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Hamster Book Club - Warmonger by Terrance Dicks (featuring Luke Sims-Jenkins, Andrew Batty & Jon Arnold) · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:00
  Perry sipped her third, or possibly 4 for a cure, aware
• 0:04
  that she was relaxed to the point of being pleasantly tipsy.
• 0:07
  It had been an exceptionally long, hard day with an
• 0:10
  astonishing ending. She had told the doctor of her
• 0:13
  adventures and now, somewhat relaxingly, she sensed he was
• 0:17
  telling her his. It was as though he felt
• 0:20
  ambiguous about all that had happened to him.
• 0:23
  He had to be constantly prodded to go on talking.
• 0:26
  So the Algrands gave you a new title, Supremo?
• 0:30
  She said. The Doctor laughed.
• 0:32
  The rest of the Alliance took it up immediately.
• 0:35
  I suppose it had the right ring to it.
• 0:37
  Soldiers. Like a bit of swashbuckling
• 0:39
  arrogance. Then those Cybermen things
• 0:41
  joined you. Cybermen, Ice Warriors, you name
• 0:44
  it. Plus contingents of every
• 0:47
  militant human and humanoid species in the Galaxy.
• 0:51
  Why did they come? Some because Morbius attacked
• 0:54
  them or one of their colonies. Others because they felt he
• 0:56
  might attack them and they better get in their retaliation
• 0:59
  first. I think some just came because
• 1:01
  they liked a good fight. So what happened next?
• 1:05
  Did you take Zandir? We did, and then battles.
• 1:09
  The Doctor said. Really.
• 1:10
  Battle after battle. We liberated half a dozen
• 1:13
  planets after Zandir. You don't want to hear about
• 1:16
  them, Perry. All battles are very much the
• 1:18
  same. Bombardment from space, troop
• 1:21
  landings, commando attacks, sieges.
• 1:25
  I get sick of slaughter sometimes.
• 1:28
  Perry looked at him with tipsy shrewdness.
• 1:31
  But you'd like it too, don't you, Being the supremo?
• 1:35
  The Doctor looked up, tossed his drink back, and poured another
• 1:38
  from the decanter on the table. Do I like constant praise,
• 1:42
  Adulation. Almost Worship, Absolute,
• 1:46
  unquestioned authority? Dozens of people breaking their
• 1:49
  necks to fulfill my every whim? People desperately trying to
• 1:53
  work out what my next whim will be so I don't even have to ask?
• 1:57
  As you Americans say, what's not to like?
• 2:00
  He paused. But there's more to it than
• 2:02
  that, is there? Perry had a class, and the
• 2:06
  doctor refilled it. He had eaten little during the
• 2:08
  meal, but he had drunk a great deal, though without, as far as
• 2:12
  she could see, the slightest effect.
• 2:15
  There's friendship, Perry, the kind of friendship that closes
• 2:18
  the gap between species, friends who would willingly die for you
• 2:22
  and you for them. Above all, there's war, the
• 2:26
  greatest and most wonderful game of all, unbendingly complex,
• 2:30
  thrilling and unpredictable. How can you say that, Protest
• 2:34
  Perry? War is evil.
• 2:35
  People die. They do, said the Doctor.
• 2:38
  Your soldiers and the enemies. Worlds are devastated, cities
• 2:43
  burn and innocents suffer and die.
• 2:45
  That's right, said Perry solemnly.
• 2:48
  War is wrong. It's always wrong.
• 2:50
  Is it Perry? Isn't ours a good war?
• 2:54
  There's no such thing. We've liberated dozens of
• 2:57
  planets from Morbius rule, said the Doctor.
• 3:00
  We've saved hundreds, thousands of people from rape, torture and
• 3:03
  slavery. We wouldn't have achieved that
• 3:05
  by telling Morbius soldiers that they were being very nasty and
• 3:08
  would they please go away? Perry felt muddled.
• 3:12
  I suppose Nah are the same. The doctor laughed and put her
• 3:16
  hand on her bare shoulder. Don't worry, Perry, some
• 3:20
  questions don't have satisfactory answers.
• 3:22
  He slumped down into the chair. All the same, you're right, I do
• 3:27
  like being the Supremo far too much.
• 3:30
  Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever be able to stop.
• 3:33
  It's one thing giving your life for a good cause, but giving
• 3:37
  your soul? He stared moodily in space.
• 3:41
  Perry sat very still, wrestling with confused feelings.
• 3:45
  She could still feel the touch of the doctor's hand on her
• 3:48
  shoulder. She thought about the mild,
• 3:51
  friendly doctor she had first known, and realized that this
• 3:54
  ruthless, tormented supremo aroused very different feelings
• 3:59
  in her Enson. Vidal came quietly into the
• 4:02
  room, looking in mild puzzlement at the two silent figures.
• 4:07
  My apologies for disturbing you, Sue Prima, but your next
• 4:10
  appointment has arrived. She apologises for the latest of
• 4:13
  the hour, but she's had a very difficult journey.
• 4:15
  Will you see her? He glanced thoughtfully at
• 4:18
  Perry's stretched out on the chaise Lodge.
• 4:20
  Or shall I tell her that you are otherwise engaged?
• 4:26
  The doctor stood up. That would be rude.
• 4:28
  Tell her I'll be 3 in a moment. See that the guest room is
• 4:31
  prepared for Miss Brown. Vidal bowed and left her
• 4:34
  silently as he had arrived. Perry stood up, standing close
• 4:38
  to the doctor. This guest of yours, who is she?
• 4:42
  A sort of diplomatic emissary, said the doctor vaguely.
• 4:45
  She's come out for a late night conference.
• 4:47
  Sorry to break up the party, Perry, but our business is
• 4:50
  urgent. I bet it is, said Perry.
• 4:53
  She moved closer to him, sent her away.
• 4:56
  We don't need her. The doctor reached out and held
• 4:59
  her close to him for a moment, then he shook his head quickly
• 5:02
  and straightened his arms, thrusting her away.
• 5:05
  No, why not? She whispered.
• 5:09
  He released her and stepped back.
• 5:11
  There's a saying on earth, Perry.
• 5:13
  Try everything once except incest and folk dancing.
• 5:17
  I tried folk dancing once round the maypole in a place called
• 5:20
  Devil's End. It didn't work out too well.
• 5:23
  Vidal came into the room escorting a tool voluptuous
• 5:26
  blonde who looked at Perry with icy indignation.
• 5:30
  Nodding to be his guest, the doctor said Seamus Brown to
• 5:33
  headquarters. Vidal, sleep well, Perry.
• 5:36
  Not knowing if she was angry or relieved, Perry let Vidal escort
• 5:40
  her to the door. As she left, she heard the
• 5:42
  blonde say. Thank you for agreeing to see
• 5:45
  me, Supremo. This is a great honour.
• 5:49
  Not at all, said the doctor. I assure you the pleasure is on
• 5:54
  mine. Perry was a little unsteady on
• 5:57
  her feet and Vidal took her arm as he escorted her along the
• 6:00
  corridor. You've known the Supremo for
• 6:03
  some time, Ms. Brown? Before he took command, he said
• 6:07
  I knew him before his military phase.
• 6:09
  Yes, I hope no distress was caused to you by a glass over
• 6:13
  his shoulder. Heavens now, said Perry
• 6:16
  sleepily. The Supremo and I are just like
• 6:19
  brother and sister. Worst luck.
• 6:29
  Before we begin this edition of The Hamster Book Club, a warning
• 6:33
  this podcast will contain discussion of the single worst
• 6:36
  joke in any Doctor Who novel. And more sexual misconduct than
• 6:42
  you normally get in a hamster. Which is saying something, but
• 6:47
  welcome to that. Back to the Hamster Book Club.
• 6:50
  I'm John Arnold, and I have gathered with me today to
• 6:54
  discuss one of the peaks of Doctor Who literature.
• 6:58
  It's, let's say 3 of my fabulous colleagues, and in the spirit of
• 7:03
  the antagonist of this book, the mysterious General Ron Busi, I'm
• 7:07
  going to introduce them as anagrams.
• 7:11
  Who could this from Boosie be so?
• 7:16
  You really did your homework for this one.
• 7:20
  So behind the pseudonym of the prolific romantic novelist
• 7:27
  Brenda Wyatt, we have Mr. Andrew Batty.
• 7:31
  Hello, Brenda Wyatt. Oh, I love that.
• 7:38
  That's your, that's your, that's your Doctor Who romance novel
• 7:42
  name now. If you ever do a sequel to The
• 7:44
  Stranger, that's it. Well, I'm I'll be getting
• 7:48
  straight into that big finish writing competition A.
• 7:53
  Short trip. Brenda Wyatt Short trip I can't
• 7:56
  wait for. Christmas from that behind the
• 8:00
  suburban darkness, shall we say. Who knows what goes on behind
• 8:06
  those net curtains over the House of Miss June at Lake
• 8:09
  Kinks? It's it's the host of the
• 8:14
  excellent Mar and Chester, Mr. Luke Sims Jenkins.
• 8:19
  Hi. Hi all the people I've had on
• 8:21
  the show so far, how's it? Going hello and we have gone
• 8:27
  extraterrestrial for this last one.
• 8:29
  I've visited the Ute spear and come back with ood fridge.
• 8:33
  I don't know what's in his mouth, but I don't think it's
• 8:36
  spaghetti. It's Mr. Joe Ford, ladies and
• 8:39
  gentlemen. It's a long cry, it's a long
• 8:44
  cry. It's.
• 8:45
  A long cry. I refuse to participate.
• 8:51
  It's a traditional Ood battle cry.
• 8:56
  Today we can discuss a novel by a late period novel by the
• 9:01
  master of Doctor Who fiction, Mr. Terrance Sticks.
• 9:05
  As you'll probably know if you've seen the podcast listing,
• 9:08
  it's the much fated Warmonger or as it was re christened in our
• 9:13
  group, Warminger. Oh, I was calling it Warminja.
• 9:18
  Warminja yes, it's fine. I.
• 9:21
  Was thinking warminger so yeah. I mean if the if the shoe fits.
• 9:29
  And it does. It does.
• 9:31
  So, having put the boot into Terence's compatriot Mr. Barry
• 9:34
  lads, we might well end up doing exactly the same to Terence.
• 9:39
  Sorry, but Luke's not a big John Perry fan so it's going to come
• 9:43
  easy to him. I'm guessing I'm.
• 9:46
  Sorry, he's a big 5th Doctor fan.
• 9:48
  Absolutely. Hey, Luke's listened to
• 9:51
  necromanting with me recently, so you know he has commitment.
• 9:56
  He's read the book. John.
• 9:57
  He's still looking. For the 5th Doctor, if I'm
• 9:58
  honest. I hope we all So before we get
• 10:03
  into that, Joe suggested here we thought if we're going to, you
• 10:08
  know, come, maybe stick the book with little spoilers, we're
• 10:13
  going to come up with something positive about something that
• 10:16
  he's brought to the world of Doctor Who literature because
• 10:19
  let's face it, he is a keeper get.
• 10:22
  And I'm betting that like me, you've read more books by
• 10:25
  Terrence Dickson anyone in your life.
• 10:30
  So to us, because I never, never start with Joe, I'm going to
• 10:34
  start with Joe on this one. You always start with me.
• 10:39
  What are you talking about? It's revenge.
• 10:41
  I'll tell you, I think the best thing about Terrence Dicks
• 10:45
  beyond, no, the best thing about Terrence Dicks is the fact it's
• 10:49
  that old cliche that he got so many kids reading.
• 10:54
  And those kids then went on to read a lot of other stuff and
• 10:58
  then a lot of them became key personnel in television shows.
• 11:02
  And a lot of them have are making Doctor Who for us today.
• 11:06
  He inspired kids to read and I think it's so important.
• 11:10
  And he did that by taking those very exciting stories and
• 11:14
  delivering them in such an easily digestible but very
• 11:19
  engaging way. I came to the targets too late,
• 11:22
  I think. So I actually found a lot of
• 11:25
  those sort of highly celebrated Dalek invasion of Earth, spear,
• 11:30
  heaven, space, things like that. A little bit, a little bit too
• 11:34
  simple in the same way that I came to stuff like, oh God, this
• 11:37
  is controversial to say Harry Potter too late.
• 11:41
  And I found that. Prose a bit too.
• 11:43
  Simple. So, but I can see exactly what
• 11:47
  he was doing. I think he has a brilliantly
• 11:51
  engaging, succinct style. Yeah.
• 11:56
  And he, he inspired. And then what?
• 11:58
  Several generations of children to read.
• 12:01
  And I just think that is a wonderful thing.
• 12:03
  So that's why that's why I think his all time best thing is
• 12:06
  beyond being a script editor for Doctor Who, I think inspiring
• 12:09
  kids to read is far more important.
• 12:12
  Lovely. Andrew, similarly, I mean, I
• 12:16
  think that the best thing about his writing is his prose.
• 12:21
  It's just so direct and so clear and he has so many.
• 12:25
  I mean, he created so many of those kind of stock turns of
• 12:29
  phrase that describe the Doctors or the TARDIS that are just kind
• 12:33
  of, you know, part and parcel of being a Doctor Who fan.
• 12:35
  They're just in there in your head.
• 12:38
  And I think it's kind of, you know, even if he's writing
• 12:41
  absolute trash, like Warmonger, at least it's very readable
• 12:46
  trash. Like you can.
• 12:49
  I mean, I hate everything about this book and everything in it,
• 12:52
  but it's a very pleasurable, easy read.
• 12:55
  Like the word, like there's a lot of Doctor Who books that are
• 12:58
  terrible and they're terribly written.
• 13:00
  This is terrible. It's not terribly written, so I
• 13:05
  feel like that's sort of half celebrating.
• 13:10
  You know he can. He can take a very ugly story
• 13:13
  but tell it in a very readable way.
• 13:15
  That's that's actually a really good compliment, though, because
• 13:18
  something that's terrible. Yeah.
• 13:22
  And Luke? Well.
• 13:25
  I think he's the master of the anniversary story.
• 13:29
  And not only that, like, like I think when I read a Justin
• 13:33
  Richards novel and I hear that, oh, he wrote this in such a
• 13:36
  short time, It's like that's that's what I get from Terence
• 13:41
  Dix. Like I'm writing three doctors
• 13:43
  or now it's going to be rewritten.
• 13:44
  Now it's going to be rewritten. Now it's going to be rewritten
• 13:46
  because Hartnell said, because this has happened, 5 doctors
• 13:49
  this I'm having these companions in it.
• 13:51
  Oh, Tom Bat Tom's out now I've got to rewrite all this.
• 13:53
  Now I'm going to rewrite these parts too, you know, and the
• 13:56
  fact that both those stories work.
