Latest / A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast / Hamster Book Club - Myths & Legends with author Dylan Rees

Transcript

Hamster Book Club - Myths & Legends with author Dylan Rees · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:00
  The next interviewee would date right back to the creation of
• 0:03
  the show in the form of actress Carol Ann Ford, who played Susan
• 0:07
  Foreman, the granddaughter of the First Doctor.
• 0:10
  The production was conceived as a more simple Talking Heads
• 0:14
  interview in the vein of the 1st 2 releases.
• 0:16
  Shot on location at Ford's home in North London.
• 0:20
  It is a release that had ambitious technical requirements
• 0:23
  and was plagued with the difficulties.
• 0:27
  This release would be directed by Richard Landon, who had once
• 0:31
  again met Barn Father through the Dwas.
• 0:35
  He also worked in the audio visual industry and had
• 0:38
  previously employed Barn Father. I was doing a corporate show out
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  in Germany, Langdon remembers, and my colleague who was with me
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  had to drop out. I haunted around for a sort of
• 0:49
  producer type person and was aware of Keith's interest in
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  making videos, so he sprung to mind because it was a bit of an
• 0:56
  emergency. I got him on a plane and we
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  spent either one or two weeks over there.
• 1:01
  I introduced Keith to the client and he stayed on because the
• 1:04
  client was quite impressed with what Keith was doing.
• 1:07
  And I think I'm writing saying that kicked off Keith's
• 1:09
  corporate work. The corporate in question was
• 1:14
  McDonnell Douglas Information Systems.
• 1:17
  I was flown out and I'd worked there for about four days,
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  remembers Barn Father. I was there to help out with the
• 1:23
  live camera work of CAD Cam systems on the company stand.
• 1:27
  They had a vision mixer which could do effects and such.
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  I started playing with it while we were working, doing soft
• 1:33
  wipes around things and having one camera and a bit of artwork
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  and the other camera on the robot arm that was being used
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  and putting it up on a screen outside.
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  And the sales director loved it. Near the end he said to me, is
• 1:45
  there any chance you could shoot a video of the robot arm doing
• 1:48
  all of its movements? I said, yeah, of course, just
• 1:51
  clear it with the AV company. I did the shooting, took you
• 1:54
  back to London, edited it for them and forgot all about it.
• 1:58
  Then about four months later, I got a phone call from the same
• 2:01
  man who said, I'm just putting you on to my colleague Paul
• 2:04
  Hayes, who's doing a series of videos for our sales conference
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  this year. We'd like you to quote for the
• 2:10
  filming and the editing. This quote would lead to Bond
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  father getting the contract, beating a number of larger
• 2:17
  competitors and securing one of Real Time's regular corporate
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  gigs. Landon, being both a huge fan of
• 2:24
  the Hartnell era and someone with vast industry experience,
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  was an obvious choice to direct to myth makers.
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  However, camera operator Andy Grant felt that he may have been
• 2:35
  too experienced to make a production at this budget level.
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  Richard Landon worked for one of the big AV companies at the time
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  and so he was used to big budgets and unlimited kit.
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  But Keith was running tight budgets and it was all shot on a
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  single camera. One of Landon's requirements was
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  that he wanted to shoot the interview with six cameras
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  running concurrently. No mean feat when you are
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  shooting in a well equipped studio but let alone somebody's
• 3:02
  house. It was bonkers at the time, Barn
• 3:06
  Father recounts again. I think you learn as you go.
• 3:10
  When you're young and you're inexperienced, you let things
• 3:13
  happen because you don't feel confident enough to stamp on
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  them and say no. As you get older, the truth is
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  you learn enough to know what isn't practical and what is
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  practical, and there's a window and you can work within that.
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  Sometimes you can stretch it a bit, but life teaches you what
• 3:32
  you can and cannot do. Landon's thinking behind the
• 3:36
  multi camera setup was that he could shoot the interview in
• 3:39
  half the time with every angle being covered.
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  However, things did not run according to plan.
• 3:46
  The technical setup was so complicated that it took a day
• 3:50
  just to set the cameras up. Then barn father managed to
• 3:53
  break one of the cameras. So instead of taking less time,
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  the shoot ended up taking place over 3 days.
• 4:04
  On the third day, Briggs had issues of his own.
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  I was horribly, horribly I'll all night preceding the shoot.
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  The awful thing was that Carol had a very unique arrangement
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  with her lavatory and there were two doors into it.
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  There was a door on the outside from the garden which had a year
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  lock on it and there was a normal door you could access
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  from the inside. So what I did when I went into
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  the house, went to the loo, locked it behind me, was ill and
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  left through the exterior door and shut it behind me.
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  This resulted in both doors locking and the toilet being
• 4:37
  completely isolated. And I have to say, and Carol
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  won't mind, she had a little bit of a sense of humour failure
• 4:45
  about that. The shoot overrun also meant
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  Landon could not attend one of the day shooting and so Barn
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  Father had to step in. He couldn't get to the location
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  because he was working. We actually went back to Carol's
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  three times and each time in its own way was an utter disaster.
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  Landon also ended the program with a scene where Briggs hands
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  forward a key he finds, which she doesn't recognize and tosses
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  away. The key then floats in the air
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  as a titles roll. This involved hanging the camera
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  upside down and was another of the more ambitious shots that
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  would eat up time, but it was indicative of the sort of thing
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  the Myth Makers Productions would do more of during those
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  early releases as they became more creatively ambitious.
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  Briggs once again looks back on his work with a jovially
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  critical eye. I was extremely inexperienced
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  and frankly, rubbish. However, Landon was much more
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  complimentary on their collaboration.
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  I wrote a script for Nick, just a basic can you ask these
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  questions? Not in any particular order.
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  And he did wonderfully. He AB lived a bit, but he got
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  the essence of what I was asking.
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  He's very, very good. Despite Ford's mild grievance
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  over Briggs's toilet troubles, she took all the disasters that
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  befell the production in good humour, as Barn Father
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  remembers. Carol was an absolute St.
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  She really was. How she put up with us going
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  back again I'll never know. She was an absolute treasure.
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  Landon had a similar opinion of Ford.
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  She was lovely. She was quite cheeky as well.
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  She was not really like Susan Foreman as a character.
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  She was very warm, very loving, very kind and up for anything we
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  wanted to do. You know, you would just do our
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  best to accommodate. Very, very nice.
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  Ultimately, Bond father had learnt what the limits of their
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  technical abilities were. I don't think I've ever had one.
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  Please God, touch wood. That has gone as badly.
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  And again you learn. Never again.
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  I mean, I said to myself I would never use more than two cameras
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  ever in this kind of environment ever again.
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  It's pointless. Ford gives a frank
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  interpretation of how things played out for her and some
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  refreshingly pure recollections of Hartnell.
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  She clearly loves the show and the people she worked with, but
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  dislikes how the character and her career ended up.
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  In some ways, there is a melancholic undercurrent to the
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  release as we see someone who is grateful for their experience in
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  Doctor Who but also resents it. Carol Ann Ford's Myth Makers
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  would be launched in December 1985, the same month as the next
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  release. An interview with companion
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  actress Janet Fielding, who played Tegan with the 5th
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  Doctor. Initially, Myth Makers 5 was
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  advertised as featuring Elizabeth Slayden.
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  However, Slayden had to drop out shortly before filming, but
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  after the advert had appeared in Doctor Who Magazine.
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  This release would combine both the formats that the previous
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  releases had taken, shooting both on location at Shad Thames
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  in London, where Resurrection of the Daleks had been recorded,
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  and at Fielding's home. This would also be the first
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  release directed by Bond Father himself.
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  Originally we were planning on recording with Janet at Shad
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  Thames in the morning, picking her up, going down there and
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  then going back to the flat she was living in to do the
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  interview. But we arrived there at 8:30.
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  We rang the bell and she'd been out the night before and it was
• 8:31
  just too early for it and she said what the are you doing here
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  now, go away, come back in a bit.
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  We realised we were never going to be able to pick her up and
• 8:41
  get her to Shad Thames for the time that we'd arranged to meet
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  Nick to go and do the intro. So we changed the plan around.
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  We got in touch with Nick and got him to come to us and did
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  the interview at hers first and then in the afternoon we went
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  down to Shad Thames to do the wrap around.
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  Welcome back to the Hamster Book Club.
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  My name is Joe Ford, and on unusually professional terms
• 9:08
  today it's the man that has chowed down on more myth makers
• 9:14
  videos and DVD's than he would care to admit.
• 9:19
  Mr. Dylan Reece. Hello.
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  Hello Joe, thanks for having me here to plug my wares.
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  I. Beg your pardon?
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  How's the press tour going so far?
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  I mean, I hear you're doing the rounds of several podcasts.
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  Well, the press tour as it is started about three hours ago
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  where I recorded another podcast and I'll be doing a few more.
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  Just wonderful to push the book and I'll be at Hooverville later
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  this later this month to promote the book.
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  I say I'll be there. I'll be in the bar, you know,
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  but it'll be for saying. Is is I'm making up myths and
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  legends T-shirts for all of us to wear on the day with a little
• 9:56
  link so people can. We're just the more drunk we
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  get, the more people will just walk up.
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  To like a QR code that people can just.
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  Oh my God, I'll add it. I've done the sort of the mock
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  up, but I'll add it, OK. And yeah, well, obviously down
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  below we won't wear nothing, so we'll definitely get some
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  attention. OK.
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  I'm assuming the press tour's got a bit of money thrown at it.
• 10:17
  You know you're going. Thousands.
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  Millions. I mean, I'm here in Prague now
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  where there's a big following affair.
• 10:24
  You're doing the sort of Jenna Coleman, Peter Capaldi thing
• 10:27
  when they went all around the world, aren't you?
• 10:29
  Yeah. Someone's just painted me a
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  weird picture of myself. God, I didn't realize Bon Faja
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  had this sort of budget ceiling, but here we go first.
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  First class all the way, baby. Well, look, I mean, this may
• 10:41
  give people a bit of a clue as to what we're talking about
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  today. And that is your book Myths and
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  Legends, Mr. Dylan Reece. Now please, will you tell me how
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  on earth did this all come about?
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  Or maybe we should skip back to downtime just for a second and
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  and see, obviously that's that's your first book and I'm assuming
• 11:03
  this came from that. Yes, sort of.
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  So I wrote Downtime, the last years of Doctor Who, which was
• 11:10
  about the dramas of the wilderness era and beyond.
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  And as part of that I interviewed Keith Barnfather and
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  I met him then and we stayed in touch and I did a couple of, he
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  asked me to help out and a couple of myth makers.
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  From time to time, you know, we chat on social media or
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  whatever. And then during lockdown, he
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  started posting little sort of retrospectives of various shoots
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  he'd done, Doctor Who related ones, whether it's a
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  documentary, a drama or a myth maker, it's on his Facebook.
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  And they were, you know, probably a few paragraphs and
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  some nice behind the scenes photos.
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  I just sort of, I remember messaging him and going, oh, you
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  should do a book about this. And he was like, I haven't got
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  the time for the to do that. And he said you should do a book
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  about that, about this. And I said I haven't got the
• 11:57
  time to do that. And then Are you sure?
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  Yeah, well, during, as I said, it was during lockdown, my
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  brother had come to live with me at the house I was living in at
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  the time. And a few hours later I was down
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  in the kitchen having a cup of tea and we just got chatting.
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  And I said, oh, I was talking to Keith Barnfather about doing a
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  real time pictures book, you know, on myth makers and stuff
• 12:19
  like that. And he just started grilling me
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  and grilling me and just asking me loads of questions.
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  And then two hours have gone by and he went, well, you are the
• 12:27
  only person qualified to write that book.
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  So I went back to Keith and said, I've been thinking about
• 12:32
  it, maybe I should write a book about real time.
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  And so, yeah, five years later, here we are.
• 12:38
  Let's be honest, we've we've sort of too hot for TV jumping
• 12:42
  into all of this wilderness nonsense.
