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Hamster Book Club - Transit · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:05
  Welcome back to the Hamster Book BLOB.
• 0:08
  My name is the slightly poorly Joe Ford, and I'm here today
• 0:12
  with three wonderful gentlemen, Mr. Ian Winston.
• 0:15
  Hello, Ian. Hello, I'm Paulie as well might
• 0:18
  be coughing. Jason Thompson Hello, Jason.
• 0:22
  Hello, I'm not Paulie at the moment.
• 0:24
  I hope to stay that way. And Mr. James Locke hello.
• 0:27
  James I'm not yet poor, but I'm spending all my days with
• 0:31
  children, so it's inevitable. It's coming today.
• 0:35
  We are here to talk about it's all James's fault as well.
• 0:39
  Transit, you sucker. So who's faulted this?
• 0:47
  Was it my suggestion then? I think it was yours.
• 0:50
  I think you took something I'd said and you ran with it.
• 0:52
  So I'm prepared to share the blame.
• 0:54
  I'm not fully prepared to take it.
• 0:57
  God damn it, I was going to blame you for my reading of this
• 1:00
  over the last three weeks. Transit by Ben Aronovich.
• 1:05
  Last time we spoke, I somebody gave a glowing review of
• 1:09
  Aronovich's Rivers of London series.
• 1:13
  I think it was James and Jason. Yeah.
• 1:16
  And we talked about some of some of his other books.
• 1:19
  This is possibly his most notorious book of all.
• 1:22
  So it's a great choice to talk about.
• 1:25
  Before we head there, I've set you all a challenge to name what
• 1:29
  is your Doctor Who hell book or what was the Doctor Who book
• 1:34
  that you found a most of a struggle to read.
• 1:38
  We've sort of done your favourites and your favorite
• 1:40
  authors, so let's sort of turn it around now.
• 1:43
  And which, which Doctor Who book did you star and wished you
• 1:45
  hadn't? And let's go across to Jason.
• 1:52
  Well, it's there's one book that I started at what I was given as
• 1:58
  a gift a while ago, and in theory it should have appealed
• 2:05
  to my sensibilities. It's something that there's
• 2:10
  similarities to another book that we've discussed here.
• 2:13
  It's called the Doctor Who Era Finder.
• 2:18
  It's one of these unofficial publications.
• 2:20
  It's not BBC licensed or anything, but it purported to be
• 2:25
  something similar to the sort of discontinuity guide with, you
• 2:29
  know, a look at the the goofs, production areas, plot holes,
• 2:33
  etcetera in Doctor Who, which the discontinuity guide does
• 2:37
  brilliantly. Maybe we should talk about that
• 2:39
  one-on-one of these at some point.
• 2:42
  Cool. But this one, the discontinuity
• 2:47
  guide took a very affectionate look at the shortcomings of
• 2:51
  Doctor Who in terms of some dodgy dialogue, bits of set that
• 2:56
  fall off, monsters that are unconvincing, plot holes
• 2:59
  etcetera, etcetera. And we know Joe that the double
• 3:02
  entendre is subcategory in that book is pretty much informed
• 3:05
  during. This podcast?
• 3:07
  Yeah. So yeah, the Error Finder was
• 3:12
  entirely devoid of obvious affection for the series.
• 3:16
  It literally picked holes in the most humorous way, and even in
• 3:26
  some places took a swipe at other commentators who've done
• 3:31
  similar things, like somebody pointing out that it it the one
• 3:35
  that stuck in my mind is that somebody pointing out that the
• 3:38
  trans mat capsule set in Mortaring Undead has a big hole
• 3:41
  in it. Well, presumably somebody knows
• 3:43
  what a trans mat should look like then.
• 3:45
  Oh good gosh. You know, and it's just it had
• 3:48
  no, it had, it had errors and observations with no distinction
• 3:53
  in the categories as to which was what.
• 3:55
  So it was not clear what was being picked up as a mistake and
• 3:58
  what was being picked up as an observation.
• 4:01
  And yeah, it just, it was a big chunky book because it covered
• 4:04
  all of the classic series. This was shortly before the new
• 4:08
  series came. It came out when the the hype
• 4:11
  for Doctor Who was was rising again.
• 4:13
  So somebody jumped on the on the bandwagon.
• 4:17
  But yeah, there was no humour, no affection, no nothing.
• 4:21
  So I read it and at the end of it I just thought this is a
• 4:23
  completely soulless book that I have wasted all my time reading.
• 4:28
  Why would you even start that project?
• 4:30
  Like, like it's obviously got to be someone that knows Doctor Who
• 4:33
  inside out, so loves to show enough to have absorbed all that
• 4:37
  knowledge. So why would you write a book
• 4:40
  basically condemning Doctor Who? Well, that's that's what got me
• 4:45
  about it. There was just no Maybe this
• 4:48
  person loves Doctor Who but just doesn't know how to express it
• 4:50
  because there was no obvious affection.
• 4:52
  The Discontinuity Book Guide is. It's.
• 4:55
  Hilarious. Brilliantly humorous.
• 4:57
  And they, they state right from, you know, we love Doctor Who,
• 5:02
  but you know, it's ABBC production with limited budget.
• 5:05
  Sometimes things go wrong, people forget their lines,
• 5:08
  there's bad camera work, there's bad set design, and so on and so
• 5:12
  forth. Let's have a bit of fun with it.
• 5:15
  Also the when the discontinuity guide came out there was a a a
• 5:19
  large portion of fandom was in danger of taking the programme
• 5:22
  rather too seriously and actually was a corrective to
• 5:25
  that and was saying look it, it's allowed to notice that some
• 5:29
  things in Doctor Who are less than perfect and still love it
• 5:31
  to bits. Let's have the fun as well.
• 5:34
  I mean discontinuity guide captured.
• 5:36
  You know, you start. I always remember it starts off
• 5:38
  saying saying, you know, Doctor Who is written by hacks.
• 5:43
  Some of them are very talented hacks, but it was all you know.
• 5:46
  And then I think it went into Terrence Dix's.
• 5:48
  You know, our main job was that they didn't show the test card.
• 5:52
  That was a really important caller to turn, wasn't it too?
• 5:56
  Except the Doctor Who was massively flawed.
• 5:59
  And you can still love him for that reason, and that's clearly.
• 6:02
  Not for me. Clearly the person that's
• 6:04
  working this error find the book.
• 6:06
  Who is it? Jason, name and Shane.
• 6:08
  I cannot remember because I got rid of it ages ago.
• 6:10
  It went a long time ago because I am never going to pick this up
• 6:14
  again because there is no soul to it at all.
• 6:17
  It's a humorless catalogue of errors, cock UPS, goofs, fluffs,
• 6:23
  et cetera, et cetera, without a hint of fun.
• 6:27
  Or, you know, some of the bits in the discontinuity guide.
• 6:30
  It's almost like taking a knowing wink at the reader, you
• 6:32
  know? I mean, the discontinuity guide
• 6:34
  isn't perfect. I mean, it became apparent as I
• 6:37
  got to know more and more Doctor Who that some, especially around
• 6:40
  some of the missing episodes, the authors hadn't actually seen
• 6:43
  them because some of the things are taken out of the target
• 6:46
  novelizations rather than the actual episodes.
• 6:48
  They were very slewed by their own opinions as well.
• 6:51
  I remember like everyone of those dreadful Peter Davidson's
• 6:54
  stories was getting a glowing appraisal and at every single
• 6:56
  Colin Baker story was being savaged just because they didn't
• 6:59
  like those eras. But fair enough.
• 7:01
  Except. That except that they they again
• 7:05
  it was a bit of a corrective to the Hayning view which had kind
• 7:08
  of been the standard fan opinion.
• 7:10
  The Gunfighters is rubbish. And there's this continuity
• 7:13
  guide. It was one of the first books to
• 7:15
  put in print No The Gunfighters is really good.
• 7:17
  It's true and it and it was also generous towards things like
• 7:21
  Trial of a Time Lord which they assumed they assumed they would
• 7:25
  hate. And they and they actually say,
• 7:26
  look, there's some real brilliance here, particularly
• 7:28
  considering the the context. I've just remembered actually
• 7:32
  the last line. Is it major RE evaluation
• 7:34
  required? Yeah.
• 7:35
  That was the end of that review, wouldn't it?
• 7:37
  Oh, what am I talking about then?
• 7:38
  Absolute nonsense as usual. Yeah.
• 7:44
  Well, look, nameless person who of the fact fighter book you
• 7:48
  wrote is soulless robot. You shall remain nameless, but
• 7:50
  we'll all be Googling his name later.
• 7:52
  They. Sound They sound they sound like
• 7:54
  half of Doctor Who Twitter as we speak.
• 7:57
  Yeah. Like there was some.
• 7:59
  We could swear on this, can't we?
• 8:01
  There was some really. There was some mirthless twats
• 8:04
  in this. Yeah, Most of them appear in
• 8:07
  transit. Come on.
• 8:09
  In the end, what have you got for us?
• 8:12
  I mean, have you got for us? Yes.
• 8:14
  Well, as we said, as we said while we're messaging on
• 8:17
  Twitter, when you gave us this question, honestly, my first
• 8:20
  thought was transit. And we'll get on to why I found
• 8:24
  it so hard to read this book. But then it got me thinking,
• 8:27
  actually, there's a so I was exactly the right age.
• 8:32
  I was like, you know, I was, I'm 51 now.
• 8:35
  So in the 90s I was a student. I was a Doctor Who fan, starved
• 8:39
  of content. And the virgin new adventures
• 8:42
  came. And I remember picking up time
• 8:44
  Worm Genesis by John Peele and it's it's all a bit murky now,
• 8:49
  but I just remember thinking, this is a bit shit.
• 8:53
  It might not be. It might be major appraisal
• 8:55
  needed. Reappraisal needed.
• 8:56
  I just remember thinking this is a bit shit and I never and I I
• 9:00
  got about 1/3 of the way through it and that's probably the only
• 9:04
  Doctor Who thing I've never finished ever.
• 9:06
  I've finished transit. So you know and there's still a
• 9:10
  positive to transit as we'll get onto and there's probably loads
• 9:13
  of positives. I've probably not been very fair
• 9:15
  to time Worm Genesis, but I and but I I was looking back again.
• 9:19
  That's probably why I didn't become like buying every book in
• 9:24
  the series and get addicted to the range.
• 9:26
  That and the fact I was, well, I I think we're going to probably
• 9:31
  talk about the 90s and my actual life a lot tonight.
• 9:35
  Because because this book, Cohen sort of does the whole virgin
• 9:41
  new adventures, and so many things in this actually
• 9:44
  intersect with my own life and trying to write new adventures
• 9:48
  and getting rejection slips from Rebecca Levine and Dave Evans.
• 9:53
  And that's why you didn't read them really, isn't it?
• 9:55
  Well, no, no, no. But I but no.
• 9:57
  But I started reading them because as I think I've said, I
• 9:59
  went to uni as the same uni as Paul Cornell and he he just
• 10:04
  left. And so I was told by my tutors
• 10:07
  doing creative writing, Oh well, if you like Doctor Who, maybe
• 10:10
  you should try writing for these.
• 10:11
  So I went back to them and then I picked up Love and War and I
• 10:14
  was like, oh, this is brilliant. So I started reading them a lot
• 10:17
  more but a few books before I'd gone.
• 10:20
  What is this? And I might have been being
• 10:23
  unfair because I was 19 and as we'll go on to, I was taking a
• 10:27
  shit load of drugs back then. Did you take a lot of trains and
• 10:32
  turn to prostitution as well? Like how many parallels were
• 10:34
  there was if I? Like turned to prostitution.
• 10:37
  But I I took the I've got a picture here.
• 10:40
  Well, I'll show you it later. A picture of what I looked, what
• 10:44
  I looked like at the time, and I basically the 90s were
• 10:49
  dreadlocks and and cyberpunk. Oh.
• 10:53
  I've seen a picture online somewhere.
• 10:55
  I swear you've posted one. Yeah, I might have.
• 10:57
  I might have. I was like, who the hell is
• 11:00
  that? And then I look.
• 11:01
  Closer. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 11:04
  But yeah, so. I want to know how much you
• 11:07
  could have been on the cover of a new adventure and fit in.
• 11:11
  Oh no. Well I'll send you the picture.
• 11:13
  Absolutely no future. Something like that.
• 11:16
  Some yeah. That sort of period I've.
• 11:18
  Got it here. But yeah, but but you know, it
• 11:21
  was so many things in the New Adventures that at the time,
• 11:26
  that's why I found them a bit, as the kids might say today,
• 11:29
  Cringe because they felt like, OK, these are people just going,
• 11:33
  oh, new age. New age hippies were everywhere,
• 11:36
  the Levellers, the Dreadlocks and all the and and then the
• 11:40
  cyberpunk stuff as well. So they all felt like a bunch of
• 11:44
  teenagers writing, and I was conscious of it even when they
• 11:48
  were writing well. And then when I came to write
• 11:51
  mine, it wasn't quite the same as we'll get into later.
• 11:54
  Are you talking about? They all feel like a bunch of
• 11:56
  teenagers writing as I read it this week.
• 11:59
  Yeah, yeah, that's what I mean. Oh, totally.
• 12:01
  But when I wrote mine as a young person and got rejected, I mean,
• 12:05
  we'll get into this. I remember getting a thing from
• 12:07
  Peter Darville Evans saying this is quite good and I know why he
• 12:10
  rejected it because I've still got it and the the plotting and
• 12:13
  everything was off and I was trying to do a sequel to Talons
• 12:15
  of Wen Chiang, but the story wasn't big enough.
• 12:18
  So there's lots of reasons to reject it.
• 12:19
  But I always remember, he said. And also, you probably should
• 12:23
  read more of these because you know, we have a lot more sex in
• 12:26
  them than than you, you doing. You're doing quite an old
• 12:29
  fashioned Doctor Who story. Look at and now I look at it
• 12:31
  and. Now I and now I look at it, and
• 12:35
  now I've read transit. I'm like, that makes sense,
• 12:38
  because my instinct as we'll as we'll come on to my instinct, is
• 12:42
  keep sex out of the TARDIS. No, You're interested to write
• 12:45
  Doctor Who. Yeah, yeah.
• 12:48
  What was that, anyway, By the way, what was that novel called?
• 12:51
  Well, that's synopsis, the one you're talking about right now.
• 12:54
  Genesis the. One that I wrote.
• 12:56
  The one you wrote. Oh, the one you wrote.
• 12:58
  Well, the one I wrote, it's called Rainworld.
• 13:00
  Coming next from Hamster Book Club Rainworld by Ian I read it.
• 13:05
  Oh God, on the shelf there. Is it finished?
• 13:09
  It's only no, no, It's the first four chapters that you wrote as
• 13:12
  a summary. Oh no, it should have been
• 13:14
  rejected. But we'll come on to this.
• 13:16
  We'll come on to to my life and how it intersects.
• 13:19
  So I'm going to, I'm going to move on to James.
• 13:21
  Otherwise, we're never going to reach transit today, James.
• 13:24
  Oh, well, I, I, I'm, this is all good background for transit
• 13:28
  actually, because I went down a similar route to Ian.
• 13:31
  I'm a little younger than Ian and so when the new adventure
• 13:35
  started coming out, I was probably too young and I wasn't
• 13:39
  that interested and it was sort of later in the 90s.
• 13:43
  I've had a friend at school who was really into them and really
• 13:46
  thought they were sort of the pinnacle of Doctor Who.
• 13:48
  He had them all lined up and he he lent me a a few, maybe the
• 13:53
  good ones, and they always held this kind of mystique for me and
• 13:57
  have have continued to to this day really.
• 14:00
  So a while back, many, many years ago, I started reading my
• 14:04
  way through them and it turns out there were more
• 14:09
  disappointments than I was expecting.
• 14:13
  So when you asked for for a book that I found difficult to read,
• 14:16
  I actually have several candidates.
• 14:19
  Would you your top five then? Please if well if anyone is
• 14:21
  interested I have actually been trying to write a review of each
• 14:24
  of them on on Goodreads so if you search for me there you'll
• 14:28
  find in in in much depth but the one where OK so I mean I I, I,
• 14:34
  I'm I can confirm that Ian is absolutely correct about the the
• 14:38
  first in the range Genesis is not in need of major re
• 14:41
  evaluation it's it is shit but there is worse to come and when
• 14:47
  I got to the pit by Neil oh boy this is what I wrote even.
• 14:53
  About that. Movie.
• 14:54
  Oh, we got the review. I've got the review.
• 14:56
  This is what I wrote down. Doctor Who The New Adventures
• 14:58
  Guidelines for Writers 1 open with a quote from some epic
• 15:02
  portentous work. Ideally the Book of Revelation.
• 15:04
  Something that says this is going to be huge and serious and
• 15:07
  apocalyptic, though obviously you will actually say that as
• 15:10
  well, repeatedly at regular intervals. 2.
• 15:13
  Next, introduce a plethora of disparate characters and
• 15:15
  locations, though avoid actual characterization or any sense of
• 15:18
  where the locations are or how they are connected.
• 15:20
  Obviously you are creating a sense of expectation by letting
• 15:23
  the reader to think that everything will come together
• 15:25
  and make sense in the end. For an extra mystery, make sure
• 15:29
  it doesn't three eventually, and only eventually, introduce the
• 15:34
  Doctor, his companion and his space-time machine, the TARDIS,
• 15:38
  all with labour detail, as if writing for a reader who has
• 15:41
  never heard of Doctor Who. Then conclude the chapter in a
• 15:44
  way that will only make sense to someone with an encyclopaedic
• 15:46
  knowledge of its every aspect. Actually, it shouldn't entirely
• 15:49
  make sense to that kind of person either, but that's OK
• 15:51
  because nor will the rest of the book four.
• 15:55
  This doctor bears only a vague, superficial resemblance to the
• 15:58
  one off the Terry. What he says is only ever
• 16:01
  irrelevant whimsy or pseudo philosophical claptrap.
• 16:04
  He has no ability to interact with other people, least of all
• 16:07
  his companion Bonice, who knows never to expect a comforting
• 16:09
  word or a hug. Whatever awful thing she has
• 16:11
  been through. He has little eccentric habits
• 16:14
  and again, you will not recognize from any previous
• 16:16
  realization or indeed any kind of reality.
• 16:19
  This Doctor often whistles the sound made by the TARDIS, don't
• 16:23
  you know? Even though it is a sound that
• 16:24
  completely defies whistling. You should be finding the Doctor
• 16:27
  utterly insufferable by page 50, in spite of the fact that he
• 16:30
  hardly features in the story because you haven't found
• 16:33
  anything important for him to do. 5 Don't worry too much about
• 16:37
  the story. Stuff needs to happen.
• 16:39
  Lots and lots of stuff on a really huge scale, but it
• 16:42
  doesn't need a reason or explanation.
• 16:44
  In fact, do everything you can to avoid it making sense
• 16:46
  frenetically. Switch from 1 unrelated scene to
• 16:49
  another. Introduce completely new ideas
• 16:51
  or characters out of the blue. Chuck in some completely
• 16:53
  inexplicable twists. You know how kids make stuff up
• 16:56
  in the playground like that. Six.
• 16:59
  Also, for no reason, a person from history appears and has
• 17:02
  nothing at all to do with the story.
• 17:04
  William Blake, for instance. Why the hell not?
• 17:07
  Seven drugs are involved. They will resemble actual drugs,
• 17:10
  but ought to have enough sci-fi name to make it sound more
• 17:12
  glamorous than cocaine. 8 Write in short sentences to create a
• 17:16
  serious documentary feel and also to prevent anything from
• 17:19
  ever becoming at all involving 9 You can get through a lot of
• 17:22
  plot by issuing dialogue and detail and just describing
• 17:25
  events as a quick synopsis. This will leave room for
• 17:28
  irrelevant digressions about the meaning of life, the
• 17:31
  inevitability of death, the tragedy of childhood, the nature
• 17:34
  of faith or whatever else you like.
• 17:37
  This will do instead of characterization and make people
• 17:39
  think The book is like really deep man. 10 out of Nowhere.
• 17:43
  Throw in Victorian London and a Jack the Ripper subplot.
• 17:46
  Why the hell not 11 Bernice Summerfield has been established
• 17:50
  as one of the very best Doctor Who companions ever conceived,
• 17:52
  so no need to work very hard on her bits.
• 17:54
  Just be sure to remind readers that she has a sense of humour
• 17:57
  by writing every now and then, and for no reason at all.
• 18:01
  Bernice laughed. Suddenly 12 unit troops appear.
• 18:05
  Why the hell not? Thirteen Time Lord history will
• 18:08
  turn out in ways that needn't make sense, to be somehow
• 18:10
  central to what in other circumstances would be a plot,
• 18:13
  but here should be considered more montage of Fan wankery,
• 18:17
  Gallifrey, Blar, Brasselon Blar, and some of your own ideas for
• 18:19
  good Measure 14. Keep on writing until all the
• 18:23
  characters are dead and I conclude honestly, I admire the
• 18:27
  ambition of the new adventures and love that they genuinely
• 18:29
  took the franchise somewhere that it had never been before or
• 18:31
  since. But this is awful.
• 18:36
  And thus concludes our The Hamster Book Club episode on the
• 18:40
  Pit. Thank you very much.
• 18:41
  In fact, I I was listening very closely to that list there.
• 18:44
  And I could apply at least ten of those points to transit, I
• 18:47
  think. Yeah, tell.
• 18:48
  Me What? We're talking about transit.
• 18:51
  What I shall absolutely argue is that Transit does the new
• 18:55
  adventure style considerably better than the pit.
• 18:59
  Bloody hell. I'll not wait to hear that the
• 19:02
  pit is. I'm not doing the pit, Joe.
• 19:05
  I'm. Saying.
• 19:06
  No, I don't even know brave enough to do that.
• 19:09
  Well, the book I've chosen is, as I said off my it's a book
• 19:12
  that I was consuming the BBC books at the time, and I was
• 19:17
  powering through about 3 a week, like I was reading one sort of
• 19:21
  every day and a half. I was just lying through them.
• 19:24
  Then I reached the taking of Planet 5 by Mark Platform and I
• 19:30
  think it's Simon Butcher Jones and it's like a sequel to Image
• 19:36
  of the Fendal. It takes place during this war
• 19:41
  between the enemy and the Time Lords.
• 19:44
  There's all this very sort of bizarre continuity struck region
• 19:48
  of the Ape Dr. Adventures. And it's got huge.
• 19:51
  It's got big massive science fiction ideas, almost no
• 19:57
  dialogue whatsoever. It's almost dialogue free and
• 20:00
  enormous paragraphs of impenetrable prose.
• 20:05
  And I just remember having to keep rereading sentences that
• 20:09
  went on for about 8 lines, trying to figure out where it
• 20:13
  was going. It was just impossible to read.
• 20:17
  It has huge interesting ideas in it.
• 20:20
  But the actual, the, the, the writing of the book itself was
• 20:25
  so difficult and again, some parallels with transit that I I
• 20:31
  just couldn't get through it. So, yeah, avoid at all costs
• 20:36
  unless you like impenetrable powers, then go ahead.
• 20:39
  Well, thank you very much guys, for those choices.
• 20:43
  We've got four books to avoid there completely.
• 20:45
  I mean, I'm quite curious about the fact Finder, if I'm honest,
• 20:49
  Jason. I want to see that one out just
• 20:51
  just so I can get really, really, really annoyed.
• 20:53
  But a lot of those sort of unofficial non fiction books do
• 20:56
  irritate me. Yeah, you ever read the Near?
• 20:57
  The ones by Mark Clapham? Is it Mark Clapham?
• 21:01
  He writes all of these. It's like guides.
• 21:04
  It's just opinions, short synopsis.
• 21:06
  And his views are so at odds with mine.
• 21:10
  I threw one of them against the wall once.
• 21:12
  It's the only time I've ever thrown a book against the wall.
• 21:15
  Yeah, really annoying. I wonder if someone should take
• 21:17
  the Doctor Who error Finder and see how many errors there are in
• 21:20
  it and write a book about that. That sounds like a challenge.
