Latest / A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast / Hamster Book Club - The Romans (Redux) by Donald Cotton (featuring James Lark)

Transcript

Hamster Book Club - The Romans (Redux) by Donald Cotton (featuring James Lark) · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:22
  Music. Welcome back to the Hamster Book
• 0:40
  Club. My name is Joe Ford and throwing
• 0:44
  down the gauntlet today is our Mr. James Lark.
• 0:51
  Hello, James. Are they Joe?
• 0:55
  You may look sheepish over there or bite your knuckles when I say
• 0:58
  that, but why? Why would I say that?
• 1:00
  You're throwing down the gauntlet today because people
• 1:02
  may, people may look at their podcast catches and go, I think
• 1:06
  I heard this one a couple of months ago.
• 1:08
  I believe that the gauntlet has been thrown down already and I'm
• 1:11
  I am picking up the gauntlets AM.
• 1:14
  I starting rivalries here of the book club.
• 1:17
  I don't know that it's AI. Don't.
• 1:18
  Well, yes, you are actually. Let's.
• 1:21
  Fine. No, no.
• 1:23
  So I mean, this is how it basically went down.
• 1:25
  You read The Crooked World and Luke and Andrew and John went,
• 1:29
  well, we would love that. And you know, you quite liked
• 1:33
  it. The other two were sort of less
• 1:35
  keen on it. So we want to do another episode
• 1:37
  of that. And then I believe there was one
• 1:40
  sort of fortunate day where you press play on my The Romans
• 1:44
  episode. Well, you had what you warned me
• 1:47
  in advance because I think that you've known for a while how I
• 1:50
  feel about Donald Cotton's three target novelizations.
• 1:55
  In fact, I think it was a first or second time round that I
• 1:59
  brought out the Myth Makers and waved it and said this is a book
• 2:02
  that I'd recommend. And your eyes lit up.
• 2:05
  And since then we keep coming back to it.
• 2:07
  And the Gunfighters was in my top 10.
• 2:10
  So oh, and then and then obviously I did a book club on
• 2:16
  the Gunfighters with with yourself and Michael Mills.
• 2:19
  Enough. You know that's in my hamster
• 2:21
  Book Club listeners Top 10. Is it how things go?
• 2:24
  Isn't it? Right, right.
• 2:25
  Rightly so. Phil's doing well as well.
• 2:27
  You know, you and Michael Mills are a hell of a combination.
• 2:31
  I'd like, well, that's nice of you to say.
• 2:34
  I sort of, I sometimes feel like Michael Mills is there as the
• 2:36
  expert. You know, when on Newsnight,
• 2:38
  they have an expert and A and a celebrity and a, a wild card.
• 2:41
  I often feel like the wild card in in that.
• 2:44
  I notice you're not saying I'm not there as the expert.
• 2:46
  Thank you very. Much.
• 2:47
  Oh, no. I think you're very much the
• 2:48
  celebrity. Yeah, what's what's below?
• 2:52
  Z list? Celebrity.
• 2:53
  You know, the janitor. Anyway, sorry, please continue.
• 2:58
  Well, you warned me when we when we were prepping the
• 3:00
  gunfighters, I was getting messages saying, Oh, you're not
• 3:03
  going to like this, this podcast that I've recorded on the Romans
• 3:06
  and the myth makers and I but then I think I was in denial
• 3:10
  until I actually heard it because well, to to lighten the
• 3:18
  gunpowder and blow my load. At this point in the podcast, I
• 3:24
  think the myth makers and the gunfighters, the myth makers
• 3:28
  slightly, slightly more, but the gunfighters as well.
• 3:30
  And the Romans are my three favorite target novelizations.
• 3:34
  Brilliant though battlefield is much though I love remember to
• 3:37
  the dialects. There's something about Donald
• 3:41
  Cotton's commitment to adapting this into an entirely literary
• 3:46
  format that I think is unmatched in the whole of Doctor Who
• 3:51
  literature. Is that a bold statement?
• 3:52
  Yes, it is. Do these books deserve such a
• 3:55
  statement? Yes, they do.
• 3:57
  So and then I, I turn on this podcast and bear in mind, this
• 4:01
  is not it's not some also ran mouthing off about these books.
• 4:07
  This is not Fraser Gregory lobbing grenades of controversy.
• 4:12
  That we could. Understand.
• 4:14
  We could understand that it's it's luminaries like it's Andrew
• 4:18
  Batty and it's Luke the great Luke Sims Jenkins.
• 4:21
  It's it's published author John Arnold, whose books.
• 4:25
  He didn't mind it. He didn't mind it.
• 4:28
  He was he was he was the least. It was Luke who who really went
• 4:32
  on with these. But I think as I said to you
• 4:36
  when we last discussed this, it was AI was listening to it
• 4:40
  going. Have we read the same books?
• 4:43
  Because. I listen to podcasts all the
• 4:46
  time, you know, and think, have we watched the same thing?
• 4:49
  Have we? Yeah.
• 4:50
  I, I, I get it. I get it.
• 4:52
  It was like a gulf, a chasm of understanding.
• 4:55
  Now that's that I'm slightly exaggerating for humorous effect
• 4:59
  because there were moments and they were they were much kinder
• 5:02
  to the the myth makers. I think there are some things to
• 5:05
  discuss there as well, for sure. But the Roman it, it was the
• 5:10
  response to the Romans, the Romans response, I mean, Luke
• 5:14
  actively seemed to hate the experience of reading the
• 5:17
  Romans. The others were certainly
• 5:19
  lukewarm. And I don't, in a way, I guess I
• 5:23
  understand the hating more because I feel like if you don't
• 5:26
  get it, if you don't like that style, if you don't think this
• 5:29
  is an appropriate way to tell this story, then you're not.
• 5:30
  You're not going to get on with it.
• 5:32
  I mean, I certainly think they explained themselves well.
• 5:36
  If they made, they made they made them, and in highly
• 5:39
  compelling they they of course, all three of them very
• 5:44
  articulate and for. Example You have to remember
• 5:46
  Andrew. He doesn't like verbose prose,
• 5:50
  so going into any Donald Cotton book, you're in a lot of
• 5:54
  trouble. That's right.
• 5:55
  And if you go in saying, well, what I really can't stand
• 5:58
  reading is letters, you're also going to have a bit of a problem
• 6:01
  here. I think we need to address the,
• 6:04
  the various problems they had with it because however, however
• 6:08
  articulately they were articulated, I disagreed
• 6:14
  entirely with them. But no, I, I mean, I, I, I
• 6:18
  obviously believe that everyone is entitled to, to their
• 6:22
  opinion, however wrong that opinion is.
• 6:25
  And the reason I'm picking up this corner is to say other
• 6:28
  opinions are available. And I bloody love the Romans and
• 6:33
  I heartily recommend it. And I am very happy to to sit on
• 6:37
  your podcast in your ears, explaining exactly why.
• 6:41
  I think was it my idea to do this rebuttal?
• 6:45
  I think it might have been. Maybe you dropped the siege.
• 6:48
  Yeah. Possibly.
• 6:49
  And I was like, I might have just launched into it and and
• 6:51
  you were saying and you might have just sort of stopped me.
• 6:53
  Hey, hey, hey. If you're going to do this, we
• 6:55
  ought to record it. I've had people sort of
• 6:57
  contacting me, right? I get a lot of messages about
• 6:59
  the book club. I'm really surprised how much
• 7:00
  it's taken off going excuse me, you haven't covered this, this,
• 7:04
  this, this. What are you doing?
• 7:06
  2 episodes on the crooked world and alien bodies and well, now
• 7:09
  the Romans as well. But I do think there are
• 7:12
  different conversations to have with the same material with
• 7:15
  different people, certainly when there's been a strong reaction
• 7:18
  in One Direction for. Sure.
• 7:20
  And these are unusual books. I mean, I do think that these
• 7:24
  Don Cotton novelisations are are worthy of particular examination
• 7:30
  in in the way that I'm I'm not sure that Terence Tix's
• 7:35
  novelisation of the war game. Would be.
• 7:38
  Do you understand then saying that why these books are
• 7:43
  divisive? Yeah.
• 7:45
  And I also, I'm not entirely sure that I understand how they
• 7:49
  were ever published in the 1st place.
• 7:52
  It's such a they are such a departure from the the house
• 7:55
  style. It's not a Nigel Robinson, it
• 8:00
  is. So Terence is sort of.
• 8:01
  He's still writing a lot of targets, but I don't think he's
• 8:03
  overseas. Not sure he's writing a lot.
• 8:06
  And also, I mean, John Nathan Turner used to go through them
• 8:11
  because of course the story with Warriors great Warriors Gate is
• 8:15
  that Stephen Gallagher submitted a completely refitted version of
• 8:24
  Warriors Gate rewritten to to fit the the form of a novel.
• 8:28
  And it departed too much from the television version And John
• 8:32
  Nathan to know who was then still very active in accepting
• 8:36
  or rejecting what was going to be published under the target.
• 8:39
  Anna said, no, you can't do that.
• 8:41
  And he ended up having to basically do a rewrite.
• 8:44
  She's interesting. I think is when Terminus came
• 8:46
  out that diverts massively from the TV version.
• 8:51
  And but I'm wondering if Robinson's in then and you know,
• 8:54
  Robinson himself row edge of destruction and turns that
• 8:58
  two-part tiny Doctor Who story into like 180 pages or something
• 9:03
  like that, going deep into the bowels of the steampunk Tarvis
• 9:07
  that he did in that. So, so I think he wasn't afraid
• 9:10
  to to divert a little bit. No, and I think that also The
• 9:15
  Romans is published in 1987. J&T has just been through a very
• 9:20
  acrimonious experience with Eric Saywood.
• 9:23
  Probably less inclined to spend a lot of time reading books and
• 9:31
  being argumentative. Probably a bit of the fight had
• 9:34
  gone out of him. I think probably by that stage
• 9:36
  he just didn't care what they were putting out.
• 9:38
  And as you say, Nigel Robinson's kind of at the helm, steering it
• 9:41
  in a particular direction. And yet, because I'm going to
• 9:44
  make a bold claim now, then if I didn't realize that it was at
• 9:47
  that exact point, around 87, you could probably say him taking
• 9:51
  his eye off the books meant we got more interesting books, and
• 9:55
  him putting his eye back on the TV show meant we had a much
• 10:01
  better TV show on our hands as well.
• 10:04
  I agree with both of those, and possibly somewhere in the
• 10:07
  background of that as well is the fact that Doctor Who on
• 10:12
  video had just about started to take off by that by that point.
• 10:15
  So it was conceivable suddenly that people were going to be
• 10:19
  able to go back to Doctor Who in its original form, and therefore
• 10:22
  the books had to do something slightly different.
• 10:25
  Do we know how this came to be? Did Donald Cotton just go?
• 10:28
  You know what? I want to write this as a series
• 10:30
  of letters. I don't know.
• 10:32
  Because that'll be a lock. I mean, why was he I I guess I
• 10:35
  mean, I can't imagine either the myth makers or the gunfighters
• 10:40
  sold terribly well. The gunfighters by by by then
• 10:43
  known factually to be the worst Doctor Who story of all time.
• 10:48
  And as and when we discussed it, as we said, like it was a hugely
• 10:52
  satisfying read for for us as adults who are into books.
• 10:58
  Probably not the most appealing read for a 10 year old who's
• 11:03
  into targets and is expecting a Terence Dicks easy read.
• 11:07
  That's the weird thing about the cotton ones for me is that
• 11:10
  generally speaking, I can read a target anything from Heart Lost
• 11:13
  time, maybe to Colin Bakers. I think once you go past that,
• 11:17
  you're getting into more mature books with the exceptions of
• 11:21
  these three. So as a child, I could read
• 11:23
  those those terrorist sticks novel and and even now, and I
• 11:26
  just switched my brain off completely.
• 11:28
  I have to work to read Cotton three books as an adult and I
• 11:33
  don't really with any of the other targets, and I'd like
• 11:36
  that. I think that's why they're worth
• 11:38
  talking. About books, Yeah, sorry, that's
• 11:41
  such a patronising thing to say, but you know what I mean?
• 11:43
  Like, I mean, I think a novelisation has a you know, it
• 11:46
  is meant to tick particular boxes and, and it did that for
• 11:52
  the target range did that generally extremely well.