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  You are the only person qualified to write either of
• 12:48
  these two books. Well, I think there's a sort of
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  misconception, not within the whole of fandom, but I think
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  certainly within people who grew up in the wilderness era, that
• 12:57
  Real Time Pictures did a bunch of stuff in the wilderness era
• 13:00
  and that was it. But they think they've they've
• 13:02
  released more stuff post wilderness than they did during
• 13:06
  the wilderness era. Even I was surprised, and I have
• 13:10
  more peripheral knowledge of real time than the average
• 13:13
  Doctor Who fan reading this book, that there was so much
• 13:18
  coming out in the like, the last five or ten years.
• 13:21
  I thought it was, yeah, mostly that time.
• 13:24
  And actually no, they've done loads recently.
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  Well, recently, especially with the advent of the doctors
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  collections they were doing which were available on high
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  streets and stuff like that. It's sort of the.
• 13:35
  Most HMV you know and getting the VHS's but.
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  No, no, the doctors was in the last few years.
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  Oh, which one of them are thinking of?
• 13:43
  Then, so I don't know what you're thinking.
• 13:45
  Was Myth makers available as VHS's?
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  Myth Makers was available as VHS's, but that was that was
• 13:51
  very much specialist shops and then the dramas and things like
• 13:55
  Return to Devil's End you could get in HMV and things like that.
• 13:59
  But then the Doctor's releases they did with with Koch Media
• 14:03
  from about 201627 onwards were DVD compilations for each
• 14:08
  classic series Doctor that contained basically a collection
• 14:13
  of myth makers for the relevant to the era.
• 14:15
  And so you start off with John Purgley and they've got all the
• 14:18
  interviews recorded. By the time they get to Colin
• 14:20
  Baker and Sylvester McCoy and Paul Mcgahn, they need to go out
• 14:23
  and film a load of new ones. So that's when they start
• 14:25
  mopping everybody up from the classic era.
• 14:28
  But those were that those weren't just things sold from
• 14:31
  special shops. They were available on the High
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  Street. You could stream them on Amazon.
• 14:35
  They were in like they sold in good numbers.
• 14:38
  And it was like an archive release for, I would say, not a
• 14:41
  casual viewer, but a more casual fan, I think you'd say.
• 14:47
  That Keith Barn father is a very smart bloke and he knows how to
• 14:52
  mark it and to get this stuff out as widely as he possibly
• 14:56
  can. In fact, I think he's something
• 14:58
  of a something of a unique contributor to the spin off
• 15:03
  media of the wilderness years in that he's not a total prick.
• 15:07
  I mean, honest to God, I watched Was it return to Devil's End and
• 15:13
  there was one of the one of these ones and there was this
• 15:15
  massive interview with him on the DVD, right.
• 15:19
  And usually I watch these spin off bits and you hear the
• 15:21
  contributors. You know, it's people like you
• 15:23
  who go, Oh my God, these people are so annoying and bar father
• 15:28
  pops up and you honest to God one, he's talking great sense
• 15:32
  about Doctor Who in general and that he's very aware of the
• 15:38
  Doctor Who as a whole. The two he's just he has a sense
• 15:40
  of humour, which I really loved. You know, he's aware of the
• 15:44
  limitations of his resources and he just seems like a really
• 15:49
  amiable guy. He's.
• 15:50
  A he's a lovely man and he is like he, he doesn't big himself
• 15:55
  up too much, you know, like he's, I think he's very proud of
• 15:58
  what he's done. And he didn't set out to build
• 16:00
  this huge catalog, but he has and this huge resource for
• 16:04
  Doctor Who fans. But like, he takes what he does
• 16:08
  seriously, but he's not, as you say, he's not up himself.
• 16:11
  He's just, and it's not his main line of business.
• 16:14
  You know, he's wrote real time pictures, made corporate videos,
• 16:18
  broadcast television, all these things and still does around the
• 16:22
  world and that is is bread and butter.
• 16:25
  He does the Doctor Who stuff. Obviously he wants to break even
• 16:27
  or make a profit, but he does the Doctor Who stuff because he
• 16:30
  bloody loves it. And let's face it, you wouldn't
• 16:32
  do these many things unless they were incredibly profitable,
• 16:36
  which then they can't all be, or you just loved the show.
• 16:40
  I think on camera, though, you can very quickly get a sense of
• 16:43
  somebody. Yeah, especially when they're
• 16:44
  being interviewed. People are probably listening to
• 16:46
  you right now and going what cock?
• 16:48
  And no, I don't think. And I love you really.
• 16:55
  Immediately, I've got the sense of yeah, I can imagine people,
• 16:58
  even if the fee was tiny, people are going to want to work with
• 17:00
  this guy. It's like such a nice bloke, you
• 17:03
  know, I was ready to give my services for nothing, even
• 17:06
  though the interview wasn't 20 years ago.
• 17:08
  Well, OK, so this book, it's been commissioned.
• 17:12
  Yes. And now you're in the weirdly, I
• 17:16
  can't decide whether it's enviable or unenviable task of
• 17:20
  having to watch every single Myth Makers documentary and all
• 17:25
  of the, you know, outside paraphernalia as well.
• 17:28
  I mean, how long did this take? Because there's a lot of this
• 17:32
  stuff. There is a lot of this stuff and
• 17:35
  it was an enviable and unenviable task.
• 17:38
  Like it was very time consuming. Obviously you're fitting it in
• 17:42
  around life and work and all these other things.
• 17:45
  So it took five years, but it wasn't like every day for five
• 17:50
  years. So I sat there watching myth
• 17:53
  makers or documentaries or what have you.
• 17:55
  But the mistake I made to start with is I know what I'm going to
• 18:00
  do. I'm going to sit down and watch
• 18:02
  them all and then and make notes and then start writing the book.
• 18:07
  And I got to about #100 and realised that I've made a
• 18:12
  terrible mistake and I needed to go sort of, I needed to sort of
• 18:15
  get an overview of what everything looked like and go,
• 18:18
  OK, break it down into sections, right?
• 18:21
  I need to talk about this lot 1st and this lot 2nd.
• 18:23
  And so over the I interviewed many people for the book, but
• 18:27
  over the course of five years, I was interviewing and chatting to
• 18:31
  Keith like at least once a month, sometimes, sometimes
• 18:35
  twice a day interviewing and just get.
• 18:38
  And sometimes it was like a proper interview where it's
• 18:41
  like, how did you feel about this?
• 18:43
  How did you put that together? And other times it was like, can
• 18:45
  you remember why this was this spine is different to that one.
• 18:50
  And can you remember like why this release date is actually
• 18:55
  out of order? Like not things that you quote
• 18:58
  him on in the book, but just so you're trying to get a, a sort
• 19:01
  of kind of picture. Dylan, you know, he said,
• 19:03
  sitting there at midnight, you know, putting together the
• 19:05
  latest stunning corporate video and.
• 19:08
  There's your message coming. Through Do you remember the blue
• 19:11
  folder from this? And I know this was my idea he's
• 19:14
  writing back. But will you leave me alone,
• 19:16
  please? I mean, it was very much my
• 19:18
  idea, but I yeah, like he was the best resource I had.
• 19:26
  Well, yeah, in charge of real, Absolutely he was.
• 19:30
  And so he was very kind and generous with his time.
• 19:34
  And I quickly sort of realized as I interviewed him and other
• 19:36
  people, it wasn't going to be a book about facts and figures.
• 19:40
  It was and recording dates and release dates because quite a
• 19:45
  few of those things are lost to time or slightly up in the air,
• 19:48
  but the best guesses and places. But that's really boring as well
• 19:51
  and I don't want to read a load of facts.
• 19:53
  I've got the program going for that.
• 19:55
  Well, the first draft I did of the first few chapters was a lot
• 19:59
  longer because I did things like the first sort of 16 myth
• 20:03
  makers. Came out in 30 minute formats
• 20:06
  and then they did longer versions later when they put new
• 20:09
  material in. And so I reviewed them twice and
• 20:13
  I also compared where all the new footage went and if anything
• 20:17
  was cut or put in different orders.
• 20:19
  And it was a painstaking thing. And I read it and I went, who
• 20:22
  the hell wants to read that and just shunted it to one side.
• 20:26
  But that's the first line. Now having having a sample of
• 20:32
  the book and I read some of it today, Yeah, the thing I
• 20:35
  realized that I, I had that initial reaction of like, what
• 20:39
  on earth do you say about these hour long documentaries about
• 20:44
  people? And then of course I realized,
• 20:47
  yeah, you talk about the people. And the thing that really stood
• 20:51
  out reading this book was that you had managed to pull out
• 20:58
  amazing insight and anecdotes about people who I have studied
• 21:03
  my entire life. Yeah, for 40 odd years.
• 21:06
  I, you know, I thought I knew everything they want to know
• 21:08
  about Louise Jameson, Caroline, John, whatever.
• 21:10
  And without sort of spoiling the DVD.
• 21:12
  So anyone that's reading the book can still go and watch the
• 21:15
  DVD and they're going to get loads of insight about the
• 21:18
  people. And we've watched some and we'll
• 21:20
  talk about those in a bit. There was loads of stuff in
• 21:24
  there. And you know, I'm, I'm that sort
• 21:26
  of anecdote trivia, I gobble this stuff up.
• 21:31
  So when I started going through the sections on each ones, I was
• 21:34
  like, oh, give me more, give me more.
• 21:36
  You know, like, so watching them, you must, you must have
• 21:40
  been aware that you were getting a window into those people, that
• 21:45
  really there's nothing else like it there.
• 21:49
  There's very few convention videos and things like that.
• 21:52
  This is like a photograph of them at this point in their
• 21:55
  lives. What?
• 21:57
  Was it to say I, I think that was what I, I didn't know what I
• 22:01
  was going to get going in sort of because I've seen, I've seen
• 22:05
  plenty of myth makers before, but not all of them and plenty
• 22:08
  of his documentary work, but not all of them.
• 22:10
  I've seen all his dramas, but I so I didn't know what I was
• 22:15
  going to get and I didn't know what format the book was going
• 22:17
  to take because there was a, there was a point where I
• 22:19
  thought, well, it could just be sort of an episode guide to, you
• 22:22
  know, a sort of guide to real time pictures.
• 22:24
  And you go, this is the release. This is when it came out top
• 22:29
  five funny anecdotes like a sentence from Keith going, oh,
• 22:33
  what a great day we had. Like I didn't know and.
• 22:37
  You were too good, Dylan. Tara.
• 22:38
  Nuts and bolts like that. But then I would have put like a
• 22:41
  review for each one at the bottom.
• 22:43
  And then as I was watching it, it occurred to me, several
• 22:47
  things occurred to me. I mean, first of all, a lot of
• 22:51
  the people interviewed for the first ones were all dead.
• 22:55
  It occurred to me that I was hearing anecdotes that I'd heard
• 22:58
  before, but I was hearing them in a much purer, undiluted form
• 23:03
  because they they haven't been rolled out and loads of
• 23:06
  conventions and people embellished and people know
• 23:09
  where people laugh and things like that.
• 23:11
  So I realized I was like, So what my sort of view on it was
• 23:16
  what, how important is this to fandom?
• 23:19
  What's what version of those of that person does this interview
• 23:23
  give people? But also then the people making
• 23:26
  these interviews, what are their memories and recollections of
• 23:29
  their interactions with those people?
• 23:32
  So it's about, especially at the beginning of the book, it's
• 23:35
  about the organization of fandom, fandom's relationship
• 23:40
  with the stars, which crosses over into friendships and then
• 23:43
  the evolution of that. And as you go through the book,
• 23:47
  like we obviously we get to a point now where a lot of the
• 23:49
  myth makers are just sort of standard talking heads with
• 23:51
  people, you know, very much at the end of their careers and
• 23:54
  indeed end of their lives. It's it, it, it's sad to say,
• 23:57
  but it, it's largely true. And that becomes more about, you
• 24:03
  know, almost Keith and real Times need to finish cataloguing
• 24:08
  and just almost complete the classic series in a way.
