:20
  end of the season. But when he's faced with the
• 35:22
  possibility of actually facing a human with a gun, suddenly the
• 35:27
  kind of the violence by one step removed it it it overwhelms him,
• 35:35
  I think. And it actually it's quite it's
• 35:37
  quite an important character moment, but also to highlight
• 35:40
  just how different this culture is to our own.
• 35:45
  That kind of sense of formal honour code almost is what
• 35:50
  you're looking at here. And of course, as they're slowly
• 35:52
  unpicked, because of course this is about what happens when you
• 35:55
  take these figures, you put them into this kind of a liminal
• 35:59
  space where it's still in Europe, it's still in kind of
• 36:03
  like cultural centre of Europe. But you've got Byron who's kind
• 36:07
  of rejecting the the cultural mores, the sexual mores, and
• 36:14
  then you put a kind of killing machine that's gone even beyond
• 36:17
  them. There's a sense here about kind
• 36:19
  of, it's almost Nietzschean, I think of moving beyond
• 36:22
  contemporary morality. And then you put a figure that's
• 36:24
  kind of a band of morality whatsoever, and that's a Shand.
• 36:29
  One thing, one thing about the areas of this, one thing about
• 36:33
  Ryan, though, yeah. And I think I'm going to make a
• 36:37
  comparison to shoot his doctor because I think like he he, they
• 36:41
  put the emotions front and foremost with Shooty Stockton.
• 36:44
  Yeah, he's always giving emotion all the time.
• 36:47
  And so I don't I, I don't really feel anything.
• 36:50
  Whereas Ryan is always underplayed and he holds it a
• 36:55
  lot of it back. You remember that scene in
• 36:57
  Resolution where he's talking to his dad and he's so eloquent
• 37:00
  about how he's feeling. And do you remembering, Can you
• 37:03
  hear me? When he goes to his friend who's
• 37:04
  suffering from depression and he and he, he's not all over him.
• 37:08
  He's just there with him. And then he gets him to a
• 37:10
  counsellor at the end of the episode.
• 37:12
  And it's such a responsible take on a young Black.
• 37:15
  Character. I think resolution is
• 37:17
  interesting because of course, isn't it resolution where you
• 37:20
  have that awful joke about the family at Christmas with the
• 37:23
  phones and watching the TV? Yes.
• 37:27
  I mean, it made me want to eat my own head, it was so bad.
• 37:29
  And yet at the same time, you've got this kind of really nuanced
• 37:34
  look at exactly as you've described there.
• 37:37
  You've got a young black man whose dad is fulfilling the type
• 37:41
  of cliches that the right always want us to think in terms of
• 37:43
  black men and, and, and, and parentage.
• 37:46
  And the son who's a product of that relationship or a product
• 37:50
  of that figure is very different what the tabloid press want us
• 37:55
  to think. And I think the difference
• 37:57
  between what Chip has done here and what RTD will go on to do or
• 38:01
  has just done is like night and day.
• 38:03
  And I think, I mean, again, I don't want to say too much now
• 38:07
  because it was, I want to pick it up when we actually do it.
• 38:09
  But I think Davis's decision to go to war against the Not My
• 38:15
  Doctor mob, which is clearly what he does in the second
• 38:18
  season and it's all the way through that it was necessary,
• 38:22
  but I don't think it was done particularly well.
• 38:25
  Whereas Chipnor is really kind of chipping away at these kind
• 38:29
  of tabloid constructions of masculinity, of rape, subtly
• 38:35
  made. Important words, yeah.
• 38:37
  Maybe too subtly, yeah. Because of course he's realized
• 38:40
  that he's doing drama, not polemic.
• 38:42
  And I think that's that's the difference between what we had
• 38:45
  now, the he or we're watching now and what we've just watched
• 38:49
  on for the last 8. People say Jodie's not
• 38:53
  doctorate. Her putting on that hat with the
• 38:55
  enormous feathers. I mean, come on, Jodie.
• 38:59
  Is the Doctor, I don't. This is absolute nonsense.
• 39:02
  And I suppose because we'd had Capaldi before that and and we
• 39:06
  took three years to decide what type of Doctor we wanted Capaldi
• 39:09
  to be and it was a lethal mistake and I'm still staggered
• 39:14
  that too old hand to live through season 22 made that
• 39:18
  mistake. It's absolutely ridiculous.
• 39:21
  I was watching the Brothers the other day while I was taking a
• 39:24
  break from doing AI investigations and and it was
• 39:27
  season 3. So, so Baker is is there and I
• 39:30
  was struck by just how good he is in the brothers.
• 39:34
  But then he's too close to the 6th doctor.
• 39:36
  And I think part of the problem is that, as I, as I said on on
• 39:39
  blue sky, the six doctor is Paul Maroney.
• 39:44
  And that's a problem, because he's a villain, whereas Paul
• 39:47
  Maroney is very precise. He's very clipped.
• 39:50
  He's very like Jeremy Rhett's Holmes, if you could also be
• 39:52
  kind. He's a great model for the
• 39:54
  Doctor. I mean, unlike Capaldi, there
• 39:57
  wasn't really a big Jodie role before this that you could
• 40:00
  compare a Doctor to, so it was sort of like an open field for
• 40:04
  her to do. Yeah, that's true.
• 40:05
  But I think, I think, I think Malcolm Tucker hangs heavily
• 40:07
  over and Steven Moffett hangs heavily over Capaldi because
• 40:12
  Moffett has written himself just as RT, as just as J&T saw
• 40:17
  himself in in Colin Baker. Whereas Whisker's biggest role
• 40:22
  for the TV audience was in Broadchurch, where that's.
• 40:27
  She is not the central figure though, no.
• 40:29
  Even that's not the symbol, isn't it?
• 40:31
  Yeah. I mean, I don't really like
• 40:33
  Broadchurch. I think.
• 40:33
  I think Chipple's much better with this.
• 40:34
  I'll have Broadchurch, yeah. I mean, I have seen in at 11:00
• 40:40
  that, I mean, I, I thought she was the doctor from when she
• 40:42
  fell for that train. But her scene in 11 that
• 40:44
  absolutely like cemented who her doctor was for me was when she
• 40:48
  blew a kiss to that frog on a chair.
• 40:50
  Just like that's who she is. Well, I mean, the best thing in
• 40:53
  in Twice Upon a Time, which is a terrible story.
• 40:57
  Yeah. Again, you can come at me or you
• 40:58
  can say, well, Paul, you're some type of sage pointing out how
• 41:02
  bad a story was that didn't need to be there.
• 41:04
  The best scene in that is Jodie Wickinger at the end by a
• 41:08
  country mile. It sweeps away the kind of awful
• 41:11
  mawkishness this this notion that the Doctor had to give a
• 41:16
  speech to the next Doctor like they're two different people.
• 41:18
  Chippel doesn't even do that in power.
• 41:20
  The Doctor, he just said tag you're it and she's gone.
• 41:23
  And then Davis fucks it up because you put you put tenant
• 41:26
  back in in a different outfit because Lord knows he couldn't
• 41:30
  wear what Jodie was wearing. Whereas Billy could wear what
• 41:33
  shoes he was wearing or have her face slapped on.
• 41:35
  Anyway, we're getting there again.
• 41:37
  Yeah, we're, we're moving away from from what is, oh, look how
• 41:41
  beautifully shot that is, because you would think the
• 41:43
  candles are providing the only light in that room.
• 41:46
  So it's a bit I. Mean I I kept saying to Mark
• 41:48
  this is all candlelit and he went, no, it's not.
• 41:51
  I mean no, but it's supposed to be.
• 41:52
  It looks like it is. A model for that was Wolf Paul,
• 41:56
  of course. You can see how it's building on
• 41:58
  what people are now used to from this kind of a different genre
• 42:02
  completely. And it's positioning this as
• 42:05
  this is historical drama, this is important drama, this is
• 42:08
  something worth your time. When it's the the candles and
• 42:12
  the lightning, when a shadow appears, the atmosphere is
• 42:17
  thick. I mean, all of this.
• 42:19
  And they play this trick a couple of times and they do it
• 42:22
  through very clever trickery. The first few times of them
• 42:26
  going down the stairs and then coming back on the landing
• 42:28
  again. It's all very Castroval, very
• 42:29
  recursive occlusion. But then in a very funny moment
• 42:34
  worthy of classic Who, Jodie literally walks out the door and
• 42:37
  then comes back in the door and the camera don't move at all.
