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Transcript

Hamster Book Club - Touched by An Angel by Jonathan Morris (featuring Jason Thompson, James Lark & Ian Winterton) · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:01
  The rain splattered against the windscreen before the wipers
• 0:04
  swiped the glass clean. Beyond the car, headlights
• 0:08
  picked out the narrow country lane rolling out of the
• 0:11
  darkness, the high hedges on either side giving it the feel
• 0:15
  of driving through a tunnel. Rebecca rubbed her forehead,
• 0:19
  another headache, probably due to the idiot who had spent the
• 0:23
  last five minutes behind her, his headlights blazing away in
• 0:27
  her rear view mirror, or exhaustion from driving non-stop
• 0:30
  from London. There was definitely no other
• 0:33
  reason for her headache. OK, so she'd been having them
• 0:36
  almost daily since the accident, but that was no reason to go and
• 0:40
  see a doctor, no matter what Mark said.
• 0:43
  Rebecca felt a flush of anger. Mark should be with her now,
• 0:47
  paying the traditional bimonthly visit to her parents in Kilbury.
• 0:51
  He had an excuse, of course, he always had an excuse.
• 0:54
  There was a crisis at work and he had volunteered to work late
• 0:58
  to sort it out. As usual, the radio hissed as it
• 1:03
  lost signal for the world Tonight.
• 1:05
  It didn't matter. Rebecca already knew what the
• 1:08
  news would be. It would all be about the
• 1:10
  invasion of Iraq. Rebecca twisted the dial for
• 1:14
  Radio One. Approaching a sharp left turn,
• 1:17
  Rebecca changed down to 2nd gear.
• 1:20
  She turned the corner to be suddenly confronted by two
• 1:22
  brilliant shining lights bearing down upon her.
• 1:25
  Instinctively, Rebecca wrenched the steering wheel to the left
• 1:28
  to avoid the oncoming heavy goods lorry.
• 1:32
  The left hand side of her car went into a hedge, leaves and
• 1:35
  brambles scraping along the side.
• 1:38
  Her heart pounding, Rebecca remembered too late to apply the
• 1:41
  brakes. The front of her car smashed
• 1:46
  into the grill of the lorry and the windscreen shattered into a
• 1:49
  million beads of glass. The next thing she knew, she was
• 1:58
  lying in her seat, gazing across a muddy field.
• 2:01
  She couldn't feel any pain, though, which was a relief.
• 2:05
  Rebecca cursed herself. How many times had her mother
• 2:08
  moaned on the telephone about lorries using the village as a
• 2:10
  shortcut, even though the council had installed speed
• 2:13
  cameras? It was an accident waiting to
• 2:16
  happen, she'd said. Turned out she'd been right.
• 2:20
  Rebecca wondered why everything in the field had an orange hue,
• 2:23
  as though lit by a street lamp. A second later, everything went
• 2:27
  dark before lighting up again with the same orange hue.
• 2:31
  The lorry must have activated its warning lights.
• 2:34
  Rebecca tried wriggling in his seat, but nothing happened.
• 2:38
  She began to wonder whether she might have been hurt after all.
• 2:41
  Outside the car, the orange light blinked back on.
• 2:44
  Now that was weird. About 6 metres away in the
• 2:51
  field, stood a statue. The statue was of a young woman
• 2:55
  with coiled hair, wearing a flowing robe.
• 2:58
  It had two wings. An Angel.
• 3:01
  The statue stood hunched, burying it's head in it's hands
• 3:05
  as though crying. To add to the effect, rain
• 3:08
  trickled from between it's fingers.
• 3:10
  The light blinked off, returning Rebecca to darkness.
• 3:14
  Why was she thinking about bonfires?
• 3:17
  And then she realised she could smell burning.
• 3:20
  The orange light blinked on again.
• 3:23
  Rebecca couldn't be sure, but haven't the statue of the Angel
• 3:26
  been holding its head in its hands?
• 3:28
  Because now it was looking towards her with blank pupils.
• 3:31
  Eyes. Darkness again, then orange
• 3:34
  light. The statue had moved closer now,
• 3:37
  still staring at her with its impassive Stony eyes.
• 3:41
  It's mouth was now slightly open, as though drawing in
• 3:44
  breath to speak. Darkness, orange light.
• 3:49
  It now stood only two meters away, looming over her, caught
• 3:53
  in the flickering glow of a fire, thick black smoke
• 3:56
  billowing around it. It's expression had changed to a
• 3:59
  snarl of hunger. His lips had drawn back to
• 4:02
  reveal rows of sharp fangs. It reached towards her with
• 4:07
  outstretched hands, it's long fingernails like talons.
• 4:11
  But this was impossible, Rebecca thought.
• 4:14
  It wasn't moving. It wasn't moving.
• 4:37
  Hamster Book Club, The Doctor Who Novel Review Podcast with
• 4:41
  Joe Ford, James Lark, Jason Thompson, and Ian Winterton.
• 4:50
  Touched by an Angel by Jonathan Morris.
• 5:01
  Welcome back to the Hamster Book Club.
• 5:03
  My name is Joe Ford and we're going for a scary book today.
• 5:09
  Well, you might find it scary. You might just think it's a load
• 5:12
  of oh shit, let's find out. We're here today to talk about
• 5:15
  Touched by an Angel by Jonathan Morris, a range I don't think
• 5:21
  any of my book clubbers today have touched upon at all, and I
• 5:24
  went to some length to get them all a copy across the four
• 5:27
  corners of the globe. Actually, no, it wasn't too far.
• 5:32
  Fellows of the UK. How are you all doing today?
• 5:35
  Let's ask in this order. Jason, how are you?
• 5:39
  Not too bad. Thank you, Joe Good to be back
• 5:41
  and good to be talking about, as you said, a book from a range
• 5:44
  that I've not even touched on. I haven't read any of the new
• 5:47
  series books at all. My my ending question is going
• 5:52
  to be, will this entice you to read more?
• 5:54
  But we'll get there later. All right, Spears, how are you
• 5:57
  doing today? Slightly frazzled as ever when
• 6:00
  we come on these because I'm tired so I'll probably just talk
• 6:03
  shit, OK? As.
• 6:05
  Usual. Adding in the disclaimer right
• 6:07
  at the start. You're usually very articulate
• 6:11
  and eloquent, so I dread to think what you're like once
• 6:12
  you've had some sleep. Almost.
• 6:17
  James, how are you today? I'm frazzled as well for I think
• 6:21
  for the same reason, which is that I've been teaching today.
• 6:25
  I'm also at work for much of the weekend and it turns out that
• 6:28
  losing much of your weekend has a bit of a knock on effect.
• 6:31
  But unlike Ian, rather than talking shit when I'm tired, I
• 6:34
  actually become more articulate. So hopefully we'll balance each
• 6:37
  other. OK, wonderful.
• 6:40
  Well, tell us. I Neil as a teacher.
• 6:42
  James getting more articulate as you get tired.
• 6:46
  And. What about Jason and me?
• 6:51
  We're just never articulate. Yeah, actually, no.
• 6:53
  Jason, you're very. You're very articulate.
• 6:55
  And no strictly tweets. I'll tell you, I'm the one that
• 6:57
  has to read the bloody things out.
• 7:01
  Yours are the longest by a mile, but they're always packed full
• 7:04
  of substance. I love them.
• 7:06
  Tell us our post as a little icebreaker.
• 7:11
  Well, what would you call it? Creative endeavour today because
• 7:15
  we are doing a new series adventure and I couldn't really
• 7:18
  think of an icebreaker question. And I thought, well, James
• 7:20
  writes stories and I know Ian writes stories.
• 7:24
  And Jason, have you written any stories?
• 7:27
  Not for a very, very, very long time, but I'll tell you more
• 7:30
  about that in a minute. Oh, great.
• 7:32
  You just, you just pulled out your exercise book for this from
• 7:34
  when you're 8, haven't you? Basically what we're going to be
• 7:38
  doing is just for a bit of fun is we will be pitching a new
• 7:43
  series adventure with a choice of regulars and a central idea.
• 7:48
  Now Ian is slightly worried about this because obviously
• 7:52
  he's writing for Cutaway Comics and people are gonna nick his
• 7:55
  best ideas. So I think his idea might be
• 7:57
  really, really bad. So prepare yourself so.
• 7:59
  It's but that that will balance it out for when he Nicks our
• 8:02
  ideas. So you know.
• 8:03
  Oh, that's true. It depends how good they are
• 8:04
  though, doesn't it? Well, look, let's get the ball
• 8:08
  rolling and I'm going to throw it to somebody whose stories are
• 8:11
  know extremely well because I listen to his podcast, James,
• 8:16
  I'm. Not I'm not paranoid about
• 8:19
  people stealing my ideas, but there is AI have a history of
• 8:24
  I'm a bit I'm just a bit worried about coming up with an idea and
• 8:27
  then having someone do it. Not as well as I would have done
• 8:31
  my my new adventure back when I was a teenager and I was formula
• 8:35
  like, you know, planning, planning ahead.
• 8:37
  And I was going to write a new adventure.
• 8:38
  I didn't get as far as as actually writing it like Ian
• 8:41
  did, But but my new adventure was going to be set in the 13th
• 8:45
  century. And it was going to have the
• 8:46
  Doctor and Benny turning up and, and discovering that, oh, it was
• 8:53
  going to be kind of political. It was going to be gritty.
• 8:55
  And and there was going to be a kind of Benny getting
• 8:58
  disillusioned because they were the peasants were going to be
• 9:00
  talking about Robin Hood, but then they were going to meet a
• 9:04
  Robin. The character was going to turn
• 9:05
  out to be just an absolute ruffian, you know, a really
• 9:08
  nasty piece of work. It would have been Piers
• 9:11
  Venables or one of the people on which the legend is arguably
• 9:14
  based. And he would have been, you
• 9:17
  know, really violent. Benny would have gone in with
• 9:19
  this romantic idea of what of of the time, you know, based on
• 9:24
  Errol Flynn. And then the the twist was me
• 9:26
  like halfway through the story, the doctor being all worldly
• 9:29
  wise and go, well, of course it's just Pierce Plumberland.
• 9:31
  Poetry has all been taken out of context anyway.
• 9:34
  There's going to be a Cliff hanger moment and then inward
• 9:36
  stride in green tights. An actual Robin figure.
• 9:41
  So imagine how I felt when. I can only imagine.
• 9:45
  And my, you know, what would have been an absolutely lovingly
• 9:49
  recreated historical era was squandered on that story.
• 9:54
  So I. Suggest you do not listen to
• 9:57
  this Sunday strictly. Come Amsterdam please, where I
• 10:01
  was extremely positive about that.
• 10:03
  Absolutely no. I know, I know.
• 10:04
  And I, I, I guess you had to be me and to experience the
• 10:07
  heartbreak of knowing that my Robin Hood episode would have
• 10:10
  been a really meaty episode and it would have been one of.
• 10:14
  James disillusioned, gritty, you know, people leaving the new
• 10:18
  adventures in a miserable place. It does sound like a a perfect
• 10:21
  new adventure. So you you tasked us with coming
• 10:23
  up with a new series. And I thought, I mean, that was
• 10:25
  my teenage that was kind of in, in, in the in the years when
• 10:31
  probably I thought Robin and Prince of these was the the
• 10:33
  greatest piece of cinema ever made.
• 10:37
  That's what I'm saying. I still think that, but I think
• 10:40
  kind of thinking about my writing now what, what would I,
• 10:43
  what would I do? And I, my writing tends towards
• 10:46
  the more comical and I think I'd take it a lot less seriously.
• 10:50
  So here's my idea. And I, and if you do steal that,
• 10:52
  I mean, I, I think you're mad. So there's going to be the 12th
• 10:57
  Doctor and Clara. I haven't quite worked out the
• 11:01
  nuts and bolts of the, of the kind of the, the get in for the
• 11:04
  concept. But I, I think as possibly the
• 11:07
  book that we're reviewing today proves, as long as the concept
• 11:12
  is delivered in a strong enough way, it doesn't really matter if
• 11:14
  it makes sense if you start to unpick it.
• 11:17
  But there'd be a, there'd be a character who needed to get
• 11:20
  married to another person to make something happen in
• 11:24
  history. It would be kind of a obviously
• 11:26
  you, you'd set the scale, the stakes would be really, really
• 11:28
  high. The universe would be at stake
• 11:29
  or whatever. But it would depend on something
• 11:32
  as as simple as someone falling in love.
• 11:35
  And the way that the Doctor has decided to make this happen is
• 11:39
  through romantic fiction, because I really love the idea
• 11:43
  of the Capaldi Dr. trying to write erotic fiction in order,
• 11:50
  in order in order to plant ideas in someone's head.
• 11:54
  And, and with Clara coming in as a kind of script editor and
• 11:58
  saying no. Oh.
• 11:59
  Boy, can't say I want to read this so badly.
• 12:02
  The two of them would have partly also because I would want
• 12:04
  to write prosaic and and. Sounds like a Paul Myers books,
• 12:08
  and I mean that, you know, very positively.
• 12:10
  The idea of writing bad erotic. He writes as a he writes as a
• 12:13
  woman as well, doesn't he? Yeah, he's not writing erotic
• 12:17
  art. It's just gold.
• 12:18
  That's. That's a very good idea.
• 12:23
  Do you have a title for the book?
• 12:25
  Oh, oh, you better come back to me.
• 12:26
  But. Basically call it the title of
• 12:31
  the erotica that the 12 doctors riot every something absolutely
• 12:35
  trashy and dreadful. OK, well, OK.
• 12:38
  From one fertile mind to another, Ian.
• 12:42
  Oh God, I don't know. You've just reminded me of some
• 12:46
  good idea. I've got.
• 12:47
  I've got ideas to do with the angels, which we're going to be
• 12:50
  and I won't be talking about those because I want to use
• 12:52
  those maybe one day because I think the angels are brilliant.
• 12:57
  And then you've just, James has just reminded me of an idea I've
• 13:00
  got, which actually I don't want to say out loud because that's
• 13:03
  it's to do with it's to do with people meeting in a similar sort
• 13:07
  of way. But then the erotic fiction
• 13:09
  isn't part of it. But the one thing that popped in
• 13:13
  my head when when you said on the chat to come up with a shit
• 13:16
  idea then was whenever, whenever franchises get into the Muppet
• 13:22
  Baby's phase, I always think that's like the worst thing that
• 13:25
  ever happened. So I was thinking maybe if we
• 13:28
  have like young. I mean, have they ever done like
• 13:33
  Young the young doctor? They did.
• 13:36
  I know they almost did. No, no, no.
• 13:37
  They did it. They did a past Doctor,
• 13:39
  eventually called Divided Loyalties, set on Gareth Ray
• 13:42
  when the Master, the Rani, the Monk, the Doctor you like.
• 13:49
  Harry Potter Was Harry Potter just out?
• 13:51
  Drax every Time Lord we've ever met, they're all basically
• 13:54
  teenagers at the Time Lord Decker Academy.
• 13:58
  And you know, they're all fancy. The Ronnies.
• 14:00
  Oh, it's just terrible. And it was was that was that
• 14:03
  sort of just in the wake of Harry Potter becoming popular?
• 14:06
  So it's like Hogwarts on Gallifrey?
• 14:08
  It was somewhere in the back of Gary Russell's mind because he
• 14:10
  wrote it. Oh, right, that's yeah, but but
• 14:15
  I was actually thinking of monsters.
• 14:17
  So a young Zygon, a young, a young a young Carl Admutant.
• 14:23
  Not yet in its not yet in its shell.
• 14:27
  Just yeah, a young. I'm on.
• 14:29
  What do they look like when they're young?
• 14:31
  So you could get all your monsters, but make them look
• 14:33
  really cute and dumpy and and then then obviously they're all
• 14:38
  evil. And I could see it being a
• 14:39
  Disney spin off that will will appall that will appall all
• 14:45
  Doctor Who fans. Basically willing all of these
• 14:48
  books into. Existence so basically an
• 14:50
  animated an animated plundering of Doctor Who IP and making them
• 14:55
  all children and even and you could probably tie it with the
• 14:59
  Doctor as a young person. What?
• 15:02
  Would the maybe Joe Martin as a kid?
• 15:05
  The adventures of an 11 year old Zygon be like, I don't know, but
• 15:08
  I want to find out. Well be they'll really need
• 15:12
  milk, won't they? So.
• 15:13
  Oh boy, went to my dark. Jason, quickly, please tell us
• 15:19
  your story. Well, the first idea that came
• 15:24
  to mind when you said it was one I'd had years ago as a kind of
• 15:30
  reaction to Steven Moffett dismissing the Sontarans as
• 15:33
  comedy characters. And I was always like, the
• 15:37
  Sontarans are not comedy characters.
• 15:39
  You can make comedy with them, but they're not comic
• 15:41
  characters. So the, the bit in Time of the
• 15:44
  Doctor with the two Sontarans going, the invisibility control
• 15:46
  is broken. Where is it?
• 15:47
  I don't know. I can't see.
• 15:48
  It was just painful. And So what I really wanted to
• 15:53
  see when I thought would be ideal for this kind of thing,
• 15:55
  would be a story with probably with the 11th Doctor and Clara
• 16:01
  and the Paternosta gang uncovering evidence of a
• 16:03
  Sontaran infiltration, stroke invasion plan with Strax caught
• 16:09
  in the middle with the opportunity to rejoin the
• 16:12
  Sontarans and his honour restored and become the soldier
• 16:15
  that he's supposed to be. And then will he do that and
• 16:17
  betray the Doctor and everyone else?
• 16:19
  Or will he realize that there's more to life and that he's made
• 16:22
  new relationships and things like that?
• 16:24
  So that was the idea that I had originally that has.
• 16:28
  Potential, isn't it? And I, I think that was a missed
• 16:31
  opportunity because you had, you know, the Sontarans have been
• 16:34
  the enemy in every story, and now you've got one on the side
• 16:36
  of the doctor. Surely you want to put him in
• 16:38
  the middle of that situation. And nobody ever did.
• 16:41
  So that was the, the first idea I had.
• 16:45
  But then I had another idea which came.
• 16:47
  Solid idea. And that that's a big finish, so
• 16:50
  you should. Coming near you, Yeah.
• 16:53
  Yeah. Well, OK, yeah, if anyone from
• 16:56
  Big Finish is listening and wants me to develop the story,
• 16:59
  give me a shout. I'm just.