• 24:11
  Because I don't think there's a more definitive catalog of
• 24:15
  interviews that cover the classic series.
• 24:17
  And there are bits of the new series and bits of other TV
• 24:19
  shows as well. Like there's all sorts of
• 24:22
  interesting like offshoots and little documentaries and things
• 24:26
  like that. So.
• 24:27
  I quite fancy watching the hot stuff Andrew Hayden Smiths
• 24:31
  makers someday. I mean, that's a lot of fun
• 24:34
  because you watch that and it's only a short one because he's at
• 24:38
  the start of his career. But you're suddenly in this
• 24:42
  situation where you've had a bunch of people who are being
• 24:44
  interviewed who are in their 50s and 60s and, you know, are a bit
• 24:47
  slower. And then you've just suddenly
• 24:48
  got this youthful, energetic, like energy that you haven't had
• 24:52
  for a while. So it's quite interesting to see
• 24:53
  that suddenly slotted in as the new series appears.
• 24:56
  It it sort of when you're watching them in order, like I
• 24:59
  was. And I'm not saying anybody
• 25:00
  should do that. You know, tempted.
• 25:03
  I have never watched Doctor Who. I've never done the Great Quest.
• 25:07
  I've never watched it. From the start I'm trying to
• 25:09
  make that sound like an achievement.
• 25:11
  No, I've never done it from start to finish, but I've
• 25:13
  watched all of the myth makers from start to finish and most of
• 25:17
  them more than once. Trying to resist calling you a
• 25:20
  loser right now, but. Failing miserably.
• 25:24
  But like what you do as well with the book, I'm sorry you're
• 25:26
  getting a sort of a review of your own book while we're
• 25:29
  talking. But now I want people to know
• 25:30
  what they're going to get with this and why they should pick it
• 25:33
  up. Is it's not only because the
• 25:35
  thing I loved about downtime was, you know, it was sort of
• 25:40
  half this is what happened and half this is who didn't get on,
• 25:44
  you know, Right. And people were really candid in
• 25:47
  their interviews. And so it wasn't you, as usual,
• 25:50
  being a gossip. It was you literally detailing
• 25:55
  creatives, you know, creating amazing things, some less
• 26:00
  amazing but mostly amazing things, but with tension, you
• 26:04
  know, like like when you're doing things on a budget.
• 26:06
  And I really loved as well in this book is it's less that, but
• 26:11
  it's more the psycho, the psychology of people meeting for
• 26:15
  the first time. So when I was reading, it was
• 26:17
  like, you know, when Nicholas Briggs interviewed John Pertwee
• 26:22
  and he's examining within the interview that he's giving you,
• 26:25
  he's examining why he didn't think that worked and, and how
• 26:28
  nervous he was and how they were sort of feeding off each other's
• 26:31
  energy and things like that. And you do that a lot in this
• 26:35
  second book because people are very giving with how they felt
• 26:38
  meeting that person for the first time or meeting them
• 26:41
  within an interview. And that stuff is so
• 26:44
  interesting. It's not a salacious book and I
• 26:46
  think one of the things I was keen to do with this book is
• 26:50
  because the previous one all every anybody ever talks about
• 26:55
  is bill bags antics and I didn't set out.
• 26:58
  Hilarious. But I didn't set out to write a
• 27:01
  book about Bill Bags antics. I set out to write a book
• 27:05
  celebrating the dramas of real time, BBV, magic, Bullet
• 27:10
  shakedown, all these other exciting things.
• 27:12
  But I knew there was going to have to be something in there
• 27:15
  about, you know, bill bags, business practices, this one.
• 27:21
  Nobody's got a bad word to say about Keith.
• 27:23
  So it's a celebration of 40 years of real time pictures.
• 27:27
  But within that, you know, relationships do get frayed.
• 27:30
  People's interactions and how they perceive themselves, even
• 27:33
  how they perceive themselves 20 years ago.
• 27:35
  Like when Briggs and Barn Father look back at themselves, they'll
• 27:38
  be the first ones to go. Yeah, I probably wouldn't have
• 27:40
  done that like that. I probably wouldn't have reacted
• 27:42
  like that now. So it's, it's sort of it's
• 27:47
  they're sort of coming of age within an industry and within a
• 27:49
  fandom and fandom growing up and learning to be more professional
• 27:53
  as well. So I I don't want it to come
• 27:56
  across as, oh, it's just a straight making of the myth
• 28:00
  makers because I don't think. That would that would have bored
• 28:02
  me senseless if that's what you'd written.
• 28:05
  Not at all, no. But also as well, both Bond
• 28:08
  Father and Briggs are they're so they're humble about their
• 28:11
  achievements, but they're so erudite about their journeys of,
• 28:17
  of how they, you know, were initially a bit awkward doing
• 28:21
  this because they didn't really know what they were doing, but
• 28:23
  they were, you know, and then how they sort of grew in
• 28:25
  confidence. Like you get to the Colin Baker
• 28:27
  one and Briggs goes, yeah, you know what?
• 28:29
  I, I did that one with Colin Baker.
• 28:31
  Suddenly I felt as if I flourished at that point because
• 28:34
  Colin was so giving and and he he treated me like a
• 28:37
  professional who knew what I was doing.
• 28:39
  Obviously, John Perry didn't do that.
• 28:41
  You know, that's why that one John Perry was always going to
• 28:45
  be the most important person in that room.
• 28:47
  But Colin is very given. So I just like, I like seeing
• 28:50
  because obviously I know about Barbara and I know about Briggs,
• 28:53
  but I don't really know about their their journey as
• 28:57
  interviewers and present. And yeah, all that stuff was so
• 29:00
  interesting again. And I, and it's also about like,
• 29:04
  I mean, Briggs says in there that they're frustrated.
• 29:06
  He was always a frustrated film writer and director.
• 29:10
  And so some of the things are born out of that.
• 29:12
  And we cover the dramas and obviously I covered some of the
• 29:14
  dramas, all the dramas that existed when I did the Downtime
• 29:18
  book. And I've sort of revisited those
• 29:20
  chapters, revamped them, got new people who I couldn't get to
• 29:23
  interview before. So for Downtime, the drama, I,
• 29:27
  there's a whole bunch of the crew in there as well as the
• 29:29
  original interviews. I Scott to interview Ian Avine
• 29:32
  and Andrew Beach, who were both producers on it and get their
• 29:35
  important they've not. You're calling it downtime, the
• 29:37
  drama. But well, no, there's downtime.
• 29:41
  The drama as in the. Production.
• 29:43
  I know I'm being facetious. The second edition downtime, The
• 29:47
  drama. Oh my God, that would sell by
• 29:49
  the bucket load. Why don't you do that?
• 29:51
  There's a book called Downtime, The Lost Years of Doctor Who by
• 29:54
  me. Is there really?
• 29:56
  There's a drama called Downtime by Real Time Pictures.
• 30:00
  Just for anybody who's confused. It was a stupid idea of mine, to
• 30:04
  be honest. I should have called it
• 30:05
  something else. I could have should have called
• 30:07
  it Shakedown Time. No, the stupid idea was you
• 30:10
  trying to be witty when you were talking about it just then
• 30:12
  giving me opportunities to take the piss.
• 30:15
  But as well, in Myths of legends, I mean, there were
• 30:18
  moments where I was howling with laughter.
• 30:20
  The whole section about Carolyn Ford's toilet.
• 30:23
  Absolutely. I mean, I was in the middle of
• 30:25
  Wetherspoons going what? Caroline Ford's, she's got 2
• 30:28
  doors in and out. Someone got locked.
• 30:30
  I mean, it's just wonderful. So it's like a French farce. 4
• 30:33
  Old Briggs and his jiffy tummy. I know, I know.
• 30:37
  And, you know, it's also like how Caroline Ford reacts to a
• 30:43
  situation like that. And I know that sounds weird.
• 30:46
  I know that sounds weird. How anybody would react to
• 30:49
  somebody. It's like I'm navigating your
• 30:50
  toilet, that's why. It's just like this is Doctor
• 30:55
  Who fans and the stars interacting for the first time
• 30:58
  and feeling each other out because you know, it's not Stop
• 31:03
  it, Joe, stop it. You're a naughty boy.
• 31:06
  We're not in that. Caroline Ford would have none of
• 31:08
  that, all right. Fandom as a whole, and I don't
• 31:12
  just mean Doctor Who fandom, I mean the idea of fandom in
• 31:15
  anything has become very commercial and money driven and
• 31:19
  you know, people make a very good living out of it, but this
• 31:22
  is sort of nobody's done this before.
• 31:25
  So this sort of crossover of fans and stars of the show, it's
• 31:29
  a relatively new thing in the 1980s.
• 31:31
  And it's quite interesting to see that unfold and see the
• 31:35
  people involved in it. And perhaps the people who,
• 31:37
  especially on the fandom side of things, get a little bit too big
• 31:40
  for their boots and have some sort of proprietorial ownership
• 31:43
  over it. And the ones like Briggs and
• 31:46
  Barnfather who just get on with it and go, I'm having a great
• 31:49
  time here and I can really hone my skills and new skills that
• 31:52
  I've learned in other areas here and vice versa.
• 31:55
  Take the skills I learn here and apply them elsewhere.
• 31:58
  And. We're obsessed, right?
• 31:59
  We are obsessed with knowing the people behind the camera, right?
• 32:04
  And the people behind the characters.
• 32:06
  It's always been a thing with Doctor Who fans, right?
• 32:09
  It's, it's not enough for us just to watch the show.
• 32:11
  We want to know everything. We want to know what happened on
• 32:14
  set. We want to know, you know, what
• 32:16
  happened in your life to lead up to the point watching Doctor
• 32:18
  Who, what happens afterwards. And those myth makers, they're
• 32:21
  just, it's just invaluable information.
• 32:24
  And there's nothing like it for anything else.
• 32:26
  Like, I don't know whether it's because no one's ever thought of
• 32:29
  it or like, say, Star Trek or Star Wars fans, just they're
• 32:34
  more immersed in the fiction of the world, but less.
• 32:37
  Love it if someone did it for Star Wars.
• 32:39
  Still a word. I remember getting.
• 32:40
  Keith, get on it for me. There's a lot of Star Trek
• 32:43
  people still alive. I remember the getting the
• 32:46
  original series of Star Trek on DVD and expecting it to have had
• 32:50
  the Doctor Who treatment and being quite surprised that, you
• 32:53
  know, there was a couple of commentaries.
• 32:54
  There was some little interviews here and there, but there wasn't
• 32:57
  like big expansive documentaries and profiles on different
• 33:01
  writers, directors, actors. It was just very much like,
• 33:04
  here's a couple of extra bits because we know you've bought
• 33:07
  this on VHS already, so we need you to double dip.
• 33:10
  There are 100 times more behind the scenes books than Star Trek
• 33:14
  ones or any other franchise, I think.
• 33:16
  I don't think there's any other show that has been detailed
• 33:19
  white as much as Doctor Who. I'm not.
• 33:21
  I'm not at home right now. But if I was at home, behind me
• 33:24
  would be shelves and shelves of books that are just on behind
• 33:28
  the scenes Doctor Who, not even the fiction.
• 33:30
  I hate to contradict you because I do podcast with you quite a
• 33:33
  lot. Usually behind you is an
• 33:35
  enormous shelf full of Myth Makers DVDs, and I sit there
• 33:39
  longingly going Oh my God, which ones can I nick off him next
• 33:42
  time I'm round? I've got them all.
• 33:45
  But as well as all the behind the scenes stuff of making these
• 33:49
  things, yeah, as well as the funny stories like poor Carol's
• 33:53
  toilet as well as, as well as sort of documenting the order
• 33:57
  that he's came out in and and the journeys of the presenters.
• 34:02
  There's really moving moments in here as well.
• 34:05
  The the section on Ian Martyrs. Like I honestly, I had she was
• 34:10
  reading that bit because the the the note that he said.