• 42:40
  And it's such a cheap show, but. Look at that now.
• 42:43
  Look at that now. I mean, that's better than most
• 42:47
  what we've seen with all the Disney money.
• 42:49
  Yeah, although you better describe it because people
• 42:53
  aren't looking at what we're that.
• 42:55
  Scene where the nurses come in to look at the child and again,
• 42:58
  back to Joe's point, how often the child keeps coming in up in
• 43:02
  this to close the window that's closed and we've just seen a
• 43:05
  flash of light and there's something is illuminating on the
• 43:07
  other side of the lake. Holly Door is walking through
• 43:10
  walls now, I mean. Probably always really
• 43:14
  interesting. Look here, look at this shot.
• 43:15
  The camera just stays still. She walks out and then she just
• 43:18
  walks back in again. They're using tight camera
• 43:21
  angles really, really well in this because of course then of
• 43:25
  course we have limited perspective and we can't see
• 43:27
  what's there in the darkness. And so that builds on our fear
• 43:31
  of just what's there in our peripheral.
• 43:33
  Vision, look at this shot on the stairs.
• 43:34
  I mean, come on, it's gorgeous. You know, it's got one thing in
• 43:39
  common with Ghost light. The design is very striking.
• 43:43
  As we know, I do think Ghost Light's the greatest Doctor Who
• 43:47
  script of all time. And you know, Plug, I will be
• 43:49
  talking about the Ghost Light novelisation in London in two
• 43:52
  weeks Today, in fact, I'll have finished.
• 43:54
  We'll know whether it was great or shit by this point in time.
• 44:01
  I see all the candles are going out.
• 44:03
  This cannot be good news. Yeah, do you know what's great
• 44:07
  about The Butler as well is the comedy relief for the first
• 44:10
  half. Then when a Shad appears it just
• 44:12
  snaps his neck dead. The.
• 44:15
  Comedy relief is murdered horribly.
• 44:17
  Oh, isn't it because it was any other production?
• 44:20
  He survived because he's comedic, but he has to die at
• 44:23
  this point in time just to show how bad a Shand is.
• 44:26
  He's kind of two creepy fat totems.
• 44:30
  I mean, they've clearly watched What's that ghost story with
• 44:36
  Nicole Kidman and and oh. The others.
• 44:39
  The others, yeah, yeah, there's a clear sense of the others here
• 44:43
  and it's that Deborah Carr thing that that adaptation of Turn of
• 44:47
  the Screw. So because although, although we
• 44:51
  think it's Frankenstein and I suppose a Shan might be a
• 44:54
  Frankenstein type figure, the Turn of the Screw is really
• 44:58
  working through this as well, of course.
• 45:00
  And there's a bit of Mr. James here as well, of course.
• 45:02
  I think it's it's a brilliant evocation of established TV
• 45:06
  tropes and established narratives.
• 45:09
  The fact that it sues an explanation for everything, you
• 45:16
  know, usually that would be a problem.
• 45:18
  Doctor Who, I don't think there's a problem here.
• 45:19
  We've been praising Chipnall to the high heavens.
• 45:22
  This is a Maxine Alderton script.
• 45:23
  She does this and she does Village of the Angels.
• 45:26
  Yeah. And I think she is a stand out
• 45:28
  from this era. I mean, Chipnall may not be the
• 45:31
  best writer, but he's the best showrunner.
• 45:34
  I agree with that. Therefore, he can spot the
• 45:36
  talent, and I don't think there's any ego around Chipnall.
• 45:40
  In a way, that ego has developed around Russell T Davis.
• 45:44
  I think it's significant that Chipnu isn't on Twitter.
• 45:48
  He's on Blue Sky now I think, but Blue Sky is a very different
• 45:50
  place to Twitter. He's got a book.
• 45:53
  He's. Got a book?
• 45:53
  He has got a book which I'm quite interested to read
• 45:55
  actually. We'll do that for the book club
• 45:58
  one day. A colleague of my new Chipnall
• 46:01
  when he was just on just appearing, they were all up at
• 46:03
  Carton TV for pitching and Chipnall was the only one who
• 46:06
  didn't have an agent. And my former colleagues thought
• 46:08
  this is kind of sense of naivety and kind of quite, quite
• 46:12
  innocent on the part of of Chipnall.
• 46:14
  I mean, I, I've said to you before, I didn't have a great
• 46:17
  deal of time for Chipnall up until Season 7 and those two
• 46:22
  stories in Season 7, I did see then this could be a showrunner.
• 46:27
  And I think he was a great showrunner.
• 46:28
  I think he's been the best showrunner of the revival.
• 46:33
  And I think he, I think I mean this and, and Village of the
• 46:36
  Angels, they're stand out moments for me.
• 46:40
  Is it because now you know, I there was a long discussion
• 46:43
  Village of the Angels was the only episode in that flux
• 46:45
  strictly that all kicked out, and it was mostly because.
• 46:49
  What the fuck was wrong with you?
• 46:54
  Well, you should have been there.
• 46:55
  I mean yeah, but I was ruining the dreams of students by
• 46:59
  revealing the fact they'd use AI.
• 47:01
  But I the the biggest complaint was it was relying heavily on
• 47:06
  classic Doctor Who trope, and I think Dylan's had the same
• 47:10
  complaint about this one before, you know.
• 47:12
  The sort of all wrong with that. Well, that's what I said.
• 47:15
  I said, well, yeah, but that's because it works.
• 47:17
  Look. At this, I mean, this is
• 47:19
  absolutely horrific. What the baby guy missing?
• 47:24
  The baby missing and and the kind of a bit of a skeleton
• 47:27
  that's been already around the place, which is I don't think
• 47:30
  this is classic who this is this is this is lots of other
• 47:33
  sources. It's true, but I don't think
• 47:35
  it's classic who the same. I'm not quite sure the point
• 47:38
  about Village of the Angels of Classic Who where.
• 47:42
  You know it's isolated village, you know where spooky things are
• 47:46
  occurring. Right.
• 47:48
  That's not just classic. Who is it classic?
• 47:50
  Who's lifted that? From other sources, I mean.
• 47:55
  The fella playing Polidori right?
• 47:57
  It does a lot of comedy reactions that are really funny.
• 48:02
  Just open the window because it's getting warm.
• 48:04
  Oh, this is great. This scene is great.
• 48:06
  So they literally spell out all of the mysterious things that
• 48:09
  are going on one after one. They're people that don't stay
• 48:12
  dead, bones that are walking, blah blah blah blah.
• 48:14
  It just catches us up on everything.
• 48:16
  So it means Maxine also. Window there.
• 48:18
  She's very aware of everything she's set up.
• 48:21
  Oh, it's. Generically aware?
• 48:23
  Absolutely, because it's playing intelligent games with witness
• 48:25
  cliches. In a less assured writer, it
• 48:29
  would just be the witness cliches there on the screen.
• 48:31
  I don't think you get that here or in in Village of the Ages.
• 48:35
  Frankly, I'm bilious now that you put out.
• 48:37
  I haven't listened to the whole episode.
• 48:38
  You see, that's the wrong. I haven't had time and I was
• 48:40
  meant to record this. You can insert me into like some
• 48:42
  type of floating head. And I was going to you coming in
• 48:46
  like Heartnell from the Three Doctors.
• 48:47
  It wasn't, it just wasn't happening.
• 48:49
  It's just been, it's just been a manic month, but it's all right.
• 48:53
  Look at this shot of them looking out the window and then
• 48:57
  a shout. It's essentially you've taken
• 49:00
  Pride and Prejudice and you've put them into a horror film that
• 49:03
  look at that. Just that alone is a great idea.
• 49:07
  Beautifully done. It's actually, well, I mean,
• 49:11
  you've already had Pride and Prejudice in zombies by this
• 49:13
  point, of course. So it's already aware that there
• 49:16
  is this kind of pastiche sub genre where you take classic
• 49:20
  literature and you put a zombie into it.
• 49:21
  It was old hat then, but it's long enough ago that it doesn't
• 49:26
  necessarily pure old hat now. And it's just so we're halfway
• 49:30
  through the episode and bam, here's a sideman, but like, no
• 49:39
  sideman we've ever seen. No, I mean it, it it's the
• 49:42
  Cyberman, the Cybermen. I mean, up until this point, I
• 49:46
  think the best Cyberman you've had in the revival is the head.
• 49:51
  In the. Pandora Heroes in the Pandora
• 49:52
  Heroes. Yeah, I agree.