• 17:00
  Putting an oral TM stamp on this podcast.
• 17:03
  All right, there we go. The other idea I had came from
• 17:07
  something I did when I was in my early 20s in my first job when I
• 17:11
  was on the BBC message boards. I actually wrote a story which
• 17:15
  was posted up in in parts, and this predates the new series and
• 17:20
  everything with the Doctor arriving on Earth and falling in
• 17:24
  with a not quite UNIT, more a sort of scientific investigation
• 17:28
  group. And it was going to be a trilogy
• 17:31
  of stories and I only ever wrote the first one.
• 17:33
  Anyone who may remember it was called Arrival, very original
• 17:37
  because the Doctor arrives very creative.
• 17:40
  I was back there. The last one called departure.
• 17:43
  No, the last one was going to have the Daleks invading through
• 17:49
  commandeering some Earth technology with wormholes and
• 17:52
  things like that. Because I had the, I had the
• 17:54
  idea at the end of it that the Daleks would be trying to come
• 17:57
  through a wormhole, which would be collapsed.
• 17:58
  And they'd be basically their entire fleet would be stretched
• 18:00
  out to a line 3 atoms wide and 50 million light years long
• 18:05
  because they've been crushed in this wormhole.
• 18:07
  I knew the size would be accurate.
• 18:09
  That's not accurate at all. Purely theoretical, but.
• 18:14
  Trust me, Jason, we need a bloody good Dalek book, all
• 18:16
  right, because there aren't many.
• 18:18
  But the middle story, the story in the middle of it had, and I
• 18:23
  did start writing it but never got around to publishing.
• 18:25
  It was basically an old folks home, a retirement home for
• 18:32
  people with dementia and other debilitating conditions.
• 18:37
  And the guy who ran it had discovered a crashed spaceship
• 18:39
  inside which were the spheres containing the minds of an alien
• 18:44
  race. This planet had been destroyed
• 18:45
  and what have you. And they wanted our bodies
• 18:50
  basically. And he was trying to set this up
• 18:53
  and it would tie in with ideas of physical debilitation, mental
• 19:00
  deterioration like conditions like Alzheimer's and dementia
• 19:02
  and so on and so forth. And the Doctor's companion in
• 19:07
  the story would have some a relative in this who apparently
• 19:10
  was being cured and felt better because of the effect of this
• 19:14
  mind transfer. And then it became a case of do
• 19:18
  I want my relative back or do I have to let them go because of
• 19:23
  the bigger problem and all that kind of thing.
• 19:25
  And the way and when you said about making a new series
• 19:28
  adventure, I was thinking probably that would work with 13
• 19:30
  and Yaz, with Yaz's nan, bring back Gaz's nan, who we met
• 19:37
  before and how she's in the twilight years and everything
• 19:40
  and is deteriorating. And partly now.
• 19:44
  If I were to write it, it would be based on some degree of
• 19:47
  experience because I lost my nan to Alzheimer's and towards the
• 19:52
  end of her life, she had no idea who most people were.
• 19:55
  I didn't see her. She was a long way away.
• 19:57
  But I heard from my family that she was basically had no idea
• 20:00
  who anybody was. And bizarrely had a thing which
• 20:05
  apparently is quite common in dementia patients, where the day
• 20:07
  before she died she appeared to be much more composimentus.
• 20:11
  And her last words that she said to my mum were oh, I'm better
• 20:14
  now dear, thank you. Jason, that's a brilliant idea.
• 20:22
  Yeah. It reminds me of a doctor's
• 20:24
  episode, which is not science fiction, where one of the things
• 20:27
  that happens with dementia is when you get ill, they, they
• 20:30
  have a like a they sometimes their dementia lifts a bit like
• 20:34
  with autism when like when kids get ill, they get more normal
• 20:40
  briefly. You're definitely really
• 20:42
  upsetting for people you're. Definitely on to something
• 20:44
  though, Jason, because there's a 7th Doctor past doctor adventure
• 20:47
  called Relative Dementias, which deals with that subject matter.
• 20:54
  Not in the way that you've just described there, but it's really
• 20:57
  poignant. It's really very moving.
• 21:00
  So yeah, well, I can't believe I'm going to go here, but here
• 21:04
  we are. I would like to do a 12th Doctor
• 21:08
  and Clara book if I may. Who are you and what have you
• 21:11
  done with Joe Ford? She wearing the red dress.
• 21:14
  Yeah, well, I clearly fancy her a lot these days.
• 21:17
  And I fancy her so much, I'm going to call my series of short
• 21:21
  stories Splinters. So it's a bit of a offshoot of
• 21:25
  Jack Rayner's idea in that comic strip.
• 21:27
  But basically it's going to be a series of adventures of the 12th
• 21:29
  Doctor visiting various splinters of Clara after Hell
• 21:33
  Bent. Because it's very sad that he's
• 21:34
  lost her, you know? And it's going to be a mixture
• 21:37
  of genres and tones. And it's going to, we'll have
• 21:39
  some fun with it and do sort of, we won't do where's Wally?
• 21:42
  We'll do where's Clara? Because after the first couple,
• 21:45
  you start to realize she's going to show up in various guises in
• 21:47
  these books. You've got to try and figure out
• 21:49
  which one she is somewhere along the line.
• 21:52
  Put some thought into this. As you can see, one Clara, who's
• 21:56
  very sassy and figures out sort of who is this fella, stows away
• 22:00
  on board the TARDIS and ends up going into the next story.
• 22:04
  And then those two Clara's end up meeting and, well, that's as
• 22:07
  far as I go. I don't know what's going to
• 22:08
  happen from that point onwards. Then you work out.
• 22:11
  Essentially it's going to be extended therapy session for the
• 22:14
  12th doctor post Hell Bent and A.
• 22:17
  Whole box set. Well, there we go.
• 22:19
  Big finish, get in touch. Splinters coming me soon.
• 22:25
  It's OK because I feel that what fans really felt was that we we
• 22:29
  didn't get enough of Clara when she was on television and we.
• 22:33
  Think of the I can think of the possibilities of more than one
• 22:35
  Clara. Yes, I bet you can.
• 22:38
  Or you can write one of them then.
• 22:40
  Oh, we've gone there. You can write the erotic novel
• 22:43
  within that, yes. Novel is my is my idea.
• 22:49
  I think we should keep an eye on the schedules for the next two
• 22:52
  years now and we'll see what. Title I've come up with so far
• 22:55
  is An Adventure in Spicy Tomes, which is very good title, but it
• 23:02
  is a better pun than Robot of Sherwood.
• 23:06
  That's true. I.
• 23:08
  Hated the title for mine. Would have been mind lock.
• 23:11
  By the way, that was the title I was working on.
• 23:13
  And Ian, what's your title? I don't.
• 23:17
  Know I'm on babies. I'm on babies, yes.
• 23:23
  Well, yeah, as I said, keep an eye on the schedules for the
• 23:25
  next two years, all right? I'm getting desperate.
• 23:29
  Naiman and Zyglot, the quest for more milk.
• 23:32
  Well if anyone is listening and would like me to develop those
• 23:36
  ideas I mentioned then please do.
• 23:38
  I imagine female nymans probably have massive others and and lost
• 23:42
  milk someone. On the Touched by an Angel by
• 23:45
  Joe for Morris police, which is what we are here to talk about
• 23:50
  today. And I kind of have a clue where
• 23:55
  Jason and Ian are falling on this.
• 23:57
  James has kept his powder completely dry, but I think he's
• 24:00
  read this after the the rest of us.
• 24:03
  Can I just do a quick round Robin of sort of what you
• 24:07
  thought about this overall before we start digging into
• 24:09
  what's happening into this book, Jason?
• 24:13
  I actually rather enjoyed it. It's been a long time since I've
• 24:16
  read a book that I didn't want to put down because I just
• 24:21
  wanted to know what happened at the end of each chapter and just
• 24:24
  keep going. I did have to put it down
• 24:26
  because it was getting late and I'm old now and I need to sleep.
• 24:29
  But but I read it in a couple of sittings and I actually really
• 24:34
  enjoyed it. And I enjoyed it so much so that
• 24:36
  I didn't follow through on my plan, which was to read it
• 24:39
  through first because it's a new book I've never read before, and
• 24:41
  then reread it and make notes. And I didn't want to reread it
• 24:44
  and make notes because I didn't want to look at this in a
• 24:47
  clinical, reviewy kind of fashion because I had enjoyed
• 24:50
  the experience of reading it so much.
• 24:52
  What are you doing here then? I'm just going to talk shit for
• 24:56
  the next couple of hours while the rest of you sound all as if
• 24:58
  you know what you're talking about.
• 25:00
  Except that's exactly the response I had.
• 25:03
  I also. Have.
• 25:04
  I've made no notes. I also have a reasonably good
• 25:07
  memory because it was it went in and I enjoyed it so much so.
• 25:12
  OK. So kind of I'm put down a ball
• 25:14
  for you. That's that's about.
• 25:15
  Yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, and the other thing is I
• 25:17
  didn't, I realized as I even as I was reading it, I was thinking
• 25:20
  there are bits in this that won't hold up to a reread
• 25:23
  because then the holes will start becoming more apparent.
• 25:26
  And I didn't want that to happen straight after I'd enjoyed it so
• 25:30
  much. I may go back to it later when I
• 25:32
  sort of made my peace with the idea that there are plot holes,
• 25:34
  but I didn't want to start digging into it.
• 25:36
  Not actually, not as many as you might think, because I was
• 25:38
  looking out for plot holes this time, and there are some, but
• 25:42
  there wasn't as many as I suspected I would find anyway,
• 25:45
  Ian. Almost almost identical
• 25:48
  response. I I haven't read a book almost
• 25:52
  in one sitting from years because I am very old and also
• 25:57
  screens and podcasts have ruined my reading brain so I read even
• 26:01
  slower than I used to. So yeah.
• 26:04
  So I've tore through this, I loved it and then didn't make
• 26:08
  any notes and haven't gone back to it.
• 26:10
  But loads of it's still in my head and I've been thinking
• 26:12
  about it a lot since since I read it.
• 26:15
  I think it would be fair to say, yeah, I think it would be fair
• 26:19
  to say that in a very complementary fashion.
• 26:21
  It's an easy read. Yeah.
• 26:23
  Yeah. Because, you know, sometimes,
• 26:26
  sometimes the authors go for so much depth and complexity and
• 26:29
  metaphor and everything else that you find, you find at the
• 26:32
  end of it you're like, hang on. I'm a little bit confused about
• 26:35
  that. This went through in a fashion
• 26:37
  that I could follow and like a laser.
• 26:40
  Beam from Yeah, this is the idea.
• 26:43
  And here you go. And it sets up all these
• 26:44
  brilliantly simple what ifs that just if you have a certain geeky
• 26:49
  mind like we are, go, I want to know what happens next.
• 26:52
  And it's. Not just if you're a geeky and
• 26:54
  if you're a human being in that. Situation that's.
• 26:57
  What's interesting, I think. Well, maybe, maybe.
• 26:59
  Yeah. Well, whatever it is, I was, but
• 27:01
  yeah. But it's just very, it's very
• 27:03
  much a page Turner, but I don't know if it's because of the 90s
• 27:06
  setting, but it reminded me of when I first read High Fidelity
• 27:09
  and books like that that are very well written, Nick Hornby
• 27:12
  stuff. And you tear through them and
• 27:14
  all they are really is about relationships and stuff.
• 27:17
  But. And recreating era.
• 27:19
  I mean one thing it definitely luxuriates in is is the 90s
• 27:24
  setting. The soundtrack, James.
• 27:26
  Boy, there's a soundtrack to this?
• 27:28
  Yeah, well, James, let's come to you.
• 27:31
  I really enjoyed it. I didn't tear through it because
• 27:33
  I haven't had time to tear through it.
• 27:35
  But I suppose as a kind of a, a test of the book's strength, I
• 27:39
  was able to pick this up and in very busy moments, read a few
• 27:43
  pages at a time or, or a chapter on a train and absolutely keep
• 27:47
  track of where I was and the characters.
• 27:49
  You know, it's Alex, Jason says. An easy read in the best sense
• 27:53
  of the, the of, of that description.
• 27:56
  In a lot of ways, it reminded me of the kind of efficiency of
• 27:59
  Terence Dix, because for all that it's a simple book in the
• 28:05
  language it uses, in the way it tells a story, it manages to
• 28:09
  pack some quite complicated concepts into there and it and
• 28:12
  it does a a lot with a very efficient number of words, which
• 28:16
  I thought was excellent. I, I guess there were moments
• 28:19
  where I wondered if it would have been a better book if if it
• 28:26
  had been written under a slightly different brief,
• 28:28
  because there were points at which I thought it, it feels a
• 28:31
  little bit like the author is being held back by the brief to
• 28:36
  write something for a certain age group.
• 28:39
  I think the book goes into places, astonishing places
• 28:42
  actually, for, for a book clearly aimed at young readers.
• 28:46
  There are just moments where I wanted a little bit more depth
• 28:49
  and it, and it doesn't quite have the word count to do that.
• 28:53
  I also, I mean, I don't, I don't mind about the plot holes.
• 28:56
  I do think that kind of in terms of the concept, I'm not sure the
• 29:01
  overarching concept stands up to much scrutiny.
• 29:05
  I guess I'm not sure that the Weeping Angels stand up to much
• 29:08
  scrutiny, if I'm honest. And I don't think it matters in
• 29:12
  a book like this because I feel like it's it's clearly a vehicle
• 29:15
  for a series of set pieces. But again, possibly, you know,
• 29:21
  dressed up in slightly fancier language, given a slightly
• 29:24
  longer word count to to dress it up a little bit more.
• 29:26
  It might have kind of persuaded me slightly more that that that
• 29:30
  the overarching storyline had, you know, had had a bit more to
• 29:32
  it. I don't, I don't think it's that
• 29:34
  interesting that side of the story, to be honest.
• 29:35
  But. For me, I found this really
• 29:39
  refreshing reading this because I'm reading a lot of Doctor Who
• 29:42
  books at the moment and I'm reading a lot of overwritten
• 29:46
  Doctor Who books at the moment. You know, we we did transit by a
• 29:50
  better one of which I think that's over in I've just done a
• 29:52
  Barry let's they're hideously overwritten and just to read
• 29:56
  this book that I could zoom through with smooth prose, a
• 30:00
  clear story and just like characters I liked, you know,
• 30:05
  and a premise with inbuilt suspense as to is he going to do
• 30:09
  this or not? That's basically at the heart of
• 30:11
  this book. Is he going to do all these
• 30:13
  steps and savor or not? We'll get to the plot in a
• 30:16
  second. And the end of the book.
• 30:18
  And I don't cry at books ever. I do not.
• 30:21
  I'm not a Cryer. I don't cry at TVI don't cry at
• 30:23
  music. I cried when I first read
• 30:25
  Touched by an Angel, and I cried when I read it this time.
• 30:28
  Not like, you know, blobbing, but I had a tear in my eye when
• 30:31
  he held her at the end. And so it did.
• 30:34
  It connected to me in quite a, well, I'll say profound way,
• 30:39
  really in a way that a lot of Doctor Who books don't and books
• 30:43
  that are, you know, other books that are geared at a much older
• 30:46
  audience than this is. Yeah, we really need a spoiler
• 30:49
  warning on this one, because I'd hate for anyone to.
• 30:52
  I'd hate for I'd hate for anyone to be spoiled by before they
• 30:56
  read this book. I think it's inherent in the
• 30:58
  concepts. Yeah, yeah.
• 31:01
  But no. But I would just say.
• 31:02
  I think, I think what it does brilliantly as well is it
• 31:05
  balance it, which it's some other books that I've read
• 31:07
  haven't done because they go for a particular tone, but this one
• 31:11
  managed to balance lightness with darkness in many ways.
• 31:17
  I mean, the concept, the central concept is very dark and takes
• 31:23
  you to some very dark places mentally and is resolved in a
• 31:27
  very heartstring tugging kind of way.
• 31:30
  And yeah, I I teared up a bit towards the end as well.
• 31:34
  But in the middle of that it's a Steven Moffett era, Matt Smith,
• 31:37
  Amy and Rory story. So there is plenty of comedy and
• 31:42
  there's a farcical sequence in the middle of it which I thought
• 31:46
  would take me right out of the story and seem ridiculous, but
• 31:48
  actually really just, I enjoyed it.
• 31:51
  I thought this is great. It's the kind and and looking
• 31:54
  back on the thing as a whole, it's what you needed in the
• 31:56
  middle of this story, I think. To.
• 32:01
  Say that actually the the central concept of this book is
• 32:05
  the comic one because the central concept is the Doctor's
• 32:09
  got to stop a guy from who is living through his own past from
• 32:16
  changing it. And every episode where they nip
• 32:20
  back to try and stop that avert that, but they're not quite sure
• 32:23
  what they're doing is is a comic set piece.
• 32:25
  The, the, the, the thing that's so skillfully done is that the,
• 32:29
  the, the thing that holds those set pieces together is this
• 32:32
  deeply tragic story. And it absolutely.
• 32:35
  I mean, I think it is primarily a very funny book and I really
• 32:39
  loved. It's not even like these comic
• 32:43
  set pieces are chucked into a more serious umbrella.
• 32:47
  It's that he manages to do both at the same time.
• 32:52
  And all the time running through this, this comedy, like a lot of
• 32:57
  really good comedy, is this bittersweet note because you
• 33:01
  know that something tragic is going to happen at the end of it
• 33:04
  all. And I loved that he walked that
• 33:07
  tightrope so skilfully and and kept both going at the same
• 33:11
  time. What I realised this time was he
• 33:14
  was doing a total David Renwick on me.
• 33:17
  It's the sort of thing that he does, his foot in the wave and
• 33:19
  things like that is he was totally distracting me with a
• 33:22
  lot of sort of warm character moments and funny set pieces,
• 33:27
  but he was distracting me from the fact that he's getting me
• 33:29
  very involved in the central relationship between.
• 33:32
  Good grief, I've forgotten the character's name, Rebecca, and
• 33:35
  someone help me. Thank you.
• 33:37
  Oh, Mark. That's my overall name.
• 33:39
  Jesus, Rebecca and Mark. And, and he's doing it so slyly.