• 21:24
  Doctor Who Error Finder Error Finder would.
• 21:28
  The weird thing about. Is recursive.
• 21:30
  The weird thing about that book is I read it.
• 21:32
  Is it very clear that this guy who wrote it had done really
• 21:37
  done meticulous work? He picked out.
• 21:40
  You've really done some good nitpicking and you know there's
• 21:43
  there's fun to be had in nitpicking.
• 21:45
  I've also got the Nitpickers guides, the Star Trek books,
• 21:48
  which are hilarious and brilliant and fun and and then
• 21:52
  you watch the episodes and you see some of these things and
• 21:54
  you're like, how did I notice that?
• 21:56
  So you know, it's really meticulously done.
• 21:58
  But as I say, there was just no humour or love coming through
• 22:03
  the way it's written at all. It's just.
• 22:05
  But we've all met lots of. Fanning approach.
• 22:08
  Not all fans are the same, and there's a certain strand of them
• 22:11
  that I don't know why they like this show.
• 22:14
  I don't know why they like it. Oh, I think it is.
• 22:17
  It's now you. Don't seem to like.
• 22:19
  It it's possible to have been a fan of Doctor Who for long
• 22:21
  enough that you've hated it for longer than you've liked it.
• 22:25
  Yeah, for sure. In fact, I'll put out a tweet
• 22:28
  this way asking people for their opinions on the Series 2 for the
• 22:31
  next Twinkly come Hamster. And the victory holder came
• 22:34
  back. I couldn't believe it.
• 22:36
  Yeah. Anyway, series two of the new
• 22:46
  series is not what we're here to talk about today.
• 22:48
  We're here to talk about transit and I'm going to immediately
• 22:53
  throw this over to James because I believe you're going to mount
• 22:59
  either a heroic defence or a celebration of transit.
• 23:04
  I I just want to know what what's your overall opinion of
• 23:06
  this book and and why do you admire it so?
• 23:10
  Oh, my overall opinion is quite complex as we shall be unpacking
• 23:17
  for the next 7 or 8 hours. I I came to Ben Aronovich like I
• 23:27
  imagine everyone here and everyone listening through his
• 23:32
  television Doctor adventures. I remembers the Daleks and
• 23:36
  Battlefield were two of the target books I bought first.
• 23:40
  Obviously he didn't write Battlefield, but that's his
• 23:43
  story and I I love both of them. But the the novelisations and
• 23:48
  the the televised versions. And when I saw his name on the
• 23:52
  spine of a a new book, I mean he's very easy to spot because
• 23:56
  he's always right at the beginning of the shelves in a in
• 23:58
  a bookshop. But when I saw the first Rivers
• 24:00
  of London book, I grabbed it because I recognized the name
• 24:03
  and that is a great series of books and I have continued to
• 24:07
  buy them and very much appreciated and I think they're
• 24:11
  they're really skillfully written books and they show the
• 24:14
  hallmarks of his scripts, which is that they are meticulously
• 24:19
  researched. I mean the reason that
• 24:20
  remembrance is so good is that he just assimilated everything
• 24:23
  about Doctor Who and and and yet somehow managed to not
• 24:28
  regurgitate it as just series of continuity references but to
• 24:31
  effortlessly kind of drop in this continuity.
• 24:34
  As if he'd known the program you know in depth for his whole
• 24:37
  life. Which he which he hadn't he was
• 24:38
  he was I think a fan but the research was all was all done.
• 24:42
  And Rivers of London the the gimmick is that it's a world in
• 24:46
  which magic is real and the magic is consistent and there's
• 24:49
  a a lot of thought gone into what can and can't be done and
• 24:53
  what the effects of magic are on on the world.
• 24:55
  But it's half that and it's half police procedural and it feels
• 24:59
  like the police procedural bit is as well researched as as the
• 25:04
  magic bit has been conceived. And I I just moved to London and
• 25:10
  I was on the day off and I saw a sign in a local Waterstones and
• 25:14
  it said Benarolovich signing the third book in the Rivers of
• 25:17
  London series and and it was on the day often.
• 25:20
  So I went in and it was this wonderfully surreal experience
• 25:24
  where you go did I did did life free did I used to have free
• 25:28
  afternoons and and this they the bookshop had kind of cake and
• 25:33
  Prosecco and Benaronovitch was there just sort of chatting
• 25:37
  casually and Andrew Carmel was there because he's mates with
• 25:39
  Benaronovitch and I just sort of chatted with them and I'd
• 25:42
  brought along my paperback copy of Remembrance of the Dialects
• 25:45
  to sign and we got chatting about that and and we got onto
• 25:49
  transit which I hadn't at that point read and he did he was
• 25:52
  kind of he was just he's quite self effacing about.
• 25:58
  I mean I think he's quite self effacing about all of his work
• 26:00
  actually. I think he's hyper self critical
• 26:02
  which is the hallmark of a good writer.
• 26:05
  But he was particularly kind of self effacing about his early
• 26:08
  work. Remembrance The Remembrance
• 26:10
  novelisation is his first piece of prose writing and transit
• 26:14
  came up in conversation and and I I bought it on the back of
• 26:17
  that conversation, not thinking that this is going to be a a
• 26:19
  great read but because I was interested and it's actually
• 26:24
  it's a really difficult read and it's difficult for lots of
• 26:29
  reasons. One of them is just I think the
• 26:33
  the prose is difficult it's so dense.
• 26:38
  I I I think anyone would find the first half in particular a
• 26:44
  bit of a slog to get through. But I do remember finding it
• 26:48
  rewarding and I do remember having, you know, sort of coming
• 26:52
  away from it, feeling that I'd I'd had, you know, that I'd
• 26:56
  entered a complete world that had entered the world that was
• 26:59
  characteristically well conceived, well put together and
• 27:04
  fundamentally well written. Now going back to what I said
• 27:06
  about new adventures, and, and I think context is important here,
• 27:10
  the new adventures came out at a time when Doctor Who had clearly
• 27:14
  stopped and I think there was a a sense amongst fandom of just
• 27:18
  loss and directionlessness and nothing much was happening.
• 27:22
  You know Doctor Who Magazine? It's one of the weakest periods
• 27:26
  for the for the comic strip. Certainly no one really knows
• 27:28
  how to draw Celeste McCoy. They don't know whether he's a
• 27:30
  clown or a shadowy figure, and they attempt to mix the two with
• 27:35
  with pretty underwhelming results.
• 27:37
  Suddenly the new adventures come along and it is at least a
• 27:41
  series that I think I listened with great interest to your
• 27:43
  Lance parking interview and he basically described it as having
• 27:48
  a showrunner. It's it's a version of Doctor
• 27:50
  Who that whatever you think of it it has a clear sense of
• 27:54
  direction from the top and that's coming from particularly
• 27:58
  I think Peter Darvell Evans at first who wrote these this these
• 28:05
  guidelines that I'm I presumably were the ones that were sent to
• 28:08
  to you Ian and it feels to me I still.
• 28:14
  Got them somewhere, I think that.
• 28:17
  'D be very interesting because it feels to me as though bereft
• 28:21
  of its, of of its program, bereft of any possibility of
• 28:26
  Doctor Who coming back. The the resort for Doctor Who
• 28:29
  fans is to take it really, really seriously and to go, OK,
• 28:33
  we want Doctor. We want to prove that Doctor Who
• 28:35
  has grown up and Doctor Who can be real sci-fi and the the first
• 28:40
  tranche of new adventures are all hard sci-fi or science
• 28:44
  fantasy, or in this case cyberpunk.
• 28:48
  And the the concept, which is to put Doctor Who into a very
• 28:54
  gritty, very real world in which there is sex, there are drugs,
• 28:57
  there is swearing, sits awkwardly alongside this attempt
• 29:02
  to crowbar in a load of Doctor Who law and influence.
• 29:08
  I think very much by Ben Aronovich, and particularly the
• 29:11
  novelization of remembrance of the dialects in which he does
• 29:13
  that effortlessly. These first books crammed
• 29:16
  together, this weird mix of soft core pornography and references
• 29:23
  to Gallifrey. And it always sits hugely
• 29:27
  uneasily, partly because you're reading something that you kind
• 29:30
  of think, oh, this doesn't really feel like Doctor Who
• 29:31
  because it's got naughty bits. But also because all of the
• 29:35
  references to Gallifrey are so laboured and so ponderous.
• 29:39
  And they're trying to kind of not only squeeze in sort of, you
• 29:43
  know, 15 references per page to the classic series, but also a
• 29:47
  bunch of stuff from the Cardinal Master Plan and Lung Barrow,
• 29:50
  which they've all heard about. So they now want to kind of
• 29:52
  suggest that something really big is going on.
• 29:54
  And I think it's AI think it makes for a a really messy start
• 29:59
  to this series and I think we would also now I mean now we
• 30:05
  know that Doctor Who in prose can be fun we've we know that
• 30:08
  Doctor Who can be explored through the world of cartoon
• 30:11
  characters to take a recent book club example which we all
• 30:14
  enjoyed very much at the time. They they had no concept of this
• 30:17
  and that's not what they were trying to do.
• 30:18
  They were trying to do something which was grown up and and adult
• 30:22
  and within those terms, which we may well not want our Doctor Who
• 30:28
  to be like at all. In fact, I think it would be an
• 30:29
  odd person who looks at this and goes, this is really how Doctor
• 30:31
  Who ought to be. But within those parameters, I
• 30:34
  think transit gets the closest. The irony is transit comes out
• 30:38
  and people hated it. I think.
• 30:40
  I think Gary Russell's review in Doctor Who Magazine said it has
• 30:44
  absolutely no redeeming features whatsoever, which is.
• 30:47
  Nonsense, obviously. Nonsense, No, Doctor.
• 30:49
  Clearly. Nonsense.
• 30:52
  And what's what's also kind of ironic is that the book that
• 30:55
  went down a storm is Nightshade, which is Mark Gates novel
• 31:00
  published a couple of months before, which is basically it's
• 31:02
  a Jon Pertwee era traditional Doctor Who story, a few kind of
• 31:06
  quite a massive references. It feels very traditional, I
• 31:09
  have to say. I think if you put the two side
• 31:10
  by But but isn't it ironic that the
• 31:23
  Doctor Who fans thought they wanted hard sci-fi and the
• 31:26
  minute they're given it, they actually, that's what they want?
• 31:29
  Nightshade. Nightshade has got like a really
• 31:32
  miserable, Moody doctor that doesn't want to do anything in
• 31:37
  it. Whereas this, I'll say this, for
• 31:39
  transit, it does have a Doctor Who's on the move, who's been
• 31:43
  quirky and funny and engaging and you know, like Aranda
• 31:47
  Aronovic likes the 7th Doctor. Absolutely.
• 31:49
  That was, well, that's that is one of the points that I will
• 31:52
  elaborate on further when other people have had a chance to
• 31:54
  talk. I think he does the Doctor
• 31:55
  really well. But I think there are other
• 31:56
  things in here if you can get past this bleak dystopian and
• 32:00
  very, I mean Ian will fill us in with much more expertise than I
• 32:04
  have on on the whole cyberpunk thing.
• 32:07
  But clearly it's it's going into that genre I and and it's doing
• 32:13
  it as far as I can tell. And I'm speaking as someone who
• 32:16
  hasn't read a great deal of cyberpunk.
• 32:19
  In fact, I'm not sure I've read any cyberpunk apart from this,
• 32:23
  but I but I feel like the world here is well conceived and it's
• 32:27
  consistent. And also underneath these this
• 32:29
  surface, this superficial bleakness, I think there is
• 32:33
  actually quite a traditional story and a story that basically
• 32:36
  makes sense. If you detail the plot, it's
• 32:39
  quite simple, yeah. It it's just made extremely
• 32:43
  complicated by how the story is told and and just the insane
• 32:49
  amount of detail in the world building.
• 32:51
  You know it. It is over complicated.
• 32:53
  It's over complicated. It's on a point where the book
• 32:55
  needs a bloody glossary for you to get through it, and I don't
• 32:58
  think any book should have a glossary.
• 33:00
  You should not. You shouldn't have to explain.
• 33:03
  It shows that he's not just plucking words out of the air,
• 33:05
  which you sometimes get the idea with these early new adventures
• 33:09
  that they were just making stuff up and going, oh, that sounds a
• 33:11
  bit sci-fi. Benaronovich has written a
• 33:13
  glossary. I I I would agree it shouldn't
• 33:16
  be printed in the back of the book.
• 33:17
  It shouldn't be necessary. He should have written the book
• 33:19
  in a way it. Shouldn't be at the front.
• 33:21
  Shouldn't that be at the front of the bloody book?
• 33:23
  It shouldn't be there at all. It.
• 33:25
  Shouldn't be there at all. I think maybe I know my terms.
• 33:29
  I I. Introduced them in a way that
• 33:31
  actually fits and flows. Like, you know, you can have a
• 33:34
  term and then explain in the prose as it when it first gets
• 33:38
  introduced what it means and why.
• 33:39
  They could like the, you know, they they refer to a group of
• 33:41
  people as cat food monsters. And these are people who are so
• 33:45
  poor, so destitute, that they're reduced to eating pet food
• 33:48
  supplies just to survive. But you've got to read the
• 33:52
  glossary to find out why they call them cat food monsters.
• 33:55
  But do you need to know what cat food monsters are?
• 33:57
  I I didn't spot the glossary until I finished reading it, and
• 34:00
  I I sort of kicked myself from there.
• 34:02
  I thought, do you know what? I At no point in this book did I
• 34:05
  feel the need to know what any of these things were.
• 34:07
  I just felt that it was possible world that I didn't understand,
• 34:10
  I questioned. Puts in a case.
• 34:12
  I'm sorry, it's a cake monster as well.
• 34:15
  Well, I think that's a that's a description of the these
• 34:18
  monsters that have that have, isn't that the kind of
• 34:20
  vernacular that's adopted to describe them, the the kind of
• 34:25
  shape of these monsters, which are never really described in
• 34:27
  much depth. So I thought that worked for me.
• 34:29
  I I was picturing something fluffy.
• 34:31
  It made me think of cake from a from a day-to-day I.
• 34:36
  Can see it must be that the. Glossary.
• 34:39
  The glossary did baffle me because I was like, OK, he's
• 34:42
  he's clearly created a very detailed world.
• 34:44
  He's really thought about this. And I remember messing you,
• 34:46
  James, when I was reading the opening chapters, this going,
• 34:48
  wow, there's some serious world building going on here.
• 34:51
  But that kind of suggests to me that he's not confident that
• 34:54
  he's managed to get it across in his book.
• 34:57
  So he sort of slapped that at the end, say right?
• 35:00
  Well, just in case you need a bit of help.
• 35:02
  Or or was that an editorial decision.
• 35:04
  I mean I I wonder how much editorial input there was.
• 35:07
  I I gather that these things were written you know on a very
• 35:11
  low budget and probably with quite a tight turn around.
• 35:14
  I have a lot of questions about the process and sort of
• 35:16
  decisions that were made. But I do kind of what I wrote
• 35:19
  after reading chapter one was Terence Dix would have done this
• 35:22
  in half a page and Tarapsaw one is all build up.
• 35:25
  It's all it's all a pre credits teaser but there's it's like a
• 35:28
  statement of intent. No, I'm going to establish this
• 35:31
  world in so much detail that you can tell that it's it's serious.
• 35:35
  And I just think that, you know, maybe a more experienced writer
• 35:37
  or a better editor would have gone OK, but we don't need that.
• 35:40
  And you know when you get to the also people later in the range,
• 35:43
  I think that's his next book, isn't it?
• 35:45
  I mean, I said in our group chat, it's as if the editor has
• 35:48
  just gone chill the fuck out and just have some fun writing a doc
• 35:51
  through book. And he went completely the other
• 35:53
  direction. And guess what?
• 35:55
  It's all that amazing. Well building.
• 35:57
  I love. I love.
• 35:58
  This some more enjoyable read, yeah?
• 36:00
  Yeah, I love. Let's let's throw this across to
• 36:02
  Jason then and hear your initial thoughts on transit.
• 36:07
  My initial thoughts on transit. The first thing I wrote, I made
• 36:10
  some notes. The first thing I wrote was,
• 36:12
  holy crap, Why? Because this is in some respects
• 36:20
  this reminds me of Torchwood, in that given the brief to create
• 36:25
  an adult version of Doctor Who, someone has gone right fill it
• 36:29
  full of sex, swearing, drugs and gruesome death.
• 36:33
  Rather than write something more mature, more, you know, they
• 36:39
  talk about things to it being. I mean, the tagline for the New
• 36:42
  Adventures was too broad and deep for the small screen.
• 36:45
  There is nothing broad and deep about filling it, full of sex
• 36:50
  and swearing. Breasts are mentioned on page 2.
• 36:54
  I've got a list of breast mentions in my note, and he's
• 36:56
  got a. Thing about breasts, I mean, at
• 36:58
  one point later in the book there's a massive action
• 37:00
  sequence and the character involved is slammed against the
• 37:04
  wall and it is concerned about the integrity of her breast
• 37:08
  implants. What does that?
• 37:10
  We don't need that. No.
• 37:11
  I've, I've, I've written that quote down.
• 37:13
  It's, it's. I've got a great quote for a sex
• 37:17
  scene, but I'll save that for later, all right?
• 37:18
  You know and. Oh, there's so many.
• 37:21
  Just in chapter one, we've got sex, drugs, prostitutes with
• 37:24
  more references to breasts. Chapter 2 contains the sequence
• 37:29
  that led to a very angry letter in Doctor Who Magazine about how
• 37:32
  awful the new adventures are because one of the characters is
• 37:35
  using a bag of nuts to as a snack to take the semen taste
• 37:40
  out of her mouth. Yeah, I remember vividly,
• 37:44
  because this was about everybody.
• 37:46
  Remembers that line, Jason. That's what everybody remembers
• 37:48
  about transit, that one line. Well, this is about the time I
• 37:51
  started to become a fan and I just started getting Doctor Who
• 37:54
  Magazine. And this was one of the first
• 37:56
  things this is how I learned about new adventures was by
• 37:58
  reading complaints about them in the Doctor Who Magazine.
• 38:01
  That is my. Age.
• 38:04
  Did that sway your opinion before you even pick one up?
• 38:08
  It made me intrigued, but not intrigued enough to buy them.
• 38:10
  I didn't have the the funds at the time to start buying a
• 38:13
  regular monthly series of books, so I didn't read Transit until I
• 38:17
  was actually at university in 2001.
• 38:20
  I found a copy in a charity shop in Brighton, so, you know,
• 38:23
  nearly ten years after it came out and I was not overly
• 38:28
  impressed then and I wasn't overly impressed this time.
• 38:30
  I mean, Ben Aronovich's World Building is absolutely superb.
• 38:35
  As, as James has said, his, his research and his ability to
• 38:39
  create a world that you can really immerse yourself in
• 38:42
  actually is, is superb. And it was interesting to see a
• 38:45
  number of parallels with this and his Rivers of London books,
• 38:50
  not least being the way that he describes all the locations in
• 38:53
  really good detail and has clearly researched.
• 38:56
  I mean, the stuff on Mars was really good.
• 39:00
  I could say where they were on Mars because I'm relatively
• 39:03
  familiar with with what Mars looks like.
• 39:07
  And so that was that was good. So places like the Farcist Bulge
• 39:10
  and RCM ONS and things like that, they're real places on
• 39:13
  Mars. Did you just say bulge and?
• 39:16
  Arse, I said. The Farcist.
• 39:19
  More rude words, better rodovich.
• 39:21
  And RCM. He chose those things with care.
• 39:25
  You know it's. Like.
• 39:27
  The Marlins as well, I mean. Anyway, those are actual places
• 39:33
  on Mars, so yeah, but what we've basically got is a Doctor Who is
• 39:40
  told in an adult way by chucking in such a dystopian world.
• 39:43
  There is nobody in this book that I like.
• 39:46
  It's a. Bit it's a bit of a problem.
• 39:49
  Exactly. Like Cadiatu, I do.
• 39:52
  You know what? As it went on, I I weirdly felt
• 39:55
  that I had grown to like a few characters.
• 39:58
  I kind of did get to like Cadiatu, but there's there's
• 40:01
  quite. And there's so much, I mean
• 40:03
  this. This is a world that is really
• 40:04
  well built but you would not want to live in because it's all
• 40:08
  the the prostitutes, the the the drugs, the ex soldiers with PTSD
• 40:16
  and implants and that people having cybernetic implants to
• 40:19
  get information download into their brains and all that kind
• 40:22
  of stuff. There is nothing in this future
• 40:25
  that he describes that I would ever want to live in.
• 40:29
  Nobody has a nice break in a in a nice place, apart from that
• 40:35
  brief moment where they're at the Doctor's house, which I've
• 40:37
  forgotten that he had in the New Adventures that he but they
• 40:39
  decided he actually had a house in Kent.
• 40:42
  They have a great time in the house in Kent, don't they?
• 40:45
  They do. But again, that's another part
• 40:47
  of it that that that Jarred with me, because there there is a
• 40:50
  moment where the doctor is downstairs in the kitchen trying
• 40:52
  to sort out things and he hears a sound which you oh, the sound
• 40:56
  of children laughing. Isn't that lovely?
• 40:58
  The children are Cadiatu and Blondie and they're laughing
• 41:01
  because they're about to have sex.
• 41:03
  Oh, I thought it was because it was like the bed springs going
• 41:06
  and it just sounded like laughter.
• 41:07
  So to preface a sex scene with a description of them as children
• 41:12
  was just please don't do that. Please don't put sex scenes in
• 41:16
  Doctor Who. Anyway, I don't.
• 41:18
  You know, that was one of the things that I used to love about
• 41:20
  who when I was a fan and a teenager and say it was, it was
• 41:24
  one of the few things on television that didn't concern
• 41:27
  itself with romance and sex and things like that.
• 41:30
  And I have said before, and I'll say many more times, I'm sure
• 41:34
  that when you've got a program with the breadth that Doctor Who
• 41:38
  Can do, you can go to the past, the future, the present, go
• 41:42
  sideways in time to different dimensions, meet aliens and
• 41:44
  everything else. Filling it with romance and sex
• 41:48
  is the most boring, mundane thing you can do.
• 41:51
  But can I counter that? Because Doctor Who does plenty
• 41:53
  of all that other stuff, alternative universes and big,
• 41:56
  high concepts, ideas, and there's so much room for
• 42:00
  storytelling within romance and sex and love.
• 42:03
  And you know, you can tell stories with real hard by adding
• 42:06
  those things in. Having some of it there.
• 42:08
  I don't think it's an issue as long as it doesn't literally
• 42:11
  push away the rest of those things.
• 42:13
  I think Rosen. Sorry.
• 42:17
  No, go on. Sorry.
• 42:17
  I'll just cheer my throat. The term dance was a good
• 42:19
  example. They have the romance, they have
• 42:22
  the romance but they also bring it.
• 42:24
  They fold it in with big sci-fi ideas and maybe slightly ripping
• 42:27
  off His Dark Materials but but you know, but they they have the
• 42:31
  parallel universe stuff that the the big sci-fi nonsense is part
• 42:36
  of. Rosen, David Tennants.
• 42:38
  But I don't think your opinion there, Jason, is an unusual one
• 42:43
  in sort of certain Doctor Who circles as well.
• 42:45
  But can I? Since we're since we're talking
• 42:48
  about the sex, I I mean the all the all the constant, the
• 42:53
  constant references to to to breasts and prostitutes
• 42:57
  particularly. Again, it's it's sort of an
• 42:59
  opening gambit. It's it's part of the world
• 43:01
  building. It's it's not pleasant.
• 43:04
  How much of that is part of the cyberpunk genre?
• 43:07
  Because my understanding is that that is very sweary and and full
• 43:11
  of kind of sexual perversion and you know that that's he's, he's
• 43:18
  been briefed to to write in this style he's he's doing it.
• 43:23
  He's he's taken the brief. I mean the thing about cyberpunk
• 43:28
  is, is it's like any genre, when it's written well then you, then
• 43:33
  it's written well. This, I mean, it's almost like
• 43:37
  we're to start with this book. I think we have to sort of park
• 43:40
  the sex because. Before we park, Before we park
• 43:44
  the sex, then can I can I just say that the the scene?