• 49:54
  I think that worked really really well.
• 49:57
  The rest? Say, well, nothing time.
• 49:59
  But I don't think that's a great sideman story.
• 50:01
  It's it's a good story. It's a great story and it has to
• 50:06
  have that kind of transformation element to it.
• 50:09
  Therefore it has to be the Cyberman.
• 50:10
  But he knew who has suggested the Daleks can transform people
• 50:14
  as well. Of course, Chibnall did it in in
• 50:16
  Asylum and the Daleks haven't he?
• 50:18
  So it's no longer just the preserve of the Cyberman.
• 50:21
  They transform people. But this is different.
• 50:23
  This is what if the cybernisation process, to use an
• 50:27
  old who term, goes wrong and you don't remove emotion and what
• 50:32
  you get is hate and fear and. And she's she brings all of that
• 50:38
  up in a minute in a wonderful scene with a Shad where she she
• 50:41
  mocks him for his half conversion, how emotional he is.
• 50:45
  Don't tell me she ain't doctorish, for fuck's sake.
• 50:48
  I don't think it's Frankenstein though.
• 50:50
  Why not? Well, for a start, Frankenstein
• 50:56
  is a story about birth. If you read the book or if
• 51:01
  you've seen the staging at the National with Cumberbatch and
• 51:07
  Johnny Miller to the two Sherlock Holmes where they
• 51:09
  played the creature and Frankenstein on on Ultimate
• 51:13
  Night. So we actually saw it at the
• 51:14
  National years ago with Cumberbatch as Frankenstein and
• 51:18
  Johnny Lee Miller as the creature.
• 51:19
  And it's always the creature from the book.
• 51:21
  It's not, it's not a monster. It's the creature.
• 51:23
  And if you read it on the way they staged it, it's a birth.
• 51:28
  And so Frankenstein becomes the kind of perverse mother to this
• 51:32
  creature. And then the creature learns
• 51:36
  because it's about education as well, but it has a very limited
• 51:40
  education. So it, one of its key texts is
• 51:44
  Paradise Lost. And so we it learns hate, study
• 51:49
  of revenge, immortal hate, and courage never to submit or
• 51:51
  yield, as Satan says in Paradise Lost.
• 51:53
  And so the creature learns that. And so then it starts to stalk
• 51:56
  its creator. And of course, crucially for
• 51:59
  those who who know the the the book, although I don't think it
• 52:01
  always appears in film adaptations, it makes Victor
• 52:05
  Frankenstein make it a mate because it it, it has this, it
• 52:09
  still has the need. So the child is significant
• 52:12
  here. The creature can't have a child,
• 52:14
  but it wants a child. Whereas in here the creature has
• 52:16
  killed its children. Therefore it's the killer of
• 52:18
  children. He just.
• 52:19
  Snapped her neck. I mean, this is an astonishing
• 52:22
  suspense sequence. I mean, what, what they've done
• 52:24
  and it can again, it's because it's, it's after the, the
• 52:28
  Nationals staging of Frankenstein, Frankenstein rapes
• 52:35
  the creature, rapes Frankenstein's fiance and then
• 52:38
  kills it because Frankenstein makes a mate for the creature
• 52:43
  and then he destroys it. And then they, they, they, they,
• 52:46
  they, they hound each other at the ends of the earth because it
• 52:49
  was the, because it's a narrative within a narrative.
• 52:52
  If Frankenstein, the last shot you get is Frankenstein pursuing
• 52:56
  the Creature across the ice in the Arctic.
• 52:59
  What he just said there. Don't be afraid little 1, you
• 53:02
  will be like us. Yeah, not only is it fabulous
• 53:05
  line, but I think turning that child into a sideman is worse
• 53:09
  than killing it. It's the ball, it is the ball.
• 53:13
  It is horrible. I mean just how that was all
• 53:17
  shot with them hiding her with the baby.
• 53:20
  You can just hear the baby muffled.
• 53:22
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sideman smashing his way through
• 53:24
  the room and then hearing, and then slowly turning.
• 53:28
  You can't stop a baby crying if he doesn't want to stop crying.
• 53:32
  That's such a great move there where you get the half that
• 53:36
  looks like a kind of messed up a regular assignment, and then
• 53:38
  suddenly it's the one thing the Cyberman shouldn't be.
• 53:41
  It's still partly human. I'll tell you what it is.
• 53:43
  Yeah, if it isn't Frankenstein. It is pleasingly nasty in a way
• 53:47
  that the Cybermen rarely are. Though The thing that pisses me
• 53:51
  off about the assignment is they're usually just played as
• 53:53
  thick robots. You know it's.
• 53:55
  The great complaint about Holmes, isn't it, that Holmes is
• 53:58
  always about loss of identity and transformation.
• 54:00
  So the one opportunity that he has to do the sideman and he
• 54:03
  misses it completely. But of course, if you read the
• 54:05
  scripts, you know what he's working with.
• 54:06
  What Jerry Davis said presenting the best thing would I mean, I
• 54:09
  like Revenge of the Sideman, but the best thing if you'd be
• 54:11
  looking in terms of transformation was get rid of it
• 54:13
  and start again. But it's.
• 54:15
  Why I like, I know it's accidental, but it's why I like
• 54:18
  seeing the eyes in the 10th planet Cybermen.
• 54:20
  It's why I like seeing the mouth in the Earth shock Cybermen.
• 54:23
  It's just a reminder. It's why I love the listen
• 54:26
  conversion scene in Attack of the Cybermen because it it
• 54:29
  literally homes in on the most terrifying thing about the
• 54:33
  Cybermen. Also when when Vaughan is shot
• 54:36
  but doesn't die and then you realise he's partly converted.
• 54:40
  Yeah, but this just doesn't just with visually, right?
• 54:43
  Yeah, it's really well done because the sidemen usually are
• 54:46
  not done well. And it's, it's, he's sort of
• 54:49
  scarred, isn't he, on that, on the part of his face looks like
• 54:52
  it's mangled his face in the process.
• 54:55
  I mean it doesn't make sense then the rest of the season why
• 54:57
  they want to kill everyone because the whole point of the
• 54:59
  sidemen is they need to convert because that's how they survive
• 55:01
  because they can't fuck anymore. It's always the great mystery
• 55:05
  about the Borg, isn't it? Why have they got that child in
• 55:08
  that drawer? Where's it come from?
• 55:09
  It's only later on you as it must have stolen from someone.
• 55:12
  It's like, that's why I find what's that two-part of that 90
• 55:16
  minute special when when you get into 7 and 9's background and
• 55:20
  the. Oh, Dark Frontier, Yeah.
• 55:22
  Yeah. I mean, it makes no sense in
• 55:23
  terms of the wider chronology with the idea that they take the
• 55:25
  child and they turn her into a Borg.
• 55:27
  It's really horrible. And that's working through here,
• 55:30
  I think. Yeah.
• 55:32
  I'm just pleased that Chipper was willing to go there because
• 55:35
  Moffett wouldn't have done that with a kid.
• 55:37
  No way. No.
• 55:38
  No, no, he would. But then it's different how
• 55:41
  they're using children. I mean, what's intro Moffett is
• 55:44
  that he does what he does with Melody Pont.
• 55:47
  As a rule, you wouldn't expect Moffett to leave a child
• 55:50
  abandoned in an alleyway, dying in New York.
• 55:54
  Yeah. Yeah, I mean that that all feels
• 55:57
  very unmoffit, like, frankly, given how important Amelia Pond
• 56:02
  is and it's about a fairy tale and the Doctor, it ends with the
• 56:05
  Doctor telling her a story. But of course, throughout that,
• 56:07
  what you then discover through six and seven is actually the
• 56:10
  Doctor can't protect her. The Doctor is just a fantasy
• 56:13
  really, and he's not there to protect her when when he needs
• 56:16
  to. Whereas here a Shan doesn't do
• 56:20
  what you think he's going to do. But it's nothing to do with the
• 56:22
  Doctor intervening. It's a kind of interest in you.
• 56:27
  The child is kind of separate from the Doctor in some respects
• 56:30
  in in quite an interesting way. All I'll say is, is the moment
• 56:34
  where Shelley reaches out to Aschad.
• 56:36
  Yeah, I was convinced that we were going to do another one of
• 56:39
  these love conquers all endings. No.