• 11:56
  And I'm not in any way denigrating the the work of
• 12:00
  Terence Dicks who got it down to AT this, reducing it to
• 12:04
  something that was so, so kind of beautifully packaged for
• 12:07
  younger readers. So I'll take, I'll retract that
• 12:12
  phrase. Proper books.
• 12:15
  What but what I'm what I mean is that they read like books that
• 12:18
  you would get from from a different part of the bookshop.
• 12:21
  They read like books that you'd get from the the literary
• 12:24
  fiction section. I think they're books worthy of
• 12:28
  study and I, you know, a script to page I think is pretty much a
• 12:34
  script page, right? Exactly that.
• 12:36
  Exactly when did you first come across you read the message as a
• 12:40
  child? What the targets?
• 12:42
  These three. No now, so I read The Myth
• 12:46
  Makers about a year and a half ago when I did the commentary
• 12:50
  for it with David Glesby Pratt. I wanted to listen to the
• 12:53
  soundtrack and read the book and I'd written off The Myth Makers
• 12:56
  as I remember listening to the beginning of the soundtrack and
• 12:58
  that because it's such a bad quality soundtrack as well, that
• 13:02
  horrible popping noise and going, oh, this just is horrible
• 13:07
  on my ears. Never mind, I'm sure it's OK.
• 13:10
  Season 3 historical. It was a revelation to me, the
• 13:14
  myth makers, the book and the TV version.
• 13:17
  I think of their various mediums, They are two of the
• 13:21
  best, two of the best Doctor Who stories in those two separate
• 13:25
  mediums. Absolutely amazingly good.
• 13:27
  The Gunfighters. The first time I read that was
• 13:30
  when I did the book club with you and the Romans.
• 13:33
  I actually listened to it for, I listened to it for the previous
• 13:38
  book club, then I read it by that same book club and now I've
• 13:41
  listened to it again, so all within the last year.
• 13:43
  Right, right. And thrilled has been my general
• 13:49
  response to them. I'm glad that it's made you
• 13:51
  reassess the the TV version of the myth makers in particular as
• 13:55
  well, because it's not a great quality soundtrack and it's very
• 13:59
  hard to picture how it would have been.
• 14:00
  But there are some glorious performances in that if you can
• 14:03
  get past the quality and the I mean, it feels like an ancient
• 14:07
  product, but if you can get past that, some of the some of the
• 14:10
  acting in. It.
• 14:12
  So funny. The scenes of Hartnell, so, you
• 14:16
  know, we could catapult people over there, you know, goes Oh,
• 14:19
  well, you know, good you can go for oh, you know, I think I may
• 14:22
  have got my thumbs wrong. All of that stuff, all of the
• 14:25
  the amazing domestic drama with the with the Trojans, the
• 14:29
  family. Harris is, you know, Barry
• 14:32
  Ingham's very fae outraged Paris.
• 14:37
  When he comes in, they don't believe that he's got a
• 14:38
  prisoner. It's glorious.
• 14:40
  It really is funny. And the the whole thing about
• 14:44
  the girl who cried wolf, Cassandra, who has spent so long
• 14:48
  with her prophecies of doom. And this one time she's right.
• 14:52
  Listen to her, for God's sake. In the book, it even says the
• 14:55
  two men stood back-to-back, refusing to listen to her.
• 14:59
  I'm like, the dramatic irony of it is just wonderful.
• 15:03
  Yeah. So just brilliant.
• 15:06
  But I've always loved, I've always loved the Romans as ATV
• 15:09
  story. I think that's another another
• 15:12
  historical that's incredibly stylishly directed.
• 15:16
  I think that Dennis Spooner and that is something that's worth
• 15:19
  discussing. The fact that Spooner script
• 15:22
  scripted it and cotton novelised it.
• 15:25
  I'm wondering why that happened. Did Spooner do any?
• 15:29
  I think Spooner did do some, didn't he?
• 15:32
  Because Ian martyr the Reign of Terror.
• 15:34
  Yeah, that's. Maybe he didn't.
• 15:36
  Maybe not, maybe not. He's busy working on The
• 15:38
  Avengers or something like that, you know?
• 15:40
  Yeah, and I guess Cotton was was by that stage on the book, you
• 15:42
  know, he'd done his own scripts and probably it was a question
• 15:45
  of we've got another historical with a comedy flavour, do you
• 15:50
  want to do this one as well? But the thing I love about the
• 15:53
  Romans more than anything on TV is the pace of it because you
• 15:57
  have 4 separate storylines happening at the same time.
• 16:01
  He and Barbara Vicky in the oh, that's two, that's 40.
• 16:05
  The poisoner as well. There's lots going on anyway.
• 16:08
  And you keep going back to them and it keeps inching along.
• 16:12
  It just feels like it goes by. I lick that story in a way that
• 16:16
  a lot of 60 stories don't. I see that it's got the three
• 16:20
  storylines. It's very nicely mounted.
• 16:22
  It it here's the thing with the Romans.
• 16:27
  It for me, it doesn't work and wow.
• 16:31
  And I and I think the reason is I just don't think it's very
• 16:35
  funny. Why?
• 16:37
  Why not? I think it's hilarious.
• 16:40
  I think the humour is so broad and I, I think that I think that
• 16:51
  old comedy is always an issue anyway.
• 16:54
  And we're, you know, I, I, I, I love classic comedy.
• 16:58
  Don't get me wrong that there there's a couple of things going
• 17:03
  on here. The first is that having become
• 17:08
  in not even recent years, but certainly in the in the over the
• 17:13
  last 20 years, a real devotee of silent comedy, There's the
• 17:18
  realization that an awful lot of the jokes that that we first
• 17:21
  experienced in 70 sitcoms were actually invented by Chaplin and
• 17:26
  Keaton and done better. And they were done better
• 17:31
  because they were done with a film budget.
• 17:33
  And they were done better because they were done without
• 17:34
  any health and safety by people like Keaton who would just throw
• 17:38
  himself around. And the stuff that he does on
• 17:40
  screen is still kind of jaw droppingly, you know, incredibly
• 17:44
  athletic and and all the funnier for it.
• 17:48
  So that version that you saw in a TV, a 70s TV studio with all
• 17:52
  of the limitations of TV rehearsals and TV cameras and
• 17:56
  limited space and first take means that those jokes are not
• 18:00
  as as good. You remember them being great
• 18:02
  because you the. Studio audience are roaring, of
• 18:06
  course. And rightly and rightly so.
• 18:08
  And and so there is part, there's partly the fact that I,
• 18:11
  I feel that for an awful lot of particularly visual humour,
• 18:14
  there's a there is a better version and you you just have to
• 18:16
  go back to the kind of 1920s for it.
• 18:19
  Also, I think that comedy age is worse than any other kind of
• 18:26
  entertainment. And So what?
• 18:29
  You know, I'm, I've, I still watch an episode of Dad's Army
• 18:33
  with great pleasure, but how many times do I actually kind of
• 18:37
  barely laugh? A few.
• 18:39
  I mean, I mean you, you do because there are Gen. genuinely
• 18:42
  funny performances in there and people with genuinely funny
• 18:44
  bones and and they will pull something out, but it's not
• 18:47
  laugh a minute. What?
• 18:50
  Can I ask you, just as a total side note, what's the sitcom
• 18:53
  that will make you barely laugh on a regular occasion that you
• 18:58
  know if you go to it you will you will laugh once in an
• 19:03
  episode out? Loud out loud.
• 19:06
  I think of the classic ones yes, Minister has the edge for me
• 19:11
  because it because it's based in such densely written and and and
• 19:21
  cleverly constructed dialogue. It's, it's so witty then so
• 19:26
  clever and, and I, I do kind of like comedy that makes me feel a
• 19:30
  little bit clever because I'm watching something where I've
• 19:31
  actually kind of worked out what, what the joke is.
• 19:33
  And, and, and of course, 3 absolutely exemplary
• 19:37
  performances at the heart of it. I think kind of more recently, I
• 19:41
  do like kind of fairly broad humour, but I'm more of a League
• 19:44
  of Gentlemen guy than a Little Britain guy, if that makes
• 19:46
  sense. I sort of feel like the, you
• 19:48
  know, the I like a bit of pathos mixed in with my humour.
• 19:51
  And actually, for all the legal gentlemen did grotesques, they
• 19:54
  did real characters as well. And and that's and I and I do, I
• 19:57
  think that's probably true as well.
• 19:58
  Like the more painful something it is, the funnier it is.
• 20:02
  I think in my my goes who guaranteed laugh is probably 1
• 20:07
  foot in the grave, and that's just because it's so cleverly
• 20:11
  plotted. Most of the time there are duds,
• 20:13
  but most of the time it's so cleverly plotted and you've got
• 20:16
  2 triumphant performances at the heart of it.
• 20:19
  And Annette Crosby, I mean unsung performance in that makes
• 20:24
  me. How blessed.
• 20:26
  Absolutely. And that's, I mean, that's it.
• 20:28
  That proves what I mean. I totally agree.
• 20:29
  That's that's one of my go to as well.
• 20:31
  And it's the fact that the two of them, it, it pulls weird
• 20:36
  things out of the back when you're least expecting as well.
• 20:38
  You think you're just in a kind of domestic sitcom, and then
• 20:42
  suddenly they find a frozen cat in the freezer.
• 20:45
  And it's the way they react. They react with complete
• 20:48
  seriousness because because awful things, awful things
• 20:53
  happening to people, somehow what's happening and people
• 20:56
  responding as if they're awful things is much funnier than
• 20:59
  people responding as if they're comic things.
• 21:02
  Again, it's a that's a stylistic thing that has evolved certainly
• 21:06
  kind of since most of the comedies of the 70s where and
• 21:09
  it's why Buster Keaton still is the funniest for me of the
• 21:11
  silent comedians because he's got that thing where he's
• 21:14
  completely dead banned, but it's his eyes.
• 21:16
  He responds to the madness around him just with confusion.
• 21:21
  And he's not saying this is this is ridiculous.
• 21:24
  He's saying why is this happening to me?
• 21:26
  So do you think then the comedy in the Romans doesn't work as
• 21:29
  well one, because it's just a Rust production so they haven't
• 21:32
  got time to sort of craft it? I don't think it's very nuanced,
• 21:37
  particularly like episode 3 is the comedy episode and I think
• 21:40
  all of that kind of running a Nero chasing Barbara around.
• 21:44
  It's it doesn't feel like it's been particularly cleverly
• 21:48
  choreographed, which is what you really, that's how fast needs to
• 21:51
  be done. And fast is the hardest kind of
• 21:53
  comedy to pull off. It is.
• 21:55
  You know, succeeds the best in there.
• 21:57
  It's Hartnell, I think, because during that sequence, they're
• 21:59
  all doing all the running around and he just wanders in at one
• 22:02
  point and goes, oh, I wanted to talk to Susan Nero, but he seems
• 22:05
  to be rather busy. And he just walks off again, you
• 22:08
  know, and his timing is Immaculate.
• 22:09
  You're right, Hartnell, Hartnell gets it and and he gets that
• 22:12
  less is more. And of course the stand out
• 22:14
  scene in the Romans is the liar playing scene, which is
• 22:18
  completely underplayed and it's all in the reactions.
• 22:22
  So that what that scene absolutely works for me.
• 22:26
  I love the camaraderie. I love the the gentleness of the
• 22:32
  Romans, the way it begins and the fact that the cast are so
• 22:35
  clearly having a wonderful time and and loving being on the show
• 22:39
  and loving being with each other and that that feeds into their
• 22:43
  characterization. I just don't think it's laugh
• 22:46
  out loud funny very often. And I'm assuming you're going to
• 22:50
  say now unlike. Unlike the novelization, which I
• 22:55
  think has got so many laughs per page.
• 22:58
  So were you laughing out loud reading this?
• 23:00
  I was laughing out loud reading this and, and, and I think you
• 23:04
  said this missing kind of two out of every 3 jokes because
• 23:08
  it's so heavily populated with really, really funny jokes and
• 23:14
  well paced as well because it's got this.
• 23:16
  I mean, it's so clever. It's so witty, which, and I
• 23:18
  don't think that Donald, I don't think Dennis Spooner's script
• 23:22
  for the Romans is especially witty.
• 23:25
  There are moments of wit, but I don't think it's.
• 23:27
  You're not going to look at that dialogue and go, yeah, that's.
• 23:30
  I mean, the jokes are funny but they're obvious.