• 33:46
  So that bit at the end hits you the way it does, like he wants
• 33:49
  you. The the I think the kind of the
• 33:52
  which. Bit to the end are you talking
• 33:53
  about? The bit where she dies again.
• 33:56
  Well, I would say. Chooses not to save her.
• 33:58
  That bit hit me, but what hit me even more was the little coder.
• 34:03
  The coder at the my. Ankle at the end.
• 34:06
  That's the bit that gave me prickly face.
• 34:09
  Properly prickly face. The bit that gave me prickly
• 34:12
  face was when he goes back to talk to his mother.
• 34:14
  Oh. Oh yeah, that's nice as well.
• 34:16
  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm, I lost my dad 2 1/2
• 34:19
  years ago and, and all of the reference is to clearly his dad
• 34:23
  has died. It's very understated as well.
• 34:24
  You know, he's having this conversation.
• 34:25
  I don't know what his dad is. And then there's a conversation
• 34:27
  which it's absolutely clear what's happened.
• 34:29
  And I think the thing that's so enticing about this book is, as
• 34:33
  the doctor says, towards the end, everyone has something they
• 34:37
  want to go back and change. It's this idea that what it's
• 34:41
  what would you do? What would you do if you sent 20
• 34:44
  years back into your past, you know, and, and everything kind
• 34:47
  of observing yourself at university and seeing this
• 34:51
  relationship, the, the different stages of, of this relationship
• 34:54
  that grows into a marriage. All of that I, I thought
• 34:58
  resonated, you know, with me, certainly I, I had a university
• 35:04
  education. So maybe kind of all those
• 35:05
  references were, were, were absolutely kind of ticking
• 35:07
  boxes. But I, I think for anyone who's
• 35:10
  above a certain age, the idea of, you know, because above a
• 35:14
  certain age, everyone has regrets.
• 35:15
  So the idea that you would go back and be in a position even
• 35:18
  just to watch it, but possibly to manipulate it, to change it,
• 35:22
  to nudge it, is a is a really enticing 1.
• 35:25
  He writes it, right? He writes it.
• 35:26
  He says that his mum's full of hope and twinkle, not knowing
• 35:31
  that her husband is going to die in seven years.
• 35:34
  That is heartbreaking. And, and the thing that makes
• 35:41
  the angels plan so cruel is that it relies entirely on planting a
• 35:47
  seed of hope that you can go back and you can change things
• 35:52
  and you can make it better. It's the cruelest thing.
• 35:54
  It's saying this awful thing has happened, but you can stop it
• 35:57
  this time. Yeah, I, I love that brilliant
• 35:59
  bit of the instant story logic where, where you realize that
• 36:05
  the doctor says, well, they didn't pick on you, they knew
• 36:08
  they could do that to anybody. So, you know, they pick you and
• 36:11
  then they work out who you're what, who, who, which life it is
• 36:14
  they've touched because everyone got this in them.
• 36:17
  I suppose for the, for the, for the people listening, I'll just
• 36:21
  say this sort of starts with Mark, who has lost Rebecca at
• 36:27
  this point. So she's died in a car crash.
• 36:28
  And this is what several years later, comes home, finds an
• 36:32
  envelope that says open me up. It's full of money and a a
• 36:36
  series of bullet points that seem to be about his life.
• 36:39
  The angels attack him and send him back.
• 36:42
  Is it 17 years? Is it 20 years?
• 36:44
  So yeah. Something like that.
• 36:47
  And and then he realises, he opens up the envelope, he
• 36:50
  realises, oh, OK, so I've got enough money to exist in the
• 36:52
  past. I've got foreknowledge.
• 36:55
  And this is clearly a series of instructions for me to follow.
• 36:59
  And that's sort of where we start.
• 37:00
  And at the end of it, the last thing it says is if you follow
• 37:03
  these instructions to the letter, you can save her.
• 37:06
  Oh boy, yes. That's the whole.
• 37:09
  Motivation. If you follow this in these
• 37:11
  instructions, you can save her. And I found, I mean, even the
• 37:15
  opening prologue, it was very evocative to me because it was
• 37:19
  describing the car brilliantly driving down narrow country
• 37:22
  lanes with bushes on either side in the rain.
• 37:26
  And I've done that so many times because of where my office used
• 37:29
  to be. And it is horrible and it is
• 37:32
  terrifying. And I mean, the only thing I was
• 37:35
  feeling a bit, if I was feeling a bit uncharitable, is that I
• 37:40
  used to prefer doing it in the dark because at least then you
• 37:42
  could see the bloody headlights coming.
• 37:44
  Yeah. The number of times I've gone
• 37:47
  round a blind corner in those narrow roads and come face to
• 37:49
  face with something coming up the other way that I didn't know
• 37:51
  was there and had to back into a reversing space, which.
• 37:55
  But it was very evocative of things that I've done.
• 37:58
  And then of course, the whole university experience that's
• 38:03
  described. Yeah.
• 38:04
  I've done digs with housemates. I've done this student union bar
• 38:08
  of the 9. Sorry.
• 38:09
  What age are you, Jason? I'm 45, I give my university
• 38:14
  career a few years after the characters in this book, but
• 38:17
  still in the late 90s early 2000s.
• 38:19
  Because I literally, I graduated in 94, so I think I'm literally
• 38:23
  in this character's age. So it's just like that's it was
• 38:26
  basically my life at uni. That's probably a point.
• 38:30
  All the references were my life. We could all stick a pin in and
• 38:33
  say, my God, that is my life. At a certain point, that bit
• 38:36
  where, yeah, yeah, where Mark's in a relationship with somebody
• 38:38
  and Rebecca's in a relationship with somebody and we know
• 38:41
  they're going to end up together, but you're sort of
• 38:43
  eking out those relationships, trying to make them work.
• 38:46
  Yeah. You know you have a illicit
• 38:48
  moment in the closet or wherever it was.
• 38:51
  This is still aimed at kiddies, you know and.
• 38:54
  On. The roof number of those moments
• 38:57
  when I was younger. If I want to ask, well, how do
• 39:03
  we untangle this? Do do you want to start with the
• 39:06
  angels themselves, or do you want to head straight into into
• 39:10
  Mark's story? The one the one the angels on
• 39:14
  the on the the only thing I've got against this book and as
• 39:18
  most and I don't want to end up. I mean, I guess we're I don't
• 39:21
  want to focus on negatives, but I think there are a few.
• 39:25
  But one of the things is I wasn't quite the angels of a
• 39:28
  strange creation because in this one they have so much agency
• 39:33
  that it was almost disturbing, like the fact that they can
• 39:36
  write letters now they can. Where is there more?
• 39:39
  They can move. You see a move in.
• 39:42
  But but there was just something about Oh my God, that that
• 39:45
  revealed that they wrote the letter.
• 39:48
  Felt like maybe you're seeing? Them too far for me, for the
• 39:51
  angels. You're used to seeing them as
• 39:52
  something scary. You don't see them when no one's
• 39:54
  looking and they're just yeah. Yeah.
• 39:57
  I don't know if you guys agree, but to me they seem a bit more
• 40:00
  instinctive when they do stuff. But but to actually sit down and
• 40:03
  go, right, what we're going to do is we've got to get a letter
• 40:05
  and we've got to do that. Maybe it took a bit out.
• 40:08
  Agree. I think the more I think the
• 40:10
  more present the angels are, the less threatening they become.
• 40:14
  And that and the problem is, and I think it's a problem with
• 40:17
  their their appearances on television as well, which is not
• 40:21
  to say that that they haven't found ways of doing them
• 40:25
  differently. But I do think there is a law of
• 40:27
  diminishing returns. And in a book where they are in
• 40:31
  virtually every scene, they appear apparently to kind of get
• 40:36
  in the way of someone or to that there is they're a kind of
• 40:39
  nebulous threat. And this is what I mean by
• 40:42
  angels don't really make much sense when when you scrutinize
• 40:45
  them, they're sort of there. Are they there to stop the
• 40:49
  Doctor and Amy and Rory? Or are they there to stop Mark
• 40:52
  or they're not because Mark is in the right place at the right
• 40:55
  time. So actually the angels don't
• 40:56
  want to get in the way of Mark, but they seem to be the more I
• 40:59
  thought about, the more I was like, so do they want to touch
• 41:01
  them or not? And I feel like it's the
• 41:06
  strongest appearance of the angels are right at the start of
• 41:08
  the book. And you've got this idea that
• 41:10
  there's an Angel in a security camera or in a television
• 41:13
  screen. This idea that the image of an
• 41:15
  Angel is a dangerous thing is, is a really powerful idea.
• 41:18
  And it's very well told as well. With every repetition of there
• 41:22
  were 6 angels and they were getting closer every time I felt
• 41:25
  OK, but what are they actually doing there and what is the
• 41:28
  threat here? What?
• 41:29
  We had to keep finding ways for them to be able to move.
• 41:32
  And I do think it was impressive because to, to, to take a visual
• 41:35
  idea and to pull it off in a book, because I did wonder how
• 41:38
  on earth the Angel, I mean, it's even more weird in Big Finish
• 41:41
  when it's just sounds, but and he, he does the lights from the
• 41:47
  emergency vehicle at the start, doesn't he?
• 41:48
  And then in the club, it's the flashing lights there.
• 41:51
  And then there's a storm later on when they're coming.
• 41:53
  So there's lots of different ways to sort of have them sort
• 41:56
  of lit up all of a sudden so you can see them moving.
• 42:00
  But yeah, I kind of, but I just don't get the angels anyway.
• 42:03
  I just don't get this species of creature made out of stone that
• 42:08
  eats time paradoxes. Like, I don't get what sort of
• 42:10
  culture do these people have? Like, we're never going to know
• 42:13
  because they were really supposed to be in one episode,
• 42:15
  right? And it's just the fact that they
• 42:17
  were popular that we keep pulling them out the closet.
• 42:20
  They were really, they were really brilliant creation.
• 42:22
  But I, I mean, I like, I liked flesh and stone, but then I felt
• 42:30
  Village of the Angels was really lots of people seemed to like
• 42:34
  that, but. I loved it.
• 42:36
  I just thought it was a million weird things and they were all
• 42:38
  doing stuff and the. I mean the angels.
• 42:41
  Are in it, but it just seemed and that and yeah, and then they
• 42:44
  can turn the doctor into a. It just seemed a bit like, well,
• 42:49
  they're just doing anything. Yeah, but I mean, this is the
• 42:52
  problem, I think, with the Angels when they became
• 42:54
  unexpectedly a big hit and Moffett wanted to bring them
• 42:58
  back because in blink, they make sense.
• 43:02
  You know, you don't know. Well, I see them.
• 43:07
  They look like Angels. They're quantum locked.
• 43:09
  If you look at them, they freeze into stone.
• 43:11
  No problem. How did that even come to be?
• 43:14
  What sort of? Evil.
• 43:15
  Anything's possible with crime and the evil process.
• 43:19
  Weird quantum physics and everything else.
• 43:20
  But The thing is with that they don't need to have.
• 43:23
  But was that Jason's science corner today?
• 43:26
  Weird. Quantum Physics.
• 43:28
  But they did. But when the concept, as they're
• 43:30
  explained in Blink, they don't need to have a culture, they
• 43:33
  don't need to have relationships or a language or communication
• 43:39
  because they're basically portrayed as hunting animals.
• 43:43
  Yeah, they go through their life finding people to ZAP through
• 43:46
  time, and they feed off the paradox energy and that's it.
• 43:49
  That's all the concept was. I mean, that's exactly what
• 43:51
  they're doing here though, right?
• 43:52
  He just says they're feeding off the paradoxes.
• 43:54
  They've sent you back to a certain amount of time, they've
• 43:55
  manipulated him into a certain position, and they're just gonna
• 43:58
  eat the paradoxes that are as a result of it.
• 44:01
  But that's the point though, isn't it?
• 44:02
  In the first? In their first means, they
• 44:04
  didn't manipulate anybody into a particular time specifically
• 44:08
  until they got to. Live yourself to death, didn't
• 44:10
  you? That was.
• 44:10
  Enough. They basically just zapped you
• 44:12
  into a random point in the past, and now they're doing it right.
• 44:16
  We're going to find a person, we're going to ZAP him to a
• 44:18
  specific point and we're going to write a note to make sure
• 44:21
  that he does certain things that we want him to do to make sure
• 44:24
  that he actually gets to this point.
• 44:26
  It's The thing is, what I don't get is if they could do that and
• 44:29
  it's only just occurred to me and This is why I didn't want to
• 44:31
  reread the book you've, you know, if they could.
• 44:36
  Remember you enjoyed it, OK? Just remember that.
• 44:38
  If they could ZAP him back to that point and make him live
• 44:41
  through his entire life and have all the bits with the Doctor and
• 44:45
  Amy and Roy, I think because they wanted the paradox to be
• 44:48
  that he saved her life, why didn't they just ZAP him back to
• 44:50
  the car accident and have him save her life?
• 44:54
  So. It would be a very short book.
• 44:57
  But I don't. Think changing time thing that
• 44:59
  doesn't make sense either. You know, you start to go well,
• 45:01
  why is the doctor worrying about things not working out when
• 45:04
  clearly whatever they do, it kind of works out as they were.
• 45:07
  You know, it's, you have it, it works because it's a conceit.
• 45:10
  It's a comic conceit really. You know, this, this well, we've
• 45:13
  got to work really hard to make sure that things happen exactly
• 45:15
  the way they happened before. But actually, if you read the
• 45:18
  logic of the book, it's that things do kind of happen the way
• 45:20
  they did before because that's how they happened.
• 45:22
  You know they forgive me. Yeah, forgive me for doing this
• 45:25
  because I so rarely do this, but like all Steven Moffett scripts,
• 45:30
  if you start pulling at these threads, none of it makes any
• 45:33
  sense whatsoever. No, I mean the angels.
• 45:35
  I was about to say. Running a fucking hotel not long
• 45:38
  after like this so. Yeah, a big Mama Statue of
• 45:44
  Liberty there as well. Yeah, so.
• 45:46
  So in a weird way, this just prefigures what Moffat was
• 45:49
  already going towards, which was they have a lot more agency.
• 45:53
  And then by the time we get to Village of the Angels, they're
• 45:56
  established as an assassin class that the Time Lords use.
• 46:00
  So I mean, so maybe that's just maybe this book actually makes
• 46:05
  more sense as we go forward. Probably made less sense when
• 46:09
  all you had was blink. But this book makes sense.
• 46:12
  It makes emotional sense. And yes, we're all talking about
• 46:15
  Moffett, but actually I think this is the Angels as Russell
• 46:20
  would have written them, because reminded me not of any.
• 46:23
  No, I think the actual time paradox thing is very simple and
• 46:27
  it's very clearly spelt out and we don't have to revisit it.
• 46:31
  We just. But it's Father's Day, isn't?
• 46:34
  It say, but it's also. You might remember in series
• 46:40
  which I mostly hated, called Cucumber, there was an episode
• 46:44
  in which Russell T Davis did basically an entire life and it
• 46:48
  was the character. And that was brilliant and I
• 46:50
  agree with you about. Cucumber that.
• 46:51
  Episode alone is a real. Episode.
• 46:54
  And this this reminded me of nothing about that, you know,
• 46:58
  and the the way in which it does an an entire man's life is, is
• 47:03
  truly impressive. Particularly, you know, there
• 47:05
  are sort of montagey chapters where you go through kind of an
• 47:08
  if you were a date and a vignette of a thing happening
• 47:12
  and then we move on. And that seems to me to be much
• 47:16
  more the approach that that would be taken by a writer who's
• 47:20
  not that interested in the concept, but he's much more
• 47:23
  interested in the characters. And, and certainly what we have
• 47:26
  here in Mark and Rebecca are two characters who absolutely leap
• 47:29
  off the page. I think they're really
• 47:31
  aggressively drawn. This is one of the things I
• 47:33
  really loved about this book, and it's something that I think,
• 47:37
  and This is why it doesn't feel very Steven Moffett either in
• 47:39
  some respects, is that it is telling a story where the threat
• 47:45
  is the universal ramifications of a time paradox.
• 47:49
  As the Doctor keeps telling us, you know, the universe is going
• 47:52
  to be screwed up. The threat is really that this
• 47:54
  man is going to have to go through the loss of his wife
• 47:57
  again. And the focus is very much on a
• 47:59
  very, very small group of characters that you can follow
• 48:03
  through and sympathise with and understand because none of them
• 48:07
  are trying to do anything specific.
• 48:10
  Mark is the only character with a particular motivation
• 48:13
  throughout the entire story that we meet, because all the others
• 48:16
  are just people in his life. He's the one who's got the
• 48:20
  motivation, he's the one who's trying to save his wife, and
• 48:23
  he's the one the doctor has to talk down from doing that at the
• 48:26
  end. Yeah.
• 48:29
  And that's what makes it so good.
• 48:30
  It's such an intimate little story.
• 48:33
  Yeah, One thing that leapt out at me after I read it was this.
• 48:38
  When we haven't touched on this yet, but it captures 11 and Rory
• 48:43
  and Amy absolutely perfectly. But if you actually were to go,
• 48:48
  if this was, and I kept going because this would be an amazing
• 48:50
  episode, but then I kept thinking, but if it was in
• 48:53
  Moffat's era, people wouldn't die at the end to be he'd run
• 48:58
  around, he'd run around the console going, going, no, I will
• 49:02
  not have it. Click, click, flick.
• 49:04
  I'd go to, you know, the Doctor would find a way like that says
• 49:08
  about the Time war. The Doctor would find a way to
• 49:10
  solve it. Rebecca would either exist.
• 49:12
  Between. The end.
• 49:14
  It'd either exist between two heartbeats, turn into a puddle,
• 49:17
  or fly about in a diner through time and space.
• 49:20
  One or the other. Because it was because it was
• 49:23
  dealing with time paradoxes and complications and things like
• 49:26
  that. It did leave me wondering at the
• 49:29
  end, would there be some last minute way of saving her that
• 49:34
  did still didn't allow the angels to create the paradox,
• 49:38
  and the fact that it didn't was just it.
• 49:40
  Would fill us a sheet chase. Only it would.
• 49:42
  Absolutely. And that's why I really, really
• 49:44
  love. The ending this, this is a sign
• 49:45
  of what Moffat's done to Doctor Who is the all the things he
• 49:51
  does, all the things people he saves.