• 13:58
  I mean, three doctors maybe isn't as good, the jellies and
• 14:01
  things like that, but I'm not a monster.
• 14:04
  That's you know, it's a watchable story and I I see it
• 14:07
  for what it is and I love seeing trout and then pert we interact.
• 14:11
  I love the five doctors. That's not perfect either, but
• 14:14
  for you know how hard it was to kind of get everything together
• 14:18
  And and if we're going to keep it literary, I guess, or book
• 14:21
  wise, I think all three of his new adventures are pretty solid
• 14:25
  and readable and they hold up as as fun, solid new adventure, new
• 14:31
  adventure readers books, whereas so many of them you go back and
• 14:36
  you're like, oh, that hasn't aged too well or I like parts of
• 14:40
  this, but I haven't way aged too well.
• 14:41
  Terry Terry's prose or in books most of the time this warming
• 14:46
  accepted has an age. He's usually aged pretty well.
• 14:49
  What about his all time great anniversary story, The 8
• 14:52
  Doctors? Masterpiece.
• 14:57
  Yeah, it well, you know. Ish.
• 15:01
  It's got the master in it there. You go.
• 15:06
  And lots of pieces are being moved around, yeah.
• 15:09
  If you want to get a good glimpse of what parts of Doctor
• 15:12
  Who he likes and doesn't like, read The Eight Doctors.
• 15:15
  It'll tell you everything you need to know, really.
• 15:19
  And ask me, I'm going to say it's a mastery kind of structure
• 15:25
  of a story. And it's it's not necessarily
• 15:28
  noticeable particular targets, but he just has little bits of
• 15:31
  tidying up on the story, just filling in the logical plot
• 15:35
  holes, you know, And some are doing it frequently in a kind of
• 15:40
  quite wasp, specially witty kind of way.
• 15:42
  You know, VH Doctors is basically what the hell are you
• 15:46
  doing with my with my show. But something like the end of
• 15:50
  the Android invasion. He's just like, what the hell
• 15:56
  was this rubbish he. Says.
• 16:00
  Everything but fag fuck it's over.
• 16:02
  He just says the Android invasion is over.
• 16:05
  And thank God for that, says the doctor.
• 16:09
  But, yeah, he ties up the story and whatever else you say about
• 16:13
  your story, and it's partly in his room as well.
• 16:16
  He keeps these kind of simple. Yeah.
• 16:17
  The Five Doctors, Robert Holmes gave up on that terrace sticks
• 16:22
  builds a structure here in which he can kind of accommodate all
• 16:25
  these shifting actor schedules. Who's available, who's not
• 16:28
  available, the last minute stuff.
• 16:30
  How many other writers can do that?
• 16:32
  He's kind of got that producer's head and he's got that script
• 16:34
  wrong head on. So you know, it's that he's can
• 16:37
  kind of form miracles on at short notice, which must make
• 16:41
  you an absolute dream to work within television.
• 16:46
  Imagine if this script turned up on his desk warminger.
• 16:50
  Yeah, I turned up on his desk. What would he have said?
• 16:54
  He'd have pissed himself laughing, surely.
• 16:56
  Why is? This nonsense.
• 16:58
  Well, this is, this is what I'm going to get before, you know,
• 17:01
  OK. Should we go into the discussion
• 17:03
  of the book then? I take breath, everybody.
• 17:06
  Ever ready? It's a long cry.
• 17:08
  It's a long cry. I'm not doing it.
• 17:18
  Because this is, I was reading this book and I was kind of
• 17:20
  going, if you ever read that Doug's kind of New Adventures
• 17:24
  guidelines of the 8th Doctor's guidelines.
• 17:26
  This is exactly the book they tell you not to write.
• 17:30
  What? Is those guidelines.
• 17:33
  Basically, don't use, you know, past continuity.
• 17:37
  It should be an original story which stand upon its own with
• 17:42
  strong characters and and possibly less mentions of rape I
• 17:48
  would say than there are. The big example they give in
• 17:53
  it's either the New Adventures or the 8th Doctor ones is it's
• 17:59
  like don't include like gratuitous sexual violence, for
• 18:03
  example, don't gang rape Perry like as like a little jokey
• 18:06
  quip. And it's like that that like is
• 18:09
  a threat in this actual book. So it's it's almost like he's
• 18:13
  read those guidelines. He's like, you know what, I
• 18:14
  don't have to listen to this. I'm going to do what I want.
• 18:17
  I'm Terence. Yeah.
• 18:21
  So yeah, I just thought it's it read like it was written by a
• 18:26
  kind of like a 15 year old writing their first fanfic
• 18:28
  rather than Terence Stewart's writing is whatever, 7
• 18:32
  thousandth Doctor Who story. Yeah, it it, it feels like if
• 18:40
  you asked a non Doctor Who fan what they thought one of these
• 18:43
  books was like, this is what they would think it would be
• 18:46
  like. Oh, it's probably like a load of
• 18:48
  crap from the 70s that they brought back for the fans.
• 18:52
  Like loads of shooty Bang Bang in space and like War for Boys
• 18:57
  and being very serious and dark and loads of stuff about tits.
• 19:00
  Like that is what you'd expect like a stereotypical nerdy
• 19:06
  Doctor Who fan would want from these books.
• 19:09
  Which is exactly which is not what they are like most of the
• 19:12
  time when they're good. But this is all of those things
• 19:16
  and. But also that thing, you know,
• 19:20
  the, I think everybody always says don't ever do what if the
• 19:25
  Cybermen and the Draconians and the Ice Warriors and the Ogrons?
• 19:30
  And the Daleks may be in a nightmare.
• 19:32
  All teamed up to take on Morbius, you know.
• 19:35
  And the Sontarans. Oh, spoilers.
• 19:37
  Come on. Rambusi Rambusi.
• 19:39
  Oh, sorry. Yeah, it was so well hidden.
• 19:42
  Honestly, I'll. Come to you.
• 19:47
  So what did you think of this book?
• 19:49
  Me, I agree with Andrew that it is.
• 19:55
  It's a smooth read in how it is written.
• 19:58
  On every single page there was either a bit of really terrible
• 20:05
  characterization of people that we know really well.
• 20:10
  As being written by the grandfather of Doctor Who who
• 20:13
  knows this stuff really well. Like Terrence wrote cases of
• 20:17
  Ranchozani, the target novel, he knows that to write most.
• 20:21
  Of the target novels for Davison.
• 20:24
  Sorry, sorry. Alright.
• 20:26
  But not just not just bad characterization, the most
• 20:31
  obscene amount of rape references you're ever going to
• 20:34
  read in a Doctor Who book. If I've ever pointed at the
• 20:37
  Virgin New Adventures and said they are inappropriate, this is
• 20:41
  probably the most inappropriate Doctor Who book.
• 20:45
  And it's not like there's just sort of like one really
• 20:48
  egregious example. It's literally about every 5
• 20:52
  pages in this book there's a reference to rape, and usually
• 20:58
  in the context of Perry being threatened with rape and it's
• 21:01
  just mind bogglingly inappropriate.
• 21:05
  It's always women as well, isn't it?
• 21:08
  Like there are there are women and men working for the reason,
• 21:11
  but it's always the women that are being leched over and
• 21:15
  threatened and oh, it's just unpleasant.
• 21:19
  It's really horrible. And it's the fact that it's
• 21:21
  Terence right in here. It just feels wrong.
• 21:25
  Not so much the grandfather. Disgusting.
• 21:29
  Doctor Who. Yeah, I, I think that is issued
• 21:33
  me. It's, it's that tonal issue of
• 21:35
  it. It's just doesn't, you know, it,
• 21:38
  it's structurally, it's a big space opera.
• 21:41
  Doctor Who Storm, just as Andrew said, it's that kind of cliche
• 21:45
  of the cliches of Doctor Who. And it's kind of grafted this
• 21:48
  weird, horrible undercurrent. And it's it's mainly in how he
• 21:53
  characterizes mercenaries and the ruthlessness, I think in
• 21:57
  this. It's basically like the gas tax,
• 21:59
  isn't it? From it's that sort of ragtag
• 22:02
  bunch of butt just really horribly horny for some reason.
• 22:08
  Too. By the way, I think I'm pretty
• 22:09
  sure there's a couple of references to them.
• 22:12
  Or what the gas tanks are in risk.
• 22:13
  But also as well, it's a it's a really shit sequel to the Brain
• 22:18
  of Morbius. It's a really shit prequel to
• 22:21
  the Brain of Morbius because it does it.
• 22:24
  It tries to put all the pieces in place, but we'll get there.
• 22:27
  But it does it in the most comic book ridiculous way you could
• 22:30
  possibly do it. It's a really bad space opera.
• 22:37
  And there's a very odd moment halfway through the book where
• 22:41
  the Doctor, sorry, the supremo, decides to assemble this great
• 22:48
  fleet of people and and he spells out the whole rest of the
• 22:51
  book. There's no surprises.
• 22:53
  He literally goes, right, here's what we're going to do.
• 22:54
  We're going to assemble a great space fleet.
• 22:56
  We're going to then chase Morbius across the Galaxy.
• 23:00
  He's eventually going to turn around and go, what?
• 23:02
  I can't have this. They're coming after all the
• 23:03
  planets I've already conquered. He's going to fight back.
• 23:06
  We'll overwhelm him. The end.
• 23:08
  And I'm like, and then that's that literally is what plays out
• 23:11
  in the second-half of the book. So there's no surprises at all.
• 23:15
  I'm like, whichever is what are you doing?
• 23:16
  Like this might have been quite an amusing read, certainly in
• 23:20
  terms of plotting, had you not told us how the second-half of
• 23:23
  the book was going to play. So as a space operator it's
• 23:25
  just, but as a Doctor Who book as featured the 5th Doctor and
• 23:31
  Perry. Step between Planet of Fire and
• 23:35
  the Caves of Andrew Turner. Did I say?
• 23:37
  Perry sorry, I meant to say the the Scourge of Sylvana or.
• 23:41
  Wherever she's going. In there, it's just the worst.
• 23:45
  Yeah. Please ask somebody else.
• 23:46
  I've got nothing. Else to say.
• 23:48
  So Luke, as the resident 5th Doctor fan here, how did you?
• 23:55
  Is it worse than Necromantia? Is a question I'm going to ask
• 23:58
  you. No, I would say this is the
• 24:02
  second worst 5th Doctor story there is, Hands down.
• 24:07
  Full stop. The other one is Necromancia,
• 24:11
  and that one's worse because they got bloody Peter Davidson
• 24:14
  to be a part of it so. And the dude who you think might
• 24:18
  have assaulted Aram lives and gets away at the end.
• 24:23
  So for that, that is by far the worst Peter Davidson 5th Doctor
• 24:28
  story of all time. And coming at a kind of close
• 24:33
  second is warmonger a story I am gobsmacked has this terrible
• 24:40
  characterization for the 5th doctor and Perry considering
• 24:44
  he's written for Perry before. Like isn't she in players like
• 24:49
  she's he's he's done like he knows the character.
• 24:53
  He's probably also written a couple of Did he write any six
• 24:57
  doctor? Mysterious planet.
• 25:00
  There you go. Also, he wrote the majority of
• 25:03
  the Davison targets. I haven't read a lot of them,
• 25:07
  but yet it's kind of one of my my plans to to start getting
• 25:12
  through them. But here he wrote most of them.
• 25:15
  So he knows this character. He also wrote the five doctors.
• 25:18
  So like character like he knows he knows who this guy is.
• 25:24
  He he, he knows characterization is wrong.
• 25:28
  And and if someone tells me, yeah, but Luke, maybe this was a
• 25:32
  Colin Baker story and they swapped it.
• 25:33
  I'm like, that is still wrong because like, you just swap the
• 25:37
  doctors and I'm just like, well, he's got that doctor wrong now
• 25:41
  too criminally. Wrong.
• 25:43
  Like, I'll just step in for a second, though, because I do
• 25:45
  think, yeah, as a Colin Baker book, this would still be
• 25:49
  fucking dreadful, but it would make more sense to me.
• 25:54
  There are moments where Colin is violent, where he is brash,
• 25:59
  where, you know, he does seem to relish being in a fight and
• 26:05
  things like that. So there's moments, you know,
• 26:07
  where the 5th Doctors described in this as like, oh, did I enjoy
• 26:10
  it? Am I enjoying seizing power and
• 26:13
  being this Great War Minja? You know, sorry I'll never get
• 26:17
  old. It would make more sense.
• 26:20
  It would still be terrible. But I do wonder if this was
• 26:23
  supposed to be a sick doctor book.
• 26:25
  I think in the opening he snaps to do, he snaps this monster's
• 26:30
  neck, he just goes behind and it's like.
• 26:33
  That's Colin, right? He's Colin.
• 26:35
  If I remember right I think it was because there wasn't going
• 26:38
  to be a 5th Doctor Who book for some like 18 months.
• 26:40
  Because if I remember instruments, it's instruments of
• 26:44
  darkness being. Checked back 'cause so many
• 26:49
  problems. Oh, you need to talk to Gary
• 26:52
  Bates. Fuck.
• 26:55
  Sake. Oh, in that I mean, let's get
• 26:59
  this. Just what is so bad about?
• 27:04
  I mean, what's bad about the 5th Doctor in the year?
• 27:08
  It's not him. It's.
• 27:10
  Just yeah, yeah, please. Thank you.
• 27:13
  In in that frock coat, in that, in that cricket jumper, the nice
• 27:16
  English gentleman breaking necks going round, you know, in a
• 27:21
  supreme in the supremo outfit. Yeah, Colin, I can imagine him
• 27:25
  wanting to get into a big military outfit, that big
• 27:28
  personality. Yeah, it's the Thing as well
• 27:30
  that like, so the concept of the book is like, what if the Doctor
• 27:34
  became like a war bastard and like, it's Terence doing like
• 27:39
  his Napoleon fantasy with the Doctor.
• 27:42
  But The thing is, like, I could understand if after that the
• 27:45
  Doctor is suddenly this blood bloodthirsty maniac, but it's
• 27:49
  like from the very first page, he's snapping pterodactyl necks
• 27:53
  and like threatening to kick someone's head in if they like
• 27:57
  look at Perry. And it's like this just is
• 28:01
  nowhere near the character that that we know.
• 28:05
  And like you don't. It's like if your if your
• 28:08
  concept is that, and it's like, Oh, I'm going to choose like, I
• 28:11
  mean, obviously he didn't choose like the the softest, nicest Dr.
• 28:14
  to do that because it was meant to be a sick doctor.
• 28:16
  But you know, if you if suddenly you're given that brief of like,
• 28:19
  oh, now it's the 5th doctor. Let's see the transition to how
• 28:22
  he becomes this this leader of men and like ruthless military
• 28:29
  dictator. I guess there's some, I mean, I
• 28:32
  don't really want to read that story, but there's some, there's
• 28:34
  an interesting story you could tell with that about how he goes
• 28:37
  from one to the other, but he's not interested in that at all.