• 23:32
  It's stuff like, you know, if I get my hands on who's
• 23:35
  responsible whilst he's got his arms around Vicky.
• 23:37
  It's exactly that, yeah. But the joke really there is in
• 23:40
  Vicky's reaction of like, oh fuck it.
• 23:45
  And and of course, Donald Cotton's two scripts for Doctor
• 23:48
  Who are I'm not that they are much more about verbal dexterity
• 23:52
  and verbal wit and and rich characterization.
• 23:55
  I mean the myth makers especially, but the gunfighters
• 23:58
  as well. They've got really good
• 23:59
  characters in. And I think where I said the
• 24:03
  gunfighters novelization has got the edge sometimes over the the
• 24:08
  TV production is the costumes in control of the performances,
• 24:12
  which again, the restrictions of television, the restrictions of
• 24:16
  rehearsal time in the gunfights, you've got some people
• 24:18
  struggling with an accent they're not entirely happy with.
• 24:20
  They're not always giving the best comic performances because
• 24:24
  there are so many other things conspiring to stop that.
• 24:26
  Those scripts are screaming to be done.
• 24:29
  Like with a movie budget on film everybody Perfectly timed,
• 24:33
  aren't they? You know what we get?
• 24:34
  That's great, but could? Be or or on stage.
• 24:38
  Yes, yeah, One of the criticisms of the first Romans episode was
• 24:45
  that a lot of the material from the TV story was dropped in the
• 24:53
  novel or a lot of the incident. So I really, I listened to it
• 24:56
  this time and I really wanted to focus in on how much had fallen
• 25:00
  away. I don't think that's true at
• 25:04
  all. I think he pretty much covers
• 25:07
  every plot base that's in the story in the book, just in a
• 25:11
  really clever way. Absolutely agree.
• 25:15
  What he's done actually is that he's he's looked at the
• 25:20
  original, he's gone. Well, that's a very televisual
• 25:24
  idea and won't translate well into text.
• 25:29
  So how do I retell that part of the story?
• 25:32
  He has made some changes and he's certainly changed the
• 25:36
  emphasis of certain things. I suppose the, the kind of the
• 25:40
  big change is the central liar scene which the Romans builds up
• 25:46
  to. Andrew was one of the people who
• 25:48
  said, you know, he, he missed that scene being there.
• 25:51
  I just cannot envisage any narrated version of that scene
• 25:57
  coming close to the comedy value of Hartnell doing it and being
• 26:03
  able to see those reactions. So instead, Cossen chooses to
• 26:07
  replace that idea of the emperor's new clothes with the
• 26:11
  Doctor inventing modern music. Now I'm a composer and I have to
• 26:16
  say that the the, the pretension of modern music, of contemporary
• 26:23
  music, of a certain, you know, certain types of contemporary
• 26:25
  music. Are.
• 26:28
  A source of of immense entertainment to me.
• 26:31
  And the fact that he does it so kind of slightly like the fact
• 26:37
  that the Doctor calls his composition thermodynamic
• 26:39
  functions. I mean, it's funny because there
• 26:42
  are probably about 8 compositions written in the
• 26:44
  1980s called thermodynamic functions.
• 26:47
  You know, it's exactly the kind of wanky title that a certain
• 26:49
  type of composer would give their their piece.
• 26:53
  And so the, the doctor inventing it, sort of experimenting with a
• 26:57
  tonality. And it's just about, you know,
• 26:59
  it's it's, it's not too specific, but Cotton describes
• 27:04
  it specifically enough that you can tell that's what he's doing.
• 27:06
  He's basically inventing modern music, Nero.
• 27:11
  Thinks it's the most hideous racket he's ever heard in his
• 27:14
  life. Exactly that.
• 27:16
  And whereas the Doctor thinks that he's just been, this is
• 27:19
  and, and we will come to the characterisation of the Doctor
• 27:22
  in a moment, but this is the Doctor being immensely proud of
• 27:24
  what, you know, forget being anachronistic and, and
• 27:28
  introducing things into the timeline in the wrong order.
• 27:30
  He just think he, he sees himself as a great artist, which
• 27:33
  I think is absolutely true to Hartnell's Doctor.
• 27:37
  And he talks about it with great pride.
• 27:39
  And he says, I confess to being well pleased with my first
• 27:41
  attempt at eternal composition. It's my first, It's his first
• 27:45
  attempt. So we're even given to believe
• 27:47
  that it's probably is crap. It's just the Doctor thinks he's
• 27:50
  really good at it. Thermodynamic functions, since
• 27:52
  to me it typifies the eternal conflict between art and
• 27:56
  audience, which is brought to an altogether alienating crescendo
• 28:00
  of raucous discords in the final movement I've read programmed.
• 28:04
  Wonderful heart. Or you just fit there.
• 28:08
  So I, I think that's an acceptable alternative to what
• 28:12
  we get on television. The other thing that yeah.
• 28:16
  Was you about to say you've written compositions?
• 28:17
  Then that could be described that way.
• 28:19
  No, no, no, I didn't say. I said I'd read programs.
• 28:22
  I'm afraid I'm a bit of a conservative composer by modern
• 28:25
  standards. I still write.
• 28:26
  Gene, there was one part of the book there where they were
• 28:29
  talking about homicidal musical criticism.
• 28:33
  I was like, I wonder if he's never faced any of that.
• 28:37
  I should certainly hope not. I've seen you in action, you
• 28:40
  know. Not to my knowledge, but No 10
• 28:42
  people tend to be kind of stonily, stonily polite about
• 28:45
  music. They don't like it.
• 28:46
  What a night that was as well. We're still talking about my
• 28:51
  composition. No, we're talking about that
• 28:53
  fabulous symphonia. Yes, that's what I was talking
• 28:58
  about. Oh my God.
• 28:59
  It's not the sort of thing I usually go to at all.
• 29:01
  I felt incredibly cultured. That was yeah, that was a happy
• 29:05
  evening. Anyway, back to the doctors
• 29:06
  music we've so that that's the that's the liar bit.
• 29:11
  I mean, I the farce, as Don Arnold pointed out, farce in
• 29:16
  text is very difficult. Wodehouse can do it, but only in
• 29:22
  small doses. I mean, you Wodehouse absolutely
• 29:27
  does do the different people hiding in different cupboards
• 29:30
  scenes, but the reason Woodhouse can do that is that he, he
• 29:37
  creates the situation 1st and, and actually that's the, the
• 29:42
  whole core of good fast writing is that it's not funny per SE
• 29:46
  that someone's hiding in a cupboard.
• 29:48
  It's funny if you know who that character is and their
• 29:50
  relationship to the other characters and they've all got a
• 29:53
  different reason and a different motive and they're all going to
• 29:56
  think something completely different.
• 29:57
  The more convoluted you can make that, the fun, yeah, that's
• 30:00
  going to be. The Romans doesn't have any of
• 30:02
  that. I was going to say I'm watching
• 30:05
  Geez and Worcester at the moment, obviously based on a lot
• 30:08
  of Woodhouse stuff. And the joy of it is you're
• 30:11
  right. It's the set up, but also the
• 30:13
  inevitability of what's going to happen and you're waiting
• 30:17
  because you, he set it up so well.
• 30:19
  You just know that person's posing as that person, that
• 30:22
  person's posing as that person, that person's fiance is going to
• 30:25
  turn up that and you. And then when it hits, God, it's
• 30:28
  gold. It is wonderful, but very hard
• 30:31
  to do on the page. Very hard to do on the page and
• 30:34
  but also as I say this, this is not a story that's gifted with
• 30:37
  that kind of set up. The the nearest we come to it is
• 30:41
  the three groups of TARDIS travellers not ever meeting each
• 30:46
  other, which possibly controversial, I'm going to say
• 30:50
  is not actually that's well communicated on television.
• 30:53
  You get it in the final scene when they come back and they
• 30:56
  don't realize that they've all been an adventure and that's the
• 30:58
  joke. But I'm not sure that size
• 31:00
  fitting in and of itself. I'm not sure how well directed
• 31:05
  the near misses are. Now.
• 31:08
  John Arnold says that Donald Cotton blows the ending by
• 31:11
  having the Doctor meet Barbara and Ian in Rome.
• 31:15
  They don't have the return to the, to the, to the villa.
• 31:21
  I feel like that's just an efficient way of ending the
• 31:23
  story. Like there's no need to return
• 31:24
  to the villa. And actually the fight, the
• 31:26
  final joke is the burning of Rome, which I sort of feel is,
• 31:32
  is a better way of rounding off the whole thing.
• 31:35
  It's set up very early on. The idea of the, you know, the,
• 31:38
  the, the reference to the fiddling, the reference to the
• 31:40
  burning of Rome. It's made very clear that it's
• 31:42
  the Doctor Who sets off the conflagration.
• 31:45
  He thinks it's a sunset and the TARDIS crew look worried and and
• 31:51
  that and there it ends. I think that's the the the best,
• 31:54
  funniest way of ending it. We don't need to go back to the
• 31:56
  villa. So it makes absolute sense for
• 31:58
  him to finally bump into Barbara and Ian in the you know, in Rome
• 32:04
  with Nero and and then to get out together.
• 32:07
  There's but there is also a moment again.
• 32:10
  I don't know how in text you would do the doctor Vicky almost
• 32:14
  bumping into Barbara but not seeing her.
• 32:16
  Instead he recognizes Barbara and and again, this comes back
• 32:22
  to the characterization of the Doctor, who's so kind of single
• 32:25
  minded. The Doctor just refuses to
• 32:27
  believe that it could be Barbara's.
• 32:29
  Well, that that young slave looks a little bit like Miss
• 32:32
  Wright, and she even tries to get his attention by waving it
• 32:36
  in frantically. How do you go, Sir?
• 32:38
  But I absolutely know I left her in the safety of the villa, so
• 32:42
  it's impossible. Exactly that.
• 32:44
  That's to my mind, it's a different joke, but it's as good
• 32:48
  a joke and I think it's a better joke in text.
• 32:51
  Can we talk about the First Doctor in this book then?
• 32:54
  That we can in a moment. But I do want I also want to say
• 32:56
  that this book, although it's it mostly replaces that those
• 33:00
  visual gags with something more textual, which I think is
• 33:03
  entirely sensible. It does do for us.
• 33:06
  And you've got this assassin character who keeps popping up
• 33:09
  in his letters to his mother and the much more explicitly than on
• 33:14
  television, It's the same assassin each time trying to
• 33:17
  kill the doctor. And his attempt to kill the
• 33:19
  doctor get Wilder and Wilder and sort of culminates in the doctor
• 33:23
  accidentally releasing releasing lions and and having him.
• 33:29
  Oh yeah, he gets entangled up in the lyre.
• 33:31
  Now, the an assassin repeatedly failing to kill the Doctor is
• 33:36
  absolutely farcical and really, really funny in this book
• 33:39
  because we get the Assassin's response and we get, you know,
• 33:43
  the doctor again, people keep trying to kill me.
• 33:46
  Is is kind of the closest he gets to any awareness that that,
• 33:49
  that, that and and he he keeps recognizing the assassin as
• 33:52
  well, but he's not, he's doesn't seem overly bothered by it and
• 33:56
  he's not deliberately taking on this assassin.
• 34:02
  It's just that in the way of a a good farce, he keeps
• 34:05
  sidestepping these attempts and the assassin, like a cartoon
• 34:08
  character, gets more and more injured and and aggrieved as it
• 34:11
  goes on, which is great fast. Great brute of a man, James.
• 34:15
  He gets more desperate the more he writes.
• 34:18
  Dear Mum, how would you and Dad feel about buying me out of the
• 34:21
  Legion? The sooner the better.
• 34:23
  Bless him, he finally met his match.
• 34:26
  The Doctor. Go on then, let's talk about the
• 34:30
  doctor. Let's talk about what, because
• 34:32
  that was, I mean, one of the one of the big criticisms about it
• 34:35
  was that everybody talks with the same sort of, I can't think
• 34:40
  of a better word than verbosity. Think of one for me, you know?
• 34:44
  Well, verbosity is not a bad starting point.
• 34:46
  OK, well. There's a lot of sort of
• 34:48
  alliteration in there, isn't there?
• 34:50
  There is a lot of alliteration, and who was it who said they
• 34:53
  didn't like alliteration? One of them didn't like
• 34:55
  alliteration. Again, you're you're you're
• 34:59
  maybe reading the wrong book altogether.