• 49:53
  All you have to do with this person is get her out of the car
• 49:57
  and go. You can go live in the future.
• 49:59
  I've got a time machine. So I'm glad they didn't.
• 50:03
  But because of the the complete interference, you know, when it
• 50:08
  was Father's Day, it was very much no, you can't change stuff
• 50:11
  like that. When it gets to Moffat, it's
• 50:13
  like, yeah, we can change a million things.
• 50:14
  We always died about three times this week and.
• 50:17
  It certainly does show the value of getting people off and
• 50:21
  keeping dead. How that can, you know, provoke
• 50:26
  an emotion in you? Because those endings for all
• 50:28
  those companions, I was just baffled.
• 50:29
  I didn't know how to feel about any of them.
• 50:32
  And in this book we arrive at this gut punch moment where the
• 50:35
  doctor has to talk someone into letting their wife.
• 50:39
  And it's plain simple and it's pretty unflinching.
• 50:43
  I think you're right. It would have been an absolute
• 50:45
  cheap not to and it would have cheapened all the moments
• 50:47
  running through the book where he thinks about his wifes death.
• 50:50
  Because what that would have been meaningless if if actually
• 50:53
  there was a way of getting her out of it.
• 50:54
  The book only has emotional weight because it's it's a
• 50:58
  moment in time that cannot be changed.
• 51:00
  I love the clincher though, the clincher at the end where if you
• 51:04
  save her, you may never have met her in the 1st place.
• 51:07
  You might completely rewind the entire relationship because you
• 51:10
  are so involved in your own life now.
• 51:13
  You never would have gone back and done all of those things
• 51:15
  that led us here. And that's almost like a motive
• 51:18
  of like, OK, I can't save her, but I've got all those memories
• 51:22
  of her. And it's almost like a metaphor
• 51:23
  of moving on, right? You know, yes, I have those
• 51:26
  times, but. And that's how you get your coda
• 51:29
  right? Absolutely, that's what it is.
• 51:32
  Just sacrifice living with her and he'll never know.
• 51:37
  And she goes on and lives and meets someone else because he
• 51:40
  goes. Well I did have a nice marriage
• 51:43
  and she's dead. On the other hand, at least I
• 51:46
  got to marry her and I'm still alive.
• 51:48
  I. Don't think it was quite as
• 51:50
  shoulder shrugging as that, you know.
• 51:53
  But but. You know, this is totally a
• 51:56
  thing about moving on, which is something that Steven Moffett on
• 51:59
  the screen never manages to do. And I think that he has his own
• 52:02
  issues around that because he keeps killing people off and
• 52:04
  bringing them back. But how many people who at this
• 52:07
  point, you know, in their life hasn't lost somebody and
• 52:11
  occasionally just thought I would give absolutely anything
• 52:15
  for one more conversation with that person for one more day, or
• 52:18
  to have them still with me? I know I've got people in my
• 52:21
  life. I've said it on this podcast
• 52:22
  before, you know, And in fact, in the most beautiful written
• 52:26
  moment, I think, for Rory in the entire book, Mark says to him in
• 52:31
  that climax, you know, would you, would you save Amy?
• 52:34
  And he just thinks to himself, of course I would like a shot,
• 52:37
  which is exactly how I'd feel about my mother.
• 52:39
  The universe be damned. The paradoxes cometh.
• 52:42
  You know, I would do it in a heartbeat.
• 52:46
  Yeah, it's it's, yeah. I mean, it's, I mean, it's not
• 52:51
  really, really not to take away from Jonathan Morris's book.
• 52:54
  It's more the implications of the MOFA era make make this book
• 53:00
  make less sense I don't think. Morris is trying to reject the
• 53:05
  Moffett era in this book because he's absolutely writing a a
• 53:08
  story that could be told within that era.
• 53:11
  He's very, very good friends with Stephen Moffett.
• 53:14
  Oh yeah, yeah. But he's got some ideas.
• 53:15
  We learned that, didn't we Jason, when we did the the
• 53:18
  Strictly with him? Oh yeah, absolutely.
• 53:20
  I mean, is there anything more Moffaty, if that's a word, Then
• 53:24
  the sequence in the middle with the wedding where there's a
• 53:28
  problem and the Doctor just is bouncing back and forth with the
• 53:31
  TARDIS and the bride and the father of the bride.
• 53:34
  And then at the end goes, and I'll just wipe your memory so
• 53:36
  you don't remember any of that at all.
• 53:37
  And there you go. It's all done thinking, I mean.
• 53:39
  That was, that was, I mean, that made me think of the curse or
• 53:42
  fatal death. No, The Big Bang.
• 53:44
  I was thinking of all this jumping about all over the.
• 53:46
  Place, Big Bang, yeah, all that kind of stuff.
• 53:48
  And it was but, but it was brilliantly written.
• 53:51
  It was so well written that I did.
• 53:52
  I was looking at it thinking this is one of Moffett absurd
• 53:55
  tiny whiny things, but it's fun and I enjoy it and I'll let it
• 53:59
  slide. Because.
• 54:00
  It wear his life is so good. Oh fuck, I'm gonna have to take
• 54:03
  her in the TARDIS to the wedding.
• 54:05
  Like it was like, I really would love to see that on the screen.
• 54:09
  Yeah, it's. A little bit of Vicar diddly as
• 54:11
  well when she gets splashed with mud on her wedding.
• 54:13
  Dress I really think Renwick is a is a great comparison joke
• 54:18
  because it's that is a knock about slapstick sequence.
• 54:22
  It's laugh out loud funny. It's it's and it built and built
• 54:24
  and built in the way that good comic writing does.
• 54:26
  It gets sillier and sillier, but there's this moment where the
• 54:30
  older Mark realises he's standing in the same place that
• 54:33
  his wife's grave is going to be. He's at his wedding and but he's
• 54:38
  not just seen the church that he got married and he's seen the
• 54:41
  church where he held a funeral for this woman.
• 54:43
  And that runs through it like in the best episodes of 1 Foot in
• 54:46
  the Grave where you've got very, very funny things going on.
• 54:49
  But this just underlying sadness or or laced through it all.
• 54:56
  I Yeah. What?
• 54:56
  It is is. I'll tell you.
• 54:57
  I'll tell you the episode what I mean.
• 54:59
  Loads of the grave episodes. It's the one where Victor
• 55:01
  Meldrew is buried in the garden with a plant pot over his heads.
• 55:05
  And then Mark goes, oh, God, what's that?
• 55:07
  She pulls the plant pot up and he just goes, look, it wasn't my
• 55:10
  fault, all right? And all you can see is his head
• 55:12
  coming out of the soil. Then she gets a phone call and
• 55:14
  comes back and she goes, oh, my God, my mum's dead.
• 55:16
  And you're like, what? He just flaws you?
• 55:20
  And I think Morris does that several times in this book.
• 55:24
  Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, it's, it's, it's a marvellous book.
• 55:27
  I mean, we're, we're nitpicking and it was, it's also, it was
• 55:31
  him processing a genuine grief as well.
• 55:34
  I, I believe. I think that kind of makes, you
• 55:37
  know, the epilogue is all about closure.
• 55:39
  It's all about a man who has spent, you know, most of his
• 55:43
  adult life really grieving for a woman.
• 55:45
  And and that's where actually the fact that she has to die and
• 55:50
  yet the fact that he's he's given the chance to process that
• 55:54
  it, it doesn't make for a surprisingly optimistic given
• 55:58
  that this is a book about the all, it's all paths lead towards
• 56:02
  this, this young woman's death. It's a surprisingly optimistic
• 56:07
  ending as well. Yeah.
• 56:08
  And I, and I think, I think Maurice, there's, there's lines
• 56:11
  in there that are coming back to me now as well, where he makes
• 56:14
  the stakes of if he does save his wife, then the power the
• 56:20
  angels will get endangers life on Earth.
• 56:22
  So they kind of make, they make it Earth's at stake if you are
• 56:27
  selfish. So, you know, so I mean, I'm
• 56:30
  like I said, I'm really glad he didn't like do a muffat and go,
• 56:33
  there has to be a way. There's always a way.
• 56:36
  I've read a lot of new adventures in 8th Doctor books
• 56:39
  recently, and the death count is high.
• 56:42
  Yeah. And sometimes this whole
• 56:43
  planet's being destroyed or, you know, 80% of the world's
• 56:47
  population in eternity weeps and things like this, and it has no
• 56:50
  impact on me whatsoever. How am I supposed to feel about
• 56:52
  that? You know all of those people
• 56:54
  dying, one person in this, but one person dies and it really
• 56:59
  impacts. I'll tell you what that is.
• 57:00
  It's, I mean, when when I'm teaching screen writing, there's
• 57:03
  a it's not me that came up with this quote.
• 57:05
  Lots of screen writing courses use this.
• 57:07
  There's a quote from Stalin that gets used in screen writing
• 57:10
  courses at the beginning. There's a sort of provocative
• 57:12
  thing and it's it's a million deficits, a statistic.
• 57:17
  What? No.
• 57:17
  Yeah. One death is a tragedy.
• 57:19
  1,000,000 deficits. And we use that make people go
• 57:24
  what? And then you go, well, you know,
• 57:27
  how many things can you watch on the news?
• 57:29
  And we don't give a shit, but Oh my God, you know?
• 57:32
  I'm going to just pull up something that Jane said earlier
• 57:34
  in the episode about if this was being aimed at an older
• 57:38
  audience, then you would go into some maybe muddier places than
• 57:43
  this does. One of the things I really loved
• 57:46
  about the depiction of Mark and Rebecca's relationship
• 57:50
  throughout this book was it was just a series of quite beautiful
• 57:55
  but utterly mundane moments. Yeah.
• 57:58
  It's not a big operatic relationship, which is what you
• 58:01
  get in the Moffett era, usually a love affairs, you know, River
• 58:04
  Song, all through time, meeting out of order and all of this and
• 58:06
  massive moments. And it was just meeting in cafes
• 58:09
  and, and meeting in discos and just those things that actually
• 58:13
  you and I, we're all in relationships.
• 58:16
  We, we all have those moments. And that's what our
• 58:19
  relationships are built out of. And I really liked how
• 58:21
  understated all of that was. The only really big moment is
• 58:26
  the wedding. And that's a big moment in
• 58:27
  everybody's life. Yeah.
• 58:29
  But yeah, we've not, we've not mentioned the book one day, have
• 58:32
  we? Which Jonathan Morris, I've
• 58:34
  heard an interview says that was sort of one of the first things
• 58:38
  he says is unashamedly. I just read the book one day,
• 58:42
  which is just had that new version, brilliant Netflix
• 58:47
  adaptation of it, which I would recommend.
• 58:50
  But that's basically like this without the time travel and it's
• 58:53
  but every time you meet them, it's it's the same day, but over
• 58:56
  the years. So it's like little vignettes,
• 58:58
  little snapshots of their life. And that's kind of what the, you
• 59:03
  know, that's he's built in the snapshots of the life with the
• 59:06
  list on the thing. And it's got a similar and it's
• 59:10
  kind of sort of 80s into the 90s into the 2000s, I do believe.
• 59:17
  Just to. Be it's got a similarly gut
• 59:18
  wrenching tragedy in it as well. So, James.
• 59:23
  I, I didn't, I didn't mean to imply that I wanted this book to
• 59:26
  go into muddier places. I, I felt that it had been
• 59:28
  restricted by a word count to telling.
• 59:30
  I, I think the simplicity of the storytelling is, is really its
• 59:32
  strength. And I, I, I, I definitely didn't
• 59:36
  want, I didn't want, I didn't want any, any change to that.
• 59:41
  I feel like the world that he builds is very much restricted
• 59:45
  to these two people. You know, there are some friends
• 59:47
  who make recurring appearances, but we don't really find out
• 59:49
  anything about them. They are, they are
• 59:51
  two-dimensional. You know, they're just there to
• 59:53
  play a role. You know, the, the former
• 59:55
  girlfriend is, is not a, you know, she's not important.
• 59:58
  So he doesn't dwell on who she is.
• 1:00:00
  Lies. They'll get a few lies each
• 1:00:02
  personally don't. I and I feel like actually kind
• 1:00:05
  of going back to Ian's comparison with Nick Hornby,
• 1:00:09
  that this is a world that is pretty well realized in, in, in
• 1:00:15
  terms of the setting and then and, and drawing of the 90s.
• 1:00:17
  And, and I just, I wonder if he would have liked to populate it
• 1:00:20
  with a few more characters and actually make the, the parents
• 1:00:23
  live a bit more and, and make the friends, you know, give them
• 1:00:27
  more of a friendship circle and have a bit more.
• 1:00:29
  I'd have lived in that world very happily for a, for a few
• 1:00:32
  more chapters. And I just feel like the freedom
• 1:00:35
  of a slightly longer world word count.
• 1:00:37
  There would have been the possibility to do that.
• 1:00:39
  I think he built in. He built in that he has to keep
• 1:00:42
  away from his own life, so I guess there's an inbuilt.
• 1:00:46
  Like, I know this has time travel in it, I know it has
• 1:00:48
  monsters in it, but it's all very recognisable.
• 1:00:53
  I don't know, Soapy, whatever you want to call it,
• 1:00:55
  relationship drama. Is there scope for Doctor Who
• 1:00:58
  stories that are just in this space?
• 1:01:03
  Well, I mean, we've, we've already talked about Father's
• 1:01:06
  Day. We've talked about, I mean, love
• 1:01:08
  and monsters is similar spine to this and Blink is and the
• 1:01:15
  logger, which I haven't really watched since transmission.
• 1:01:18
  But yeah. And Blink itself is, is kind of
• 1:01:21
  about, you know, is about a bit of relationship and that poor
• 1:01:26
  cop that the doctor uses horribly.
• 1:01:29
  I've still not had that. Explain to me why That's all
• 1:01:31
  right. I need you to deliver a message
• 1:01:33
  and take the long way around. You've got a time machine, mate.
• 1:01:36
  Could you do it and come back and get it?
• 1:01:38
  The angels had it. And could you maybe, could you
• 1:01:40
  maybe go and live over there for 30 years and go.
• 1:01:44
  There is a reason, there is a reason why we didn't touch on
• 1:01:48
  time travel very much for our Doctor Who's entire run, because
• 1:01:51
  the second you start saying, well you've got a time machine,
• 1:01:53
  just go back to the start and just change the start.
• 1:01:56
  Yeah, but hear me out in Blink. Why?
• 1:02:00
  But as you tell the poor cop who gets zapped back, you've got to
• 1:02:02
  go and meet Sarah Sparrow when you're on your deathbed.
• 1:02:06
  Why doesn't he go? You stay with Martha, enjoy the
• 1:02:09
  60s. I'm going to go and live for a
• 1:02:11
  few decades until Until I can go and say, hey, he's Sally
• 1:02:15
  Sparrow. Why can't you do that?
• 1:02:17
  Why does he live a whole man's life?
• 1:02:19
  A whole man's life. Because it's a paradox and a
• 1:02:22
  time loop. It's already written that that's
• 1:02:24
  what happened. Is it at what point?
• 1:02:27
  At what point is he already? Is it written that he says?
• 1:02:30
  Sally wrote it all down and gave it to the doctor, who then got
• 1:02:34
  stuck in 1969 and had to do what was written on the thing.
• 1:02:36
  It's a bit like what happened here.
• 1:02:38
  It's a list of instructions. That's why.
• 1:02:40
  And because it is. But yeah, you're right.
• 1:02:42
  All those drips down. Sorry, James.
• 1:02:46
  Yes. I'm just I'm just trying to
• 1:02:47
  answer the question that job has posed in the 1st.
• 1:02:49
  Thank you. Rather than doing strictly come
• 1:02:52
  blink I The thing is, you're asking a question about Doctor
• 1:02:59
  Who can Doctor Who, you know, heartbeat do do the soap opera
• 1:03:02
  thing? I mean, we're talking about
• 1:03:06
  Doctor Who in in as written as a as a book.
• 1:03:09
  I think Doctor Who can do anything.
• 1:03:11
  And I love I love that Doctor Who was so flexible in its first
• 1:03:15
  three years on television. It really did run the gamma of,
• 1:03:18
  you know, different styles of television drama, but we're not
• 1:03:21
  even talking about television drama.
• 1:03:22
  So yeah, I think probably in a in a 45 minute episode of
• 1:03:25
  television, to do a soap opera episode would be a mistake.
• 1:03:28
  But if you've if you've got this series of books that are
• 1:03:31
  potentially kind of limitless, then you know, it's Doctor Who.
• 1:03:35
  So you probably want a strong story thread running through it.
• 1:03:39
  But if the characters are well written and the relationships
• 1:03:42
  are compelling and I want to read about those people, then
• 1:03:44
  absolutely yes, Doctor Who can do anything.
• 1:03:47
  I mean, I, I was actually thinking of the also people,
• 1:03:49
  which, you know, is, is a really cracking read until the story
• 1:03:55
  kind of gets in the way of it. And that's the point of which,
• 1:03:57
  you know, I would have quite happily just stitched the story
• 1:04:00
  all together and spent a few more chapters enjoying the
• 1:04:03
  company of these people. I mean.
• 1:04:04
  I have a. Great.
• 1:04:05
  Doctor Who can do anything like that.
• 1:04:07
  I mean, the story that you're talking about there that sprung
• 1:04:09
  to mind was the big Finnish audio scherzo scarezo, which is,
• 1:04:15
  you know, a sci-fi concept. But the whole point of that
• 1:04:18
  story is the relationship between the Doctor and Charlie
• 1:04:20
  Pollard and what they've just been through, processing what
• 1:04:22
  they've done, what they've just been through.
• 1:04:24
  So, yeah, Doctor Who absolutely can go into these bases.
• 1:04:27
  I wouldn't want it there all the time.
• 1:04:29
  It's not a soap opera and it's not, you know, that it's that's
• 1:04:32
  not it's driving force. But as James said, the story,
• 1:04:36
  the show can do anything. And I'm kind of sounding like
• 1:04:39
  I'm contradicting one of my own most often repeated complaints
• 1:04:44
  about, which is that with a story that can do anything, then
• 1:04:47
  restricting it to romance and sex is the most mundane and
• 1:04:51
  boring thing you can do. Can't object.
• 1:04:53
  To it here, it's not the Doctor. But my objection is when it
• 1:04:56
  involves the Doctor with the surrounding characters and the
• 1:05:01
  supporting characters, Absolutely you can go there.