• 28:42
  It's just how quickly can we get to big guns and big spaceships
• 28:46
  and teaming up with the Sontarans?
• 28:48
  And who wants to read that? Who want who wanted this story?
• 28:54
  This is the guy who's the master of like, I've got to chop and
• 28:58
  change this because of the scheduled conflict of all right,
• 29:02
  Katie Manning can't be in this anymore.
• 29:04
  We get all right, Carolyn Johnson instead something
• 29:07
  whatever with the five doctors like all this kind of stuff.
• 29:09
  He's he's he's been under the pump worse than this before,
• 29:13
  hasn't he? Like, you know, and there's less
• 29:17
  eyes on this and I don't know, man, it's just.
• 29:21
  I just, I just think it's tempted fate when you name a
• 29:24
  character Nadia, because it is. I.
• 29:32
  You know, I think Terence is, you know, that that anecdote he
• 29:36
  says all the time in interviews. Oh, you know, one doctor's just
• 29:39
  like another. You know, you can give, it's the
• 29:41
  actor, you know, they, they, you give them the same words and
• 29:44
  they make something different out of it.
• 29:45
  And I think he's written as the 6th Doctor and oh, we want it
• 29:49
  for the 5th Doctor. Well, one doctor's much like the
• 29:51
  other. Let's just make it the fifth.
• 29:53
  We'll put the open on his face and the cricket sweats or
• 29:55
  whatever. And it'll be fine.
• 29:57
  I knew we were in. Trouble F Cat badge replacement.
• 30:02
  That's what he did. I knew we were in trouble when
• 30:05
  this bit happened right where the Doctor justifies Solon's
• 30:10
  experiments. And this is the 5th Doctor
• 30:12
  saying this line. You ready?
• 30:14
  We both know he's a nasty piece of work, but don't forget he's
• 30:17
  also doing good, saving lives every day, including yours.
• 30:20
  If he likes to mess around with corpses in his spare time, well,
• 30:24
  it doesn't do the dead any harm. And every boy needs a hobby.
• 30:27
  What Can you imagine Peter Davidson saying those words?
• 30:34
  It kind of is that book that you go it needs the characters to be
• 30:37
  stupid to work, and that's a bad.
• 30:40
  Story. Yeah, and my God is Perry
• 30:42
  stupid. Oh boy.
• 30:45
  Let's get on to it. She's also horny as well, isn't
• 30:48
  it? Yeah, but the Doctor.
• 30:52
  But before she's hot for the Doctor, she's hot for Morbius.
• 30:54
  And it's like, oh, this mysterious, like, evil general.
• 30:59
  Also, the Doctor is so stupid for not just immediately being
• 31:03
  like, that's Morbius, that guy, That's Morbius.
• 31:06
  Like, I'm on Khan. Solon's here.
• 31:09
  Things haven't kicked off yet. There's a big military dictator
• 31:12
  in town. I wonder who that could be.
• 31:14
  So. But then you've got Perry being
• 31:16
  like, oh, this guy's fit. Like therefore, like all the
• 31:20
  awful stuff he's doing is just invisible to me and deciding
• 31:24
  that she's just going to like basically abandoned the doctor
• 31:28
  to go for a nice dinner with Morbius because because he's a
• 31:33
  hunk. And it's just like, that's not
• 31:37
  that's not parrot. Like doesn't make any sense.
• 31:41
  She's quoted here as saying in an argument with the doctor.
• 31:43
  I'm not a child, I'm a grown woman.
• 31:46
  You're just jealous just because you've never shown any.
• 31:49
  And then the line stops there. Oh boy.
• 31:53
  It's like some. Dreadful.
• 31:54
  Like American soap in the 80s, isn't it?
• 31:58
  It's like, you know, when you read those, those script
• 32:03
  proposals for American Doctor Who films from the 90s, like
• 32:07
  that's what this reads like of like, let's give him a huge gun
• 32:11
  and he's gonna have a companion with massive Bahoonas.
• 32:16
  It's like you just Bahoonas. I don't know.
• 32:19
  I'm and I don't know what they want.
• 32:23
  I'm not an 80s film producer. Yeah.
• 32:29
  I couldn't. You can imagine one of those
• 32:31
  people writing those scripts because I've written here.
• 32:33
  What? Perry is groped by Gas Tac.
• 32:35
  She punches him in the nose and he calls her a lousy bitch.
• 32:39
  I mean honest to God have. We gone too far with Doctor Who
• 32:44
  books, you know? Should we be raiding it back a
• 32:46
  bit? Is Ruby read the right approach
• 32:48
  nowadays? You know, I can only think that
• 32:52
  Justin Richards was like, he's such a safe pair of hands.
• 32:55
  I don't need to read this draft and.
• 32:57
  Printing. It straight to print and then it
• 32:59
  was like, oh, oh, this has to go to print because otherwise we'll
• 33:03
  have no book this month because I feel like there has been no
• 33:07
  editorial eye on this. I think there was, I think
• 33:11
  there's two in the dedication because Terence includes the
• 33:13
  editor here and I think as Joe's, as Joe Blue Tooth, that
• 33:18
  second-half is basically this is what we're going to do and they
• 33:21
  do it. I think that front section was
• 33:24
  shifted to that front, to the front of the book because he
• 33:27
  says something about just in having story needing a
• 33:30
  beginning, middle and end, but not necessarily that order.
• 33:33
  So shifted the middle to the front to make it kind of more
• 33:38
  interesting, because otherwise it's a very straightforward
• 33:40
  plot. Well, if he did read this, that
• 33:42
  makes it worse. I did think about that, because
• 33:45
  if the book did start where you would imagine it would start
• 33:49
  with the TARDIS landing in that jungle and then Pterodactyl
• 33:53
  coming down attacking Berry, and then we sort of follow it in a
• 33:57
  linear fashion. Yeah, but actually easing you in
• 34:00
  like that might have been a better approach than going in.
• 34:04
  Where does it start? Perry's a gorilla, the scourge
• 34:08
  of Skillvana, or some. Excellent.
• 34:10
  With her knife and her blaster being trapped and threatened
• 34:13
  with rape every. Like that's such a immediately
• 34:16
  irritating start to the book. Yeah, you're in the middle.
• 34:20
  You're in the middle of the story then, aren't you?
• 34:23
  So. If you had a told the story in a
• 34:24
  linear fashion, does that mean we wouldn't have gotten
• 34:27
  Interlude 2 where Perry so impressed with how the Doctor
• 34:32
  not only glorifies war, but says to Perry, Oh no, you're just
• 34:37
  naive. You're just a naive girl who
• 34:39
  doesn't understand that sometimes men and things in war
• 34:42
  happens and it's fine and all that.
• 34:45
  And the Doctor pretty much just glorifies war and loves being a
• 34:48
  fucking general and says it to Perry.
• 34:50
  And Perry's just kind of like, do you want to bang?
• 34:55
  Pretty much the Doctor's like, no, I'm like, wait, sorry, hang
• 35:00
  on. Back up, back up, back up.
• 35:03
  I'll just read that paragraph. What the fuck?
• 35:07
  What the hell? It's the same interlude where
• 35:11
  the doctor literally says, and remember, it's the 5th Doctor.
• 35:15
  OK, do I like constant praise, Adulation.
• 35:19
  Almost worship, absolute unquestioned authority?
• 35:23
  Dozens of people breaking their necks to fulfill my every whim?
• 35:27
  People desperately trying to work out what my next whim will
• 35:30
  be so I don't even have to ask. As you Americans say, what's not
• 35:35
  to like? What?
• 35:38
  Does that mean like if this was a column Baker book, there still
• 35:43
  would have been that scene That's is that even worse?
• 35:47
  Like, because they've got, they've been together for a
• 35:49
  while and is that more camaraderie like?
• 35:51
  Yeah. What is what is happening?
• 35:55
  It would be. Worse.
• 35:56
  It would be worse because the 6th Doctor tried to throttle her
• 35:59
  and now he's this evil militaristic warmonger and she's
• 36:02
  aroused by it. It would be worse.
• 36:05
  Yeah. But I feel like there is, there
• 36:07
  is potentially like an interesting story to tell of
• 36:11
  like Perry being into the doctor of like, you know, she's this
• 36:15
  young student who's like met this interesting traveller on
• 36:21
  her holidays and she's gone off. And I feel like maybe Perry and
• 36:24
  the Piskin paradox or something does something with and there's
• 36:27
  maybe a big, big finish that does something with this.
• 36:29
  And it's like there's an interesting story to tell there
• 36:31
  about, you know, like Perry and also like, and then that that
• 36:35
  doctor like immediately dying and being replaced by the by a
• 36:38
  lunatic. This this is not the story.
• 36:43
  That's like a kind of an exploration of Perry's like
• 36:48
  feelings and and characterisation.
• 36:50
  It's not that at all. It's not.
• 36:52
  Only that she meets the Sontarans and the Cybermen
• 36:56
  before she knows who they are. So this definitely should have
• 37:00
  been a column book or Justin wasn't reading this too closely
• 37:03
  because, you know, she doesn't meet them until attack of the
• 37:06
  assignment and the two doctors like she's like.
• 37:10
  Like it's no they they agree never to talk this again on the
• 37:13
  last page. Well.
• 37:16
  That's all right then. I know it's like you're waiting
• 37:19
  for like a big reset switch to happen or like the Time Lords
• 37:23
  are going to wipe their memories and we can all go back to how it
• 37:26
  was before. It doesn't happen like.
• 37:27
  I was convinced it was a parallel universe.
• 37:29
  We were going to get A twist at the end, but this wasn't our
• 37:32
  universe. Yeah, And it feels like maybe
• 37:34
  this could work as like, like Big Finish, if done with the war
• 37:37
  6th Doctor or whatever, whatever the fuck that was.
• 37:41
  Like this could work as like a what if of like, what if the
• 37:44
  Doctor was a massive bastard Again, I don't know who wants to
• 37:47
  read that, but I'm sure there's some market for it.
• 37:50
  But no, it's Yeah. But it's all still trying to fit
• 37:58
  into. This is a book that takes place
• 38:00
  between the TV stories Planted fire and the Caves of Andrew
• 38:03
  Zani. So we're meant to believe that
• 38:05
  they. They.
• 38:07
  Yeah. That is the most cavernous hole
• 38:10
  ever now isn't it? That that gap, But with all
• 38:13
  those Arrow mem stories, this whole bullmonger's epic all.
• 38:18
  The superior beings as well. That's that's in there.
• 38:21
  It's by Nick Walters. Is that correct?
• 38:24
  Is that him superior? Beings, yes.
• 38:26
  Yeah. Andrew, you, you.
• 38:29
  It do make me think though. I didn't think about this
• 38:31
  before. He a proper writer.
• 38:34
  A better writer? No, not even a better writer.
• 38:37
  Terence on form. Just somebody with some skill
• 38:40
  bringing this book to life could write a book where the 5th
• 38:45
  Doctor is inadvertently trapped in this position of having to be
• 38:50
  the figurehead for a military force.
• 38:53
  And you could deal with like, how do I, how do he's not that
• 38:57
  person? How do I project that?
• 38:58
  How do I even navigate any of that?
• 39:01
  Again, it's not a really a sorry hard one, but you could make
• 39:04
  something of it instead. Jared's just suggests that he's
• 39:07
  been seduced by the power of it all and he loves, you know.
• 39:11
  He wears Jack boots. At one point, he's dressed up
• 39:14
  like a. Fucking it does.
• 39:18
  It does. I forgot about that.
• 39:21
  He does quote Hitler. Oh my.
• 39:24
  And and the Southern Confederate general as well.
• 39:27
  Oh yes, that's true too do. You think Tara's got out of his
• 39:30
  big book of military leaders? The best quote is the guy's
• 39:34
  right. I'm going to have the doctor
• 39:35
  say. All of them, he's trying to say
• 39:38
  anything. With this.
• 39:40
  All the doctors to let the Cybermen join the army that he's
• 39:45
  building. It's the one who lost Adric to
• 39:49
  the Cybermen. Like what?
• 39:52
  He doesn't even doesn't even think about that.
• 39:55
  Like his last words are Adric. I'm pretty sure if he saw the
• 39:58
  Cybermen, they would flash through his mind at least like
• 40:01
  once throughout the book, right? We wouldn't have to dwell on it.
• 40:04
  I understand. But you know, his name is not
• 40:06
  even in the book at all. You know, there's no kind of.
• 40:11
  The Cybermen just turn up and then and in their own way, just
• 40:14
  like we want to join you and doctor's like, OK, And they're
• 40:17
  like excellent. Can you?
• 40:19
  Imagine a Cyberman saluting as well.
• 40:25
  If we're going to a current team, Joe, is this the basis for
• 40:29
  A Good Man Goes to War? Oh, there's another terrible
• 40:33
  story. Jesus Christ, I don't know
• 40:35
  what's worse. No, this is worse.
• 40:37
  This is absolutely worse. Like there was one fun thing in
• 40:43
  the latter half of the book that I did like, and that is, you
• 40:45
  know, when all of the armies are going to war and you've got all
• 40:50
  of the alliance, the Suntaras assignment, and they've all got
• 40:54
  different tactics because they're different species with
• 40:57
  with their own strengths. And so they all attack in
• 40:59
  different ways. That was the one bit where I was
• 41:01
  like, oh, there's something here, there's something here.
• 41:05
  He hasn't got it, but there's something here.
• 41:08
  That's a point. Where you that's a bit where you
• 41:10
  can see what he's kind of trying to do with it.
• 41:12
  I think where there's a point to some kind of point in all this.
• 41:16
  But you know, I haven't mentioned.
• 41:18
  Wait for five pages. Hang on, I better put in another
• 41:20
  reference. I did actually count how many
• 41:23
  times rape appeared and anyone had a guess at how many times it
• 41:26
  appears. I don't know, but if you would
• 41:29
  have played a rape drink drinking game, John, how fucked
• 41:33
  up? Ran asked.
• 41:34
  Would you get by the end of this?
• 41:35
  I'm going to say. 40 it should be none, but go on.
• 41:39
  It should if you mentioned right once in your Doctor Who book.
• 41:42
  It's one time too many, I'm pretty sure.
• 41:45
  Like definitely. Only six with a further 4
• 41:49
  threats. That's wow.
• 41:52
  That's 10 more than we needed. Yes, absolutely and and the
• 41:56
  problem is the. Implication lingers throughout
• 41:59
  the whole book, so you kind of keep it at the back of your mind
• 42:02
  while reading this because every bad guy wants to partake in it
• 42:07
  in some way, you know, like the implication is there, it's.
• 42:11
  Not easily. As if that's bad enough, right?