• 56:42
  I was absolutely convinced because I've seen it so many
• 56:44
  times. And then when he says it's, it's
• 56:46
  horrific, Paul, that I'm having a reaction to him saying he
• 56:49
  killed his children. Yes, punch in the air, you know,
• 56:53
  but. Here we are would be it would be
• 56:56
  to be historically inaccurate towards Shelley herself.
• 56:59
  Of course he can't do that because of course Shetty's
• 57:04
  Shetty's life becomes a bit of a bin fire.
• 57:06
  You know, they get caught up they get accused of radicalism
• 57:09
  more radical than maybe they are they they you know, people who
• 57:12
  can't make them manoeuvre away from supporting revolutionary
• 57:15
  France in 179394 with the terror Wordsworth man who's the Shetty
• 57:21
  group don't so they can kind of denounces as as as radicals and
• 57:26
  dangerous to Britain. And it was Austin writes about
• 57:30
  this encoded in Northanger Abbey.
• 57:32
  So then to have gone with something kind of mawkish and
• 57:35
  trite around Shelley would be just just just wrong.
• 57:39
  Frankly, Chipnall's too. He's too intelligent a writer to
• 57:44
  do that. I think Shand is just brutal and
• 57:50
  he can't be reasoned with and therefore there's no sense in
• 57:52
  which love will conquer all and they'll go off high skipping it
• 57:56
  and he might kill himself. He's just, he's designed just to
• 57:59
  terrify and. People were saying why did they
• 58:02
  bring him back in Power of the Doctor?
• 58:03
  Because it was fucking cold or Jesus Christ.
• 58:08
  The problem is he's not in it enough.
• 58:10
  No, he doesn't make an impact though.
• 58:13
  He does, but he's not in it enough.
• 58:14
  There's too much in power of the Doctor.
• 58:16
  It's kind of we're overwhelmed in that.
• 58:19
  It's too much. I love it all, every kiss to the
• 58:24
  past that's there and there's so many of them particularly.
• 58:27
  What comes after it? I think we were absolutely
• 58:29
  spoiled there. We were kind of glutted with it
• 58:31
  and that beautiful end where the kind of survivors network sits
• 58:35
  down and Ian Russell clearly already sinking into the
• 58:39
  dimension that's going to overwhelm and then gone just
• 58:42
  just too soon. It was it was really well done.
• 58:45
  What's interesting, of course, is they got could get
• 58:47
  performances out of Bonnie Langford in that they could get
• 58:52
  a performance out of Bonnie Langford at the end of season 1
• 58:55
  of RTD 2. But Christ on a bike, she's
• 58:58
  bloody awful at the end of RTD 2.
• 59:01
  Holy Mary, Mother of God, that. Whole universe is just an
• 59:05
  experiment to her. I mean, I'd like to think that 6
• 59:09
  minute scene of everyone standing around listening to two
• 59:12
  egos talking was a deliberate parody, but I just think he was
• 59:16
  just shit. That's how you have a lot of
• 59:18
  guest characters and give them fuck all to do.
• 59:20
  This is This is Shelly, isn't it?
• 59:22
  Why, when the doctor says you know I will not lose anyone else
• 59:26
  to the Cybermen, is she talking about Adric or Bill?
• 59:29
  Bill. Bill Meg will tell you when it's
• 59:31
  Bill and and and it's important to make that it is Bill.
• 59:35
  It might be both of. You know, I hate having that
• 59:39
  whole shot in her. I just thought that.
• 59:41
  Was I can't watch that. I it's a great, it's a great two
• 59:44
  parter. I absolutely can't watch it.
• 59:46
  It's just too sad. It's too much for me.
• 59:48
  I've become horribly sentimental I think since my children were
• 59:51
  born. And so I find nastiness really
• 59:53
  difficult. I always find horror films
• 59:55
  difficult anyway, so I was surprised I got through this,
• 59:57
  but I was glad I did because I think it's really well done.
• 59:59
  So this is Shelly, isn't it now? Finding my Siberian.
• 1:00:04
  This bit I could live without and like Jack having sent the
• 1:00:07
  message about beware the lone Cyberman, I could have done
• 1:00:10
  without all of that, frankly. This is really beautifully shot,
• 1:00:14
  of course, because of course this is kind of here's the
• 1:00:16
  natural world. He's a romantic poet.
• 1:00:19
  So he's in order to the natural world.
• 1:00:21
  And then you dump the great part of nature into this dark space.
• 1:00:24
  I, I, it's, it's visually, visually it's in continuity with
• 1:00:30
  or it agrees with what the script is telling in a way
• 1:00:32
  Doctor Who sometimes isn't. This is kind of a totalised
• 1:00:37
  picture of Doctor Who, what it could be when you spend the
• 1:00:39
  money on it, historical or well of course.
• 1:00:42
  And we've said before, haven't we, when we did ghosts like how
• 1:00:44
  well Doctor Who can do. Here we're explaining the vast,
• 1:00:48
  the ghost, everything. So I I figured at this point,
• 1:00:55
  yeah. OK, All right, So we're going to
• 1:00:56
  get an explanation for everything.
• 1:00:57
  The doctor says the whole thing's like a panic room.
• 1:00:59
  That's why they're going in the outer rooms and then back into
• 1:01:01
  them again. So what about the ghosts?
• 1:01:03
  That Graham soon we never find out.
• 1:01:10
  And there's even that gag at the end.
• 1:01:11
  We go, oh, come on, Doc, you've got an explanation for that,
• 1:01:13
  haven't you? And she goes, have I?
• 1:01:16
  That's it. I mean, it's a better gag, you
• 1:01:20
  know, it's a better in line than what's that bollocks at the end
• 1:01:23
  of some Moffett episode where don't you know, Pond or whatever
• 1:01:27
  the hell, You know what, I eat some shit there.
• 1:01:29
  I think at the end of Amy's Choice, which is an episode I
• 1:01:33
  love, but there's a final line there somewhere.
• 1:01:35
  I just want to keep the screen race.
• 1:01:37
  It kind of just feels like a Moffett ISM.
• 1:01:39
  Where is this? Did you see that then, Paul?
• 1:01:41
  AI from the future, You see, this is how bad it's going to
• 1:01:44
  get. AI is epoxy will kill us all.
• 1:01:48
  I mean, I'm looking around the state of this house and all the
• 1:01:50
  books that I've got and the books the children have got
• 1:01:52
  because of course they've inherited that for me.
• 1:01:55
  But actually, after the last few weeks, I think we need the books
• 1:01:58
  because the tech Bros will destroy them.
• 1:02:00
  And then we'll be relying upon what they tell us to think on
• 1:02:04
  their machines. And we're not watched over
• 1:02:06
  machines of of of love and compassion, whatever the hell
• 1:02:09
  Alan Curtis episode is called. Oh, the fury that Whittaker
• 1:02:14
  brews up now and she turns it on her friends and she very rarely
• 1:02:18
  does that. She's blazing, Ryan says at one
• 1:02:25
  point. We'll just let him kill him.
• 1:02:27
  If that's what he wants. Let him kill him.
• 1:02:31
  It's just one life. There we go.
• 1:02:37
  I I'd like that there's a moral dimension to this as well.
• 1:02:40
  Or immoral, as far as Ryan's concerned.
• 1:02:43
  Well, it's a great PN to literature as well, of course,
• 1:02:53
  which, you know, I like as we hear the the death knell of the
• 1:02:57
  humanities. What are they for?
• 1:03:00
  You know, reading does make you more empathetic, I think.
• 1:03:04
  But. Everybody is allowed an opinion
• 1:03:07
  in this room. It's full of people and they all
• 1:03:09
  give their say on this choice. Oh.
• 1:03:11
  Yeah, that's true, that democracy.
• 1:03:13
  But you know, that does end up with like, just kill him.
• 1:03:20
  I just love it because I've been going with this flat team
• 1:03:23
  structure thing for so long, and she finally goes, yeah, until
• 1:03:26
  the big choices need to be made. Look at her.
• 1:03:31
  She's furious. Whittaker does Fury really,
• 1:03:35
  really well. Usually quite few, but here
• 1:03:38
  because it is, it's that doctor, doctorish thing, isn't it?
• 1:03:42
  A single life. What is it?
• 1:03:44
  What is it on, on Schindler's ring?
• 1:03:46
  He who saves one life, saves the world.
• 1:03:49
  And it's writ large here, I think.
• 1:03:50
  And and then of course, because it's Shelley, because of the
• 1:03:54
  impact that he'll have on on on the world after his death,
• 1:03:57
  because of his literature. I don't know.