• 1:05:04
  Soap opera is a series of is a series of episodes.
• 1:05:07
  It's kind of directional saying, you know, a soap opera runs and
• 1:05:09
  runs and runs and storylines keep having to be kind of
• 1:05:12
  fabricated and invented and injected.
• 1:05:14
  That's how soap operas work. It wouldn't be a soap opera.
• 1:05:17
  It might have the appearance of one, but it would be it, you
• 1:05:19
  know, it'd be a novel beginning, middle and end.
• 1:05:21
  You'd have to discipline it in that way.
• 1:05:23
  So like. You said because this is focused
• 1:05:26
  so squarely on two people, it's less a soap opera, which is a
• 1:05:29
  big cast of people, isn't it? This is specifically painting a
• 1:05:33
  picture of this relationship in a lot of depth or as much depth
• 1:05:37
  as you can do in 250 pages. I mean, I've recently read
• 1:05:40
  Porsche Dacosta's a stranger, you know, that was also a Doctor
• 1:05:44
  Who book, say in this interesting world.
• 1:05:48
  And I'll tell you what, if you're going to do it, you got
• 1:05:50
  to do it well and don't have that much sex in it because
• 1:05:53
  it's. This also.
• 1:05:55
  This also doesn't break the rule of the rule that I think Jason
• 1:05:59
  and I are both and probably James as well.
• 1:06:01
  But you know, it's got to be Certificate 12 and no higher.
• 1:06:05
  And this, this, this. You could imagine the tone of it
• 1:06:08
  and everything perfectly feels like this era.
• 1:06:12
  Can you imagine this being a really tightly written episode?
• 1:06:17
  Well, then I've got another question.
• 1:06:18
  That would make you cry at the end.
• 1:06:20
  And that is this office. This is aimed at a younger
• 1:06:24
  audience than the three of ours. Is this all OK for kids like,
• 1:06:30
  you know, death and grief and yeah.
• 1:06:34
  Oh yeah, absolutely. Death and grief.
• 1:06:37
  Is death and grief hits you at any age?
• 1:06:40
  Yeah. I lost my I lost my granddad at
• 1:06:42
  the age of 11. I lost my, my, well, my one of
• 1:06:49
  my granddad's at the age of 4, three or whatever.
• 1:06:52
  I barely remember him. I lost my granddad at my my
• 1:06:55
  mum's mum at the age of 11. And you know, we, we tend to get
• 1:07:02
  a bit squeamish about introducing, you know, adult in
• 1:07:07
  inverted commas concepts to kids.
• 1:07:09
  But death is the one constant that will strike at any time.
• 1:07:13
  And I think that there's a degree to which the idea that
• 1:07:17
  is, the idea that you should keep it from them, yeah, is just
• 1:07:21
  counterproductive because they are going to experience it.
• 1:07:25
  It's the, it's the only, it's the only inevitable thing that
• 1:07:28
  every single person is going to experience in their life is the
• 1:07:32
  loss of somebody else. Yeah, but also as a kid, some of
• 1:07:35
  the most memorable experiences are watching stuff that makes
• 1:07:39
  you cry, like Bambi's mum or, you know, or more recently I
• 1:07:45
  had. Written the story.
• 1:07:46
  Watch. Watch.
• 1:07:47
  Yeah, oh God, watching. Or the little creature going on
• 1:07:51
  the fire in Beastmaster. Or me the.
• 1:07:54
  Entirety of Watership Down. Yeah, God, watership down.
• 1:07:58
  But yeah, but even more, even more recently, they've got, I
• 1:08:01
  had the most amazing Christmas when we all sat down and watched
• 1:08:06
  the Peter Jackson King Kong with so many different generations.
• 1:08:10
  And from my mum, who's well, then in the late 70s, now she's
• 1:08:15
  early 80s, late 70s to my to, to like my little Elliot, who you
• 1:08:20
  met. But just before we started
• 1:08:22
  recording, everyone was bawling their eyes out at the end.
• 1:08:24
  And it was absolutely wonderful. And people are fine with the
• 1:08:27
  idea of dying. And, you know, well, maybe not
• 1:08:31
  fine is the wrong word, but it's totally suitable for for, you
• 1:08:36
  know, this, this the target audience of this, which is
• 1:08:40
  nominally 11 year olds or whatever, would be totally like,
• 1:08:43
  Oh yeah, someone's dying and oh, cool, I want to know what
• 1:08:45
  happens next. And it will always land
• 1:08:47
  differently depending who you are, because every piece of
• 1:08:50
  drama does. But like all good, all good kids
• 1:08:54
  films, I think it has layers. This book, an adult can read it
• 1:08:59
  as well and enjoy it and take something from it as well.
• 1:09:02
  I liked how how taking him back through time and forcing him to
• 1:09:06
  live that life. It's basically a metaphor for
• 1:09:09
  the journey of grief. And you know, people say, oh,
• 1:09:11
  just, you know, after a couple of months, just get over it.
• 1:09:14
  No, everybody's journey of grief, it takes a certain amount
• 1:09:17
  of time. This poor fellow, it just takes
• 1:09:18
  17 years for him to come to the to the conclusion that I do have
• 1:09:22
  to move on with my life. But I admit that that was
• 1:09:25
  explicit as like a sci-fi concert was used explicitly to
• 1:09:29
  to to show that. Really clever.
• 1:09:31
  I I really do to an author called Maurice Gleitzman who has
• 1:09:37
  written a really extraordinary series of books which I can't
• 1:09:43
  recommend highly enough. The first one is called Once and
• 1:09:48
  the follow up book is called. Then there's another book called
• 1:09:51
  after and these are books that deal with the Holocaust and they
• 1:09:57
  are written using language that a 9 or 10 year old absolutely
• 1:10:02
  could read. And they are written in such a
• 1:10:05
  clever way. First of all, primarily, really,
• 1:10:08
  they're written with a child's viewpoint, so they are instantly
• 1:10:14
  accessible for a child and they are looking at these events with
• 1:10:17
  an innocence that means that they have a different meaning.
• 1:10:21
  They hit differently depending on how old you are and how much
• 1:10:24
  you know about what is being talked about.
• 1:10:26
  So although it's a book that absolutely unflinchingly
• 1:10:33
  addresses the horror of one of the worst atrocities in, you
• 1:10:41
  know, in certainly in living history, but in, you know, in
• 1:10:44
  history of humankind, really, it is written in such a way that
• 1:10:48
  it's, it can be processed by young readers.
• 1:10:55
  He's, he's a very fine writer. I would say, you know, pick up
• 1:11:00
  once and you'll read it in a in a couple of hours, but my God,
• 1:11:03
  it will never leave you. He also wrote a phenomenal book
• 1:11:07
  called Two Weeks with the Queen in which he deals with
• 1:11:09
  homophobia. And, and what he's constantly
• 1:11:13
  showing is that actually you can, you can deal with the
• 1:11:16
  toughest issues if you approach them in a way that is
• 1:11:22
  specifically for an audience of, of young readers.
• 1:11:26
  And he does tend to use the child's eye point of view.
• 1:11:28
  And that's the probably the safest way of doing it in a way
• 1:11:32
  that's, you know, going to going to make its mark.
• 1:11:35
  You can deal with, you can deal with these tough issues that are
• 1:11:38
  going to be faced by children at some stage.
• 1:11:40
  As as Jason and Ian have both said, these are things that they
• 1:11:44
  are, they are surrounded by, it means that they can start to
• 1:11:47
  tackle these issues at their level and start to understand
• 1:11:50
  them. So I, I actually kind of, I
• 1:11:54
  mean, I teach kids who have been bereaved and the more conscious
• 1:11:58
  I am of that, the more conscious I become that of the kind of
• 1:12:02
  omnipresence of tragedy and death.
• 1:12:05
  You know, it's, it's, it is all around us.
• 1:12:07
  You can't shelter them from it. And actually, you know, the, the
• 1:12:11
  healthiest thing is to give them ways of confronting it and
• 1:12:15
  processing it. So I, I feel like this book
• 1:12:19
  absolutely does that. Would I, would I hand this book
• 1:12:22
  to someone whose mother had just died in a car crash?
• 1:12:24
  No. But would I, would I remove it
• 1:12:28
  from the shelves and hide it from a, a child who'd lost a, a
• 1:12:31
  parent or a grandparent? Absolutely not.
• 1:12:33
  No. It deals with death in a, in a
• 1:12:34
  mature way and in a way that I think can be processed.
• 1:12:36
  It's not gratuitous, it's not explicit and it's, and it's full
• 1:12:40
  of nothing if not love. And, you know, the positivity
• 1:12:43
  of, of, of what life is spent in a marriage or in a relationship.
• 1:12:50
  So yeah, I think it's, I think it's a healthy thing for young
• 1:12:53
  people to read. I just want to read out one of
• 1:12:56
  the last paragraphs in the book because I think this sums it up
• 1:12:59
  really nicely and it just, it makes for a really nice ending
• 1:13:03
  to a book that's all about grief and death.
• 1:13:06
  The first thing he would do, he decided, would be to go and see
• 1:13:09
  Lucy and Emma. He hadn't seen them for years,
• 1:13:12
  but he knew they wouldn't mind if he turned up out of the blue
• 1:13:15
  and spent an evening talking to them about Rebecca.
• 1:13:17
  Not because he wanted to talk about her death or how much he
• 1:13:20
  missed her, but because he wanted to remember her and
• 1:13:22
  celebrate her life with friends. Because the memory of her no
• 1:13:25
  longer made him feel sad. And I think that's perfect
• 1:13:31
  summation of the final stage of processing the grief and loss of
• 1:13:35
  somebody. You, you know, I mean, you were
• 1:13:37
  saying, Joe, people say to you, get over it.
• 1:13:38
  I don't think you ever, ever get over a bereavement, not, not
• 1:13:43
  ever, not through the rest of your life.
• 1:13:44
  You never get over it. But I like the metaphor that
• 1:13:47
  grief is like a hole in your life.
• 1:13:50
  And as you get older, that hole becomes a smaller part of your
• 1:13:54
  life so you don't keep falling into it every time you take a
• 1:13:57
  step. And yeah, I think this book
• 1:14:01
  takes, I think this book actually deals with death a lot
• 1:14:06
  better than any televised Doctor Who story does.
• 1:14:10
  Any single one is how many times on Doctor Who you see people
• 1:14:13
  getting killed in UNIT battles and all kinds of things
• 1:14:16
  exterminated by the Daleks and say, oh, they're dead, never
• 1:14:18
  mind. The closest it comes, I think,
• 1:14:21
  is in the Green Death when Cliff comforts Joe about the fact that
• 1:14:25
  they'll never be another bird forever.
• 1:14:28
  And that's about as much of a handling of grief as you ever
• 1:14:30
  get in Doctor Who, I think, on telly.
• 1:14:33
  But this book handles it so brilliantly.
• 1:14:36
  Yeah, well, Father's Day and Loving monsters to handle it
• 1:14:40
  very well, I think. Well, I was, I think, I think
• 1:14:45
  making the person you've just lost return to life as a paving
• 1:14:48
  slab is probably just torpedoing the entire.
• 1:14:52
  I was more thinking. I was more thinking.
• 1:14:53
  Of his mother, I. Was thinking of his mother.
• 1:14:59
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That lovely coda when he, you
• 1:15:04
  know, remembers his I think I think the Absorberloff has
• 1:15:09
  ruined as as a lot of people off an amazingly well structured
• 1:15:13
  brilliant. Oh, it's I, I do love that
• 1:15:15
  story. It does say something to the to
• 1:15:18
  the realism of this book, though.
• 1:15:20
  I kept thinking to myself all the way through, what would I
• 1:15:23
  do? What would I do if I was in this
• 1:15:25
  situation? You know, there was a point
• 1:15:27
  where I got into too much to get, but there was a point where
• 1:15:30
  my mum asked me, please, Joe, hide my cigarettes because I've
• 1:15:34
  got to that point where I need to stop smoking otherwise I'll
• 1:15:37
  be in a lot of trouble. And I lost my mum to lung
• 1:15:39
  cancer. And I did.
• 1:15:41
  And by the end of that week, she was threatening to throttle me
• 1:15:44
  up against the kitchen wall because she didn't have a
• 1:15:46
  cigarette. And I gave in and I said, oh,
• 1:15:48
  God, they're in the drawer. You know, would I go back to
• 1:15:50
  that moment and and stop myself? And you bet you I would.
• 1:15:53
  I absolutely would. And there was lots of moments in
• 1:15:56
  this book where I was going. Yeah, I do that as well.
• 1:16:00
  I was marked for a lot of this book.
• 1:16:02
  And I don't, I don't often find myself, you know, Doctor Who
• 1:16:06
  book, you know, in this. Yeah, I think 1.
• 1:16:10
  I think one thing that speaks to that as well is that this is
• 1:16:13
  like more Rory's story than just.
• 1:16:16
  I don't think he ever has. He's a weird character, Rory.
• 1:16:21
  He's never quite given, he's never quite given much to do in
• 1:16:26
  TV. And in this one, it's almost
• 1:16:29
  like, well, Amy's not needed in this one for once.
• 1:16:31
  And Rory all about It's all about Rory.
• 1:16:35
  Yeah, well, I mean, it's astonishing.
• 1:16:37
  We've got half about 45 minutes into a conversation about this
• 1:16:41
  book, and we haven't actually talked about the Doctor Who
• 1:16:43
  aspects of it, which is the Doctor, Amy and Rory.
• 1:16:45
  And how do you think they fare in this?
• 1:16:48
  Yeah, well, they all might. They're almost sort of zipping
• 1:16:51
  in and out a bit like the Doctor does in Blink.
• 1:16:56
  So even though we see more of them because it's a longer story
• 1:16:59
  and they've got more to do, but it's still, it's still, they're
• 1:17:05
  coming into this guy's life same as it was Sally Sparrow's life,
• 1:17:08
  which I like actually. And yeah, I'd say one of the one
• 1:17:14
  of the few, the few criticisms of this is that Amy doesn't have
• 1:17:19
  an arc. She doesn't have much to do.
• 1:17:21
  They don't he doesn't find. So you think he wrote this at a
• 1:17:23
  massive clip as well with a not very tight deadline.
• 1:17:27
  So it's a miracle of a miracle of writing and Rory has totally
• 1:17:32
  got loads to do. And he also that brilliant line
• 1:17:35
  you mentioned earlier. You know, what would you do?
• 1:17:38
  I'd because his main his main thing is that he's absolutely
• 1:17:41
  can't believe his luck that he gets to marry Amy and Amy is
• 1:17:45
  going to be right. Thing is.
• 1:17:47
  He's so, he's so down on himself.
• 1:17:50
  He sees Amy looking at another version of Rory and gets
• 1:17:54
  jealous. It's like what is wrong with
• 1:17:57
  you? I know there were, there were.
• 1:17:59
  I mean, we could talk. I could talk for ages about why
• 1:18:01
  I think I did just prefer Amy by herself without the.
• 1:18:04
  Wrong. No, you're mad.
• 1:18:07
  Really. Rory is Rory is one of my
• 1:18:10
  favourites. He's my favorite of that era
• 1:18:13
  bomb, I think, and I think he was shortchanged in a lot of
• 1:18:16
  stories and especially when it came to closure.
• 1:18:19
  It's. It's not.
• 1:18:20
  It's hard to tell of companions whether it's because they were
• 1:18:23
  shortchanged or because they were annoying as a character.
• 1:18:27
  I think, and I think Rory is, is a brilliant character.
• 1:18:30
  I think that he was just. I just I never believe in their
• 1:18:33
  relationship ever. I I kind of do, but I think the
• 1:18:36
  problem just don't. Believe in it he's he's too.
• 1:18:39
  She's too horrible to him and and he.
• 1:18:43
  Tells me that's just being heterosexual though.
• 1:18:45
  You. Know, and he doesn't.
• 1:18:48
  And he doesn't leave her. I think the the problem I've got
• 1:18:52
  with Rory is that he gets because the the concept that
• 1:18:55
  Steven Moffett seems to be going for is basically, well, we have
• 1:18:58
  to have the Doctor and a young female companion plus one.
• 1:19:03
  But we won't worry too much about doing things like actually
• 1:19:05
  seeing his reaction to being told that the Doctor isn't dead
• 1:19:10
  properly because we get Amy, River tells Amy.
• 1:19:13
  And then we cut to a shot from the window of the house where we
• 1:19:16
  see a silent bit where Rory finds out.
• 1:19:19
  We don't get a goodbye, Rory gets zapped by an Angel.
• 1:19:22
  And then we. Go back into strictly again.
• 1:19:24
  Loving all that. So I think actually having Rory
• 1:19:27
  as a more of a focus here and Amy not having so much to do, I
• 1:19:30
  actually quite found I found quite refreshing.
• 1:19:33
  But I also the other thing I think that he does very well is
• 1:19:37
  capture the 11th Doctor. I could totally hear and picture
• 1:19:41
  Matt Smith in his season 5 stroke 6A character because I
• 1:19:48
  mean, for some reason the 11th Doctor undergoes a massive shift
• 1:19:51
  in character halfway through his run.
• 1:19:54
  But I could totally picture the Season 5 and 6A version of of
• 1:19:57
  Matt Smith's Doctor doing and saying the things that he does
• 1:20:01
  and he gets. To do a lot of things, he gets
• 1:20:04
  to be sympathetic, he gets to be comic and zany and he gets to be
• 1:20:08
  angry. And I could totally picture Matt
• 1:20:10
  Smith delivering all those lines.
• 1:20:12
  So I. Love.
• 1:20:13
  I love that. Talking of delivering lies, I
• 1:20:15
  mean, I can't do a good Matt Smith impression, but when he
• 1:20:17
  said, do you think they sent you here out of the goodness of
• 1:20:20
  their hearts? No, they're here now because I
• 1:20:22
  think you're going to create a big juicy space-time event.
• 1:20:25
  I was like, I could just hear Matt Smith pacing that dialogue.
• 1:20:28
  Yeah, yeah, no. And that I had that feeling all
• 1:20:31
  the way through the book. James, please say what you're
• 1:20:34
  trying to say. I want to I want to slightly
• 1:20:37
  disagree. I thought I'm I'm a fan of this
• 1:20:41
  era, or at least I'm a fan of Matt Smith's first series in
• 1:20:46
  particular. And I and I do buy the Amy Roy
• 1:20:48
  relationship in in that one. What he does with them after
• 1:20:52
  that is I think I'll judged. I think Amy and Rory are really
• 1:20:56
  well characterized in this book and I agree it's Rory's story.