• 34:14
  I can't wait to to to watch this start the 1st result and but he
• 34:19
  wasn't alive long enough for it to happen.
• 34:21
  Three weeks after it was recorded he was dead and stuff
• 34:25
  like that. So.
• 34:25
  So you're right, these are invaluable records of people's
• 34:30
  lives work. That Ian Martyr note that he
• 34:35
  sends that. So David Howe very kindly sent
• 34:38
  me a big folder, like thick folder full of his paperwork
• 34:42
  that he'd kept from the two myth makers who directed Ian Marta
• 34:45
  and Mary Tam. I got it through the post and I
• 34:48
  went to the pub and I sat there with a beer and I was like
• 34:51
  pouring through it. And then I just found this
• 34:53
  little letter from Ian Marta just sort of, I can't wait to
• 34:56
  see them like yours, Ian. And it was like he'd literally,
• 35:01
  it's dated and he died like 2 days after writing the letter.
• 35:04
  And it's just so sad. And it's to your credit and you
• 35:08
  ain't going to like this because you struck me as something like
• 35:11
  the better way a compliment that that in those little prices,
• 35:15
  those those where you do the review at the end of each
• 35:18
  section. Yeah, is that you summarize that
• 35:20
  sort of stuff really, really well and your opinion on it.
• 35:24
  But you, you kind of make me feel something as well.
• 35:28
  And there where you're talking about the fragility of life
• 35:30
  because, like, Ian, Marta recorded that, and then we lost
• 35:33
  him. Really moved me.
• 35:35
  Yeah. You're a very good writer, Dylan
• 35:37
  Reece, you know. Thank you very.
• 35:38
  Much You normally talk such bullshit.
• 35:41
  I'm like, who's this? Where's this man on my podcasts?
• 35:44
  You know, usually we're watching Probe when to die or have you.
• 35:49
  Classic. Excuse me?
• 35:50
  Indeed, and it happens a few times and still to this day with
• 35:54
  the myth makers like happens to Paul Bernard, he dies before his
• 35:58
  comes out. Did somebody ask him please why
• 36:01
  he does so many of those zooms in and out?
• 36:04
  I can't remember Trevor Martin his, I think his comes out just
• 36:09
  after his death. Then there's people like Derek
• 36:13
  Martynus. I think it's Derek Martynus
• 36:15
  where they get him just as he's been diagnosed with Alzheimer's
• 36:21
  or dementia. And so it's so they they have to
• 36:24
  spend a bit of time coaxing, coaxing sort of memories out of
• 36:26
  him. Barbara Clegg just after she's
• 36:29
  sort of had a stroke and had operations and stuff like that.
• 36:32
  And so it's really like it goes from capturing these people
• 36:37
  giving their sort of in the 80s and early 90s telling their
• 36:41
  stories for the first time to the tail end of like
• 36:44
  unfortunately, people telling them potentially for the last
• 36:46
  time that's. Crazy, isn't it?
• 36:50
  So can I ask you a very sort of personal question?
• 36:53
  When you got to the end of this journey and you'd watched them
• 36:56
  all? Yeah.
• 36:56
  How did you feel then? I mean, have you retained all
• 36:59
  the information that's in those DVDs?
• 37:03
  I definitely haven't retained all the information that's in
• 37:05
  those DVDs, but I did feel like I'd accomplished something.
• 37:09
  Like, I mean, obviously I've wrote a book, but like, there
• 37:13
  was something. Why we're here, Dylan.
• 37:16
  There was something very sort of, I'm trying to think of the
• 37:20
  right word. It felt like I'd been on a
• 37:24
  journey, not just not just like a long journey of writing a book
• 37:28
  or watching all these things. But I did feel like I'd got to
• 37:31
  know sort of the changing nature of Doctor Who fandom and like
• 37:38
  knowing some of their stars a bit better and where they were
• 37:40
  in their lives. Like Michael Craze and Richard
• 37:42
  Franklin, both of their myth makers, come at a point where
• 37:45
  I'm a bit like, oh, this is this is quite a sad, like very happy.
• 37:50
  But they were definitely at turning points in their lives
• 37:52
  and perhaps weren't where they wanted to be.
• 37:55
  I can remember watching that. Michael Cray's one, you know
• 37:58
  where he goes. I'm going to pull you the best
• 37:59
  point you've ever had, you know, and and there's just no passion
• 38:05
  in what he's talking about in that.
• 38:07
  And yeah, he's had quite an interesting career.
• 38:09
  Yeah, I know what you mean. There's a real poignancy to some
• 38:12
  of them. Well, we're going to talk about
• 38:13
  Tom Baker in a little bit, and I think that's a really
• 38:15
  interesting point in his life that they chose to film that.
• 38:18
  Absolutely. Ian Collier is another one.
• 38:20
  Like his like they capture him at a point and where his acting
• 38:26
  career is pretty much over and he talks about, you know, quite
• 38:29
  candidly about not being able to get rolled because he was
• 38:34
  diagnosed as HIV positive and insurers wouldn't insure him at
• 38:38
  that point because it was seen as that much of A stigma.
• 38:41
  And I have no idea about that, that with Ian Collier.
• 38:44
  And that's on record. That's out there in this this
• 38:47
  interview that's that's been out there for the best part of a
• 38:49
  decade or whatever. But as much as I love Doctor
• 38:53
  Who, you can't consume everything around it.
• 38:55
  So to sort of go on this journey with all these, all these people
• 38:59
  at different points in their life and people pop up again.
• 39:01
  Like a few people have a couple of myth makers or they show up
• 39:04
  in a documentary or they get an updated version.
• 39:07
  And it's really interesting to see, you know, where they are
• 39:09
  even 10 years later or 40 years later and just you, you walk
• 39:14
  away with a better understanding of who these people are.
• 39:17
  And some of them only want to talk about Doctor Who.
• 39:19
  Others they'll talk about their entire lives.
• 39:21
  And others they'll just talk about their careers and it's
• 39:24
  whatever they feel comfortable with.
• 39:25
  And you also get some master classes, like when you hear
• 39:29
  about when you're talking people like Douglas Campfield and
• 39:36
  Christopher Barry, when they're talking about directing.
• 39:38
  It may be a directing from a bygone age, but if you were
• 39:41
  teaching a class on the history of television directing in
• 39:46
  studio, you know, studio band dramas, you could just put those
• 39:50
  on and you would get a master class in it.
• 39:52
  It's fun, like fascinating stuff.
• 39:54
  You also get a master class, I think in presenting and
• 39:59
  interviewing because one thing that staggered me.
• 40:04
  And that's only because I haven't really experienced much
• 40:06
  of this was mad Nick Briggs. And I know there's several
• 40:10
  presenters of these and they've all got their their strengths.
• 40:13
  But Briggs in particular because one of the ones we're going to
• 40:17
  talk about later, it's a it's an interview that's packed full of
• 40:20
  sort of somebody being quite vulnerable and talking about
• 40:23
  sensitive issues. He's so comfortable with it and
• 40:27
  he engages on all the points and like, you know, I'm somebody
• 40:31
  that's put out 1000 episodes of this bloody thing.
• 40:33
  OK. So you, you learn after a while,
• 40:36
  you sort of gauge very quickly how somebody wants to be
• 40:40
  treated, how far you can go with questions and things like that.
• 40:43
  I just think he's got a great instinct as an interviewer and
• 40:48
  it's to his credit. Yeah, he's brilliant.
• 40:51
  So the the range starts off the 1st 2 are done by a guy, the
• 40:56
  interviews a guy called Keith Harrison who worked for Channel
• 40:59
  4 and various other things that Keith just knew in the industry.
• 41:02
  And he was like, I need a professional presenter.
• 41:04
  And he does a fine job, but he doesn't have that Doctor Who
• 41:07
  knowledge in there. And so he ends up sort of making
• 41:11
  a few faux pas, the sort of faux pas that were perfectly logical.
• 41:15
  But he, you know, he does something like he interviews
• 41:19
  John Leeson and Michael Wisher on the same day.
• 41:21
  And Michael Wisher goes like, you know, I was off in a van
• 41:24
  with a headset. And then John Leeson says the
• 41:27
  same thing. And so he just assumes, oh, so
• 41:29
  you and John Leeson, we're in the same, same van, which is a
• 41:33
  perfectly reasonable. You were going to say, he said
• 41:36
  to Michael Wisher. You know, what was it like being
• 41:37
  the tin dog, John Leeson? How do you feel being in that
• 41:41
  wheelchair? You know, like.
• 41:43
  No, no. But it was just a perfectly
• 41:44
  reasonable assumption that they would have worked together in
• 41:46
  that way, but obviously they didn't.
• 41:48
  I think within these sort of interviews, yeah, where the
• 41:51
  subject is so specific, yeah, you do need that knowledge.
• 41:55
  So Briggs does. Briggs comes in and his first
• 41:59
  interviews with Nick Courtney, a slightly uneasy one.
• 42:01
  They become great mates and there's an updated version where
• 42:04
  Nick's definitely had a couple of drinks and they're having
• 42:07
  such a laugh. And you can.
• 42:08
  Get a better advertise that way. But you can tell that there's
• 42:12
  just such a warmth between them and they've really sort of, you
• 42:15
  know, but formed the friendship there.
• 42:17
  And he gets better over the the sort of the 1st 10.
• 42:20
  And he's a young man in his 20s sort of feeling his way out and
• 42:23
  seeing whether actually, because it's very different from being a
• 42:26
  Doctor Who fan on stage at a convention going.
• 42:29
  So what's your favorite story or how did you get the job to like,
• 42:33
  how do I make an engaging interview for a product that
• 42:36
  I've got to sell? And he really hitched his stride
• 42:40
  and he sort of does about the 1st 50.
• 42:43
  And then there's this thing where Nick's very busy sort of
• 42:47
  touring in plays and then eventually goes off to do Big
• 42:50
  Finish. And so Keith does the interviews
• 42:52
  and Briggs sort of does the links and then pops back to do
• 42:55
  in person interviews every now and then that goes on for a bit.
• 42:57
  And then after a while, Bond father and him have to have a
• 43:00
  conversation where he goes, you know, we can't keep having this
• 43:05
  format. So that's when it gets in other
• 43:08
  people. And like there's there's quite a
• 43:09
  few different people that do it. From Sophie Oldridge, Ian
• 43:12
  Kubiak. I've seen the Angela Bruce 10,
• 43:15
  it's blissful. They go down the High Street and
• 43:18
  then head to the pub, have a few and it's Sophie and Angela Bruce
• 43:21
  just having the best day out talking about and Angela Bruce's
• 43:24
  career is amazing. And the the main, their main
• 43:28
  presenter now is a guy called Robert Dick, who is a lovely man
• 43:32
  who does a lot of conventions and he.
• 43:34
  Just does the BFI ones. No Oh Oh no sorry.
• 43:39
  I've just heard the name Dick. There's loads of Dick jokes.
• 43:41
  That's Dick. JD Oh, sorry, Too many Dicks.
• 43:44
  Too many Dicks. Yeah, but Robert Dick and Rob
• 43:47
  Roberts are really good interviewer and he does all the
• 43:49
  sort of the the key ones these days.
• 43:54
  And Briggs does pop back eventually.
• 43:55
  The last one Briggs does is a thing called The Day of the
• 43:57
  Daughters, which is a documentary about Sadie Miller
• 44:01
  and what's her name, Carolyn John's daughter.
• 44:04
  Oh, Daisy Ashford. Daisy Ashford And that's really
• 44:07
  lovely and you talk about. Developed relationship with all
• 44:12
  them by a big finish now. So, well, you can see their
• 44:14
  relationship there, but also he is talking about difficult
• 44:17
  subjects and the death of their mothers and things like that.
• 44:19
  And he's very able to be very empathetic having lost his
• 44:21
  father and just being a good interviewer.
• 44:23
  And you really get a warmth between them and you're like,
• 44:26
  it's really lovely to see him back.
• 44:28
  And you know, I hope he'll he'll do a few more at some point as.