• 1:03:59
  I mean, Shelley's and he's as good as some of the other
• 1:04:02
  writers around that period, but he's still a significant figure.
• 1:04:04
  He's also a Sussex figure, of course, because his family have
• 1:04:06
  got land outside of Horsham. So, you know, I'll have to big
• 1:04:10
  him up there. Ada Lovelace, of course, he's
• 1:04:12
  related to she's the her daughter is married to Wilfred
• 1:04:22
  Scarwin Blunt, who of course lives in Worth and he's
• 1:04:25
  important around here. What do you think about this
• 1:04:28
  great Macguffin, then the Siberian that kicks us into the
• 1:04:31
  last two-part? It's nothing, isn't it?
• 1:04:33
  It's, it's, it's horseshit. It's just, it is, it's just a
• 1:04:37
  Macguffin. I don't, I don't really know
• 1:04:39
  what it is. What is it?
• 1:04:40
  Is the Cyberman's consciousness or something?
• 1:04:42
  It's. All the intelligence that he can
• 1:04:44
  take the to reactivate all the cyber army after the great cyber
• 1:04:48
  wars or something. I don't care.
• 1:04:51
  Ice bollocks. I watched Attention to the
• 1:04:55
  Sidemen recently. I really how was up.
• 1:04:59
  Oh, it's a great two par. What are you talking about?
• 1:05:01
  I mean, Davis should have watched it and gone.
• 1:05:02
  That's the model someone said, didn't they on on your flux
• 1:05:05
  episode that that that's what David should have looked to for
• 1:05:08
  a model. He abandons that absolutely and
• 1:05:10
  he should look to this how to write an end of season as well.
• 1:05:15
  What a three-part end of season. Three-part raw, one off.
• 1:05:18
  Season 11 is a great end of episode.
• 1:05:20
  I'll repeat that. You're fucking laughing like you
• 1:05:25
  don't know. I don't.
• 1:05:26
  Mind it. That's a brilliant this is a
• 1:05:31
  great end of season as well. I I've got no time for Heaven
• 1:05:37
  sent. It's a great performance like
• 1:05:39
  Capaldi, but on either side of it. 2 great episodes.
• 1:05:42
  Yes, Heaven. You know Hell sent, Hell Bent or
• 1:05:44
  whatever the fuck it's called is a great story.
• 1:05:47
  Here is, though, the greatest Cyberman of all time.
• 1:05:51
  Oh, without a doubt, certainly the most chilling.
• 1:05:56
  I mean, it's a great performance though as well, Is it?
• 1:05:58
  It's not just a. Yeah.
• 1:06:04
  That's it. She's going to take the Mcguffin
• 1:06:06
  off him. Yeah, I do like the fact that
• 1:06:09
  the Siberian chooses the doctor as well.
• 1:06:13
  I'm a bit tastier than you. This bit kind of is boring and
• 1:06:20
  frankly it just makes me think of a Nightmare and Silver.
• 1:06:27
  Who is it who thinks Nightmare and Silver is the best sideman
• 1:06:30
  story? Of nemesis Michael Storm.
• 1:06:33
  What the fuck? Wow, you know we've all you.
• 1:06:35
  See, the square is kicked in here now by this we've all got.
• 1:06:38
  Quirks, you know. There's quirks and there's
• 1:06:41
  quirks. You think every Rd. leads back
• 1:06:44
  to Underworld for God's sakes? Only when I'm looking to go
• 1:06:48
  people, as I told you earlier today, gold, gold, lacerate
• 1:06:52
  raised whirlwinds as far as Tynan used to say.
• 1:06:56
  I'll tell you what I love it is that obviously he says I'm
• 1:06:59
  literally going to use my ship to blow up this entire planet
• 1:07:02
  unless you give it to me. So she goes, oh all right, have
• 1:07:04
  it. And then she goes right .1 is
• 1:07:09
  I've saved everyone .2 as now I've got to go and sort out all
• 1:07:13
  the fucking consequences of what I've done during .1.
• 1:07:18
  So basically she ends this by making an enormous mistake.
• 1:07:23
  Well, yeah, I mean, because of course they've been won by Jack,
• 1:07:26
  haven't they, in Fugitive? Of.
• 1:07:30
  The of not fusive from the jejune rod, if you're listening
• 1:07:34
  to this call, I know your point, I take it, but that's the title
• 1:07:38
  whether you know, whether you like it or not, you.
• 1:07:41
  Don't listen to this for a while.
• 1:07:45
  You can edit this show. You know me.
• 1:07:49
  And so there's this weird sense of Jack already knows this.
• 1:07:52
  I don't know how he knows this, and I don't know why he needs to
• 1:07:55
  come back to warn about the Lone Cyberman.
• 1:07:58
  It's it's a bit. What?
• 1:08:01
  Oh, yeah. He's taking it, hasn't he?
• 1:08:02
  That's why, yeah, the doctor has made a terrible, terrible
• 1:08:05
  mistake. But Shelley is alive and the
• 1:08:07
  child is alive and actually, everybody lives apart from the
• 1:08:11
  Butler. So they, you know, I like.
• 1:08:12
  That I like that. She goes, he goes oh, fucked up.
• 1:08:16
  OK, I better head to that two parter now and sort it all out.
• 1:08:20
  But that's important, you see, because that's an important
• 1:08:23
  trope in Doctor Who. When the Doctor makes a mistake,
• 1:08:27
  it's cataclysmic. And it's pertly, isn't it?
• 1:08:34
  He has to, he has to see his fear.
• 1:08:37
  And like the Mehabilius crystal, he has to go and face what he's
• 1:08:40
  done. That's what you've got here.
• 1:08:42
  And of course, that's a sign of not in necessarily the
• 1:08:46
  scriptwriter, but the figure over that, the showrunner with
• 1:08:51
  an absolute awareness of how the show works and what it means for
• 1:08:55
  the Doctor to get it wrong. And the Doctor will then have to
• 1:08:59
  go and and and and make things right, even at the cost of
• 1:09:02
  themselves. This is wonderful, I told.
• 1:09:06
  You where is the shop? I have no idea.
• 1:09:08
  It's beautiful though, isn't it? Is it the same place where they
• 1:09:11
  shot the thing in Sweden with the frog or Norway with the
• 1:09:15
  frog? Oh.
• 1:09:15
  Maybe. The the woods look quite
• 1:09:18
  similar. This is an overseas though, this
• 1:09:20
  is definitely. Oh, no, no, no.
• 1:09:22
  Was that shot overseas? No, I don't think so.
• 1:09:24
  That was Cardiff as well. There's, there's quite a bit of
• 1:09:26
  matting actually in it takes you away.
• 1:09:30
  But here I love it where she says the spell's broken to Byron
• 1:09:33
  and then Polidori walks up to him.
• 1:09:34
  You think he's going to say something witty and it just
• 1:09:36
  gives him a little smile and walks off.
• 1:09:39
  Hey, you know, on one level, it's reflective of how their
• 1:09:42
  relationship collapses. And yeah, they, they they part
• 1:09:46
  company. And Polidori probably kills
• 1:09:48
  himself. And here's Shelley.
• 1:09:53
  Sorry about the sneak peek of your deaf mate.
• 1:09:56
  Well, of course he is. You know, he does die young,
• 1:09:59
  doesn't he? Byron will die when he goes off
• 1:10:01
  to fight for Greek independence, and then Shelley will die
• 1:10:04
  because he's just a sickly figure.
• 1:10:06
  What's that film? Bright Star, isn't it?
• 1:10:10
  Bright Star or some of some of called the we want to see that
• 1:10:13
  very early Doors. My wife cried at that.
• 1:10:17
  I think you're right, Paul. I think this is where they shot
• 1:10:20
  a take shot in. Very.
• 1:10:22
  Very similar. What's interesting that was I
• 1:10:24
  was really interested in that, but in like just because it's
• 1:10:27
  interesting enough in of itself, but don't think about in terms
• 1:10:29
  of Norwegian folklore and that sense of place.
• 1:10:33
  And I thought they they really skewed where I thought they were
• 1:10:36
  going to go with it. I drum what makes me a GOG is
• 1:10:39
  just how much location work there is in Chiba's time and how
• 1:10:42
  little location work there is in RTD too.
• 1:10:45
  He doesn't. He doesn't.
• 1:10:46
  He's not interested in it. He's not interested in place at
• 1:10:50
  all in that second run. It's bizarre A.