• 35:02
  And So what John Arnold did say, which I think is interesting, is
• 35:05
  he didn't think that there, that the different characters in this
• 35:09
  book speak with strong voices. He thinks the author is poking
• 35:12
  through. I think there's a absolutely
• 35:18
  truth in that, that the author is poking through.
• 35:21
  It's gloriously word wordy from the, the, the outset, you know,
• 35:24
  it's, it's established as a, a series of documents that have
• 35:27
  been assembled by Tacitus in his attempts to well, his failure
• 35:34
  to, to finish off his history of Rome, because he's, he's met
• 35:37
  with the issue of the issues raised by these documents.
• 35:41
  And it's stuffed from the beginning, full of jokes, full
• 35:44
  of word play. It sets the tone immediately.
• 35:47
  So part of my, I suppose my confusion as to the negative
• 35:50
  response was that I feel like from page one, it's quite clear
• 35:53
  what world we're in. I think it could.
• 35:56
  It's. I think in Andrew's case it was
• 35:58
  shit. I hate this style and I've got
• 36:00
  another 140 pages of it to go. Andrew said that he, well,
• 36:05
  Andrew said he's annoyed by long words again.
• 36:08
  That's because he's used to reading targets written by
• 36:10
  Terence Styx. Yeah, it this book has got a lot
• 36:13
  of long words in it, and it's got a absolute love of language.
• 36:20
  He, rather unfairly, I think, described it as a shit version
• 36:23
  of Asterix. I'm not sure it is any version
• 36:26
  of Asterix. I think it's much closer to
• 36:29
  Blackadder, which has got that kind of verbal sparring, that
• 36:34
  word play. As well Very.
• 36:37
  Yeah, yeah. And Ben Olson loves long words
• 36:41
  and I mean, look at upstart Crow.
• 36:42
  The the the way that language is used in that and and and indeed
• 36:47
  alliteration. I do think that there are some
• 36:50
  strong voices in here. I think that Papaya has got a
• 36:53
  really strong voice. Nero's wife, she talks more like
• 36:57
  kind of a, you know, a slightly over privileged.
• 37:00
  I mean, the again, this is a joke that annoyed some of the
• 37:05
  the original book lovers, but they are anachronistic.
• 37:09
  The idea that that she speaks as if she's been to Cheltenham
• 37:11
  Ladies College and ends her epistles.
• 37:14
  Hey, ho is you know, it's it's obviously a caricature to some
• 37:19
  extent. Let's let's paint her as this
• 37:22
  particular type of of person who will be recognized by a 20th
• 37:27
  century reader. I mean, Nero absolutely has his
• 37:31
  own voice, right? I mean, did you hear Christopher
• 37:35
  Biggins reading it? Because I do feel that, you
• 37:38
  know, it's, it's not that kind of Biggins esque.
• 37:41
  It's John Coulshaw in the audio and he is loving every word.
• 37:48
  I wish her Tri syllabic name were Doris and Irene or Jane.
• 37:54
  He's having a great time. Was it?
• 37:56
  I can only assume whether when you wrote the word Ms. you meant
• 38:00
  Mouse. Well, well, Mouse, I shall be
• 38:04
  your pussycats. I mean, no one else sounds like
• 38:07
  that in this book. I I at once forgot all but my by
• 38:11
  now routine pursuit of the beautiful Hori and snatching up
• 38:15
  some golden Google from my wifes dressing table, I chased her
• 38:19
  lively about the endless corridors of my palatial
• 38:21
  loveless and we fled me like some shy gazelle.
• 38:26
  And I am reasonably confident that she would have allowed me
• 38:29
  to catch her on this occasion, had not my wing at Fiat
• 38:31
  encountered a loose leopard skin draft stopper which brought my
• 38:34
  subtle courtship to a premature and undignified clothes and let
• 38:38
  me spread eagled on the floor of the very room from which I had
• 38:40
  started out with such high hopes, I remind.
• 38:43
  If you should have done the reading.
• 38:45
  I remarked whoops or some such exclusive or.
• 38:51
  Very simply, when he talks about Lacosta with her for a friend,
• 38:54
  one hardly needs an enema. He's got a very distinct way of
• 38:58
  talking. Having said that, it doesn't do
• 39:01
  fast. I mean, it definitely does
• 39:03
  slapstick in in places. And the fact that it's, it's
• 39:06
  written by Nero, I mean the joy of that, of this particular
• 39:10
  document from Nero's scrapbook is that it follows a letter from
• 39:13
  Barbara Wright, which in which she is absolutely clear about
• 39:21
  her having absolutely no feelings at all for Nero.
• 39:24
  She ends. I'm sorry if this seems harsh,
• 39:26
  but I hope that you will feel able to forgive me in time and
• 39:28
  allow me to remain your unmolested, but in other
• 39:32
  respects, obedient servant Barbara Wright.
• 39:36
  The next document begins. She loves me, almost sure she
• 39:40
  does. Why else should she have written
• 39:42
  me a letter concealing her true feelings?
• 39:45
  I've no meddle, I changed, you know.
• 39:47
  But what about what you say? I think I thought you made
• 39:51
  firies again, probably not. I was prone prone to the the,
• 39:55
  the similar misinterpretations of misses.
• 39:59
  So I do think there are individual voices.
• 40:01
  Now, you could argue that Ian Chesterton writes in a very
• 40:05
  Florida way. Akin to the Doctor.
• 40:08
  Akin to the doctor absolutely right.
• 40:11
  I mean, let me find a bit, because I just wishing to put.
• 40:19
  Wishing to purchase provisions for my importunate young
• 40:22
  protege, I asked one of the latter if he could direct us to
• 40:25
  the marketplace, and having unscrambled his patronising
• 40:29
  ablative absolutes and plumbed his disgruntled gerundives, we
• 40:33
  came at length to an amenity area where some kind of an
• 40:36
  auction was about to begin. However, it soon became apparent
• 40:38
  that we were in the wrong department, for not a vegetable
• 40:41
  was on display and on consulting the auctioneer, A drunken
• 40:44
  functionary named Saverde so Cheria, I quickly realised that
• 40:48
  we had unwittingly stumbled into the slave market.
• 40:51
  I mean, it's a mouthful, isn't it?
• 40:52
  But what's? What's not to love about that?
• 40:56
  I mean, I've messaged you at one point.
• 40:59
  As I said, the way Ian signs off his letters absolutely kills me.
• 41:03
  I fear I may drown before I even have a chance to be born.
• 41:06
  In that case, Headmaster, you will never have a junior member
• 41:09
  of staff called. Sincerely, Ian Chesterton PS If
• 41:14
  you have not, then please disregard this letter.
• 41:16
  I mean, he's much wittier in prose, isn't he?
• 41:20
  I guess also, I feel like it's absolutely true that Donald
• 41:28
  Cotton's love of language is seeping through all of these.
• 41:31
  The Chesterton, the Doctor's bits, I feel like that's he's
• 41:37
  chosen a style that would have been recognized by a
• 41:40
  contemporary audience to some extent from the work of Robert
• 41:44
  Graves. And everyone knew of I, Claudius
• 41:46
  by then because of the famous BBC production.
• 41:49
  But just to give you a comparison I, Claudius opens
• 41:59
  with, let me give you a bit of the second paragraph.
• 42:03
  This is not by any means my first book.
• 42:05
  In fact, literature, and especially the writing of
• 42:07
  history, which as a young man I studied here at Rome, one of the
• 42:10
  best contemporary masters was, until the change came, my sole
• 42:13
  profession and interest for more than 35 years.
• 42:16
  My readers must not therefore, be surprised at my practice
• 42:19
  style. It is indeed Claudius himself
• 42:21
  who is writing this book, and no mere secretary of his, and not
• 42:23
  one of those official analysts either, to whom public men are
• 42:26
  in the habit of communicating their recollections in the hope
• 42:28
  that elegant writing will eke out meagerness of subject matter
• 42:32
  and flattery. Softened vices, I think, Sure.
• 42:35
  That's not from the Romans by Donald Cotton.
• 42:38
  Do you see? Do you see that I feel like
• 42:40
  Donald Cotton is knowingly writing a text which is based in
• 42:45
  Roman culture. It's written in the first
• 42:47
  person, the person voice that's much like his wonderful COD
• 42:55
  American lingo in the gun fighters is an exercise in this
• 43:00
  is how people know that Roman novels sound.
• 43:05
  So to some extent he is parodying a style at the same
• 43:11
  time as giving voice to these people, which is why I think
• 43:14
  that they are more verbose than we would necessarily expect
• 43:16
  those characters to be if they were if if it was to be an
• 43:19
  authentic attempt to write down, you know, the the voice of Ian
• 43:23
  Cheston as we saw him on television.
• 43:24
  But I don't think it is that. That to go back to something we
• 43:27
  were saying right at the start, that verboseness that those long
• 43:30
  words that Andrew was talking about.
• 43:33
  I think it's a challenge for young readers that are used to
• 43:38
  Terence Dix novelisation and for those people that won on the
• 43:44
  page because they can't watch Doctor Who in the 80s and now
• 43:48
  it's different. We've got it all at our
• 43:49
  fingertips. But then I can see why there was
• 43:52
  a push against this, that this is sophisticated language, it is
• 43:56
  difficult to understand. You have to work for it to make
• 43:59
  sense. Yeah, you do.
• 44:04
  I I just don't think that's a problem and I did.
• 44:09
  Like this as a kid. Not when I first started picking
• 44:17
  up target novels, but certainly by the age of 11 or 12.
• 44:23
  But then I was into the late ones as well.
• 44:25
  I was, I, I really liked the the Eronovich novelization of
• 44:30
  Remembrance. And then we've talked about
• 44:32
  Battlefield, both of which are more challenging in terms of
• 44:36
  style. But I think the point is a thing
• 44:39
  can be difficult to read and absolutely soul destroying.
• 44:44
  I don't think these are that because I think that if a thing
• 44:50
  delivers when you've worked out what it is that it's saying,
• 44:55
  even if it's a little bit harder now, of course, approaching the
• 45:01
  right text at the right age is important.
• 45:05
  I'm a great lover of Dickens, but I would never recommend a
• 45:07
  Dickens novel to any of the kids I teach because they are, they
• 45:10
  leave school at 13. It's too young, too.
• 45:12
  And, you know, reader adaptation, by all means watch
• 45:17
  it on television, but, but I think that that is language that
• 45:20
  is basically, you know, it's beyond a 13 year old.
• 45:23
  And I got into it when I was 16. And that's about the right age
• 45:27
  probably. And I do think that it's going
• 45:31
  to depend on on on what else someone has read.
• 45:33
  Someone reared on nothing more than Terrence Dix novelisations
• 45:41
  who hasn't gone beyond. You're looking at me right now.
• 45:44
  Well. No, I'm not, because I.
• 45:46
  Was force fed Dickens at a young age, I'll have you know.
• 45:49
  Were you? Actually?
• 45:50
  Yeah, unfortunately so. Yeah, but I mean the.
• 45:53
  And you're right, I'll do projective.
• 45:54
  That is the depressing thing is, and I think people who think
• 45:57
  they hate Dickens hate Dickens because they were given Dickens
• 46:00
  at the in the wrong way or the wrong age.
• 46:03
  Like the target range is quite an interesting one because of
• 46:06
  course there are more challenging ones, but Malcolm
• 46:08
  Hulk was more challenging than Dick's.
• 46:10
  And, and more challenging than that is the David Whittaker
• 46:13
  ones, which, and I do remember reading the Daleks when I was
• 46:16
  quite young and, and enjoying that.
• 46:19
  You know, if, if I had picked up the Doctor Who in the Romans
• 46:22
  when I was still in my Enid Blyton phase for all of Enid
• 46:26
  Blyton's various qualities, I don't think I'd have gone on
• 46:30
  with this. So yeah, it's, it depends when
• 46:33
  you approach it. And, and I'm, I'm certainly, I'm
• 46:35
  making no claim that this is easy reading.
• 46:38
  I just think the joy of it is it is in having to work.
• 46:42
  I mean, you've clearly found that because you said that you
• 46:43
  had to work hard at at reading this, but you've loved it.
• 46:47
  I have. I have.
• 46:48
  Yeah. I mean, I usually take the
• 46:50
  archetypal fan to be, sigh, heart, right?