• 44:30
  Well, when you've developed a relationship, repeat.
• 44:32
  I know you've ever heard the the Big Finish interviews they put
• 44:35
  out with Tom Baker and Colin Baker and both of those into
• 44:38
  brilliant. And, you know, he's got such a
• 44:40
  good relationship with him. He goes, you know, Colin, why
• 44:42
  did you do? I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out of
• 44:45
  here. What good did that do with your
• 44:46
  career? And he goes, oh, really, Nick?
• 44:48
  Really. Yeah.
• 44:49
  Yeah. You wouldn't if they paid off
• 44:50
  your house, would you do it? You know, it's great stuff.
• 44:54
  And the Tom Baker one that they do for Big Finish as well, it's
• 44:57
  the first time that it feels like for about 40 years, you get
• 45:00
  a new anecdote out of Tom until Matthew Sweet comes along and
• 45:04
  does his. But it's like again, because
• 45:05
  those relationships exist. Another thing that I really took
• 45:09
  away from the book as well. And like, you know, you may
• 45:11
  sound like we're spoiling off the book here.
• 45:13
  We're covering about 0.2% of this book.
• 45:16
  It's absolutely packed full of stuff.
• 45:18
  Yeah, go and get it. That's what I'm saying.
• 45:20
  All right, the links below it's but there's this.
• 45:25
  I just thought it was talking heads.
• 45:27
  I didn't realize there was one about a day in the life at DWM.
• 45:30
  I mean, if I don't get hold of that this year, somethings gone
• 45:34
  wrong with my year because I want to see that so badly.
• 45:36
  Peter Darva Evans and a whole one on the new adventures.
• 45:39
  I run a fucking book club for God's sake.
• 45:41
  Why haven't I seen that? There was loads of sort of
• 45:44
  peripheral ones like that that I think they those are, there's
• 45:48
  nothing at all. There's there's nothing at all
• 45:50
  else like that with that kind of insight into the new adventures
• 45:54
  into DWM. And their documentary range as
• 45:57
  well. And there are things like this.
• 45:58
  Who on earth is Tom Baker? And there's things like the
• 46:03
  Panopticon Tapes, which are compilations of lots of bits of
• 46:06
  early conventions, stuff about conventions down low, down
• 46:11
  under. Patrick Trouton in America is
• 46:13
  brilliant. He just went to, it's not like a
• 46:16
  brand new production per SE, although he shot some new stuff.
• 46:20
  It's a bunch of interviews that Patrick Trouton did and idens
• 46:22
  that he did for public broadcasting stations in
• 46:25
  America. And he, Keith just goes over,
• 46:28
  finds out about how these were made, find out how Tratton was
• 46:32
  on the convention scene there. And it's like I came away from
• 46:35
  that going. I I've seen like maybe 10
• 46:38
  minutes of Patrick Tratton being interviewed in my life.
• 46:41
  And all of a sudden I've seen like an hour and a half's worth
• 46:44
  I'm. So scared to learn though, you
• 46:46
  know, because I think I am going to collect all of these now
• 46:48
  because I'm just so intrigued. Your book has intrigued me
• 46:51
  enough that I want the fucking collection.
• 46:53
  Sorry, excuse my language. And there's a brilliant range
• 46:56
  that he's been doing for the last few years called Doctor on
• 46:58
  Display. I don't need to know about more.
• 47:01
  Which is, which is all these things about Doctor Who
• 47:03
  exhibitions and even I was a little bit like, what is there
• 47:08
  possibly to I could see a documentary on a, on all the
• 47:12
  Doctor Who exhibitions, but you can't fill, you can't fill an
• 47:15
  hour, hour and a half, you said. What, The amount of Doctor Who
• 47:18
  back alleys you've been up and you were turning your nose up,
• 47:21
  That's right up your street. And of course I was wrong.
• 47:24
  And each one of them are brilliant and like have all
• 47:27
  these footage, all these bits of like fan footage and things like
• 47:31
  that from the Blackpool exhibitions, the Longleat
• 47:33
  exhibitions, like there's so much like just a treasure trove.
• 47:38
  The, there's, there's two on Longleat, one on the big sort of
• 47:41
  the early days, the 20th anniversary, and then the the
• 47:43
  later events that they do. And one of them features some
• 47:46
  footage shot by me when I was 12 years old.
• 47:52
  That's terrible. Oh, no, no.
• 47:53
  It absolutely is. It's on our family camcorder.
• 47:56
  But we went to this day, this long leak day that they had on
• 48:00
  and they had they, they staged like a mini episode with the
• 48:03
  Brigadier. It's called like a day out in
• 48:04
  the country fighting some Cybermen.
• 48:07
  And there were explosions and things and I filmed it all.
• 48:09
  I'm 12 years old. You must have been having the
• 48:11
  best day ever. It was the best day.
• 48:13
  And so they asked for Pete. Keith put a shout out down.
• 48:16
  Has anybody recorded this? Of which loads of people had.
• 48:18
  And he's just about cobbled together the entire story from
• 48:22
  various bits of it, but a little bit of it's mine.
• 48:25
  I envisage, you know, that your direction style is probably a
• 48:28
  bit like Richard Martin in Dalek Invasion of Earth, so shooting
• 48:32
  above the action so you can't really see what's going on.
• 48:35
  It's worse. It is worse.
• 48:36
  I'll refuse to believe that. Jesus Christ.
• 48:41
  Oh boy, Oh boy. Yeah.
• 48:42
  So but there's also real times like own dramatic productions as
• 48:48
  well that you cover in this too. And I know there's less, there's
• 48:51
  less of those than in downtime to cover.
• 48:56
  But you've got your wartime in here.
• 48:59
  It's still when the devil sees of Arador.
• 49:01
  Help me out. So it's wartime downtime, the
• 49:05
  mind game stuff, demos rising. Those were all covered in my
• 49:09
  first book. But I've, as I said, revisited
• 49:11
  them, got some new interviews, sort of, you know, to to make
• 49:14
  the definitive version of those stories.
• 49:17
  But then the newer stuff like White Witch of Devil's End and
• 49:22
  Sill and the Devil Seeds of Aridor, and then some stuff
• 49:24
  that's hopefully happening in the future.
• 49:27
  And it was nice to revisit those those and also sort of complete
• 49:33
  that as it stands, the dramas and do, because I've never
• 49:36
  written about SEAL before. I when I wrote downtime the last
• 49:40
  years of Doctor Who, White Witch had been shot but hadn't come
• 49:43
  out. So it's nice to sort of cover
• 49:46
  those as complete. What was that that fit in the
• 49:48
  script called the Priory Is is that coming out?
• 49:52
  What's it called? Fuck, I know it's called
• 49:54
  Anomaly. It's.
• 49:55
  Called Anomaly. That is, that is coming out.
• 49:59
  So the last couple of chapters in the book, we talk about the
• 50:02
  future and what things Keith wants, still wants to do, and
• 50:06
  he's got two more dramas that he intends to do, and Anomaly is
• 50:11
  one of them, and I hope to see it.
• 50:13
  Well, sum up your overall experience.
• 50:16
  I mean, I'm sure you're relieved now that early copy is going out
• 50:21
  and soon it's going to be on the shelves for everybody to enjoy.
• 50:24
  I'll say for my part, yeah. Because, you know, Dylan Reece
• 50:28
  is a very humble man, you know, so he goes, well, I'm not sure
• 50:31
  if it's as good as the first one.
• 50:32
  It is every bit as good as downtime.
• 50:35
  I was hoovering it up this morning reading it and I've only
• 50:39
  read like 1/4 of it. But I'm literally I'm off for
• 50:42
  the rest of the week and this is what I'm going to be devouring.
• 50:45
  What's the experience of writing this book bin like?
• 50:48
  It's been, it's been really great.
• 50:50
  And to sort of jump into somebody's life, Keith's life
• 50:54
  ultimately and have and sort of get an overview of like, almost
• 50:58
  like, what the hell were you thinking?
• 50:59
  Like not in like, like would you ever expect it to go this far
• 51:04
  and become this thing? And Keith has been so generous
• 51:06
  with his time. And we went down to his office
• 51:09
  and we went through all this paperwork and we got lots of
• 51:11
  photos that haven't been seen before and bits of artwork that
• 51:14
  haven't been seen before. And it just felt like the last
• 51:18
  thing that we did essentially was me and Keith going through
• 51:22
  all this photos and stuff. And we had a couple of beers and
• 51:24
  ate a pizza. And it was just a really nice
• 51:27
  moment of like, it's done. And I just feel I'm very humbled
• 51:35
  that I was allowed to do it because myth makers played an
• 51:38
  important part in my life. Real time pictures did.
• 51:40
  And I know like, it may not be some huge studio somewhere, but
• 51:45
  it was these things were instrumental in shaping my
• 51:48
  career because learning about how things were made, like I got
• 51:53
  that from myth makers and behind the scenes documentaries that
• 51:56
  that Keith did. So it was really nice to be able
• 52:00
  to tell his story and help him celebrate 40 years, 40 years of
• 52:04
  making Doctor Who interviews and documentaries and spin offs.
• 52:08
  I mean, that is quite the feat. It's lasted longer than most
• 52:11
  television shows. It's lasted longer than Doctor
• 52:13
  Who, the classic series. I had Doctor Who, the new
• 52:16
  series, you know, that was such a lovely sort of summation.
• 52:20
  You said there I was trying very hard to resist saying something
• 52:23
  extremely rude to you because this is still Hamster.
• 52:26
  But obviously I'm going to do it anyway.
• 52:28
  Like, just how hard were you when that exclusive artwork of
• 52:33
  real time, you know, when all that was being brandished?
• 52:36
  I mean, you must be so excited. My God, give an air.
• 52:40
  I was, do you know what the worst thing was?
• 52:43
  There was more and we couldn't get it all in, but we got all
• 52:45
  the important bits. But there were so many things
• 52:48
  like unused real time logos and we put a couple in there but we
• 52:51
  couldn't use them all. Unused wartime things, loads of
• 52:54
  different versions of Myth Makers covers that never were
• 52:57
  and it was so exciting to find these things.
• 52:59
  If if it's not all there, this is easily and I think will
• 53:04
  always be the most definitive exploration of real time preach
• 53:10
  and everything that they've done and Keith Barnfarfer's work.
• 53:13
  Well, the first 40 years, let's say we might come back and do
• 53:15
  the second 40 years in 40 years time.
• 53:18
  You're just as bad as all those other doctors who created Let's
• 53:21
  come on, let's do a sequel. I'm sure we can drive a few more
• 53:25
  quid out of them. No.
• 53:27
  I mean, I don't know how long Keith's going to continue
• 53:30
  putting things out and I hope it's for a very long time, but
• 53:34
  this certainly it feels like it's it's the definitive 40
• 53:38
  years. Obviously he will continue to
• 53:39
  put things out that aren't in there, but we're not going to
• 53:41
  like update it every two years or something like that because
• 53:44
  there's six new myth makers. Tell me if I'm off base, but I
• 53:47
  think I I relate Keith to Graham Harper, OK?
• 53:54
  Graham Harper once said to Barry, let's I want to be this
• 53:56
  great director of television. Yeah, but I'm a nice guy and I
• 54:01
  just, I don't want to navigate this thing where I have to be a
• 54:04
  bastard in order to succeed. Yeah.
• 54:07
  And I think Keith Bartha is that person as well.
• 54:09
  He's a genuinely creative bloke that's created this engine, vast
• 54:14
  engine of sort of documentaries that rolls on and on and on and
• 54:19
  managed to navigate it all being a good bloke as well.
• 54:22
  No, absolutely. That is rare within Doctor Who,
• 54:25
  I'm telling you. And Doctor Who, like even Doctor
• 54:28
  Who fandom, is full of stories of people screwing each other
• 54:31
  over and being complete bitches and no one's got a bad.
• 54:33
  Word a bad day. Nobody's got a bad word to say
• 54:37
  about Keith, and if they do, they certainly didn't say it to
• 54:39
  me and they had every opportunity to.