• 42:13
  I wrote towards the end of the book, why is Terence Dicks
• 42:17
  suggesting the necrophilic rape of the sisterhood of Khan?
• 42:21
  Because someone goes, Oh well, never mind, we'll kill them and
• 42:25
  we'll have fun with some of them.
• 42:26
  And then he goes, Oh well, we'll have fun with some of them after
• 42:29
  they're dead. I'm like what is happening right
• 42:32
  now? It's not just that kind of.
• 42:35
  It's the yeah, that Drago, he's this.
• 42:39
  He gives Perry excessive bed bath.
• 42:41
  He's just like what's? Yeah, and.
• 42:45
  Do you remember the doctors threat to him about how how
• 42:49
  someone else that did this they destroyed their reputation and
• 42:53
  he slit his throat in a pool of blood or what?
• 42:56
  What are you talking about? Very, very.
• 43:02
  Much thanks. By the way, Solon is the only
• 43:04
  one that can. Perry gets attacked by a
• 43:06
  pterodactyl. That's all right.
• 43:08
  The doctor snaps, snaps his neck.
• 43:10
  But. Oh, Perry's arms hanging off by
• 43:11
  a thread. The only doctor in ever in the
• 43:15
  history of the universe that could possibly save Perry is
• 43:19
  apparently Solon. Solon.
• 43:21
  Like, I'm thinking to myself, like, I don't know, what about
• 43:24
  Professor Marius or something. Like.
• 43:26
  Yeah. And the book wouldn't happen.
• 43:31
  Yeah, it's a, it's a huge universe, like yeah was.
• 43:35
  Were they already on Khan or did he go from the pterodactyl
• 43:38
  planet to Khan? He.
• 43:40
  Goes from pterodactyl planet to Khan because he's like there's
• 43:43
  only one person in the entire world who could entire universe
• 43:46
  of all of time who could possibly help Perry's bitten
• 43:52
  arm. What about the What about the
• 43:54
  race doctor that has regeneration?
• 43:58
  You know, like surely you've got some medical skills on Gallup.
• 44:03
  We don't even mention like, all right, so this is back in time
• 44:06
  and he's he's meeting more BS out of order.
• 44:09
  So that shouldn't be allowed somehow.
• 44:11
  I know Doctor Who does that anyway, that's fine.
• 44:13
  But he goes back in time and he goes to Gallifrey in Gallifrey's
• 44:18
  past. They figure out who he is and
• 44:22
  there's like no repercussions there.
• 44:25
  There's no like like where it should have led was, look, you
• 44:29
  shouldn't be here. And that's why you have to be
• 44:31
  the general of this army, because if you don't, you're
• 44:34
  hey, you're breaking these laws of time.
• 44:36
  You shouldn't be in Gallifrey in the past.
• 44:37
  So like that's a no, no, No, instead there is no no.
• 44:43
  They know. They know he's from a different
• 44:44
  time period or something like, how is that?
• 44:49
  Come on, Terry. Didn't you make?
• 44:51
  Some of this stuff, like what is, what is?
• 44:53
  Yeah, you know, it's I've melt. I'm melting like I am melting
• 44:57
  right now. Yeah, it's it's hurts my noggin.
• 45:00
  It really. I was really.
• 45:02
  Confused also like again to say that it's Terry who like knows
• 45:05
  his continuity and all that stuff as to when the Gallifrey
• 45:09
  stuff took place because Barusa's in it.
• 45:13
  So presumably the Doctor is alive but in the past of that
• 45:16
  version of Gallifrey but hasn't left yet.
• 45:19
  But it's also about Morbius, who I thought was in like the like
• 45:24
  thousands of years ago in Gallifrey.
• 45:26
  Like it was just very like, what?
• 45:27
  When is this happening? What is happening?
• 45:29
  Is it just? And well, they know he steals a
• 45:31
  TARDIS like. Yeah.
• 45:33
  And Terence, who wrote The Five. So he understands Barusa.
• 45:37
  He understands the doctor in Barusa's relationship.
• 45:40
  Barusa doesn't need to be in this book.
• 45:42
  But there's a scene. Where Barusa?
• 45:44
  Where Barusa is like trying to wrestle control of the
• 45:47
  negotiations. So the doctor basically goes
• 45:50
  execute Barusa unless he gets into heel.
• 45:53
  I'm like, what? I just kept saying what and.
• 45:57
  Then Barusa is meant to be like going back and teaching the
• 45:59
  young doctor even though he knows that the general is this
• 46:02
  evil war bastard and not like it just doesn't make any sense.
• 46:06
  This should have been called War Bastard.
• 46:08
  That's. Basically what he's aiming for,
• 46:14
  isn't it? Yeah, it also makes me angry
• 46:16
  that I'm getting motivated about it because like, this is such
• 46:18
  trash, it doesn't matter. Like who cares?
• 46:23
  Oh, John, what did you love about this book?
• 46:26
  I did actually love the way he played so long in this book
• 46:29
  because he's just this big, over the top, terrible character.
• 46:35
  It's. Was it?
• 46:36
  Yeah. The way he's kind of got this
• 46:39
  attitude towards surgery. The life of death of the patient
• 46:42
  is largely irrelevant, you know, and he was intoxicated on his
• 46:47
  own brilliance. I really kind of love that it's
• 46:50
  kind of the the surgeon as a one of those pretentious artists.
• 46:56
  It's. Like a dude from.
• 46:58
  It's like Julian Glover from that episode of Blake 7.
• 47:01
  You know, like soon as Blake threatens to fucking chop his
• 47:05
  hands off, suddenly he's just like, no, but I'm a genius.
• 47:08
  Yeah. That that.
• 47:09
  Kind of that even. He's a sleeve.
• 47:11
  He goes, oh, you know, when, when I'll save Perry.
• 47:14
  Maybe she'll be grateful. Nice.
• 47:19
  To take it back, I I think what you have to think about Terrence
• 47:22
  is going back and it's just caused me to think back on his
• 47:25
  stories. He really doesn't write women at
• 47:28
  all. Well, he knows his kind of niche
• 47:30
  is this writer of pulp SF and knows what he's doing.
• 47:33
  Church without for what? He's the audience.
• 47:36
  Teenage boys, adolescents are the adults and that.
• 47:39
  But yeah, on top of everything else, there is a this gag.
• 47:43
  Let's see what's it is Gaz with women taking their time to get
• 47:46
  ready. Is Perry with Is that a gun in
• 47:48
  your pocket? So she's like almost killed and
• 47:55
  then has a transplant and recovers and then the next
• 47:58
  minute she wants to go on a shopping.
• 47:59
  Spree. Like, yeah, give me the credit
• 48:03
  cards now I need a pretty frock for the ambassador's reception.
• 48:06
  Tonight. And it's like at that point they
• 48:09
  could leave this fucking horrible planet where everyone
• 48:12
  has just tried to rape her. Oh no, I can go and try and some
• 48:15
  fair coats. Oh, I'll absolutely do that
• 48:17
  instead of just getting in the TARDIS and leaving.
• 48:20
  But she's not just a Pretty Little lady that likes frogs,
• 48:24
  she also has quotes like this. Bullshit.
• 48:27
  You're talking to the cut throat gorilla leader.
• 48:29
  Remember they used to call me the Scourge of Sylvanor?
• 48:33
  Somebody get me a ham blazer, a hand blaster, a laser rifle and
• 48:40
  and a knife. Like what is going on?
• 48:44
  Who is this girl? I don't.
• 48:46
  Recognize her at all? It's like, why doesn't he just
• 48:49
  tell her like, because she won't accept that they can't don't
• 48:53
  they don't have to deal with Solon.
• 48:54
  And he could just be like, hey, you know how I have a time
• 48:57
  machine? Yes, well, I dealt with it in
• 49:01
  this planet's future. But my past, I've dealt with it.
• 49:04
  It's over. It's done.
• 49:05
  Someone has been dealt with. All right, now let's fuck off.
• 49:09
  But he's also like, oh, Perry, it's far too complicated for me
• 49:12
  to possibly explain it to you. It's like, no, it's, it's just
• 49:15
  time travel. You've been here before.
• 49:17
  Like, it's not. It's not complicated.
• 49:19
  Oh and in fact the worst Perry bit in the whole book was where,
• 49:23
  I mean it's the worst Morbius bit as well is where she's on on
• 49:28
  this ship. And she starts scraping her arm
• 49:31
  just so it's sort of a little bit red raw and goes, Oh my God,
• 49:35
  I'm a leper. He's like, oh, I'm so pretty, I
• 49:38
  can't get leprosy. Eject her immediately.
• 49:40
  And that's how she escapes. It's not bad playing on the
• 49:44
  Villains vanities. The one thing I did like Beck
• 49:46
  Kerry is that she is a Douglas Sandwich fan because she puts
• 49:49
  Douglas Sandwich in the book. I felt a bit dirty, you know
• 49:53
  that being in here, you know, in this book.
• 49:56
  Yeah, it's yeah. Hang on.
• 49:58
  It's a good writer. Writer.
• 49:59
  His words are in here. What's going on?
• 50:03
  Yeah, Oh, the the Solon stuff pissed me off though, because
• 50:07
  it's the fact that like you've got that Solon stuff at the
• 50:10
  beginning of him like building the zombie army and then they
• 50:14
  just use, he ignores it for like 200 pages.
• 50:16
  And then I was like, oh, things are finally wrapping up in this
• 50:19
  battle battle. And then it was like, oh shit,
• 50:21
  now we have to do the zombie army.
• 50:23
  Like all of that stuff that like was in the 1st 15 pages.
• 50:27
  Now that's going to come back and we're going to have to deal
• 50:29
  with all of that shit. I was like, can this not just
• 50:32
  end? And then you've got all of that
• 50:33
  bollocks with the trial and. You know it is the zombie army
• 50:37
  turns up and is defeated in half a page.
• 50:40
  I was. Like I mean, yes.
• 50:42
  That was that was a small mercy, but I mean, maybe Terence was as
• 50:47
  sick of it as I was. I would say it's like the
• 50:49
  vampire as well, isn't it? It's badass.
• 50:52
  He's around in the back, right for, you know, 200 pages.
• 50:56
  There's a few bits splits right? There you go, done.
• 50:58
  He's gone. That's it.
• 51:00
  Knocked him off quite easily. What?
• 51:03
  Is there any any way that an army consisting of Sontarans,
• 51:10
  Cybermen, Ice Warriors, Ogrons? Have I forgotten anyone?
• 51:14
  Draconians. Is there any way that that could
• 51:17
  be made to made sense? I don't think it it can I?
• 51:23
  Think the Centenarians would just rather fight all of them at
• 51:25
  the same time? Because they would love it.
• 51:28
  They would absolutely love it. We'll fight Morbius, we'll fight
• 51:31
  the Cybermen, the Draconians, the Rutan.
• 51:35
  We'll just do it. Just let's just go.
• 51:36
  We, we don't care. We, we get a clone 8 million of
• 51:39
  us a day anyway. What?
• 51:41
  However, what crazy man it is. We, we we love this shit.
• 51:45
  We don't need your help. We don't want your help.
• 51:47
  We've got this by ourselves. That that to me would make more
• 51:50
  sense with the Sontarans. Like, yeah.
• 51:54
  It was like the only way you could make it work would be if
• 51:57
  the threat was so massive that they had to all which it just
• 52:00
  had dark. Opens.
• 52:03
  I guess so, but like you'd you'd have to and that's what they
• 52:06
  imply in this book. But I mean, the threat is not
• 52:08
  that big. It's like some guys with a few
• 52:12
  guns and some space there's. There's no scale to it.
• 52:15
  Is that for a book supposed to be planned?
• 52:18
  Planets, galaxies, Mobius being this ultimate threat, it's just
• 52:24
  racing around too fast to build it.
• 52:27
  Parents Dicks knows that there is a galactic Federation in the
• 52:30
  future. It's in two stories that he
• 52:32
  script edited, The Curse of Paladon and the monster of
• 52:35
  Paladon. So get rid of all these have the
• 52:38
  humans, draconians, the Ice Warriors.
• 52:42
  And Army. Of and.
• 52:44
  Heaps of different Alpha Centuri who for some reason still want
• 52:47
  to rape Perry somehow. I don't know why, just ignore
• 52:49
  that. But all this caught like there
• 52:52
  you go, you've got the Galactic Federation there now you don't
• 52:56
  have to have all this kind of weird stuff that doesn't make
• 52:58
  sense. And guess what, Morbius, maybe
• 53:02
  maybe he's just like, Hey, I need a foothold in my Galaxy or
• 53:06
  something in this Galaxy or something.
• 53:07
  How about Hey, some to Aaron's, we'll help you.
• 53:10
  I'll help you out with some of this Rutan business if you if
• 53:13
  you join my army for a bit. And also, hey, Cybermen, I got a
• 53:18
  way you can be immune to gold if you if you help me out.
• 53:23
  Here it is, you know, Yeah. Those guys should be working for
• 53:27
  the Morbius, not against him. Who are these mercenary, rapey
• 53:32
  dudes? We don't want that, but we want
• 53:33
  bad guys. Cybermen.
• 53:35
  How? Close to how close to combat?
• 53:38
  Rock. Is this because that also had
• 53:40
  horrible rapey mercenaries in it?
• 53:43
  But they were just. Million.
• 53:45
  Miles away. Is that in the future?
• 53:47
  Was that before? I don't think this is setting
• 53:51
  given is different but but. Mick Lewis makes them truly
• 53:55
  loathsome and ugly and unpleasant in a way that
• 53:59
  Terrance is just making them sort of comedy.
• 54:02
  It's a different book. Mick Lewis is going for kind of
• 54:04
  visceral horror and he's upfront about that.
• 54:07
  Terrance is bolstering a very thin story with Terrance.
• 54:14
  I mean, again to the red thing, Alan Alan Moore is often
• 54:18
  criticized this. And as he points out, he he used
• 54:20
  it as the ultimate horror, as as the ultimate marker of person's
• 54:23
  character that they're willing to go that low that they weren't
• 54:26
  to perpetrate one of the worst horrors you can perpetrate.
• 54:30
  So after this book is 10 little aliens and the book after that
• 54:34
  is combat. Rock.
• 54:35
  Oh wow. OK, the rape.
• 54:37
  Trilogy. Is there raping tender aliens?
• 54:41
  Yeah, there was that soldier who?
• 54:44
  The ugly soldier who got. Unpleasant.
• 54:48
  But we're officially terming it that trilogy now.
• 54:50
  Oh. God.
• 54:52
  But it does seem to me that those, those mercenaries, they
• 54:55
  have two thoughts. 1 is when am I going to attack everybody and
• 54:58
  2 is when can I hurt, you know, when can I rape?