• 1:10:54
  Story in the engine I can tell most of that's filmed in some
• 1:10:56
  back alley in fucking Cardiff. No, they were hardly going to go
• 1:11:00
  to It's Nigeria, isn't it? Well, they would have done in
• 1:11:02
  Chippenhall's time. They certainly went over.
• 1:11:03
  Yeah, that's the point. That's the point, isn't it?
• 1:11:06
  I'm just, there's a kind of quiet brilliance in Chippnall's
• 1:11:11
  three years as the dot, as the showrunner, and it's not showy,
• 1:11:16
  but it is showy. But it's showy without, I
• 1:11:18
  suppose, because he's not there going.
• 1:11:19
  It's all marvellous, dear. It's all marvellous.
• 1:11:22
  Chip was kind of anonymous almost.
• 1:11:26
  I mean, we know he's not because of course we all remember when
• 1:11:28
  he turned up going, what the fuck were you doing right in
• 1:11:30
  that shit? And packy Gore.
• 1:11:32
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Stick it to the stick of these
• 1:11:35
  two old cunts in there. Check trousers.
• 1:11:38
  But kind of he's withdrawn from that and what you've got here
• 1:11:42
  and like this is maybe because I don't know that a spy 4 like I
• 1:11:47
  can't stand actually, I don't really understand spy four and
• 1:11:50
  and then it's kind of hit and miss me season 12.
• 1:11:52
  This this I loved on 1st viewing.
• 1:11:55
  I haven't been able to listen to it here because I'm talking over
• 1:11:58
  it and I've got it turned out on my phone, but it's a great
• 1:12:02
  episode. It's a.
• 1:12:04
  She is the universe. Oh yes.
• 1:12:08
  Yeah, a bit, a bit of Shelley there.
• 1:12:10
  Not even like the obvious Shelley, not even Aussie Mandy's
• 1:12:12
  King of Kings. It's just it's more interesting
• 1:12:14
  than that. And it's not exactly what you
• 1:12:16
  were supposed to do, right? It's given you a fun and scary
• 1:12:19
  haunted house story. It's given you a bit of history.
• 1:12:22
  Yeah. And it's set up the final two
• 1:12:24
  parter as well. It's also got one of the great
• 1:12:27
  arrangements of the theme tune. Oh, that key drop.
• 1:12:31
  I hate the way it's kind of been written out of the history of
• 1:12:37
  the revival. The the music from Chippenhalls
• 1:12:40
  run. That's an amazing version.
• 1:12:43
  I'm going to have to stop that because it's going straight into
• 1:12:45
  and that's thankful later on, isn't it?
• 1:12:48
  Straight. No, no, no into Ascension.
• 1:12:52
  I don't think that was a particularly effective
• 1:12:54
  commentary, but I think it was a very interesting conversation,
• 1:12:57
  Joe. So we'll have to see what your
• 1:12:59
  what your view is. I disagree.
• 1:13:01
  As usual, you bring in all these fabulous sources.
• 1:13:05
  What I am going to have to ask you to do though, before we go,
• 1:13:08
  is try and sort of pull your thoughts into a semblance of
• 1:13:12
  order and give me free things to recommend this episode, and I'll
• 1:13:17
  do the same. You start with one, then me,
• 1:13:19
  then you, then me, then you, then me.
• 1:13:21
  Jodie Whittaker's performance. Yes.
• 1:13:25
  Again, this demonstrates just what a great doctor she was.
• 1:13:29
  She can do light, She can do exposition.
• 1:13:32
  She can do fury. Quiet and overt.
• 1:13:35
  She is the doctor, whether people like it or not.
• 1:13:39
  A great doctor. A genuinely great doctor.
• 1:13:42
  The first? No, not the first.
• 1:13:45
  There's been a couple of examples in Chipper's time
• 1:13:47
  already, but this is written and directed by a woman.
• 1:13:52
  And it's to his credit that he brought in a female doctor, that
• 1:13:56
  he brought in focus on female historical characters, that he
• 1:13:59
  brought in a ton of women to write and direct the show.
• 1:14:04
  And now I know you're not that keen on enlightenment, are you?
• 1:14:07
  That was that was the one time in classic Who when we had a
• 1:14:12
  female writer and director. It's glorious in many, many
• 1:14:15
  ways, but I think, and I think this is true of the books as
• 1:14:22
  well, because Kate Orman, Jacqueline Rayner, when women
• 1:14:25
  come in, they just bring something different to the show.
• 1:14:28
  And I'm not, it's not just quality.
• 1:14:32
  It's a palpable difference to to what Nicholas Briggs and all
• 1:14:36
  those alpha men are bringing. And I think it's here in spades
• 1:14:40
  in dear Darcy. So just just the women?
• 1:14:43
  I think what's interesting, of course, in the in the long
• 1:14:45
  history of Doctor Who, I think I think Ian Dawn and Dorian Linsky
• 1:14:48
  make this point in their origin stories episode on Doctor Who is
• 1:14:53
  how the first season with Lambert as producer and then
• 1:15:00
  with Warrick Hussain as director.
• 1:15:04
  You know, these kind of marginal figures.
• 1:15:06
  You know, a woman from a Jewish background, a gay man of colour
• 1:15:12
  from is it is it a Muslim background with Hussein?
• 1:15:15
  That's a more radical reduction team that you're going to get
• 1:15:18
  from most of original Doctor Who until, you know, maybe J&T.
• 1:15:23
  But even then and that India, as you say, that's when you start
• 1:15:25
  to get women as writers and director because Mary Ridge is
• 1:15:28
  there, even though Mary Ridge has got like really pulls a
• 1:15:32
  short straw with Terminus. Look at the work she does for
• 1:15:36
  Blake Seven. Look at what she does for like
• 1:15:38
  more conventional drama. Paddy Russell, of course, is
• 1:15:41
  there from from very early on. Of course she'd worked with
• 1:15:46
  Cartier. So of course, you know, she goes
• 1:15:49
  right back to the very birth of TV drama.
• 1:15:51
  And so there's a sense in which Chipna was reconnecting with
• 1:15:55
  that egalitarian past of Doctor Who where you've got women in in
• 1:16:00
  really significant places. And Barbara as well.
• 1:16:02
  Of course, if we go back to that original that that TARDIS crew,
• 1:16:05
  just how important Barbara is as an as a slightly older female
• 1:16:10
  figure, authority figure, as a teacher.
• 1:16:13
  Look at how she stands up to the Doctor in the Aztecs.
• 1:16:16
  And there's a sense in which Whittaker's Dr. is a lineal
• 1:16:19
  descendant of Barbara as much as of these Doctor figures.
• 1:16:23
  And so that's Chippenham long term fan who's aware of where
• 1:16:27
  you've had it in the past and where it's kind of been like
• 1:16:31
  suppressed, almost not not deliberately suppressed by male
• 1:16:35
  showrunner, CIS white male showrunner, CIS white male story
• 1:16:40
  editor, CIS white male majority cast.
• 1:16:43
  In. In Knew who?
• 1:16:45
  Yeah, before she came along. Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:16:49
  You've got what, Helen Rayner in RTD one, I think that's the one.
• 1:16:52
  The one woman that's given a big role either writing or
• 1:16:57
  directing, and you've got Rachel Tulalay in RTD Two.
• 1:17:01
  Sorry, Moffitt's time. Are there female writers in
• 1:17:04
  Moffitt's time? There's not many.
• 1:17:05
  No, I think I think we have to think about how important Julie
• 1:17:08
  Gardner and Jane Tranter are in. RTD one, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:17:13
  And Gardner is crucial because Gardner is the quote UN quote
• 1:17:17
  normal viewer who's able to go to the two fanboys.
• 1:17:21
  What about the normal people? And what's interesting is how if
• 1:17:25
  you if you if you listen to the commentaries on the box set for
• 1:17:28
  Season 1, which of course is always strange because
• 1:17:31
  Eccleson's not there because he walked over at that point.
• 1:17:34
  And that's why Barrowman was so important, because he fulfills
• 1:17:37
  that role where Eccleson should be both in terms of the
• 1:17:40
  commentaries but also in terms of promotion of the series.
• 1:17:45
  You can hear how Gardner is still both.
• 1:17:47
  She's a fan, but also she's a we and a not we at the same time.