• 46:52
  Like, he's absolutely the heart of fandom.
• 46:55
  And he hated this as a kid. He wanted to read the Romans on
• 46:59
  the page, and what he got was a series of letters scrimping
• 47:03
  apparently on the incident. But now he loves it.
• 47:06
  He adores this book now because as he got older, he, you know,
• 47:11
  started working in the library and basically read the entire
• 47:13
  library. And now we can see this is a
• 47:15
  very enjoyable piece of work. I do think it's one that matures
• 47:21
  with people though, You know, it's like a fine. 1 I mean to to
• 47:25
  come back to the character of the Doctor as well.
• 47:28
  This is a a particular take on the doctor.
• 47:30
  I think it's absolutely consistent with the Doctor as we
• 47:33
  see him in the myth makers and in the gun fighters.
• 47:36
  Cossen couldn't be further from the the conception of the Doctor
• 47:40
  as a a God or a a timeless child or anyone of any great import.
• 47:48
  The the Doctor in Don Cossen's scripts is is a a tramp with a
• 47:54
  time space machine. Kind of.
• 47:58
  Humbling around time. Who's the fellow of the Gabby
• 48:00
  Tooth that walks into a saloon bar?
• 48:02
  Yeah, causing havoc everywhere he goes.
• 48:08
  He's so. He does have a mission in this,
• 48:10
  doesn't he? He does in the.
• 48:12
  Book he There is a vague sense that he actually goes to to take
• 48:16
  a stand against at Nero and to pull him up on various things,
• 48:20
  which he does. I mean, it's specifically he
• 48:22
  says he wants to interview Nero because he suspects that history
• 48:25
  has dealt harshly with him. If the fiddle be myth, then what
• 48:28
  of the fire? He wants to see exactly what
• 48:32
  happened, obviously not suspecting for one second that
• 48:35
  he would have any involvement in it at all.
• 48:38
  In fact, he specifically says he reiterates the point about not
• 48:42
  interfering with history somewhere halfway through the
• 48:44
  book. And there's a there is a point
• 48:46
  where he says, never mind today, we should be in Rome, where I am
• 48:50
  confident I shall find an opponent more worthy of my
• 48:53
  steal, namely the emperor Nero. So he's painting him as an
• 48:57
  opponent. He's he's he seems unlike
• 49:00
  Hartnell in the televised version where he just seems to
• 49:04
  be enjoying the company of a famously awful person.
• 49:09
  He he goes with with the intention of actually
• 49:11
  confronting him on stuff. And Nero is really pissed off
• 49:15
  that the doctor comes in and starts asking him about traffic
• 49:18
  congestion and on conditions in the inner city areas and the
• 49:22
  phasing out of slavery in favour the the principle of one man one
• 49:26
  vote. Oh, it's.
• 49:27
  Just joyous, isn't it? You know, the doctor is
• 49:30
  described as a highly rated practitioner of pugilism and
• 49:34
  other martial arts at one point. So so the doctor is is utterly
• 49:39
  guileless and I and and and and and and a great comic creation,
• 49:44
  which I've got plenty of time with.
• 49:47
  I don't think I don't need to be reading this going yes, but what
• 49:49
  about the arch manipulator of the McCoy years?
• 49:52
  I just think I, I, I can see Hartnell absolutely throwing
• 49:56
  himself into the scripts when he's given them.
• 49:59
  I think it's hilarious in the gunfighters novelization where
• 50:02
  the doctor is the one who accidentally starts off the
• 50:05
  gunfighter, the OK corral by firing off a gun that he doesn't
• 50:08
  know how to work. I think it's hilarious here
• 50:10
  where he accidentally sets fire to Rome and also kind of brings
• 50:13
  about the, the, the, the, the situation where there are lions
• 50:17
  roaming and and slaves escaping just because he didn't realise
• 50:21
  that the counterweights on a thing would open a door into the
• 50:26
  into the arena. So.
• 50:28
  There seems to be a a a insinuation that the pomposity
• 50:32
  of the Doctor in these letters is somehow not the doctor we had
• 50:38
  on screen. I'm here to tell you guys, it
• 50:40
  absolutely is the doctor we had on screen.
• 50:44
  I mean, he's an arrogant gate in this one.
• 50:46
  He is and, and as I say, it's not, it's not at all far
• 50:50
  removed. And bear in mind we're, we're
• 50:52
  reading his words as well, not the, not the exterior.
• 50:55
  We're reading what the Doctor thinks.
• 50:57
  So I think we're allowed to to, to believe that the Doctor maybe
• 51:01
  did look down a little bit on his human companions, bearing in
• 51:05
  mind it wasn't entirely his decision to travel with him in
• 51:08
  the first place. Luke was very upset by his
• 51:12
  attitude of Vicky, who he just describes as having a tiny mind.
• 51:15
  I I. Can't mean a bought a manuensis,
• 51:18
  James. Yeah, I, I sort of think his
• 51:21
  attitude of Vicky is a little bit patronizing on television,
• 51:25
  because Hartnell's attitude to young women was a little bit
• 51:29
  patronising. I, I don't find any conflict
• 51:32
  here at all. And he looks down on, on pretty
• 51:34
  much everyone because that is his character.
• 51:36
  He's a he's an arrogant arse. He does notice, you know, that
• 51:39
  her remarks sometimes teeter on the edge of criticism, which
• 51:44
  they do. So when he writes further after
• 51:48
  some reflection, I have also decreed that Barbara Wright
• 51:50
  shall remain here with with Ian. She and Vicky have just returned
• 51:53
  from what I intended to have been a cautious reconnaissance
• 51:56
  foray to the neighboring market town.
• 51:58
  And what do I find? Why that instead of sounding the
• 52:00
  ground as instructed, they have attracted undesirable attention
• 52:04
  to themselves by what I can only describe as an unauthorised orgy
• 52:08
  of public spending, and purchased enough drapery, napery
• 52:11
  and similar feminine phalols as to overstock the bargain
• 52:15
  basement of a consumer. Rama An orgy of public spending,
• 52:20
  you say? He doesn't mind, you know,
• 52:22
  suggesting the odd fruity incident, does he?
• 52:27
  The Doctor said to be cackling maniacally and looking for the
• 52:30
  world like backers on the way to an informal debauch.
• 52:33
  There's a little bit of that. And, and actually, while we're
• 52:36
  on the subject, Luke was upset that the refrigerator scene
• 52:41
  wasn't in there. I think he felt cheated of the
• 52:43
  nookie between Ian and Barbara. I think that's suggested rather
• 52:49
  efficiently in the book. I certainly think Papaya
• 52:52
  visiting the soldiers at all times of the night to see if any
• 52:56
  of them needed. Chance certainly has a such.
• 52:57
  A little bit. I like the fact that both Nero
• 53:00
  and Papaya describe her being a total tart as a professional
• 53:05
  engagement. That's very funny.
• 53:08
  This is what the book says about Ian and Barbara.
• 53:10
  I must say that the latter have hidden their disappointment of
• 53:13
  being excluded from the expedition with well simulated
• 53:16
  equanimity, at the time not so easily deceived, and I'm
• 53:19
  confident that this relatively brief period of being, as it
• 53:22
  were, confined to barracks will prove to be a salutary lesson
• 53:26
  for them. It's.
• 53:28
  A bit cheeky, isn't it? But in a way that these books
• 53:31
  aren't. I can't think of many Doctor Who
• 53:33
  books, certainly not targets, that refer to this sort of
• 53:37
  thing. We had a bit of it in the
• 53:39
  gunfires as well. We did.
• 53:41
  We certainly, yes. What was it, Marco?
• 53:44
  Lightly. It's House of Pleasure.
• 53:48
  Wonderful. Yeah.
• 53:49
  I think the doctor is absolutely glorious in this.
• 53:52
  And he does dominate, doesn't he?
• 53:54
  I think he gets 5 or 6, five or 6 letters.
• 53:58
  He does, and he makes a big impression as well.
• 54:01
  Nero talks very clearly about how annoying he finds the doctor
• 54:07
  and it's the doctor runs through it like a vein in A and and and
• 54:12
  has probably the most verbose things to say, which is which is
• 54:15
  appropriate. He's got the longest diary
• 54:17
  entries, which I yeah, it feels to me entirely consistent.
• 54:23
  And it's a glorious piece of characterization.
• 54:26
  Nero says to the doctor that there was a lot of assassination
• 54:30
  about these days and he mustn't feel as if he's being
• 54:32
  discriminated unfairly. People keep trying to kill him.
• 54:36
  00 and there was a wonderful moment as well.
• 54:39
  It's so casual. In the audio, I howled with
• 54:42
  laughter. I was on the sea front and I
• 54:44
  laughed out loud. Where he said to Vicky and meet
• 54:47
  me at the corpse in an hour's time.
• 54:49
  Like that was the meeting place where the dead body.
• 54:53
  I love the darkness of it. I do, yeah.
• 54:55
  I like that it's implied that Vicky is basically traumatised
• 55:00
  every time she she comes across some kind of dead body and and
• 55:04
  he just treats her like a she's having a bit of a panic attack
• 55:07
  and needs to be put put back to her to to rest and sort.
• 55:11
  Of Lacosta is quite pleased when she comes a knocking on her door
• 55:16
  that's an. Interesting she only.
• 55:17
  Gets one, doesn't she? She only gets one and.
• 55:20
  Again, there's a there's a counterpart in I, Claudius,
• 55:24
  isn't there? There's the poisoner there,
• 55:26
  played by Miriam Margulies and a lovely scene where she she
• 55:32
  compares. Is it with Livia compares
• 55:35
  different ways of poisoning people?
• 55:38
  My favorite poisons we get. There's definitely a kind of a
• 55:41
  flavour of that in her chapter. I I like the fact that Lucas
• 55:47
  says she's been inundated with orders because of the banquet.
• 55:49
  I was trying to kill each other, James.
• 55:51
  It's not a place I'd want to be. Vicky's asked if she's
• 55:56
  considered a career in toxicology as it's a growth
• 55:59
  industry right now. And that made me laugh the other
• 56:02
  time as well. And I said it to them and I got
• 56:05
  Stony silence back. One thing we should we should
• 56:10
  address again, Luke was very kind of perturbed by the fact
• 56:15
  that Ian, how was he in writing all these letters?
• 56:18
  To his headmaster, yes. And why was he writing to a
• 56:21
  headmaster at all? And they're friends, he.
• 56:24
  Literally says that they are friends.
• 56:26
  So listen, I, I mean, I do think it's fundamentally that's the,
• 56:31
  the joke. And I, I think it's, I mean, I,
• 56:38
  I do get that it, it wasn't that, that the original book
• 56:42
  club readers didn't get that it was a joke.
• 56:45
  They just didn't like the joke. But I, but I think it's
• 56:47
  hilarious. I think the visual of Ian trying
• 56:49
  to keep up some kind of letter to his headmaster even while
• 56:54
  he's in chains and rowing in a galley is just automatically a
• 56:58
  funny idea. And it gets more and more
• 57:00
  frantic, his attempt to kind of keep this letter going.
• 57:04
  What's what's? He says he's doing it in his
• 57:07
  coffee break. I mean, I said I, I think I said
• 57:11
  in the episode, just go with it. Otherwise, what you don't have
• 57:15
  is this experiment. Yeah, and, and, and Papaya makes
• 57:21
  it more explicit when she says even to bring this little
• 57:24
  notebook up to date requires more time than I can really
• 57:27
  spare from keeping my wits about me and ensuring that I'm not
• 57:29
  imposed upon or murdered in some way.
• 57:31
  But it must of course be done or future generations will never
• 57:34
  know the most secret thoughts and private fears of a very
• 57:36
  young Empress. And and the The punchline is in
• 57:42
  the epilogue where Tacitus finally gets a positive response
• 57:48
  to having sent these documents over to his publishers and and
• 57:52
  asks for his fee. But he refers to the different
• 57:56
  documents and in fact isn't, Yes, that was revealed in his
• 58:06
  diary, which he later left, presumably inadvertently, on the
• 58:08
  kitchen table, together with Chesterton's journal, which he
• 58:11
  had apparently confiscated for his hypercritical content.
• 58:15
  That even the ridiculousness of these documents getting into
• 58:19
  anyone's hands is addressed. So I think we can see that as
• 58:23
  very much part of the the comedy.