• 43:47
  We want to talk about the sex a lot, but but maybe later,
• 43:50
  because I've got lots of sex. I mean, the Bad sex Awards, if
• 43:54
  they'd if they'd just have been on the radar.
• 43:56
  This has got so many. I've got so many quotes written
• 43:59
  out. OK, but maybe, but for a fair
• 44:02
  comparison you need to go back to John Peel's Genesis, which
• 44:05
  has got nipple tweaking and and so on.
• 44:07
  Yeah, yeah. Well, I remember that was that
• 44:09
  was that was in the tabloids, wasn't it?
• 44:10
  Because he had a topless prostitute.
• 44:13
  But as to the as to the actual act of two people having sex in
• 44:17
  the Doctor's house, it's a it's a a mere paragraph.
• 44:20
  It's not explicit. And I have to say, I quite
• 44:24
  welcomed the moment of tenderness between 2 characters
• 44:26
  in a world that seemed to be so desperately crying out for it.
• 44:30
  I'm far less bothered. I mean, I'm I'm with you.
• 44:33
  I don't want hanky panky in my TARDIS, but I'm far less
• 44:37
  bothered by two people having a a loving and consensual moment
• 44:42
  together than I am by the 10th Doctor bragging about bedding
• 44:47
  Queen Elizabeth the First. Which is where, I think that you
• 44:49
  know knew who got it so badly wrong.
• 44:52
  Or Matt Smith emerging from that woman's skirt.
• 44:55
  Well, what about a jolly tie under there, you know what I
• 44:58
  think? That's interesting.
• 44:59
  When you say about having the the tender moment, it's one of
• 45:02
  the things that I did like was the scene and spoilers right at
• 45:06
  the end where they wear Kadiyatu and someone else whose name I've
• 45:12
  forgotten because the name. Is Blondie in the head?
• 45:16
  Yeah, it's when they go to the blondie's funeral, because
• 45:18
  Blondie's dead and they have the moment between them where they
• 45:23
  bury him and they go to the tree or whatever where he's been
• 45:26
  buried. And there is that.
• 45:28
  It is beautifully written as Cadiatu gives into the emotions,
• 45:31
  screams, cries, etcetera, and they they hug each other and
• 45:34
  support each other. And that's, you know, when when
• 45:37
  he's not writing all this flowery cyberpunk stuff that's
• 45:43
  almost impossible to follow, he can actually write those moments
• 45:47
  really, really well. And that's one of the things I
• 45:50
  like about the Rivers of London books as well.
• 45:51
  There are a lot of those moments in in those books.
• 45:54
  And so you know, he he there, are there, are there are hints
• 45:58
  in this of what he can actually do, and I think that later
• 46:04
  works. He's also simplified his style a
• 46:08
  great deal, hasn't he? He's learned the value of just
• 46:10
  using not so many words. Yeah.
• 46:13
  Absolutely. Well, I think, I think one of
• 46:15
  the main things, one of the reasons I wanted to talk about
• 46:17
  sex as a as a separate thing was on a basic level, I'd love to
• 46:22
  know what Ben Aranovich actually thinks of this book himself.
• 46:26
  I mean he sort of hinted James that he's maybe maybe not a big
• 46:31
  fan of it himself but the the the prose is so, so and
• 46:36
  engaging. It's so it's it's it's I mean
• 46:40
  it's not the problem of it's not it's not the fault of cyberpunk
• 46:43
  because if you read William Gibson, William Gibson is a
• 46:46
  brilliant writer in the same sort of world.
• 46:50
  I like this world. I like reading cyberpunk.
• 46:53
  It's a it's basically a sci-fi version of Philip Marlowe or
• 46:57
  something. It's you know mean streets and
• 47:00
  detectives. It's cool.
• 47:02
  It's it's, you know cyberpunk, when it's done right, is yeah,
• 47:06
  I'm just going to put a neural implant into my head and I'm
• 47:08
  going to go hacking. But I'm also in a place with
• 47:10
  like Japanese vending machines and and it's all if he's done
• 47:15
  well, it's a certain type of thing and it works really well
• 47:18
  and Neuromancer is a brilliant, brilliant book and there's a
• 47:23
  reason it changed. You know spawned the genre.
• 47:27
  Absolutely brilliant and it's so well written and I mean and
• 47:34
  Aranovich is obviously a very talented writer, but he doesn't
• 47:39
  he, he, he he does the world building well.
• 47:41
  But all the things that I think I said when we were discussing
• 47:44
  this sort of online is all these things that are in this apart
• 47:49
  from the transit thing going through the through the solar
• 47:52
  system, which is very cool. But all the actual cyberpunk
• 47:57
  stuff is so derivative and so even by this point so old, you
• 48:03
  know, Neuromancer was 1984. Snow Crash, which is a
• 48:07
  brilliant, amazing book by Neil Stephenson was 1992.
• 48:13
  So, so all that sort of, you know, lawn mower man, all these
• 48:18
  all these things had started really coming out and becoming
• 48:20
  very mainstream. I say mainstream, not
• 48:23
  mainstream, but mainstream within people that like this
• 48:26
  sort of shit, as in, so I mean, as I said, and there's this,
• 48:31
  there's a, there's a role-playing game like a
• 48:32
  Dungeons and Dragons tabletop game called Cyberpunk that came
• 48:36
  out in 88. And it just brought all of these
• 48:40
  things into all the sort of things from the genre and put
• 48:45
  them into a role-playing game. And that's basically what
• 48:49
  transit is. Transit is that role-playing
• 48:51
  game in a Doctor Who's. I I suppose the only counter to
• 48:56
  that I I have and you know I I totally bow to your expertise on
• 49:01
  in terms of you know authentic cyberpunk and and and its
• 49:05
  quality and it was clearly hugely influential and I was
• 49:08
  kind of thinking I was tracing its influences.
• 49:10
  This kept reminding me of of all sorts of things, you know, from
• 49:13
  the 90s. Clearly cyberpunk seeped into
• 49:15
  the mainstream and you've got, you know, as I said lawn MO man,
• 49:18
  you've got Johnny Mnemonic, 12 Monkeys, Hackers, Strange, you
• 49:23
  know the mid 90s is full of films like this.
• 49:26
  You've got David Bowie releasing an album that he calls a non
• 49:28
  linear gothic drama Hyper Cycle which is again it's sort of it's
• 49:33
  got those influences. An album which by the way I
• 49:35
  think is aged well not because of the concept but because of
• 49:37
  the music. But it the thing that reminded
• 49:41
  me most weirdly was Red Dwarf, the sitcom with the bleakest
• 49:46
  ever opening episode in which over 10,000 people die but but
• 49:51
  not so much the series as the the the novels.
• 49:53
  The first one in particular which was called Infinity Well
• 49:56
  comes Careful Drivers published before transit.
• 49:59
  So I wonder whether this was an influence and and actually the
• 50:02
  there are references to similar places but I think the isn't it
• 50:06
  the first line in the first episode of Red Dwarf is Lister
• 50:08
  singing a song about Ganymede and Titan.
• 50:11
  And this has got right. This book has got many
• 50:14
  references to Ganymede and Triton.
• 50:16
  So you start to think, well, OK so there's there's some some
• 50:19
  links here it feels very very of its time but but however
• 50:24
  derivative it is, I I do think it's fair to say Doctor Who is
• 50:28
  quite often derivative and that's one of the things I like
• 50:32
  about it like not being a particular fan of Hammer Horror.
• 50:35
  I don't need to watch those films because I've got the
• 50:37
  Hinchcliffe era, so that does it for me and I quite like it when
• 50:41
  Doctor Who takes something from a no lifts something almost
• 50:45
  completely and does it as Doctor Who and it's never.
• 50:48
  Subtle is it. You can't do it.
• 50:49
  You don't do it subtle. Because you know, like like the
• 50:51
  Victoriana in Talon Swing, Cheyenne, you know it's all the
• 50:54
  obvious things, Fu Manchu and you know theatres and all the
• 50:58
  all the things that you expect to see.
• 50:59
  And here, if you're doing Doctor Who does cyberpunk, then I don't
• 51:02
  know what the key ingredients of cyberpunk are, but you've just
• 51:05
  got to throw them all in there. So people get it that aren't
• 51:08
  interested in cyberpunk, I think.
• 51:10
  But this refers back to what I was saying about Aronovich's
• 51:14
  skill of working in Doctor Who law.
• 51:19
  It's it's also filled with Doctor Who references, but it
• 51:21
  makes them feel for me at any rate, it makes them feel part of
• 51:24
  this world. At no point did I think always
• 51:26
  cramming in another bloody reference to season 17.
• 51:29
  It's always it's there. You know the the thing with the
• 51:31
  Ice Warriors, there's been a war with like the Ice Warriors.
• 51:34
  There's the background to that. There are actually.
• 51:37
  There's a tons of Wen Chiang reference.
• 51:40
  Isn't there the? He.
• 51:44
  He. He.
• 51:45
  Puts these things in, but it doesn't ever feel gratuitous.
• 51:49
  It feels like it's part of, Oh yeah, the the Sigma experiments
• 51:51
  get a reference because that's that's absolutely on topic.
• 51:55
  He references, you know, recent history as well.
• 51:58
  But never, it never feels like it's a kind of a fan, pleasing
• 52:02
  rundown bits of Doctor Who. It always feels like it's on
• 52:05
  point. No, I totally agree.
• 52:06
  And that's, that's the bits of the new adventures in general
• 52:11
  when they did stuff like, you know, calling, you know, we know
• 52:17
  about the Ice Warriors and we know about this.
• 52:19
  And just sort of creating a believable background from the
• 52:24
  fact that, well, if humans went to Earth in that period, then
• 52:28
  they probably had a war with the Ice Warriors and that kind of
• 52:31
  world building. And yeah, Aranovich in
• 52:33
  particular, I think that's why remembrance is so successful.
• 52:37
  You know this, this is it's like the opposite of the Timeless
• 52:40
  child, what he did in in remembrance.
• 52:44
  Leave it alone. All right, you.
• 52:46
  Know what he did in remembrance was like, totally like if he if
• 52:51
  he'd done it badly, people would have gone How dare you desecrate
• 52:54
  to the first episode of Doctor Who and and and make 1963
• 52:59
  important. That's not what it was about.
• 53:01
  But what he did was do it so brilliantly and bring in the
• 53:03
  hand of Omega and everyone went, yeah, brilliant.
• 53:07
  It was accepted immediately into this very fussy fandom.
• 53:11
  We immediately went yet Fine, yeah, you know, and he just,
• 53:17
  yeah, you're right, you're right.
• 53:18
  He does do all that stuff absolutely brilliantly.
• 53:22
  You said there how this still felt like Doctor Who to you
• 53:25
  because of all those references going in.
• 53:27
  This felt like a trout in the story to me.
• 53:29
  And bear with me a second because it was set in a load of
• 53:31
  train tunnels with a disembodied intelligence roaming about.
• 53:35
  I was getting massive web of fear vibes from this.
• 53:38
  All right, I'm certainly not in tone.
• 53:39
  I've got to say I agree with you, Jason.
• 53:41
  I wouldn't want to know any of these characters really, beyond
• 53:44
  the Doctor and Kaliatu, not even Benny in this.
• 53:47
  And we'll get on to Benny later. And I agree with you, Ian, that
• 53:51
  the tone of this is all wrong and it is unengaging.
• 53:54
  I don't agree about the pros, though.
• 53:56
  I feel like he he does write this quite well.
• 53:59
  I've got a couple of quotes here about the transit system.
• 54:02
  And I was, as I was reading it, I was going, yeah, that's a
• 54:04
  great way of saying this. He calls it an Organism with a
• 54:07
  multitude of orifices that swallowed people up and spat
• 54:11
  them out elsewhere, which I thought was a lovely light.
• 54:13
  And then later on, he's talking about the transit system
• 54:17
  stretching out into the universe, and he says the beast
• 54:20
  had yawned and stretched out to annihilate another frontier.
• 54:24
  And the whole book is full of really potent lines like that.
• 54:27
  I mean, I mean, you're right as well.
• 54:29
  So I guess, I guess what it is, is there are passages that
• 54:34
  aren't engaging and then there are passengers that are, I mean
• 54:38
  the bit. That's took.
• 54:39
  I didn't think this was engagement at all, Ian.
• 54:41
  If I'm honest, I just. I mean, I mean as in as in the
• 54:44
  writing but but the one that stuck out for me was when
• 54:47
  Francine was like flying a jet and and it seems so unexciting
• 54:54
  like the way it's described like she's flying a jet and missiles
• 54:57
  are doing this and it's just like I don't feel like I'm there
• 55:00
  but you're right. I agree there are however, like
• 55:03
  great poetical bits and stuff that that would do.
• 55:06
  Work. I think it's.
• 55:08
  I think it's a book of Aranovic after all.
• 55:11
  I think it's a book of two halves.
• 55:12
  I I mean, reading the first half, which switches again, it
• 55:18
  feels like a statement. It's part of the world building.
• 55:21
  It's deliberately obtuse. It's not.
• 55:24
  It doesn't want to be an easy read.
• 55:27
  It's not just being grown up in that kind of juvenile way with
• 55:31
  breasts and prostitutes. It is actually saying this is a
• 55:34
  grown up readership who can work things out for themselves.
• 55:37
  And I kind of respect that. I think it goes too far.
• 55:39
  I think it could actually hold us by the hand.
• 55:41
  James, should you put that many linguistic barriers between your
• 55:45
  audience and you, though? Should should you have to work
• 55:48
  this hard. No.
• 55:50
  Well, I mean, it's such a difficult one because this was
• 55:56
  aimed at a really small audience of people who I think he could
• 56:00
  justifiably assume we're going to make the effort.
• 56:03
  And I don't think, I don't think books have to be easy to read.
• 56:07
  I'm and I'm a huge fan of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy, and
• 56:12
  particularly Wolf Hall. The first of those is not easy
• 56:16
  because it doesn't make it obvious necessarily who she's
• 56:19
  talking about and it plunges you into this world populated with
• 56:24
  vast number of characters and you really have to keep up.
• 56:27
  And it doesn't have a glossary, but it has various family trees
• 56:30
  at the back and I was constantly flicking backwards and forwards.
• 56:32
  But I think that's one of the greatest books written in the
• 56:34
  last 20 years. So I mean, I don't think Transit
• 56:39
  is on that level, but I I sort of, you'll be surprised to hear,
• 56:42
  but I do. I admire the.
• 56:46
  Hutspa. I I do really.
• 56:48
  And I I and I respect him. I respect him going, no, this
• 56:54
  is. I'm not going to patronize the
• 56:56
  audience. As I say, I think maybe part of
• 56:59
  the problem is the lack of editorial input.
• 57:01
  And and the first half I was really kind of finding a slog to
• 57:05
  read at the same time as I was getting abusive messages from
• 57:09
  Joe saying how much I'd ruined his Christmas holiday.
• 57:11
  And I just needed. To let.
• 57:14
  You know that. I was having a miserable time
• 57:16
  and being blamed 100%, which as I've said I think was a little
• 57:19
  unfair. The moment they go to the
• 57:23
  Doctor's house, which is about halfway in fact it's it's just
• 57:25
  before kind of that it's in two parts.
• 57:27
  I I really feel it lifts and I feel like we reached the point
• 57:30
  that we maybe should have reached within a couple of
• 57:32
  chapters and the plot starts to really move along.
• 57:35
  He's less interested in the world building because he's
• 57:37
  built his world. I think that the whole sequence
• 57:40
  in the doctor's house, they get on a heritage steam train.
• 57:43
  You know, it's it's part of this cyberpunk world is that some
• 57:45
  things are still kind of functioning, presumably because
• 57:48
  that part of society that still wants to run a steam railway
• 57:51
  does, and they go to a house in Kent and it's it suddenly feels
• 57:54
  really Doctor Who. And the end of the first half of
• 57:57
  the book is the Doctor works out who the villain is while cooking
• 58:01
  and it just seems so suddenly. That was gorgeous and lovely.
• 58:05
  To see how he concocted that machine up out of all the
• 58:08
  Gubbins, just felt like the Time monster to me and went, oh, this
• 58:11
  is Doctor Who, we're back in. And then they started fucking
• 58:14
  upstairs and I was like, Oh no, wait, we're still in the New
• 58:16
  Adventures. Yeah, no.
• 58:17
  I had exactly the same feeling when they went to Kent.
• 58:20
  That reminded me of some reason. It reminded me of Professor
• 58:24
  Cronotis retiring. Oh yeah, yeah.
• 58:27
  All sorts of stuff. And and it was a bit like, did
• 58:30
  he, I don't know why he had to. I mean, he did the cyberpunk
• 58:36
  stuff. And the weird thing is, I did I
• 58:39
  I could follow every single thing.
• 58:41
  Because every single thing I knew I didn't need a glossary or
• 58:44
  anything. So that wasn't my barrier.
• 58:46
  I was there going, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know what's happening.
• 58:49
  I just didn't find a lot of it. I found a lot of it tedious.
• 58:53
  And then? It's turgid, isn't it?
• 58:55
  It's. It's turgid.
• 58:56
  Laboured and. It's not it's it's it's
• 58:58
  basically if you I, I, I, I beg you, go and go and read
• 59:01
  Neuromancer 1984, written on a typewriter but it feels like the
• 59:07
  future. He invented cyberspace in that
• 59:09
  book, the word cyberspace. He's invented.
• 59:13
  And it feels like the future. And it's probably quite corny
• 59:16
  now, but it is people. People being half online, half
• 59:20
  on offline, augmented warriors with PTSD.
• 59:24
  It's all the things that are in this but done.
• 59:27
  But I guess in the point I'm making.
• 59:28
  Is the money really writes it well?
• 59:31
  I, I, I, I, I will pick it up and read it because you've
• 59:34
  spoken passionately about it and I and I respect your opinion,
• 59:37
  but it's not a book that I would normally go to because it's not
• 59:39
  really my area of interest. The reason I picked up transit
• 59:42
  is because it's got the doctor in it and that's my in.
• 59:45
  And actually as I said, it turns out that underneath all the the
• 59:49
  cyberpunky surface, there's quite a traditional story and
• 59:53
  for the second-half I think rattles along at quite a pace.
• 59:56
  And there was a point where I thought actually, do you know,
• 59:58
  I'm really enjoying myself now. It's got a lot of scenes.
• 1:00:01
  With the Doctor in Kadiatu who have a brilliant kind of
• 1:00:04
  relationship, there's a great dynamic, it's very witty writing
• 1:00:09
  and it's kind of the more I thought about it, the more I
• 1:00:12
  thought this would break down quite easily into a traditional
• 1:00:15
  4 parter. It's that four act structure
• 1:00:17
  where the 1st episode is tension and horror, the 2nd is kind of
• 1:00:23
  working out what's going on, building the tension but
• 1:00:26
  starting to get some answers to. The third is a chase scene and
• 1:00:29
  the 4th is that your your showdown?
• 1:00:31
  Yeah, yeah. You know the.
• 1:00:33
  Interesting thing for me was that as you say this, I mean you
• 1:00:36
  talked about a lack of editorial input.
• 1:00:38
  There's there's also some very obvious editorial impact.
• 1:00:40
  Cadiatu was definitely being built up as a new companion.
• 1:00:43
  And then someone said no, we're having Benny actually, so he had
• 1:00:45
  to cram Benny in and not knowing much about her, he gets her
• 1:00:50
  possessed by an alien intelligence right off the bat
• 1:00:52
  and then presents us with lots of fake Benny's.
• 1:00:55
  Jason, imagine Rose Walk stepping out of the TARDIS at
• 1:00:58
  the end of the world and being possessed for the whole episode.
• 1:01:01
  I mean, you just wouldn't do it, would you?
• 1:01:03
  No, I mean, and the other thing of course is that not only is
• 1:01:06
  Benny possessed, but she's possessed by what is an evil in
• 1:01:10
  Inverted Comma's intelligence because she does some really
• 1:01:12
  horrific things, starts a riot, or gets people killed.
• 1:01:16
  Child mortality is a thing in this story which is quite often
• 1:01:22
  ignored. Generally speaking, children are
• 1:01:25
  usually safe. I can only think of two
• 1:01:29
  examples, and they're both from modern who where children have
• 1:01:32
  explicitly been killed, and one of them is the little boy who
• 1:01:36
  falls through the ice in thin ice, and one of them is the kid
• 1:01:40
  who's with the family that gets blown up by the Daleks in the
• 1:01:43
  stolen Earth. And the Choclophone?
• 1:01:46
  Oh yeah, Well, yeah. The Tockler fame, of course,
• 1:01:48
  but. Lot of that.
• 1:01:50
  Plane that went down in the giggle mouth here, housing,
• 1:01:52
  estate or two as well, yeah. But, and in this case, it's
• 1:01:56
  Benny who gives a grenade to a child to throw into the mix who
• 1:02:00
  cannot get away from the blast radius of the grenade, which is
• 1:02:03
  horrific. And then we have all these fake
• 1:02:06
  Benny's and everything else. So there's Editor.
• 1:02:08
  But in amongst that there is a traditional Doctor Who story,
• 1:02:11
  and I found it ironic that at the beginning, the description
• 1:02:15
  of the remains of the people who get splattered by the transit
• 1:02:18
  system when it goes out of control.
• 1:02:21
  Quite apart from the fact they've done something
• 1:02:22
  incredibly stupid sticking their podium right at the end of the
• 1:02:25
  track, which even in the 20th century, we weren't doing
• 1:02:28
  anything that moronic by having everybody standing at the end of
• 1:02:31
  a track with. Wouldn't you?
• 1:02:32
  Love to have seen that realized though, in the early 90s, That
• 1:02:35
  trainer, that massive explanation.
• 1:02:37
  It would have been terrible. The way he describes the remains
• 1:02:40
  being so mushed up that they're not, it's not blood and guts,
• 1:02:44
  it's a blue smear across the wall.
• 1:02:46
  And you think this would actually work on televised
• 1:02:48
  Doctor Who. It's sort of family friendly,
• 1:02:50
  gruesome death. And then in the next chapter
• 1:02:54
  he's got people being impaled graphically into their seats and
• 1:02:58
  descriptions of the wound and the blood dripping out of it and
• 1:03:02
  alien cake monsters or whatever they're called being blasted and
• 1:03:05
  having holes blown in and bits of bodies coming up in.
• 1:03:08
  Hang on a second. Jason oh, it was, yes.
• 1:03:11
  The editor was Eric Saywood. So you.
• 1:03:14
  Know it's almost you know this is oh it's all family, friends.
• 1:03:20
  No, it's not. No, it's not.
• 1:03:22
  It's. Not, you know, there's there's
• 1:03:23
  something that you could make a traditional Doctor Who story out
• 1:03:27
  of, but if you stripped away a lot of.
• 1:03:29
  I kept thinking, do you know what?
• 1:03:31
  Take that. You could actually go, let's do
• 1:03:34
  exactly that. You could imagine a showrunner
• 1:03:37
  going. Actually I quite like the
• 1:03:40
  principle of the, you know, of the the whole universe, a train,
• 1:03:44
  a train line, basically London, London, London Underground.
• 1:03:49
  But it's but it's throughout the solar system that's quite neat.
• 1:03:53
  Take that basic thing with Mars and all this, and he could
• 1:03:57
  actually make a good episode of No.
• 1:03:59
  It was. It was mooted.
• 1:04:01
  That was his original idea. When he was approached to Doctor
• 1:04:04
  Who, it was going to be this idea, obviously, not this tone.
• 1:04:06
  Wouldn't have read like this? But that was, that was.
• 1:04:09
  But that was the basic premise of what he wanted to go with
• 1:04:11
  originally. Yeah, the the whole cyberpunk
• 1:04:14
  thing feels it's. It's not just that it's done
• 1:04:18
  badly and derivatively, and it's a block to the casual reader or
• 1:04:22
  even the casual reader, isn't it?