• 55:01
  Get my hand away, yeah. Jeez, wow, that's some deep
• 55:05
  characterization there. Yeah, that's the problem.
• 55:09
  Was this like 2002? 2002 and 3 SO publication date.
• 55:15
  Like Taylor? 2002.
• 55:17
  Yeah, Taylor, End of wilderness, where it was like, let's just do
• 55:20
  what we want. You know this as well, though,
• 55:22
  right? The both the Doctor and Perry,
• 55:24
  at various points of this book decide, you know, well, we're
• 55:27
  either going to have victory or we'll just kill ourselves.
• 55:32
  And at one point, the Doctors, the Doctor was also considering,
• 55:35
  quite dispassionately, methods for killing both Perry and
• 55:38
  himself before the final collapse.
• 55:41
  Knife or something lifting towards the end or something
• 55:45
  like that. Doesn't he?
• 55:47
  Like what do you got the knife for, doctor?
• 55:48
  No reason. It's definitely a better idea to
• 55:54
  like, kill my companion and myself than just find the
• 55:56
  TARDIS. It's in the thing.
• 56:00
  It's it's been, it's in the cupboard the whole time.
• 56:03
  It's Oh my God. And like he the doctors, like
• 56:07
  earlier on in the book, we can't possibly leave.
• 56:10
  There's someone guarding it. And I'm like what?
• 56:15
  How do you guys think this seeks into brain and Morbius saying
• 56:19
  what did we learn there? That Morbius was a a great
• 56:22
  warlord, that he went into a dispersal chamber and that so
• 56:26
  Lord has his brain and the sisterhood of Khan are paranoid.
• 56:31
  Does it work? No.
• 56:35
  Because. I hope the big Finnish audios, I
• 56:38
  haven't heard them, but I hope the ones that are doing all this
• 56:40
  Morbius stuff ignore this ever existed.
• 56:43
  I'd say the only characterization that's kind of
• 56:45
  solid is the Sisterhood of Khan. Act like the sisterhood of Khan.
• 56:50
  Like that's like they act like, yeah, that's, you know, that's,
• 56:56
  that's pretty accurate, I'd say, you know, like that's not too
• 56:59
  far out of the realm. But I mean, even just getting
• 57:02
  the head out of the thing and then put it all right.
• 57:05
  So Morbius is put on trial and he has to get executed, right?
• 57:09
  So then, But they only execute his body because so so on.
• 57:14
  Sneaks in, takes his head out, sews it back up and puts makeup
• 57:20
  on it or something and. No, in the future puts him in
• 57:25
  the dispersal chamber and goes, Oh well, I got up early and I'll
• 57:29
  put him in there. I'll sign I did him or
• 57:31
  something, put him in there. Just to save you the bother and
• 57:33
  no one, no one has a good look and then that's it.
• 57:37
  Is it the weather time? Yeah, I just like the idea of it
• 57:41
  sneaking in kind of open your head, taking the brain out and
• 57:45
  then going, oh, has anyone got any foundation?
• 57:47
  I just want to cover up the stitches.
• 57:50
  They have tinted moisturize. Yeah.
• 57:55
  I think the thing about the brain of Morbius is like that
• 57:59
  back story of Morbius feels very mythic and like it's sort of
• 58:04
  Time Lord mythology that the doctors kind of walked in on.
• 58:08
  And I feel like this just sort of like lessens it.
• 58:10
  It's like I don't need to see Morbius strutting around and I
• 58:14
  don't need to see Barusa and all of that stuff.
• 58:16
  Like it's just it's fine for that not to be explored.
• 58:20
  Like Morbius is this fallen, fallen dictator who's been
• 58:23
  executed on car. That's all I need to know.
• 58:25
  I don't need to see it. And also the Brain of Morbius is
• 58:30
  a Frankenstein parody and I don't like Morbius is there to
• 58:35
  be Frankenstein. Like it doesn't need a prequel.
• 58:37
  I don't care. Like, I know that if it's like
• 58:40
  if there's something Time Lordy Doctor Who fans want to fill the
• 58:43
  gap and like, you know, explore all of that, but I feel like it
• 58:47
  needed to be more of this kind of broad strokes, mythic legend
• 58:54
  type story than this sort of sordid boys in space with guns
• 58:59
  story. It's kind of similar to the Star
• 59:03
  Wars peoples on that front because Star Wars is built on
• 59:05
  this mythic movie. The Jedi being this ancient
• 59:07
  order, the Empire being this long standing thing and then
• 59:11
  this, these stars peoples. No, this had back 20 years
• 59:13
  before. So everything in that has been
• 59:15
  compressed and you don't need a detail.
• 59:18
  I know it's a Spanish thing to want to fill in those details.
• 59:20
  Be interested then law and the myth, but really it's just
• 59:24
  scaffolding for a story, you know, it's it turns.
• 59:27
  Out it was all about trade negotiations with a long star.
• 59:30
  Absolutely. Or the.
• 59:32
  Negotiating with holograms and videos and all that kind of
• 59:35
  stuff. For, for, for them to say that
• 59:38
  all traces of these mythical people were erased in like, not
• 59:43
  even because how old's Luke in the first Star Wars movie?
• 59:46
  Is he 20 or is he 18 or something like that?
• 59:48
  It's not. Teenage has been meant to be.
• 59:50
  Yeah, well, there you go. That's even less time because in
• 59:53
  in Revenge of the Sith, like he's born like, so that's even
• 59:57
  less time. Wouldn't.
• 59:58
  It so disgusted with warmonger we've turned into a Star Wars.
• 1:00:01
  Oh God. I'd rather watch any of those
• 1:00:05
  prequels that read this. Wouldn't make that time 40 plus
• 1:00:09
  years because when you get to Rome, right, by the time
• 1:00:13
  Augustus passes away, he has been the emperor for over 40
• 1:00:18
  years and pretty much most of the people who remember Rome as
• 1:00:24
  this kind of Republic are dead and gone.
• 1:00:27
  Like he is about to be, you know?
• 1:00:30
  So you'd need that length of time, maybe even more because
• 1:00:33
  there's future technology with holograms and shit.
• 1:00:35
  So like, I don't know, let's call it a couple centuries, but
• 1:00:38
  no, never mind. Anyway, that was my start.
• 1:00:41
  Star Wars talk, everyone. As well, right?
• 1:00:43
  So much of the brain of Morbius actually makes sense in that he
• 1:00:47
  is a devotee of Morbius. He has his brain.
• 1:00:50
  The sisterhood are paranoid, so they're bringing the ships down.
• 1:00:54
  He's desperate so he's cobbling together a body out of the the
• 1:01:00
  dead bodies that are in those ships.
• 1:01:02
  That all makes sense. But Oh no, no, no, he's been
• 1:01:05
  doing this for years. He's been making Frankenstein
• 1:01:09
  monsters for the for ages out of cobbled up.
• 1:01:12
  Why would you do? That I don't understand.
• 1:01:15
  Yeah, It takes away the desperation of the character.
• 1:01:17
  He's only doing this because that's all that is left to him
• 1:01:20
  for him to work with. That's why he's doing it.
• 1:01:22
  But to say that like, oh, you know, like I work in this
• 1:01:27
  hospital on Cannes before all this happened and you know what?
• 1:01:31
  I would take the bodies and I would reanimate them.
• 1:01:34
  And so lobster hands on cat people and things just for fun
• 1:01:37
  and all this kind of shit. I actually did put a horse on
• 1:01:41
  top of a man like. There was one of them coming
• 1:01:47
  over that field. But you've got to be so careful,
• 1:01:53
  right? When you're doing a sequel or a
• 1:01:55
  prequel, you've got to be so careful because you're taking
• 1:01:57
  something that's kind of loved and you're adding context to it.
• 1:02:00
  That's the reason you're doing it.
• 1:02:02
  And you just don't want to make that original 1 shitter than it
• 1:02:07
  already was. And that's what this.
• 1:02:09
  Does you know, I mean, I've heard recently, you know,
• 1:02:11
  people. Saying that about the whale
• 1:02:13
  doing that about midnight, you know, like you, we're so
• 1:02:16
  obsessed these days with adding to stuff that's already happened
• 1:02:19
  instead of just telling an original story it.
• 1:02:21
  Diminishes the original if you don't get it right.
• 1:02:23
  And this does not get wrong. I mean, you know, something like
• 1:02:26
  the love of war is based on a line from the brain, Morbius,
• 1:02:29
  and that works is all right. Inspiration though, isn't it?
• 1:02:32
  You know, Yeah. It's taken and expanding.
• 1:02:34
  This is diminishing. It's it's like a colouring book
• 1:02:37
  in book. Basically it's filling or join
• 1:02:40
  the dots. It's not.
• 1:02:42
  Create something of your own, something original, something
• 1:02:45
  that will engage you. I mean, Perry being hot for the
• 1:02:49
  Doctor, that's original. Oh, oh, God.
• 1:02:53
  But again, going back to it, Perry had been threatened with
• 1:02:56
  rape all the way through this book, and there's that line.
• 1:02:59
  The only thing in short supply was female company, although
• 1:03:03
  Perry and a handful of hospital nurses did their best to fill
• 1:03:06
  the gap. Oh.
• 1:03:07
  No. What?
• 1:03:09
  And. Even at the end of the book,
• 1:03:11
  right where? We're finally putting all of
• 1:03:13
  this bullshit behind us and we're going back to the TARDIS.
• 1:03:15
  She's like, oh, what did happen with that woman who came?
• 1:03:19
  And. You know, meant I couldn't fuck
• 1:03:21
  you in the middle of the book. What happened with her?
• 1:03:23
  He's like, oh, Perry, you don't think that?
• 1:03:25
  Oh, just keeping you on your toes, Doctor.
• 1:03:30
  Oh God. Oh my.
• 1:03:33
  God, was there anything good about this?
• 1:03:37
  Contractorization of the sisterhood of Khan, maybe?
• 1:03:40
  The Sontaran drinking song. The single worst guy.
• 1:03:51
  It's such a dad joke it. Doesn't make any fucking sense.
• 1:03:56
  No one. It doesn't make sense.
• 1:04:01
  Which is why I. Care to explain the joke please?
• 1:04:04
  Because everyone's very confused, right?
• 1:04:06
  Now OK, so the Song Towers have a watch out of Isilon Kwai and
• 1:04:11
  this is set up through the first half of the novel until the
• 1:04:14
  Doctor as a supremo goes along to recruit them and the Doctor
• 1:04:20
  has a little drinking game with them as the Santoras have boxed
• 1:04:24
  them in to an Earth inspired drinking chart.
• 1:04:28
  So the Doctor sits down. It's all quite what's going on.
• 1:04:32
  Oh, it's your thing. It's it's a long way to
• 1:04:35
  Tipperary. It's a long, quite a Tipperary
• 1:04:42
  fuck. Off would Sontarans know that it
• 1:04:48
  doesn't make sense why? Why it's so scared?
• 1:04:53
  Yes. It's just so stupid.
• 1:04:56
  That's why it's so, yeah, unexpectedly I feel like.
• 1:05:01
  He's had that rattling around in his head for about 30 years and
• 1:05:05
  he's been looking for somewhere to use that, and this was the
• 1:05:08
  place I think it. Meant.
• 1:05:10
  I think that's. The bit, you know where Justin
• 1:05:12
  sort of is at the print, he's got the book in his hand and he
• 1:05:14
  hasn't looked at it. He's got to that point.
• 1:05:17
  It just shut the. Book anyway, just get it on the
• 1:05:19
  shelves. All right, what we're doing next
• 1:05:22
  month, Steve, you're doing 10 it later and come on.
• 1:05:24
  Let's never talk about this again.
• 1:05:26
  Get it printed and ship them straight to that orphanage.
• 1:05:35
  Do you know what you know? There was a joke about that in
• 1:05:38
  the blood cell while I was reading recently.
• 1:05:40
  Yes, about about books. Oh, never mind.
• 1:05:43
  Maybe. Maybe they'll be used to warm up
• 1:05:45
  an orphanage. I thought, my God, he's actually
• 1:05:47
  referencing it in a. Book well.
• 1:05:50
  There was one bit I did find him using, and that is that certain
• 1:05:55
  members of the agency on Gallifrey were involved in the
• 1:05:58
  original conspiracy to free Morbius, which means that the
• 1:06:02
  Time Lords are technically financing both sides of this
• 1:06:06
  fight. Now that's that seems like a
• 1:06:08
  very Time Lordy type thing to do.
• 1:06:10
  And even that's a bit more interesting story than the one
• 1:06:13
  we get if you sort of looked into that a bit more.
• 1:06:15
  But no, it's just a throwaway gag.
• 1:06:17
  But it weren't for me. There's a lot of interesting,
• 1:06:20
  kind of potentially interesting stories, but if they're just not
• 1:06:24
  right together, it's like chucking the worst possible
• 1:06:28
  ingredients you can together. I don't know what, what would
• 1:06:31
  they be? God, anything with mushrooms and
• 1:06:35
  you should put your taste together.
• 1:06:37
  Don't match. And it's done right throughout
• 1:06:41
  this book. It's like a terrible kid.
• 1:06:45
  Do you think Terrible Kid is a good book?
• 1:06:48
  No. Yes, because he got paid for it.
• 1:06:54
  So I would say not only should he be embarrassed for writing
• 1:06:57
  this, Justin should be embarrassed for, well, his role
• 1:07:03
  in editing or lack thereof. This book and the fucking people
• 1:07:08
  who made the cover should also be embarrassed because that is
• 1:07:12
  absolute shit. It's one of the few black sheet
• 1:07:16
  covers that actually looks like an artist had something to do
• 1:07:19
  with. No offence to black sheet
• 1:07:20
  covers, you know what I mean? Like someone might have, you
• 1:07:22
  know, put a pen to paper and kind of drawn something rather
• 1:07:25
  than, you know, fucked around on Photoshop or something like
• 1:07:28
  that. And it's still absolutely
• 1:07:30
  terrible. It's why, Why is that planet
• 1:07:33
  cracking floor? What is that planet?
• 1:07:35
  No. No.
• 1:07:35
  Why is that planet? Any hollow planets are not
• 1:07:38
  hollow. What is any of that?
• 1:07:42
  Maybe it's like the planet where M&M's come from.
• 1:07:45
  That's a sci-fi cover drawn by someone who doesn't know a
• 1:07:49
  freaking thing about science fiction.
• 1:07:51
  It's it's someone's I think it looks like Chris Foss covers
• 1:07:53
  coming from the Foundation novels in the 70s which just
• 1:07:56
  spaceships Gen. generic spaceship put together.
• 1:07:59
  Also, will you just have a look please at how close that planet
• 1:08:02
  is to that castle? Because it looks like it's going
• 1:08:05
  to fall down. It's like Gallifrey coming in at
• 1:08:08
  the end of time, you know? So and and as a as a graphic
• 1:08:11
  designer, is there any redeeming feature of this cover at all?