• 1:17:51
  So there's still a point at which she can go, this is really
• 1:17:54
  good. We shouldn't do this because
• 1:17:56
  there's, you know, what are you going to do with the ordinary
• 1:17:59
  members of the public? So I think, I think Julie Gunn,
• 1:18:01
  although of course, you know, Eccleston has called for them
• 1:18:03
  all to be sacked. And there might be like a point
• 1:18:07
  at which you go, maybe he's right.
• 1:18:09
  Lucy McCall, if you're listening in, you know, you and I were on
• 1:18:12
  Rod's bust and we had that conversation.
• 1:18:14
  But there's still that figure there.
• 1:18:16
  But you're right, by and large, you don't get it in the revival.
• 1:18:19
  It's. Like, that's like the New
• 1:18:20
  Adventures, right? They have Rebecca Levine
• 1:18:22
  steering the rudder and just Kate Horman writing books.
• 1:18:26
  And otherwise it was all a load of blokes.
• 1:18:27
  I don't think it's good enough. Whereas as soon as Chivas comes
• 1:18:31
  in, you've got a female writer for Rosa for The Witch Finders.
• 1:18:34
  I think it's a writer and director for The Witch Finders.
• 1:18:36
  A female writer for Can you Hear Me Villagers the Angels Eve of
• 1:18:40
  the Daleks is directed by a woman legend to the Sea Devils
• 1:18:45
  is directed by a woman. Like there's I just think he he
• 1:18:49
  does better. He does better.
• 1:18:51
  But I think with Chipnall, it's that this is the best person for
• 1:18:55
  the job. Not necessarily I want a woman
• 1:18:57
  in here because I'm going to make some very progressive
• 1:18:59
  point. And there's a sentence in which
• 1:19:00
  is entirely natural and it's entirely right, which again we
• 1:19:04
  come back to the point, this is a really well run production
• 1:19:07
  team. I mean, you vote.
• 1:19:10
  Look. At.
• 1:19:11
  Look at Eva, the Daleks. Yeah, which is an impossible
• 1:19:15
  ask. It's a COVID production.
• 1:19:16
  It's saying a fucking warehouse. It should be the most boring
• 1:19:20
  looking episode of all time. It's stunning the direction of
• 1:19:22
  that. What a slightly creepy,
• 1:19:24
  stalkerish subtext. Oh yeah, that's chippers Ryan,
• 1:19:27
  though. Yeah, and I did make it a black
• 1:19:31
  man, didn't they? Worryingly.
• 1:19:34
  As a bit of a Moffettism there I I think, but what's?
• 1:19:38
  Your second thing, let's get on. Let's see, let's see.
• 1:19:42
  I like its use of the kind of standbys of period drama that on
• 1:19:51
  one level it is a period drama and then it moves from, it's
• 1:19:55
  like Austin with a vampire in it.
• 1:19:57
  And I really like that kind of hybrid nature of it.
• 1:20:00
  And and and and visually it it evokes those two genres and and
• 1:20:06
  they work on screen in a way maybe they shouldn't do.
• 1:20:08
  That is something almost unique to Doctor Who, right?
• 1:20:12
  That you can take 2 very different sources and mesh them
• 1:20:17
  together, but still make it Doctor Who as well.
• 1:20:21
  OK, well my second thing then is going to be, I mean, I really, I
• 1:20:24
  love how this almost at the halfway point goes from being a
• 1:20:28
  very creepy, extremely well executed haunted house story to
• 1:20:33
  being a riveting Doctor Who story.
• 1:20:37
  Because the Sideman comes in, suddenly, the Ark's being set
• 1:20:40
  up, there's the Doctor having great speeches, and it makes
• 1:20:44
  that transition effortlessly and and to no detriment of the
• 1:20:49
  episode as a whole. Yeah, actually, it does do that
• 1:20:53
  very well because, you know, we all can think of Doctor Who
• 1:20:55
  stories where they get to a point and then it shifts gear
• 1:20:58
  and it you can hear the gears creaking in a way you can't
• 1:21:02
  hear. My Third Point is this is the
• 1:21:05
  greatest Cyberman in the history of the show.
• 1:21:08
  The Borg have come home and they're going to kill that
• 1:21:12
  child, but then they're not. I mean, it's inspired by the
• 1:21:16
  Cybermen, now we're inspired by the Borg.
• 1:21:19
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And let let's not kid ourselves.
• 1:21:22
  It's a really great idea because of course, yeah, the vision of
• 1:21:25
  the Borg is from that that Japanese and science fiction,
• 1:21:28
  that puppet science fiction show that was on here in the in the
• 1:21:32
  very early 80s. I've forgotten what it's called.
• 1:21:34
  So brilliant, Paul. Well done.
• 1:21:35
  Another kind of tangent there, Danny get There you go Daniel
• 1:21:38
  and my other people online. There's another tangent for you
• 1:21:41
  can follow that up. But like Picard when he's was he
• 1:21:44
  Lacoute's Borg? That's visually from that
• 1:21:47
  Japanese team, but they are really the Cyberman.
• 1:21:49
  But here it's the Cyberman's Borg, and it's brilliant.
• 1:21:53
  It's absolutely terrifying. And my last thing then is going
• 1:21:57
  to circle right back to what I said at the start of the
• 1:21:59
  episode, and that is taking the typical Chip Nuira complaints
• 1:22:05
  and fucking ace in all of them. The the, the large guest cast,
• 1:22:10
  the three companions, the exposition, the Mcguffin
• 1:22:16
  becoming like this big moral argument, just all of it, man.
• 1:22:19
  I think. I don't think it's deliberate.
• 1:22:22
  I just think he's honed it at this point where he's getting
• 1:22:25
  all of that stuff right. Yeah, I don't think it is
• 1:22:29
  deliberate because it's deliberate in Davis in the
• 1:22:33
  second run. And that's why it feels didactic
• 1:22:37
  and it feels like kind of like almost like slogan Eisenhower
• 1:22:41
  protest. This doesn't feel unnatural to
• 1:22:44
  the drama. This feels like a natural
• 1:22:46
  outcoming of the drama. It feels like a natural product
• 1:22:48
  of the writing. But on one level, I think it is,
• 1:22:52
  as you say, it's a response to those criticism.
• 1:22:55
  If he's aware of them. Because I don't know, chip
• 1:22:57
  noise. I don't, I don't.
• 1:22:59
  I think there's a sense in which he's not necessarily following
• 1:23:04
  obsessively what people are saying about the show and he's
• 1:23:07
  just doing the best that he can for the show.
• 1:23:10
  And I think I think it's a brilliant run.
• 1:23:11
  I don't I don't know why the audience falls off because when
• 1:23:14
  they got 8,000,000 for the Woman who fell to Earth.
• 1:23:17
  Higher No 1011 million. Blimey.
• 1:23:23
  And then I mean. I mean, it settles around 5:00,
• 1:23:26
  which is still, it's still like a top 10 every week.
• 1:23:30
  Yeah, I just don't know what happens.
• 1:23:32
  I think probably this is just about to tip into we're going to
• 1:23:36
  write for the fans and it's probably a mistake.
• 1:23:41
  I mean, we're there right side men.
• 1:23:42
  The Master Gallifrey by. The way yeah, yeah, yeah, and
• 1:23:45
  and and and flux absolutely is going to go hairy down that
• 1:23:49
  hole, but there's a sense in my favorite.
• 1:23:51
  Whitaker story Flux so I can't really, but then I'm a fan.
• 1:23:56
  But it's as a fan, but as if you could somehow distil Joe fan
• 1:24:02
  there and Joe as critical viewer, not fan there in a kind
• 1:24:06
  of Jekyll and Hyde type fashion. Yeah, no.
• 1:24:09
  One will watch, in the other words, and I think that's where
• 1:24:13
  the problem emerges. And it's a problem then, which
• 1:24:17
  is reflective of the fact that Tenant, as the most beloved
• 1:24:21
  person on British TV, doesn't get the viewing figures they
• 1:24:25
  think they're going to get for the Star Beast.
• 1:24:28
  I mean it, it's better than the tail and the Whittaker, and it's
• 1:24:32
  certainly better than Gatwa. It does take a spike.
• 1:24:36
  Yeah, and then. But it doesn't build an
• 1:24:38
  audience. It gets people back and then
• 1:24:41
  they go away again. Is it because the British view
• 1:24:44
  in public is irrederably racist? I I absolutely think that is an
• 1:24:49
  issue. Yes, absolutely.
• 1:24:51
  And homophobic as well. Like absolutely.