• 1:04:24
  Almost. It falls away as a thing that's
• 1:04:27
  necessary quite in quite the main.
• 1:04:32
  The main big concept is the transit system.
• 1:04:35
  We don't go into cyberspace at the climate, so we go to this
• 1:04:37
  other dimension isn't. Yeah, right.
• 1:04:39
  That, that, that just felt like, oh, looks like you've confused a
• 1:04:42
  lot and now we're going into the mind.
• 1:04:44
  Rock. Totally.
• 1:04:45
  Lost about? This really, really interesting
• 1:04:47
  thing that I noticed when I read this, when you compare that to
• 1:04:50
  his Rivers of London Books, because that's a fairly common
• 1:04:54
  thing that happened in The Rivers of London Books, is our
• 1:04:56
  protagonist goes into an alternative realm to resolve the
• 1:05:00
  plot of the story. You know I.
• 1:05:03
  Mean there's also very new adventures that happens in.
• 1:05:05
  I mean that's that is the the I would say again I I know I'm the
• 1:05:10
  bar is extremely low as a point of comparison.
• 1:05:13
  But I think in terms of being a kind of coherent ending to this
• 1:05:19
  story this is far more readable than the ending of Revelation
• 1:05:23
  which just goes into kind of the doctor's head for what feels
• 1:05:26
  like forever and he sees former versions of himself and it's
• 1:05:30
  like ticks the boxes of the things that will please the fans
• 1:05:32
  and it's not really about sorry this feels to me much more.
• 1:05:35
  I mean it's there's a bit of a weird obsession with Alice in
• 1:05:38
  Wonderland and there's a lot of imagery from kind of that that
• 1:05:40
  kind of surreal. But it does at least feel like
• 1:05:43
  it's a conclusion to this plot. Even though he's taken the
• 1:05:47
  decision to to put it in a in a surreal reality, it is all
• 1:05:51
  driving towards a a conclusion. It's not just kind of padding.
• 1:05:57
  You know, it also has something in common with with other 7th
• 1:06:00
  Doctor stories in that the resolution, in part in a large
• 1:06:04
  part, only works because the Doctor, without saying anything,
• 1:06:10
  somehow knows that his companion is going to leap into the same
• 1:06:14
  situation and do something a bit like the end of Greatest Show in
• 1:06:18
  the Galaxy that relies on somebody tossing that medallion
• 1:06:20
  into the pit at just the right moment for him to to do He's.
• 1:06:24
  The master of 1000 games. Jason.
• 1:06:26
  He's seen it all. He knows it all.
• 1:06:28
  It's Kadiatu arriving at just the right time to start causing,
• 1:06:33
  yeah, enough of a distraction for him to actually do what he
• 1:06:35
  needs to do. And it's all very abstract and
• 1:06:37
  weird and. Abstract is the word too
• 1:06:40
  abstract from my taste. Yeah, it got a bit weird and
• 1:06:42
  it's basically just seen oh there we go, right, problem
• 1:06:44
  solved. Now you're you can say.
• 1:06:47
  I just like something a bit more explicit.
• 1:06:49
  It was all done with weird imagery and I'll go What is
• 1:06:51
  happening? I had no clue what was going on
• 1:06:54
  in the climax. And there there's a.
• 1:06:56
  Lot of people did you not because?
• 1:06:57
  I took a quote from one of the sequences where people going
• 1:07:01
  into cyberspace and getting information directly from
• 1:07:05
  cyberspace with an implant in their heads, and it's like it
• 1:07:08
  was out on the margins by the Ministry of Education, a
• 1:07:12
  backwater region where Shoals of Wales swam grazing quietly
• 1:07:16
  through the history files. Students running search
• 1:07:19
  programs, a fine haze of translation flags hungover, the
• 1:07:23
  still surface of the data, a flock of updates wheeled
• 1:07:26
  overhead. Occasionally one would dive into
• 1:07:29
  the files and vanish, rising up moments later with an error
• 1:07:32
  swerving in its beak. That's so mid, so mid 90s that.
• 1:07:37
  Isn't it? But, but, but what's going on
• 1:07:39
  here is is actually quite clear. He's he's gone into the
• 1:07:41
  computer, he's fighting a computer virus, and the only way
• 1:07:44
  he can defeat it is to go in and face it on his own terms.
• 1:07:48
  And that means going in and he is able to picture things
• 1:07:51
  because he's part of now this computer matrix, he's able to
• 1:07:54
  picture things as he wants to. So it ends up in this surreal,
• 1:07:57
  as I say, sort of Alice in Wonderland inspired kind of
• 1:08:00
  court proceeding in which he is picturing the various parts of
• 1:08:04
  the computer and the virus as characters, which I don't know.
• 1:08:08
  I I feel like that's a really intelligent and interesting way.
• 1:08:12
  So much for explaining it to. Me, but but also so he's.
• 1:08:15
  So it's also. Derivative.
• 1:08:17
  Well, you say it's derivative, but.
• 1:08:19
  But. That is William Gibson,
• 1:08:20
  Cyberspace, The Matrix, he called it.
• 1:08:23
  But it doesn't. And you go into cyberspace and
• 1:08:26
  and that's what happens. People, people, you know, the
• 1:08:30
  the what they call Netrunners, they go in with their their
• 1:08:34
  implants and all that sort of stuff happens.
• 1:08:36
  But I don't but I think it's sort of wears its influences on
• 1:08:38
  its sleeve. I'm not yeah yeah I'm sure it's
• 1:08:41
  derivative but it's but it's for me it's entertaining like the
• 1:08:45
  the where he's actually having this this surreal court case
• 1:08:48
  presided over by the the majesty the emperor of subsystems and
• 1:08:51
  all these characters these they're they're comical it's
• 1:08:54
  inventive it's there's real jeopardy as well but it's it's
• 1:08:57
  it's in a highly an entertaining way and it's very 7th doctor to
• 1:09:00
  have that kind of showdown. But it's not derivative for a
• 1:09:02
  Doctor Who story because we haven't done this before.
• 1:09:05
  No, I guess. We can't assume everybody
• 1:09:07
  reading this book is a cyberpunk fan, because they're.
• 1:09:09
  Just you know, and I I I think cyberpunk work would work.
• 1:09:13
  I mean, I think it would probably work in this if they
• 1:09:16
  just dial down the sex. But there's the main problem for
• 1:09:19
  me for this book was something off with some of the pros.
• 1:09:24
  But can I go back to what you were saying about?
• 1:09:27
  The sex, the whole the whole sex thing.
• 1:09:29
  I I don't like this level of sex in anything to do with Doctor
• 1:09:34
  Who. Which is?
• 1:09:35
  To talk about the, to talk to go back to what you were saying
• 1:09:38
  about the kind of the violence, the the death, the dead children
• 1:09:41
  and all these references to prostitutes.
• 1:09:43
  I I do think, I mean, again, this is not a version of Doctor
• 1:09:47
  Who that I'm arguing anyone really wants, and it's not a
• 1:09:51
  version of Doctor Who that I would want.
• 1:09:54
  But it's presented in a way that I, I find within its own terms
• 1:10:00
  works, even down to the Doctor getting drunk.
• 1:10:04
  In the first scene, it's written as it would be played if
• 1:10:09
  Sylvester McCoy was doing a a scene of the Doctor getting
• 1:10:11
  drunk I. Thought that was quite playfully
• 1:10:13
  done. Absolutely, yeah.
• 1:10:15
  So if you say to somebody, you know, in the first bit of the
• 1:10:18
  book, the Doctor gets drunk, they're going to go, well,
• 1:10:20
  that's not what the Doctor does. But somehow he managed to
• 1:10:23
  present it in a way that feels perfectly in character.
• 1:10:25
  And the the other thing that I think is absolutely to his
• 1:10:28
  credit is that it's not prurient that, you know, Yes, there's
• 1:10:34
  there's fairly kind of unflinching view of
• 1:10:37
  prostitution, but it's never seen through the male gaze.
• 1:10:42
  I don't think it's ever there to be titillating.
• 1:10:44
  In fact, I think he writes the prostitutes as quite sympathetic
• 1:10:47
  characters and I think we. Agree there.
• 1:10:50
  Would you? I mean, I I think it's.
• 1:10:52
  I'm not. Sure, it's each characters, but
• 1:10:54
  I also think, I also think it's very much like, was he just not
• 1:11:00
  getting laid when he was writing?
• 1:11:02
  Because I think. It's a complaint I'll make about
• 1:11:05
  Steven Moffat. Quite a lot, you know.
• 1:11:07
  Oh God. It's it's just it's unbearable.
• 1:11:09
  It's like, I mean like you were saying about the oh, they
• 1:11:12
  haven't. We've got the nice bit of
• 1:11:13
  Doctor. It feels like Doctor Who again.
• 1:11:15
  I know they're fucking upstairs. It's like even when they're even
• 1:11:18
  when they're in The Cave even with the Ice Warrior graffiti
• 1:11:21
  it's like oh it's about Ice Warrior tits.
• 1:11:24
  It's you know, it's about dorsal dorsal displays and and and this
• 1:11:29
  and it's just it's just and when when the there's so many all the
• 1:11:33
  way through it. I just kept going, oh, I'm going
• 1:11:34
  to write it down and it's well, you know when when the what they
• 1:11:38
  call the Rasvetka, they're all webbed up in the stuff on the
• 1:11:42
  way to a mission. So Mon's copying a fail.
• 1:11:45
  It's just like constant sex and it's embarrassing.
• 1:11:48
  I'm embarrassed for him. There's a there's a moment when
• 1:11:50
  when in when they go to Mars and they find that what turns out to
• 1:11:54
  be a fake Benny has has stolen a dump truck and she's killed some
• 1:11:57
  poor SAP who was like, and for whatever reason, there's no
• 1:12:00
  reason for it. It doesn't.
• 1:12:01
  Oh yeah, yeah. And it's porn.
• 1:12:02
  I wrote that one down. Turns out that the poor guy was
• 1:12:04
  browsing a porno mag at the time, and they make mention of
• 1:12:07
  the fact that he had porn. That has nothing to do with
• 1:12:10
  anything. You didn't need that.
• 1:12:12
  We just needed to know that she'd killed an attendant.
• 1:12:15
  We didn't need to know that he was reading porn and having a
• 1:12:17
  wank on duty, you know? And this?
• 1:12:20
  Maybe this is the time to go into discussing a bit.
• 1:12:23
  Tread or RAD. And also sex in Doctor Who
• 1:12:27
  because I've never liked Torchwood as because let alone
• 1:12:32
  this Torchwood until it became Children of Earth and it found a
• 1:12:37
  tone that was Doctor Who a bit grown up.
• 1:12:41
  I hated it. I hated there were fucking you
• 1:12:43
  know you had orgasm monsters and you had orgasm gas.
• 1:12:46
  What it was and you had people fucking in bathrooms in a Doctor
• 1:12:51
  Who program. And I just.
• 1:12:53
  Everything. That's a Doctor Who programme,
• 1:12:54
  though it was tortured. No, no, but it was.
• 1:12:57
  Because I I like you to Secret torture is an anagram of Doctor
• 1:13:00
  Who. No, it's not joking.
• 1:13:02
  No, it was founded by Queen Victoria in fucking werewolf
• 1:13:07
  adventure for eight-year olds. They they.
• 1:13:09
  But they deliberately put it on later on another channel and
• 1:13:11
  gave me a different. Value but but but I'm just
• 1:13:14
  saying that it's. Still, not the Huniverse these
• 1:13:16
  days. I wonder how many children have
• 1:13:17
  stumbled across that. It's in the Huniverse and even
• 1:13:20
  when it was on, I remember loads of kids saying it's Doctor Who
• 1:13:23
  for adults. Have you seen it?
• 1:13:24
  Yeah, it's got naughty bits. Do you get to that line in the
• 1:13:27
  Time Warrior? Then when he goes, what is it?
• 1:13:30
  I thought it would be a bit too old for that sort of thing,
• 1:13:33
  Every humour in Doctor. Who this thing that is as I've
• 1:13:36
  as I've said again I've said before and so I'm I'm kind of
• 1:13:39
  like a stuck record is that in in that period Russell T Davis
• 1:13:44
  was presiding over Doctor Who and an adult spin off in the
• 1:13:48
  form of Torchwood and a children's spin off in the form
• 1:13:51
  of Sarah Jane Adventures. And for my money, The Sarah Jane
• 1:13:54
  Adventures was far the more mature of the two.
• 1:13:56
  Yeah, yeah. And that's exactly what.
• 1:13:58
  That's exactly what we've got. The problem with transit is, you
• 1:14:00
  know, feels like it's, I think I said this in the thing, you
• 1:14:05
  know, the the the GIF of, Oh my God, with David Brent, this
• 1:14:10
  feels this, this this feels so childish because it's trying to
• 1:14:16
  be so hard. I'll make a comparison, OK in
• 1:14:19
  the also people. And that's what this really
• 1:14:21
  sticks out in my head as, as a moment where Ross has a romance
• 1:14:26
  with somebody. And I remember there's a scene
• 1:14:30
  where she never they never, I don't think you're ever, it's
• 1:14:32
  ever described as the two of them having sex.
• 1:14:34
  But she puts her house down his trousers and she sort of plays
• 1:14:38
  with his pubic hair, right? And obviously that's explicit,
• 1:14:41
  but it's kind of it's a sweet moment, you know, and and that
• 1:14:44
  just shows you how much he's learned from there to there.
• 1:14:48
  Because what we get here is I don't object to the sexiness
• 1:14:50
  because I think James is right. If it's played by its own rules
• 1:14:53
  and you're having sex in this world, then go for it.
• 1:14:56
  Don't do it timidly, Just go for it and do it rapidly.
• 1:14:58
  But the. Sex But the sex is badly
• 1:15:01
  written, I. Mean.
• 1:15:01
  That's what I was going to say. I've got a quote here.
• 1:15:03
  Wait for this. Cadiatu locking her legs across
• 1:15:06
  his hips, her arms around his back, straining to drag him
• 1:15:09
  inside her to make it hard herself.
• 1:15:12
  Serious sex this time. No jokes or laughter, just deep.
• 1:15:16
  The Malian instinct ascending through a complex strata of
• 1:15:21
  emotions. Yeah.
• 1:15:22
  That's the sort of line I would have written when I was 14,
• 1:15:24
  yeah. I've written the words bad sex
• 1:15:26
  award above that but but this is the I mean, there's so many bad
• 1:15:30
  ones. They've fallen out of bed and
• 1:15:32
  the impact of her buttocks on the floor had triggered her
• 1:15:35
  flight. Her climax?
• 1:15:36
  The 1st in her life. Are we?
• 1:15:38
  And we've all had that happen. Come on now.
• 1:15:40
  Well. But that my wife looked at that
• 1:15:43
  and she just went. That man's never touched a
• 1:15:45
  woman. I'm not back here.
• 1:15:48
  Really. Ben Ben Ben Ben Ben Aronovich is
• 1:15:53
  59 now, so he was quite old then.
• 1:15:57
  He was 28, Yeah. 28. Lance Parkin on in in his
• 1:16:02
  interview. I wrote this down like.
• 1:16:03
  A14A Horny 14 year old. In in your, in your, in your
• 1:16:07
  Lance Parkin, he said. One of the problems with getting
• 1:16:09
  young writers for this kind of thing is you get the last
• 1:16:12
  vestiges of teenage pretension, which is absolutely true of, you
• 1:16:16
  know, most of these books and 28 is not old for for, you know, to
• 1:16:22
  to be published. And I think, you know, he's
• 1:16:24
  still an inexperience. This is his second piece of his
• 1:16:28
  second attempt at writing a novel.
• 1:16:30
  I think you get the teenage pretension.
• 1:16:32
  You also get the teenage bad sex.
• 1:16:36
  I I think there are. I think it's more mature than an
• 1:16:41
  awful lot of what is around it in the new adventures.
• 1:16:45
  I'm not saying it's it's particularly brilliant writing,
• 1:16:52
  but I feel like there's a point to it.
• 1:16:54
  I never feel that. It's gratuitous because I feel
• 1:16:58
  like it's part of the world. It's part of the world building
• 1:17:01
  and particularly kind of on the on the on the death like
• 1:17:05
  comparing it to Eric Saywood who would just Chuck in dead bodies
• 1:17:09
  as cannon fodder. I actually feel he there's some
• 1:17:11
  quite interesting juxtapositions and it's all to do with this.
• 1:17:14
  You know I I was often reminded of the doomsday weapon actually.
• 1:17:18
  And the world that Malcolm Hulk built up there and and the
• 1:17:23
  grimness of that kind of that corporate blandness and the the
• 1:17:28
  profit making as a as at the heart of it all because there's
• 1:17:30
  an awful lot of that in here as well.
• 1:17:33
  And it it all seems to me that it's it's the kind of detritus
• 1:17:37
  of the of the politics that we we get a glimpse of.
• 1:17:41
  And there's a scene where Blondie is in put into a a an
• 1:17:45
  armoured suit and almost kills his friend just by think, by
• 1:17:49
  accidentally jokingly thinking shoot.
• 1:17:53
  And he realizes that you know how easily you can kill in this
• 1:17:56
  armour. And it's juxtaposed with a scene
• 1:17:58
  where the doctor in Kariyatu arrive at a station after a
• 1:18:00
  massacre and they're surrounded by dead bodies.
• 1:18:03
  And I felt like the dead bodies have been put there not just as
• 1:18:05
  cannon fodder but actually as a kind of the flip side of this.
• 1:18:09
  We've been shown the weaponry we've been shown the kind of
• 1:18:11
  sleek profitable side of killing.
• 1:18:14
  Now we're shown the impact of that.
• 1:18:17
  It all seemed to be kind of part of that world and I think he's
• 1:18:19
  quite interested in. I mean, there's a lot of things
• 1:18:25
  in this that feel quite prescient, I think.
• 1:18:28
  Now I'm sure it is also derivative.
• 1:18:30
  I'm sure it also kind of comes from the cyberpunk world, but
• 1:18:33
  there are glimpses of the illogical logic of machines
• 1:18:39
  taking charge of stuff that wouldn't have been the case in
• 1:18:42
  1992, but absolutely are the case now.
• 1:18:44
  And I just read it with recognition.
• 1:18:46
  Anyone who's fought with one of those bloody machines in Tesco
• 1:18:48
  knows, you know, the experience of of of a machine taking part.
• 1:18:52
  One of the, I mean, one of the one of the geniuses of William
• 1:18:55
  Gibson is is he famously wrote Neuromancer on a typewriter
• 1:19:01
  after reading some computer magazines.
• 1:19:03
  But it's it's it's such a prediction of our of our how
• 1:19:08
  we're start, how we're living now it's set in the 22nd century
• 1:19:12
  just like this book but it's early 22nd century but it is so
• 1:19:17
  spot on. I mean we've seen it coming down
• 1:19:20
  the track, multi multinational corporations becoming more
• 1:19:24
  powerful than than nation states.
• 1:19:28
  The the disconnect, the rise of AI it's all there in 1984.
• 1:19:33
  The. First Person's Future, which is
• 1:19:37
  a season seven episode of The X-Files which is incredibly
• 1:19:40
  derivative and highly sexist. We all have our off days.
• 1:19:45
  Who? So who wrote?
• 1:19:45
  That William Gibson did. Oh, did he?
• 1:19:47
  Well, he also wrote the you know, the the, the unmade, the
• 1:19:51
  the instalment of Alien which which was made as an audio,
• 1:19:56
  which is good, but it still was a bit.
• 1:19:59
  I could see why they didn't bother making the movie.
• 1:20:01
  With reference to the to the blue slime that Jason was
• 1:20:04
  talking about, I I enjoyed this paragraph.
• 1:20:07
  Some wag of a pundit had suggested that since most
• 1:20:10
  politicians were slime, death had merely caused them to revert
• 1:20:12
  to their natural state justice. The Justice Ministry was
• 1:20:16
  probably raiding its databases right now looking for a law to
• 1:20:19
  arrest him with. And I thought, well, that's
• 1:20:22
  exactly what this government would do then.
• 1:20:24
  You know, if some pundits said something like that, you know
• 1:20:26
  that distasteful and so many. He's a witty writer, isn't he
• 1:20:30
  really, really is a witty. A lot of the humour here is
• 1:20:32
  really bleak, but it is it is witty throughout.
• 1:20:36
  It's just all taking place in this very, very depressing
• 1:20:40
  world. Yes.
• 1:20:42
  Are we on board with exploring it or you're sort of repelled by
• 1:20:45
  it? Yeah, that's the thing that that
• 1:20:47
  that made this such a struggle for me to get through, is that
• 1:20:50
  we Yeah, OK, it's a dystopian future.
• 1:20:53
  It's all that kind of thing. But aside from the bit in the
• 1:20:57
  doctor's house where they have a nice bit of dinner and actually
• 1:21:00
  get to relax a little bit, there's no indication given that
• 1:21:06
  any character has somewhere nice to go or some fun times with
• 1:21:12
  mates. Or, you know, there's there's
• 1:21:14
  fun things happening. Like anything that we might do
• 1:21:19
  to enjoy ourselves in a world that is absolute shit, let's be
• 1:21:23
  honest, you know? But even in the world, even in a
• 1:21:26
  world that's absolute shit, there are still going to be
• 1:21:28
  things that are good and fun. And there wasn't a single hint
• 1:21:31
  of any of that through this book that I could determine one thing
• 1:21:35
  I did. I mean, just, I've just got my
• 1:21:37
  notes in front of me. One thing that did make me
• 1:21:39
  giggle, because he's so nearly got it right, is the reference
• 1:21:42
  to the navsat that somebody find their way around you just you
• 1:21:48
  just switch those two around. We all use those.
• 1:21:53
  And yeah, but one thing this did remind me of in places, partly
• 1:21:58
  because of partly because there's large chunks of it set
• 1:22:01
  on Mars, and partly because of the thing about multinational
• 1:22:05
  corporations becoming more powerful than governments,
• 1:22:07
  Things like that is the The Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson,
• 1:22:14
  which is another bit of superb world building, excellent
• 1:22:19
  descriptions of the terrain on Mars.
• 1:22:20
  And yeah, it describes a future where all sorts of weird and
• 1:22:24
  wonderful things go on and multinational corporation or
• 1:22:27
  trans Nats as they're called in that book, become the ultimate
• 1:22:30
  power. I those are, those are brilliant
• 1:22:34
  books. And that's another thing to
• 1:22:35
  recommend. If anyone wants some really good
• 1:22:37
  sci-fi is go and read the Miles trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson.
• 1:22:42
  It's absolutely superb. There is one moment in the
• 1:22:44
  second book that made me go wow. It was a real kind of Wham.
• 1:22:50
  Like the one that's got greening of Mars and then?
• 1:22:53
  It's Green Mars. And yeah, I'm sure, yeah.
• 1:22:55
  Green Mars, Red Mars. There's a there's a there's a
• 1:22:58
  moment, and it may be a spoiler for people, but hopefully
• 1:23:01
  everyone would have forgotten because they're such big, chunky
• 1:23:03
  books. It will take you forever to get
• 1:23:04
  to that point. Anyway, there's a moment in
• 1:23:08
  where there's one in Red Mars where they destroy a space
• 1:23:10
  elevator, improve the physics of a problem of a space elevator
• 1:23:14
  when the huge carbon fiber elevator shaft wraps itself
• 1:23:18
  around Mars and causes incredible damage.
• 1:23:21
  But there's also a sequence in Green Mars where they're sort of
• 1:23:24
  part way through the terraforming process and there's
• 1:23:26
  a bunch of terrorist attacks happening.
• 1:23:29
  There's a city that's about to get wiped out and somebody goes
• 1:23:33
  on about the terraforming efforts and the the way the
• 1:23:36
  atmosphere has been changing and how the pressure changes on Mars
• 1:23:39
  and all that. And then somebody says it's
• 1:23:41
  breathable. And at that point, without the
• 1:23:44
  context, it doesn't seem so big. But at that point I was like, Oh
• 1:23:48
  my God, I know what they're going to do next.
• 1:23:50
  And it was, it was superb. It's really, really well
• 1:23:52
  written. So now.