• 58:27
  And for me, it the, IT, it cut, it's there's this visual just in
• 58:31
  the back of my head the whole time, which is, you know, the
• 58:35
  assassin is writing half of these letters in a sewer on
• 58:40
  what? It doesn't matter.
• 58:41
  It doesn't matter. How does Homer just walk into
• 58:44
  the camp? It doesn't.
• 58:45
  It doesn't. Well, that was also brought up
• 58:47
  in the episode as well. And I said, yeah, but that's the
• 58:50
  joke, right? But he can't get in and out, but
• 58:53
  he can. He's got a side door.
• 58:54
  You know, it's funny, it's fun. James, what is occurring with
• 59:01
  the Christians back in the Roman times?
• 59:03
  I mean, there's a lot of jokes at their expense in this book.
• 59:06
  There are a fair number of jokes.
• 59:07
  I mean, it's, I suppose the one thing that I felt that we
• 59:10
  definitely do lose. I'm not sure I miss it that
• 59:14
  much. Is Tavius as a kind of a serious
• 59:19
  character and his rescue of Barbara as a selfless act which
• 59:24
  is revealed to be a result of his Christianity in what I think
• 59:28
  is a fairly moving scene on television?
• 59:30
  Yeah, it's lovely. Instead, he's he's portrayed as
• 59:35
  a fairly dubious character, and it's only in the epilogue that
• 59:39
  we find out that he was in fact a Christian.
• 59:42
  This is the paragraph. Moreover, the loathsome Tavius.
• 59:48
  This is Tacitus explaining, explaining back story.
• 59:52
  Moreover, the loathsome Tavius, who fortunately makes only a
• 59:55
  brief appearance in this chronicle.
• 59:57
  Wonder if that's a reference to the fact that he has rather more
• 1:00:00
  time on screen. Was just another revolutionary
• 1:00:03
  whose only motivation beneath the cover of honest slave
• 1:00:07
  gatherer was to open the floodgates of chaos to democracy
• 1:00:11
  and Christianity with order attendant dissensions.
• 1:00:15
  And hence his jubilation at the death of the anonymous
• 1:00:17
  Centurion, who it seems was head of counterintelligence.
• 1:00:21
  And he's definitely, and this is a lovely reference for for
• 1:00:27
  particularly for 80s Doctor Who fans who by by the time this was
• 1:00:31
  published, had a very clear idea of what their doctor stood for
• 1:00:33
  and what he could and couldn't do.
• 1:00:34
  The mysterious Dr. was therefore entirely correct to have no
• 1:00:37
  truck with the traitorous fellow, and his instincts were
• 1:00:40
  of the soundest when he expressed his determination not
• 1:00:43
  to become involved with any form of conspiracy which might
• 1:00:45
  conceivably lead to the overthrow of Empire and the
• 1:00:48
  downfall of civilization. Think about what Mccoy's doctor
• 1:00:51
  was about to do on television. In fact, his non interventionist
• 1:00:55
  attitude as revealed in the diary deserves nothing but
• 1:00:58
  praise. I, I had a very and no offence
• 1:01:02
  to anybody listening, I don't know if there are any religious
• 1:01:05
  people listening, but there is a constant sort of reminder that
• 1:01:09
  Nero is feeding the lions Christians by by the crowd for
• 1:01:14
  and and he's never once stopped to ask the lions whether that's
• 1:01:18
  an adequate diet for them. And then it goes Christians
• 1:01:21
  again, this is from the lions point of view.
• 1:01:23
  Why can't you stay in and cook something very well, says Nero.
• 1:01:27
  You shall have roast Christian. I mean please.
• 1:01:31
  Obviously in that line from the meaning of life, isn't it mean
• 1:01:37
  life? Is that the Monty Python 1 where
• 1:01:39
  they were all on the crosses at the end?
• 1:01:40
  No, that's the Life of Brian. The Life of.
• 1:01:42
  Brian But they're literally all just being LED in to be eaten by
• 1:01:45
  lions. Yeah, but I mean, you know, it's
• 1:01:48
  it's it is, it is known that it's Nero fed Christians to
• 1:01:53
  lions. So it's yes, it's making light
• 1:01:55
  of a, a, an atrocity. I mean the the atrocity
• 1:02:01
  happened. Let's stop short of sight.
• 1:02:03
  They're only Christians. Never mind.
• 1:02:05
  Well, I'm not, no, I'm not obviously not saying that at
• 1:02:07
  all. I think it's just the that's
• 1:02:10
  again, that is the joke. And I did, I did wonder whether
• 1:02:14
  from a 1960s audience, whether the 60s, particularly when Rome
• 1:02:20
  was 1964, still a fairly kind of conservative society, still a, a
• 1:02:26
  Christian identifying country in a way that I'm not sure the UK
• 1:02:29
  is, is now. And I, I feel that probably in
• 1:02:34
  the 60s that would have read to a television audience, you know,
• 1:02:38
  as as a a good piece of drama revealing his Christianity.
• 1:02:42
  Would the equivalent moment have had so much resonance for an
• 1:02:46
  audience in the mid 80s? I think I would argue probably
• 1:02:49
  not. So hence again, Cotton turns it
• 1:02:52
  into a joke, which is probably more appropriate for this method
• 1:02:55
  of delivery. James, who's your favorite voice
• 1:02:59
  out of all of them in this? I did enjoy the assassin that's.
• 1:03:07
  Mine too. Although Papaya's great, her her
• 1:03:11
  bits are are really good, Nero's are Nero's bits are so funny.
• 1:03:17
  Very hard to choose that. And, and the point is actually I
• 1:03:21
  wouldn't want, I wouldn't want this to be narrated by any one
• 1:03:25
  person. I think the joy of this is that
• 1:03:27
  you get all of these different voices.
• 1:03:29
  It's the I mean, in that sense, it's an easier read than either
• 1:03:32
  of the myth makers or the gun fighters because it's it caters
• 1:03:36
  to the short attention span. The chapters, the documents are
• 1:03:39
  very cool. You get a different voice each
• 1:03:41
  time you get a different set of jokes.
• 1:03:43
  And it does it means that he mixes it up a bit.
• 1:03:45
  It doesn't ever become repetitive or say me.
• 1:03:48
  I sometimes it works on audio as well because I sometimes find a
• 1:03:51
  target audio when they're hours and hours long and you see these
• 1:03:55
  huge chapters lengths. Whereas for the Romans, it's a
• 1:03:58
  different voice for each person writing the letters.
• 1:04:02
  I mean, you've got fabulous, Louise Jameson does one, Maureen
• 1:04:05
  O'Brien does Lacosta, and that's gorgeous reading and they're
• 1:04:09
  sort of 55, 6 minutes a piece, you know?
• 1:04:12
  So listening to the audience now, I just flew through it.
• 1:04:14
  I was like, OK, fine, I can sort of stop this any 5 minutes if I
• 1:04:16
  want to and then just come back to it.
• 1:04:19
  It makes it really digestible. Yeah.
• 1:04:21
  And and I think that is it's another thing that I would say
• 1:04:26
  about this kind of writing this this detailed difficult, right.
• 1:04:31
  I mean, it is difficult writing, absolutely understand why it may
• 1:04:35
  not be, may not appeal to to some readers because it's hard
• 1:04:39
  work. It feels to me like writing
• 1:04:41
  that's designed to be read out loud.
• 1:04:44
  It's devilish hard to read out loud actually, because they're
• 1:04:46
  bloody long sentences. I think I told you I read the
• 1:04:49
  Myth Makers once as a bedtime story in my school and it went
• 1:04:54
  down a storm. I had to work really hard to, to
• 1:04:57
  to communicate it. But of course I was doing the
• 1:04:59
  hard work because I was I was the one doing the reading.
• 1:05:02
  And if you can tackle a long sentence and, and make sense of
• 1:05:06
  it as you were reading out loud, then the difficulty of the
• 1:05:10
  writing becomes not not an issue.
• 1:05:13
  And so I would, I mean, what I would say to anyone who thinks
• 1:05:16
  they don't like Dickens is find someone who reads Dickens really
• 1:05:21
  well. Listen to Martin Jarvis reading
• 1:05:23
  some Dickens, because that is that it transforms it.
• 1:05:26
  It's a joy. You've got the characterization,
• 1:05:29
  you've got the sense, and you're not having to do the hard work
• 1:05:31
  yourself. I, I agree with you and I
• 1:05:34
  disagree with you, which is an interesting position to be in
• 1:05:37
  because I do think it's difficult, but I do think he has
• 1:05:42
  a good idea of rhythm of the sentence and, and, and uses his
• 1:05:46
  and structures those sentences in a way.
• 1:05:49
  So there's flow. I've read quite a few Doctor Who
• 1:05:51
  books lately, like original Doctor Who books.
• 1:05:54
  They've been very sort of staccato in how they're, and
• 1:05:57
  it's really awkwardly phrased and I'm like, fuck sake, just
• 1:06:00
  read this out loud. It doesn't sound like a person
• 1:06:03
  talking. Exactly that.
• 1:06:05
  I mean, that was CS Lewis's advice to A to a young wannabe
• 1:06:09
  writer was read everything aloud if it doesn't sound right when.
• 1:06:13
  You've got like 15 commas in a sentence.
• 1:06:16
  Something has gone awry in that sentence.
• 1:06:18
  Whereas here they're long words, but I don't know, I think he's
• 1:06:22
  just sort of sprints at the end of the sentence.
• 1:06:24
  It it works. He just writes really good.
• 1:06:27
  It's just good writing at the end of the day.
• 1:06:29
  He can write. He can write sentences that go
• 1:06:31
  on for, for, for as long as a 15 comma sentence and it, and it's
• 1:06:36
  OK because he knows how to do it.
• 1:06:39
  You're, you're quite right. I mean, it's the, it's the the
• 1:06:41
  reading aloud test is a basic one, but it's one that every
• 1:06:44
  writer ought to do. I I have a sort of offbeat
• 1:06:48
  question, but if you could assign Donald Cotton to write
• 1:06:54
  one more target book, but obviously he didn't write what,
• 1:06:58
  which one do you think would most suit his talents?
• 1:07:03
  Time in the Rani. Oh boy.
• 1:07:08
  I mean, that was, yeah, in terms, in terms of interestingly
• 1:07:12
  structured sentences. Actually, no, I'm going to
• 1:07:16
  change that. I would get given the mark of
• 1:07:18
  the Rani because Can you imagine with all the, all of the various
• 1:07:21
  scientists coming, you know, he'd find voices for them and
• 1:07:24
  he'd, he'd, he'd. Mark of the Rani as a series of
• 1:07:29
  letters. You know, Steve, you also think
• 1:07:31
  Luke and he would, he would relish the Master and the Rani's
• 1:07:37
  dialogue and he'd he'd really get stuck into that.
• 1:07:40
  Also, I Can you imagine Cotton let loose on Colin Baker's
• 1:07:44
  Doctor? If Cardinal's Doctor is a is a
• 1:07:47
  pompous prick, then imagine what he'd make of the sick Doctor.
• 1:07:51
  It would be absolutely delightful.
• 1:07:53
  Well, look, scour your notes and please, if there's quotes, I
• 1:07:59
  mean, there's probably a million quotes in your notes.
• 1:08:02
  That's sort of back back and forth because I've written down
• 1:08:04
  quite a few bits of dialogue here.
• 1:08:07
  I do I do have notes before I come, before I come back to the
• 1:08:10
  Romans. I did just want to dip into the
• 1:08:13
  myth makers as well, which which because.
• 1:08:16
  Always just addressing the other episode.
• 1:08:18
  Again, the gauntlet that was thrown down there, it was thrown
• 1:08:21
  down with a lot less force and slightly, slightly less
• 1:08:25
  grudgingly. And I think generally the
• 1:08:27
  feeling was that this was a better read or or at any rate
• 1:08:34
  met the expectations of those readers much more to the extent
• 1:08:38
  that John Arnold has said that he was pleased that it only
• 1:08:41
  exists in that form. I think that's going a little
• 1:08:43
  bit far. Please don't stop searching for
• 1:08:46
  the myth makers just because John prefers it as a book.
• 1:08:49
  But I but I I do sort of see what he's saying, which is that
• 1:08:52
  it, you know, exists in this in this beautiful form.