• 1:08:15
  No, no. And I feel bad that we did our
• 1:08:20
  worst black sheep covers and I overlooked this one because
• 1:08:23
  it's, it's yeah. It's fucking terrible.
• 1:08:27
  Yeah. So you'd like, it's not like
• 1:08:30
  Andrew Hunt's book where like, no matter what you think of it,
• 1:08:33
  it's not the greatest book there is.
• 1:08:35
  It's not, but at least the cover is absolutely beautiful and make
• 1:08:40
  sure that that book will in some way be forever remembered, at
• 1:08:43
  least by me forever, because it's got the awesome Unicorn and
• 1:08:46
  there's the cat and it's just freaking gorgeous.
• 1:08:49
  You know, I don't remember much about the dimension writers
• 1:08:52
  either, but the Doctor playing chess with the skeleton.
• 1:08:54
  It's it's beauty. That's the best 7th Doctor on a
• 1:08:58
  on a cover in the on the books, right.
• 1:09:00
  You know, like there's like there's covers for bad books
• 1:09:03
  that you will still remember that book even now.
• 1:09:06
  It's bad, but the cover is just wonderful piece of art.
• 1:09:10
  And then you've got this. That's shit in every conceivable
• 1:09:12
  way that something can be shit and and that's it.
• 1:09:16
  Like the. BLOB The back BLOB is full of.
• 1:09:20
  Lies. As well, it's full of lies.
• 1:09:23
  A chain of Avengers has been a set in motion that will change
• 1:09:26
  the Doctor and Perry forever until the case of Andrazani.
• 1:09:30
  And what until it makes 288? The answers lie in the origins
• 1:09:34
  of a conflict that will affect the whole cosmos, does it?
• 1:09:38
  It is a conflict that will test both the Doctor and Perry to the
• 1:09:41
  limit and bring them face to face with the dark side of their
• 1:09:43
  own personalities, does it? They just sort of go, I quite
• 1:09:48
  like this a bit and I quite fancy you when you're murdering
• 1:09:51
  people. I think it's a shame as well
• 1:09:55
  that having Terence Dix his name on the cover, probably more
• 1:09:58
  people read this than a lot of like the good stuff that was
• 1:10:02
  coming out. Then 10 little aliens or
• 1:10:04
  something, yeah. And like.
• 1:10:05
  And like the really great stuff that was happening in the 8th
• 1:10:07
  Doctor books around this time. But yeah, this is the one that
• 1:10:11
  all those kind of Triad 70s fans would have been like.
• 1:10:14
  Oh, Brain of Morbius prequel. What was the 8th Doctor book
• 1:10:18
  that came out A. Lot I'm looking right now.
• 1:10:19
  It would have been May 2002 and it is The Book of the Steel by
• 1:10:25
  Paul Ebbs and I quite like. That book, I like that one as
• 1:10:28
  well. Oh yes.
• 1:10:30
  There's around that sort of like camera obscurer.
• 1:10:33
  Like Crooked Worlds? Yeah, Time 0.
• 1:10:36
  Gold and. Then this shit.
• 1:10:39
  Yeah, Trading Futures, Book of the steel crooked world History
• 1:10:43
  101 camera obscurer like before trading futures, the
• 1:10:46
  microphobia, the time zeroes around there, like, yeah, that's
• 1:10:52
  a that's a goldmine of amazing books right there.
• 1:10:54
  Even even some of the more. Yeah, well, trading futures is
• 1:10:58
  Atlanta's best book, but it's still a really fun like near
• 1:11:02
  future James Bondian kind of adventure.
• 1:11:05
  It's remembering. Yeah, it's that pulp novel that
• 1:11:08
  this is trying to be almost. And it works.
• 1:11:13
  This novel should have been pulped.
• 1:11:15
  I see it. Sorry.
• 1:11:16
  That's a bad joke. Does anybody else?
• 1:11:18
  I mean, please. I mean, I've got so many notes
• 1:11:21
  here. Does anyone else have any like
• 1:11:22
  that? You know, the worst of
• 1:11:23
  warmonger, No? So nobody can tell me anymore
• 1:11:29
  that Terrance Dicks can do no wrong.
• 1:11:31
  Like I was. I said, I've said this last
• 1:11:34
  night to to Andrew. I'm like, there might be parts
• 1:11:37
  of the Pertwee era that aren't for me, but I respect it because
• 1:11:41
  what he and Barry did was make sure Doctor Who had a longevity
• 1:11:46
  to it that lasted until the late 80s.
• 1:11:48
  You know, like they they said a template was fucking popular as
• 1:11:52
  hell and it, it put it, put the show on the map in a way it
• 1:11:56
  hadn't been before. I I huge respect for that.
• 1:11:59
  So. But this is by far like the
• 1:12:03
  worst thing he's ever done. Like easily.
• 1:12:05
  Like, so he can do wrong. And here's evidence of it.
• 1:12:08
  Right. Yeah.
• 1:12:10
  One thing I idea I did like in here, which is on the Time
• 1:12:14
  World, so it's on the continue, is that idea of a Time World
• 1:12:16
  prison cell, that Ubiet suite where they just put them in.
• 1:12:20
  Yeah, yeah. A comfortable, nice place and
• 1:12:24
  they just drop them in there forever and forget them.
• 1:12:28
  That's that's a really nice kind of idea of the mythology.
• 1:12:30
  It's working with that. To be honest, I thought that
• 1:12:32
  sounded really nice. I was like, I'll, I'll go to the
• 1:12:35
  yeah tweet with like loads of books and movies.
• 1:12:38
  Yeah, what's the word? Hollow discs?
• 1:12:40
  Even the hollow discs are replaced or something.
• 1:12:43
  Well, we've all been through COVID now, so that doesn't seem
• 1:12:45
  like such a bad idea. Doesn't it like?
• 1:12:48
  This Are you ready? This is all in one scene at the
• 1:12:51
  start somebody goes, you I take it are the famous commander
• 1:12:54
  Perry. And then Perry kicks him in the
• 1:12:58
  groin hard and fast and he goes you'll suffer for that you
• 1:13:02
  bitch. And then and then he goes you're
• 1:13:06
  not too bad, a bit skinny but not too bad, fancy a good time
• 1:13:09
  before you go. And then Perry is appalled.
• 1:13:12
  She goes you know this girl was being raped by your troops
• 1:13:15
  before the 1st wave landed. And he comes back with some
• 1:13:18
  girls have all the luck. And As for you, you're lucky the
• 1:13:21
  commandant is one of the old school or I would have made your
• 1:13:24
  last night one to remember. Like what is going on?
• 1:13:33
  Oh God, what's it paid? Oh something she's got.
• 1:13:36
  She gets three dates, 2 propositions in her proposal
• 1:13:40
  because she wears a low cut top that I see.
• 1:13:44
  This is what occurs with me. I think the only redeeming way I
• 1:13:47
  can even begin to read this is that he is ripping the piss out
• 1:13:51
  of the Eric Say Wood era because.
• 1:13:53
  It's something about the English name and big boobs, though,
• 1:13:57
  because you guys had that Page 3 for decades.
• 1:13:59
  Like must be something that makes makes makes makes some
• 1:14:04
  people in the UK be like a wooga, A wooga.
• 1:14:07
  And you know, I don't know. I think there's actually like a
• 1:14:10
  lot. I think the reason so much of
• 1:14:13
  this is directed at Perry and the way that the character is
• 1:14:17
  constantly sexualized, even though she's not a particularly
• 1:14:20
  sexual character is simply because she wore bikini in her
• 1:14:23
  first story. And it's like, oh, it's open
• 1:14:26
  season on just like having her sexually assaulted all of the
• 1:14:29
  time because her introduction, her introduction story takes her
• 1:14:33
  clothes off and it's like it doesn't really happen.
• 1:14:36
  Apart from Ace in the in the new adventures, other character,
• 1:14:39
  other Doctor Who companions aren't really treated the way
• 1:14:42
  that Perry is in the series and an extended universe stuff.
• 1:14:46
  And like that's pretty much the the reason.
• 1:14:49
  Like she's got breasts and it's like.
• 1:14:52
  It's, yeah, it's what John Nathan Turner wanted her to be,
• 1:14:55
  isn't it? With the the leotards as well in
• 1:14:57
  attacking Veros. Yeah, and it's.
• 1:14:59
  Just like it's like getting Jared, Jared Fielding to go
• 1:15:02
  along with any of that, right? Like or Tegan like, there's no
• 1:15:05
  way in hell. Yeah.
• 1:15:07
  And would have been in 2002 like they were putting out books like
• 1:15:14
  I. Could believe in Tegan as a
• 1:15:16
  gorilla leader. She could do it easy.
• 1:15:20
  This is the lady that slides across the floor and starts
• 1:15:22
  shooting Cybermen and stuff like, yeah, I could.
• 1:15:24
  I could see some of that, yeah. It's so it's really unpleasant
• 1:15:29
  because I don't think terroristics sees Perry as a,
• 1:15:32
  as, you know, a space gorilla and a Violet.
• 1:15:36
  He sees her as a sex object. Yeah.
• 1:15:38
  That's. Icky.
• 1:15:40
  Yeah. I've brought that conversation
• 1:15:46
  to an end. Yeah.
• 1:15:48
  I mean like, sorry. Terrorist.
• 1:15:50
  But you did bad hair, right? Yeah.
• 1:15:53
  I would love you but. I was just looking at my eBay
• 1:15:56
  history because I was like, I really hope I didn't pay a lot
• 1:15:58
  of money for this and this one does.
• 1:16:02
  This is one of the ones you have to usually pay quite a lot for.
• 1:16:05
  I spent £7.50 on this which is not too bad, but getting this
• 1:16:08
  for less than £20 is quite the challenge.
• 1:16:10
  And don't do it people, it's not worth it.
• 1:16:13
  It's not. It's not worth. 20 Aussie
• 1:16:15
  dollars, that's how much I paid for a 20 Aussie dollar He do so
• 1:16:19
  I am OK with that. That's because I also heard that
• 1:16:23
  saw it had seen other copies go for heaps.
• 1:16:25
  But yeah, I got 20 bucks. I was like, yeah, all right, I
• 1:16:28
  can. I paid Kevin Brown, so I thought
• 1:16:31
  that was too much. Yeah, why have I written this?
• 1:16:37
  What the hell does this mean? Life on this spaceship was like
• 1:16:40
  being a succulent bone in the middle of a pack of starving
• 1:16:44
  dogs. And that's.
• 1:16:47
  Wanting to eat you up. That's men listing after Perry
• 1:16:50
  again, isn't it? Oh, it's not.
• 1:16:52
  Oh, she's not described as a succulent bone in the pack of
• 1:16:55
  starving dogs. Oh please.
• 1:16:59
  Oh, more likely, you know. When the death toll starts
• 1:17:03
  coming in and then the doctors like Oh well, casualties of war,
• 1:17:08
  you. Know like he just doesn't care.
• 1:17:10
  Does. He Peter.
• 1:17:11
  Davison's doctor doesn't care that people are literally being
• 1:17:15
  slaughtered around him. Like I just watched Warriors of
• 1:17:18
  the Deep like recently and in episode 4 of that, yes, he's
• 1:17:24
  gassing everyone with Hexochromite, but every step of
• 1:17:26
  the way he's trying to like at least save some of these
• 1:17:30
  solutions or turn the gas off. At the end, he doesn't even want
• 1:17:32
  to use the gas. He has to.
• 1:17:33
  He has to like all this kind of stuff.
• 1:17:35
  So he's trying to mitigate the freaking casualties in every
• 1:17:38
  step of the way. Why did it?
• 1:17:40
  He's just like, by the end, he's with Perry's just like, oh, fuck
• 1:17:43
  it. But this, there should be
• 1:17:46
  consequences. The characters but said that
• 1:17:48
  last night. Let's not talk about it ever
• 1:17:50
  again. Well, what the hell is this
• 1:17:53
  point of this then? If you're going to put your
• 1:17:54
  character through the dark side, just, you know, other books do
• 1:17:59
  this a lot better and with more suitable stories.
• 1:18:03
  In this week's Doctor Who, you know Ruby Sunday was suffering
• 1:18:05
  from PTSD after travelling to the Doctor.
• 1:18:07
  But I I think. Perry is the one Ruby, You had a
• 1:18:10
  pretty easy ride compared to Perry, all right.
• 1:18:13
  Can just can you guys? I'm going to do one last quote
• 1:18:15
  and I'd like you guys to please explain what on earth this
• 1:18:19
  means, OK, there's a saying on earth, Perry.
• 1:18:23
  Try everything once except incest and folk dancing.
• 1:18:28
  What? That's a.
• 1:18:29
  That's a. That's a quote from someone.
• 1:18:32
  Oh, that's. Real.
• 1:18:33
  It's Oscar Wilde. It's Oscar Wilde I.
• 1:18:34
  Think it's not hero? Is it something like that?
• 1:18:37
  I can't believe that is a real quote.
• 1:18:39
  Is it really? I I think it's Oscar Wilde.
• 1:18:41
  Let me, I'm not Googling. That oh look up what book came
• 1:18:45
  out basically. That's how the doctor friend
• 1:18:48
  zones Perry Who's. Going on to it.
• 1:18:54
  Oh dear. Oh.
• 1:18:55
  God I thought you were a nerd. That just like salary until and
• 1:18:58
  cricket. So sorry, it's a Sorry, I'm
• 1:19:01
  misattributing it, It's Sir Thomas Beecham.
• 1:19:04
  Well, there we go, Sir Thomas. Beecham.
• 1:19:08
  You are responsible for incest turning up in a Doctor Who book.
• 1:19:11
  Well done. It is possibly the only mention
• 1:19:14
  of it in Doctor Who, I think, but I.
• 1:19:17
  Hope so. I hope so.
• 1:19:20
  Oh, I'm sure that the new adventures but.
• 1:19:25
  Not the not the alien dudes in human nature, no, oh, all kinds
• 1:19:33
  or whatever. No, I don't know.
• 1:19:35
  But anyway, moving on. It's.
• 1:19:37
  Fucking awful, isn't it? I mean, of all the books we've
• 1:19:40
  read so far. This is the worst.
• 1:19:42
  This is fucking awful. This might have been easier for
• 1:19:46
  me to read than The Ghost of N Space, but I I found by the time
• 1:19:51
  we finished talking about that, I think even you said to me,
• 1:19:54
  Joe, look, you had a you had quite a few nice things to say
• 1:19:57
  about that book because they were there were things that
• 1:20:01
  parts of that book that I thought were pretty freaking
• 1:20:03
  awesome, even though on a whole I think that book's pretty shit,
• 1:20:07
  but it it doesn't whiff anywhere near as bad as the stank Nuggets
• 1:20:11
  of warming. That's for sure.