• 1:23:54
  Come on Josh, you've got happy about doing this.
• 1:23:55
  Recommend another book series on a Doctor Who book called Cast.
• 1:23:59
  Definitely recommend the The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley.
• 1:24:02
  Orbits Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars.
• 1:24:03
  It's they're superb books. I've not read them.
• 1:24:07
  I remember being intrigued by them on in in Waterstones.
• 1:24:10
  I don't quite. Recommend them.
• 1:24:13
  There's there's some there's two things that two other things I
• 1:24:16
  want to cover and then obviously I'll throw it out to everybody
• 1:24:19
  for anything else they want to add.
• 1:24:21
  But one is we touched on Caveati, but we haven't really
• 1:24:23
  talked about it too much and I feel that's an important thing
• 1:24:26
  just but also just the nature of the threat in this and how well
• 1:24:30
  you thought that came across. Let's go across too.
• 1:24:34
  Well, what about Cadiati Ian? Well, yeah, that I was literally
• 1:24:38
  going to say we haven't even talked about the beginning of
• 1:24:40
  getting horny in Africa. More sex?
• 1:24:46
  Yeah, yeah, because. Because.
• 1:24:47
  She was a genetic experiment. But she she Yeah, but.
• 1:24:52
  Yeah, it's kind of fudged, isn't it?
• 1:24:54
  She's adopted. But it's also it's also the
• 1:24:57
  Brigadier getting horny in Africa.
• 1:24:58
  But it's weird because with my, with my, with my, with my lad,
• 1:25:02
  he's suddenly discovering all the he started to out of it on
• 1:25:06
  his own volition. He's 8 watch because of iPlayer
• 1:25:10
  watch. Classic.
• 1:25:11
  He doesn't watch. He tends to not be able to do
• 1:25:13
  the whole episode but but he's stuck on that but he's stuck on
• 1:25:17
  the planet of the Spiders today. And it's so weird because we've
• 1:25:20
  got Turkish delight of the East Shahrazadi and you see the you
• 1:25:25
  see the Brigadier like he he lived.
• 1:25:28
  You tell me there's no sex in Doctor Who.
• 1:25:30
  Oh, the Brigadier is absolutely that lays the ground for
• 1:25:33
  Kadiyatu and and his whole. Yeah, yeah, in African.
• 1:25:36
  Reaction. You know when when he says
• 1:25:37
  weird. I was about, I was about to come
• 1:25:39
  and do this podcast and then just coincidentally, my lad puts
• 1:25:42
  on that episode and it makes me go, Oh yeah, there's the,
• 1:25:46
  there's the, there's the Brigadier showing some
• 1:25:49
  sexuality. Happy memories of that time in
• 1:25:51
  Africa. Yeah you've maddened it but but
• 1:26:01
  but yeah, yeah, but but I yeah, again many, many, many elements
• 1:26:04
  of sex in this. The Brigadier watching 1/2 naked
• 1:26:08
  native lady jiggle jiggle around and just it's awful.
• 1:26:13
  Absolutely. I was grinding my teeth when I
• 1:26:16
  was reading it. It's awful.
• 1:26:17
  But what about And then the? Character.
• 1:26:20
  Oh yeah, and she. But yeah, she is actually.
• 1:26:24
  It's almost like, I mean nothing against Benny, but she's a lot
• 1:26:28
  more generic and Katie are too soon, actually.
• 1:26:30
  Maybe they should have gone with her as a character, As a
• 1:26:32
  companion. It really feels like the book
• 1:26:35
  that is going that way isn't. You can see how this.
• 1:26:37
  Is written and she pops up very so often doesn't she?
• 1:26:40
  But she's yeah, she's really good.
• 1:26:43
  I just wish. I just wish they because there's
• 1:26:45
  no need for her to. It's a bit too neat making her a
• 1:26:49
  left bridge Stewart. And then the fact that they've
• 1:26:52
  the fact that they have a black character and then they take it
• 1:26:55
  to colonial stuff and they have all that, Oh, it's just you
• 1:26:58
  could probably unpick how, you know, borderline offensive that
• 1:27:03
  is. I would have been a hell of a
• 1:27:05
  companion intro, wouldn't it? The Doctor ended up in bed with
• 1:27:07
  their companion in the very first.
• 1:27:09
  He doesn't end up in bed with her, he ends up in her bed.
• 1:27:12
  But that's a different. Potato.
• 1:27:15
  Potato. Well, come on, James Cadiatu.
• 1:27:18
  She hasn't, Jody. So you know, that mattress was
• 1:27:22
  definitely there, weren't it? I think it is.
• 1:27:24
  It is worth pointing out that the the problems with Benny are
• 1:27:27
  not Aronovic's fault because of the turn around of these books.
• 1:27:32
  I I what I As I was reading it, I actually began to wonder
• 1:27:36
  whether he'd written a draft with Ace because Kadiatu is a a
• 1:27:42
  you know, she she's a more interesting character than Ace,
• 1:27:45
  certainly at at this stage of her development.
• 1:27:49
  But there are similarities and her function in the kind of end
• 1:27:54
  game of the plot is identical to what Aces would have been, which
• 1:27:57
  is the Doctor is with someone who he trusts to basically
• 1:28:01
  disobey him and burst in after him and and and rescue him and
• 1:28:05
  there's a really interesting tension.
• 1:28:07
  Again, contrasting unfavorably with Ace, By which I mean the
• 1:28:15
  the Ace tension by this stage of the new adventures has become
• 1:28:18
  really tired and sort of pointless.
• 1:28:21
  They, they're constantly bickering, they're constantly
• 1:28:24
  distrustful. And you think, well, why are you
• 1:28:27
  spending time with each other? Feels like a very juvenile way
• 1:28:31
  of trying to create adult tension, Whereas here there's a
• 1:28:34
  genuine tension because she is strange.
• 1:28:36
  She's, you know, there's something about her which is
• 1:28:38
  unknown. She's the product of some kind
• 1:28:41
  of genetic experiment, but she's introduced as a student.
• 1:28:45
  She's introduced as, I think, a really compellingly written
• 1:28:50
  character who's independent, who's feisty, who's got
• 1:28:52
  interesting contacts. She is observant.
• 1:28:57
  She's ambitious and she kind of takes control at the start and
• 1:29:01
  when the Doctor gets drunk, she's the one who who kind of
• 1:29:04
  drags him out of it. I feel that he's created a a
• 1:29:09
  character who absolutely is companion material and it's
• 1:29:14
  really unfortunate that the book before Paul Connell had done
• 1:29:18
  exactly the same thing and created a well-rounded, really
• 1:29:21
  interesting character that people wanted to know more
• 1:29:23
  about. But he wasn't.
• 1:29:24
  You know when the turn around of these books meant that he knew
• 1:29:26
  nothing about Benny, he he really had to shoot her on her
• 1:29:30
  in at the last minute and that adds something.
• 1:29:33
  It did occur to me that it adds a bit of a sort of self
• 1:29:37
  sacrificial element to this. I kept getting kind of a ring of
• 1:29:41
  caves of Andrew Zani where obviously he he puts his life on
• 1:29:45
  the line to rescue someone he's barely met.
• 1:29:47
  Similar thing here where he goes chasing after Benny across you
• 1:29:50
  know to Mars and there's a point where someone says why why not
• 1:29:55
  just kill her? You know she's that we could be
• 1:29:58
  done with this and he says she's my friend so there is it adds an
• 1:30:02
  element to their relationship. I think it's not ideal for her
• 1:30:05
  second story I. Think you're being generous
• 1:30:07
  there? Yeah, because I think your
• 1:30:09
  theory about it being ace Ace getting possessed would make a
• 1:30:14
  lot more sense. Because yeah, but I think
• 1:30:16
  CARDIAC is playing the ACE role here.
• 1:30:19
  I wonder if it was written as the Doctor?
• 1:30:20
  Yeah, that's exactly what I mean.
• 1:30:21
  But, but, but I think you've been generous in terms of if
• 1:30:26
  you'd make it Benny then then Oh my God, that's a weird decision
• 1:30:30
  and if you'd had more time to rewrite, but yeah, if he.
• 1:30:34
  Had. I don't think he did have time,
• 1:30:35
  though I I think that he. Yes, I mean, if he's just doing.
• 1:30:38
  I think he just had to take a character in the book and.
• 1:30:42
  And make Benny's character absolutely.
• 1:30:44
  Somebody who got possessed. In fact, you know, we're in that
• 1:30:46
  lovely little respite period where Ace has been written out
• 1:30:49
  and we're in love and war before Ace comes back in deceit.
• 1:30:52
  I wish that's. Somehow even worse than she was.
• 1:30:56
  Before. I wish they hadn't brought her.
• 1:30:57
  Back in terminally bad. But Karyatu could so have played
• 1:31:01
  that role. You're right, she could have
• 1:31:02
  been in all those books, but it just would have been a more
• 1:31:05
  engaging run of books had it been.
• 1:31:07
  Because I'll tell you what I thought.
• 1:31:09
  I thought she worked really well and I thought she had a great
• 1:31:13
  chemistry with the Doctor. I thought they weren't really
• 1:31:15
  well. They they were very effective
• 1:31:17
  and they were driving the story together and they were working
• 1:31:19
  things out together and you could just see how this is good
• 1:31:22
  Doctor companion. What I object to is the high
• 1:31:25
  companions that come with like whole lists of things and you
• 1:31:29
  know, yeah, Brigadier F Ritz, Stewart's descendant,
• 1:31:33
  genetically engineered, the fastest, strongest, smartest,
• 1:31:36
  you know. It's like this absolute ideal in
• 1:31:39
  the mid 90s of what a woman in science fiction should be, isn't
• 1:31:44
  it? And it's so tedious, like, just
• 1:31:45
  write a good character like you like he has done.
• 1:31:48
  You don't need all that other shit to go with it.
• 1:31:50
  Yeah. Jason, how did you how did you
• 1:31:52
  find her? I found her to be the most
• 1:31:55
  engaging character in the book, so clearly it was, and which is
• 1:31:58
  what you'd expect if you were introducing a new companion.
• 1:32:02
  You would. You would definitely expect that
• 1:32:04
  to be the case. I didn't come away from it with
• 1:32:09
  any sense of there being any real reason why she had to be a
• 1:32:13
  Lethbridge Stuart at all. I think she could have just
• 1:32:17
  been. I think that came across when I
• 1:32:20
  was reading. Honestly, that came across as
• 1:32:22
  just a way to hook the reader who is a Doctor Who fan into her
• 1:32:26
  before. We've actually met her properly
• 1:32:29
  to introduce this connection with a well loved character
• 1:32:32
  which didn't really seem to need to be there for my money.
• 1:32:36
  The other thing that struck me about her is that she is, or
• 1:32:40
  appears to be a precursor to Riversong in that she is a
• 1:32:45
  genetically engineered human who one character explains it has
• 1:32:52
  been created as humanity's response to the doctors constant
• 1:32:56
  intervention in their history. And that is exactly what
• 1:33:01
  Riversong is she is created, has a response to the Doctor's
• 1:33:05
  intervention in in this case, the people of the Gamma Forests
• 1:33:09
  things. I mean, I have issues around
• 1:33:12
  that in the, you know, we've never met these people before so
• 1:33:15
  how why would we care that they've introduced, they've
• 1:33:17
  created, why would they have this beef with the Doctor Who
• 1:33:21
  never mind is it? A good idea?
• 1:33:22
  Is that a good idea? Or as a reaction to the Doctor's
• 1:33:26
  interference in humanity, Is that something that's worth
• 1:33:28
  exploring? I I don't actually think it is
• 1:33:32
  to be perfectly honest with you because the idea that somebody
• 1:33:36
  has noticed the doctor is is fine you you would get that
• 1:33:40
  because he does pop up a lot and if you were to sit and connect
• 1:33:44
  the dots you would do that. I mean, you know, we got that in
• 1:33:46
  the first episode of the revival, but it was just a bloke
• 1:33:49
  in his shed collating all the evidence.
• 1:33:53
  And I think it's a bit contrived that Cadiatu has been is able to
• 1:33:58
  create a time machine at all because we've been told
• 1:34:03
  throughout the history of Doctor Who that time travel is
• 1:34:05
  incredibly difficult. Time travel requires a lot of
• 1:34:08
  work. The Time Lords powered their
• 1:34:10
  time travel experiments by destroying a star and so on and
• 1:34:14
  so forth. And Cadiatu is, I can't remember
• 1:34:18
  how old she's supposed to be. She's either late teens or early
• 1:34:20
  20s and she's already come up with the basic theoretical means
• 1:34:26
  of creating a time machine. And the doctor has found her
• 1:34:28
  work and decide and is trying to decide whether to sabotage it or
• 1:34:31
  not. And at the end of the book she's
• 1:34:33
  realized a time machine already. And it's like this is I know
• 1:34:37
  she's genetically engineered and what have you, but that seems to
• 1:34:40
  be a huge leap to just be able to on her own, create a time
• 1:34:46
  machine. So in previous times we've seen
• 1:34:49
  time machines are the province of huge groups of civilizations
• 1:34:53
  and extensive work, and it doesn't always work and so and
• 1:34:58
  so and but she managed to make one on her own, which she then
• 1:35:01
  powers by blowing up an institution later.
• 1:35:03
  Although I did like, you know the bit where he's deciding
• 1:35:05
  whether you know I'm going to introduce these subroutines and
• 1:35:08
  ruin research and all of this, it reminded me of that scene in
• 1:35:11
  rumors of the Dallas talk. You know, huge decisions to
• 1:35:14
  create ripples going to go, you know, is it is she the one?
• 1:35:16
  Is this where time travel comes from?
• 1:35:18
  Am I doing the right thing? And it's just a lovely moment
• 1:35:20
  for the 7th daughter. It is a nice moment for the 7th
• 1:35:24
  Doctor, which, but as you say, it might have been even more
• 1:35:29
  nice if it hadn't been basically what he'd already been
• 1:35:33
  ruminating on in Benaronovich's first Doctor Who story, which is
• 1:35:37
  the ripples of decision making that the Time Lords have, the
• 1:35:40
  Doctor has to deal with. Isn't it sort of suggested that
• 1:35:44
  Gadiatu has there is a link to Gallifrey.
• 1:35:46
  It's not specified, but she has a dream about the the Pythia.
• 1:35:51
  What? Is that James right now that now
• 1:35:53
  you will need to read Mark Platts New Adventures and?
• 1:35:58
  Do I have to well? Well, you have to, because I'm
• 1:36:00
  not sure I can put myself through it again.
• 1:36:04
  I like his writing very much. Cradle Cat's Cradle.
• 1:36:07
  The Pythia keeps comes up. It's part.
• 1:36:09
  It's part of this Lung Barrow thing and I've I have read Lung
• 1:36:14
  Barrow and I I didn't rate it very highly at the time.
• 1:36:17
  I mean it's part of this very kind of tedious delving as far
• 1:36:21
  as we can into Galifraim mythology.
• 1:36:23
  But I think from the little that this book gives you, the Pythia
• 1:36:28
  cursed the Time Lords and that's why they can't have children and
• 1:36:32
  that's why they have to weave their offspring in the looms,
• 1:36:36
  which is where the Doctor came from.
• 1:36:40
  Right. What's cantigas you've got to do
• 1:36:42
  with all of that? It's not made clear, but if
• 1:36:44
  she's dreaming about the Pythia then there's there's common
• 1:36:48
  links there and it's sort of suggested that there's a the
• 1:36:51
  reason for the Lethbridge Stewart thing is all kind of
• 1:36:53
  past of times rich tapestry and she's linked somehow in I.
• 1:36:57
  Suppose that's the only box I haven't ticked.
• 1:36:59
  She's the smartest, the cleverest, but all of that.
• 1:37:02
  And a bit time loud. And she is involved in the
• 1:37:04
  creation of civil society or something like.
• 1:37:06
  That, you know, don't believe in fate, but if I did, it's heading
• 1:37:10
  towards Katyar 2. So Big Finish, where's our
• 1:37:13
  Katyatu spin off? This is, this is what what?
• 1:37:16
  One of the things that always seems.
• 1:37:18
  It almost seems like a blind alley because there's so much
• 1:37:21
  effort put into building up Katyatu as a new companion, new
• 1:37:24
  character, and then I think she appears twice more in the entire
• 1:37:28
  range. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:37:30
  So, you know, it's almost unfortunate in some respects
• 1:37:33
  that we don't get to really properly realise her as a
• 1:37:35
  companion of the Doctor. I did enjoy.
• 1:37:39
  I mean on a slight tangent I did enjoy the fact that Aaronovic
• 1:37:43
  writes the you know here we have a a problem with an intelligence
• 1:37:48
  in a technology but technology might be a way to solve it and
• 1:37:51
  the TARDIS is very technological.
• 1:37:52
  So instead he has the TARDIS caught up in a collision and
• 1:37:55
  rammed into a wall with the door facing the other way so they
• 1:37:57
  can't get into it. Which that's that's a that was a
• 1:38:00
  that was a decent way of of getting the TARDIS.
• 1:38:03
  And it's great image as well, isn't it?
• 1:38:05
  Yeah, it is the TARDIS buried in a wall, yeah, which we have seen
• 1:38:09
  more recently. The darkness, isn't it?
• 1:38:11
  Oh, there's a rock fall. So yeah, I did enjoy that and.
• 1:38:18
  OK, so it looks like Cadiatu is a bit of a win, even if we don't
• 1:38:22
  like all of the building blocks of her character.
• 1:38:25
  What about the central threat here?
• 1:38:28
  Because I'm going to let you in on a little secret.
• 1:38:30
  I was seeing Sort of early to mid 90s, dreadful CGI effects in
• 1:38:35
  my head as I was reading this book.
• 1:38:37
  So the the this creature on the Train, I was just seeing The
• 1:38:40
  Langoliers. I don't know if any of you have
• 1:38:42
  seen that movie with these bizarre creatures made out of
• 1:38:45
  buzzwords with gnashing teeth. That's kind of what I was
• 1:38:49
  seeing, but I couldn't really get.
• 1:38:52
  So correct me if I'm wrong. It's a virus that comes through
• 1:38:57
  from another dimension that's infected the transit system.
• 1:39:00
  A bit like a computer virus in in circuits, yeah.
• 1:39:03
  And what that's a path through from the other dimension for
• 1:39:07
  thread, which is this extra dimensional?
• 1:39:11
  Intelligence. Yeah.
• 1:39:13
  Is that right? I think this, I think the virus
• 1:39:17
  it's almost like ghosts in the machine.
• 1:39:19
  I was going to say it's not clear that it's come from
• 1:39:21
  another dimension. They don't think it's come from
• 1:39:23
  outside. It's they've built this transit
• 1:39:25
  system, it's grown organically and it's going through the
• 1:39:29
  dimensions into some, you know, weird realm so that you can get
• 1:39:33
  from place to place. Which is?
• 1:39:35
  How you do it we'd we'd. We'd let it in by without
• 1:39:38
  technology. I don't.
• 1:39:39
  I didn't get that input. I think the the point.
• 1:39:42
  Is no, no Jason, no the. Transit.
• 1:39:43
  The transit system has become self aware.
• 1:39:47
  So a computer, a mechanical, electronic, computery system
• 1:39:50
  becoming self aware is is hardly an original idea that's been
• 1:39:54
  done to death. But because it's so complex,
• 1:39:58
  subsets have emerged and including something that is kind
• 1:40:02
  of like a virus, and decided that bit of itself wants to come
• 1:40:07
  through and and. Deal with everything.
• 1:40:09
  So it's kind of it's almost spawned itself.
• 1:40:11
  It's not an external threat as such, it's just built from the
• 1:40:15
  the way the transit system has grown organically and they just
• 1:40:18
  kept adding to it and now they've it's implied.
• 1:40:21
  The fact that they've now extended it to interstellar
• 1:40:23
  distances may have had something to do with it because of the
• 1:40:25
  complexity there. Is a passage.
• 1:40:27
  There's a passage about that. They've gone and they've
• 1:40:29
  basically punched a hole. I swear it is extra dimensional
• 1:40:33
  the the fact the fact that the transit system has gone out that
• 1:40:36
  far. Yeah, extra dimensional things
• 1:40:37
  which allows the system to, but it's all come from within the
• 1:40:40
  system, but it's just because it's in these extra dimensional
• 1:40:43
  areas, it allows it to come. I thought.
• 1:40:44
  I thought the realisation it's not an actual external threat
• 1:40:48
  that was waiting for something to come through.
• 1:40:50
  Guys, can you go back and read this again again?
• 1:40:52
  The fact that none of us could agree what this thing is, which
• 1:40:55
  might suggesting it's very abstract.
• 1:40:57
  Indeed, yeah, well. She goes for a second reason.
• 1:40:59
  Yeah, because of In the On the childish.
• 1:41:02
  Wicked on Childish Wiki. I had a look through because I
• 1:41:05
  hadn't understood, but I had a look through it on TARDIS wiki.
• 1:41:08
  It says it's come through in the sort of weakness in space-time
• 1:41:12
  or whatever it is. Yeah.
• 1:41:13
  But who wrote that TARDIS wiki? Transit, well, probably not been
• 1:41:17
  having a. Is it a?
• 1:41:17
  Reliable source. That's what I want.
• 1:41:19
  Probably the mirth mirthless twat that.
• 1:41:22
  Probably the era the air. Response.
• 1:41:25
  The person who did target Wiki probably wrote that 10 years
• 1:41:27
  ago. We read this last week and none
• 1:41:29
  of us can decide where this thing has come from.
• 1:41:32
  Jesus. But do you think it was well
• 1:41:33
  realized, James? Sorry, I was just distracted by
• 1:41:38
  Ian saying Jesus and I thought maybe that's no.
• 1:41:41
  No mate. That's That's not a that's not a
• 1:41:43
  suggestion. A reading on this book.
• 1:41:44
  No, not a reading on this book. I can't just jumped at my back
• 1:41:46
  and now I have martyr, yeah. What did you think?
• 1:41:52
  That's what the cat cats jumping out of places is also on topic.
• 1:41:56
  Yeah, there's a pair of cats in the climax.
• 1:41:58
  I didn't know what that was all about.
• 1:42:00
  Well that's a reference back to Cats crate.
• 1:42:01
  I mean that is all. TARDIS is still infected by
• 1:42:04
  something, but sort of who cares.
• 1:42:06
  But yeah, that that's, that's seems to have been kind of
• 1:42:09
  forced in from a previous sequence.
• 1:42:13
  I what I liked about the threat was how it unfolded.
• 1:42:21
  I don't, I don't think it matters actually that we're
• 1:42:24
  arguing over whether it came from outside or inside the
• 1:42:27
  system. I sort of, you know, where does
• 1:42:30
  the great intelligence come from?
• 1:42:31
  Where does the nesting consciousness come from?
• 1:42:33
  I don't think it really matters. It's there.
• 1:42:36
  And I liked the way again in a very traditional Doctor Who way.
• 1:42:42
  It was a complete mystery at the start and there was a point
• 1:42:44
  halfway through where the Doctor works out, it's a virus and you
• 1:42:47
  go, oh, of course it's a virus that should have been obvious.
• 1:42:50
  And maybe it was obvious to Ian because he's read a lot of this
• 1:42:53
  sort of stuff. But it wasn't obvious to me.
• 1:42:54
  And the way that it's then gradually personified and and
• 1:42:59
  finds a body first in the person of Bernice and then in in these
• 1:43:03
  surreal characters that the Doctor has to have his final
• 1:43:06
  showdown with. Even down to the kind of twist
• 1:43:09
  at the end that they've they never wanted Bernice in the 1st
• 1:43:12
  place, but they've used her as a way to lure the Doctor.
• 1:43:16
  I thought that all of that unfolded in a really nice place
• 1:43:19
  and in a very Doctor Who way, particularly a very kind of
• 1:43:22
  Sylvester McCoy era Doctor Who way.
• 1:43:25
  This mysterious influence in the meantime can manifest in the
• 1:43:30
  form of monsters, and I think cake monsters into my mind.