• 54:41
  Have you seen the size of you? I wouldn't say it to you either.
• 54:44
  Not not in the zoom. They don't know.
• 54:46
  I could be a tiny little boy. Well, okay, I want to very
• 54:52
  quickly because we're going to talk a little bit about myth
• 54:55
  makers would be quite nice, you know, to do a little bit of
• 54:57
  plugging for the myth makers as well, you know, people and buy
• 55:01
  the book and then bloody hell, Barn father is going to be
• 55:04
  living in a penthouse by the end of the year.
• 55:06
  The amount of marketing we're doing for him today, I'm going
• 55:09
  to play a very small game with you.
• 55:11
  Because. You seem to have suggested, I
• 55:14
  mean, I've got the proof of your book that you've digested an
• 55:17
  awful lot of Myth Makers. Yeah.
• 55:19
  So I want to play a game called and hang on, pump in the music
• 55:22
  called higher or lower. All right, Now I'm going to name
• 55:27
  Myth Makers DVDs, and you have to tell me if it's higher or
• 55:31
  lower in the order that they came out than the one
• 55:35
  previously. All right, this will see whether
• 55:37
  you can pay it. This will see whether you did it
• 55:39
  in order. Right?
• 55:40
  OK. So we'll start with start with
• 55:43
  Jackie Lane. All right?
• 55:44
  Right now, do you know where she falls?
• 55:46
  Yes, roughly. Or what number suit you think.
• 55:49
  Oh, she's about 2530, something like that.
• 55:52
  She's. 24 So you're quite close. You're quite close.
• 55:55
  All right. OK.
• 55:56
  Well, next we're going to skip to Barry Newberry.
• 56:00
  Oh, hi. Yes, 46.
• 56:03
  Well done, Jack Pitt. I hear that's a good one.
• 56:07
  Oh, it's a very good 10. Barry Newberry, Jack Pitt.
• 56:11
  I think it's higher, but only just.
• 56:14
  It's just lower, I'm afraid. Barry was 46, Jacks 45.
• 56:19
  OK, let's move on. That should have been 69.
• 56:22
  Oh, no, Phillip Siegel. I bet that's a banger.
• 56:25
  Oh. Phillip Siegel's Really Good.
• 56:27
  Really, really Good is. It higher or lower though.
• 56:30
  That's higher. It is higher is number 56.
• 56:35
  Well done. Glad to go.
• 56:36
  You really were paying attention.
• 56:38
  Well, what about Victor Pemberton?
• 56:40
  That's lower, but not as low as you would think because it's #11
• 56:44
  but it actually comes out. It actually comes out as not
• 56:49
  like it doesn't come out for years.
• 56:50
  So it suddenly comes out. I want to say it's actually
• 56:53
  number between like 17 and 18 or something, so let me go.
• 56:57
  OK, well now I'm going to skip to the woman who asked my other
• 57:01
  half to marry me, Daphne Ashbrook.
• 57:04
  Where does she fall? Oh, she is much higher.
• 57:08
  She's in like sort of 2016, so the Times.
• 57:11
  That's right, 127. Apparently very, very high.
• 57:15
  It's all right. This agonizing game will be over
• 57:18
  with shortly to give people an idea of the names that are
• 57:21
  available here. Oh my God, June Hudson.
• 57:25
  I'll bet she's glorious. She is glorious and she's lower.
• 57:29
  She is number 99. You're absolutely right.
• 57:31
  Anthony Ainley. Oh, higher.
• 57:39
  He's 116. He is higher.
• 57:41
  Well done. You haven't got one wrong for
• 57:43
  ages yet. OK, Gary Russell.
• 57:46
  Oh, much higher. He's in one of the later era.
• 57:49
  The myth makers live. 164 by all accounts.
• 57:54
  Oh my God, the queen of Finnish big Lisa Bauman.
• 57:58
  Lower than Gary Russell. 135 Wow, I'm really interested to
• 58:04
  see this one. Wally K Daily, OH.
• 58:06
  That's brilliant. Lisa Bauman or Higher than a
• 58:14
  Piece of Bad Man. Oh, I thought I was sort of
• 58:16
  cheats again. It's only like 4 lower.
• 58:18
  It's 132. So so here's, here's the idea.
• 58:22
  Basically is, is it's actors, it's producers, it's directors,
• 58:26
  it's musicians, it's extras, it's people that have been in
• 58:29
  monsters. Yeah, I mean, it's an incredible
• 58:32
  array of people. Absolutely.
• 58:34
  Some of them you know very well. Some of them you've never seen
• 58:37
  interviewed before or might have seen once and like, it's just
• 58:41
  like a huge archive for Doctor Who fans.
• 58:44
  And if you go to time travel TV, you can rent a download, buy a
• 58:47
  download, get the DVD, or if you or some, if they're still in
• 58:50
  print, the Doctor's compilations.
• 58:52
  You'll get like 5 or 6 different myth makers on a couple of
• 58:56
  discs. Unusually for these sort of
• 58:58
  things, they're a pretty decent price.
• 59:00
  You know, for what you're getting, I think they're a very
• 59:02
  good price indeed. Well, look, we watched four.
• 59:06
  I know you chose them specifically.
• 59:07
  We watched 5. No, unfortunately, I only had
• 59:09
  time for four. Sorry, Simon.
• 59:11
  Simon Williams has been shelved. I had to read your book as well.
• 59:15
  All right? There's only so much homework
• 59:17
  I'm willing to do. So we watched.
• 59:20
  Jacqueline Pearce. We watched the the the Wiles
• 59:25
  team at a convention. Tom Baker and Matthew
• 59:28
  Waterhouse, right? Indeed.
• 59:30
  I mean, I've got to say, of the four, Jacqueline Pierce's was by
• 59:33
  far my favorite. Oh my God, When it opened on her
• 59:38
  decorously on a chaise lounge with a glass of champagne in one
• 59:42
  hand and a fag in the other talking about an orgasm, I was
• 59:45
  like, I'm going to love this. I mean, the Jackie Pierce one is
• 59:49
  an is an interesting one because she's, I mean, she's hilarious
• 59:52
  and it's shot in a tiny little bedsit in.
• 59:54
  Soho, so it's her Romani caravan.
• 59:57
  She's. Draped out in sort of red
• 1:00:01
  velvets and gold. It's every bit so of a lad, I'll
• 1:00:05
  tell you. It's, and she sat there chain
• 1:00:07
  smoking and drinking champagne and she talks of her life and
• 1:00:10
  it's, it's hilarious and captivating and tragic and you
• 1:00:14
  just think what a personality, what a life.
• 1:00:17
  And it's, it's like, it's bizarre in many ways, but it's a
• 1:00:21
  fantastic. Interview so honest in the
• 1:00:24
  interview, like remarkably candid about the lowest points
• 1:00:28
  of her life. And that's the one I was talking
• 1:00:30
  about how Briggs navigates that interview.
• 1:00:33
  Just listening to her and you know, you're talking about
• 1:00:38
  depression and things like that. You know that your first, your
• 1:00:41
  first orgasm, she froze. Like, I don't know if she's
• 1:00:44
  trying to shock or whatever, but she throws really personal stuff
• 1:00:48
  at him and he just absorbs it and then comes out with a
• 1:00:51
  question. It is a really skillful
• 1:00:53
  interview. And she's just like this forms
• 1:00:57
  part of a range where Doctor Who's been off the air for a
• 1:00:59
  while. And so they start interviewing
• 1:01:02
  people from other TV shows to sort of varying levels of
• 1:01:05
  success, not in terms of the production productions and the
• 1:01:07
  interviews, but like Doctor Who fans are very loyal.
• 1:01:10
  And it turns out perhaps people of other shows just aren't
• 1:01:13
  necessarily interested in in these things.
• 1:01:15
  So like, they're all an interesting watch.
• 1:01:17
  But like, you get people like Herbert Jefferson Junior from
• 1:01:21
  the original Battlestar Galactica.
• 1:01:23
  Fascinating interview, knew nothing about the man.
• 1:01:25
  But ultimately, I don't think more than a handful of Doctor
• 1:01:29
  Who fans bought it. It certainly wasn't the start of
• 1:01:32
  a load of Battlestar Galactica ones, but the ones that do do
• 1:01:34
  quite well are the Blake 7 ones. So.
• 1:01:37
  Well, there's a lot of overlap though with those fandoms, isn't
• 1:01:40
  it? I mean, their stories are just
• 1:01:42
  blissful where she's talking about, you know, my friends,
• 1:01:45
  darling, they asked me to bring this cannabis to their house, to
• 1:01:49
  this party. And anyway, the next thing I
• 1:01:52
  knew, I was being dragged out of the airport in handcuffs.
• 1:01:55
  And I said this is the closest I've ever got to being in an
• 1:01:58
  episode of the Bill laughing my head off.
• 1:02:02
  She. She's absolutely brilliant, but.
• 1:02:05
  And she's mad, but she's brilliant.
• 1:02:07
  And she talks very candidly about like, oh, you know, the
• 1:02:09
  job she had to take in between jobs even after Blake 7, sort
• 1:02:13
  of, you know? She talks more candidly about
• 1:02:15
  Blake 7. She goes, Oh, weren't they
• 1:02:18
  boring, those scripts? She goes, I couldn't understand.
• 1:02:21
  She goes, I had an unearned ability to find the emotional
• 1:02:24
  honesty in stuff that I found so boring.
• 1:02:27
  She goes How successful was I, darling?
• 1:02:31
  But as you say, Briggs navigates not just her sort of personal
• 1:02:35
  trauma, but also like, you've got to remember people have come
• 1:02:38
  because to this interview because they like Blake's Evan
• 1:02:41
  and then she is slagging it off and he's able to sort of
• 1:02:43
  navigate that and bring it slightly back on track.
• 1:02:46
  Like he is a a brilliant interviewer.
• 1:02:49
  I love that ruthlessness, though, that she's just willing
• 1:02:51
  to be completely honest about it.
• 1:02:54
  And you were in Doctor Who. He goes and we do need to cover
• 1:02:57
  that before the end. She goes, yes, that script was
• 1:02:59
  even more boring. She goes, but I had a wonderful
• 1:03:01
  time by the pool with Patrick Trowan.
• 1:03:04
  Just great. And then like, so to show the
• 1:03:06
  diversity, the Tom Baker one really fascinating moment in his
• 1:03:10
  career, because it's post Doctor Who, but it's pre that point
• 1:03:15
  where he's really realized that he can get a lot of work because
• 1:03:20
  he was Doctor Who and trade on his reputation.
• 1:03:23
  He's quite somber in it. And he he he's looking down all
• 1:03:27
  the I'm so used to his eyes glittering.
• 1:03:28
  Yeah. Big smile.
• 1:03:30
  I don't think he smiles once, except when the little girl
• 1:03:32
  comes out the pub. Yeah, it was.
• 1:03:33
  So this is about 19891990 and they're on location at the
• 1:03:39
  Android did cut the Android Invasion Village.
• 1:03:44
  And so Keith being the sly businessman that he is, he'd
• 1:03:48
  employed Tom to do some voice over work for corporate things a
• 1:03:52
  few times, gone to the studio, met him, they got on well.
• 1:03:56
  And then eventually through his agent who is Jackie Lane, he
• 1:04:03
  goes sort of what? So here's the thing, like
• 1:04:04
  obviously we've really enjoyed working with Tom on these.
• 1:04:07
  I am a Doctor Who fan. I have this company.
• 1:04:10
  This is what we do. Do you think Tom would be
• 1:04:12
  interested? And she asked him.
• 1:04:14
  And Tom goes, yeah, yeah, sure. And I think Keith only gets him
• 1:04:17
  at this point because Tom's turning down all the conventions
• 1:04:20
  in the UK, goes to American ones every now and then because he
• 1:04:23
  gets flown first class to all expenses paid to America.