• 1:08:55
  There was just. You wear boxing gloves on James,
• 1:08:59
  but good look. I wanted to address the thing
• 1:09:02
  that Andrew brought up and absolutely need to make clear
• 1:09:07
  that I'm not dismissing his, his view on this at all, but he
• 1:09:09
  brought up the issue of homophobia.
• 1:09:12
  And I just thought it was an interesting one because, I mean,
• 1:09:14
  clearly he found it homophobic. And I'm not disputing that at
• 1:09:21
  all. And, and, and he argued it very,
• 1:09:22
  very clearly. It's just an interesting one
• 1:09:25
  because when I came at it I I noticed those bits and as a gay
• 1:09:32
  man myself, I didn't find them. I didn't either.
• 1:09:35
  I didn't either. I mean I I I noticed the
• 1:09:38
  reference but I just didn't. I noticed the reference and I
• 1:09:41
  just, I suppose for me, I was quite pleased that it was in
• 1:09:45
  there. What's the phrase where he says?
• 1:09:56
  A murderer spat Achilles without wit.
• 1:09:58
  Patrick Lus was a boy, a boy quite so to understand is not
• 1:10:03
  necessarily to approve. Now, clearly Homer, the the
• 1:10:08
  voice that Cotton has given Homer is as a is a slight
• 1:10:12
  homophobe or certainly not not approving of this particular
• 1:10:17
  situation. That to me just say it was quite
• 1:10:21
  just thought it was quite cute that Homer was written as this
• 1:10:25
  all bit probably anachronistic. It's like curmudgeon when it
• 1:10:29
  comes to kind of the the the young youth of today.
• 1:10:32
  I mean the district, the description of Achilles, as you
• 1:10:37
  know, beautifully proportioned. He had that look of
• 1:10:40
  narcissistic, petulant 1 so often sees in the face of health
• 1:10:43
  fanatics or male models who pose for morally suspect sculptures.
• 1:10:46
  Again, I can, I can totally see the reading of that as
• 1:10:48
  homophobic as a, you know, a particularly as you know, I
• 1:10:51
  believe the Greeks have a word for it nowadays.
• 1:10:54
  Except that you lost me abusely proportioned well.
• 1:10:58
  There is that thing like it reads to me like the words of a
• 1:11:01
  slightly jealous old man who's you know, you know who?
• 1:11:07
  Who amongst us doesn't know a slightly older gay man who is
• 1:11:13
  slightly sniffy about young attractive people at times
• 1:11:18
  displaying their perfect? So again, it just it struck me
• 1:11:24
  not as the homophobia of the author so much as a an
• 1:11:30
  interesting character note, and one that didn't bother me
• 1:11:33
  particularly in the light of the way that he describes other
• 1:11:37
  characters. I mean, Agamemnon, those rather
• 1:11:42
  vicious good looks in the body of an athlete run to seed, look
• 1:11:44
  fine on the Mycean coins, but not in the flesh.
• 1:11:47
  And there was plenty of that in evidence.
• 1:11:49
  You know, he's it's not like he's writing flattering
• 1:11:52
  descriptions of anyone. So the fact that one is
• 1:11:54
  described as narcissistic, albeit perfectly proportioned,
• 1:11:58
  just seems to me like, you know, part of the style.
• 1:12:01
  This is Homer is an author who doesn't paint flattering
• 1:12:04
  pictures. So I wanted to take that up and
• 1:12:06
  not not disagree with Andrew so much to as to say that it it
• 1:12:11
  didn't seem to me as problematic as it was for him and I just
• 1:12:15
  thought it was interesting. I mean, I, I would say for my
• 1:12:19
  part, whether it is negative or an amusing passage, I'm kind of
• 1:12:29
  just grateful as they're here. Well, that's that's why I felt I
• 1:12:33
  would, I I like that there are acknowledged homosexuals in this
• 1:12:38
  book. You know, it's not heart
• 1:12:41
  stopper, but but also it's 1980. It's 1985.
• 1:12:47
  This is published. So, you know, there was
• 1:12:51
  precious, precious few other gay characters in in children's
• 1:12:53
  novels. And the fact that this one is
• 1:12:55
  slightly snuck under the radar, I think it's quite, quite fun.
• 1:12:58
  I mean, I would say as good as the Romans is, and I think it is
• 1:13:01
  wonderful, I do think the Myth Makers is a better book.
• 1:13:06
  It has a better story. It is Cotton bringing to life
• 1:13:10
  his own material and giving it another pass.
• 1:13:13
  So already sophisticated, witty, clever material.
• 1:13:18
  It's just taken up a notch. It's it's, I said in the first
• 1:13:22
  episode it was the best Doctor Who book that I'd read today on
• 1:13:27
  the book club. I don't think I have found
• 1:13:31
  another one I've enjoyed more yet.
• 1:13:36
  That's a big yet. Yeah.
• 1:13:39
  But for a target novel that came out in the 80s of a 60s TV
• 1:13:44
  production back going. Yeah.
• 1:13:48
  And as I said before, I just think that the fact that Cotton
• 1:13:53
  who it would have been paid the standard rate for these which
• 1:13:59
  wasn't a lot, I don't imagine, I mean I'm sure.
• 1:14:01
  It didn't have to be this good it.
• 1:14:03
  Didn't have to be this good. He could have just knocked out
• 1:14:06
  a, you know, a lazy scripter page of his wonderful scripts
• 1:14:11
  and and they would have worked because because they're they're
• 1:14:15
  well written scripts and they're dramatic.
• 1:14:17
  And he he chooses to to do a Page 1 rewrite of every aspect
• 1:14:22
  of it and make it as as beautifully written as he can.
• 1:14:25
  I think the fact that all three of these exist is is a wonderful
• 1:14:28
  thing. Well, swing his background to
• 1:14:31
  the Romans and come on, what? What gems have you got in your
• 1:14:35
  notes? I'll start us off.
• 1:14:37
  Shall I start us off? His fashionable passion for
• 1:14:41
  so-called democracy might have been all very well during the
• 1:14:44
  Republic, but could hardly fail to raise eyebrows and attract
• 1:14:47
  attention in the Empire. Suppose, for instance, he was to
• 1:14:50
  advocate it's transformation into a Commonwealth.
• 1:14:54
  No, it will never do as it never does in my experience.
• 1:14:58
  So says the doctor. I love the dialogue when they
• 1:15:03
  bump into the well, when they find the body of the liar
• 1:15:05
  player. And I think this is this has
• 1:15:08
  little in common with the dialogue that Spooner wrote.
• 1:15:16
  I tell you, this is Vicky. I tell you Barbara.
• 1:15:18
  And I saw him in the market only yesterday, she said.
• 1:15:21
  And if you remember, I told you so at the time, it's the liar
• 1:15:23
  play who sang that embarrassing song about Lucretia.
• 1:15:25
  Very vulgar it was, I agree that on second thoughts the
• 1:15:28
  resemblance was not so strong as I had supposed, for I now notice
• 1:15:31
  a lubricous curl defacing the dead lips, which I had hitherto
• 1:15:35
  taken to be a symptom of the death agony.
• 1:15:38
  I was still not altogether convinced by her identification,
• 1:15:40
  for surely a liar player might reasonably be expected to carry
• 1:15:45
  a liar about him. He was.
• 1:15:47
  You've been sitting on it for the last 20 minutes, she
• 1:15:49
  informed me, somewhat pertly. I fancied.
• 1:15:53
  In that case, why didn't you say so at once?
• 1:15:54
  I demanded, rising to inspect the instrument which I had
• 1:15:57
  hitherto taken to be one of those superannuated bedsteads so
• 1:16:00
  commonly discarded in places designated as being of special
• 1:16:03
  scenic interest. I might have damaged it.
• 1:16:06
  It sounds as if you have, she said, plucking A tentative a
• 1:16:09
  string which emitted A feline wine.
• 1:16:12
  Give it to me. I want to not impatiently,
• 1:16:14
  perhaps. It seems to me that her remarks
• 1:16:16
  sometimes teeter on the edge of criticism.
• 1:16:17
  The instrument only needs to be tuned.
• 1:16:19
  Go on, then, she said. I suppose you'll tell me you're
• 1:16:21
  a professional liar. Tune.
• 1:16:23
  And next I am naturally acquainted with the basic
• 1:16:25
  principles of harmonics, I informed her stiffly.
• 1:16:28
  As indeed with all scientific matters now.
• 1:16:32
  That was a complicated passage. Did you see how well that skips
• 1:16:35
  along? I mean, you're a reader as well.
• 1:16:38
  But it was almost, it was almost musical.
• 1:16:42
  Oh, he gets me. Oh, yeah, no, I think that's
• 1:16:44
  that's absolutely right. He totally gets the.
• 1:16:46
  Hearing Tim Trellore say this line in that heavy Welsh accent.
• 1:16:52
  PS Why did you? Why did you and dad name me
• 1:16:55
  after a parasitic worm? Very funny.
• 1:17:00
  All the PS is in the letters are great.
• 1:17:03
  I love this when when Ian Chesterton finds the his
• 1:17:06
  opponent's handshake kind of too strong.
• 1:17:11
  Your response? For goodness sake, don't make
• 1:17:12
  such a fuss or they'll think it's all faked.
• 1:17:14
  Now put yourself together before their wrestling begins.
• 1:17:17
  Apparently we've got a bit of a reputation here in Britain.
• 1:17:20
  Or natives of that island where the good times and the girl
• 1:17:24
  natives of the oh God, start that again.
• 1:17:26
  Hang on. Cut, cut cut, natives of that
• 1:17:29
  island where the good times are and the girls know a thing or
• 1:17:33
  two. Ha ha.
• 1:17:36
  I love this from the legionary. The Assassin.
• 1:17:39
  I have so sorely needed a mother's guiding fist in my
• 1:17:42
  predicament. Papaya, says a man whose very
• 1:17:47
  presence fills me with the sort of nausea I normally reserve for
• 1:17:51
  my husband. Barbara on Nero's gifts.
• 1:17:57
  Nero, enough. What is the use of going on like
• 1:17:59
  this? I'm not unaware of your interest
• 1:18:01
  in me, having received from your clammy hands to date more
• 1:18:03
  priceless jewels of the Orient than I can possibly wear without
• 1:18:06
  appearing to be vulgar. And while we are on the subject,
• 1:18:09
  can you really believe that if I were to incorporate Cleopatra's
• 1:18:12
  coronet into my quefer, such ostentation would not arouse
• 1:18:16
  your wife's criticism? Should should she notice the
• 1:18:18
  adornment? I was listening to that on the
• 1:18:21
  page as well. I was howling, Oh my God.
• 1:18:24
  Oh and this Nero thinking of future artistic endeavours.
• 1:18:27
  Note for future reference, Aegis would rhyme well with Bogner
• 1:18:31
  Regis. Oh, good grief.
• 1:18:39
  It is a very, it's a very funny scene with which again, it
• 1:18:42
  builds on what's on television where, where there's poison in a
• 1:18:45
  chalice. But the joke is that they all
• 1:18:48
  know that there's poison in the chalice because they've worked
• 1:18:51
  out by that point that some one of the chalices has got
• 1:18:53
  poisoning. So it gets passed around,
• 1:18:55
  absolutely everyone. So as usual, this is Nero.
• 1:18:58
  So, as usual, we put the matter to the test by summoning an
• 1:19:01
  independent arbiter of the wretched Taek illness, drawing
• 1:19:04
  the short straw on this occasion, who shortly thereafter
• 1:19:07
  expired in a cloud of steam and with what I'm sure would have
• 1:19:09
  been a strangled scream on his lips had the poor fellow ever
• 1:19:12
  been capable of speech. James, you and I are both
• 1:19:17
  recently engaged. Congratulations.
• 1:19:19
  By the way, anyone that was following your diary extracts in
• 1:19:24
  the last one, things have changed.
• 1:19:27
  Anyways, this is a bit of advice for you and me from Nero.
• 1:19:31
  If a marriage is to come to last, it will never be my fault.
• 1:19:35
  I have in fact already written her obituary and cannot wait to
• 1:19:38
  publish. And Papaya writes of Barbara and
• 1:19:44
  her name, which is Barbara has, well, barbarian overtone so.
• 1:19:51
  You know James, people seem to think I'll sit around all day
• 1:19:54
  and do nothing but writing songs, persecuting Christians,
• 1:19:57
  and organizing orgies. Maximus is 3 times my age, twice
• 1:20:06
  as mad and half as talented. Oh, I want to get that into
• 1:20:09
  conversation one day along with a man UN oh God, what was it
• 1:20:14
  again? Help me out.