• 1:20:15
  I'm going to say. I put a picture of Warmonger on
• 1:20:18
  Twitter, right? And mostly people were like, oh
• 1:20:21
  God, good luck. And a handful of people messaged
• 1:20:26
  and was like. Oh, yeah, I really like this
• 1:20:29
  one. Please get in touch and tell us
• 1:20:31
  why you enjoyed this book. But the most amusing thing about
• 1:20:34
  that tweet was one of the likes of me going, Oh God, here I go
• 1:20:39
  was Steve Cole himself. So the X editor has clearly read
• 1:20:45
  this. But.
• 1:20:49
  You don't want right, like you might be, you might be going
• 1:20:53
  like, oh, I've got to follow a Terrance 6 book.
• 1:20:55
  Oh, I don't know about that. Then he then he probably got a
• 1:20:58
  proof copy of warmongers. Like you know what?
• 1:21:01
  My book's 20 times better than this.
• 1:21:03
  I'll be right and it is 10 mill aliens.
• 1:21:05
  He's great. I bet Steven Jester would never
• 1:21:08
  tell, but there's got to depends.
• 1:21:09
  Like there's got to be a story. It hasn't.
• 1:21:11
  Got to be a story. Well, Terry's dead anyway.
• 1:21:13
  Like, what's the what? Come on, man.
• 1:21:15
  We're all, we all, we all like Terrence Dicks anyway, you know,
• 1:21:19
  like, he's done too much good. I and this one shitty novel's
• 1:21:23
  not going to undo any of that. So you know, we can handle a
• 1:21:27
  couple of couple stories about him writing a crap one crappy
• 1:21:31
  Doctor Who novel because, like the rest of them are pretty
• 1:21:34
  solid. I haven't read the one he did
• 1:21:37
  with Barrett. Let's so I have no idea.
• 1:21:39
  Bitter reunion, but it. Wasn't great, but it was better
• 1:21:42
  than this. Yeah.
• 1:21:44
  They didn't have the tone. Tonal misstep, Sure, he said.
• 1:21:49
  Maybe. Just sends off the challenge.
• 1:21:51
  I'm just going to riot just the shittiest thing and see if they
• 1:21:55
  still pay me. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised.
• 1:21:57
  Like, I feel like, you know, Terence Dicks did have that sort
• 1:22:01
  of that contrarian, sort of puckish side to his character.
• 1:22:06
  And it's like, I wouldn't be surprised if he was like, you
• 1:22:08
  know what? I'm going to write the
• 1:22:09
  shittiest, most inappropriate thing and see if they'll publish
• 1:22:13
  it. And, and they did, because it's
• 1:22:16
  Terence Dick. And then he's there down the
• 1:22:17
  chippy with Barry on the Friday, and Can you believe they put
• 1:22:21
  that shit on the ship? Barry, take a look at this mate.
• 1:22:24
  Like they published this? Don't worry, I'll buy you chips.
• 1:22:28
  They paid me. Like I said, it's like that.
• 1:22:30
  Oh, he's just taking the piss out of Eric saying with the tune
• 1:22:32
  and 88 pages, Yeah. But he does that.
• 1:22:36
  Can you do that by creating? Something worse than anything,
• 1:22:39
  Eric. Would put on the.
• 1:22:41
  Screen. Somehow he managed.
• 1:22:45
  Yeah, I've realized. Well, it might be.
• 1:22:49
  Eric, this, this group and especially sort of stretching
• 1:22:52
  back to when it was just the two of you guys, the past doctors is
• 1:22:58
  basically been your domain for the hamster book club because
• 1:23:01
  we've done so many missing and past doctor adventures.
• 1:23:05
  And I think we're going, we're doing enough one next, aren't
• 1:23:07
  we? So the run will continue.
• 1:23:10
  Fortunately, we've done better ones than this.
• 1:23:14
  Well, that's not difficult because that's a low particle.
• 1:23:17
  Yeah, but that kind of like leads us nicely onto the well, I
• 1:23:23
  would say 3 favourites here. But what we came up with for the
• 1:23:27
  for the three, we pick our three sections.
• 1:23:30
  I suggested, given this book is all about complete lack of
• 1:23:35
  taste, three of your favorite or least favorite examples of
• 1:23:42
  lapses of good taste in the book?
• 1:23:44
  What are the points where the books went too far, went the
• 1:23:49
  wrong way? So, Luke, have you got any of
• 1:23:53
  this list of three? Well, look, I this is it's kind
• 1:23:57
  of creepy when one of the people behind the creation of Ace
• 1:24:03
  decides to put like a description of Ace in the
• 1:24:08
  shower. That's weird, man.
• 1:24:10
  That's no, that's not good. I don't like that.
• 1:24:14
  That's kind of creepy. I don't even think I really
• 1:24:16
  liked it when I was younger either because I you're, I even
• 1:24:20
  my young brain, like I know who Andrew Cartmel is and in I know
• 1:24:25
  he, it feels like the, the, the father of Ace or like, you know,
• 1:24:30
  the, the person who birthed Ace. Somehow one of the people who
• 1:24:33
  did that is writing something like that.
• 1:24:36
  No, no, it's Ace in the shower and warhead.
• 1:24:39
  No, that's. That's terrible.
• 1:24:41
  I know that's supposed to be kind of from the perspective of
• 1:24:44
  a teenage boy, but yes, it's just.
• 1:24:48
  It was. Yeah, and four, I'm sure if you
• 1:24:55
  were at the right age at the time.
• 1:24:56
  There you go. Your copy is a bit soggy but but
• 1:25:00
  that's a good Andrew. What's your first one?
• 1:25:04
  Mine was kind of the same. I've been trying to think about,
• 1:25:08
  you know, there's a very like a broad playing field when it
• 1:25:11
  comes to this one. So my first one is sort of the
• 1:25:14
  same one, but like in general terms, just the new adventures
• 1:25:17
  taking the companion's clothes off all of the time.
• 1:25:20
  It feels like every single new adventure has a scene where Ace
• 1:25:23
  or Benny or Roz get naked, have a shower, love themselves up for
• 1:25:28
  no particular plot reason other than satisfying that teenage
• 1:25:32
  male audience. And they're just really
• 1:25:35
  embarrassing when you go back and read them now.
• 1:25:37
  And particularly when sometimes, like, the storytelling is really
• 1:25:40
  good. And then they'll just be like,
• 1:25:42
  oh, and then Ace has taken her knickers off for no reason.
• 1:25:44
  And it's, yeah, it's just, it's just cringe.
• 1:25:48
  There's a there's a scene at the end of the Also People where
• 1:25:51
  Kitiatu and Roz are dumped in the water naked and Benny's
• 1:25:57
  dumped in the water, but she's got a bikini on.
• 1:26:00
  But when she surfaces, she's like, oh, where's my top?
• 1:26:03
  Where's my top? And I'm like, this book is being
• 1:26:06
  near on fucking perfect. Now I'm giving it a 99.5.
• 1:26:15
  But I have to admit, like if they were ever going to do a
• 1:26:18
  scene like that, that's might be the best time it's ever done.
• 1:26:22
  It's still like, but yeah, so even even something that's kind
• 1:26:28
  of near on novel perfection, I love that book.
• 1:26:32
  I I love it. But yeah, that's that scene.
• 1:26:34
  I was just like, all right, OK, well, you know, fine, OK, it's
• 1:26:39
  there. You could have just all had them
• 1:26:41
  have swimsuits on and the scene still would have worked.
• 1:26:43
  But you know, it's all good. And I dread to think because we
• 1:26:47
  all know what Joe's like. What's your first one show?
• 1:26:52
  Quite innocent compared to these two.
• 1:26:55
  My. First, my first one isn't it's
• 1:26:57
  the Doctor Who extended media went on to explore established
• 1:27:04
  alien races in so many varied and interesting.
• 1:27:08
  Ways. Where he's going.
• 1:27:10
  But in Craig Hintons God engine. There we go, I did.
• 1:27:13
  Not need a sequence of a scaly Ice Warrior penis emerging from
• 1:27:20
  a viscous pubic sack to reign terror on a woman who is
• 1:27:26
  absolutely objecting to the fact that yes, it is a near rape
• 1:27:30
  scene with an Ice Warrior penis erect in it.
• 1:27:35
  And I don't know, I mean, how did we ever get there?
• 1:27:39
  What, so Ice Warrior penises reigning terror?
• 1:27:43
  That's. Right.
• 1:27:44
  That's my number ones, yeah. I'm going to go slightly away
• 1:27:49
  and slightly mine. I'm going to go for the body
• 1:27:51
  snatches. I'm not going to go with, you
• 1:27:54
  know, sexual. It's more that there is a quite
• 1:27:58
  graphic description of someone getting a broken bottle in the
• 1:28:03
  face. It's.
• 1:28:05
  Really vivid. Yeah, it's and it's a it's a
• 1:28:09
  good pulp Doctor Who story, straightforward.
• 1:28:12
  And you think the 8th Doctor of range was supposed to be going
• 1:28:16
  for a slight the younger reader and they're just in the middle
• 1:28:19
  of the book just oh, the glass grinding it So and it just takes
• 1:28:24
  you right. Took me right out of that novel
• 1:28:26
  completely. And it's yeah, horrible.
• 1:28:29
  So that's my first one. Back to you, Luke.
• 1:28:35
  So showers, showers. Sexualization, penises, bottles
• 1:28:42
  in the face, right? That's our first round.
• 1:28:45
  Look, there's 2 for this character you could have chosen,
• 1:28:49
  but and I'm going to choose. Look, this character is done
• 1:28:55
  dirty in the war machines because now you see me and now
• 1:29:00
  you never hear from me ever again.
• 1:29:02
  And poor donor getting freaking shot in the face who killed
• 1:29:06
  Kennedy. I'm like no respect, I tell you,
• 1:29:08
  no respect. And and I'm sure someone might
• 1:29:12
  mention the other one, like this poor lady in the books, like
• 1:29:17
  there's an opportunity to expand her character, do something,
• 1:29:21
  maybe pick up the thread of where she was afterwards, which
• 1:29:23
  was what her Kennedy kind of does, maybe do something like, I
• 1:29:27
  don't know, fun, nice, interesting.
• 1:29:31
  Like this character was done dirty.
• 1:29:33
  Like, come on, do something good.
• 1:29:36
  And you know, I think a lot of writers have taken Liz Shaw,
• 1:29:39
  except for Jim Mortimer, and done really good things with
• 1:29:41
  her, except Jim Mortimer, you know, and really fleshed out
• 1:29:44
  what Liz Shaw did post UNIT, except Jim Mortimer.
• 1:29:47
  Jim Mortimer took the flesh off. Her.
• 1:29:50
  Yeah. So I'm still.
• 1:29:52
  I've been weeping eternally ever since.
• 1:29:54
  So no. But look, I remember liking that
• 1:29:58
  book. I don't know how much it holds
• 1:30:00
  up for me, but even I was just like, really?
• 1:30:02
  We needed to shoot her in the head.
• 1:30:05
  Wow, that's that's kind of depressing and kind of terrible.
• 1:30:09
  So yeah, though they're getting shot in the face.
• 1:30:13
  They really wanted to brutalize classic companions in those
• 1:30:17
  books. For some reason well.
• 1:30:20
  We talked about shortly, apparently repeatedly pitched to
• 1:30:23
  do that to companions, but and he got there in the end.
• 1:30:27
  And we'll come to that address. Andrew, you're #2?
• 1:30:32
  Exploding head cocaine monsters. It's horrible.
• 1:30:41
  It's. Horrible.
• 1:30:42
  So yeah, what the hell is that? I've just forgotten what the the
• 1:30:47
  book is called. Damage goods.
• 1:30:48
  Damage Goods, a late New Adventures novel.
• 1:30:54
  And I think the thing that makes it stand out more is obviously
• 1:30:56
  the fact that it was written by Russell T Davies and the way
• 1:31:01
  that, I mean, the book is very difficult to find.
• 1:31:04
  So this wouldn't have happened. But like an 8 year old could
• 1:31:07
  have enjoyed going to their local library being like, oh, a
• 1:31:11
  Doctor Who book by Russell T Davies.
• 1:31:13
  Let's pull this off the shelf. And there you've got like
• 1:31:16
  infanticide sex in cars, like and the the exploding cocaine
• 1:31:25
  head monsters. Yeah.
• 1:31:28
  And there is the story as well of like that Bbci wanted to put
• 1:31:32
  an e-book of of it up after the new series started.
• 1:31:37
  And obviously that that was vetoed.
• 1:31:40
  But yeah, it's just that, I mean, we're laughing about it,
• 1:31:44
  but it was like that book is sort of like the I think in your
• 1:31:47
  episode about it, Joe, you talked about it the the way it's
• 1:31:50
  just so depressing and it's so bleak and miserable and it's
• 1:31:53
  like the antithesis of sort of what you want from a doctor's
• 1:31:56
  story. And then I think T Davies
• 1:32:00
  obviously kind of like took a lot of parts of that book.
• 1:32:03
  But then you get in a more hopeful direction with what he
• 1:32:05
  did for the theories. My dog is barking at a cat
• 1:32:08
  window. I don't think she's barking at
• 1:32:10
  Russell T Davies, but you never. So yeah, that that even even
• 1:32:15
  though it's a great book, it's just it doesn't really feel like
• 1:32:18
  it sits with Doctor Who, particularly with where the
• 1:32:22
  series has gone since the New Adventures range.
• 1:32:28
  So Joe, how do you follow that? I'm going to go in the other
• 1:32:34
  direction away from it now and I think it is incredibly poor
• 1:32:39
  taste that in. The War of the.
• 1:32:42
  Daleks John Peel decides because Terry Nation didn't like where
• 1:32:49
  the direction of the Daleks stories went after he stopped
• 1:32:53
  rising them to wreck on the lot of them in the most like
• 1:32:59
  obscenely unrealistic way, which offers a new reading on
• 1:33:03
  everything we've seen since Destiny of the Daleks.
• 1:33:07
  It's just terrible, and it's absolutely what the book
• 1:33:11
  shouldn't be doing. The book should be kicking off
• 1:33:14
  in a new direction, not looking back and rewriting the old
• 1:33:17
  direction. None of it makes any sense.
• 1:33:21
  I think it's two fingers up at all of the hard world that went
• 1:33:24
  into those Dalek stories. Yeah, I just don't like it at
• 1:33:27
  all. I think.
• 1:33:28
  I think it's one of the worst Doctor Who books of order for
• 1:33:33
  many, many reasons, but that's the worst.
• 1:33:35
  Basically, just say I'll allow what you did.
• 1:33:38
  So this is what happened instead.