• 1:04:27
  But he's like, in terms of Doctor Who found him in the UK,
• 1:04:31
  He's been gone for five, 6-7 years, something like that.
• 1:04:36
  And Keith says he's like, I don't, we didn't know whether we
• 1:04:40
  were going to get just yes or no answers, whether he'd wander off
• 1:04:44
  halfway through the day board or anything like that.
• 1:04:46
  But you, you capture him. And there's like his curls are
• 1:04:49
  gone, but he's still the skinny, skinny Tom of sort of season 18
• 1:04:53
  older. And he's quite introspective.
• 1:04:56
  And I've talked a lot about the anecdotes we hear, some of the
• 1:04:59
  anecdotes we know here, but they're not embellished in the
• 1:05:02
  way that they they become later on.
• 1:05:05
  He's super honest about how he was with directors, how you
• 1:05:09
  know, he understood the nuts and bolts of making the show better.
• 1:05:13
  And it's not the stories he tells now is like, you know, I
• 1:05:15
  told him to do a one shot and a two shot.
• 1:05:17
  You know, he actually is looking back and going, you know, maybe
• 1:05:21
  that wasn't right of me to do that.
• 1:05:23
  Because it's it's only a decade ago and a decade at some points,
• 1:05:27
  like when I first saw the Tom Baker one when I was like 12
• 1:05:29
  years old, like he seemed impossibly old and not like the
• 1:05:32
  Doctor. But I think about myself a
• 1:05:35
  decade ago and how I would have changed things and done things
• 1:05:38
  differently. And you sort of like so he's at
• 1:05:41
  that point where he can still remember everything that
• 1:05:43
  happened a decade ago really sharply.
• 1:05:45
  And he's very introspective and very critical of past Tom in a
• 1:05:49
  way that now we see him 90 sort of breakdown in tears when he
• 1:05:53
  talks about how he how he behaved, which is a.
• 1:05:55
  Little bit awkward now, yeah, but.
• 1:05:57
  It's, it's very sad, but this is somebody who's like, I think he
• 1:06:00
  kind of thinks his career's over essentially.
• 1:06:03
  And he's just gonna go and live in the country and do some voice
• 1:06:06
  over work every now and then. And he's got, he's got a whole
• 1:06:09
  second career ahead of him that he doesn't even know about.
• 1:06:11
  I think Little Britain wasn't it, That was the point when he
• 1:06:13
  realised, Oh my God, people high up in the industry watched me
• 1:06:17
  when I was a kid and I can and absolutely his career thrived
• 1:06:20
  after that. So this, this is a really unique
• 1:06:23
  window into a Tom Baker that I don't think people usually see.
• 1:06:27
  He's, he's not quite melancholy, no.
• 1:06:30
  No, but he's not. He's not a raconteur in this.
• 1:06:34
  He's. Just stating what his behaviour
• 1:06:38
  was like, what the industry was like.
• 1:06:40
  He's down to earth. He's not larger than life.
• 1:06:43
  He is not. It's nice to know he's capable
• 1:06:45
  actually of just being a normal person.
• 1:06:47
  Absolutely. It'd be like, it's like when you
• 1:06:50
  see a clip from Z Cars with Brian Blessed in it and he's
• 1:06:54
  acting normally and you're like, oh, I forgot that that this
• 1:06:57
  person was actually like a a normal actor at one point.
• 1:07:01
  Now the convention panel one, it's lots of people I hadn't
• 1:07:06
  heard talk. So it was super interesting on
• 1:07:09
  in that respect. And I think that's the joy of of
• 1:07:11
  this myth makers, Rangers. There's a lot of voices in there
• 1:07:14
  that people won't have heard their anecdotes about or maybe
• 1:07:17
  even know that they're out there.
• 1:07:19
  A lot of people we've lost and who worked, you know, this is
• 1:07:22
  people that worked in the First Doctors era.
• 1:07:25
  The the reason I struggled a little bit with this one was
• 1:07:27
  only because it was a convention panel, you know, so it wasn't
• 1:07:31
  like a one-on-one intimate interview.
• 1:07:33
  It was it was lots of people in a line giving their stories.
• 1:07:37
  Yeah, absolutely. So this this was never meant to
• 1:07:40
  be released as a one on as a release on its own, but I'm very
• 1:07:44
  glad it did. So one father organizes the
• 1:07:46
  first couple of Doctor Who conventions in the UK.
• 1:07:50
  They don't video them. There isn't really the
• 1:07:51
  technology to do it. Or if there is, but it's very
• 1:07:54
  expensive. As he and other fans like Andy
• 1:07:57
  Grant, who works on the myth makers get start their
• 1:07:59
  professional careers and start doing myth makers and bits, they
• 1:08:03
  suddenly realize they're able to provide the audio visual rigs
• 1:08:07
  for the DWAS conventions, the Panopticon convention.
• 1:08:10
  So you go the sort of things that's fairly standard now at
• 1:08:14
  this point. There's two 3000 people going to
• 1:08:16
  these events. They're in massive rooms and
• 1:08:18
  universities or whatever. There's a big screen, there's
• 1:08:22
  cameras all around the room, like a couple of different
• 1:08:24
  cameras getting a couple of different angles and it's just
• 1:08:27
  so everybody can see them. Some of the conventions later
• 1:08:29
  on, you'd be able to tune it if it when it was in a hotel, you
• 1:08:32
  could go to your hotel room and watch the convention footage
• 1:08:36
  live so that because they're. Just live streaming on YouTube
• 1:08:39
  now. Don't.
• 1:08:40
  They Yeah, exactly. But but this was that, you know,
• 1:08:42
  that was this was how they did it in the the late 80s.
• 1:08:46
  And so for there's about four or five conventions where they get
• 1:08:50
  wall to wall coverage of everything.
• 1:08:52
  And they released these things called the Panopticon tapes
• 1:08:55
  early on, which are little snips, snippets of panels and
• 1:08:57
  things like that. And you know, so there's one on
• 1:09:00
  the Pertwee era, there's one on the Hartnell and Trout and era,
• 1:09:02
  all those things. And they're brilliant.
• 1:09:04
  They're a great insight into what conventions are like.
• 1:09:06
  You get all the best anecdotes and things like that.
• 1:09:09
  Later on, when barn fathers digitising his the the all of
• 1:09:14
  real times back catalog, he's like, oh, I've got all these
• 1:09:17
  Doctor Who convention panels and a lot of the people involved
• 1:09:21
  with them A we never did a myth makers with and B have passed
• 1:09:24
  away. I said to you, I didn't know
• 1:09:25
  what any of their voices sounded like until I'd watched this.
• 1:09:28
  So there's a few of them. There's the John Wiles team, the
• 1:09:31
  Ennis Lloyd team, the Peter Bryan team.
• 1:09:33
  And so we did the John Wiles team.
• 1:09:35
  And is it the the best convention panel ever?
• 1:09:39
  No. Is it a chance to see people
• 1:09:44
  that you've never seen before here?
• 1:09:45
  So it's John Wiles, Dennis Spooner, Paul Ericsson and
• 1:09:49
  Donald Cotton. And there's another panel which
• 1:09:52
  is a bonus on the disk which we didn't watch, which has also got
• 1:09:54
  William EMS on it, which. Boner is a hoe, Arthur.
• 1:09:58
  Yeah. I mean, you can tell he's a
• 1:10:00
  witty writer. Absolutely.
• 1:10:02
  Spoon is the one where I'm like, oh I wish they'd got a few more
• 1:10:05
  interviews with him because he comes across as an absolute.
• 1:10:08
  They caught him early enough, you know, to do a proper thing,
• 1:10:11
  make his own. Yeah, and Paul Erickson, you
• 1:10:15
  know, I mean, he's American. Who knew?
• 1:10:17
  Well, I didn't know that. Also, it was like I didn't.
• 1:10:20
  I didn't watch it. I didn't watch it being made.
• 1:10:23
  I just wrote the script and then went to America because I know
• 1:10:27
  nothing. I don't really know why I'm
• 1:10:28
  here. It's all about the rest of my
• 1:10:31
  career. But, you know, this is sort of
• 1:10:33
  1520 years on for them and so they've still got some decent
• 1:10:38
  like it's at a point where we've got these amazing guests.
• 1:10:41
  But perhaps the the questions aren't always the most
• 1:10:44
  insightful. But it's a brilliant thing to
• 1:10:46
  have though. Yeah, it's.
• 1:10:48
  Such invaluable insight. And John Wiles comes like we
• 1:10:51
  know that, you know, it was chaos in Cardiff, as we'd call
• 1:10:54
  it now for the John Wiles era, but he says so much without ever
• 1:10:59
  being salacious as well. Well, I noticed that on all four
• 1:11:02
  of these, you know, there's things that are said and there's
• 1:11:05
  things that are said without saying them.
• 1:11:07
  Yeah, and when I first saw this, I was just like, I cannot end up
• 1:11:13
  with. I just cannot believe it exists
• 1:11:14
  and I'm so happy it does. As I said, the Innis Lloyd one
• 1:11:18
  is well worth having a look at as well because it's Innis
• 1:11:20
  Lloyd, Peter Bryant, Victor Pemberton and Michael Cray.
• 1:11:22
  So some of those you've seen before?
• 1:11:24
  Does Innis Lloyd sound like Fraser Hynes suggestion?
• 1:11:27
  Fraser, me old boy. Does he sound like Captain
• 1:11:29
  Bird's Eye? No, he's a bit more softly
• 1:11:31
  spoken. OK.
• 1:11:33
  I knew they exaggerated on these.
• 1:11:35
  Conventions, but it's such a lovely thing to have.
• 1:11:39
  And then there's another panel that gets used as part of
• 1:11:41
  there's a Don Houghton and Terence Dix interview.
• 1:11:44
  And so that comes out as a Don Houghton myth makers.
• 1:11:46
  And again, is it the most insightful interview you'd ever
• 1:11:49
  want with Don Houghton? No.
• 1:11:51
  But is it nice to hear Don Houghton talk for 45 minutes?
• 1:11:54
  I think Dix is on there as well. Yeah, Dix is on there as.
• 1:11:57
  Well, he'd make he'd make any interview gold.
• 1:12:02
  Well, the last one we did, and I thought I approached it with
• 1:12:06
  caution because it came in at almost two hours, was the
• 1:12:10
  Matthew Waterhouse one, which is a lot later, isn't it?
• 1:12:13
  Yes. So I wanted to pick ones that
• 1:12:15
  sort of spread across the the the width and breadth of the
• 1:12:19
  real time catalog. And this is the first one that
• 1:12:21
  Robert Dick does and with Matthew Waterhouse.
• 1:12:25
  And Matthew and Robert are good pals.
• 1:12:28
  And it is, you know, it's nearly two hours long, but I just think
• 1:12:31
  Matthew Waterhouse. It could have been five hours
• 1:12:34
  long. I think he's a top bloke.
• 1:12:36
  Matthew Waterhouse. So honest, so sweet, so he's
• 1:12:41
  ridden that reputation of Adric so well.
• 1:12:44
  He's also got real great insight into the character of Adric and
• 1:12:48
  the characters around him in that era.
• 1:12:51
  Like he's very intelligent. You can tell it's.
• 1:12:54
  So literate you. I didn't need to see Toby Haydo
• 1:12:57
  walking into his house in Hastings, although I know where
• 1:13:00
  that is in Hastings actually. So I'm coming to see you,
• 1:13:02
  Matthew. Should we pop round?
• 1:13:03
  I better have a fried breakfast as well, but I didn't need to
• 1:13:06
  see that His living room was an enormous library.
• 1:13:08
  Because when I heard him at a convention before, you could
• 1:13:10
  just tell how well read he was. You know?