• 1:43:35
  It produced something vague enough that it was kind of
• 1:43:38
  visceral because I was picturing something, maybe dripping bits
• 1:43:42
  of stuff like a cake would and flapping around like a a sponge
• 1:43:46
  cake would, and you know, walking like a cake would.
• 1:43:48
  So not very well, but but in a way that would be menacing if a
• 1:43:53
  cake was menacing. I'm not describing that stuff.
• 1:43:56
  I saw when the way that it was extremely graphic in places it.
• 1:43:59
  Was graphic in places, but he he doesn't spend a long time
• 1:44:02
  describing the monsters, does he?
• 1:44:04
  No, just their effects on people I was, I was flinching away
• 1:44:07
  from. That's enough for me, though.
• 1:44:09
  Show, don't tell. I sort of feel like it's, you
• 1:44:10
  know, he's doing what a good director would do, which is not
• 1:44:13
  actually showing too much of the monster, just showing the
• 1:44:15
  effects. But I think occasionally prose
• 1:44:19
  didn't quite put a picture in my head though, so it was so
• 1:44:22
  abstract as I'm not not quite sure what's going on.
• 1:44:26
  I agree. Because I'm not quite he's not
• 1:44:28
  quite describing enough. The funny thing is the.
• 1:44:31
  Show, don't tell. And then there's there's,
• 1:44:33
  there's, like, I'm not even going to show you or tell you.
• 1:44:36
  And I was picturing and maybe this is because of the book
• 1:44:38
  cover, I was picturing the London Underground, You know, I
• 1:44:41
  was picturing it all as Joe says, it's the web of fear.
• 1:44:45
  You know, I I wasn't picturing something super technological,
• 1:44:48
  but I was picturing kind of platforms.
• 1:44:51
  But that is what the, the cover shows and it is suggested that
• 1:44:54
  this new technology has been rammed into kind of existing
• 1:44:57
  infrastructure, which is exactly what happens.
• 1:44:59
  So I I didn't have a problem with that.
• 1:45:02
  Yeah, it was so good. They had the cover of the cover
• 1:45:05
  art for transit at the museum in.
• 1:45:06
  It's beautiful cover I. Think a lot of the covers here
• 1:45:10
  are are are beautiful? It's.
• 1:45:12
  That's why the books are so disappointing, because the
• 1:45:14
  covers are great. Covers are fantastic and the
• 1:45:16
  con. James, I want to battle you on
• 1:45:18
  this one, though, because I I do think the new adventure covers
• 1:45:22
  are very here and there. Some of them, yeah.
• 1:45:24
  Yeah, Perhaps. Cradle Walls Witch mark.
• 1:45:27
  You know the fairy tale Cover I. Like that one?
• 1:45:30
  Beautiful. You know it's.
• 1:45:31
  I think that's absolutely gorgeous with the Unicorn on it.
• 1:45:35
  But go and look at no future, you know, with Liza Minnelli.
• 1:45:37
  Yeah, yeah, that's a horrible. Thing as Bernice Summerfield.
• 1:45:40
  I think there are more, more hits.
• 1:45:42
  I mean, Night Change has got a beautiful cover and revelation's
• 1:45:48
  got a lovely. Color or sanctuary that's got a
• 1:45:50
  nice cover. That's got a nice cover.
• 1:45:51
  Yeah, Iceberg has got a nice cover that's like.
• 1:45:54
  What's the one with Sophie? Audrey with all the goo on her
• 1:45:56
  fingers leaning out? I'll Theatre of War.
• 1:45:59
  It's Theatre of War, yeah. The dimension light is that the
• 1:46:02
  one with the the skeletons playing chess?
• 1:46:05
  Oh yeah. That's a gorgeous.
• 1:46:07
  I'm not building up a great argument here, am I?
• 1:46:11
  But yeah, so but yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to jump in totally
• 1:46:16
  randomly with A1A minor nitpick. What?
• 1:46:20
  It wouldn't be an episode without one.
• 1:46:23
  A minor nitpick, his world building is superb.
• 1:46:25
  His descriptions of Mars are great, but he repeatedly gets
• 1:46:28
  the distance to Arcturus wrong. Only you would know that.
• 1:46:35
  It's mentioned several times. It's 26 light years away, except
• 1:46:39
  Arcturus is 36 light years away, or 36.7, the latest estimates.
• 1:46:45
  Arcturus is an actual, you know. Obviously you can't say the word
• 1:46:49
  Arcturus to a bunch of Doctor Who fans without them picturing
• 1:46:52
  the little thing from Curse of Palladon, but Arcturus is a real
• 1:46:58
  star. It's the fourth brightest star
• 1:46:59
  in the night sky, and it's quite easy to find.
• 1:47:03
  I'll I'll tell you what, when when this goes out, I'll put a
• 1:47:05
  little star chart up so that people can find Arcturus.
• 1:47:09
  But it's a it's a lovely red giant * but it is 36.7 light
• 1:47:13
  years away, not 26 light years away.
• 1:47:17
  Please can we have a Jingle for Jason's mind?
• 1:47:18
  A nitpick? Yeah.
• 1:47:19
  OK. I'll.
• 1:47:20
  Do it. There, there's like some.
• 1:47:21
  Science nitpicks, Yeah, we'll do.
• 1:47:23
  We'll do those. But I've got.
• 1:47:24
  To say that, you know, take the the transit system as a whole.
• 1:47:30
  I didn't really like any of the characters beyond Caddy R2.
• 1:47:32
  I didn't really enjoy any of them.
• 1:47:35
  I didn't really understand any of their back stories, their
• 1:47:38
  motif and nothing but the transit system.
• 1:47:41
  Now if you were calling that a character, yeah, I understood
• 1:47:45
  every nut and bolt and rivet, every location like he he
• 1:47:49
  delivers an incredible character in that transit system and I
• 1:47:53
  think that's that's like the stand out thing from this book.
• 1:47:57
  Yeah, I think. It's that idea and how that
• 1:47:58
  explores it. That that transit system with
• 1:48:00
  the way it was described was brilliant.
• 1:48:02
  I mean the only another A minor nitpick and it might not be
• 1:48:06
  because of course. Hang on, hang on the Jingle, OK,
• 1:48:09
  go. Because it's because it's a
• 1:48:12
  transdimensional transit system. But there's an odd sequence
• 1:48:15
  where they're going in pursuit of Benny and they describes the
• 1:48:18
  train going through various stations, which are moons of
• 1:48:20
  Saturn, and then it goes through Umbria, which is a moon of
• 1:48:23
  Uranus, and then it's packed the moons of Saturn again.
• 1:48:26
  So it seems that just seems a little bit weird.
• 1:48:29
  But of course, because it is a transdimensional network,
• 1:48:31
  there's no reason it shouldn't do that and things are
• 1:48:33
  constantly moving, so who knows. But but yeah, the fact that the
• 1:48:38
  descriptions, the moons of Saturn, the moons of Jupiter,
• 1:48:40
  Mars, Pluto, the locations on Mars are described and they are
• 1:48:44
  recognisable and in the correct relation to each other.
• 1:48:48
  So. Yeah, it is.
• 1:48:51
  But there's a lot of effort that's gone into this, isn't it?
• 1:48:53
  This has not been found in this. Book, but that's what everyone
• 1:48:56
  of it. Does he's one of the?
• 1:48:57
  Problems researched and and and really well constructed.
• 1:49:01
  I mean, you can do, you could do a Rivers of London tour because
• 1:49:05
  he goes to real locations. There's even a well, you know,
• 1:49:08
  one of the one of the books ends up in a retail estate in
• 1:49:11
  Gillingham, which I've been to many times.
• 1:49:16
  I'm not sure you can do a location tour of transit though,
• 1:49:18
  you know. No, but I don't think, not with
• 1:49:20
  current technology. But I think one of the problems
• 1:49:23
  you're highlighting is the transit idea and the realisation
• 1:49:26
  of it is brilliant. And then he's gone and swamped
• 1:49:29
  it with his side with his William Gibson wankiness, which
• 1:49:34
  is, you know, he does bad William Gibson in the Doctor Who
• 1:49:38
  world and then has loads of sex. But actually the the core idea
• 1:49:42
  of the transit reminds me of trans mats in the, you know, in
• 1:49:47
  Patrick Trout. And.
• 1:49:48
  But it's a very simple idea and it makes you go, yeah, that's
• 1:49:51
  how it works. All trout and it's effectively a
• 1:49:54
  trout and tail. This isn't it.
• 1:49:56
  Just with. Yeah, and he swamps it.
• 1:49:57
  He swamps it all with like this. Weird.
• 1:50:01
  Trying too hard. It's trying to be too hard to be
• 1:50:04
  cool. That's.
• 1:50:05
  A quote for the cover, isn't it? You're trying to.
• 1:50:09
  It's very it's just try it's it's try hard.
• 1:50:12
  It's like oh you're cool oh look at you swearing oh look at you
• 1:50:16
  having writing sex. It's it makes.
• 1:50:19
  Me swear, but I get. Like.
• 1:50:21
  You do read reviews. You embarrass this book.
• 1:50:24
  And and and you'd think from some of the reviews that it was
• 1:50:26
  all sex and and and swearing on every page.
• 1:50:28
  Do you know how many mentions of the word fuck are in this book?
• 1:50:32
  Live. It is 14, which is 14, which is
• 1:50:36
  not many for a book that clocks in at 100 and 238 pages is that.
• 1:50:42
  Be 14 more times than you needed at all.
• 1:50:45
  Oh yeah, I I agree with that. But but I don't.
• 1:50:47
  It doesn't feel like, you know, I've I've seen books with a lot
• 1:50:51
  more swearing in than this. Do you know the one that
• 1:50:53
  irritate me? The only one that really
• 1:50:55
  irritate me was when Benny went. Because I've been taken over by
• 1:50:58
  a fucking alien intelligence and I'm like, the fucking adds
• 1:51:01
  nothing to that sentence. So why is it there?
• 1:51:05
  Or is it literally because it's something that Bernie's wouldn't
• 1:51:07
  say? Oh, no, I mean, she says.
• 1:51:09
  She says I. Think she would say, though,
• 1:51:11
  wouldn't she? She says.
• 1:51:11
  She does say a lot. Yeah, I think.
• 1:51:14
  I think this is the whole. I mean, get down to the whole
• 1:51:20
  like like your your interview with Lance Parker with the whole
• 1:51:22
  trad V Rad. And I'm very much up for RAD.
• 1:51:27
  But Tone still has to be Doctor Who.
• 1:51:30
  That's why I never got on with, never got on with Torchwood.
• 1:51:34
  Tone is such a difficult it's it was.
• 1:51:37
  Children of Earth. I'm thinking.
• 1:51:39
  Perfect tone for Torchwood. But you're but they there you
• 1:51:42
  go. I mean, Children of Earth is is
• 1:51:44
  doing a lot of tortured stuff and yet some.
• 1:51:46
  There's There is sex and swearing.
• 1:51:49
  There's children being killed. There's.
• 1:51:51
  Yeah, yeah, but that's fine. I don't mind any of that.
• 1:51:53
  Any any of that could be watched by a 12 year old.
• 1:51:56
  It's certificate 12. I'll say I bore everyone to
• 1:52:00
  death. Certificate 12 do go no further
• 1:52:03
  in the Doctor Who universe. That thing of what makes it feel
• 1:52:06
  like Doctor Who, though, is so there's a weird alchemy.
• 1:52:10
  You know? I over Christmas, I watched The
• 1:52:13
  Seeds of Doom, having convinced myself that it's a de facto
• 1:52:15
  Christmas special and I think it's one of the most violent
• 1:52:20
  pieces of Doctor Whoever made. I think Scorby is one of the
• 1:52:24
  most authentically unpleasant characters and yet it just
• 1:52:27
  everything sings. Everything feels like Doctor
• 1:52:30
  Who. And yet the Two Doctors, which
• 1:52:32
  has a a a script by Robert Holmes, it's got Patrick
• 1:52:36
  Troughton in it. It's got Sontarans in it just
• 1:52:39
  doesn't feel quite right. And.
• 1:52:42
  There will be loads of objective thing though, isn't it?
• 1:52:45
  Exactly. I was going to say there will be
• 1:52:46
  loads of people disagreeing with both of those statements and
• 1:52:49
  that's fine. And I and I sort of feel like I
• 1:52:51
  love the Doctor Who has gone there and I don't think the new
• 1:52:55
  adventures ultimately are represents a particularly
• 1:52:59
  successful experiment in terms of pushing Doctor Who.
• 1:53:02
  And I think probably what you find as you read through is that
• 1:53:04
  it becomes more and more traditional as it goes on and
• 1:53:07
  and drops a lot of this kind of superficial grown up Ness, which
• 1:53:11
  is actually just really adolescent.
• 1:53:13
  But I like that they tried. I like, I like that they were
• 1:53:16
  kind of taking their their starting point from these, these
• 1:53:20
  absolutely kind of genre defining sources and doing it as
• 1:53:24
  Doctor Who. It's basically like we're so
• 1:53:26
  pleased they did it. Don't do it again.
• 1:53:29
  Yeah, basically. They did it.
• 1:53:30
  And then there's a reason why it's it's got to be a bit
• 1:53:34
  traditional, and it can be a slightly radical, but don't do
• 1:53:38
  it's not Doctor Who if you're doing it like that.
• 1:53:41
  It's just that Transit isn't Doctor Who.
• 1:53:44
  That's what I said that on the on the group chat, actually I
• 1:53:47
  think there's you know the some somebody, I can't remember who
• 1:53:51
  it is, who it was, who described it as the best science fiction
• 1:53:55
  novel ever written. And I think there's a as a
• 1:54:01
  science fiction novel. Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:54:04
  This is, this is superb science fiction.
• 1:54:07
  The the world building, the the, the, the nature of the threat,
• 1:54:10
  the transit system, all of that. And it's a superb science
• 1:54:14
  fiction book. I don't think it's a terribly
• 1:54:16
  good Doctor Who story because of all the trappings, even though,
• 1:54:21
  as we've said, there is a very traditional Doctor Who story
• 1:54:23
  buried in there. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:54:25
  The presentation I. Don't think it's buried in there
• 1:54:28
  though. I think there's a lot of
• 1:54:29
  corridor wandering in this. A future of history.
• 1:54:33
  There's an alien intelligence to defeat.
• 1:54:36
  The Doctor goes off to defeat the villain at the end.
• 1:54:39
  It absolutely feels like a Doctor Who story.
• 1:54:40
  I mean, obviously it wasn't a Doctor Who story, because it's.
• 1:54:43
  Totally adapt it. You could totally adapt it and
• 1:54:45
  get rid of all the shit. I had this conversation with
• 1:54:48
  somebody recently about Damaged Goods.
• 1:54:50
  Damaged Goods is a nasty piece of work.
• 1:54:53
  It's an astonishing book. Absolutely astonishing.
• 1:54:56
  Does it feel like Doctor Who? Because it pushes all of this to
• 1:54:59
  extremes. The sex, the violence, the
• 1:55:01
  nastiness, all of it. And it doesn't feel like Doctor
• 1:55:05
  Who at all. And then Johnny Morris came
• 1:55:06
  along, turned it into a big finish story, took out the
• 1:55:09
  extremes, but found the Doctor Who story in it.
• 1:55:13
  That's exactly what I. Thought Is it a better piece of
• 1:55:16
  work, though? I don't think so.
• 1:55:16
  I think the book's probably a better piece of work.
• 1:55:18
  But I was gonna ask you about. I mean, you you were you were
• 1:55:22
  eulogizing damaged goods when you when you reviewed it as as a
• 1:55:25
  piece of fiction. But I felt dirtier after reading
• 1:55:28
  damaged goods than after reading transit.
• 1:55:30
  That's an an equally miserable mix of drugs and prostitution
• 1:55:35
  and dogging and self harm and sorts of gynecological problems,
• 1:55:39
  and the characters are picked off in a really nasty series.
• 1:55:43
  It's really graphic. And I don't think Damaged Goods
• 1:55:46
  has the kind of spark of humanity that the 7th Doctor
• 1:55:50
  brings to transit. And one of my points was going
• 1:55:52
  to be that actually I find that there is a warmth to some of
• 1:55:55
  this writing. So I really love the scene at
• 1:55:57
  the end. Zamina, who is one of the
• 1:55:59
  prostitutes who makes it through to the end, she's had a pretty
• 1:56:02
  rough day, is sort of left, you know, as this, as this survivor
• 1:56:09
  at the end. And the doctor comes up to her
• 1:56:12
  and he says, I thought you might need, I came for you.
• 1:56:15
  I might, I thought you might be cheering up.
• 1:56:18
  And she says, why me? I'm I'm worthless or I'm worth.
• 1:56:23
  I'm, I'm nobody. And he says you're worth as much
• 1:56:27
  as anybody else. And I think there is that seed
• 1:56:30
  of warmth and humanity that that it actually does run through
• 1:56:34
  this, although it's it's very well hidden for an awful lot of
• 1:56:37
  the. I think it almost exclusively
• 1:56:39
  comes from the doctor, that warmth.
• 1:56:41
  Yeah, no he he he gets the Doctor perfectly.
• 1:56:43
  Even in this weird non Doctor Who story.
• 1:56:48
  What was the other one I liked? I loved?
• 1:56:50
  When he Cadiatu, goes on a killing spree or she kills one
• 1:56:54
  of the Bentley copies and she rounds, she's really furious
• 1:56:58
  because she accuses him in a way that is reminiscent of Ace in
• 1:57:03
  some of these new adventures. She says no one's supposed to
• 1:57:05
  die without your permission, and he responds If that was true,
• 1:57:09
  you'd all be immortal. Yeah, gorgeous.
• 1:57:14
  And even even the and the stuff that, you know, I probably
• 1:57:17
  object to if I read it in a, you know, synopsis.
• 1:57:19
  The doctor drinking ouzo and keep falling off under the table
• 1:57:22
  in the bar, waking up in bed with a woman.
• 1:57:25
  I know that's not how that I'm making that sound.
• 1:57:28
  But all of that stuff is done with warmth and a weird,
• 1:57:32
  awkward. I like that he's just sitting
• 1:57:33
  there in the bed, isn't he? Going through the.
• 1:57:35
  Travel. Experiments.
• 1:57:37
  I didn't mind that, that that's that's almost the same doctor
• 1:57:40
  that's having fish fingers and custard.
• 1:57:42
  You know it's it's I didn't mind that.
• 1:57:46
  It's it's so much of it. I'm really maybe it's maybe
• 1:57:50
  because Doctor Who's British and I'm very British.
• 1:57:53
  I don't mind the violence. You can turn.
• 1:57:55
  You can turn the violence with a bit.
• 1:57:56
  But the sex just pisses me off. Don't read any more new
• 1:58:01
  adventures then what? You know, let's do it for this.
• 1:58:04
  Well, look, I'm very aware we've been talking about the book now
• 1:58:06
  for about an hour and 15 minutes.
• 1:58:09
  Yeah. Anything you guys would like to
• 1:58:11
  anything you haven't covered that you'd like to cover before
• 1:58:13
  we? Well, the thing I kept the.
• 1:58:15
  Thing I kept being about to say was just just Jason made me
• 1:58:19
  realise Moffat's read this, hasn't he?
• 1:58:22
  Because it has the whole it has the whole erasing.
• 1:58:26
  Oh, people know too much about me.
• 1:58:28
  I'm going to go and erase myself from all the records.
• 1:58:32
  Yeah, he's got to do that every couple of centuries, you know?
• 1:58:34
  Yeah, yeah. But it's there's definitely
• 1:58:37
  stuff that you can recognise going.
• 1:58:39
  Yeah, yeah. Going forward, I think there was
• 1:58:46
  part of the part of the issue with the Benny subplot being a
• 1:58:49
  late edition. And I think you're right.
• 1:58:52
  I think the Aronovic took a character that was already in
• 1:58:55
  the book and made it. Benny would explain why the
• 1:58:58
  Doctor apparently forgets about her for about 3 chapters and
• 1:59:02
  suddenly realizes, ah, we've got to go to Pluto to go after her.
• 1:59:06
  And it's like, this is somebody that you have had an adventure
• 1:59:09
  with. You've met, and I haven't read
• 1:59:11
  Love and War to be perfectly honest with you.
• 1:59:13
  But it seemed very odd that Benny with the Doctor in the
• 1:59:18
  TARDIS at the beginning, gets, you know, caught up in the the
• 1:59:23
  damage and everything else gets sent off to Pluto or whatever
• 1:59:26
  falls down a shaft. But the Doctor apparently has no
• 1:59:30
  interest in pursuing her until about 3 chapters later when he
• 1:59:33
  suddenly goes oh shit, yes, I've got a friend I've got to go
• 1:59:36
  after, but that is. Let me ask you if you if you got
• 1:59:40
  drunk one night, you know, and then ended up in bed with a
• 1:59:42
  woman, would you be thinking about your best mate?
• 1:59:46
  Especially he's only just met her as well.
• 1:59:50
  It just didn't seem very. I mean you know, the doctor
• 1:59:54
  getting drunk and falling over seems a bit out of character,
• 1:59:56
  but it was quite fun. It's really fun.
• 1:59:58
  But then to forget, you know, he's he's compos mentis enough
• 2:00:02
  to realise that Kadiatu, this guy, this person, he's only just
• 2:00:05
  met. Has got this thing going on and
• 2:00:07
  is related to a friend of his and has all the time travel
• 2:00:10
  stuff going on and he's thinking about that and at no point does
• 2:00:13
  Benny even enter his consciousness until he sees
• 2:00:16
  something a bit later on. And he it's not only that, he's
• 2:00:19
  you know, I would understand it if it was shortly after he
• 2:00:24
  regained consciousness and was distracted by Caveati.
• 2:00:27
  But they get up and they go somewhere else and they go to do
• 2:00:29
  other things. And then it's not until quite a
• 2:00:31
  lot has taken place that he suddenly goes, oh shit yeah,
• 2:00:34
  Benny and that that seemed to be off.
• 2:00:37
  To me, it's implied that something confusing has
• 2:00:39
  happened, though, because the way that's described, you're
• 2:00:41
  you, you were left in the dark as a reader.
• 2:00:43
  As to what's happened to Benny and I I feel like there's a kind
• 2:00:47
  of we're with the doc, we're seeing things through the
• 2:00:50
  doctor's eyes there, which is that he, you know, A, A, a
• 2:00:53
  massive traumatic thing has happened.
• 2:00:55
  He's been caught up in an accident and it takes him a
• 2:00:57
  while to work out A what's happened and then B what he
• 2:00:59
  actually needs to do to sort it out.
• 2:01:03
  The whole Benny subplot was weird to me.
• 2:01:05
  What the The bit where they're chasing around.
• 2:01:07
  Yeah, that's what was all those fake Benny's that we're chasing
• 2:01:10
  after and then murdering. I was like, what is all this?
• 2:01:13
  It just felt like we were sort of running around trying to
• 2:01:15
  sketch in the locations even more because we were going, we
• 2:01:18
  were covering a lot of ground there, weren't we?
• 2:01:20
  Martian nests and all of this. That was the other thing that
• 2:01:23
  struck me as well. The all the stuff about the
• 2:01:24
  Martian nests and the the implication that Ice Warriors,
• 2:01:27
  it's like that didn't seem to go anywhere.
• 2:01:30
  No, but it does. It's all background though,
• 2:01:32
  isn't it? Because, and actually it does,
• 2:01:33
  it leads to it. Again, a kind of reconciliation
• 2:01:35
  towards the end. And that that reconciliation at
• 2:01:40
  the end of this book, actually what happened, it doesn't work
• 2:01:42
  and that's covered in God Engine.
• 2:01:44
  Oh, really? OK or.
• 2:01:46
  God, awful, as we should call it.
• 2:01:47
  That's a terrible book later in the yeah, it's really incredibly
• 2:01:52
  about one of the worst new adventures I'd.
• 2:01:53
  Say I was going to, I was going to ask about things coming after
• 2:01:57
  this. I don't remember Benny being
• 2:02:00
  massively traumatised and going, you know what happens in this.
• 2:02:05
  I might be wrong because you guys have.