• 1:20:59
  I think he's he he's very compelling in this and and
• 1:21:02
  really endearing. I found the Doctor pretty hard
• 1:21:05
  work and pretty slappable for quite a lot of this.
• 1:21:08
  And like I said, he completely captured.
• 1:21:12
  It's Matt Smith. James, I know that Matt Smith
• 1:21:15
  could be irritating, but like Matt Smith turned up to 11:00 to
• 1:21:21
  12:00 and I, you know, from the off, it's Matt Smith doing the
• 1:21:26
  thing where he runs around and waves his arms and emotes and
• 1:21:34
  two things. One is that like this, I found
• 1:21:36
  this, this version of the doctor kind of ineffective and, and
• 1:21:41
  annoying. I, I, I mean, I just longed for
• 1:21:45
  any of the doctors who just did, did kind of talking like, let's
• 1:21:49
  talk calmly to this person about this emotional trauma that is at
• 1:21:52
  the center of the story and shows some sensitivity.
• 1:21:58
  The other thing is that I don't know how well characterized this
• 1:22:02
  doctor in the pages is. We're all saying that, you know,
• 1:22:06
  we can absolutely hear Matt Smith say in these lines.
• 1:22:09
  Yeah, I totally can hear Matt Smith reading these lines.
• 1:22:12
  If you had never seen Matt Smith in a Doctor Who story, I'm not
• 1:22:16
  sure what you'd get from this. I.
• 1:22:18
  Think James, please. But that's but that's a bag of
• 1:22:21
  wonderful. But that's an old kind of worms
• 1:22:24
  about, I mean, the angels in particular Daleks.
• 1:22:27
  Like if if you'd never seen a Dalek and you're reading a Dalek
• 1:22:32
  book, what the fuck are you reading?
• 1:22:34
  I mean, what are the angels? I mean, that's, I mean, we'll,
• 1:22:38
  we'll only know that by giving it to someone who's never seen
• 1:22:41
  Doctor Who, OK? We're all, we're all creative
• 1:22:47
  adults, you know, with a certain kind of amount of experience of,
• 1:22:52
  of, of reading Doctor Who books. We're, we're doing the thing
• 1:22:54
  where we, where we hear voices in our head.
• 1:22:57
  Like I'm, I'm really wondering about perhaps a, you know, a, a
• 1:23:00
  reader who's less confident and less experienced reading a lot
• 1:23:04
  of like a lot of the doctors lines in this are sarcastic
• 1:23:09
  Doctor, they're catching up, said Amy.
• 1:23:10
  Yes, whispered the doctor. Please let me know when they
• 1:23:13
  catch up and kill us. I'd hate not to notice Now
• 1:23:15
  that's. Absolutely sounds like the. 11th
• 1:23:18
  That line is deadly. If you don't know how Matt Smith
• 1:23:23
  delivers sarcasm as you're just reading someone literally saying
• 1:23:27
  please let me know when they catch up and kill us, I'd hate
• 1:23:30
  not to notice. Trouble is, though, James.
• 1:23:32
  No, but that's obviously a sarcastic thing.
• 1:23:35
  Unless we're going to go to JK Rowling levels of shite and and
• 1:23:39
  have you know I've everything had said said how you
• 1:23:43
  sarcastically. It's not of Jonathan Morris by
• 1:23:48
  any stretch. It just made me think how
• 1:23:49
  difficult this character is to write because I feel like an
• 1:23:54
  awful lot of that doctor is the performance.
• 1:23:57
  But I was seeing the performance in the writing, and I did find
• 1:24:01
  it irritating in the same way that I find the performance on
• 1:24:04
  TV irritating. I thought it was very accurate
• 1:24:07
  because just for that reason, just that, I was like, oh, shut
• 1:24:10
  up. During the wedding, during the
• 1:24:11
  wedding bit I remember myself going on.
• 1:24:13
  It's just a bit where I'd probably be groaning if it was
• 1:24:15
  on TV. I'll be going.
• 1:24:16
  Because Matt Smith's dialogue is on the sarcasm.
• 1:24:19
  And don't get me wrong, he can dial it down, but as we went
• 1:24:22
  along, he did it less and less. And his sort of default setting
• 1:24:26
  at the end was to dial it up and to wave his arms and to be
• 1:24:29
  sarcastic and all of this. I don't know, it just felt, I
• 1:24:33
  mean, I, I actually really love spending time with Amy and Rory
• 1:24:38
  in this book. I mean, Amy was a bit nothing,
• 1:24:40
  wasn't she? I didn't really think she had
• 1:24:41
  much. To do couple of lines though,
• 1:24:43
  she's got a nice line in, you know, not being told what to do
• 1:24:46
  and, you know, disobeying the. Doctor Yeah.
• 1:24:48
  I just thought they could have found something and maybe this,
• 1:24:52
  he's a bit back to what you were saying, James have a slightly
• 1:24:54
  longer word count. Maybe they could have found a
• 1:24:56
  parallel regret for Jane for Rory and Amy to have, or just
• 1:25:01
  something that you know is thematically similar because
• 1:25:05
  Rory kind of has it. Rory gets all the action
• 1:25:07
  sequences as well. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:25:09
  He's great and a bit a bit at the start where he gets sent
• 1:25:12
  back and they think he's they're only sending it back an hour and
• 1:25:15
  it's a bloody week and he's waiting again, just like he
• 1:25:17
  always does in his series. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:25:20
  And this, this is before he's been a bloody Centurion forever
• 1:25:23
  and stuff as well, isn't it? Oh, it's.
• 1:25:24
  After. No, this is after.
• 1:25:26
  That at this point. A line where he says I'm always
• 1:25:28
  waiting. Yeah, so he doesn't even some of
• 1:25:32
  the brief for writing these that you have to be slightly vague
• 1:25:34
  about when they're happening. So you so you can't Oh no, there
• 1:25:39
  probably was a line about the Centurion.
• 1:25:41
  Oh, but what if somebody hasn't seen that episode?
• 1:25:43
  Well, they're. Very clearly stated to be
• 1:25:45
  married, which only happened after all the events of the
• 1:25:48
  Pandora open The Big Bang. So this is but this is probably
• 1:25:52
  This is pre before between season 5, Series 5 and series 6.
• 1:25:55
  And they're they're, they're ending as well.
• 1:25:58
  I've heard Johnny Morris talking about how you can read this book
• 1:26:02
  and watch watch what's he called Angels Take Manhattan and the
• 1:26:08
  you know, the the Rory and Amy's unconvincing swansong, and it
• 1:26:13
  still works. Well, it goes through exactly
• 1:26:17
  what they go through there, isn't it?
• 1:26:18
  He gets them back in time to live all those years again, just
• 1:26:21
  as they do in the Angels Take Manhattan.
• 1:26:23
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:26:24
  If I, yeah, I mean, one of the one of the bits in this book
• 1:26:27
  that didn't convince me and did leave me going because I say
• 1:26:30
  most of it I could go through, oh, it's a, it's a tiny whiny
• 1:26:33
  story, etcetera, etcetera. But the one bit that did make me
• 1:26:37
  think, well, that's bloody handy, isn't it, was when Rory
• 1:26:40
  gets touched by an Angel at the end and gets sent back a week,
• 1:26:44
  just enough time to be right in the right place to do The funny
• 1:26:48
  thing that the Doctor has written down for him to do as
• 1:26:52
  well. And it's like, well, if these
• 1:26:53
  angels really wanted to stop any of this crap from happening, why
• 1:26:56
  didn't they send him way out of the way?
• 1:26:59
  You know, I know they're supposed to be running low on
• 1:27:01
  energy or whatever, but it's a bit convenient.
• 1:27:03
  You just happen to go back and meet Amy and Rory and the Doctor
• 1:27:06
  again and. Trouble is though, I just don't
• 1:27:09
  do the shit about mechanics. A plot like that.
• 1:27:12
  I was just so invested in the characters at this point, yeah.
• 1:27:15
  And it's the only bit that made me think.
• 1:27:17
  That was the only his wife at the moment of her death as she
• 1:27:19
  slips away. As I've so beautifully written
• 1:27:22
  on the page, I didn't care that they were plot holes at that
• 1:27:24
  point. I was crying me eyes out.
• 1:27:26
  I mean, I've got to be honest and say that's the one thing I
• 1:27:28
  wasn't overly be keen on and it's something I'm not.
• 1:27:31
  It's not this book in particular, it's something I'm
• 1:27:33
  not keen on. In any book is a scene where a
• 1:27:36
  character dies written from the point of view of the character
• 1:27:38
  who's dying. I don't find that engaging.
• 1:27:42
  I find it somewhat unpleasant to read.
• 1:27:50
  I don't care for that at all. If someone is going to die by
• 1:27:54
  the people who actually feel their passing, not the person
• 1:27:57
  who's actually passing. It's a call back to the prologue
• 1:28:01
  though, isn't it? Which Which, as he said, is a.
• 1:28:04
  Very atmospheric piece of writing.
• 1:28:05
  I mean, I, I almost forgot it is, I opened a Doctor Who book
• 1:28:08
  when I, when I read that it was it's, it is.
• 1:28:10
  But again, at some point, I'm saying at some point we will all
• 1:28:12
  be first. Person witnesses to our own
• 1:28:14
  death. We will, and we'll all be
• 1:28:16
  sitting there thinking this is nothing like any of those.
• 1:28:19
  Bastards wrote. You know, we're all.
• 1:28:23
  Kind of terrible angst tonight now.
• 1:28:25
  What was it? The same red.
• 1:28:26
  Dwarf that, but that's not to say it's.
• 1:28:29
  Badly written or you know. Anything like that.
• 1:28:31
  It's just that it's not to my taste.
• 1:28:33
  But that's two bits at the beginning and the end of the
• 1:28:35
  book. And I can, you know, I can
• 1:28:37
  forgive that and just enjoy them because the rest of the book was
• 1:28:39
  so fucking good. I don't need every reference to
• 1:28:42
  Wibbly and Wibble Detector and Wibble.
• 1:28:44
  Wobble, timey wine, but that's what.
• 1:28:47
  And this book is in the Moffett. Era in the entire.
• 1:28:51
  Oh yeah, I get to go back 20. Years.
• 1:28:53
  That's one thing I'll I'll find changing.
• 1:28:56
  Doctor Who. So no one.
• 1:28:57
  Ever says to me why me To quote Toby Haydog, if I had the
• 1:29:00
  choice, I'd go back in time and. Stop that copy of The Time
• 1:29:03
  Traveller's Wife ever reaching Steven Moffett and see what else
• 1:29:07
  he'd write instead. Do you know what?
• 1:29:09
  Actually there was well known that I'm not too keen on The
• 1:29:13
  Christmas Carol and I hate that the Doctor's role in that story
• 1:29:16
  re sculpting somebody's life, for better or for worse, playing
• 1:29:21
  God with somebody's life for his own purposes.
• 1:29:23
  Weird enough, I didn't mind it at all in this story because it
• 1:29:26
  wasn't the Doctor doing it. It was a completely different
• 1:29:29
  character. So I was like, OK, I don't mind
• 1:29:30
  that story being told, but who's doing the the telling of that
• 1:29:34
  story is Joe? Do you mind the ghosts
• 1:29:38
  manipulating Scrooge? In A Christmas Carol, No, not
• 1:29:45
  really. That's sort of taking place in
• 1:29:46
  his head though, isn't it? And they're not rewriting.
• 1:29:48
  Time they're not going back and rewriting his past.
• 1:29:50
  They're making him kind of. He's giving him vision also as
• 1:29:54
  well. They're not rewriting.
• 1:29:56
  Scrooge, you know. To save Amy Potent, which I may
• 1:29:59
  object to them if that's the problem, isn't it?
• 1:30:01
  It's Amy Pond is being saved, Tony.
• 1:30:04
  Tim, well as Toby does a page one rewrite on that.
• 1:30:07
  Man's life. It's well as.
• 1:30:09
  Toby said in his in his Strictly on.
• 1:30:12
  The Christmas specials. You know, if you can go back in
• 1:30:14
  time and piss around with Kasran Sadiq's life, why don't you go
• 1:30:17
  back to before or Amy and Rory got on the thing and go,
• 1:30:19
  actually, let's go somewhere else.
• 1:30:20
  We're back there again, you know, bloody TARDIS.
• 1:30:22
  It's a problem. Nourish, isn't it?
• 1:30:25
  This is why people in classic who didn't go wibbly.
• 1:30:28
  Tiny Why me on their plot lines? Because as soon as you do that,
• 1:30:32
  it starts creating problems. But why hasn't he gone and
• 1:30:36
  rescued Adric? Why?
• 1:30:37
  Hasn't he gone and rescued? Because there are some rules
• 1:30:41
  that cannot be broken even in the.
• 1:30:42
  Tardis, unless the plot requires me to do it and the guy I'm
• 1:30:46
  supposed to be saving hasn't just come to the end of his
• 1:30:48
  contract and can't be booked again.
• 1:30:52
  Why? Currently unspoken.
• 1:30:54
  Deal just. Don't.
• 1:30:57
  Don't do it. TARDIS is broken quick to that
• 1:30:59
  great exhibition. Why can't he?
• 1:31:02
  When when Amy and Rory go. Back to New York and he can't
• 1:31:05
  land in New York. Why can't he land in Baltimore
• 1:31:08
  and get on a fucking train or land in New York?
• 1:31:13
  At any other time, well. You know, I could say this.
• 1:31:15
  All your favorite Doctor Who stories I could ask?
• 1:31:17
  Similar questions, all of them, but no, because they used to,
• 1:31:21
  they used to sort of go. When when you land, you're stuck
• 1:31:25
  landing but you've got out the wardrobe.
• 1:31:27
  You like Kate Zardrozardi. He could have taken the Tardis
• 1:31:30
  back in. Time and stopped them from
• 1:31:32
  falling into the spectrox next and at the start like you just
• 1:31:35
  keep asking that question I know and that's exactly why you don't
• 1:31:38
  do it that's why you don't do it that's why the.
• 1:31:40
  Tardis is a place to take you from a because you.
• 1:31:42
  Can't do it because he's not supposed to be able to cross
• 1:31:44
  your own time streams and all that.
• 1:31:45
  Sort of stuff. You start messing around.
• 1:31:47
  It's dangerous, Yeah. What you can do as soon as you
• 1:31:50
  do have it, as soon as you have it in the show.
• 1:31:52
  It makes you go. Why aren't they doing that?
• 1:31:54
  Saved Clara. What you can do is tell.
• 1:31:59
  Really intricate and in the case of this book, emotional stories
• 1:32:03
  with a timey wimey concept at his heart.
• 1:32:07
  So I don't think it I don't think it's not worth going there
• 1:32:09
  because I think sometimes the payoff is great.
• 1:32:12
  But also this isn't timey wimey as much it's it's almost like.
• 1:32:15
  Are you mad? You think this isn't timey
• 1:32:18
  Wimey? No, no.
• 1:32:19
  All happens timey wimey. It's very simple.
• 1:32:21
  He goes back and says you can't. Change anything and.
• 1:32:23
  That feel that it seems more in keeping with most of Doctor Who,
• 1:32:26
  but when you're in the Moffat area, it's like I've got a time
• 1:32:30
  machine. It's all told in order as well,
• 1:32:32
  The Angels wicking back in. Time and the doctor pops up
• 1:32:35
  every now and again just to make sure that he's not doing the
• 1:32:39
  things that are going to cause the paradoxes that the angels
• 1:32:41
  want. That's what it it's not he's
• 1:32:43
  not. That depends on who's who's
• 1:32:46
  point of view you're reading. Though if you're reading from
• 1:32:48
  the Doctor's point of view, it's very timely wiring indeed.
• 1:32:51
  He's still going in chronological order though,
• 1:32:53
  isn't he? Still going in chronological.
• 1:32:54
  Order he's still following, but the only but the only timey
• 1:32:56
  wimey. Bit is right in the middle is
• 1:32:57
  that wedding sequence fast where he's popping back and forth in
• 1:33:00
  the TARDIS to avoid the 15 minute delay and everything
• 1:33:03
  else. But that's just for comic
• 1:33:05
  effects. We'll go back in time and
• 1:33:06
  definitely make sure he gets that video of Four Weddings and
• 1:33:09
  A. Funeral there, yeah, but the the
• 1:33:10
  the whole of the but as as far as everything else is.
• 1:33:13
  Concerned this is the doctor trying to do to stop a timey
• 1:33:16
  wimey problem that someone else has caused rather than using
• 1:33:19
  tiny wimey issues to solve a non tiny wimey problem which is what
• 1:33:24
  Christmas Carol is. Stop playing tiny wimey please.
• 1:33:27
  Tiny Wimey. That's the last time I'm going
• 1:33:29
  to say it. Unless, of course, this gets.
• 1:33:30
  Into some kind of weird wibbly wobbly tiny wimey thing, and I
• 1:33:33
  end up saying wibbly wobbly tiny wimey a whole bunch more times.
• 1:33:36
  It's like sapphire and steel. We're going to be on this call,
• 1:33:39
  whatever. Under the lake isn't that
• 1:33:41
  doesn't that's a bit. Odd with the time travel.
• 1:33:46
  No, stop it now, because that's true.
• 1:33:49
  Again, I think you're right that in.
• 1:33:50
  This story the. TARDIS is is is.
• 1:33:54
  I mean, I, I agree with Ian that I don't think the TARDIS should
• 1:33:57
  should ever be part of the story.
• 1:34:00
  I think it should be the thing that deposits you in the story
• 1:34:03
  and then you leave it alone. In this, the TARDIS basically
• 1:34:06
  allows the Doctor to observe, and it's, you know, it doesn't
• 1:34:09
  actually mess with the structure of the thing, which is very
• 1:34:11
  simple. We start in one place, we go
• 1:34:13
  back in time, and then we follow it through, knowing what's going
• 1:34:16
  to happen at the end of it. Yeah.
• 1:34:19
  Yeah. Well, I have a couple.