• 1:13:13
  He's absorbed so, so much and yet he's still willing to
• 1:13:17
  celebrate this tiny corner of his career that a lot of people
• 1:13:22
  look at and laugh. I think he's such a humble
• 1:13:25
  bloke, he's wonderful. He's fascinating, and there's
• 1:13:27
  something about him, as he's an older guy now and more
• 1:13:30
  eccentric. He has that sort of intelligent
• 1:13:35
  raconteurship that a lot of the actors who played the Doctor
• 1:13:39
  had, you know, like some people that convent show up at
• 1:13:41
  conventions are themselves. But if you'd said to me I'd
• 1:13:44
  never seen Doctor Who before, and you'd put Colin Baker,
• 1:13:47
  Matthew Waterhouse and Sylvester McCoy on the stage and said all
• 1:13:50
  three of them played the Doctor, I would have believed you, you
• 1:13:53
  know? Imagine if at the end of the
• 1:13:55
  Reality War, Shooty Gatwa regenerated into Matthew
• 1:13:58
  Waterhouse. Oh hello, it would have been
• 1:14:01
  great. Would have been the second best
• 1:14:04
  cameo in the episode. Well, yeah, quiet, yeah.
• 1:14:08
  But, you know, I I think he tip toes the line between being very
• 1:14:15
  honest about his time on the show and being very respectful.
• 1:14:19
  He does it really skilfully. And I've read Blue Box Boy, so I
• 1:14:24
  know he had a right shitter of a time during season 18.
• 1:14:28
  And, you know, and he was at a time in his life where he was a
• 1:14:32
  young man. You know, we don't know
• 1:14:34
  anything. And all these anecdotes that
• 1:14:35
  come out about him trying to give Richard Todd, I mean, he
• 1:14:38
  does counter a lot of these stories about him being drunk
• 1:14:41
  and gastrovalva and all this. And he goes, yeah, I don't know
• 1:14:44
  how true all of this is, but. No, because they're anecdotes
• 1:14:47
  that embellished for years and years and years and years like
• 1:14:50
  and that. And I think these later things,
• 1:14:54
  if the earlier ones are about people telling their stories
• 1:14:57
  without the embellishment. This isn't giving somebody like
• 1:14:59
  Matthew a chance to go. But it wasn't quite like that.
• 1:15:02
  It's a good story, and he says it himself a lot of the time.
• 1:15:04
  Like they're good stories. Barry Letts was good for that.
• 1:15:07
  Are you sure? Are you sure that's how it
• 1:15:09
  works? But he's just he's good company
• 1:15:13
  like he he's good company when I've met him at a convention,
• 1:15:16
  he's good company and that Toby Haley one and for two hours of
• 1:15:19
  my life this week, he was fantastic company as they
• 1:15:22
  explore the nooks and crannies of Cranley Hall.
• 1:15:26
  I we shot some occasionally. I help Keith out with some of
• 1:15:31
  the Myth Makers live stuff and we shot some at Hooverville a
• 1:15:33
  few years ago and afterwards Keith took us for a Curry and
• 1:15:37
  Matthew came along because he's good friends with Robert.
• 1:15:39
  Dick and I had a delightful hour, an hour and a half, sat in
• 1:15:43
  a Curry house next to Matthew Waterhouse and he was the nicest
• 1:15:46
  man that you could possibly imagine.
• 1:15:48
  Well, you could have got me his number.
• 1:15:49
  I forgot a looker, you know. Oh, actually, you know, whilst
• 1:15:53
  we're talking of, sorry, this is still hamster doing, but whilst
• 1:15:56
  we're talking about good looking people, Yeah.
• 1:15:58
  Who was that person in Jacqueline Pierce's one?
• 1:16:01
  You know where she goes, my friend over here.
• 1:16:03
  And then the camera cuts to this insanely handsome man.
• 1:16:08
  Is it John Ainsworth it? Probably is, yeah.
• 1:16:10
  Fucking hell John, you were beautiful back in the day.
• 1:16:14
  Jesus Christ, are you? Saying it's not now.
• 1:16:16
  Well, I've done an interview. We all get older, you know,
• 1:16:19
  grief. But I mean, doing those four, it
• 1:16:23
  was really interesting choices because I think you, you, you've
• 1:16:27
  got people at various points of their career and people that are
• 1:16:31
  giving different amounts of themselves in the interviews and
• 1:16:37
  different interviewers that have different sorts of results.
• 1:16:40
  So it just goes to show the variation that you get in these
• 1:16:43
  myth makers. I just want to give a quick
• 1:16:45
  shout out to the one you didn't watch, the Simon Williams one
• 1:16:48
  which was done at one of the Myth Makers Live is.
• 1:16:50
  That the best of the five. I'm so sorry.
• 1:16:52
  It's not the best of the five, but it's, you know, it's, it's a
• 1:16:54
  really good one. It's Sophie Eldridge
• 1:16:56
  interviewing Simon Williams, who's had this massive career on
• 1:16:59
  television. And he's so like, it's done in
• 1:17:02
  front of a live audience, which really helps.
• 1:17:04
  He's so funny, but also quite touching and emotional at times.
• 1:17:09
  And he, you know, he talks about a lot of the friends that he's
• 1:17:11
  lost and he's somebody that's sharp and with it.
• 1:17:14
  And it's just a brilliant sort of representation of what the
• 1:17:17
  rains can do now. A bit part actor in Doctor Who,
• 1:17:21
  who is more famous for a lot of other things, whose story is
• 1:17:25
  appealing to Doctor Who for. And anybody who would watch it,
• 1:17:27
  you walk away from it going, God, Simon Williams and I was in
• 1:17:31
  that room and there'd been 6-5 other interviews that day that
• 1:17:34
  were all brilliant and that one was electrifying and everybody
• 1:17:37
  walked out on. A Well, I'm going to watch it
• 1:17:38
  now, Jesus Christ. Although you should know better
• 1:17:42
  than bringing up Sophie Aldrin on a call with me.
• 1:17:44
  You know, if I don't get a copy of Sophie's Choice as mentioned
• 1:17:48
  in your book, gifted to me by a Hello Ham fam.
• 1:17:52
  Anyone out there? If you've got a copy of Sophie's
• 1:17:54
  Choice please 20 Winchcomb Road, Eastbourne BN 2280.
• 1:17:58
  Thank you very much. Hopefully Keith listening.
• 1:18:00
  I mean, I'm going to get a load of doctors through the post now
• 1:18:03
  as well, but I will hopefully will get a copy.
• 1:18:06
  Yeah, really, just really, really interesting.
• 1:18:09
  Dylan. I want to do the run, I think
• 1:18:11
  like as a a podcaster of of prolific podcaster now
• 1:18:16
  apparently there's just so much material here that I could use
• 1:18:20
  to talk about in podcasts. Do you know the weird thing?
• 1:18:23
  So obviously I watched them all to write the book, and some of
• 1:18:26
  them I watched multiple times for varying reasons.
• 1:18:31
  And then like I finished and I hadn't watched any for months.
• 1:18:34
  And now I'm doing this little run of podcasts, you know,
• 1:18:38
  pushing the book. I've obviously had to revisit
• 1:18:41
  the the, but I like when you asked me to pick five, it was it
• 1:18:49
  wasn't. It was a difficult choice in the
• 1:18:51
  sense of like which 5, but I wasn't pushed like I didn't.
• 1:18:56
  I'm glad it was the world where I walked away from it and went,
• 1:18:58
  oh, I never want to watch another myth makers again.
• 1:19:00
  Like I sat down to watch these five and a couple more for
• 1:19:03
  another 1 and I had a great time the same time I did when I
• 1:19:07
  watched the first time, second time, whatever.
• 1:19:09
  And I will for the rest of my life, every now and then throw
• 1:19:13
  on a myth makers every now and then just to just to enjoy them
• 1:19:16
  and have a nice time. Be it Kate Eastall or David
• 1:19:21
  Banks, Oregon, John Pertwee or the tribute to Jacqueline Hill,
• 1:19:24
  like the there's so many wonderful titles within the
• 1:19:27
  range and there's something for everybody and you.
• 1:19:31
  They're just a lovely experience for nerds like us.
• 1:19:36
  What I will say, the last thing I'll say on the topic is, yeah,
• 1:19:41
  before I did those five, yeah. And this is the sort of insight
• 1:19:44
  you're going to get everybody from these Myth Makers DVDs.
• 1:19:47
  All right? This is why you need to go out
• 1:19:49
  and buy the whole lot is. I didn't realise why Jacqueline
• 1:19:53
  Pearce went from being sort of mousy and quite masculine in
• 1:19:57
  series 2 of Blake 7 to suddenly wearing these beautiful flowery
• 1:20:02
  dresses and long red luscious nails and gorgeous hairdos in
• 1:20:06
  series 3. It's because she had her first
• 1:20:10
  orgasm between the two seasons and she said, oh, blossom does a
• 1:20:13
  woman, darling. Yeah.
• 1:20:14
  I mean, God almighty, this stuff is just gold.
• 1:20:16
  I'll lock this stuff up. But I know every single one of
• 1:20:20
  the four I watched, I gleaned a ton of trivia that I just didn't
• 1:20:23
  know before. That's why you should listen to
• 1:20:25
  them. Beyond all the other reasons,
• 1:20:27
  what you said is you will get much.
• 1:20:29
  Much more insight about these people that make up this stupid
• 1:20:33
  show that we're all so obsessed with.
• 1:20:36
  Absolutely. And it's not just the the key,
• 1:20:39
  the the doctors and the companions.
• 1:20:41
  Like, everybody's got a story to tell that that is interesting
• 1:20:46
  and they're well worth seeking out.
• 1:20:48
  So do you obviously ask why we've done this podcast?
• 1:20:51
  Well, let's finish this then by saying where is this delightful
• 1:20:55
  tome available? You can get it from the website
• 1:20:59
  of the wonderful Telos Publishing who very kindly
• 1:21:03
  agreed to put the book out and they've been super helpful in
• 1:21:06
  the editing process and put it all together and done a
• 1:21:09
  fantastic job. So buy it from there.
• 1:21:11
  It's also available from all your usual sort.
• 1:21:14
  Of get it from Amazon all right. No exactly.
• 1:21:17
  It's on people and slave drive them to work.
• 1:21:19
  Get it from Telos. Yeah, exactly.
• 1:21:22
  Direct from the source and will be at Hoop.
• 1:21:26
  They'll be at Hooverville selling it and I'll be there in
• 1:21:29
  if you want to ask me any questions about myth makers.
• 1:21:32
  I, I want to say like a massive thank you because you and me,
• 1:21:35
  we've got on a massive journey and I don't think we're finished
• 1:21:38
  actually. But with all of this spin off
• 1:21:41
  stuff, whether that's doing your podcast and me exploring some
• 1:21:45
  things for that or you coming to me and we do commentaries on the
• 1:21:50
  entire Stranger run and now this, looking at all of these
• 1:21:53
  fabulous myth Makers DVDs and there's this whole world to
• 1:21:58
  explore outside of broadcasted Doctor Who that's just so
• 1:22:03
  interesting. So I'm so pleased that we've
• 1:22:05
  done it. But I also want to say fuck you
• 1:22:08
  Dylan Reece, because now I'm going to spend a load more money
• 1:22:11
  buying all these DVDs a lot. I'm so sorry.
• 1:22:15
  I'll put bread on a shelf for a living.
• 1:22:17
  I'm going to get everyone. No, seriously, it's a wonderful,
• 1:22:23
  wonderful book in your typically brilliant writing style.
• 1:22:27
  I'm think you underestimate how good of a riot you are.
• 1:22:30
  That's. Very kind of you.
• 1:22:32
  Everybody go out and grab it. Or I want it to be like the
• 1:22:36
  Argos catalog at that convention, you know, just
• 1:22:39
  vanishing everywhere. He'll sign it, you know, good
• 1:22:41
  grief. He'll put ink on his butt cheeks
• 1:22:44
  and sit on it for you if you like. £45 a signature, £80 for a
• 1:22:48
  photo. And how much for a butt cheek
• 1:22:50
  print? £2.50 He.
• 1:22:54
  Can kick it. Dylan, thank you so much for
• 1:22:57
  your time today. Thank you for having me.
• 1:22:59
  It's been wonderful and I will out it there.