• 2:02:07
  Read. But remember, Benny did have she
• 2:02:10
  had books like Forza, Shadow and Parasite.
• 2:02:12
  No, but no. But she was.
• 2:02:14
  Tortured for about 900 pages. No, no, no.
• 2:02:16
  I don't mean that. I just, I no, I just mean what
• 2:02:18
  she does in this book. Does it ever get mentioned
• 2:02:21
  again? Probably not, but again, but
• 2:02:23
  again, what I mean well. So the whole thing about we've
• 2:02:27
  got a showrunner? We haven't really, because he's.
• 2:02:29
  Like, Oh yeah. Let's go up and start writing a
• 2:02:32
  companion. You can write a companion.
• 2:02:34
  Oh, we've fucked up. I don't think that Darl Evans is
• 2:02:37
  running the show in the way that I would because clearly you've
• 2:02:40
  got a turn around time where you know, I don't think this book
• 2:02:42
  was knocked out. As Joe says, there's real
• 2:02:44
  planning gone into this, this. This is at least six months
• 2:02:46
  work, isn't it? You know?
• 2:02:47
  And so while he's writing this, the next three are being written
• 2:02:50
  by three other people. And yeah, communication between
• 2:02:53
  them would have been limited. So there's no chance to
• 2:02:55
  establish something unless someone really strong is saying
• 2:02:57
  this has got to happen this. And I I feel like that's where
• 2:03:00
  the new adventures really fall down because instead of planning
• 2:03:03
  proper character development, they're saying, well, Ace is
• 2:03:05
  going to be written out of this one, but she's going to come
• 2:03:07
  back in this one and she's going to be a bit tougher.
• 2:03:09
  And then they're not going to get on very well.
• 2:03:12
  And it's like that's not really. Really just feel like Aranovic
• 2:03:15
  didn't was expecting Ace to be in this one because possessing
• 2:03:20
  Ace would would you know would be fine.
• 2:03:23
  Because we know Ace Ace has been around forever, so that would be
• 2:03:28
  fine to take her out. For this it's It is an
• 2:03:30
  unfortunate. But till I make it, oh oh shit,
• 2:03:32
  he's got a new companion. He's got a new companion.
• 2:03:35
  Or will have to be here then? The the other thing is, with all
• 2:03:38
  the fake Benny and everything, you're never actually sure by
• 2:03:40
  the end of it, which bits Benny, Benny was actually involved in.
• 2:03:44
  Yeah, it's very it's very confusing which ones are fake,
• 2:03:47
  which ones are real And. And what we have said this a lot
• 2:03:49
  in this episode. Oh, I'm not sure what happened
• 2:03:51
  there. I don't really know where that
• 2:03:53
  came from. So it does strike me, despite
• 2:03:56
  the detail, there is some I'll definition.
• 2:03:59
  Here, absolutely. Maybe deliberate, but I don't
• 2:04:01
  think so. I think some of, I think some of
• 2:04:04
  the lack of clarity over what's happening is is deliberate.
• 2:04:07
  I think some of it is creating a sense of tension and mystery by
• 2:04:10
  not giving the reader every sort of thing all the information
• 2:04:13
  they need in one go. I just don't think that there's
• 2:04:16
  enough clarity when it comes to the explanations.
• 2:04:18
  I think Doctor Who fans that the reason why this is sort of
• 2:04:21
  lingering at the bottom of polls is I think Doctor Who fans like
• 2:04:24
  to be spoon fed a bit more than this on the whole.
• 2:04:27
  Should they, though? Probably not, and as an
• 2:04:30
  experiment this is probably very worthy, but I can kind of see
• 2:04:34
  the objections. But just to, but just to throw,
• 2:04:37
  but just to show what a contrary bunch Doctor Who fans are, they
• 2:04:40
  also then slate a story for. Having a simple plot.
• 2:04:44
  Yeah, of course, yeah. Yeah, we, we've, I've seen
• 2:04:46
  several more, several recent episodes being slated because
• 2:04:49
  they don't have, you know, wibbly, wobbly, timey wimey
• 2:04:53
  stuff going on. And they have a very
• 2:04:54
  straightforward plot of set up, investigation, resolution,
• 2:04:58
  epilogue. And it's like, that's basic
• 2:05:00
  storytelling, yes. Did have Bruce said it the other
• 2:05:02
  day, right? He goes, yeah, Doctor Who fans
• 2:05:04
  are always complaining things are too trad and boring.
• 2:05:07
  And then when you try something, No, no, not like that.
• 2:05:09
  Don't do it like that. Whatever you do, you know, like
• 2:05:11
  you just can't please people. But this didn't please a lot of
• 2:05:14
  people, which makes me think. It's because it's it's quite
• 2:05:17
  badly done. I mean, Bennett, Ben Ben
• 2:05:21
  Aronovich, obviously a brilliant writer.
• 2:05:23
  But what was I just, what was, I mean, get to interview him?
• 2:05:28
  I don't know if he'd want to come on and talk about this
• 2:05:31
  particular book. I'm not going to sit there and
• 2:05:33
  ask Ben Aronovich why was your book a spectacular failure?
• 2:05:37
  Explain yourself. Or just just say.
• 2:05:39
  I know enough people though, Ian, that don't think this was a
• 2:05:42
  failure. You know, I I've I've you know
• 2:05:45
  people like people published have written things to say that
• 2:05:49
  this is a great example of cyberpunk that is a great
• 2:05:52
  example of world building and things like this.
• 2:05:54
  And The funny thing about when you put on Twitter, you asked
• 2:05:57
  what people thought was you were getting two types of response.
• 2:05:59
  One was people saying this is the worst thing ever written,
• 2:06:02
  and the other was saying this is the best thing ever written.
• 2:06:03
  Which is strange, because demonstrably neither of those
• 2:06:06
  things is true. I like to call it the love and
• 2:06:08
  monsters effect. You know, You either love it or
• 2:06:11
  you hate it. Well AM.
• 2:06:13
  I am I the only person that likes cyberpunk and doesn't like
• 2:06:16
  this? A lot of people like cyberpunk
• 2:06:19
  and like. Well, you're the only person
• 2:06:20
  here. Yeah, yeah.
• 2:06:21
  And that's because we've never read any.
• 2:06:23
  And that's, yeah, exactly. Cyberpunk is a genre, is not one
• 2:06:26
  I'm familiar with. So this is basically it.
• 2:06:29
  My 2 recommendations would be Neuromancer to get you going and
• 2:06:34
  Snow Crash by Neil Stevenson. But not first person's future
• 2:06:38
  from The X-Files. All right, that's terrible.
• 2:06:39
  So William, I'll. I'll recommend that earlier.
• 2:06:42
  But don't. OK, what summary thoughts,
• 2:06:45
  Jason? It's a good story, hamstrung by
• 2:06:51
  a rather immature attempt to be adult by dealing things with
• 2:06:57
  sex, prostitutes and swearing. You know there is a good Doctor
• 2:07:01
  Who story in there and the 7th Doctor is captured perfectly.
• 2:07:06
  I think it also suffers and is lauded at the same time because
• 2:07:13
  it came so early in the New adventures run when it was
• 2:07:16
  trying consciously the entire range was trying to do something
• 2:07:20
  different and being experimental and saying this is what we want,
• 2:07:22
  let's let's try Doctor Who in this area, let's make it more
• 2:07:28
  adult, bigger stories, etcetera, etcetera.
• 2:07:31
  Let's see what we can do. And I think that had this story,
• 2:07:38
  this basic story, come along later in the range, it might
• 2:07:43
  have benefited from a bit more of maturity of the range as it
• 2:07:48
  went along and could be considered one of the best.
• 2:07:52
  But because it is so early, because it is hamstrung by this
• 2:07:56
  effort to be different, and because the editorial problems
• 2:07:59
  of having to shoehorn Benny into it are really, really obvious,
• 2:08:03
  unfortunately, I think that's it sort of falls between 2 stools.
• 2:08:10
  It doesn't quite gel where it is and it wasn't well received at
• 2:08:14
  the time for reasons which I think are very sound in that
• 2:08:18
  this is suddenly this is not what people want of Doctor Who.
• 2:08:22
  But I I am glad it exists because it was the range was
• 2:08:29
  trying to do something new and different with Doctor Who and it
• 2:08:32
  was an experiment worthy of being carried out.
• 2:08:36
  And I think everything that has followed has learned a lot from
• 2:08:41
  where this range it's really succeeded, because when it
• 2:08:44
  succeeded, it flew. It absolutely flew.
• 2:08:46
  There are some brilliant books in that range and where it
• 2:08:49
  failed. And so I think what has come
• 2:08:54
  after bizarrely owes a lot to this book.
• 2:08:59
  So you know, it was. It's not one I'll be in a hurry
• 2:09:02
  to read again. And you can, you know.
• 2:09:06
  But. But Ben Aronovich is a great
• 2:09:08
  writer and I thoroughly recommend his other works.
• 2:09:11
  Yeah. That says it all, you know.
• 2:09:13
  I'm glad this book exists, I just wouldn't want to read it
• 2:09:16
  again. Ian Yeah it's it's so weird that
• 2:09:21
  it's a Ben Ben Aronovich book because I I haven't read that
• 2:09:27
  many new adventures because I but the but it was weird because
• 2:09:32
  I obviously transit obviously passed me by because if I saw
• 2:09:35
  Paul Cornell I'd always buy it. If I saw Ben Ben Aronovich I
• 2:09:39
  always bought it so because I like the also people and then
• 2:09:44
  Survivor soon which is Kate Orman and you know I love those
• 2:09:48
  books they they really work and I just I think this is like he's
• 2:09:55
  he's he's like he's throwing shit at the wall and seeing what
• 2:09:59
  sticks and it's just and he's basically managed to ruin of
• 2:10:02
  real all the good stuff he's ruined it by and I think there
• 2:10:07
  is really room for Doctor Who to do cyberpunk.
• 2:10:10
  It would be brilliant. I mean there's elements of that
• 2:10:13
  in the Happiness Patrol or Paradise Towers you know they're
• 2:10:17
  dystopians. They're sort of 2000 AD style
• 2:10:20
  dystopians, which also owe so much to William Gibson type
• 2:10:25
  stuff. Or even dragon fire, yeah.
• 2:10:27
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Yeah, totally.
• 2:10:29
  And that, yeah, that's kind of Halo Jones.
• 2:10:30
  That's aces A ace is a waitress, isn't it?
• 2:10:34
  All those all those things, so there's definitely room for it.
• 2:10:37
  But he's basically, he's almost like he's got two ideas for a
• 2:10:39
  novel and put them into one novel.
• 2:10:42
  They could be separate novels, like find a way of making
• 2:10:45
  cyberpunk important or have your mass transit system throughout
• 2:10:49
  the solar system. And I love the world building
• 2:10:52
  when it deals with that, When it deals with it's the 22nd century
• 2:10:55
  and I love the bits where Bernice's, he allows her to go.
• 2:10:59
  Oh, this is the transitional period.
• 2:11:02
  And that makes sense because we're in transit.
• 2:11:05
  You know, the human race is in transit.
• 2:11:07
  But then all the cyberpunk stuff is so laid on so thick and it
• 2:11:12
  how many people did it make? Just close the book a third of
• 2:11:15
  the way in because it's and it's and it.
• 2:11:18
  Ultimately it's not needed. Because when you when you know
• 2:11:21
  when James says it flies because it gets rid of that shit and I.
• 2:11:26
  Did write down. I did write down.
• 2:11:27
  I wonder how many people gave up before they got off.
• 2:11:29
  Yeah, yeah. And I and I think I probably
• 2:11:31
  would have done if you hadn't been for this, but it's.
• 2:11:35
  But you know, I just don't know why he put all the cyberpunk
• 2:11:40
  stuff in quite so heavily and quite so densely and quite so
• 2:11:45
  uncompromisingly at what made him want to do that when his
• 2:11:49
  main idea was the transit idea, which didn't need augmented
• 2:11:54
  super soldiers with PTSD and prostitute and and you know,
• 2:11:59
  it's like Mega City One on a downer.
• 2:12:04
  You know, Mega City One is how you do.
• 2:12:08
  So far. Dystopia Dystopia.
• 2:12:10
  If you could have 4 kids, you know 1212 certificate mega
• 2:12:14
  dystopia is Judge Dredd. It's Halo Jones, It's Happiness
• 2:12:19
  Patrol. It's Paradise Towers.
• 2:12:22
  This was William Gibson done badly that got in the way of a
• 2:12:27
  good story. So.
• 2:12:30
  Well, I'll frustrating. I'll go next, so I'll throw it
• 2:12:34
  out to James Last. And I'm going to be really
• 2:12:37
  succinct. I think this is a very
• 2:12:39
  substantial, very detailed bit of world building, but it's a
• 2:12:45
  world I don't want to spend any time in at all, except when I'm
• 2:12:49
  with the Doctor. Those scenes I quite like, but
• 2:12:53
  the rest of this I didn't enjoy at all, despite the fact there's
• 2:12:57
  a lot of skill that's gone into creating it.
• 2:13:00
  James. Well, I said I was prepared to
• 2:13:02
  defend transit, and I got to the end of reading it.
• 2:13:05
  And I discovered that although I had found it a difficult read, I
• 2:13:07
  had enjoyed it and I came away admiring a lot of its qualities.
• 2:13:14
  So I've made a list of reasons to read it if you're up for a
• 2:13:17
  challenge. Go for one.
• 2:13:19
  One is the quality of the prose. Clearly it's mixed.
• 2:13:22
  We've talked about some of the less well written passages, but
• 2:13:24
  there are some passages here that really sing.
• 2:13:26
  He writes better about jazz than he does about sex, but when he
• 2:13:29
  does choose to write about music, that's a theme that
• 2:13:31
  actually runs through the book really successfully.
• 2:13:33
  I think the Doctor visualizing everything through music.
• 2:13:36
  And again that feels very 7th Doctor 2.
• 2:13:39
  The scale, complexity and thoroughness of the world build
• 2:13:42
  thing. We've already talked great deal
• 2:13:44
  about 3. The characterization of the
• 2:13:47
  Doctor and his temporary companion and just the wit
• 2:13:50
  running through it, This is actually a really quotable book.
• 2:13:54
  It's got some lovely lines in it that you can absolutely hear
• 2:13:58
  Sylvester McCoy saying. You know, in one of his great
• 2:14:01
  episodes. Things like the light at the end
• 2:14:04
  of the tunnel is often that of an oncoming train or there are
• 2:14:09
  no Gods. I should know.
• 2:14:09
  I've met a few. It just it's full of really,
• 2:14:13
  really nicely written dialogue between the Dachshund Katiyatu
• 2:14:17
  #4. As we've discussed, there is a
• 2:14:19
  traditional Doctor Who story in here and #5 I think there is a
• 2:14:23
  humanity underlying everything that is ultimately a lot less
• 2:14:26
  pessimistic than the book superficially appears.
• 2:14:30
  I think you do have to dig quite deep to find it, and if you're
• 2:14:34
  not up for a challenge, I would recommend the Rivers of London
• 2:14:36
  series which is excellent. A much easier read.
• 2:14:40
  Yeah, absolutely. I second that recommendation for
• 2:14:43
  probably the third time. I think we've already mentioned
• 2:14:45
  it every time we've done these podcasts.
• 2:14:46
  But yeah, I recommend the Rivers of London series.
• 2:14:48
  Definitely. But as an example of Benoit as
• 2:14:52
  he's honing his craft, really. Fascinating.
• 2:14:55
  And you can see so many things developing there that are going
• 2:14:58
  to come good, you know, later on in his career.
• 2:15:00
  Yeah, absolutely. Like, like the talking about
• 2:15:02
  music, like the protagonist going into a different realm as
• 2:15:06
  part of the plot, like the world building, like the research that
• 2:15:10
  that clearly goes into what comes in.
• 2:15:13
  I mean, this is the same as you said with remembrance of the
• 2:15:15
  dialects. He's looked at Doctor Who and
• 2:15:17
  he's gone, right? We're going to go to the
• 2:15:19
  junkyard at Tofers Lane, going to do a bit of Time Lord lore
• 2:15:24
  and put a bit of extra mystery into it.
• 2:15:26
  And I'm going to take the dialects and remember what the
• 2:15:29
  dialects are supposed to be and write a story that parallels
• 2:15:32
  that with real world concerns and does it absolutely
• 2:15:36
  brilliantly. So yeah, but yeah, as an early
• 2:15:40
  example of Ivanovich's writing, it's interesting.
• 2:15:43
  And you you do see a lot that comes out in later works.
• 2:15:47
  It did make me Also, there's one, there's one line and it's
• 2:15:51
  because I read too much of his as a kid.
• 2:15:53
  And the Profanosaurus. But it did give me an image of
• 2:15:57
  with the 7th Doctor having a poo.
• 2:15:59
  Because I've got it, I've got it written down here, It says
• 2:16:02
  Blondie, and Kadiatu walks back to the house, leaving the doctor
• 2:16:06
  and coiling his cable in the moon.
• 2:16:19
  Well, I'll end the conversation on Transia there and bring us
• 2:16:24
  round two As ever. My favorite heart of the
• 2:16:28
  episode. I can't get the image of, so
• 2:16:30
  nothing. Before.
• 2:16:30
  I haven't. Thanks, Ian.
• 2:16:31
  Yeah, No, we're all going to have nightlife.
• 2:16:33
  In the moonlight as well. And that is our recommendations.
• 2:16:36
  I'm going to go in the reverse order to where we went then.
• 2:16:39
  So James, what have you got for us this time?
• 2:16:42
  Well, what I was going to recommend is being nicked by one
• 2:16:45
  of your previous book club members.
• 2:16:47
  I was going to recommend the latest issue of Warp Warp, which
• 2:16:50
  is excellent and which Ian has had some small part in putting
• 2:16:54
  together and just a really really fine selection of
• 2:16:58
  articles. And the the the DVD that comes
• 2:17:02
  with it is an absolute treat as well and some some lovely
• 2:17:06
  writing. Mr. Winterton very skillfully
• 2:17:08
  adapted there, so I can't have that on because someone else
• 2:17:11
  chose it. So I've chosen a book which I
• 2:17:14
  think is now available under a different title, but it's JMT,
• 2:17:18
  The Scandalous, The Life and Scandalous Times of.
• 2:17:23
  I think it's now out as Totally Tasteless, The Life and
• 2:17:28
  Scandalous Times of John Nathan Turner.
• 2:17:31
  It's a really, really fascinating biography of John
• 2:17:35
  Nathan Turner, who's obviously an important man in the history
• 2:17:38
  of Doctor Who. I like very much that although
• 2:17:42
  it doesn't shy away from some of the less palatable aspects of
• 2:17:48
  him and the the things surrounding lesson licensed
• 2:17:55
  times working in television, it it still manages to talk about
• 2:17:58
  him with great affection and sum up, you know, what his his great
• 2:18:00
  qualities were. Which is the master.
• 2:18:03
  This is the Richard Marsden book, yeah.
• 2:18:05
  The the thing that I remember enjoying most about it though,
• 2:18:09
  and this is, it's such a page Turner.
• 2:18:11
  I read it in no time at all. It's absolutely gripping.
• 2:18:14
  But the thing that I really loved about it was that it
• 2:18:17
  paints a picture of the BBC before.
• 2:18:19
  It was before. The kind of this new corporate
• 2:18:22
  approach kind of ruined everything.
• 2:18:27
  I mean, at a time when a lot of the important decisions were
• 2:18:30
  made, not in broadcasting hours, but you know, in the pub down
• 2:18:33
  the road. A time when you know the the
• 2:18:36
  creativity was was allowed to flourish in a way that it just
• 2:18:41
  wouldn't nowadays because it wouldn't be seen as profitable.
• 2:18:44
  It wouldn't be seen as an efficient use of time and yet
• 2:18:48
  somehow produced some of the most brilliant television that
• 2:18:52
  has ever been made in the history of television.
• 2:18:55
  It paints a picture of the BBC and it's sort of the last day
• 2:18:59
  days of of that freedom as the walls kind of closed in and and
• 2:19:04
  John Nathan Turner kind of as a victim of this, a victim of
• 2:19:07
  people with absolutely no imagination whatsoever.
• 2:19:11
  They are quoted as well. They're allowed their say and
• 2:19:13
  they don't come out of it terribly well, whereas John
• 2:19:15
  Nathan Turner, for all of his faults, does.
• 2:19:18
  It's a really, really interesting portrait and I
• 2:19:20
  highly recommend it. The the last third of it, I just
• 2:19:24
  felt this aching sadness and somebody whose career was
• 2:19:28
  utterly on the rise and then plummeted.
• 2:19:30
  Really depressing. It's a really depressing read.
• 2:19:34
  And This is why it's when Stephen Wyatt did the sort of
• 2:19:39
  audio drama about the sort of post Doctor Who JNT.
• 2:19:45
  Because I was. Whenever I've tried to think of
• 2:19:47
  that, I was like, you couldn't do an adventure in space and
• 2:19:50
  time for the JNT years because it's so depressing.
• 2:19:54
  It would. It would.
• 2:19:55
  You couldn't do it and aim me at the people that watch Doctor
• 2:19:59
  Who. Again the certificate 12th thing
• 2:20:01
  but Stevens audio drama because he knew Jonathan, JNT and and
• 2:20:08
  Gary is. He's basically not aimed at
• 2:20:12
  Doctor Who fans. It's not the 12 year olds, which
• 2:20:14
  is why it works. So where is that available?
• 2:20:16
  Where can we hear that? That's it's something to do with
• 2:20:19
  me but it's auk. But yes, Steve Stephen wrote.
• 2:20:24
  It's an audio drama too. It's just a it's A2 hander and
• 2:20:27
  it's really nice. It sounds great.
• 2:20:30
  Yeah, yeah, but but yeah, but he used to go around to their house
• 2:20:33
  and you know, and obviously knew him from Doctor Who writing as
• 2:20:38
  well, but live quite near them for a quite a long time and
• 2:20:41
  during this period. So it sort of shows them
• 2:20:44
  drinking, being a bit sad, Gary having Gary having cancer and
• 2:20:50
  then they sort of, you know, JNT looks after Gary and then Gary
• 2:20:55
  looks after JNT and he's an alcoholic.
• 2:20:57
  So. So in a way, I mean when I
• 2:20:59
  interviewed Stephen from my podcast, he was, I was very
• 2:21:02
  much, yeah, yeah. Gary, if asked me or could you
• 2:21:05
  write a thing about a stage play or something about JNT.
• 2:21:08
  And I just looked read Marsden's book and I'm like not if you
• 2:21:12
  want it to be like happy in any way.
• 2:21:14
  And then who wants to, who wants?
• 2:21:17
  If it's about who, you can tell the William Hartler story or the
• 2:21:21
  Tom Baker story because they kind of have an arc and they're
• 2:21:24
  about Doctor Who and they're still be quite positive.
• 2:21:27
  The JNT story, I mean. The BBC killed him, I mean.
• 2:21:32
  Absolutely. Yeah.
• 2:21:33
  Yeah, you do. And you're right.
• 2:21:34
  You're right. You see a brilliant man, so
• 2:21:37
  successful early on, just. The coldest story they use.
• 2:21:41
  They coldest him. The opposite, basically.
• 2:21:45
  Oh, you're still employed, but we're not going to give you
• 2:21:46
  anything to do. Are you going to get a bit
• 2:21:48
  impressed if that happens to leave?
• 2:21:51
  Can I go next thing because mine is a good companion piece to
• 2:21:54
  James. Mine is the JNT Diaries which
• 2:21:59
  has been pieced together. So basically there was in JNT
• 2:22:03
  and Gary's house, there was this huge sack of correspondence that
• 2:22:07
  was due for the bin and God bless his name, Richard
• 2:22:11
  Molesworth. Molesworth.
• 2:22:13
  Richard. Molesworth basically was offered
• 2:22:15
  that. Do you want it?
• 2:22:16
  Yes. He suddenly realized he could
• 2:22:18
  piece together a narrative because it's all JN TS receipts
• 2:22:22
  and you know, all the money he's spent and all this.