• 1:34:21
  More questions for you all, and then let's sort of scour our
• 1:34:26
  notes. You 2 who don't have notes,
• 1:34:27
  scour our brains for anything else we may want to say and
• 1:34:31
  summarise our thoughts. James just got to Can I ask you
• 1:34:37
  what? What were you expecting?
• 1:34:39
  What were you? Expecting from a book from this
• 1:34:41
  range. And did this meet those
• 1:34:43
  expectations? Absolutely nothing, because I
• 1:34:46
  hadn't read any of this range whatsoever.
• 1:34:48
  So. I had no idea what they were
• 1:34:49
  going for. I didn't didn't have any
• 1:34:54
  expectations. What I wasn't.
• 1:34:55
  Expecting was for it to end. When it did in terms of page
• 1:34:59
  count because the volume I've. Got certainly has.
• 1:35:02
  More pages than I've thought of prose and things, prologues for
• 1:35:09
  other books in the range. And so I was looking at it
• 1:35:12
  thinking how much more have I got to read?
• 1:35:13
  Oh, I've still got quite a bit of a chunk to read.
• 1:35:15
  And then it's like, and that's the end.
• 1:35:16
  And now it's also available. So.
• 1:35:18
  Oh, OK. So I was kind of blindsided by
• 1:35:21
  the fact that the end came when it did just because of the way
• 1:35:24
  the the physical copy that I had was laid out in terms of the
• 1:35:27
  page count. But I had no expectations in
• 1:35:30
  terms of the content because I haven't read a single new series
• 1:35:34
  adventure at all up to this point.
• 1:35:37
  So well. Has this encouraged you or not?
• 1:35:41
  To explore anymore. Like if we did another one of
• 1:35:44
  these for the book club, if we did another one for the book
• 1:35:46
  club, I'd read it, but it probably hasn't encouraged me.
• 1:35:49
  To go out and explore the range anymore on the two for two
• 1:35:54
  reasons. 1 Is that there? Oh, oh, she had to make an
• 1:36:00
  appearance. Hey, Nola, you.
• 1:36:04
  Really want to take bets on when the cat's claws are going to.
• 1:36:08
  When it is, it's going to be attacked in the.
• 1:36:11
  Ow, right. Anyway, what was I saying?
• 1:36:14
  Yes, I'm always wondering. Have I seen at the beginning and
• 1:36:16
  we have. I wonder if the cat is a ruse.
• 1:36:18
  She's got cramp, no? No, she's definitely here.
• 1:36:21
  She's definitely. Here.
• 1:36:23
  Oh, I believe you don't. But no, it hasn't.
• 1:36:29
  Prompted me to read any more of the range, partly because I've
• 1:36:32
  never been massively interested in the book ranges that are
• 1:36:37
  related to the series anyway. I didn't I I read a few new
• 1:36:42
  adventures and a few EDAS and PDAs and things during the
• 1:36:45
  wilderness years, but never really got into the range.
• 1:36:48
  For me, Doctor Who is first and foremost a television show, and
• 1:36:51
  that's where my my main focus is.
• 1:36:54
  The other reason is simply that I enjoyed this book so much that
• 1:36:57
  I have a feeling that I may have peaked too early and so anything
• 1:37:01
  else I read would be like reading.
• 1:37:03
  Transit. I mean, this one, Jason came out
• 1:37:07
  alongside Naomi. Alderman's borrowed time, which
• 1:37:10
  is another brilliant. But I think the new series of
• 1:37:13
  ventures may have peaked when these three and there was a unit
• 1:37:16
  McCormack one as well. I think this may be yeah, where
• 1:37:19
  they hit their peak. Yeah.
• 1:37:20
  It might be downhill from here, James.
• 1:37:25
  Well, you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but.
• 1:37:28
  The the addition that Joe managed to get me is is the
• 1:37:30
  original printing, not the not the rather sexier reprint.
• 1:37:36
  And the cover put me in mind of nothing if not a thing that
• 1:37:41
  David J Howe wrote in the 1993 yearbook in a article comic
• 1:37:48
  article reviewing kind of items that have been.
• 1:37:50
  Available in the past do. You remember those junior Doctor
• 1:37:52
  Who books, They were sort of the brain of Morbius, and they saw
• 1:37:55
  one in a shop the other day, the ones that we illustrated.
• 1:37:58
  Yeah, because I had, I had the giant robot.
• 1:38:00
  Right, that was one of my first Doctor Who books I owned.
• 1:38:04
  The. Joke in the yearbook is David J
• 1:38:06
  Howe, imagined junior? Doctor Who is the character and
• 1:38:09
  it's he imagines a 12 year old junior doctor and we're back to
• 1:38:13
  my idea running around. Well, nothing.
• 1:38:17
  Nothing. Says that.
• 1:38:18
  That scenario? Junior doctor.
• 1:38:20
  Who like the picture they put on the front of this book which
• 1:38:22
  shows all three of the regulars looking about 12 years old.
• 1:38:26
  Even Matt Smith looks like a fan, you know, 12 year old fan
• 1:38:29
  called playing the Doctor. I don't think he ever dressed
• 1:38:32
  like this in this series, but they are dressed like 12 year
• 1:38:34
  olds. Amy in particular looks like a
• 1:38:36
  kind of sulky, like that's what she wears in the Apostle
• 1:38:39
  Astronaut. Does she have her hair like
• 1:38:42
  that? Yeah, That's literally a
• 1:38:44
  photograph from the impossible astronaut Violet Elizabeth
• 1:38:47
  bought in this pit. So.
• 1:38:50
  They are. They are very airbrushed.
• 1:38:52
  So they're very. Scooped down when they weren't
• 1:38:55
  junior. Doctor Who and his 212 year old
• 1:38:57
  chums, Amy and Rory. I was, I was kind of relieved.
• 1:38:59
  I know I, I, I haven't spent a lot of time with the, the new
• 1:39:04
  series adventures. I've actually got a shelf full
• 1:39:07
  of them because the school library was checking out a load
• 1:39:11
  of copies and they're there, and my enthusiasm for reading them
• 1:39:16
  has, I guess, been proved by the fact that I haven't.
• 1:39:19
  But I don't know. I I don't know.
• 1:39:25
  I it feels to me and. This I thought this was an
• 1:39:29
  excellent read. I hope, I hope that's come
• 1:39:30
  across. But it it does feel to me like
• 1:39:33
  they are very much children's books.
• 1:39:36
  And so for the same reason that I'm unlikely, I think, to pick
• 1:39:40
  up a lot of the target books, which again, feel like, I mean,
• 1:39:45
  I even less likely in a way, because those are stories that I
• 1:39:48
  can watch in their original televised version.
• 1:39:51
  But again, it just feels like they're aimed at a different
• 1:39:53
  readership. And Speaking of someone who
• 1:39:56
  doesn't have an awful lot of time for reading, I kind of have
• 1:39:59
  to deploy my reading time quite. Carefully and I.
• 1:40:01
  Do quite like reading grown up books.
• 1:40:03
  So that's that's why are you looking at me when you say that.
• 1:40:11
  Oh yeah, we're on a Zoom call. Yeah, Ian, Yeah, I mean as you.
• 1:40:18
  Know I've got the least amount of experience of Doctor Who
• 1:40:22
  books of anyone here, so I guess I had no idea.
• 1:40:25
  Really no preconceptions whatsoever, but I think based on
• 1:40:31
  this, I've ordered a Jonathan Morris.
• 1:40:35
  Plague City. Always not Sounds good.
• 1:40:38
  Sorry, Johnny. Yeah, well, it's good.
• 1:40:40
  But yeah, but, but I thought I've ordered one and then I'll
• 1:40:43
  see what I see what? I think about Ian Borrow time.
• 1:40:45
  Get that one. OK, I'll have a.
• 1:40:47
  Look at that as well. But yeah, the Internet's full of
• 1:40:49
  them. But but I thought, I thought in
• 1:40:52
  terms of I could really appreciate a This is a brilliant
• 1:40:54
  read and it made me feel like watching children's program
• 1:40:58
  Doctor Who, which is what it should feel like.
• 1:41:01
  It's a show that should work for five and up.
• 1:41:04
  And this obviously it's a book. So a 5 year old might struggle,
• 1:41:07
  but you know, a 10 year old, you know, a nine, a 10 year old and
• 1:41:11
  up would be all right with this. And when I read it, I go, this
• 1:41:15
  is a really well plotted stuff that also children would like.
• 1:41:19
  And so I like the fact that it has the tone of the show.
• 1:41:22
  We're in book form and I know this isn't popular for people
• 1:41:26
  that who were more brought up in the wilderness years, the Wild
• 1:41:30
  West, but I do like the show being tonally the show and the
• 1:41:37
  spin off material being tonally. You know, the show can go
• 1:41:41
  tonally very in many places and can be quite grown up or can be
• 1:41:46
  very, very silly, can be robot bloody Sherwood, but it can but
• 1:41:53
  generally within that. You know.
• 1:41:56
  Between Robot of Sherwood and Genesis of the Daleks, you can
• 1:42:01
  have so many different stories that, you know, work for
• 1:42:04
  children and adults can read them as well.
• 1:42:07
  And so this made me think this is a really good rattling, you
• 1:42:11
  know, I guess like when people read Harry Potter, I hate Harry
• 1:42:14
  Potter with a passion. But when people read those
• 1:42:16
  books, they're kids books, but they work.
• 1:42:19
  And they probably have, I don't know, I've not read them.
• 1:42:22
  But they probably have layers that adults pick up, especially
• 1:42:26
  in the longer ones where she didn't have an editor.
• 1:42:30
  They do. And she should have had it.
• 1:42:31
  But yeah, but. I but actually, I mean I do read
• 1:42:35
  quite a lot of children's books. Because it's my job and it seems
• 1:42:40
  to me that that, you know, the quality really wildly ranges
• 1:42:46
  from from very, very poor two absolutely brilliant.
• 1:42:52
  I mentioned Maurice Leitzman. But you know, those, I think,
• 1:42:55
  you know, I read those. And I thought, well, this is the
• 1:42:57
  best, the best stuff I've read all year, you know?
• 1:43:00
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know.
• 1:43:04
  Michael Moore, Pergo. Is like a.
• 1:43:05
  Really. You know, he, he rattles them
• 1:43:08
  out, but they all, you read them and you're like the page
• 1:43:10
  turners. And at his best, he's a third
• 1:43:13
  line author, isn't he? Yeah, yeah, he's, you know.
• 1:43:15
  But. He's.
• 1:43:17
  Pitching at this. Level and it works and it can
• 1:43:19
  make an adult cry, but it could also make a 10 year old cry.
• 1:43:22
  And these I mean, I don't know what the but you know, I
• 1:43:25
  wouldn't be adverse to doing any of one of these.
• 1:43:27
  They're from an era that's not particularly my era and I'm not
• 1:43:31
  particularly that bothered by the Amy 11 Rory years.
• 1:43:38
  But you know, at least this evokes like the the earlier Matt
• 1:43:44
  Smith years. It's terrible, but I actually am
• 1:43:47
  now getting nostalgic for the. The 11th Doctor era.
• 1:43:51
  Oh, God. That's because it's, you know,
• 1:43:53
  Yeah. Well, remember, I mean, the
• 1:43:54
  series is coming up for 20 years old.
• 1:43:56
  I I sort of put it down and went, Oh no, that's enough for
• 1:43:59
  another 10. Years, I think, you know,
• 1:44:01
  although I will say the version that I've got from the Monsters
• 1:44:04
  collection, yeah, I've got a particularly disturbing.
• 1:44:09
  You see the blinds behind me here?
• 1:44:10
  Well, the moonlight sort of comes through the window at
• 1:44:13
  night when the blinds are open, and one night they came across
• 1:44:17
  this cover sitting on my bedstead.
• 1:44:19
  Jeez, I had to turn a bloody thing upside down.
• 1:44:21
  It is absolutely chilling. Not as chilling as this picture
• 1:44:27
  of Amy. You mean young?
• 1:44:31
  Amy, Yeah. She's not like she's been turned
• 1:44:33
  to stone. You need a doctor like an Auton
• 1:44:36
  rather than. Amy, what I will say about the
• 1:44:37
  new series of adventures is I do think, I don't think.
• 1:44:40
  People are wrong to have deserted it after the original
• 1:44:44
  novel stop, you know, the 8th Doctor books and the past Doctor
• 1:44:46
  books because they were aiming for a younger audience.
• 1:44:49
  What I will say is from the ones I've explored, and I've done
• 1:44:53
  some good ones and I've done some bad ones, is I think the
• 1:44:56
  batting average is pretty good and they're a lot better than
• 1:45:00
  tie in novels to a television show need to be.
• 1:45:05
  And and this one is at least trying to say something
• 1:45:07
  meaningful. And I think it aims quite high
• 1:45:10
  at that and hits the target totally.
• 1:45:15
  You can give this to a non fan I think.
• 1:45:17
  Like you could get a non fan to watch.
• 1:45:19
  Blink. OK, You don't like Doctor Who.
• 1:45:20
  He's not in it much. And they will, and they can
• 1:45:23
  watch Blink. You could probably go if you
• 1:45:25
  roughly know what time travellers and reaping angels
• 1:45:28
  are, you probably like this and I bet you a lot of people could
• 1:45:31
  get trapped in a hotel room and have nothing to read, but
• 1:45:34
  there's and go. That was that was a really
• 1:45:36
  amazing page Turner that reminded me of the 90s and Nick
• 1:45:39
  Hornby. Joe.
• 1:45:41
  Then to pick up on your comment about the batting average on
• 1:45:44
  these. New series ones being pretty
• 1:45:46
  high. Do you think that's possibly
• 1:45:49
  something to do with the fact that unlike the new Adventures,
• 1:45:51
  the missing adventures, the PDAs, the 88, the 8 EDA's and
• 1:45:56
  whatever, there's fewer of them when the range was trying to
• 1:46:01
  churn out a book or two every month?
• 1:46:05
  There's more new series adventures than there are
• 1:46:07
  missing adventures. And there's almost as many as
• 1:46:10
  there are new adventures. So there's there's over how much
• 1:46:14
  time they are pretty fast for a while.
• 1:46:17
  Weren't they? Yeah, they were doing.
• 1:46:18
  Three at a time. Because they were selling by the
• 1:46:21
  bucket loads. They were selling far in access
• 1:46:23
  to the New Adventures of the EDA when they first started coming
• 1:46:26
  out. But then the show was a hit,
• 1:46:27
  wasn't it? You know, that was huge.
• 1:46:30
  But during the during the 9:10. 11 Doctor.
• 1:46:33
  Period. Yeah, No.
• 1:46:35
  Straight. Yeah.
• 1:46:35
  Straight away. Yes.
• 1:46:36
  Clockwise, man. So series one, God, I was, I've
• 1:46:40
  said this a million times. I was working for a book
• 1:46:42
  wholesaler. And we were going.
• 1:46:43
  From maybe 3000 copies selling of an Eighth Doctor book to
• 1:46:49
  hundreds of thousands of those new series of ventures selling.
• 1:46:53
  So they were a massive hit. Yeah.
• 1:46:55
  That is big business. It's why, you know, Justin
• 1:46:57
  Richards kept writing. Them going yeah, oh, lovely.
• 1:46:59
  The paychecks will keep coming. Hit rate ought to be good
• 1:47:03
  because the names of the people writing them they.
• 1:47:05
  They didn't go for unknowns. They they weren't in the
• 1:47:08
  business of like the New Adventures, giving someone a
• 1:47:10
  chance to write their first novel.
• 1:47:11
  This it's a it's a pretty impressive rock.
• 1:47:13
  They started. As they went along though, I
• 1:47:15
  noticed they started. Experimenting with new writers
• 1:47:19
  and then, you know, bringing in the sort of prestige writers
• 1:47:23
  from the other ranges, Paul Mars, Lance Parkin, people like
• 1:47:25
  that. And boy, did they knock them
• 1:47:27
  out. You know, great books for kids.
• 1:47:30
  Well, fellas, anything else in your notes or should we wrap up
• 1:47:34
  Touched by an Angel? The one thing we haven't talked
• 1:47:37
  about is is all the. 90s referencing, which apparently
• 1:47:42
  there was a lot more in it to. The editor got in and said
• 1:47:46
  there's too much of this, and I still think there's maybe too
• 1:47:49
  much of it. I did at the start.
• 1:47:50
  I kept thinking, OK, that's one song too many.
• 1:47:54
  And some of it the bit that stuck out for me because.
• 1:47:56
  This is literally my, I think it's almost literally my era is
• 1:47:59
  some of it I'm not quite sure of the meaning of some of the pros,
• 1:48:02
  like when he goes, oh, we're about to go and see a band,
• 1:48:05
  they're going to be as big as Blur or Blur or Oasis.
• 1:48:10
  And then and then they go called Echobelly.
• 1:48:12
  And I'm like, what? What was the meaning of that
• 1:48:15
  line? Was it supposed to make you go?
• 1:48:16
  No, they weren't they're shit. Or was it made?
• 1:48:19
  Was it supposed to make you go, yeah, they're even bigger than
• 1:48:22
  it's like, I didn't quite get the meaning of that.
• 1:48:25
  They're called Echobelly. I just, it just bothered me
• 1:48:27
  because of it. Like, well, they're not terrible
• 1:48:29
  Echobelly, but they weren't as big as Oasis or Blur.
• 1:48:32
  So if, if you'd said like menswear, then that would have
• 1:48:35
  been a joke because they were shit.
• 1:48:37
  But it's all subjective again, you know?
• 1:48:40
  But yeah. Yeah.
• 1:48:40
  But does does he does. He hate echobelly I.
• 1:48:43
  Was wondering supposed to be a joke or was it just am I
• 1:48:46
  reading? Too much into it.
• 1:48:48
  You think you were confused? What would a young reader think?
• 1:48:50
  I was I that I mean I. Didn't mind, Yeah, since I
• 1:48:53
  thought they were fun. But I was reading thinking from
• 1:48:55
  the most part. This is a book that's dealing in
• 1:48:57
  understatement. It's.
• 1:48:58
  Yeah, this is a writer who's diving.
• 1:49:02
  Back into his past. And really enjoying kind of
• 1:49:04
  digging up the imagery of the, you know, not just the songs,
• 1:49:07
  but the, you know, the shops and the, you know, the reference to
• 1:49:10
  our price and all of that. And our price.
• 1:49:12
  What's a What's a What's a young reader?