• 1:20:17
  An amenable amanuensis or amanuensis.
• 1:20:21
  What do you think about the Quovardis TARDIS affair?
• 1:20:25
  I mean, what I was going to mention that actually he's
• 1:20:28
  pretty restrained when it comes to the to the Latin jokes.
• 1:20:34
  You know, it, it, it could, he could have gone way overboard
• 1:20:37
  with that. I do like this is from the
• 1:20:44
  journal of Ian Chesterson again. And then the emperor squealed to
• 1:20:49
  his feet, advancing as his theory that treachery was at
• 1:20:51
  work and that any right thinking members of the public would do
• 1:20:54
  very nicely for themselves if they finished off the pair of
• 1:20:56
  us, thereby showing their loyalty to the throne and their
• 1:20:59
  allegiance to the established order of things.
• 1:21:01
  The what's the phrase he used the status quo.
• 1:21:07
  That's it. He.
• 1:21:10
  Does I think he has a bit more fun with the Greek in the myth
• 1:21:14
  makers, doesn't he? That's right.
• 1:21:16
  Yeah, he does, yeah. Yeah.
• 1:21:17
  Oh, I love this word play as well.
• 1:21:19
  Was it he once eviscerated A harpist?
• 1:21:21
  I pointed out that my own viscera was still manifestly in
• 1:21:25
  situ. And then we have the the
• 1:21:28
  doctor's crap loot joke. Speaking of which, I very much
• 1:21:32
  regretted that I would be unable to give my promised concert his
• 1:21:35
  banquet this evening, as my particular and apparently
• 1:21:38
  personal assailant had got away with the loot.
• 1:21:41
  That was a pleasantry which failed to raise a smile,
• 1:21:44
  probably because, as I later realised I'm reviewing the
• 1:21:47
  conversation, The lute was an instrument which first appeared
• 1:21:50
  in Europe during the 14th century, and lute as a synonym
• 1:21:55
  for as a synonym for booty was hardly in general use until the
• 1:21:59
  Capone era. That's for the conversational
• 1:22:02
  hazards of time travel. He has more fun with that in the
• 1:22:06
  myth makers as well. He does.
• 1:22:07
  He does, yeah. I mean, I'm going to try one
• 1:22:09
  more, OK. And this is quite a tongue
• 1:22:12
  twister, so please, I'm going to sort of mangle it.
• 1:22:15
  But this is the doctor on Rome. Are you ready?
• 1:22:18
  Instead of having, you know, that that terrible model come up
• 1:22:21
  on screen and it just says Rome. We get at the moment, it is
• 1:22:25
  brash, to say the least. High rise temples where priests
• 1:22:28
  ponder their impenetrable Penetranelia.
• 1:22:32
  Excuse me. Impossibly jostle with
• 1:22:35
  unimaginative. Oh, good grief.
• 1:22:37
  Impossibly jostle with unimaginative.
• 1:22:40
  Unimaginably impractical. Oh fucking hell James, I'm going
• 1:22:44
  to edit. This when you need, I'm going
• 1:22:46
  to. Keep going, impossibly jostle
• 1:22:48
  with unimaginably impracticalities, fumbling for a
• 1:22:52
  foothold amongst a crawling sprawl of tenements.
• 1:22:58
  Jesus Christ. The reason I didn't choose this
• 1:23:00
  one as a bedtime story and so I'm enjoying all the musical
• 1:23:06
  references. This this there's a final
• 1:23:09
  offering is the Doctor learning to play the Liar?
• 1:23:12
  I soon mastered the rudimentary principles on which the Liar can
• 1:23:15
  be persuaded to operate, and was endeavouring to implement some
• 1:23:17
  permutations which had occurred to me involving it's more
• 1:23:20
  advanced harmonic frequencies. When I was distracted from this
• 1:23:23
  pleasant pastime by a series of thumps and bangs which appeared
• 1:23:27
  to emanate emanate from the next room, my immediate impression
• 1:23:31
  was that my neighbor might possibly be a percussion player.
• 1:23:34
  Anxious to accompany my impromptu recital, and glad as
• 1:23:38
  always to accept professional assistance whenever offered, I
• 1:23:41
  strode rapidly to the communicating door, which I
• 1:23:43
  flung open with a few well chosen words of welcome which
• 1:23:46
  now escaped me. But no matter, for it was soon
• 1:23:49
  obvious that for once I was under a misapprehension.
• 1:23:53
  God, gosh, I wish you could read the whole thing out to me.
• 1:23:55
  Do you know very good at this. OK, I'm going to do one more.
• 1:23:59
  You ready? It might benefit austerity if I
• 1:24:02
  were to complete the destruction of Nero's grandiose scheme for
• 1:24:06
  the featureless construction of Rome, and perhaps therefore
• 1:24:09
  contribute, however slightly, to the sum of human happiness.
• 1:24:13
  I therefore ignited once more the remains of the parchment and
• 1:24:16
  disposed of them outside a sewer grating outside the Temple of
• 1:24:20
  Minerva. Just like I hope that Andrew
• 1:24:24
  Batty, Luke Sims Jenkins and John Arles are really enjoying
• 1:24:27
  this bit of the podcast where we just read bits out of the book
• 1:24:29
  that they go on it. Since I've since you did another
• 1:24:32
  one, here's one more for. Me.
• 1:24:33
  You finish this off. Another myth exploded.
• 1:24:37
  Not all roads lead to Rome by enemy.
• 1:24:41
  That might be the quote of the episode.
• 1:24:44
  That is fabulous. Oh boy, oh boy.
• 1:24:47
  Well, let's summarize our thoughts on the Romans.
• 1:24:50
  I mean I think we've done kind of well, but a bold experiment,
• 1:24:56
  certainly an ambitious target and whilst not for everybody
• 1:25:02
  let's charitably say, and certainly I think this has
• 1:25:05
  divided opinion. 50506040 I think there is a division on
• 1:25:12
  which side of the line you are with the Romans.
• 1:25:16
  Man, I'm so pleased, I'm so pleased.
• 1:25:19
  Towards the latter end of the target range, they just started
• 1:25:23
  thinking outside the box. I think I'm going to, I'm going
• 1:25:26
  to put it more strongly than that.
• 1:25:28
  I think The Romans is absolutely unique, I think as a Doctor Who
• 1:25:34
  novel, full stop. Firstly, I, I can't think of
• 1:25:38
  another one structured quite like this one, you know,
• 1:25:43
  certainly within the target range, but but actually
• 1:25:45
  elsewhere as well. Secondly, I just think the
• 1:25:48
  quality of the writing hits a level that very few Doctor Who
• 1:25:55
  novelists are capable of. I'm thinking of, I mean the
• 1:26:01
  little, the little we have in prose by Douglas Adams.
• 1:26:04
  He didn't really do Doctor Who. They did he in prose and I'm and
• 1:26:11
  I'm not sure that the the attempts to to do Sharda quite
• 1:26:15
  do justice to to to what Douglas Adams would have written.
• 1:26:18
  So scrap that. Paul Mars.
• 1:26:20
  I think, you know, maybe, maybe can give Don Cotton a a run for
• 1:26:24
  his money. These writers are so rare.
• 1:26:26
  It's a precious thing to have writing this good.
• 1:26:29
  So I would say if you haven't read the Romans, you need to
• 1:26:34
  beg, buy, borrow or steal a copy.
• 1:26:37
  And even if it's not up your street, just for the sheer fact
• 1:26:41
  that you won't have read a Doctor Who book like it.
• 1:26:44
  And you know, I would then add to that that the other two
• 1:26:48
  Donald Cotton novelisations are, are equally beautifully written
• 1:26:52
  in a way that I, I don't know that there is anything to
• 1:26:56
  compare with them in terms of the, just the love of language.
• 1:26:59
  And not to discount those people that might find picking up the
• 1:27:04
  book a daunting prospect. I'm not sure why you book with a
• 1:27:06
  target. It's like 130 pages.
• 1:27:09
  It isn't long, but it is complicated.
• 1:27:11
  As we've said it, it is sophisticated.
• 1:27:14
  Then it's 799 on Audible and read by some thrilling actors
• 1:27:21
  and brought to life beautifully with music and sound effects.
• 1:27:24
  And like you get to experience all of the humor of that without
• 1:27:28
  doing much of the work of reading it off the page.
• 1:27:31
  Absolutely. And and ABS, there's no kind of
• 1:27:34
  snobbery here about audio books. It's the same as reading a book.
• 1:27:37
  If you're if you're listening to an particularly an unabridged
• 1:27:40
  version of a book, it's the same as if you've read it.
• 1:27:43
  And for a lot of people, that's going to either way in if you
• 1:27:46
  like audiobooks, there's a podcast called Neurotic
• 1:27:48
  Literature that you might like to have as a chaser for your
• 1:27:51
  Doctor Who. And one last note, because this
• 1:27:55
  started with a, you know, a gauntlet being the showdown.
• 1:27:58
  So the previous book club, what I would say is I think I don't
• 1:28:02
  think anybody in that said it wasn't constructed with any
• 1:28:05
  skill. I just think that your reaction
• 1:28:10
  to this book is it's a taste thing.
• 1:28:13
  It's going to come down to your taste in Word play and your
• 1:28:17
  taste in humour. And no one wants a book that
• 1:28:21
  everyone feels the same about, do they that?
• 1:28:23
  Would be very boring. I was.
• 1:28:25
  Can you imagine if everyone was shocked about I was?
• 1:28:28
  Because I was sending messages about the Romans whilst reading
• 1:28:33
  it to the previous book club and getting nothing back.
• 1:28:37
  So when we turned up on a date I just thought it was going to be
• 1:28:39
  a massive loving and I was like baffled by the reaction.
• 1:28:45
  But you know, that's why this is a joy.
• 1:28:46
  All opinions welcome. All opinions welcome.
• 1:28:49
  You know, some people don't like Delta and the management, so
• 1:28:51
  it's a. Crooked World.
• 1:28:53
  I was going on in the world, Honestly.
• 1:28:55
  Yeah. James, where are we heading
• 1:28:58
  next? I've been saying this to you a
• 1:29:00
  lot lately, but I think you, me and Mr. Mills are going to
• 1:29:06
  attack a slightly longer tone. Yeah.
• 1:29:09
  Something certainly verbose as well, but.
• 1:29:14
  Very pretty as well. More than 128 pages and more
• 1:29:18
  expensive to buy online than the Romans.
• 1:29:21
  Do you not have it? Then what are we doing again?
• 1:29:28
  Lungbarrow. That's right.
• 1:29:30
  Oh, sorry, I was talking about the graphic novel we talked
• 1:29:33
  about. I believe that's, oh, I think
• 1:29:36
  that we shelved that idea. Oh, did we?
• 1:29:39
  Did we? Oh God.
• 1:29:41
  I'll cut this bit as well. OK, You just you just come in
• 1:29:43
  with Lungbarrow again. Go on.
• 1:29:46
  Lung Barrow by Mark Platt Lung. Barrow Now we recently did a
• 1:29:51
  book by Mark Platt and declared it one of the best ever.
• 1:29:54
  This has a bit of a reputation, this one it.
• 1:29:57
  Does and interesting, having read a very early Mark Platt
• 1:30:04
  novel, which I think you argued was the first the first new
• 1:30:09
  adventure in style. One of the best.
• 1:30:12
  To then go to the last new adventure which I think has a
• 1:30:15
  good reputation. It does.
• 1:30:19
  The last time I read it I thought it was fine.
• 1:30:23
  Yeah, I've read it once a very long time ago, and I thought it
• 1:30:27
  was fine. Let's Hope Mills enjoys it some
• 1:30:31
  more than I will say this that one of the previous book club,
• 1:30:35
  I'm not going to name names now. So, you know, if you want to
• 1:30:38
  find that, go listen to all their episodes.
• 1:30:39
  Put Longbarrow on their bottom 10 Doctor Who list and basically
• 1:30:46
  said, why do I want to hang out with these eccentric weirdos for
• 1:30:50
  an entire book? But also put Ghost Light in the
• 1:30:53
  same category so you know. OK, so well, well read the
• 1:30:59
  Romans. No eccentric in there to hang
• 1:31:02
  out with. Just plenty of eccentric
• 1:31:04
  language.