• 1:33:41
  Terrible, terrible taste. I'm I'm I'm going to stay with
• 1:33:45
  it and I'm just going to go basically for balls, the shadow
• 1:33:51
  because. Damn it, I was just going to say
• 1:33:55
  the whole thing. All.
• 1:33:56
  Yes, all of it. And the entirety of it.
• 1:33:59
  I I did read it and it wasn't quite as bad as I remembered it,
• 1:34:02
  but I thought I must be half trumped out.
• 1:34:04
  But it comes in the range of this really dark, really
• 1:34:07
  horrible run where the only remotely amusing thing is a
• 1:34:10
  builder who stabs kittens for fun.
• 1:34:14
  And then you get this and it's just the Tanith and Gabriel and
• 1:34:17
  Jane page in this to a certain extent are just sadistic beyond
• 1:34:22
  what you need them to be. In a Doctor Who book they put
• 1:34:27
  Benny absolutely. Oh God I have PTSD.
• 1:34:34
  Yeah. I have PTSD just thinking about
• 1:34:36
  this kind of thing. They they are just nasty.
• 1:34:41
  It's that again it it's reading it and it beat you feeling this
• 1:34:46
  isn't kind of suitable for what is essentially A pulp science
• 1:34:51
  fiction range. And who's you wonder who's at
• 1:34:55
  the wheel on this one? Who's got who's looking at this
• 1:34:58
  and going tone this down a bit. Go back.
• 1:35:01
  Well, was this just published flat out as the author submitted
• 1:35:05
  it? Because I'm sure I know a couple
• 1:35:07
  of new adventures were so I'm pretty sure this one is.
• 1:35:10
  And I should point out here that Joe did make us not mention
• 1:35:15
  Colon that's in this section because it would be too easy.
• 1:35:18
  Too easy, yeah. So for our final choices, Luke.
• 1:35:25
  Aren't we allowed to mention? What was that?
• 1:35:26
  Oh. You're allowed to mention.
• 1:35:27
  Yeah, you can mention. If you want.
• 1:35:30
  Well, no, I was just going to mention like Mr. Gilgamesh.
• 1:35:33
  And the implication is like underage people and stuff.
• 1:35:37
  But in time, we're in Genesis, the introduction to original
• 1:35:41
  Doctor Who fiction, everybody. So, you know, look, it's like
• 1:35:47
  every time I'm confronted with that saying in the Time Meddler,
• 1:35:50
  I'm like, look, I know something and pillaging happened in wars
• 1:35:57
  and things like that. Fine.
• 1:36:00
  It doesn't need to be in like an adventure show.
• 1:36:03
  And I also know that in old ancient times they had different
• 1:36:08
  values and things like that. So that those kinds of things
• 1:36:12
  with ages, it happened. I don't like it.
• 1:36:15
  I really don't like it. And I know what happened in
• 1:36:18
  history, but just because you've got a book set in the past, it
• 1:36:22
  doesn't mean you have to highlight all that kind of
• 1:36:24
  stuff. You can tell a awesome story,
• 1:36:27
  adventure story set in the past without that.
• 1:36:34
  Don't give me that. I don't want it.
• 1:36:36
  Get out of here. And creep up, but isn't H naked
• 1:36:39
  at the start of that as well? Oh, for fuck's sake, yes.
• 1:36:42
  Somehow we've mentioned. Rape, incest and paedophilia in
• 1:36:46
  this episode. What was going on in these
• 1:36:48
  original books? Can we just go back to books
• 1:36:51
  about Nazis please? Uplifting stuff again, that was
• 1:36:56
  the better option. Just war, here we go.
• 1:37:00
  Like nothing happened. Bad happens to anyone in that
• 1:37:02
  book. Like no.
• 1:37:06
  So for your fun choice, Andrew or Brenda.
• 1:37:11
  OK, this is with the caveat that I haven't read Combat Rock, so
• 1:37:17
  I'm sure if I'd read that something from that would have
• 1:37:19
  gone on this list. But my final choice is Tantric
• 1:37:23
  Sex Monkeys. So this is from The Adventurers
• 1:37:30
  of Henry Eccatree, which while being a brilliant book, has
• 1:37:36
  stuff in it which should be nowhere near a Doctor Who book.
• 1:37:40
  So is set in a brothel in Victorian times and the sex
• 1:37:46
  workers there have this practice where they they have tantric sex
• 1:37:51
  with clients and then an interdimensional portal opens to
• 1:37:57
  the dimension with these sort of murderous sex monkeys that come
• 1:38:02
  out of and then start killing people.
• 1:38:05
  And it's a way to travel through that.
• 1:38:07
  It's like, I'm sure if Alan Moore, if it was like an Alan
• 1:38:11
  Moore comic or something like it would, it would be fine.
• 1:38:15
  But in a Doctor Who book probably issued the same time,
• 1:38:19
  the same month that like The Invisible Enemy came out on VHS,
• 1:38:24
  it just only does not fit well with me.
• 1:38:30
  The invisible enemy, as we all know, has Michael his balls.
• 1:38:33
  That's not that bad. Imagine a kid being presented
• 1:38:37
  with those two. I've got your Christmas presents
• 1:38:39
  right? The invisible to being the
• 1:38:40
  adventurous Doctor Who book as well.
• 1:38:42
  Enjoy do. You think it was Wrestle
• 1:38:45
  authorized? Every one of these, these books
• 1:38:47
  that come to the orphanage, it's like, no, no, when I haven't
• 1:38:50
  that I want kids picking these up for Christmas.
• 1:38:55
  So Joe, your top choice. Yeah, Well, do you know now just
• 1:38:59
  thinking about adventurous, just the whole idea of setting a
• 1:39:02
  Doctor Who story in a brothel is very bad taste, isn't it?
• 1:39:06
  But actually my last choice is I've been reading Jim Mortimer's
• 1:39:11
  work recently and I do want to really want to sort of delve
• 1:39:16
  into what happened to him as a child because clearly he's got
• 1:39:20
  this fatalistic streak where just miserable things happens to
• 1:39:24
  all the time. But I don't want to talk about
• 1:39:26
  bloody. I want to talk about eternity.
• 1:39:28
  Weeps at the end of the New Adventures line, which is a well
• 1:39:33
  written book. Jim Mortimer is a good writer.
• 1:39:36
  Fuck me, wipe it out. I think it's 80% or something
• 1:39:40
  like that of the world's population accidentally as a bad
• 1:39:45
  joke. It's possibly the biggest lapse
• 1:39:48
  in, you know, Jason Kane. Whoops is yeah, it's just
• 1:39:52
  terrible. And it it's also sort of
• 1:39:56
  mirrored against the divorce of Benny and Jason, as if that the
• 1:40:01
  biblical execution of almost everybody on the earth is as
• 1:40:06
  dramatic as two people getting divorced in a new adventure.
• 1:40:11
  But then alongside that, Liz Shaw is murdered.
• 1:40:15
  And then alongside that, Chris is suffering horribly because of
• 1:40:19
  Ross's death. It's just so miserable.
• 1:40:23
  Like Doctor Who should never be this without hope.
• 1:40:28
  So yeah, it's it's a bad joke. And a lot of people died in
• 1:40:33
  service of that terrible joke. So eternity weeps.
• 1:40:37
  The worst taste in all of Doctor Who for me.
• 1:40:41
  What in worse and cold nuts? Well, we know you something to
• 1:40:46
  get rid of the. Taste.
• 1:40:51
  I was kind of considering something like here, like the
• 1:40:54
  doctor in time of Exodus, you know, saying he likes a Ruben
• 1:40:57
  esque, which I don't think of Sebastian Coe with that.
• 1:41:04
  But I ended up thinking what's the biggest complete lap?
• 1:41:07
  Saying I didn't want to go into areas of race because I don't
• 1:41:10
  particularly qualify. Talk about that.
• 1:41:12
  Instead, I just want to go for the whole idea and execution of
• 1:41:17
  new Ace Jo will get that alone for that picture of Sophie
• 1:41:23
  Aldred in that type PVC with a gun basically for the cover of
• 1:41:30
  First Frontier. Yeah.
• 1:41:33
  And yeah, I get the character race was this teenager.
• 1:41:37
  You wanted to go away and grow up, but she comes back and
• 1:41:44
  you're giving young men trying to write a woman with kind of
• 1:41:52
  her own agency, with authority. And what?
• 1:41:55
  And their idea of it is to put to give her big guns, blow
• 1:41:59
  things up. Yeah, which isn't out of line
• 1:42:02
  with the character as we've seen, but just make her the most
• 1:42:07
  miserable and likeable character going going back to some of the
• 1:42:12
  new adventures for these. You're just going.
• 1:42:15
  She brings the range down. You need to get rid of her as
• 1:42:19
  soon as possible. You have Benny, who is vibrant,
• 1:42:23
  who is funny, who is exactly what the range is, who you're
• 1:42:26
  kind of happy to hang around with.
• 1:42:28
  And you weigh her down with a character who is essentially
• 1:42:34
  very little in common with the one who left in level more.
• 1:42:37
  It's what I mean what I think you were saying blood heat joke.
• 1:42:42
  Well, it's. She has hearts of blood heat
• 1:42:45
  hating the Doctor and Benny, and then at the end when the Doctor
• 1:42:49
  wipes out an entire universe, she ends blood heat hating him
• 1:42:54
  even more. I mean, what a journey.
• 1:42:56
  The defining character of her in the adventure, she hates the
• 1:42:59
  Doctor. And yeah, it's interesting to
• 1:43:02
  have a character who doesn't like the Doctor travelling with
• 1:43:04
  him. But over a range of books it
• 1:43:07
  piss you down so much. And I said we did something and
• 1:43:12
  I was so happy that she left. There's a wonderful quote in The
• 1:43:16
  Who Adventures from Rebecca Levine who said I kept telling
• 1:43:20
  these people, stop writing her like this.
• 1:43:23
  And then I just wanted rid of her because nobody would listen
• 1:43:27
  and they were over sexualising her and they, you know, and they
• 1:43:31
  didn't have time to do anything about it.
• 1:43:32
  So she just wanted her gone. And she's absolutely.
• 1:43:36
  Yeah, her instincts were bang on.
• 1:43:39
  Again, you put a woman in charge of the books here and she sees
• 1:43:43
  it a lot better than these inexperienced young writers did.
• 1:43:48
  Can I ask you though, John, I realise it's a bit awkward doing
• 1:43:50
  this on the call in front of other people, but you know, when
• 1:43:53
  you got those books when you were younger, did you see the
• 1:43:56
  cover of First Frontier and go look at look at Sophie Audrey's
• 1:44:00
  knockers, you know. No.
• 1:44:05
  It wasn't working then, whatever they could try to do.
• 1:44:10
  I mean, but to even go there near finding her remotely
• 1:44:15
  attractive, you need to want to go nearer person.
• 1:44:19
  Would you really want to go hang around with this person?
• 1:44:22
  I swear that cover was a poster in Doctor Who magazine.
• 1:44:26
  There was a full size poster of that cover.
• 1:44:29
  That first Frontier cover with the alien spaceship behind her.
• 1:44:33
  Yeah, but. Yeah.
• 1:44:36
  Pin up Sophie Aldridge. Let's put this way that that
• 1:44:40
  yeah, that gun was not symbolic in any way.
• 1:44:44
  Shape was. Fine, like they will bring 2 gun
• 1:44:48
  Tooting companions into the TARDIS from original Sin.
• 1:44:50
  And I like Chris and I like I just read the awesome people.
• 1:44:55
  Ros is fantastic in that and she is freaking badass.
• 1:44:59
  Ros Ros is a brilliant character, really directed.
• 1:45:03
  Yeah, yeah. I'd like to explore some more
• 1:45:05
  roles actually. But they're on the list.
• 1:45:09
  They're all on the list. What are you talking?
• 1:45:13
  I would. As a?
• 1:45:14
  As a. Small extra I would just like to
• 1:45:17
  add. Ferrell, Joe Grant from Bloody.
• 1:45:21
  Who? That's enough.
• 1:45:23
  That's enough of a point mate. She's feral.
• 1:45:25
  But no, she's clutching the bloody rags of her miscarried
• 1:45:28
  child as well. Like.
• 1:45:30
  Jim Moore, I'm a man. Bless your heart.
• 1:45:32
  Like, go get some therapy, yeah. Too broad and too drink for the
• 1:45:36
  small screen people. And they all lived happily ever
• 1:45:40
  after, like fuck they did, said Jim Mortimer.
• 1:45:43
  Or David A Mcentee or Dale Smith later on.
• 1:45:48
  It's just seemed like bright, bubbly Joe Grant from the 70s in
• 1:45:52
  her blue fur coat and like, oh, doctor, oh, you've stolen my
• 1:45:57
  sandwiches. I know what I'll do.
• 1:45:58
  I'll give her an aborted fetus to like, carry around.
• 1:46:01
  It's. True, like smearing mud on her
• 1:46:04
  face. I don't like it much more
• 1:46:06
  genocide either. Yeah.
• 1:46:09
  That's what they want in the 90s, yeah.
• 1:46:12
  No. No.
• 1:46:15
  Well, that kind of sums up the the lighter end of the Doctor
• 1:46:21
  Who. Uplifting episode.
• 1:46:23
  Tell me where do I start? A lighter next time, please.
• 1:46:27
  What are we doing next time chaps?
• 1:46:29
  Anyone want to give me an answer?
• 1:46:31
  Luke is now showing us. It's Face of the Enemy by the
• 1:46:36
  late, great David A Mckinty. We wanted to do 1 when he, when
• 1:46:42
  he passed was like, hey, we haven't done one of his books
• 1:46:44
  yet, let's do it. And this is what we chose.
• 1:46:47
  They're the book club lads are determined to make sure I read a
• 1:46:53
  Pertwee novel that I like and they chose one that doesn't have
• 1:46:56
  fucking Pertwee in it. So.
• 1:47:01
  Weirdly enough, you know, I think war monger is trying to
• 1:47:03
  make me feel sort of, you know, Butch and masculine.
• 1:47:06
  But face of the enemy is doing a far.
• 1:47:08
  But I'll bound your pages in all the bombs and guns and things
• 1:47:12
  you know, Sweeney esque action sequences.
• 1:47:15
  Oh, I feel like a real man. I'll tell you what.
• 1:47:19
  A real man from the 70s. I am like enjoying it too, but
• 1:47:23
  it's one of those books where there's a lot of gruff male
• 1:47:26
  characters who only have surnames and it's like, I don't
• 1:47:28
  know who this one is like. That's the discussion for
• 1:47:32
  another time. It is, yeah.
• 1:47:36
  Right. Anyway, there's only one way we
• 1:47:39
  can out this episode really, isn't it?
• 1:47:41
  Absolutely a raising chorus. Whatever.