• 2:22:24
  And it tells a really different picture.
• 2:22:30
  And there's all the memos flying to and from with the the bigwigs
• 2:22:34
  at the BBC as well. And JNT actually comes out of
• 2:22:37
  that in a slightly different way.
• 2:22:41
  The certainly the mid 80s where he is jetting off to America
• 2:22:45
  about 14 * a year and accepting enormous wads of cash for
• 2:22:50
  screening Doctor Who episodes illegally over there for the
• 2:22:54
  fans and spending very little time in the production office.
• 2:22:59
  I think what happened is is he took Doctor Who, he had a vision
• 2:23:04
  for it. He really poured his heart into
• 2:23:06
  it. And then his hubris took over
• 2:23:09
  his overconfidence that this show was indestructible and he
• 2:23:14
  could exploit it because the sort of it shows that he
• 2:23:17
  absolutely was exploiting it in the mid 80s.
• 2:23:20
  And then the second that hiatus came, it was such a blow because
• 2:23:24
  it was like he thought the show was indestructible.
• 2:23:27
  And from that point on the trips to America stop, he's back in
• 2:23:31
  the office. He's making the show as good as
• 2:23:33
  he can because he wants to move on.
• 2:23:34
  The show's basically killed his career at this point, and so he
• 2:23:38
  does detail the same story with a very different emphasis.
• 2:23:42
  I know the the scandalous Times one.
• 2:23:45
  That's all sort of anecdotes from people at the time, isn't
• 2:23:48
  it? Yeah, I mean, it does.
• 2:23:49
  It does go into that. There are things where you about
• 2:23:52
  his unprofessionalism, like the fact that he took Doctor Who
• 2:23:55
  rehearsal time to rehearse his pantos and you asked him what he
• 2:23:58
  did what. I just think this we get to JN
• 2:24:02
  TS actual story because it is detailed accounts of his actual
• 2:24:06
  behaviour. I was also told that some of
• 2:24:09
  some of the, I mean, I I've never met Richard, but I I've
• 2:24:12
  sort of had e-mail exchanges with him and he's and I think
• 2:24:15
  his book's brilliant. But I've also been told that
• 2:24:18
  Janet Fielding might be in a room with him because she felt
• 2:24:21
  misrepresented. Which Richard are we talking
• 2:24:23
  about here, Marsden? Marsden Yeah, yeah.
• 2:24:27
  And because. Nicholas the same as though
• 2:24:29
  Nicholas and had. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 2:24:31
  And I think it's quite a bit, they were like, you know, they
• 2:24:34
  loved Janet and they feel like that, but they feel like my
• 2:24:38
  husband's book isn't. Isn't.
• 2:24:41
  Good representation of him. But I will say that is a
• 2:24:44
  balance. But, but maybe.
• 2:24:45
  Maybe they're wrong because they're too close.
• 2:24:47
  They show him as a party animal but a lover of life, welcoming
• 2:24:51
  to friends, having everyone over, partying into the night,
• 2:24:54
  making people feel. Special that as well, Yeah.
• 2:24:58
  I think the show isn't professionalism.
• 2:24:59
  Read them together, he shows him.
• 2:25:01
  He's not he's he's not into Doctor Who at that stage, did
• 2:25:06
  he? He's into pantos.
• 2:25:07
  He's into. I'm going to cast somebody
• 2:25:08
  because I've given you a paycheck.
• 2:25:10
  You'll be in the panto well. He likes variety and he likes
• 2:25:14
  soap operas, you know, and and the tragedy is that 10 years, 10
• 2:25:17
  years earlier or 10 years later, he'd have been fine.
• 2:25:20
  Yeah, he likes, he likes very pretty Doctor Who fans as well.
• 2:25:23
  But let's not go there, Jason. What have you got for us?
• 2:25:25
  Eligible Barkers. What I've got?
• 2:25:30
  For you? Well, I I have no idea what else
• 2:25:33
  has been recommended, so somebody may have already done
• 2:25:36
  this, but what I've got is the first non fiction Doctor Who
• 2:25:41
  book that I was ever given as a Christmas present.
• 2:25:44
  It's Doctor Who the. 6th. Oh.
• 2:25:48
  Yes. So yeah, so this is this was
• 2:25:52
  published in 1992. Doctor Who hadn't been off the
• 2:25:56
  air for that long. There was still occasional
• 2:25:58
  rumours that it was going to come back, and it was all
• 2:26:01
  uncertain. But at this point, I think it
• 2:26:04
  was beginning to become clear that probably it was going to be
• 2:26:07
  a long time before it came back. And so reference books, factual
• 2:26:13
  material, started really coming through.
• 2:26:16
  And one of the first was this excellent series by house
• 2:26:21
  stammers and Walker of the the decades, So the 60s.
• 2:26:25
  This was my into a lot of early Doctor Who, so I'd already seen
• 2:26:28
  by this point the time Meddler and the mind robber had been
• 2:26:31
  repeated on BBC Two when I got this.
• 2:26:34
  But this is where I learned about the first six seasons of
• 2:26:39
  Doctor Who, the concept of seasons, the fact that there
• 2:26:44
  were so many more episodes in the 60s than they were in the
• 2:26:47
  later years. The pictures in it are
• 2:26:50
  absolutely gorgeous. There's a lot of information.
• 2:26:55
  I mean it does have one thing that is now that now dates it
• 2:26:59
  and gives you the attitude of as as as James was saying earlier
• 2:27:03
  on that people wanted Doctor Who to be taken very, very, very
• 2:27:05
  seriously. Because it insists that the
• 2:27:09
  first serial is called 100,000 BC and that the third, the
• 2:27:14
  second is called The Mutants and the third is called inside the
• 2:27:17
  spaceship. And the single episode set on
• 2:27:20
  Kemble with Mark Corey is called Dalek Cutaway.
• 2:27:25
  Rageous. But other than that, and it it's
• 2:27:30
  the first time I got information, it's got
• 2:27:32
  information about the viewing figures.
• 2:27:33
  So it gives you the average viewing figures for each.
• 2:27:36
  You're on the crafts for each season.
• 2:27:38
  It's got a chapter about William Hartnell, it's got a chapter
• 2:27:41
  about the genesis of the stories it's got, it covers the movies,
• 2:27:47
  it covers the toys as well that were the merchandise that came
• 2:27:51
  out in in in that period. And it's just a really, really
• 2:27:56
  nice book. It's a really easy read and it's
• 2:28:01
  got some fantastic pictures in it.
• 2:28:02
  And it also, I mean it's totally, totally bizarre.
• 2:28:05
  But this, this is the first book they've got.
• 2:28:07
  It's got a smell to it that I associate with my childhood.
• 2:28:10
  Now the smell of this book is just and I remember getting it
• 2:28:14
  for Christmas. I remember reading it avidly
• 2:28:16
  from cover to cover, vividly remember sitting in my
• 2:28:18
  grandmother's house reading this book and writing down
• 2:28:22
  information about the stories as I was going through and and and
• 2:28:26
  just soaking up the information because I was just becoming a
• 2:28:30
  fan of Doctor Who at this point and just learning about it.
• 2:28:33
  And this was how I got so much information about the the early
• 2:28:37
  years of the series. So yeah, so this is, I recommend
• 2:28:43
  this one and the 70s and the 80s that came after, but this one in
• 2:28:46
  particular because I think probably because at the time
• 2:28:49
  this was such a sort of unknown era of Doctor Who to many people
• 2:28:55
  and this was fascinating to read.
• 2:28:56
  So. Excellent.
• 2:28:58
  I can just remember poring over the photographs in that.
• 2:29:01
  So many pictures of stories I'd never seen.
• 2:29:04
  So many pictures, not only but a production of the stories as
• 2:29:07
  well. So you've got pictures of like
• 2:29:09
  Dalek casings in half and John Scott Martin sitting in a Dalek
• 2:29:13
  skirt, The power of the Daleks and things like that.
• 2:29:15
  Just beautifully presented, like, compared to, you know,
• 2:29:19
  like a celebration of things like that, a grainy black and
• 2:29:21
  white, which they're just all glossy, beautiful pictures, like
• 2:29:25
  a gateway to the past. It is.
• 2:29:27
  It is a lovely book, brilliantly presented, and you know how
• 2:29:31
  Stammers and Walker have a lot to answer for because they are
• 2:29:33
  largely responsible for an awful lot of received fan wisdom
• 2:29:36
  across the 90s. This podcast been picking apart
• 2:29:38
  those opinions for the last two years.
• 2:29:41
  But the the fact, the simple fact is they wrote some
• 2:29:44
  absolutely superb reference books.
• 2:29:47
  But Doctor Who fans, they are absolutely brilliant.
• 2:29:50
  This. Yeah, Fraser.
• 2:29:52
  Fraser recommended one of the handbooks.
• 2:29:55
  So yeah, they're they're they're brilliant works.
• 2:29:58
  So I definitely recommend those Decades books, particularly the
• 2:30:01
  60s. Just read them in tandem with
• 2:30:03
  the error spotter book and then you won't go wrong.
• 2:30:08
  You'd be better off using the error spotter book to the.
• 2:30:10
  Door wedge. Ian, what have you got for us?
• 2:30:15
  Well. I'm going to compliment you on a
• 2:30:21
  previous podcast, as in The Glorious Dead that you covered
• 2:30:25
  amazingly. It's absolutely wonderful and
• 2:30:29
  it's made me go and get my old copy.
• 2:30:32
  But so it's my old copy, but it's also signed by Martin
• 2:30:35
  Goethe, who I've worked with, so I got him to sign it while we're
• 2:30:40
  working on some cutaway stuff. But it just, yeah, your podcast
• 2:30:44
  just reminded me of I'm. I'm a lot more about me comics.
• 2:30:49
  That's kind of how the 8th Doctor especially as we've
• 2:30:52
  discovered I've probably got a big treat in store for some of
• 2:30:55
  the 8th Doctor novels. But the 8th Doctor for me
• 2:31:00
  existed as as as a comic and and it also reminded me of Voyager.
• 2:31:06
  And it's weird to me, everyone's read Voyager, but you never
• 2:31:09
  know. People might not have read
• 2:31:10
  Voyager, but John Ridgway doing the 6th Doctor because I hated,
• 2:31:18
  as everyone probably knows, I hated the Colin Baker era on TV.
• 2:31:22
  I I was the wrong age. It was shit.
• 2:31:25
  It was a stupid coat. And I was still getting.
• 2:31:28
  I know, I know. And I was still getting.
• 2:31:31
  I was still getting, but I was still getting Doctor Who
• 2:31:33
  Magazine and the John Ridgeway art.
• 2:31:36
  He's a 2080 artist. Amazing art.
• 2:31:40
  And that was my 6th Doctor era like that, that I think Beep the
• 2:31:46
  Meep on the background there behind you, Joe, I think beep
• 2:31:50
  the meep. I love the fact that Beep the
• 2:31:52
  Meep was back. All I could think was they've
• 2:31:54
  done Beep the Meep. This is this is basically
• 2:31:58
  they're just they're just seeing if it works because their real
• 2:32:01
  aim is to do Frobisher. Frobisher.
• 2:32:05
  Frobisher by the same. Frobisher by the same company.
• 2:32:09
  Start an online petition. Why he did that bloody Penguin
• 2:32:12
  emoji on one of his, on one of his.
• 2:32:14
  He did. To me he did.
• 2:32:16
  I'm like, what the hell was that all?
• 2:32:17
  About Russell Russell Russell loves comics.
• 2:32:22
  You know he loves comics. There's some of the earliest
• 2:32:24
  things he loves. The Doctor Who comics and.
• 2:32:28
  He offered them the regeneration from 8:00 to 9:00.
• 2:32:32
  That's how much he loves the comics.
• 2:32:33
  Yeah. In in.
• 2:32:35
  The he offered them the regeneration.
• 2:32:36
  He didn't. He didn't offer them the use of
• 2:32:39
  Christopher Eccleston's face. They could.
• 2:32:42
  The problem with the problem with the regeneration in the
• 2:32:44
  comics is that they couldn't actually get it to work with the
• 2:32:46
  licensing agreement. Yeah, they couldn't use, they
• 2:32:50
  couldn't use Paul McGann in the comic once Christopher Eccleston
• 2:32:53
  had appeared on television. But they couldn't use
• 2:32:55
  Christopher Eccleston in the comic before he appeared on
• 2:32:58
  television. So there was no way to.
• 2:33:00
  And the publication date of Doctor Who Magazine and the
• 2:33:03
  transmission date of Rose, they could never work out that to
• 2:33:08
  allow it to work so. I I.
• 2:33:11
  Hadn't the offer. Itself shows how much he.
• 2:33:13
  I hadn't heard that one, but the fact that he did a, you know, he
• 2:33:17
  did the similar thing going the boost of Doctor Who Magazine.
• 2:33:20
  We're going, yeah, 14th Doctor and.
• 2:33:23
  That's an incredible thing with the 8th Doctor.
• 2:33:26
  He he brilliant story as well. He RTD suggested that the Doctor
• 2:33:30
  regenerate and walk around with no face for a few episodes.
• 2:33:34
  That was his suggested solution. Yeah it's that's that's detailed
• 2:33:39
  and described in the in the in the book of the flood.
• 2:33:45
  Yeah, that's all all covered in that.
• 2:33:48
  And that was that was a brilliant end for the 8th.
• 2:33:50
  Doctor, I think it's lovely that he just gets to walk off into
• 2:33:52
  the sunset. Yeah, I.
• 2:33:53
  I I do as well. I think that's, and I think
• 2:33:56
  that's. I think that's better than
• 2:33:57
  trying to tie the regeneration into the TV.
• 2:33:59
  Yeah, because the the 8th Doctor comic strips up to that point
• 2:34:02
  had survived and thrived so much because they were divorced from
• 2:34:05
  the TV. Completely self-contained, yeah.
• 2:34:08
  So if you'd actually then anchored them right at the end,
• 2:34:11
  that would have been a bit. Yeah, I just love what they do
• 2:34:15
  with Grace Holloway, but really make they really do what's just
• 2:34:20
  the best? Expand, the media goes.
• 2:34:23
  It doesn't matter if you don't get where this comes from, but
• 2:34:25
  I'm just taking a little bit from a few lines in a in a
• 2:34:29
  television episode and I'm creating a massive story and
• 2:34:33
  massive convincing character work.
• 2:34:36
  Although they do say in the behind the scenes better but
• 2:34:38
  they didn't know they weren't allowed to use her.
• 2:34:40
  If they had, they might have fought twice but.
• 2:34:42
  Oh, well, yeah, yeah. Well, she's, yeah, she's she's
• 2:34:45
  about to be released and able. She'll probably properly.
• 2:34:49
  Oh, please, come on. I saw when I was when I saw
• 2:34:53
  Megana Hooverville, some a fan told him that they'd met.
• 2:34:58
  What's the name who plays Grace Ashbrook?
• 2:35:00
  Anthony Ashbrook. And she was said, yeah, and I
• 2:35:03
  think she's like a year or two away from being released.
• 2:35:07
  And then that character will be able to be more freely used,
• 2:35:12
  which is Megan was just going oh whoa, brilliant.
• 2:35:14
  Which is distressing because it means it's nearly 30 years since
• 2:35:17
  the TV. Oh.
• 2:35:18
  Yeah, yeah. But it also, but it also means,
• 2:35:21
  but it also means we're going to get McGann and Ashbrook.
• 2:35:24
  Yeah. In in audios.
• 2:35:27
  Anyone wants to meet McGann and Daphne Ashbrook, they're at
• 2:35:30
  Bedford. Who?
• 2:35:31
  Charity Con. I'm going.
• 2:35:32
  Don't you worry. Or mine.
• 2:35:34
  I'm going to try and get to that one, I think do.
• 2:35:36
  Any of you going to Frank Rock, by the way?
• 2:35:38
  Yes, No. Oh, I will see you there, Jason.
• 2:35:41
  I will see you there. See you there.
• 2:35:44
  I deliberately haven't watched it for years.
• 2:35:45
  We're we're getting very indulgent now talking about our
• 2:35:47
  social schedules in the episode. But fellas, I knew this was
• 2:35:52
  going to be a brilliant conversation about transit.
• 2:35:54
  I didn't know I was going to get this feisty.
• 2:35:56
  So that so much the better for that.
• 2:35:57
  Frankly, as ever just fabulous at this all of you.
• 2:36:02
  I'd like to put a great responsibility on Jason
• 2:36:05
  Thompson's shoulders now because I feel like we sort of went
• 2:36:09
  towards transit. As if you're happy to keep
• 2:36:11
  reading, of course, because of James.
• 2:36:14
  I'd like Jason to choose where we're going next.
• 2:36:17
  On a whim right now. On a whim right now, I'd like to
• 2:36:21
  cover one of these reference books that I keep.
• 2:36:24
  OK. Hanging on about.
• 2:36:25
  I think we should do a factual book.
• 2:36:27
  We'll pick one. And I think it would be great
• 2:36:30
  fun because we've mentioned it so many times, why don't we do
• 2:36:33
  the discontinuity guide? OK.
• 2:36:36
  Perfect. Yeah.
• 2:36:38
  I have no idea how we will. Go find one online.
• 2:36:43
  But I mean, mine's falling apart.
• 2:36:45
  I have to handle it very carefully.
• 2:36:47
  I used to have one and it went missing at some point during the
• 2:36:49
  90s. But I had to head into non
• 2:36:52
  fiction sooner or later. Yeah, I can't think of a better
• 2:36:55
  place to start. Yeah, if you.
• 2:36:58
  Given given your propensity for turning up at the BFI, and sorry
• 2:37:03
  about this, if you I want to borrow mine, I'll bring it along
• 2:37:08
  to Fangroc because I read the discontinuity book cover to
• 2:37:10
  cover many times. I'll give it a quick read in the
• 2:37:13
  next week or so and then I'll bring it along to Fangroc and
• 2:37:16
  you. Can Oh, yeah, yeah.
• 2:37:16
  Well, I'm yeah, well, I'm definitely there.
• 2:37:18
  I've already got mine and. If anyone would like to borrow
• 2:37:20
  my copy of Neil Penswick's The Pit.
• 2:37:25
  No, I'm not using it. Oh, actually it's quite drafty
• 2:37:29
  by house. Yeah, I could put it under the
• 2:37:30
  door. Do you?
• 2:37:32
  Know what I did the other day? I thought I'd got rid of every
• 2:37:34
  single I I thought my mum. Between me and my mum, we just
• 2:37:39
  got rid of all my virgin new adventures years ago.
• 2:37:41
  Some reason I found this in a box.
• 2:37:45
  That's a good one. That's a really, it's not a
• 2:37:46
  good. Cover a good one.
• 2:37:47
  It's a good one because if you ever want to do 1.
• 2:37:48
  Of those, this is finally my argument about the covers there.
• 2:37:52
  No. You know, if you ever, if you
• 2:37:54
  ever. White Darkness stands up really
• 2:37:55
  well. Yeah.
• 2:37:56
  Yeah, that's a that's a good book.
• 2:37:58
  Or maybe we'll get to it one day, but fellas will be.
• 2:38:01
  Will be, because I've got it. Reconvening the discontinuity
• 2:38:05
  guide at some point soon. Thank you very much for your
• 2:38:08
  time. Very quickly, let's go around.
• 2:38:11
  Where you at? Where can people find you,
• 2:38:12
  James? If you want to find out more of
• 2:38:15
  my views on new adventures then you can find me on Goodreads.
• 2:38:19
  I'm also on Twitter X as James Lark and on the 2nd of March.
• 2:38:24
  If you're a music lover, I have a fairly large orchestral work
• 2:38:29
  being premiered in Berkhamsted by the Bridgewater Symphonia, so
• 2:38:34
  that 2nd of March at the Centenary Theatre in
• 2:38:38
  Berkhamsted. Details at the Bridgewater
• 2:38:40
  Symphonia website. Wonderful, Jason.
• 2:38:45
  I am on Twitter. I refuse to call it X as.
• 2:38:50
  You say that every time. Yeah.
• 2:38:53
  I will continue to say it's Twitter at Jason under score
• 2:38:56
  JTT, where you may find some interest in my Doctor Who actors
• 2:39:02
  in threads. There is another one in the
• 2:39:04
  pipeline. I'm I'm, I'm taking an extended
• 2:39:09
  break after I did the Doctor Who actors in Doctor Who thread for
• 2:39:12
  the 60th anniversary, and that took bloody ages because there's
• 2:39:15
  so many of them. No, the cliffhangers thread.
• 2:39:18
  That was my favorite. The cliffhangers, threads,
• 2:39:20
  they're all they're all there. Guys, he reviewed every
• 2:39:24
  cliffhanger of Doctor Who. I mean, I didn't agree with the
• 2:39:27
  one of them, but it was a hell of a piece of work.
• 2:39:31
  Yeah. They're all they're all there as
• 2:39:33
  well. And I'm also on Blue Sky at
• 2:39:36
  Jason JTT not so active there. I need to I need to pick that up
• 2:39:42
  a bit. But I'm.
• 2:39:43
  Yeah, I'm on Blue Sky as well. Should we?
• 2:39:45
  We should make that more of a home, really, shouldn't we?
• 2:39:47
  I've got a Blues. Probably you've never used it
• 2:39:50
  other than set it up. I'll set up the group chat there
• 2:39:52
  then. And I'll just do another another
• 2:39:55
  quick plug because I mentioned it on a previous podcast, but
• 2:39:59
  Robots in Your Eyes season 2 is starting up again very soon with
• 2:40:05
  a very special episode on He Man and Shira The Secret of the
• 2:40:09
  Sword. So.
• 2:40:11
  Shira instrumental in my childhood, Shira, I was, you
• 2:40:15
  know. Absolutely.
• 2:40:16
  Ian. I'm well, I'm on Ian Winston on
• 2:40:22
  on X Go. Elon Musk on Twitter.
• 2:40:29
  Elon Musk as a cunt. Can we quote you on that?
• 2:40:36
  Yeah, quite happily. Heart type bastard.
• 2:40:42
  So yeah, so I'm on Twitter, Ian Ian Winterton at Twitter,
• 2:40:47
  whatever. However you say it's at Ian
• 2:40:49
  Winterton. And I'm also look for me on
• 2:40:51
  Cutaway Comics and a little bit of warp, Warp.
• 2:40:53
  I tend to share that. And at Cutaway Bunker is my
• 2:40:57
  podcast that I now do because of Joe, inspired by Joe and Joe's.
• 2:41:03
  Joe's the first first episode of Season 2 and I've just had Rob
• 2:41:09
  Shearman and the one that's out on Monday and I've still got to,
• 2:41:13
  I've still got to edit finish is Emma Reeves, who was lovely.
• 2:41:18
  Yeah, listen, it's all these writers coming in and they put
• 2:41:21
  me out first. Joe Ford from podcasting.
• 2:41:23
  Thanks, Ian. Rob Sherman, Rob Sherman, I had
• 2:41:27
  to do. He likes to talk.
• 2:41:29
  Does Rob try to turn him into two episodes?
• 2:41:32
  I've got lovely Gary Russell coming up and who else?
• 2:41:38
  Can't remember? And Steve Noonan at some point.
• 2:41:43
  I am going to make a quick plug for Strictly Come Hamster.
• 2:41:46
  You will hear Jason in our second episode which is all
• 2:41:50
  about Christmas and New Year's specials.
• 2:41:52
  James in our season 11 episode where he gave a heroic defence
• 2:41:57
  of the monster of Peloton so convincing it almost won.
• 2:42:01
  And. I I agreed with you.
• 2:42:03
  I was cheering it on. I love Monster.
• 2:42:05
  Peloton, Peloton. Just in itself, it's brilliant.
• 2:42:08
  Have you got a season yet, Ian? Right, I'll get him on it.
• 2:42:11
  Don't you worry. I've got a scheduler for that
• 2:42:13
  one, so I'll get. Him on it?
• 2:42:14
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 2:42:16
  Fellas, it is always wonderful to spend an evening with you
• 2:42:19
  guys. Thank you very much for your
• 2:42:20
  time.