• 1:24:55
  And, and here, you know, I see. I think it is a problem for some
• 1:25:00
  people that Jodie is a woman, a female Doctor.
• 1:25:03
  You think it's a problem. You know it's a problem.
• 1:25:05
  And as we said already, the people who didn't like the
• 1:25:08
  Doctor being a woman absolutely don't like the doctor being a
• 1:25:12
  black man who might be gay. You know, it's blown a little
• 1:25:16
  mind. And in fact, they've probably
• 1:25:18
  wanked themselves dry at the prospect of the Doctor ending at
• 1:25:22
  that point in time because, yeah, as Anthony Trollope will
• 1:25:26
  tell us, he knew he was right. And it's always a he.
• 1:25:30
  It's never any women comments online going, no, the doctor's
• 1:25:34
  black and he's gay. What a terrible.
• 1:25:36
  Except that woman in the convention crew.
• 1:25:38
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, but then what?
• 1:25:41
  She seemed. She seemed irredeemably
• 1:25:43
  irritated. Was she dressed as Davros?
• 1:25:48
  Was she dressed as Ian Levine? Adventures dressed as Ian
• 1:25:53
  Levine? I don't know.
• 1:25:54
  I. Don't.
• 1:25:55
  Know that people are going to go to the target thing in a couple
• 1:25:59
  of weeks time dressed up as. Well, I will now.
• 1:26:01
  Just a shock, Will. You as Ian Levine?
• 1:26:03
  That's right. And these big white pants that
• 1:26:05
  the Polish box keep talking about with the skid marks up at
• 1:26:09
  the back. That's the world.
• 1:26:11
  We have to get here eventually, didn't we?
• 1:26:14
  What to skid marks? That's right.
• 1:26:16
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it could be all erudite.
• 1:26:18
  I said at the star that Flux episode.
• 1:26:21
  I said what a shame because the gutter Press of Doctor Who is
• 1:26:25
  not here. I like to think that I am lying
• 1:26:31
  in the gutter but looking up at the stars, to paraphrase wild.
• 1:26:34
  And occasionally I can elevate myself so it's not all just like
• 1:26:39
  references to sex and metal anuses and a lot of swearing,
• 1:26:43
  although there has been a bit of swearing on this.
• 1:26:45
  And you know, I, I apologize to those who'd rather have just the
• 1:26:48
  literary version and you know, there'll be no swearing at
• 1:26:51
  Target, but it is. I love both.
• 1:26:54
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, I, I try.
• 1:26:57
  It's, it's an odd 1, isn't it? Because it has to be.
• 1:27:01
  I think that they just can't cope with the Doctor being a
• 1:27:06
  woman. There's nothing in those first 3
• 1:27:09
  episodes of which of his run that would suggest that you'd
• 1:27:12
  have to turn off the TV because they're badly made television.
• 1:27:17
  They're not. You may not like it because
• 1:27:20
  she's a woman. And then when you're confronted
• 1:27:22
  with Rosa Parks, your racism probably kicks in and therefore
• 1:27:26
  you turn the TV off then as well.
• 1:27:28
  I mean, I think I think Meg's argument on our video we made
• 1:27:32
  that there's a problem with the Rosa Parks episode because it
• 1:27:35
  becomes white saviour narrative and Graham's a bus driver.
• 1:27:39
  And I think that is a, it's a wild kind of accidental, but
• 1:27:44
  those are three really well. Wait Paul, it's even worse Then
• 1:27:47
  he's taking a pop at Trump in the 4th episode.
• 1:27:50
  I know, I know, but then he by. That point, all the right
• 1:27:53
  wingers are just in such a tears.
• 1:27:55
  He didn't shit himself quite as badly as Marvel did when they
• 1:27:58
  pulled their punches with the most recent Captain America film
• 1:28:01
  where Trump is. Isn't he the red Hulk?
• 1:28:03
  I mean I don't watch Marvel anymore.
• 1:28:04
  How many people do it? So I don't know so so so someone
• 1:28:08
  can comment on this either on blue sky or on or if you're
• 1:28:11
  going to put it on patron, but you know, just check on blue sky
• 1:28:13
  Joe. I don't I know it's a bit
• 1:28:15
  roundly for patron really, isn't it?
• 1:28:17
  It might kill your income St. slightly drunk Paul rambling
• 1:28:22
  about what you want on on Saturday night.
• 1:28:27
  Well, look. To circles around Bombshell, to
• 1:28:32
  the haunting ability at Arty. Oh boy.
• 1:28:35
  I mean, I love you off the off the leash as well.
• 1:28:40
  It is just wonderful, isn't it? I don't know.
• 1:28:46
  I go top five. I definitely go top 10.
• 1:28:48
  To loop Limpy back to where? To loop you back to where we
• 1:28:51
  were. It's a brilliant episode.
• 1:28:53
  I think it's my favorite episode from season 12.
• 1:28:56
  It would definitely be my top three for Joe.
• 1:28:58
  We did do a pretty good commentary on Orphan 55 if you.
• 1:29:02
  Remember, that's a great story. I don't know what the fuck is
• 1:29:05
  wrong with these people. That's a great story.
• 1:29:07
  It is. And practices as well.
• 1:29:09
  What is it? Do you think we should destroy
• 1:29:11
  the environment? Well, you, you rock on.
• 1:29:13
  You know, I've got children. I need to think about the future
• 1:29:15
  and they don't cope well in the heat.
• 1:29:17
  You're pretty. I'm quite bored now, so I wear a
• 1:29:20
  hat a lot of the time. So if it's like, if it's warm
• 1:29:23
  come Target, I'm going to be there dressed like David Banks
• 1:29:25
  when you turned up to pay the doctor when pertly got the shits
• 1:29:28
  that time or whatever it was. Oh, it's spoilers all the time,
• 1:29:32
  isn't it? With me?
• 1:29:33
  You've got a big mouthful anyway.
• 1:29:36
  How would you like to end this? I don't know you're you're the
• 1:29:40
  producer when it's not like some type of.
• 1:29:41
  No, I just go with the guests really.
• 1:29:43
  If they go on a mad rant at the end then so be it.
• 1:29:47
  Last time that happened, you know, was when when Toby lost
• 1:29:52
  his shit at the end of that strictly, where he was forced to
• 1:29:56
  choose between evil and power of the Daleks.
• 1:29:58
  And he had. He threw all of his toys out of
• 1:30:00
  the pram and Emerald never came back.
• 1:30:04
  Power of the Daleks is clearly the best story in in season 4.
• 1:30:09
  Win. It won.
• 1:30:10
  Toby I I I'm, I I think Toby is a great cultural commentator.
• 1:30:15
  I think his work on Cuatamas is brilliant.
• 1:30:19
  But you know, there's no doubt that Power is a better story
• 1:30:23
  than either of the Daleks. It's it's quite clearly the case
• 1:30:26
  that Power is better written, it's better structured.
• 1:30:31
  There's not this weird shit where the TARDIS turns up at
• 1:30:33
  Gatwick and it gets stolen and they go down to Chelsea and they
• 1:30:36
  sell. It's fucking weird.
• 1:30:39
  The the best thing for evil is you've got the Emperor Dalek,
• 1:30:42
  but it's nostalgia. It's the same way you think Evil
• 1:30:44
  is brilliant and you think Tomb of the Simon is brilliant.
• 1:30:46
  Tomb of the Simon is dog shit. Everyone knows that that's not
• 1:30:51
  what you're looking for here. What you're looking for is the
• 1:30:53
  Jodie Whittaker run is quietly maybe the most competent three
• 1:31:00
  seasons in you Who? And I love Matt.
• 1:31:05
  Disagree. I love Matt Smith.
• 1:31:08
  I love Capaldi Tenant. I don't necessarily love his
• 1:31:12
  performance. I think he's really important.
• 1:31:14
  I think Eccleston was great casting, but I think instead of
• 1:31:17
  just getting down, doing the job of turning in 10 episodes of
• 1:31:21
  well made, well written, well performed, well directed TV, you
• 1:31:26
  can't find much better than season 11 and season 5.
• 1:31:31
  This is season 12, so I've kind of scuppered that argument.
• 1:31:33
  But Season 12, The end of Season 12?
• 1:31:37
  If you're a Doctor Who fan, that's all for you.
• 1:31:40
  You may not like it, but you needed it.
• 1:31:43
  The Timeless Children is a brilliant concept.
• 1:31:48
  Will cast it there.