• 1:49:14
  Going to make of this what you know when.
• 1:49:16
  He refers to big fish. Little fish.
• 1:49:17
  That's just, that's me. Yeah.
• 1:49:19
  He doesn't know who wasn't there.
• 1:49:22
  There was some short hand like when he said a cup of tea was
• 1:49:24
  like 40. Pi was like, that's, that's a
• 1:49:27
  really quick way of saying we're in the past.
• 1:49:29
  You know, I, I wanted to just say one line that when I read
• 1:49:36
  it, I kind of recorded from the page a bit and went right in the
• 1:49:42
  climax when he's trying to tell the doctor why he's going to do
• 1:49:47
  what he's going to do and save Rebecca, he says, how do you
• 1:49:51
  think I felt on September the 11th watching all those people
• 1:49:54
  die? But I did nothing.
• 1:49:56
  I could have saved my own father, but I did nothing.
• 1:50:00
  I followed the rules, doctor. I did as I was told.
• 1:50:03
  I just want one life. Is that too much to ask?
• 1:50:06
  I just thought that reference to September the 11th, I was like,
• 1:50:09
  I don't know if I would have put that in.
• 1:50:11
  Yeah, that that jumped out at me because it's like I watched all
• 1:50:14
  those people. Die and could do nothing.
• 1:50:16
  What exactly could you have done?
• 1:50:18
  The whole point here is that you can.
• 1:50:20
  You have the option to save your father.
• 1:50:21
  You have the option to save your wife.
• 1:50:23
  You have the option to move your friends into different areas and
• 1:50:26
  things. But something of size and scale
• 1:50:28
  of it's it's another area that Doctor Who should probably
• 1:50:32
  avoid. And it does, because, yeah,
• 1:50:35
  we've talked about the Holocaust earlier.
• 1:50:38
  But. If the doctor ever lands in
• 1:50:40
  Auschwitz, No, the doctor, he can't.
• 1:50:44
  He can barely even mention these things happening because they're
• 1:50:47
  too heavy stuff. Yeah.
• 1:50:55
  So it's just. So, yeah, so.
• 1:50:57
  So bringing 911 into it is just a little bit.
• 1:51:00
  It's just a little bit too, yeah, maybe a little bit too on
• 1:51:04
  the nose, I guess. Anything else from anybody else?
• 1:51:12
  Now Jason's quiet for all that I found for the characterization
• 1:51:16
  of the Doctor. Quite irritating.
• 1:51:20
  I think the way that he describes the Doctor when he
• 1:51:23
  first comes into it is like textbook Terrence Dicks
• 1:51:27
  shorthand. This character taking a deep
• 1:51:34
  breath. Mark Turn.
• 1:51:34
  Around to see a tall pretty girl with long.
• 1:51:37
  Fiery hair and a young man with a prominent nose and a woolly
• 1:51:41
  cello hat, both staring attentively at the window.
• 1:51:44
  Beside them stood a handsome young man with angular
• 1:51:46
  cheekbones and thick brown hair swept up into a fringe.
• 1:51:50
  With his tweed jacket and bow tie, he looked like he was on
• 1:51:53
  his way to a fancy dress party as Albert Einstein.
• 1:51:57
  That's great. I mean, that's, that's what what
• 1:51:59
  what more do you need to, to to establish the doctor?
• 1:52:05
  And then he then I read that line, James.
• 1:52:06
  I was like, oh, I'm in trouble now.
• 1:52:08
  Yeah. Here he is, the 11th Doctor.
• 1:52:11
  I wonder what Arthur Darville thought about the description.
• 1:52:14
  It's just that word. Of all the things that describe
• 1:52:16
  it, the prominent nose. And then later on he does the
• 1:52:20
  same thing with the TARDIS. Which he just, he says that the
• 1:52:23
  centre of the chamber being taken up with a cross between an
• 1:52:25
  avant-garde brass sculpture and a child's activity centre.
• 1:52:29
  Yeah. Oh, it's hideous, isn't it,
• 1:52:32
  that. Room well fellas.
• 1:52:35
  Well, thank you for for reading that.
• 1:52:37
  That was my recommend. I'm pleased you all enjoyed it
• 1:52:40
  to a greater or lesser degree. We've already determined where
• 1:52:44
  we're going next, haven't we? But will someone please tell us?
• 1:52:47
  It's quite a tone that we're reading next, so we're going to
• 1:52:49
  need a little time to get through it.
• 1:52:51
  James, why don't you let us know?
• 1:52:53
  Because it's not my choice. Whose choice was it?
• 1:52:56
  Because. As always, you're looking to
• 1:52:58
  blame. James.
• 1:53:00
  I'll get you one day, don't you? It was Ian's.
• 1:53:02
  Choice about 3. Podcasts ago, but we got sorry.
• 1:53:05
  Was that what are we going? Are we going?
• 1:53:07
  Are we going for the writer's tale?
• 1:53:08
  Yes, yes, I suppose it's good now because now we have had
• 1:53:12
  R2R2DR2D2, whatever his name is, RTV two, yeah.
• 1:53:20
  So so it. So it gives us another lens to
• 1:53:23
  outlook for it. But yeah, the writer's tale, I
• 1:53:25
  mean, that book is so full of scandal and gossip.
• 1:53:29
  And insight as well. I mean, if it got passionate
• 1:53:33
  talking about Moffett in this call and the N word.
• 1:53:35
  But yeah, let's not start talking about it now.
• 1:53:37
  I have not read. It so I'm looking forward to
• 1:53:40
  this. Oh, Jason.
• 1:53:41
  You're in for a treat, never off.
• 1:53:43
  My all I will say we'll talk about it obviously on.
• 1:53:45
  The podcast, but I literally have it with me and I re and I
• 1:53:51
  dip into it and just all the time like a like a disease.
• 1:53:56
  One question I do have because I have a vague.
• 1:53:59
  Memory of this, but wasn't it reissued with extra bits?
• 1:54:04
  Yes. So which version?
• 1:54:06
  Are we actually? Going to read I mean.
• 1:54:08
  I've got the later version with the extra.
• 1:54:11
  I don't know what my version is. James, what version have you
• 1:54:15
  got? I don't own this book.
• 1:54:18
  Ow, as I recall, it originally came out in the middle of.
• 1:54:24
  The new series run of Russell T Davis.
• 1:54:26
  And then it was reissued after he'd finished off.
• 1:54:30
  Yeah, there was a reissue at. Which covered all the specials
• 1:54:34
  as well. Yeah.
• 1:54:35
  And that's where you learn about what the last story could have
• 1:54:39
  been of David Sennen before That Sounds interesting.
• 1:54:43
  Yeah, it really is. That's my favorite page.
• 1:54:47
  It's Russell T Davis's drawing of Midshipman Frame from his
• 1:54:51
  dream. Yes, yes, the doctors, but yes.
• 1:54:55
  So yeah, so I think I might have got the original one off of the
• 1:55:00
  Internet, so well worn copy. Yes, yeah.
• 1:55:06
  And and considering this. Is, you know, James, I've talked
• 1:55:08
  to you about. Rusty Davis episodes in the past
• 1:55:11
  sort of strictly and I know sort of four isn't really your era or
• 1:55:15
  you know, it's a bit smug. So and it's covers a lot of
• 1:55:19
  four. So I think we have some
• 1:55:21
  interesting conversation around this one.
• 1:55:26
  How are we going to end? This Do we have any?
• 1:55:28
  Recommends. I normally end on a recommend.
• 1:55:31
  Oh my God I didn't even bring one.
• 1:55:32
  Did anyone bring a recommend? No.
• 1:55:34
  Told us that I was going to lie and say I've been reading.
• 1:55:37
  The curse of Fenrir. Oh, I forgot to give you a
• 1:55:39
  ranking thing, that's why. Oh jeez, it's been.
• 1:55:42
  A long week, you know. Don't worry, we'll do it next
• 1:55:45
  time it's I do have one slight tangent of a recommend if I.
• 1:55:49
  May go on because it's not Doctor Who, but it is kind of
• 1:55:54
  tangential in that it's ABBC cult sci-fi series and it's a
• 1:55:58
  book that has it's taken 40 years to be written about this
• 1:56:02
  BBC cult sci-fi series The Tripods all for.
• 1:56:07
  Nothing. So this is basically.
• 1:56:12
  Season 3. This is basically a making.
• 1:56:16
  Of. Of the tripods.
• 1:56:19
  But it's not, you know, a dry production diary with dates and
• 1:56:23
  location filming and scripts and things like that.
• 1:56:26
  This is essentially told as a series of anecdotes by the
• 1:56:30
  people who were involved and it's an absolute visual feast.
• 1:56:34
  It's got loads of photographs of the locations, of the actors, of
• 1:56:38
  the props. God I'd love the tripods.
• 1:56:40
  Tripods themselves. The guy who wrote it, Chris
• 1:56:45
  Jones, managed, has appears to have managed to track down all
• 1:56:49
  the surviving main cast members and spoken to them.
• 1:56:52
  So they've got lots of anecdotes from them.
• 1:56:56
  And I mean, I read through this really, really quickly.
• 1:57:00
  It covers the genesis of the series, the production of the
• 1:57:03
  two seasons that actually aired and the plans and the Michael
• 1:57:08
  Grade and Jonathan Powell crushing of the third series
• 1:57:12
  because they didn't like sci-fi, basically.
• 1:57:14
  And it's a very expensive book, Jason.
• 1:57:16
  It looks nice and glossy. It is quite a chunky and
• 1:57:19
  expensive book, but it is worth the.
• 1:57:21
  Cover price for the pictures in it alone, because there's been
• 1:57:24
  so little written about the Tripods over the years, you
• 1:57:27
  know, a few magazine articles here and there and a couple of
• 1:57:31
  not very informative websites. This is the most comprehensive
• 1:57:36
  thing I think that's ever been produced on the Tripods, and
• 1:57:38
  it's brilliant. So if you have even the
• 1:57:40
  slightest interest in the series, I recommend it.
• 1:57:44
  Yeah. Why?
• 1:57:45
  Why haven't they? Adapted the books.
• 1:57:47
  Since because they're they're currently talk about the
• 1:57:50
  children's books, they're currently held up with rights
• 1:57:53
  issues as to who can make. It and various other things so
• 1:57:57
  no one can currently bloody adapt it.
• 1:57:59
  Very depressing ending. Yeah, it's almost as bad.
• 1:58:03
  As Blake 7. And the televised Was it all for
• 1:58:06
  nothing? Not quite, but it's almost like.
• 1:58:09
  That it's almost like that, but yeah.
• 1:58:11
  Anyway, But yeah, so that's my recommendation is the tripods
• 1:58:15
  I've. Got a slight tangential
• 1:58:16
  recommend as well actually and that.
• 1:58:18
  Is not a book that I would advise anyone to read as the
• 1:58:21
  definitive subject on on this particular subject matter.
• 1:58:28
  But it's the glossy book that came out on Daleks 2150 AD.
• 1:58:34
  And what was it called? I think you've got it as well,
• 1:58:36
  James. What's it called?
• 1:58:37
  That book, The huge coffee table book.
• 1:58:41
  I can't remember what the. Title is let's call it Doctor
• 1:58:44
  Who and the Daleks, the glossy table book.
• 1:58:47
  Anyway, I mean, it's got scant detail in it, but it's just full
• 1:58:51
  of beautiful, beautiful pictures.
• 1:58:53
  Some of them are the colourized ones by Clayton Hickman.
• 1:58:56
  Some of them are in black and white.
• 1:58:57
  But I just, I just put it off my shelf pretty much every other
• 1:59:00
  day and bask in the glorious Technicolour of those Daleks
• 1:59:05
  from those movies. So if you just want to look at
• 1:59:07
  pretty images of the Cushing movies, that is the book for
• 1:59:10
  you. When's, when's this going out,
• 1:59:13
  Joe? When's this podcast coming out?
• 1:59:19
  Yeah, a couple of weeks probably.
• 1:59:22
  Why? No, just I was maybe going to
• 1:59:26
  say we have. Got a kick start?
• 1:59:28
  We've got a crowd funder for Cuts Away with 10 days to go at
• 1:59:31
  time of recording or, or Drax and Iris, Wild Time and and
• 1:59:39
  Eldrad and God, who else isn't it?
• 1:59:43
  Drac Children? Oh, yeah.
• 1:59:44
  And a new story by Stephen, Stephen Gallagher.
• 1:59:48
  Oh, I didn't know where that Stephen was going then.
• 1:59:51
  Yeah. No, Stephen Gallagher with that.
• 1:59:53
  Yeah, the anti 9. Killer from the first page of
• 1:59:56
  warriors Gate novelisation. Can I ask you is cutaway now is
• 1:59:59
  doing the doing the Graham? Williams one.
• 2:00:03
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Graham Williams is the next one
• 2:00:05
  that's. Right, an essay for that.
• 2:00:06
  You know, I thought you might. Be.
• 2:00:10
  Yeah. Yeah, finally everyone's chance
• 2:00:13
  to get. Their oh, an edge on me.
• 2:00:15
  Yeah, yeah, we'll be, we'll be, we'll be allowed to plug that
• 2:00:18
  one. Without, absolutely.
• 2:00:21
  Yeah. Anyways, James, did you have a?
• 2:00:23
  Backwards. Recommend.
• 2:00:25
  I was simply going to remind. People to look out for an
• 2:00:27
  adventure in. Spicy tomes journey through time
• 2:00:33
  and space and erotic literature. 12th Doctor and a cameo
• 2:00:37
  appearance from Lady Paine Ford. In that case, I'm.
• 2:00:42
  Just going to remind. Everybody that if anyone's
• 2:00:44
  listening and wants. To develop my script ideas or my
• 2:00:46
  story ideas from earlier on, please do give me a shout
• 2:00:50
  because I've been thinking about them for years, but I'd lack the
• 2:00:56
  I think I lack the spark to actually write them down
• 2:00:59
  properly and make them decent. So anyone wants to what's this
• 2:01:03
  has just been announced on Twitter.
• 2:01:05
  Oh. Ian, it's Zygon 9121O.
• 2:01:08
  Wowzers, there we go. I told you they weren't quick.
• 2:01:12
  I've not even published yet. Coming soon from The Big Finish
• 2:01:17
  starring Beth Chalmers. It's the four box sets called
• 2:01:19
  Splinters. Joe is.
• 2:01:21
  That's right. It's not the one by bill bags
• 2:01:23
  then. Trouble is though, right?
• 2:01:25
  It's. I know I thought up that idea,
• 2:01:27
  but there's no way I'd listen. To that Jesus Christ.
• 2:01:29
  Not a load of Clara's anyway, fellas.
• 2:01:34
  Right, let's bring this madness to an end somehow.
• 2:01:37
  I'm going to very quickly go round and say, where can people
• 2:01:40
  find you online, Jason? You can find me on Twitter as
• 2:01:46
  Jason under Score. JTT I'm also on Blue Sky as
• 2:01:49
  Jason JTT because it didn't like underscores at the time I signed
• 2:01:53
  up. I believe it now will allow
• 2:01:54
  them. You can also find me on
• 2:01:56
  Instagram and threads. I am Kerr under score Avon on
• 2:02:01
  those, but with a three instead of an E in cur and a 0 instead
• 2:02:05
  of an O in Avon. I could have probably said that
• 2:02:08
  a lot simpler, but what the hell.
• 2:02:10
  No, it's you, Ian, as you Jason. So I don't expect simple.
• 2:02:14
  Ian, I don't know what any of my handles are, but they're all
• 2:02:19
  very. Very simple.
• 2:02:20
  So look for my search for my name, Ian Winterson on Twitter
• 2:02:23
  and Threads and cutaway universe is what I write for again on
• 2:02:30
  Threads and I think they're big on Instagram, which I rarely
• 2:02:35
  venture onto. But yeah.
• 2:02:37
  And and look for the Indiegogo thing.
• 2:02:39
  And if it's still live, then it's fully made its target.
• 2:02:42
  But if you want a chance to be, get some early bird pledging and
• 2:02:46
  get the comics a bit earlier than otherwise they'll be
• 2:02:49
  available to buy after everyone else will have had them before
• 2:02:53
  you. And you're a Doctor Who fancy
• 2:02:55
  you don't like that? And I'm on Twitter.
• 2:02:59
  And I'm on threads and I'm on Blue Sky.
• 2:03:01
  James Lark I'm the one who looks a bit like me.
• 2:03:06
  If you want to hear some of my story writing to my Doctor Who
• 2:03:12
  novel coming out, then it's Neurotic Literature, which is a
• 2:03:16
  podcast you'll find on all of the usual platforms.
• 2:03:19
  It's absolutely gorgeous as well.
• 2:03:21
  I'm going to recommend. James's episode of Desert Planet
• 2:03:24
  picks with Joe. Primarily for the cheese song at
• 2:03:26
  the end. Yeah.
• 2:03:28
  Yeah, That's brilliant. Yes.
• 2:03:31
  We've recently started stocking more BA, I'll have you know.
• 2:03:36
  And I would just like to say very quickly, I've got some
• 2:03:39
  exciting Strictly, it's coming up soon.
• 2:03:41
  Season 25 will be coming out at some point, starring James Lark
• 2:03:46
  and Robert Shearman. Season of the Flux will be
• 2:03:51
  recorded with Ian Winston and Jeff Cockrell.
• 2:03:55
  And Series 8. You.
• 2:03:57
  You're the one who convinced us all to do it.
• 2:04:00
  I didn't know it was official. Yeah, it's.
• 2:04:01
  I'm afraid I was. 8. B Oh God, Jason, who's on it
• 2:04:07
  with us? I've got absolutely no idea,
• 2:04:10
  Robbie forgotten nugget of. Information.
• 2:04:12
  Well, it's got Jason Thompson on it.
• 2:04:14
  Giving his. Reading on Kill the Moon.
• 2:04:16
  And so I want you off there. Listen to those episodes.
• 2:04:19
  They're going to be amazing. I heard you say someone was
• 2:04:21
  actually going to travel 20 years back into his past to be.
• 2:04:23
  On that podcast with himself. Oh Timey, why me?
• 2:04:29
  Well, let's thank you very much for your time until we reconvene
• 2:04:34
  with lots of notes of gossipy scandal about Rusty Davis.
• 2:04:39
  Au revoir, au revoir. Never ask for.
• 2:04:45
  These fucking things, Jesus.